[This month marks the 15th anniversary of the launch of Mad Men.
The show isn’t just compelling narratively and aesthetically — it
also features a little remarked upon consideration of left ideas.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

15 YEARS AGO, MAD MEN QUIETLY BEGAN ITS ENGAGEMENT WITH LEFTIST IDEAS
 
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Shaun Richman
July 4, 2022
Jacobin
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_ This month marks the 15th anniversary of the launch of Mad Men. The
show isn’t just compelling narratively and aesthetically — it also
features a little remarked upon consideration of left ideas. _

Jon Hamm as ad exec Don Draper in Mad Men., (AMC)

 

The prestige drama _Mad Men_, which ran for seven seasons, beginning
fifteen years ago this month, received plenty of awards and close
readings from mainstream critics. The Left press largely slept on it,
which is a shame: the series was not only very funny and poignant and
offered viewers a lot to chew on about the changing politics and
gender roles of the 1960s, but seemed to draw direct inspiration from
socialist thought. Series creator Matthew Weiner tipped his hand
that _Mad Men_ would at least play with Marxist critiques of
capitalism in the very first episode with two simple words: “It’s
toasted.”

That advertising slogan is prominently featured in a classic
mid-century Marxist text, _Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American
Economic and Social Order
[[link removed]]_ by Paul A.
Baran and Paul M. Sweezy. In an age when supermarket shelves were
newly and fully stocked with competing technicolor boxes of breakfast
cereal and the constant introduction of “new” and “improved”
products, the two writers, associated with the Marxist magazine and
book publisher _Monthly Review_, argued that “competition, which
was the predominant form of market relations,” had been replaced by
“large-scale enterprise producing a significant share of the output
of an industry, or even several industries, and able to control its
prices, the volume of production, and the types and amounts of its
investments.”

Monopoly, in other words, wasn’t an occasional mistake of the
capitalist system — now it _was_ the system.

One of Baran and Sweezy’s central arguments is that the massive
surplus value (or, more crudely, the profits) generated by monopoly
capital could be democratically and equitably distributed to provide
for the material needs of all members of society. Instead, it’s
wasted.

One particularly egregious form of waste they target is the commercial
advertising business, which was rapidly expanding in the 1960s.
Instead of reinvesting surplus in innovation or using the lowered
costs of production to make more products available to more people,
advertising wastes vast fortunes on convincing consumers that one
identical product is somehow superior to another.

In the process of advancing this argument, Baran and Sweezy cite a bit
of Madison Avenue braggadocio from ad exec and author Rosser Reeves:
the George Washington Hill tobacco company’s “It’s toasted”
advertising campaign — “So, indeed, is every other cigarette, but
no manufacturer has been shrewd enough to see the enormous possibility
of such a simple story.”

The plot of _Mad Men_’s first episode centers on an impending
Surgeon General report that will link smoking tobacco to lung cancer.
This is a crisis for the series’ protagonist, Don Draper.

Not a health crisis, of course. In fact, Draper, the head of the
creative department at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising
agency, is first introduced smoking a cigarette and sketching out
tobacco ad campaigns on the back of a cocktail napkin in preparation
for a high-stakes meeting with his largest client, a tobacco company.
Cigarette advertising had long emphasized the supposed therapeutic
benefits of smoking, and the client wants a plan for how to continue
selling a product when the public inevitably finds out it’s deadly.

“This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of
cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical
products,” Draper declares after some initial floundering.

To prove his point, Draper asks the men to describe how their
cigarettes are made. His client, the patriarch of Lucky Strike,
blathers on about insect-repellent seeds, the North Carolina sunshine,
and the harvesting, curing, and toasting of the tobacco leaves.

“There you go!” Draper declares about the fact that tobacco leaves
are toasted before they’re rolled into cancer sticks. When the
owner’s son objects that all cigarette tobacco is toasted as part of
the manufacturing process, the advertising agency’s head of creative
counters, “No. Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky
Strike’s is toasted.”

This was not a famous advertising campaign. It’s hardly “Where’s
the Beef [[link removed]]?” and
was for a completely different cigarette maker. It seems clear that
Matthew Weiner read _Monopoly Capital_ and drew some inspiration
from it. But what, if anything, was he trying to say about the
advanced stage of capitalism and artistic creativity in an industry
built on lies and deception?

A Beautiful Sentiment

Early reviewers noticed that _Mad Men_ was slyly feminist, with
secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson’s slow climb toward
professional respect and artistic ambition marking her as the show’s
parallel (if not primary) protagonist. From early on,
interviewers drew out
[[link removed]] Weiner
on the influence that Betty Friedan’s _Feminine Mystique
[[link removed]]_ and
Helen Gurley Brown’s _Sex and the Single Girl_ had on his pilot
script.

Those were bestselling books. But Cold War–era Marxist economic
texts are deeper cuts, so _Monthly Review’_s contribution to _Mad
Men_ has gone unremarked upon.

Baran and Sweezy are not the last or even the most obvious example
of _Mad Men_ cribbing from leftist texts. A third-season episode has
a pair of copywriters, recently hired to help court the emerging baby
boomer market, making a “kids these days” presentation about
developing a youth market for a client, a coffee brand, to Draper.

Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson in Mad Men. (AMC)

The smarmier of the two, Smitty, launches into an already passé
staccato faux-beatnik rap about “this letter from a friend back in
Michigan . . . he’s still in school, man, and it’s got this — I
dunno — sixty-page rant in it.” He reads from it: “We would
replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by
power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and
creativity.”

Though unnamed in the episode, that “rant” is the _Port Huron
Statement_, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society
and a seminal text of the New Left.

“That’s a beautiful sentiment,” Draper replies sardonically.
“Does your friend know what you do for a living?”

