“Despite
everything, we’re still America, you’re still Europe. You go to our movies, read our books, listen
to our music, speak our language. How
can you stop thinking about us? You see
us and hear us all the time. Ask
yourself. What comes after America?”
~Don
DeLillo, Falling Man
In the early months of 2012, the AMC series Mad Men endured some unsurprising
controversy – that is, unsurprising for those who were already attuned to the
hit show’s apocalyptic undertones, its subtle flavors of marketing mania and
the meaning of postmodern America. Of
course, I’m speaking in vague terms that other critics might swiftly disagree
with. Is Mad Men a show about postmodernism?
Is it a show about American consumer culture? Is it a show about the meaning of “America”? I
think the answer to all of these questions is a resounding YES, but I readily
admit that it’s about much more than all of this too. Specifically, and most importantly, Mad Men is in many ways not at all about
the historical period on which it focuses (namely the decade of the 1960s): it
is about today, about the post-9/11
world in which we live. I emphasize “post-9/11”
in this description for several reasons, not least of which is the controversy
with which I began this paragraph. For
those unaware, or who have forgotten, in the early months of 2012 Mad Men suffered criticism for its
increasingly explicit invocation of 9/11 imagery.[i]
Once again, this controversy is likely less surprising
for those who perhaps already sensed something of an apocalyptic current
spreading throughout the show since its first season, and even less surprising
for those who had already picked up on the imagery itself well before it
received any criticism:
The show’s famous “falling
man” opening sequence is not only a nod to conflicted protagonist Don Draper’s
less-than-productive life choices. It
also recalls a similar image, captured on the morning that terrorists crashed
two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York:
Richard Drew’s photograph
is known as The Falling Man, and the
figure depicted in it was never definitively identified.[ii] The image quickly became a source of
controversy well before Mad Men
premiered in 2007, and the unidentified man came to signify an element of the experience
of September 11th and the communal sense of loss, hopelessness, and
homelessness in the wake of the tragedy.
In this manner, the figure also nearly perfectly encapsulated the tragic
narrative of Mad Men’s Don Draper.
Mad Men took its
appropriation one step further, however; as a hit television show, there was no
way to avoid the promotional moves necessary for selling its product to the public.
Quite consciously, Mad Men
participated in the very behavior that it simultaneously critiqued, which was
part of its artistic merit. Inevitably,
the stenciled figure falling through the show’s opening credits (unidentified,
anonymous) became a marketing icon; and equally inevitably, it pulled Drew’s
haunting photograph along with it:
And this:
Understandably, these
advertising techniques drew heavy criticism from individuals and families most
directly affected by the events of 9/11.
AMC denied any referential ties to either the tragedy or Drew’s
photograph. Yet it feels increasingly
difficult to believe that the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, and its writers
did not have the imagery of 9/11 in the back of their minds, despite anything
Weiner might say about the opening sequence being an homage to Hitchcock (after
all, can’t these two things overlap?).
The show sealed the deal, in my opinion, with “Lost
Horizon,” its twelfth episode of the final season. While in a meeting, Don turns his head to
glance out the window and witnesses the following scene:
The vision prompts Don to
leave the meeting, sending him impulsively out West, through Wisconsin,
Oklahoma, Utah, and finally to California.
Critics and viewers have interpreted the ambiguous ending in various
ways, with some seeing it as an optimistic and hopeful moment of authentic rediscovery
for Don, as the finale depicts him meditating at a spiritual retreat before
smash-cutting to the famous 1971 advertisement for Coca-Cola.[iii] Others (myself included) view the ending more
cynically, as the clear entanglement of a peaceful collective and consumer
culture forecloses the possibility of true authenticity in any traditional
sense. However, no matter how one
chooses to read the show’s conclusion, the scene of Don witnessing the plane
fly past the Empire State Building raises some unavoidably foreboding
conclusions. I for one see no way to
dissociate this image from the terror attacks of 9/11. At the time the “Lost Horizon” episode is
set, in June 1970, the Empire State Building was still the tallest structure in
New York City.
It was surpassed in October 1970 by the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
It was surpassed in October 1970 by the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
...
What
inspired Don to get up and leave the meeting?
Was it some kind of spiritual yearning? An anti-corporate impulse? Or was it something darker? I don’t believe in prophecy, so I’m not
trying to claim that Don saw 9/11 coming or anything so supernaturally
poignant. I do want to suggest that we
read the show not purely from within, however – that is, not as though all we
have to work with is the historical moment of the narrative itself, the trials
and tribulations of its characters. As
critics, we have more at our disposal.
