Backwards Ran The Aesthetics, Until Reeled The Mind

(And where it all will end, only knows God.)

As a follow-up to my review for Pajamas of AMC’s Mad Men (and in case you’re wondering, I’m enjoying the mini-series quite a bit more these days than my original take, now that it’s gotten past its overly expository folk-Marxist premiere episode), Rondi Adamson makes a great observation. If you buy into the Babbitt-like subtext of the series, “Every marriage fifty years ago, we are led to believe, was nothing but a loveless travesty, maintained for public perception only, secretly crushing the will to live of both partners.” On the other hand:

Say what you will about the role of women fifty years ago, but at least they didn’t go out in flippity-flops or stretch pants, flab showing, hair out of control, even the wealthiest among us looking like we’re on our way to the convenience store nearest our trailer-park in order to stock up on Doritos. And say what you will about the men, but they wouldn’t have dared show up at even a casual weekend barbecue in crocs and shorts, wearing an “I’d rather be sailing” t-shirt or a baseball cap adorned with some silly sports logo, fingers poised to scratch inappropriate areas publicly. They were groomed and matching, even as personal happiness eluded them.

Speaking of the aesthetics of relationships designed largely for public consumption, don’t miss her photographic comparison of now and then as an example of how society has “progressed” over the past 50 years.

Rondi’s post reminds me very much of something that James Lileks once wrote about the era portrayed–ocasionally with a brush so heavy-handed it must weigh a ton, in Mad Men:

I’m fascinated by the post-war era–1946 to, say, 1964–and in many ways it was an absolute Golden Age. Not perfect; no era is. It’s stupid to romanticize a period, but equally stupid to dismiss it for its failure to be as Perfect and Glorious and Wise as our enlightened time. It’s easy to snicker at their fear of Communism, but in context I’d be scared too–the USSR was a heavily armed, expansionist totalitarian state, and its domestic apologists were not only wrong, but defending a system that equaled and bested the Nazis for prolonged brutality.

The ’50s are sniffed at, I think, because the victors write the history, and in the cultural battles fought by the boomers, the ’50s were the era of Mom and Dad, the era of rules, the era of oppression. To the boomers, the ’60s are the Years of Glory, because that’s when they got to go to college, live in dorms, stay out late and come home blitzed on ditchweed without answering a lot of questions. Being Boomers, they elevated this period to mythic status, and hence we’ve had to live with this incessant ’60s worship ever since. Personally, I’m sick of it; I’m sick of their music, their fashions, their politics, their interminable self-satisfaction and narcissistic desire to regard their generation as the apogee of human endeavor. Yawn. It’s been such a stultifying weight on society that we can’t seem to come up with anything new–hence this never-ending cycle of nostalgia we’re in. We must worship the ’60s, be amused by the ’70s, and loathe the ’80s. Why loathe? Because that’s when the boomers first started to feel out of touch, i.e., old.

These are all horrible overgeneralizations. That’s the problem. Each era gets boiled down to a few pat symbols. The ’50s are sock hops and tail fins. The ’60s are protest and Woodstock. The ’70s are shag and disco balls. The ’80s mean greed and Izod. The ’90s–well, who knows. It’s all ridiculous; every era is much more than that, and at the same time no different than our own. People eat, work, raise kids, laugh, snore, worry about whether the sofa should go in that corner or over there.

All that said, I have only two points: I love living now, and wouldn’t change this time for any other. Point #2: were it a choice between driving a minivan down a vacant suburb strip mall corridor eating a franchise hamburger and listening to some “Big Pimpin'” on the CD player, OR driving a turquoise BelAir around downtown Philly listening to Joe Niagara introduce Chuck Berry tunes on the AM radio–

Not even close.

Tip of the Trilby to the always stylishly-shod Manolo, who also links to the newest blog in his burgeoning fashion empire. I think the punchline at the end of this post actually was understood reasonably well during the era of depicted in Mad Men, and then forgotten, oh, about six or seven years later. I’d like to think that hopefully as The Great Relearning slowly (all too slowly) progresses, it too will be rediscovered.