I wanted to write something about the recent online dust-up (micro-kerfuffle?) in media studies sparked by Ian Bogost’s post, Against Aca-Fandom, which riffed off of Jason Mittell’s essay On Disliking Mad Men and in turn sparked another post from Henry Jenkins, On Mad Men, Aca-Fandom, and the Goals of Cultural Criticism. But the more I tried to disentangle the various threads (in these posts, and the comments to them, and Twitter, and elsewhere) the less clear I became about the substance of Bogost’s critique and its relationship to Mittell’s essay. So I decided to go back to the beginning and look again at what Mittell actually wrote about Mad Men. I should probably caveat that I am a fan of Mad Men, and a semi-fan of Mittell’s work (dude kind of lost me with his posts on the final season of Lost).
So Jason Mittell vs. Mad Men: he starts by saying that on paper, he should like it as a fan of a certain brand of cable-style “quality TV” which falls within the genre of complex serialized narratives that he’s made a name for himself out of analyzing and championing. Moreover, his peer group of critics and academics all seem to love the show. Which leaves him at great pains to try to advance a critique of the show which is not a critique of its fans/his friends — “that I can offer my negative take on the series without implicating its fans in my critique” — by “highlight[ing] [his] own aesthetic response to shed some light on the mechanics of taste and televisual pleasure.” So far, so good, right? (Though I’m not entirely sure what he means by “aesthetic response”, which seems to be a synonym for affect, as he repeatedly links it to pleasure while bracketing off his respect for the caliber of the acting, writing, set design, etc. as objective qualities which fail nevertheless to provide him with pleasure.)
But he chooses an odd strategy to insulate fans from his critique, by articulating his “absence of pleasure” in Mad Men “dialogically, in comparison [with] what the show’s admirers find so enjoyable. In discussing Mad Men with friends and reading celebratory criticism, I believe the three core types of pleasure that they take from the show (and that evade me) are in the visual splendor of its period style, the subtextual commentary on American history and identity, and the emotional resonance to be found with the characters and their dramas.” Spoiler alert: each of these “core types of pleasure” end up eluding Mittell, and he never ends up reconciling his displeasure with his friends’ enjoyment of the show.
Mittell never makes clear the origin or status of the types of pleasure he describes — specifically, whether they’re inherent to the show, cultivated by the fans, or forged in complicity between the fans and the show’s creators. But his displeasure — his inability to find pleasure in Mad Men, to recognize himself amongst his peers as a fan of the show — circles around contradiction and ambivalence. He can’t find pleasure in the contradiction between the glossy veneer of the show’s period style and its cultural critique, in the ambivalent politics of “social critique [which] seems to promote a sense of superiority to the characters and the 1960s milieu, while simultaneously inviting us to return to this unpleasant place each week.” He’s left cold by the narrative’s “emotional distance”, the characters “we are seemingly supposed to find… both appealing and repellent at the same time”: Mittell “ultimately doesn’t care about these people.”
At one point Mittell, discussing Betty Draper in the first season, describes her as the character he found “most off-putting”, with her depiction in the show “making us complicit in her degradation and generating contempt for her frail character.” Yet later on he reserves special contempt (“disgust and disdain”) for the lead character Don Draper, who he deems less sympathetic than “quality TV”‘s murderous rogues gallery of Tony Soprano, Dexter Morgan, or Vic Mackey. Mittell cites an episode where Don ruins his daughter’s birthday party as cause for singular scorn: “as a father, I found this unmotivated behavior a step too far.”
In a suggestive phrasing, Mittell suggest that “[t]he missing ingredient from Draper and nearly all of Mad Men‘s characters is empathy, as virtually nobody’s behavior or situation invites me to place myself in their shoes. Instead, I watch the characters from an emotional remove….” But surely the lack of empathy that Mittell locates here resides in himself; he eschews complicity with Betty’s plight, and actively disidentifies with Don — a man with “the most agency” and “copious opportunities” who “created his own destiny”, “a charmed life of limitless professional and romantic opportunity.” I can’t speak to Mittell’s love life, but surely some of the phrasing he uses to describe Don’s achievements and capabilities could also apply to a certain degree to his own position as a tenured media studies professor with several publications and a solid reputation in the field — solid enough at least to be invited to contribute to a volume on a show that he doesn’t even watch?
