AMC’s Mad Men and the Politics of Nostalgia

Abstract

Nostalgia is an integral concept and appeal in AMC Network’s popular TV series Mad Men (2007-). The series follows the exploits of several men and women who work for the fictional Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper in early 1960s America. There are several different forms of nostalgia expressed in Mad Men. The first can be called the ‘nostalgic imaginary’ because the series represents the era as both alluring and repellent (Dove-Viebahn, 2013). Nostalgic pleasures can be found in the era’s fashions and styles, the blissful unawareness of the dangers of alcohol and tobacco, and the impending promise of dramatic social change at home, in the workplace and in American society. But these pleasures come tempered with the period’s most repulsive elements: sanctioned workplace misogyny, blatant racism and homophobia, rampant smoking, alcoholism and consumerism (Dove-Viebahn,2013). The second nostalgia, as outlined by Niemeyer and Wentz (Chapter 8), is linked to the ways in which Mad Men, as a TV serial and mediator of the cultural past, evokes, through its visual appearances and narratives, an intense emotional loss and longing in the viewer, which in turn is ‘healed’ through its very representations. Mad Men intensifies these feelings by centring its narratives around a main protagonist, Don Draper, who repeatedly longs for a home he never had as a child and probably will never attain as an adult.