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 office. A television is on in the background here, too, its presence emphasized when Pete asks Harry, “Can you turn that off?” Harry replies, “Not really,” though he does turn the volume down. As Pete and Harry talk, a CBS News bulletin comes on in the background, but they are oblivious to it. In his hotel room, Duck turns off the same bulletin when Peggy arrives for a lunchtime assignation. It’s not until the Sterling Cooper employees crowd into Harry’s office—one of the few with a television—that Harry and Pete realize what has happened and that we viewers begin to see the impact of the event on Mad Men’s fictional world.
FIGURE 5.2. Mad Men’s detailed mise-en-scène just barely contains the emotional upheaval below the surface of midcentury American “normalcy.”
For the rest of the episode, televisions provide crucial narrative information and prompt characters to take, at times, extreme actions. Betty is particularly affected, with her confrontation of Don taking place beside a television tuned to funeral preparations (figure 5.2). Later, after seeing Lee Harvey Oswald killed on live television, she screams and exclaims, “What is going on?!” Motivated by the television violence she has witnessed and the collapse of her privileged world, she eventually leaves the house to meet Henry Francis, and he proposes to her. Thus, the television, an element of mise-en-scène, evolves in this episode from seemingly insignificant set dressing to major narrative catalyst, blending the personal crises of the characters with larger moments in American history.
The episode ends with one final comment on an object and its implicit reference to the assassination. After exiting the kitchen of his house in the scene discussed above, Don arrives at the empty and dark office, which is closed for a national day of mourning, and finds Peggy, who has come to escape her grieving roommate and relatives. The harsh, punishing florescent lights are off, and she is working by the natural light of a window, augmented by a desk lamp. Don examines the Aqua Net hairspray storyboards on her desk, one of which contains a high-angle view of four individuals in an open convertible (figure 5.3). Before he can offer an opinion, she anticipates his criticism: “It doesn’t shoot until after Thanksgiving. We’ll be okay.” But Don authoritatively dismisses this delusion by shaking his head. The scene is rather elliptical unless the viewer is able to place this storyboard image within the iconography of 1963 and recognize how much it resembles widely circulated high-angle photos of the presidential convertible limousine in which Kennedy was shot (figure 5.4). Since none of those photos is shown in the episode, only viewers who associate the storyboard imagery with the visual vocabulary of 1963 will understand Don and Peggy’s motivation for considering redoing the storyboard.
