David Hare raves re “Mad Men”
Perhaps some of you have seen this Guardian piece by noted playwright, TV writer, and screenwriter David Hare. If you haven’t, read it. If you have already, read it again:
In a hilariously combative interview in the London Evening Standard last March, the best-selling author Lee Child argued the superiority of thrillers over any other kind of fiction. The problem with the literary novel was that it was too easy. He could run up a Martin Amis in three weeks. The only literary writer for whom he had any respect was Ian McEwan, because McEwan was at least trying to “put a suspense dynamic into an intelligent, intellectual novel”. So-called serious writers “don’t quite get it” because they’re usually too fastidious to accept how simple the formula is. “You ask or imply a question at the beginning of a book and you absolutely self-consciously withhold the answer. It does feel cheap and meretricious but it absolutely works.”
“Cheap and meretricious” may seem an unlikely way to describe the programme which is persuading many of us that the future of American film belongs on television, but anyone contemplating Lee Child’s prescription is going to hear eight bells ringing when they settle down to the fourth series of Mad Men. Once it had been established, very early on, that the masterly advertising executive Don Draper had a past identity to which he didn’t admit, then everything has followed effortlessly, both in plot and in theme. The man’s a fake. But who is he? The murky and rather conventional flashback sequences which have sketched in a rural upbringing and funny business during the war are admittedly the only clumsy elements in what has otherwise been 39 hours of superbly achieved production. The Gatsby question has provided a framework which has held the series steady from beginning to end. But it has also licensed the writers to wander into the lives of at least 12 other equally dodgy characters without ever making the audience feel they are leaving home. The series’s extraordinary freedom is a product of its discipline. Hanging plotlines are like brush-strokes in a picture which is all the richer by not being tidied up.
It needs courage to withhold, and withholding is what this series is all about. Feature films in the English language seem to obsess more and more on only one thing at a time — they concentrate on their given subject with a kind of furious, exhausting dullness. But in Mad Men, nothing is dwelt on very long and, as in life, lots of things happen at once. It’s entirely typical of Matthew Weiner’s complicating techniques that when at the climax of three series, Don Draper drives home to find that his wife Betty has finally opened his desk drawer and come upon evidence of his previous self, he meanwhile has another woman waiting for him in the car outside. Even when facing the crisis of his life, our hero’s mind can’t help, partly at least, being on something else.
Critics of the series have tried to suggest that what we are watching here is fancy soap — the lives and loves of a group of people in a shared milieu. (They echo the complaints made against greatly successful contemporary novels such as Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.) But no soap I ever watched has the governing metaphor of authenticity. If Don Draper has no idea what he really thinks and feels, who does? Who exactly are these people? And is anything they say or do real — to themselves, or to us? As someone who likes never to spoil their pleasure by reading about the things they most enjoy, I have tried to avoid commentary. But whenever I have seen Mad Men described I have been doubly mystified. Why on earth do people call it a satire? And why is its real subject commonly assumed to be the 1960s?
I hate to disrupt Hare’s narrative, but fair use and all that. Anyway Hare ends with a bang:
In all this, it scarcely needs saying, it has been the writing which has been the star. This autumn Bafta is offering a series of lectures in London by screenwriters which also seems poignantly timed. They come at a moment when the English-language publication of François Truffaut’s last interview finds him regretting the dismal consequences of trying to turn regular film directors into auteurs. The intention of the nouvelle vague, he said, had been “more personal films”, but the results were films which were, in fact, “more than personal: they became narcissistic”. Gradually, Truffaut said, he had himself returned “to a narrative tradition based more on observation and synthesis than subjectivity and self-exploration”. The lessons painfully learned by Truffaut in 20 years still haven’t been absorbed by the Anglo-American cinema in 60. Mad Men has auteurs, all right. They’re the boys and girls who write it.
Woo-hoo! The writers are the auteurs! I suppose if there’s one lesson from all the quality cable TV series in the last several years — “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “The Shield,” “Breaking Bad,” “Sons of Anarchy,” “Weeds,” “Dexter,” and of course “Mad Men” — it’s that there are times and places in Hollywood where writers do, indeed, rule.
What other kick-ass TV shows have you loved over the last decade, shows that really highlight the writing?
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