UP@NIGHT

…………..Mad Men Casting Contest………………………………..The Wire (Wikipedia)………..

Tonight Mad Men returns.  I liked the show.  I liked it before it became popular.   (It’s not The Wire, but then, hey, what is, except The Wire.)

But now I fear for the youth of the country.  The photo on the left–which I believe I have legally downloaded from the Mad Men web site since it is an advertising gimmick, which is in itself pretty funny–says it all.  You can be in this photo.  And it seems that many people would very much like to be in it, at least judging by the Mad Men mania among the young, many of whom collected in Times Square tonight dressed in period costume.  The photo on the right is of a group of characters from The Wire, a show that struggled to stay on the air.  (Its last season overlapped with the first season of Mad Men.)  It never found a large following in its five seasons, although today it is considered by many critics and viewers to be the finest TV series ever produced.  It is set in present-day Baltimore and one of the things that it is about is how America is broken.  It is highly unlikely that The Wire could have advertised itself by holding a contest that says, you can be in this photo.

Mad Men is great fun.  The acting, the clothing, the furniture, the nicknacks, and that wonderful lighting.   And of course the show is dutifully critical of aspects of the period that it portrays.  As a matter of fact, the narrative arc was apparently meant to swing from the uptight and hypocritical 1950′s to the liberation of the ’60′s.  But something perverse seems to have happened or be happening.  In our dark economic times the atmosphere and staging of the show are becoming the message.  And this message seems to be: it’s kind of okay to forget about how awful and repressive the 1950′s and early 60′s were if its artifacts provide the fantasy or eye candy that we need in order to escape from our own times.  I know, you are going to say that I am going too far.  It’s not the TV show’s fault if it’s seductively adorned.

A short personal sidebar.   I was a child in the 1950′s and a young adolescent in the early 1960′s, yet I can still feel the claustrophobia of the period.  I can tell you that offices were rarely glamorous.  They were enclaves of sexism and repression.  I remember working in one as a mailboy in my teens.  Men were stuffed into cubicles or small offices.  Women worked in outer areas as secretaries–a version of what you see in Mad Men.  The hierarchy was fixed.  I can swear that the men spent half their time either making passes at the secretaries or making juvenile sexual jokes about them, which were not much different from what I heard in the high school locker room.  If I were a girl at the time, I would have said “ick.”  (Of course, I couldn’t actually say, “ick,” or I would have been seen as a sissy.)  What about the clothing, you ask.  Let me tell you, when you actually had to wear this sort of clothing day in and day out or be ostracized for not wearing it, it wasn’t any fun.  (I had to wear skinny ties in a public school until the late 1960′s.)

Perhaps I am getting worked up over nothing.  After all doesn’t the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, feel much as I do about the period?  But I am not the first to suggest that Weiner may be conflicted regarding his own creation.  (See Natasha Simons.)   The period is romanticized even as it is criticized.  Let’s be clear, the romance is a mistake.  The period was so bad that if I invented a time machine I would make sure that it would self-destruct before it could take anyone back into it.  From this perspective, the Mad Men contest photo does not appear innocuous.  It’s not simply suggesting: wouldn’t it be fun to be on a TV show.  It’s suggesting: wouldn’t it be a blast to be back in that time, when, to paraphrase Ogden Nash, candy was dandy but liquor was quicker.

This season Mad Men will present us with the trials and tribulations of a bunch of middle class folks struggling to build their own business in a day when the economy was still booming.  Escapism surely has its place.  But as we enjoy the accouterments of the characters’ life styles, I wonder how much time we will spend focusing on how far their world actually is from ours.  Which brings me back to The Wire, in which the drug of choice is heroin, not liquor, and upward mobility is not about getting a corner office but avoiding the coroner.  We don’t really want to watch The Wire.  It presents a political and economic system that is ill-equipped to grapple with depth of the corruption that plagues various strata in our society.  It doesn’t provide any eye candy and it certainly doesn’t hold out the hope of a world in which our homes and offices are bathed in sunlight.  If you are going to watch the fourth season of Mad Men, and you haven’t seen The Wire, it might be an interesting experiment to view them together.

