Madmen

I'm late to the party, but am watching the TV series, "Madmen," which is a brilliant look back at the early 1960s America. "Madmen" is of course a pun with various meanings--the men of Madison Ave., ie the world of advertising in New York, but also "mad men"--men who are made mad by their license and privilege. "Privilege" is an overused and perhaps abused term these days, but to me what this series dramatizes is not just the power of these white male advertising executives, but the casual cruelty to women and blacks that this system inculcated. Seeing women only as sexual objects, they are blind to every other capacity they possess. The ad men/ mad men literally are blind to  the world they live in, misperceiving it, and so they remain blind to their own cruelty and themselves. With the current MAGA nostalgia towards the fifties and sixties at high tide, "Madmen" reminds us of the tremendous loss of human capital marginalized in that time, and the costs of that uber-hierarchical, conformist, unbalanced world. Not least to white heterosexual men themselves. Don Draper, the advertising whiz at the center of the series is a cipher to himself, and as a human being is lost. It turns out the series is like nothing more than a horror film where everything supernatural and outré has been ruthlessly stripped away, revealing the horror and emptiness of the way of life of the era. Don Draper is Gatsby, one generation on.