A Blog of My Own

I’ve been commenting about Mad Men lately, and pretty much buying into the show’s conception of advertising creative people as lost souls, squandering their gifts and their lives on assignments they disdain, but I just looked at my own reel for the first time in years (I retired seven years ago), and I realized something. The show is wrong.

(A “reel,” for those of you not in the ad biz, is the collection of television commercials you’re proudest of having created; the word has been outdated ever since in-office film projectors got replaced by 3/4” videotape machines, then DVDs, then downloads, but it persists.)

Sometimes we (I and my creative compadres) did great work. And when we did, it was personal.

I mean, it came from inside us. Our experiences with the people we’d known, the people we loved. Our frustrations with life, and our triumphs. Our observations, filtered through our own sensibilities, of other people and the way they behave.

What an artist does.

We weren’t exploited by the assignments we were given. We exploited the assignments.

To us, a commercial was an opportunity to send a message in a bottle. The product, the sales pitch? That was just the bottle, the delivery system. The message inside? That was the important part—and that was us.

We put ourselves out there, into the universe. Our messages said, “Hey, this is me, these are the things I care about, I bet they’re not so different from the things you care about. I bet I know what can make you smile or choke up a little, because I bet it’s the same stuff that makes me do that. Let’s find out, anyway.”

And many times, the universe sent messages back, in the form of letters from audience members we’d touched, or gushing compliments from folks at cocktail parties. Or sales of the product shooting through the roof, even though that wasn’t really why we did what we did. The only reason we cared about that was that it meant we’d get to do it again.

Our clients, whether they knew it or not, were patrons of the arts.

We spent millions of dollars that didn’t belong to us to reach millions of people we didn’t know with stories that came from inside us and meant something to us.

I feel lucky to have spent my career at an agency which, for long stretches of time, encouraged us in our attempts at artistry, understood what was really happening within its walls, and knew that serving clients and serving us weren’t contradictory missions. Great work can’t happen without that support.

Mad Men can be infuriating when it is sloppy, and it was sloppy in its most recent episode. One character says to another, “Remember, the medium is the message.” This is supposed to sound like a smart allusion to McLuhan, but it’s not smart, because the show takes place in 1960 and McLuhan didn’t come out with that iconic phrase until his book Understanding Media, published in 1964. (I didn’t need to look this up. I knew it. If I knew it, I think the writers of Mad Men, who are purporting to tell us something about a time and place, ought to know it.)

Later there was a scene in which ad man Don Draper confronts, in his mistress’s apartment, the mistress’s beatnik boyfriend. The scene had all the freshness of a Goldie Hawn movie from the late 60s—which is to say, none. (The original Hawn model for the Mad Man scene was either There’s a Girl In My Soup with Peter Sellers or Cactus Flower with Walter Matthau, I can’t remember which—but either way not good.) The Hawn movies were rancid in their own time; to rip them off now seems like a sell-by violation worthy of a call to the Board of Health.

Early in the episode, in a scene in which Don is pitching the Israeli tourism account, we’re asked to swallow, for the sake of exposition, that he would not know that the novel Exodus had been on the top of the New York Times bestseller list for the last two years. Please.

And yet–something in the show stays with you. The mysterious, flashback-told “Don was someone else in a former life” subplot feels lifted from a generic nighttime soap, yet, on further examination, it reinforces the theme of the show–that these “mad men” are men deeply separated from themselves. And how could it be otherwise? Like Tony Soprano, Don is very good at a job which is not good. (You can make a case that advertising performs an indispensible role in our economy, and that it entertains, but Mother Teresa wouldn’t have gone into it.) Being good at your job gives you self-esteem, the kind that allows Don to answer the question “How do you sleep?” by replying, proudly, “On a bed of money.” But being good at a job that is not good is bound to create self-loathing. (And the better you are at it, the more doubts you have about whether being good at it is a good thing.)

As with any job, the only way for Don to excel is to make himself care passionately about his work. Yet, what’s it to him, on any personally meaningful level, what brand of deodorant people choose? Advertising is a profession in which success is a function of being able to make yourself care deeply about things you care nothing about; and if that isn’t a definition of being separated from yourself, I don’t know what is. The “I’m really somebody else” storyline is merely the manifestation of that.

