Mad Moods

When I've been reading a novel a lot or watching a novel-like show a lot, it alters my default thoughts, moods, and my inner dialog. I'll be walking across campus, between appointments, distracted from work for a moment, and my thoughts will drift back to a song from the TV show or a certain moment from the narrative. In some sense, I'm always occupying that world, whether or not I'm reading or watching the story at any given moment.

So it goes w/ Mad Men right now. I'd just re-discovered the first season, watching all of season 1 in a week. Now, I'm making my way through season 2 for the second time in preparation for the beginning of the third season next weekend. The mood of Mad Men is something like the mood of The Sopranos - pretty dark w/ touches of detached, sarcastic levity. Hardly the mood you would choose to be in all the time. Did I choose to watch Mad Men because it had qualities that helped me put my life in perspective in some way, as Mary Beth Oliver hypothesizes in her writings about sad and meaningful media? Maybe. But thinking about it strictly in terms of mood, the show puts me in a somewhat reflective mood but seems to have inoculated me against slipping into very bad moods. If I had watched some comedy like Arrested Development, or some other distraction, I might have experienced a temporary boost in mood that might have even carried over a bit into the rest of my life. But then I would be reminded of some dark thought that would bring my mood way down and nothing about my media experience could help with that. If anything, it might even hurt more given the contrast between the two moods and the two worlds. But w/ Mad Men and similar "bad mood" shows, those unhappy thoughts and the events that trigger them can happen to me (and they will always happen to me - that's life) and I won't be brought as low by them.

We could call shows like Mad Men "reflective media," something that had this carry-over effect on mood after you've stopped watching (but only if you're really into the show), enhancing your ability to deal w/ situations and other bad thoughts and bad moods.

Still, it might be causing me to dwell on unhappier aspects of my life. Or it might just give color and shape to the moods and thoughts that are results of my real life situations and material experience. Maybe I'm pulling the darker moments out of a show full of dark & light moments b/c that's what I need at this time. That's what makes this so fascinating to study: I don't have an intuitive grasp on whether my mood is affecting my interpretation of the show, the show is affecting my mood, or both or neither is affecting each other. Its too glib to say that they both affect each other, though that may be true. I need to know the degree to which they affect each other and the circumstances in which those effects hold up. Not to say that mood is all that matters. I wouldn't want media or anything else to make me a happy idiot, and I wouldn't want people to stop reading Hamlet b/c its too depressing. Still, I'd like to know a bit more about what causes what, especially when it comes to these indirect, lingering effects on my default moods.

Mad Men: Another Suprise Pregnancy? Really?

Did I love the conclusion of the second season of Mad Men? Sure. Don's reappearance seemed rather sudden, so sudden that I thought it was a figment of Betty's imagination (something Weiner was prone to doing as a writer for The Sopranos). The Cuban Missle Crisis, Betty's infidelity, and Peggy's revelation to Pete were so big that they blotted out the slow burn of Don's trajectory. He just seems completely erratic to me, and not in a way that's compelling. Still, I liked the power play between Don and Duck Phillips. And the HBO touches are still there: the concern with organizational hierarchies, the slight ironic distance between the characters and the audience, the possibility that a flawed main character living a life of ill repute could reform thanks to psychology, religion, or larger cultural trends or institutions. For those, I'll gladly watch another 3 seasons.

But here are my main problems with the last episode and, by extension, the show as a whole: the centrality of romantic relationships and the inevitable emphasis on two revelations: pregnancy and infidelity. I was reminded of two things I watched last night: an interview with Charlie Kaufman on Charlie Rose in which he notes that the depiction of romantic relationships in most Hollywood films is inaccurate (5:22 into the clip). I'd agree, and I wouldn't even say that the main problem is that there are too many happy endings (or any kind of endings for that matter, b/c real life relationships never truly end until one person dies). The problem, as I see it, is the overrepresentation of surprise pregnancies and infidelity. The second thing that I was reminded of is essentially a rebuttal of the first (written by the same man, Charlie Kaufman): its this scene (1:30 into the clip) in Adaptation in which Brian Cox (as Robert McKee) berates Charlie for claiming that these types of things (the melodrama of everyday life) do not happen in real life. Everyday, someone gets murdered, someone falls in love, etc. McKee/Cox is right. All of that stuff does happen everyday. People have probably been fucking around behind the backs of their wives/husbands since the beginning of time, and they'll probably continue to do that forever. It is a universal theme. And yet, in practice, it happens to individuals only once or twice in a lifetime on average.