We have the conditions in which the show itself is produced, the
conditions in which its writers are living.
We have the entire cultural history from 1971 until now, the ‘80s and ‘90s. And we have something else: literary
history. It is from this final angle
that I want to take a stab at Mad Men’s
enigmatic imagery, its dark and foreboding 9/11 undertones. Specifically, I want to consider another text
that was published in 2007, the same year that Mad Men premiered on AMC.
Don
DeLillo’s 9/11 novel, Falling Man.
In
a conversation about halfway through DeLillo’s novel, two characters discuss a
fictional manuscript that appears to predict the 9/11 attacks, producing “‘statistical
tables, corporate reports, architectural blueprints, terrorist flow charts’”
(138).[iv] The prediction of disaster is a paranoiac
fantasy, something that DeLillo flirts with in earlier novels such as White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), and Underworld
(1997). The issue is not so much the
actual prediction of disaster itself, but the accumulation of information in
the digital age, the expansion and permeation of society by data. When so much data accumulates to such an
extent, patterns become almost ubiquitous, and the unsurprising response to the
mass of data manifests in conspiracy theories: the attempt, according to
Fredric Jameson, “to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system”
(38).[v] In DeLillo’s Underworld, one character refers to this “impossible totality” as dietrologia, “‘the science of what is
behind something. A suspicious
event. The science of what is behind an
event’” (280). In the years to come, Underworld, published in 1997, would prove
a source of minor paranoiac awe for even DeLillo’s intelligent readers who perceived
the uncanny anticipation of the first edition’s cover art:
Conspiracy, of necessity,
is always retrospective. It makes sense
out of enormous pools of data, words, images, and organizes unrelated or
disconnected points into meaningful constellations.
At
the moment of 9/11, the world is entering into a new phase of global information
with the rise of internet. In more ways
than one, DeLillo’s fiction addresses the filtration and consumption of massive
global events through the lens of technical systems, namely mass media. Television is nothing new at the turn of the
twenty-first century, but the obsessive media fixation on the next big story is
relatively new, with networks such as FOX News and CNN providing 24-hour coverage
like fishermen trawling for anything they can find until their next major
catch. In this scenario, 9/11 was the
biggest catch anyone could imagine, and the response from viewers was
unprecedented. In this moment, terrorism
found a mass media outlet in a way it never had before, and it affected people
on a visceral level: “Every time she saw the videotape of the planes she moved
a finger toward the power button on the remote,” DeLillo writes of one
character; “Then she kept on watching.
The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage
that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint
that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some other
distance, out beyond the towers” (134). Out
toward, to borrow from Mad Men, some “lost
horizon.”
The
relation between media and terrorism has not gone unnoticed by perceptive
writers. William Gibson writes about it
as early as 1984 in his seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, demonstrating that science fiction more often
accurately forecasts not scientific developments, but cultural ones: “‘There is
always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt,’”
a character intones; “‘A point at which the violence may well escalate, but
beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt
itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily
understand it is innately media-related’” (57).[vi] In other words, modern terrorism may seek out
media platforms on which to stage its atrocities, but at some point the
attraction reverses. At some point it is
no longer only the terrorists who look for media platforms, but the media
platforms that seek out terrorism. This seeking
should not be misconstrued as a conscious effort, an intentional search for
atrocious acts. It is rather an effect
of global mass media. Like a
gravitational attraction, media finds itself compelled toward disastrous
events.
DeLillo’s
Falling Man does not ignore this
relationship between terrorism and the media, but actively stages it. The novel’s title is not only a reference to
Drew’s photograph, but also to a character within the novel: David Janiak, a
performance artist who repeatedly hangs from public structures in clear
imitation of the actual anonymous falling man.
A media sensation, the novel’s fictional falling man is treated as a
quasi-terrorist by law enforcement in the novel, having been “arrested at
various times for criminal trespass, reckless endangerment and disorderly
conduct” (220). Learning of Janiak’s
death, another character (Lianne) attempts to track down an image of one particular
performance that she witnessed near an elevated train track: “She tried to
connect this man to the moment when she’d stood beneath the elevated tracks,
nearly three years ago, watching someone prepare to fall from a maintenance
platform as the train went past. There
were no photographs of that fall. She
was the photograph, the photosensitive surface.
That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb”
(223). In this moment, near the novel’s
conclusion, media platforms are replaced by a maintenance platform. Lianne can discover no media trace of the act
she witnessed, causing her to think of herself, of her own body, as a kind of
media form. She becomes the photographic
record of the performative/terrorist event.
As
a media expression, the terrorist event occupies a strange and unsettling place
in our contemporary cultural unconscious.