Smitty replies with a slightly deflated, “Yeah . . . there was a
shitty note with it.”

How quickly and eagerly young men would seek to commodify youth
rebellion to sell instant coffee is treated as a bitter joke. There is
some creativity required to repackage anti-capitalist sentiment as a
new and improved lifestyle that can be purchased at the supermarket.
But that creative spark is wasted on cynical exploitation.

A major theme across _Mad Men_’s seven seasons is the tension
between the creative talent at an advertising firm and the accounts
executives who keep the corporate clients happy (and the revenue
flowing). At one point in the series, Draper bellyaches that the
creative department is the “most important, least important thing
there is.” The most important element in advertising, of course,
is _actually_ the buying and selling of radio and television airtime
and column inches in newspapers and magazines (in its 1960’s
business model, at least). That’s where the money is made. But the
creatives are essential for selling the lie that one cigarette is
superior to another (and that they will all kill you should not be a
primary concern).

In its first three seasons, the idea of advertising as “selling
out” creative ambition is most fully represented in the character
Paul Kinsey, a senior copywriter who fashions himself as a bohemian
and wears his admiration for Rod Serling and Orson Welles on his
sleeve (and his bearded face). He lets anyone who will listen know
that he’s always writing something that could turn into the Great
American Novel, or at least an episode of _The Twilight Zone_. We
also see him try to blow up a pitch meeting with the Pennsylvania
Railroad Company to protest the demolition of its classic train
station in 1963, as well as participate in — and chicken out during
— the Mississippi Freedom Rides that summer.

We’re also given the clear impression that he’s not all that
creative of a writer. He’s hilariously left behind when Draper and
his partners start a new firm after ransacking their old office in the
middle of the night. The audience sees Kinsey one more time, years
later, when the character is in a Krishna cult and shopping around a
Star Trek spec script.

Advertising as Art

Draper, in the early seasons, is similarly drawn toward the bohemian
Greenwich Village, and stays on top of the latest novels and movies.
One imagines he could create greater art than hokey tag lines for Life
cereal. Peggy similarly winds up in the orbit of artists who can at
least score an invite to Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Even the accounts men have a creative drive. Senior partner Roger
Sterling spends the fourth-season year of 1965 writing his (poorly
received) memoir, _Sterling’s Gold_, and an early episode in season
one has the announcement that junior accounts executive Ken Cosgrove
published a short story in the_ Atlantic_, stirring jealousy among
the other young men in the office.

With Cosgrove out of earshot, Kinsey and Peter Campbell and Harry
Crane confess their artistic pretensions and cook up plans to get
their own abandoned (and seemingly sophomoric) stories published;
Campbell going so far as pressuring his wife, Trudy, to reconnect with
an ex-boyfriend in the publishing business. Cosgrove, we find out,
continues to pseudonymously publish genre short stories even as his
accounts responsibilities increase — causing “fellow frustrated
writer” Sterling (perhaps in a fit of jealousy) to forbid him from
continuing to do so as a senior executive.

Whatever Matthew Weiner had to say about the employment of creative
talent in a wasteful and unnecessary industry, it seems he intended to
give the audience two potential interpretations in the series’
ambiguous final scene. Having walked out of the stultifying
environment of the enormous McCann Erickson advertising agency after
it absorbed and dissolved the small firm that Draper dedicated years
of his life to building up, Draper dries out and meditates at a
California hilltop yoga camp with an ambiguous smile on his face.
Before the scene cuts to black, it fades in a soundtrack and visuals
from a vastly more famous advertisement than “It’s toasted.”

The real-world McCann Erickson managed to turn a jingle for Coca-Cola,
“I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” into a chart-topping
single in 1971 on the strength of a stunningly cynical ad that
featured vaguely multicultural hippies embracing on a
hilltop. _Sure_, the ad sought to reassure its audience, _you just
saw cops beat the shit out of those idealistic Students for a
Democratic Society kids in Chicago and now a bunch of them are blowing
up federal buildings to protest the whole system, and your
new _p_resident was elected through a strategy of racist “law and
order” dog-whistling. But at least Coke brings us all together._

If you rewind and slow-mo the moments before Draper’s Mona Lisa
smile, you’ll notice hairstyles and outfits from the Coke ad
surround him as workers and guests at his newfound hilltop hippie
camp. Is he smiling because this scene that he’s stumbled upon has
inspired him to innovate a new decade of exploiting baby boomer
culture to sell a national culture back to them in the form of
diabetes in a bottle? Or is the dark joke of _Mad Men_ that, even
when an advertising creative walks away from a lucrative career of
emotional manipulation and lies, the machine keeps on humming without
him?

The problem is that as much as Matthew Weiner leaned on the famous
cut-to-black ending of _The Sopranos_ (his artistic home when he was
writing _Mad Men_’s pilot) as a sort of “choose your own
mythology,” his recent interviews have placed a heavy thumb on the
scale in favor of the interpretation
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Draper returns to New York to pitch the hippie Coke ad. Why does the
internet tempt creators to ruin their endings by commenting on them?
Weiner had ample opportunity to put a more definitive version on the
screen and didn’t. What now privileges his head canon over my own,
where Draper remains retired and returns to New York to be a present
father for his kids and a reliable friend to the handful of female
colleagues he managed to avoid sleeping with?

The ending in Weiner’s head is one of the most disappointingly
cynical statements that a TV show that began with a nod to how
advertising contributes nothing of productive value to society could
have landed upon. It suggests a triumph of capitalism so complete that
not only is making emotionally manipulative advertising an art that
artists should settle for because the system makes room for it, but
that it is the kind of creatively fulfilling work that an
artist _should_ aspire to. I’d rather stay at yoga camp.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Shaun Richman [[link removed]] is a former organizing
director for the American Federation of Teachers.

 

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