Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Mad Men


Different views. Share

5 comments:

Brantigny said...

I do not like this program nor do I care for the commercials, which are so over shown it reminds me of a "sham-wow" commercial.

The Show is so full of smoking that MY chest hurts. (In a time where the justified anti-smoking sense abounds it is a good thing to make smoking look glamorous?) Ok we get the point people used to smoke.

Richard

Julygirl said...

Since it is a parody of the values and cut throat mentality of the era, (nothing has changed except the smoking), we are supposed to view it and wonder, "What's it all about when you sort it out Alfie, are we meant to take more than we give?"

MadMonarchist said...

I'm a legitimate mad man and I've never been able to get through an episode. No witty 50's dialogue here, just retro greed and lust. It looks like something a commissar in the USSR would show to people to illustrate how evil the capitalist Americans are.

tubbs said...

Years ago the pornographer Guccione made a sham of a movie called 'Caligula'. There seemed to be a strong undercurrent theme of[see, there's nothing really new about our new vices, and civilization will survive in spite of them].

I see a bit of that in 'Mad Men'. If we pretend that our parents' generation had just as much corruption and debauchery as our own (AND IT DIDN'T), then we can feel a lot less creepy about the age we live in.

And MadMonarchist, I agree - the show comes off like some cheesey marxist propaganda!

Susan said...

I disagree. As a child of this era, I remember commercials with legitimate doctors promoting Chesterfield cigarettes and then when Kent came out with filtered ones, they advertised them. I love Mad Men--it depicts the mores, etiquette and way of life of that time. They were more careful to hide the vice, and lots of problems were carefully hidden away (mental illness, out of wedlock pregnancy, spousal abuse, etc.) If you think things are worse now, you're wrong--we just display them for everyone to see.