As an event of extreme violence, it enters the physical realm, wreaking
havoc on bodies and flesh, spilling blood and causing pain. As a media image, however, terrorism concerns
us at another level: the level of representation, of spectacle, a form of engagement that is quite nearly filmic,
popular, marketable. Slavoj Žižek elucidates this point when he
describes “the fundamental
paradox of the ‘passion for the Real’:
it culminates in its apparent opposite, in a theatrical spectacle – from the
Stalinist show trials to spectacular terrorist acts. If, then, the passion for the Real ends up in
the pure semblance of the spectacular effect
of the Real, then in an exact inversion, the ‘postmodern’ passion for the
semblance ends up in a violent return to the passion for the Real.”[vii]
Žižek’s argument is a troubling
one, namely that the media fascination of contemporary American culture
desired, to some degree, the tragedy of September 11th. Whether or not we agree with Žižek’s
suggestion, his analysis of the conflicting position of modern terrorism has
the ring of truth. Even if what we
desire is not real, visceral horror but the representation of horror, this
desire partakes of a strange trajectory back toward reality. Fantasies exist because at some level we
desire them, even if we do not really want
them.
Ultimately, this is what Mad Men is all about. Advertising
appeals to our fantasies and desires.
Even if it sells us products that we want, even need, it does not
succeed in selling these products by reminding us that we want them. Advertisement works by reminding us what we desire: “‘Nostalgia,’” Don Draper says
in a pitch for carousel projectors,
literally
means, “the pain from an old wound”. It’s a twinge in your heart, far more
powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine.
It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.
It’s not called the Wheel. It’s called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a
child travels. Around and around, and back home again... to a place where we
know we are loved. (“The Wheel”)[viii]
The Kodak carousel
projector doesn’t actually change one into a child again, or allow us to travel
through time, but gives us something of an experience we once had while preserving
the material structures of our current lives.
This is the fantasy of advertising, particularly in the age of mass
media. Don knows how to pitch products
because he knows how to identify and amplify the desirable attribute of an
object – the fantasy it can fulfill. Desire
isn’t about re-experiencing an experience, but about the longing that separates
us from the experience. It is a means of
reimagining the experience, of projecting
it, just as memories are always revisions of the past as well as recollections
of it.
Somewhere in its aesthetic unconscious, Mad Men recognized the fantasy of
disaster lurking at the dark heart of American consumerism, and projected this
fantasy back to its viewers in images of post-9/11 horror. Whether we are meant to see the finale as uplifting
or as a cynical concession to the throes of postmodern globalization (no matter
what Weiner himself insists),[ix] I think we have to
contextualize its falling-man imagery and “Lost Horizon” sequence within the
post-9/11 atmosphere of contemporary America, and as dark acknowledgements of
the link between the expansion of media platforms and the explosion of
twenty-first century terrorism. I do not
intend to suggest that we should continue to privilege authenticity in an era
of absolute media saturation, an era of “semblance,” as Žižek claims, in which the
“place where we know we are loved” is always partially a projection of fantasy. Perhaps this is one of the costs of living in
a network society, positioned globally within matrices of data (hence the other
paranoiac obsession of getting “off the grid”).
And perhaps there is an unrealized expansion of our current virtual
state in which technology and media forms may yet provide knowledge of the
human condition as yet unavailable to us.
One in which love is more than just an invention by men like Don Draper to sell
nylons.
 |
| "The World Trade Center was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks. She saw it almost everywhere she went." ~Don DeLillo, Underworld |
[i] Interested readers might look to
Mallory Russell’s piece in Business
Insider (http://www.businessinsider.com/unintended-horror-these-mad-men-ads-look-just-like-sept-11s-falling-man-2012-3),
or Michael Dooley’s piece from Imprint,
reprinted in Salon (http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/mad_mens_long_standing_911_connection/)
[ii] Richard Drew, The Falling Man, 11 September 2001.
[iii] For example, Tim Goodman’s reading
at The Hollywood Reporter: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bastard-machine/mad-men-series-finale-tim-796826
[iv] Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 2007, New York: Scribner, 2008.
[v] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
[vi] William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984, New York: Ace Books, 2000.
[vii] Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and
Related Dates, London: Verso, 2002.
[viii]
Matthew Weiner and Robin Veith,
“The Wheel,” Mad Men, AMC, 18 October
2007.
[ix] “Cultural harmony,” …? Maybe, but I’m not so sure: http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/matthew-weiner-on-mad-men-finale-you-cant-get-100-percent-approval-rating-1201501909/