……Cadillac (1960), Winchester, Virginia, June 2010……       Ubik, first hardcover.

In his novel Ubik, Philip K. Dick imagines a world in which corporations employ telepaths to undermine the interests of their competitors.  In turn, the competition hires firms with anti-telepaths in order to defend themselves against their adversaries and protect their privacy.  Dick is having a good time.  The use of psychic powers by companies merely mimics the dirty tricks employed by current corporate spies.  It’s still chess whether played in two or three dimensions.  New frontiers, same games.  (The best science fiction always makes the implicit present explicit.)

It seems that we face the world of Ubik today but on an even more personal level.  The World Wide Web is a marvelous thing.  But it doesn’t forget.  If you say something you might regret or post an unflattering picture, it is caught by the Web and freeze dried.  Employers, friends, strangers, those wishing you ill, or old-fashioned voyeurs will have you under their gaze with the click of a mouse for the foreseeable future.   It’s hard living in a Facebook culture when we can’t always control how we appear.  Different sorts of answers to this dilemma have been proposed.  Some legal: prevent the firing of employees based on information that does not reveal illegal activity.  Some technological: posts that automatically self-destruct after a number of months or years.  Some positively Dickean:  neutralize those who would do you harm by hiring a company to transform your presence on the Web.  Here is how the latter strategy is explained in a current New York Times Magazine article by Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting.” (Catch the name of the company below, ReputationDefender.  Dick might have called the company PsycheDefender.)

[W]ith the help of the kind of search-optimization technology that businesses use to raise their Google profiles, ReputationDefender can bombard the Web with positive or neutral information about its customers, either creating new Web pages or by multiplying links to existing ones to ensure they show up at the top of any Google search. (Services begin from $10 a month to $1,000 a year; for challenging cases, the price can rise into the tens of thousands.) By automatically raising the Google ranks of the positive links, ReputationDefender pushes the negative links to the back pages of a Google search, where they’re harder to find.

Perhaps this is akin to how the anti-telepaths worked in Dick’s novel.  But Dick’s concerns were not just with corporate dirty tricks.  The issues were deeper.  If one is always being watched, tracked in some fashion, defined by the gaze of others who one does not control, how does one become a person?  Being a person involves the possibility of changing the course of one’s life, of making choices to be (somewhat) different from how one has been.  The Web presents a real danger.   We can find ourselves permanently defined by past words and deeds, some from the long past.  Americans have always been especially attuned to the idea that we could remake ourselves, change our lives, start all over again, perhaps by going West.  But the Frontier option is no longer available, according to Rosen.

In the 20th century, however, the ideal of the self-made man came under siege. The end of the Western frontier led to worries that Americans could no longer seek a fresh start and leave their past behind, a kind of reinvention associated with the phrase “G.T.T.,” or “Gone to Texas.” But the dawning of the Internet age promised to resurrect the ideal of what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called the “protean self.” If you couldn’t flee to Texas, you could always seek out a new chat room and create a new screen name. For some technology enthusiasts, the Web was supposed to be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting identities.

But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.

One crucial point that the article does not address is that we appear to be shackling ourselves to a digital past at a time when real income for most Americans simply hasn’t been rising in line with the American Dream.  We believed, and were led to believe, that economic progress would provide us with opportunities in which we could realize ourselves in new and different ways.  The objects of our material desires, like the Cadillac pictured above, were objects that allowed our fantasies to play out.  If I buy one of those, I can be like those who own them.  If I buy this, and this, and this….I will be different.  I will be free.  Free of my past.  Free of the past.

But now that the party appears to be over, the new technology of the Internet has stepped in.  Give me an avatar and freedom will ring.  Yet the Web may have as many bobby traps in store for us as the unfettered materialism of the go go economy myth.  Unless of course we can call on a new company, ReputationCreators, that will give us whatever persona we would like.   The catch…for a price that many of us won’t be able to pay.