in today’s convergence culture with its attending devices) and to treat the program’s lush aesthetics as background visual noise free from politics. In the very first scene of the series, Patrick attempts to cruise for sex in Buena Vista Park, a decidedly atechnological means for hooking up. Partially obscured by blurred leaves, Patrick and a bearded suitor begin to give each other a hand job, but Patrick cannot shut his mouth, asking the man if he “comes here a lot” as well as his name (violating virtually all cruising etiquette). The man, having had enough of Patrick literally seconds into the series, tells him to “stop talking” before an ill-timed phone call ends the encounter for good. What if, indeed, the audience were to take the anonymous man’s cue, silencing the ordinary drama of urban gay men and refracting it into an indulgence in the purely visual? In encouraging the audience to always already be looking for something better, Looking outs itself perhaps not simply as anti-television, or as homonormative, but as an app running in the background, an imagescape that might be best viewed by hitting the mute button.
FURTHER READING
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
Clare, Stephanie. “(Homo)normativity’s Romance: Happiness and Indigestion in Andrew Haigh’s Weekend.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 27, no. 6 (2013): 785–98.
Snickars, Pelle, and Patrick Vondarau, eds. Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
NOTES
1 1. See Instagram, “Instagram’s Newest Filter: Willow,” December 11, 2012, http://blog.instagram.com/post/37739409065/instagrams-newest-filter-willow-yesterdays; and “Instagram’s Newest Filter: Mayfair,” December 22, 2012, http://blog.instagram.com/post/38546919409/instagrams-newest-filter-mayfair-yesterdays.
2 2. Clive Thompson, “Clive Thompson on the Instagram Effect,” Wired 20.01, December 27, 2011, www.wired.com.
3 3. American Society of Cinematographers, “Reed Morano Preps Looking in San Francisco,” Parallax View (blog), August 28, 2013, www.theasc.com/site/blog/parallax-view/reed-morano-preps-looking-in-san-francisco.
4 4. Matthew Hammett Knott, “Heroines of Cinema: Reed Morano, the Next Big Thing in American Cinematography,” IndieWire, November 28, 2013, www.indiewire.com.
5 5. Nadav Hochmann and Lev Manovich, “Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the local through Social Media,” First Monday 18, no. 7 (July 2013), https://firstmonday.org.
6 6. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 179.
7 7. Tim Teeman, “Yes, Looking Is Boring. It’s the Drama Gays Deserve,” Daily Beast, January 24, 2014, www.thedailybeast.com.
8 8. Christopher Glazek, “Modern Love,” Out, January 14, 2014, www.out.com.
9 9. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–52.
5
Mad Men
Visual Style
JEREMY G. BUTLER
Abstract: Through a detailed examination of how the visual look of Mad Men conveys the show’s meanings and emotional affect, Jeremy G. Butler provides a model for how to perform a close analysis of television style for a landmark contemporary series.
Much has been written about the look of AMC’s Mad Men—and not surprisingly, as the program has vividly evoked mid-century American life—the hairstyles and clothing, the offices and homes, and, of course, the chain-smoking and four-martini lunches of a particular, privileged segment of American society. However, Mad Men is more than a slavish reproduction of a bygone era. It sees that era through a contemporary filter that recognizes the despair and alienation that lay just beneath the surface. And it implicitly critiques the power structures of that time, which both casually and brutally subordinated working-class people, women, gays, and ethnic and racial minorities.
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
