Is it still 1960?

On the advice of TV junkies I admire, I decided to Tivo the Season 1 marathon of Mad Men on AMC. It's definitely sharply written, and the art direction, like that on Friday Night Lights, is probably raising the bar--not only for television, but for film as well.

Traveling back to 1960 is disturbing, but I think the toughest thing for me was the shift in my perspective that happened around episode 5. For the first few episodes I was thinking 1960 was alien--it was like watching the moon landing or a travel program about somewhere else I've never been. "Look at that apron. Look at that alarm clock. Look at the women doing their hair so they can make dinner for their husbands."

But after a few episodes 1960 started to seem familiar in a very unsettling way. The more things change, the more they stay the same. These women live in a world of unrelenting chauvinism. There's not a single married couple that doesn't seem to feel like strangers at least part of the time. There are catty women who are twice as dangerous as the men who swagger around feeling entitled to whatever they want. Here and there a character struggles feebly to escape, but often the struggle fails before the third act. At first these things were as quaint as the kitchen curtains, but the more I watch, I can't help but wonder whether we've just driven these things a little further underground.

As Coward said, "Rocks are infinitely more dangerous when they are submerged, and the sluggish waves of false sentiment and hypocrisy have been washing over reality far too long already in the art of this country." Maybe our art is finally learning its lesson, even if our reality is changing less than we'd like to admit.