One of the great things about Superbad is that there is not a single product placement in it. It’s old school that way—just like the music the characters love. Instead of selling every square inch of movie-frame real estate to the highest bidder, as all other movies do today, Superbad does what movies used to do forty years ago. When there’s a can of beer in the shot (and there are many of these shots), the moviemakers have created a fictional beer with a mocked-up label that kind of looks like Miller High Life but not really. When there’s a bucket of detergent, it’s some fictional mocked-up brand that kind of looks like the illegitimate child of Tide and Era. I really liked the way the movie didn’t whore itself out to the pimps of product placement. (And there’s something funny, satirical, about the fake brands–their graphics seem to provide an additional level of commentary on the world these kids live in.)

I have two theories to explain the absence of real brands in the movie. One is that no manufacturer would allow its products within ten miles of a movie as unjudgmental about underage drinking as Superbad is. That’s my cynical theory. But I also have an idealistic theory. This is, that the makers of Superbad said, “You know what? This isn’t a costly movie we’re making. There are no stars and no expensive locations. We’re going to make a ton of money as it is. We don’t need no stinking product placement, gringo.”

It’s a subtle thing, but the decision to keep Superbad pristine this way contributes to the movie’s feeling as honest as it does in every other way. Hooray, makers of Superbad.

When Mad Men is great—which it has not been consistently in its first four episodes—it is so great as to defy easy description. Underneath a simple enough storyline (this is not one of those shows that has you going “Huh?” like John from Cincinnati) there are so many layers going on it, so many complex and absorbing tensions pulling the characters three ways from Sunday, that it may become one of the great all-time TV shows. When The Sopranos ended, it seemed all but impossible that we’d see anything on its level on television again for a long, long time. As it turned out, it may only have taken about a month.

Mad Men’s time is 1960, and its protagonist (it’s hard to call him “hero”) is Don Draper. Unlike the Rock Hudson/Gig Young/Tony Randall stereotype that has defined the ad man in popular culture for the last half-century, Draper takes his job seriously. His whole life is fodder for the problem-solving he does for his clients. He falls asleep at night with a legal pad of jottings on his chest; he has ideas while banging his mistress; he takes notes on human behavior while sitting in a bar; he searches his wife’s nervous breakdown for insight into how to sell deodorant. And it’s not all about “approval” for him; some inner imperative to do his job well impels him to give his employers and his clients good value for money. Passionately caring about and doing the job you’re being paid to do instead of taking someone’s money and fucking off: This is behavior that we normally describe as enviable, admirable and moral. Yet Don’s hard work is frequently in the service of products that are bad for us (like Dick Nixon). This is action that is amoral, at best. In doing his damnedest to reach American consumers/voters with insights that can move them, is Draper doing a good thing (because he’s holding up his end of the contract excellently), or is he the German officer who is “merely following orders”? At one point in Episode 4, he makes a remark about his agency that “there are more failed artists and intellectuals around here than in the Third Reich.” Although he seems to be lashing out at others, the shoe fits. The parallels are uncomfortable—and not limited to advertising. They are endemic to capitalism, our way of life, the American air we breathe. Which of us, impelled by the need to get what we need for ourselves and our families, hasn’t made choices that would fail to stand scrutiny when judged in the light of the common good? Mad Men looks like a window into a different time and place, but it’s not a window—it’s a mirror.

The ambivalencies about Don Draper are just the beginning. When we see the drinking the ad men do in their offices (happy hour seems to start at 11), are we meant to think how sad that is, or are we meant to think, “Man, those were the days!”? (Day-long, day-after-day dope smoking sure looks cool when they do it in Entourage, so why should we feel any different about the alcohol use in Mad Men?) When we see kids in 1960-World jumping around in cars unseatbelted, are we meant to feel good about the strides in consciousness we’ve made since then in protecting our young, or are we meant to mourn the loss of innocence and sense of security, even if false, since that carefree time? When we see a suburban world of moms and homemakers, are we meant to key in on the lack of career options available to women then, or are we meant to celebrate a time when families could live well on one income? All of the above. Mad Men shows that complexity does not have to be confusing. Sometimes it can be enlightening. And then, there’s John from Cincinnati.

Two things, besides the superb singing, leap out at you in this medley from a 1965 Perry Como Show in which Como and Lena Horne honor the recently-departed Nat Cole.

One, the opening push-in on Perry and Lena at an unmanned piano–as we hear the sounds of a piano–is just brilliantly evocative of the loss.

Two, the way the excerpts of Cole signature songs have been selected so as to take on a whole new layer of meaning–each one feeling repurposed so as to sound addressed to Nat, and the meaning of his life and loss, without a single change in the original lyrics–is again, brilliant.

