The success of “Mad Men” has spawned a whole new genre in American television of mid-century revivalism. 2010’s hit series “Boardwalk Empire” and the upcoming premieres of “Playboy Club” and “Pan Am” are four high-budget television shows that impose a rose-tinted lens on the past. These shows are deeply concerned with a superficial depiction of the social politics of the 50s.
That “Playboy Club” and “Pan Am” seek to reproduce the “Mad Men” model is comically clear from their trailers. In eager nods to their Greatest Generation mood, both trailers open with a Sinatra standby—“Town Like This” for “Playboy Club” and “Around the World” for “Pan Am.”
In the first scene of the “Pan Am” trailer, a bride-to-be decides that conventional married life isn’t for her, and drives away to become a Pan Am stewardess. This takes eight seconds. Over the next 36 seconds, we go through a montage of various Pan Am stewardess activities—being whisked up and kissed, running hurriedly with multiple bags, being weighed on a scale by a spare female boss (“Are you wearing your girdle?”), gossiping about Life Magazine, gossiping about husbands, complaining about gossip about husbands. We run through a dizzying number of different leggy women. Then, a few boss male figures talk big business.
“Playboy Club” is similarly concerned with creating a playful atmosphere and highlighting petty concerns. A black playboy bunny who wants to be the company’s first black centerfold, a starstruck bunny who has begun making more money than her father, a man in a suit who wants Marlboro Reds.
“People are nostalgic for a time when the country seemed much more confident,” says New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanely, who has been on the TV beat since 2003, when she left her job as a foreign correspondent, having been the chief of the Rome and Moscow bureaus.
For Stanley, these shows mark a new kind of interest in the past that only makes sense for a post-9/11 audience. “‘M*A*S*H’ wasn’t really about Korea, it was concerned with people stuck in [Vietnam]. ‘Happy Days’ was poodle skirts and music everyone loves ... but the relationships and the adolescent angst was pretty contemporary.” Then, historical TV shows had interest in the past only insofar as they could find attractive and inoffensive ground to explore issues of its own day. The great sitcoms of yesteryear generally sought to give a certain or even total vision of their own era—“I Love Lucy,” “All in the Family,” and “The Cosby Show” are only a few examples.
The “Mad Men” brand does not seek to recast the past—it seeks to be lost completely in it. “We know prohibition and know that sexism got more or less redressed,” Stanley says of the main issues raised in “Mad Men” and “Boardwalk Empire.” “It’s compelling now because we’re in a difficult time and we don’t feel powerful, so it’s fun to look at eras where the country seemed more on the ascent.”
These shows, then, have a double function for viewers today. First, they allow us an escape from our present into self-contained periods in the past. Neither “Mad Men” nor “Boardwalk Empire” have any concern with what their periods mean to contemporary viewers. Instead, they want to make the past beautiful—to make the suits tailored, the women elongated, the office desks shined. In these shows, we see how the rich and powerful were able to control the culture of our country’s greatest age—the ad men of the 50s, the bootleggers of the 20s. The strong male protagonists of these shows are able to control their environment completely and allow the viewer to imagine themselves as Don Draper, the man who can seduce any woman and sell any product. Both of these shows are set in a time of American greatness, and their leading men embody the American ideal of the self-made man.
Even the problems of these eras are unserious, aesthetic. Sexism, the political division of choice, is enacted before only in its most blatant form—openly harassed secretaries, unapologetically cuckolded wives—so we can see something we have conquered. The past was pretty, we understand, and its gravest challenges have become punchlines. This kind of understanding is only appealing to an audience openly cheating on the present with the past, to a culture that has traded novelty for nostalgia. So in a post-9/11 era, these leading men carry a special appeal. Namely, they are in complete control, which stands in stark contrast the contemporary world of American decline and uncertainty about the future. What happened one day 10 years ago didn’t create this attitude, but it was the decisive event that created the culture that made it possible.
Without 9/11, there would not be this impulse to turn away from today.
I RAISE MY HAND, I TURN MY HEAD
To understand how 9/11 has shaped today’s hollow patriotism, it is necessary to understand the immense feelings of national togetherness that followed the attacks, a feeling that quickly withered away into a meaningless sense of crisis.
For Robert Putnam, Harvard professor and author of “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” this came in the form of widespread communal trust, sympathy, and connectivity. Americans felt a need to stand together in the face of a threat. “If we had a national hug index, that would have skyrocketed in the weeks following 9/11,” Putnam says.
Following the attacks on Pearl Harbor, there was a rush to enlist in the army; broad national support for a tax increase to aid the war effort; and steely acceptance of gasoline and food rations. Then, the country was amenable to making material sacrifices for the sake of the war effort and the abstractions of patriotism, says Doris Kearns Goodwin, a prominent American historian. These teenagers of the late 30s, now called The Greatest Generation, grew up valuing a dollar and a neighbor like one had to during the Great Depression. Even in times of prosperity, they continued to be more civically engaged than their parents or their children. Today, they vote at higher rates than any other age demographic, walkers and nurses in tow.
There was a critical moment, then, after 9/11, when the broad thematic strokes of our generation would be decided. Briefly, community-mindedness surged as groups of people came together around a sense of shared trauma. The opportunity to permanently strengthen these communities, however, passed us by. At a time when Americans could have been called upon to make sacrifices for their country, all that was asked of them by then-President George W. Bush was to go on living their lives as they had before the attacks, maybe taking the kids down to Walt Disney World.
“I think the adults this time failed your generation,” Putnam says. “We did not behave in ways that would encourage your generation to participate in civic life ... I was extremely hopeful that your generation could turn around civic renewal.” According to Putnam, six months after the attack levels of community trust were back to their original, pre-9/11 baseline.
On the night of Sunday, May 1, college students across the country erupted into a celebration at the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed by American military forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Two-hundred undergrads spontaneously gathered in Harvard Yard, waving American flags and chanting “U—S—A” after Barack Obama announced bin Laden’s death. That night marked the end of a decade-long manhunt for a generational boogeyman, an apparent evil for evil’s own sake who had brought us into adult consciousness.
For a moment, the patriotism that has lost its meaning since 9/11—in popular music, television, even in baseball—was revitalized. The group chanting that night was reminiscent of marches in the 60s, rioting in the 80s, events that have gained the status of folklore for people under 30. The energy was contagious.
But on May 2, patriotic symbols began to turn stale once more, repeating what took place in the years after 9/11.
In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 movie “Vivre Sa Vie,” the protagonist proclaims, “I think we’re always responsible for our actions. We’re free. I raise my hand—I’m responsible. I turn my head to the right—I’m responsible. I’m unhappy—I’m responsible. I smoke a cigarette—I’m responsible. I shut my eyes—I’m responsible. I forget that I’m responsible, but I am.“ Putnam is right that adults failed us, and omnipresent pop culture has capitalized on our need to escape the U.S. of today, heavy with mythos and light on power. It’s nighttime in America, and it feels best to think of better times. The only way out, however, really and finally out, is to take the responsibility we believed we could once have. Nostalgia not for its own sake, but as the tool to reconstruct our own times.