Its the overrepresentativeness of surprise pregnancy and infidelity that bug me, not their mere presence. Maybe its the fundamental discontinuity between character's lives and viewer's lives that does it: the character, presumably, only has one or two revelations like this in their fictitious lives, like us. However, we keep flitting around, watching the same excerpts of fictitious lives, cutting from one moment of relationship drama to another. If we compared our lives to the lives of individual characters, no problem. But, according to cultivation theory, the individual viewer compares his or her individual life to some aggregate life cobbled together from the bits and pieces, the brief windows into millions of people's lives (real and fiction) that we experience through stories. These aggregate lives are typically distorted, to heighten drama, to shorten plotlines, to sell products. They have no single author and they're not expected to be perfectly realistic. As long as they are realistic enough, we'll go along with them, and in doing so, we'll begin to modify our conceptions of human nature and social mores, whether we're conscious of that or not.

A student in the Media Effects class I'm GSI-ing for has proposed a study that hypothesizes a cultivation-like effect of overrepresentation of troubled relationships on heavy viewer's real life relationships, and I'm pretty damn sure she's on to something. Writers need drama, so they put infidelity in their storylines. In and of itself, no individual instance of this is unrealistic. But as they pile up, they give the impression that infidelity is extremely common (read: acceptable?). Though people would never admit to it, I wonder if, in the backs of their minds, they think that many other people are cheating and so they go ahead and do it, thinking "I know its 'bad,' but people do it pretty frequently." In fact, its especially likely to happen and especially hard to ferret out because our culture, every culture, likes to believe that it doesn't happen. I suppose we're that way with a lot of elements of sexual relationships: publicly denying certain aspects, speaking to one another in the code of fiction about how things "really are," but in the process, we overrepresent the dark side and make our lives darker through the cultivation of values that come with heavy viewing.

Its not even the prevlance of infidelity per se that I object to. Its the tired, cliched depiction of how it unfolds: the boredom with fidelity, the temptation, the lapse, the secrecy, the guilt, the revelation, the begrudging forgiveness. Yes, I'm sure it happens a lot like that in real life on its own, but whose to say that we don't go through this charade thinking it is in our nature when we're merely repeating the scripts that were embedded in stories for purposes of selling more soap (or more stories. There's no need to pin the blame solely on commercially-sponsored storytelling. 19th century novels and serialized stories were just as likley to include such heightened drama in order to keep the buying public coming back for more)?

Stories do not implant or invent desires. In real life, there is infidelity and there are secrecy and revelations. And yet, due cheifly to constraints of economy and technology, stories are required to reflect only certain aspects of our desires. Its not the values reflected in the stories that shape our beliefs on human nature and social mores. It is their collective and individual structures. Compare one society in which individuals read one grand narrative (e.g. the Bible, which is a collection of smaller stories, yes, but they have a unifying thread and they're typically treated as a single text) and see their lives as one grand narrative to a society in which individuals watch hundreds of different, unrelated narratives a year. We have little fragments of lives. It might have a baring on our desires or expectations for long-term relationships, as part of a marriage, a business, a country, an institution, etc.

Surprise pregnancies (especially the kind that happens when two people fuck each other once and only once) are another matter. It just seems biologically unrealistic. If you took the number of times one night stands resulted in pregnancy on TV and compared it with the number of times they resulted in pregnancy in real life (again, good luck trying to prove this, but its still my hunch), you'd see a discrepancy.

But the effects issue is beside the point. I'm just sick of it is all. Yes, infidelity, pregnancy, and will-they-or-won't-they romances happen in real life to most people and, as they are universal, are compelling for that reason. But they're overused. In this world overcrowded by stories, it is not enough to be realistic. You must be original, even if it means being unrealistic, in order to be compelling.

So, I wasn't wild about the fact that this season-ender included the old stand-bys of pregancy and infidelity. But at least it treated the former in a somewhat unique manner, lingering on the scene of the revelation in which both characters were neither horrified nor overjoyed, but conveyed something in between (perhaps horror masked by a facade of acceptance and decorum, something that pervades the show). The music, the fade to black: it all had a nice feeling to it, set it apart from the slaps-in-the-faces and the rivers of tears that characterize most pregancy revelations. Or, to be more accurate, it didn't quite set it apart by itself. It characterized the show as an HBO show. It was the kind of scene, the kind of conclusion, that you would expect of The Wire or The Sopranos, that disquiet of ambiguity, the frustration of the need for closure that we all feel when we engage with stories, that frustration mirroring that of the characters.