My take on Mad Men is that the show operates in a deeply ironic mode — contradiction and ambivalence are features, not bugs. What Mittell identifies as incongruities and incompatibilities in his three core types of pleasure are in fact irresolvable and a continued source of tension for the viewer that alternately evoke empathy and distancing. The aesthetic of the show thus lies much closer to modernist novels than the “serial fiction of the nineteenth century” to which Mittell has frequently compared recent the complex serialized narratives of shows like The Wire which he favors. For me, the subtext of Mittell’s complaint is his refusal or inability to find pleasure in that ironic mode, to secure a pleasurable place as audience and potential fan within those contradictions and ambivalences that threaten to overwhelm him with complicity and contempt. The pleasures of Mad Men, and the experience of being a fan of the series, thus remain opaque to him as they don’t align with his own.
Yet I think the experiences that he describes, even as he rejects them — complicity, contempt, disidentification — can also function as valuable critical tools for the aca-fan. If aca-fandom is to extend beyond the purely celebratory, the range of affect in question should encompass more than pleasure. Perhaps what we really need is an aca-fandom capable of operating in ironic modes of critique.
My take on Mad Men is that the show operates in a deeply ironic mode — contradiction and ambivalence are features, not bugs. What Mittell identifies as incongruities and incompatibilities in his three core types of pleasure are in fact irresolvable and a continued source of tension for the viewer that alternately evoke empathy and distancing… For me, the subtext of Mittell’s complaint is his refusal or inability to find pleasure in that ironic mode, to secure a pleasurable place as audience and potential fan within those contradictions and ambivalences that threaten to overwhelm him with complicity and contempt.
Precisely. Mad Men is challenging viewing because it’s about the way privilege rots the souls of attractive and talented people. The viewer’s sympathy is asked to shift from episode to episode, from moment to moment. You never get a chance to be comfortable. It would have been easy for MM to be all about the charm of the characters. It would have been equally easy (except from the point of view of selling it to a network, of course) to make it about how awful and doomed they are. To make us instead live for three seasons with a protagonist who has such unflinchingly-examined capacities for badness, who appears to actually be lacking a soul, and still make us understand him is hard, hard work, but I really would have thought it could be recognized as a serious aesthetic achievement, rather than a flaw.
Don’t forget the good old-fashioned dose of (let’s face it, female) audience-policing–fear that the audience will get it wrong and be drawn to these bad, bad, but so very charming and well-styled characters and not realizing that they are Bad, too. In that sense, his post sounded peculiarly like one of those laments that Nice Guys utter about how women only want Bad Boys.
The “audience-policing-fear that the audience will get it wrong” actually did resonate for me when I thought of my experience watching The Shield, with the uncomfortable sense that (predominantly male in this case) law enforcement wannabes and aficionados were rooting for corrupt cop Vic Mackey for all the wrong reasons — though my discomfort was ultimately more about having to ask whether my pleasure in the narrative & the character was really all that far removed from theirs. Which goes back to the question of complicity again (not coincidentally, a major theme of The Shield).
On the other hand I can’t get too upset at, say, those Sopranos fans who saw Tony Soprano as a hero and wanted him to essentially get away with murder. Arguably they’re reading the show against the grain, but who hasn’t ever found pleasure in cheering for the fictional villain even when there actions contravene your own ethics and morality?
In following your links I was most struck by Jenkins’ comments that he was watching the show through the filter of his childhood memories, trying to make sense of the juxtaposition of the way the show presented his parents’ generation and his own impressions of that era.
My mom loves Mad Men, mostly because in her opinion they absolutely nailed the vibe of the era with all its contradictions. She was born in 1940. Also she loves the glamorous surfaces and the period aesthetic!
Yes to loving gloriously acted villains in spite of one’s self. My personal exhibit A for that is what Jason Isaacs did with Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies!
But beyond all that, we are so comfortable now with ambiguous heroes and antiheroes with mixed motivations. There’s a big space now in our consciousness for “bad good guys”, as Dom Monaghan described his character on Lost, that simply didn’t exist in mass media fifty years ago, I think. But it does produce that uncomfortable feeling that we’re rooting for these characters for the wrong reasons. I feel that way about Leverage sometimes.
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I’d just add that my sense is that comfort levels with ambiguous heroes and antiheroes seems to vary. I’ve heard some people say that they’re not interested in watching shows where they dislike the central characters or can’t identify with them (though that preference may be genre-specific). I have a lot of people on my LiveJournal/Dreamwidth friendslist that have zero interest in watching Mad Men, for example, for all kinds of reasons — it just doesn’t appeal to them, in some cases for reasons not dissimilar to the ones that Jason Mittell voiced. And that diversity of tastes and pleasures interests me, both the liking and the disliking.