To understand how Mad Men accomplishes this critique, we need to look closely at its visual style. By “style,” I don’t mean just its fashion sense, although costume design is definitely a key stylistic component. Rather, I examine the program’s style in terms of its mise-en-scène, or elements arranged in front of the camera, and its cinematography, or elements associated with the camera itself. Mise-en-scène covers set, lighting, and costume design, as well as the positioning of the actors on the set. Cinematography includes framing, camera angle, choice of film stock, and camera movement. In addition, it is also critical to attend to the program’s editing design since editing determines what we see on the screen, for how long, and in what context. Together, then, mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing are aspects of television style that showrunner Matthew Weiner, his crew, and his actors use to construct their twenty-first-century critique of 1960s American values.
To start an analysis of Mad Men’s mise-en-scène, we should look first at its set design, which serves the crucial function of establishing the program’s time period. This is achieved both subtly—by the interior design of the rooms that characters inhabit—and not so subtly—by objects such as a March 1960 calendar that appears in close-up in the very first episode. Period authenticity is clearly important to showrunner Weiner, and the program contains remarkably few anachronistic objects, considering its relatively limited budget (when compared to feature films) and the grind of producing a weekly television program. However, period verisimilitude is not the only significant aspect of the set design. Equally important is the use of recurring sets to express the rigidity and repressiveness of early-1960s American society—as can be seen in the office of ad agency Sterling Cooper and the suburban home of Don and Betty Draper (both of which locales are replaced after season three).
The office set clearly reflects the power structure at the agency (figure 5.1). Secretaries are clustered together in a “pool,” with their desks arrayed on an inflexible grid that mirrors the fluorescent lighting pattern above them. In this public space, they are at the mercy of the higher-ranking men of the office who make degrading, condescending comments about them, take their work for granted, and shamelessly ogle new hires, such as Peggy Olson in the first season. Except for the powerful and physically imposing office manager, Joan Harris, the women, including Peggy, have little control over their own space—unlike the men who move through it imperiously. The desk and lighting grids of the set design position them as if they were rats in an executive maze. Thus, the set design and the blocking of the actors’ positions within it serve to dehumanize and contain the female characters.
The “mad men” are masters of their own spaces—afforded personal offices that physically separate them from the women. The higher up the corporate ladder, the more personalized these offices are, with agency head Bert Cooper’s as the most distinctive. All who enter it are required, as per Asian custom, to remove their shoes, and then, once inside, they are confronted with Japanese erotic art and an abstract expressionist painting that is so mysterious and so massively expensive that employees sneak into Bert’s office after-hours to stare at it in awe and incomprehension, while submissively holding their shoes in their hands.1 Individual offices like Cooper’s serve as spaces of authority, power, and privacy in contrast to the collective space of the secretarial pool.
Of course, Bert and the other men can move through the secretaries’ space with impunity, as Pete Campbell does in figure 5.1. The social status and power attached to the private offices are made clear in Peggy’s ascent from secretary to copywriter and full-fledged member of “Creative.” Initially in the second season, she is forced to share space in what becomes the photocopy room, but eventually she gets her own office, and in the layout of the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (SCDP) agency, she scores a prestigious one next to Don Draper’s. However, the SCDP offices are not nearly as commodious as Sterling Cooper’s. Contrasted with the wide-open space of Sterling Cooper’s office, SCDP’s diminished space visually echoes the diminished fortunes of the ad men as they struggle to start a new agency.
FIGURE 5.1. The rigid power structure of the ad agency is visually manifested in the office spaces of Mad Men.
Mad Men’s offices are not the only sets that repress and contain their characters. The homes and apartments of several characters serve important narrative functions as well. Central among these is the Draper home, the picture-perfect representation of affluent suburban existence, in which, however, the Draper family lives a less-than-perfect life. Indeed, with a disaffected daughter, a restless, adulterous mother, and a similarly adulterous father whose entire identity is also a fraudulent fabrication, the house is filled with melancholy and depression. In short, the idealized mise-en-scène of the Draper’s home is frequently at odds with the despair of its inhabitants.
The pressures within their home finally result in divorce in the episode titled “The Grown-Ups,” which was the next-to-last episode of season 3 and included events that coincided with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. The episode contains a breakfast scene with a set design that exemplifies Mad Men’s style of decor in that it could have been lifted from a 1950s sitcom or a Good Housekeeping article. Pine-paneled walls, avocado-green appliances, and an oh-so-modern (electric!) stovetop with a skillet of scrambled eggs are part of the mise-en-scène, as are 1963-appropriate props such as a glass milk bottle, a loaf of Pleasantville(!) white bread, and various knickknacks. Into this mise-en-scène are inserted the conventional suburban “housewife” in her housecoat, the conventional urban “businessman” in his suit, and a pair of conventional children in their pajamas. But the previous scene has been anything but conventional, as Betty angrily tells Don, “I want to scream at you, for ruining all of this [the suburban life and home]” (figure 5.2), and, saying that she doesn’t love him anymore, demands a divorce. The next morning, as Don exits the house through the kitchen for what will be the last time, he and the children speak, but the “grown-ups” of the episode’s title exchange no dialogue. The bitter contrast between the scene’s pessimistic emotional tone and its optimistic morning-time mise-en-scène characterizes Mad Men’s critique of mid-century America’s superficial normalcy and repression of the messier aspects of human behavior in the name of conformity to the dominant social order. The mess still exists, but it’s been pushed below the surface. As the 1960s progressed, however, that repression became less and less tenable. Mad Men feeds on our understanding of what is to come in the latter part of the rebellious 1960s, looking backward and forward simultaneously.
The dressing of Mad Men’s sets with time-appropriate objects creates the viewing pleasure of picking out period details, like the rotary-dial phones and IBM Selectric typewriters shown in figure 5.1. Details from the 1960s are necessary to construct the program’s general timeframe, but the program also uses objects in nuanced ways to anchor episodes to particular days in American history. “The Grown-Ups,” for example, opens on an unspecified day in 1963. The year has been established earlier in the third season, and the characters complain about the lack of heat in the office, so we know it must be fall or winter. Then, in the background of a shot of Duck Phillips in a hotel room, we see the first of two televisions that are turned on and tuned to a live broadcast of As the World Turns. The sound is off and the television has less visual impact than the ostentatious glass lamps in the foreground of the room—although the shot has been carefully framed to include the TV screen. The very next scene shows us Pete and Harry Crane, the head of Sterling Cooper’s media-buying department, in Harry’s cluttered