Mad Men - an HBO show by any other name?

While watching the series premier of Mad Men on AMC, I was straining to see the similarities between this show and the show its creator- Matthew Weiner - used to write for, The Sopranos. Usually, writer/producers leave the stifling confines of network TV for the liberating ad-free world of HBO (the 3 Davids are all former network scribes). So, what happens when they go the other way, and what influence is more powerful in determining the flavor of a show - the network brand or a staff writer? This is sort of a flawed question, b/c Weiner isn't David Chase, but still, I think you could look at Mad Men and ask whether it was an HBO-type show just by seeing how much it resembled the show Weiner used to write for.

AMC (and F/X, which has a few critically acclaimed shows like Rescue Me and The Shield) aren't network TV, but still, they have ads. Therefore, shows on those networks are broken up, interrupted by distracting advertising, and can't allow much in the way of swearing, nudity, violence, etc. Perhaps they're less likely to stand by a ratings challenged show, though its worth noting that even HBO has its limits in that regard. What I identify with HBO shows goes beyond profanity and violence. Its dramas (I'm thinking primarily of The Sopranos and The Wire, though I'm going to check out Deadwood and 6 Feet Under to see if it applies to them) seem to be:

• more serialized - the stories unfold over many episodes, and not much is wrapped up in each ep
  
• more dense in terms of plotlines and information doled out by the narration
• less redundant in terms of that information
  
• slower-paced - more scenes that work to develop character and don't advance the plot
  

I've surmised that these qualities are direct results of not having the interruption of ads. According to this theory, no show on an ad-driven network (like Man Men) could possess these qualities and maintain enough of an audience to survive for a few seasons. The ads take a viewer's attention away from the narrative, and if the show is too complex, then the viewer will become lost. Mind you, complex shows like The Sopranos or The Wire can be shown on ad-driven networks in syndication and have a significant audience b/c they've already built up an audience on distraction-free HBO. But to start out on the distraction-heavy medium of ad-TV and gain an audience while maintaining narrative complexity of this nature - impossible!

There's also a certain moral position on class in America that some HBO shows share (again, I'm thinking of The Sopranos, The Wire, maybe Deadwood): there is not one hierarchy but many, some on the right side of the law, others on the wrong side, though there seems to be very little meaningful difference between the two. Protagonists pursue success on their own terms, trying to climb the ladder and beat the other guy while vaguely aware that the whole point of their existence - to climb that ladder - may be utterly bereft of meaning.

I can't think of any network shows that address themes of class, power, and culture in that way. Though I can't say for sure, I've heard that ad-driven cable net shows like The Shield, Rescue Me, and Battlestar Gallactica do. As far as Mad Men goes, so far it seems to resemble the HBO thematic preoccupations. One of the main characters - Don Draper - is at or near the top of the game, but seems to slip into reveries every now and then, perhaps having doubts about the life he's living (but, unlike Tony Soprano, he can't blame it on not getting in on the ground floor). There's also the detached wit of those HBO shows, the way they occasionally cue us to laugh at the whole backwards culture, so seldom seen on network TV and even the aforementioned ad-driven cable net shows, which are more geared towards getting us to identify with the protagonist. Again, Man Men seems to be mocking the culture as much as it presents it as hip and appealing.

One way Weiner could maintain a certain integrity while working on advertising-driven TV: by having his show be about advertising. Its a bit too early to tell, but it seems to take a somewhat cynical approach towards advertising in general. The show would seem to offer more opportunities for product placement than any scripted show in TV history. But what does it mean for a brand to be featured in a show that's message is: ads are lies created to manipulate the masses into buying things they had no previous intention of buying, to convince them, as the protagonist so eloquently put it, that everything is OK? So, there's two questions: does a brand (like Lucky Strike, which was featured in the first ep and, not coincidentally, just stopped selling products in North America last year) suffer from being featured in the show; does a brand suffer from being featured in the interstitial ads during the show?

The answer to question two is most likely no, but perhaps sales wouldn't be boosted as much as if the product were featured in a more ad/product-friendly show.

In the end, I hope that this show, along with the other show created by an HBO ex-pat - Damages) embody some of the characteristics of The Sopranos. Given the lasting popularity of that show, in syndication and on DVD, maybe TV execs of all stripes will get the message that there's an audience for that type of show. Even if its inevitably watered-down, that distinct mix of narrative complexity, detached wit, and class consciousness that HBO pioneered in the beginning of this decade would be a welcome change from what we've seen so far.