If anyone out there in cyberland knows the identity of the musical-director-slash-creator-of-special-material for the show who is responsible for this, I’d like to know, too. These eight minutes are certainly among the best eight minutes in all of television musical-variety history.

The video–kindly contributed to YouTube by “NYCguys2007″–appeared there once before, and was yanked, possibly due to copyright issues. So it may be yanked again before long. Look at it now.

One virtue of the musical film Hairspray is that it is the first movie musical in a long time to have the courage of its convictions. That is, not to frame all its numbers as if it’s ashamed of them, in the “it’s happening on a stage within the film, so it’s justified!” way; or the “see, it’s really just an ironic commentary on the story!” way; or the “hey, don’t worry, it’s only a fantasy the character is having, so it’s not really happening!” way. (For an example of all these ways, see Chicago.) Or, the “it’s just a spoof, so relax” way. (See The Producers.) Rather, Hairspray, in the manner of classic musical films, dares to present us with some musical numbers that are simply the sincere, if outsized, expressions of its characters’ emotions. In these sequences, the movie leaves us no safe ground to run to evade the rapture of “yes, this is really happening“–yet no possibility to account for what we are seeing as logical or rational–opening up the possibility for us to feel feelings just as the characters do. And to give us choreography that isn’t all disembodied faces and hands and feet and asses. (See, again, Chicago.) Quite a lot of it works.

Most of the felicitous score (by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman) is in the pop-rock genre, but among the highlights is a number featuring Michelle Pfeiffer that owes more to “Whatever Lola Wants.” Its production is not only funny but, what’s more surprising, genuinely haunting; maybe the more haunting for being funny and the funnier for being haunting. It’s called “The Legend of Miss Baltimore Crabs.” Here’s a (somewhat choppy, unfortunately, and not terribly representative) video of a small piece of it:

Pfeiffer made something of a sensation with her piano-perching musical turn in The Fabulous Baker Boys back in ‘89. It’s too bad we’ve had to wait almost twenty years to enjoy her in a musical again–she obviously has a flair for it–but her performance in Hairspray makes it feel worth the wait.

The brilliance of Bravo’s Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List is in how it subverts the genre. (The show recently completed its season; episodes are now in heavy re-run rotation on the channel.) Although the reality show format encourages us to believe we are seeing some semblance of, well, reality, The “Kathy Griffin” we see on D-List–a minor celeb using zany strategems week after week in her indefatigible attempt to climb the ladder of fame–is no more the real Kathy Griffin than the “Jack Benny” that Jack Benny played on the The Jack Benny Show was the real Jack Benny.

True, some reality shows do capture their central figures in genuine moments, often as not humiliating, and with these, the central figures seem not so much the stars of their shows as the victims of them. (Case in point: Paula Abdul.) But Kathy Griffin uses the reality show genre, rather than being used by it. As a standup comic, she’s essentially a writer (a writer who says her own words out loud), and the situations on D-List are no less written than her act.

Just as Jack Benny knew he could use the half-hour comedy format to create a persona for himself that was “cheap” and “vain,” and thereby fashion a comedic character America loved to see get his comeuppance week after week, Kathy Griffin uses the modern-day format of reality show to fashion a persona for herself that is “famewhoring,” “desperate,” and “failing.” The real Kathy Griffin no doubt has friends that she doesn’t have to pay to be her friends, and has some sense of perspective about fame, and some limits on the things she’ll do to pursue it. But those things don’t make for an interesting character to follow on a weekly basis. And so, for her TV show, she created this fictional “Kathy Griffin” persona. Ironically, this fiction is presented as “reality”–but that’s what Jack Benny did, too. It just wasn’t called “reality show” then.

But then, doesn’t practically all fiction attempt to create some aura of reality around itself? How else can we buy into any story? Kathy Griffin’s genius is that she’s the first person to use the “reality show” format to create a dramatic literature that is brazenly, unashamedly, openly fictional. (Although I think there may be some who don’t get that.)

Griffin’s famewhoring dynamo is an inspired comic creation, one that exposes human foibles that seem to afflict an alarmingly large number of people in our culture. As a member of that culture, Griffin is not immune to the foibles. But unlike most, she has the self-awareness and wit to exaggerate them and make art out of them. Nobody on television gives me more pleasure than Kathy Griffin currently does, and if that doesn’t make her A-List, I don’t know what A-List means.