A cinematic creation? January Jones as Betty Draper in Mad Men. Photograph: BBC/Carin Baer/AMC/Lionsgate
Unlikely as the concept may seem in certain temporary residence, it can be possible to read a piece on the internet you don’t actually contract through and yet still find likable and provoking. So it was this week when I discovered Self Styled Siren writing in her role as a hardcore cinephile on Mad Men, the latest long-form TV show to leave many movie lovers feeling the guilty tang of infidelity as their attentions drift from the cinema listings and towards the DVD box write.
Matthew Wiener’sitting sleekly seductive portrait of a drink-sodden early 60s New York advertising agency has, of course, now secured an ardent following even among those who were at first cautious of it – and in the spirit of full disclosure I’ll happily admit I’m one in the same state pyrrhonist turned true believer. Which is why I found my brow furrowing at the blog’s opinion (echoing that of Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott) that the show’s vision of the Camelot era is excessively “dour”, taken in the character of allowing that timeless inner turmoil might be magically spirited away by a flying general mood of gleaming optimism. But not the least portion the less, it’s a piece that more than rewards the time spent reading it – since not looking at Don and Betty Draper as at least partly cinematic creations is, I think, to miss much of that which makes them so alluring.
It’s a relationship that’s often intrigued me during the rise of the multi-episode format that’s so efficiently nicked at minutest a chunk of cinema’s core audience. The Sopranos, of course, was tied hand and bloodied foot to the movies, its doughy Mafiosi obsessed with Cagney and The Godfather, creator David Chase’s look upon as for cinema as the “higher” art fashion forever informing the show’s identity. The Wire, on the other pointer, in no degree appeared nearly in the identical manner with indebted to film, its flavour drawn instead from non-fiction reportage and David Simon’s possess previous TV work on Homicide: Life attached the Street. But Mad Men’s gorgeous, bleak worldview is, fittingly for a project that’s made ambivalence its keystone, at once bound up with the movies and strangely distant from them.
Certainly, on-screen, there’sitting precious little of the film buffery that inspired such golden Soprano moments as Christopher’s encounter with Ben Kingsley – for the most part only the death of Marilyn registered as more than a blip in the characters’ routine. And yet the film culture of the time is for ever there in the exhalation of the dash, the rat pack snazz of the prototype Ocean’s Eleven and the brightly coloured idyll of A Hole in the Head (its Doris Day-sung theme trifle High Hopes doubling as a JFK campaign anthem) swirling about each episode like a mass of cigarette smoke, central to the idea of America the series’ characters are both forever parcelling up in spite of sale in their ad campaigns and falling for in their own fractured lives.
Pinning below the horizon the other films which be in actual possession of bled into show’s identity, the Siren’s list of marvellous sometime 50s and early 60s melodramas is, it must be said, pretty nifty. Almost any of Douglas Sirk’s grand and beautiful Hollywood tragedies could, of course, be thrown into the mix, and Imitation of Life is the grandest and greatest in number beautiful of them all. Elsewhere, it’s a big check for The Best of Everything and Advise and Consent too, but I’d also throw in another candidate – The Sweet Smell of Success, a little early having advance out in ’57, true, but in its hellishly neon-lit Manhattan and scuttling press agent Sidney Falco a fascinating counterpoint to the superficially sanitised ad men of Stirling Cooper.
Then there’s Hitchcock – another whose chiefly relevant moil (Vertigo, Notorious) would have been in the past for Don and Betty, only whose influence often seems inescapable watching the parade. I would at this position direct you to a forfeit video essay at Film Freak Central that pinpoints all form of homages to the man, from the choice of camera angles to, of pursue, the Kim Novak-esque treatment of ice-blonde star January Jones.
And yet, for we scruffy souls watching in 2009, it’s also hard not to feel the impeccably coiffed presence of David Lynch, who at the time the series is set would have been a teenage Eagle Scout – and who then embarked on a careers worth of movies that remain psychically connected with that same era even now, from the picket-fence fantasia of Blue Velvet to the Locomotion of Inland Empire. At once bound up with the past and pointed at the future, the links between Mad Men and the movies are plentiful – and more than just a parade of great suits. Although they are, of course, really great suits…
