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This chapter analyzes the underlying racial discourse that serves as the backdrop for the narrative action in Mad Men, a television series set in the 1960s about the fictional advertising agency Sterling Cooper. The creators utilize the agency as the prism through which to appraise the United States at the cusp of a period of radical social and political transformations that would have a lasting impact on American society. The main characters seem to be struggling against social forces that affect their successes and failures in advertising. Much of the show focuses on the major discursive debates on race, gender, and sexuality. The show's representation of racism and the civil rights movement denies audiences' empathetic identification with these events, thus disassociating them from other social movements and the identity politics of the time.

This chapter describes the recurrence of a mid-Victorian form at the turn of the twenty-first century. Connecting the television series Mad Men to Trollope’s The Prime Minister and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the chapter argues that each is a serialized naturalistic narrative of capitalist globalization in which an exilic subject assimilates the impacts of globalizing capital. Serialization synchronizes naturalist representation through a slow temporality that enables audiences and characters to share deferred longing for social transformation. Although Mad Men’s objective situation is millennial neoliberalism, the show’s reinvention of Judaized otherness is rooted in the centuries-long durée of capitalist and imperial unfolding. Don Draper is a virtual Jew in whom the minority subject’s aberrant particularity and the majority subject’s universalistic status collide. Like Emma Bovary, Don is a “madwoman in the attic”: a protagonist for whom aestheticism and adultery become the sole consolations for the experience of singing for one’s captors.

Chapter 2 concentrates on implicit cinematic references in serial television, ones that seem to flash up suddenly and perhaps even inadvertently. References are usually seen as synonymous with invocations, which entail the active summoning of sources, whereas this chapter relies on evocative references, which seem more random or unmotivated and often non-canonical. Using Mad Men’s (AMC, 2007–15) myriad evocations—ones that exceed the usual references to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) or Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969)—this chapter demonstrates how a series engages with cinema to talk about a particular era. It concludes with this paradox: the more authored a series, the wider its set of unintended intertextual connections might be.

This chapter discusses realism in TV drama. The narrative realism code engaged by the continuing serial narrative of soap operas and resulting in a flow akin to the rhythm of actual life is strongly contrasted by its opposite, narrative disruption. By necessity, the industrial nature of the soap opera production line that has to churn out three, four, or five episodes a week imposes severe constraints on realism. No single storyline can continue its natural lifespan without disappearing, if only temporarily, to make way for others. In any case, this is how soap institutions target different audience segments and guarantee variety. The chapter then looks at The Street (BBC, 2006–9) and Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15).

This chapter examines the depiction of masculinity in two early twenty-first-century representations of Appalachia: the short-lived reality show Buckwild and Rebecca Scott’s Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields. Both texts offer portraits of men contending with their vanishing ways of life. The author analyzes these representations as depictions that shape ideas of manhood and proposes necropolitics as a framework for theorizing coal war fields of a globalized economy. The chapter thereby takes “place” as a matrix of meanings that includes racialized, classed, and gendered politics of space, and the social identities emerging from those configured areas.

When Mad Men debuted, it was lavished with praise for its authenticity in portraying American life in the 1960s. Created by Matthew Weiner, Mad Men excavates the trying social issues from this tumultuous time—civil rights, gender roles, and sexual liberation—and renders them as real issues in the lives of its complex characters, paying special attention to that era’s emerging twentysomethings. The show overflows with these young adults who enjoy an extended adolescent period, where they have affairs, try out new ideologies, and resist adulthood. This chapter examines two early scenes from Mad Men to untangle the complexities of this generation and their revolutions. Both scenes use versions of “The Twist” underneath activities of Mad Men’s twentysomethings, and through devices both explicit and implicit, distill the Zeitgeist of this generation and encapsulate the enormity of the adolescent wave sweeping through the 1960s that helped shape our understanding of the Sixties.

The conclusion discusses the implications of Hollywood’s selective amnesia regarding late sixties dissent for the 2016 presidential election campaign and contemporary social movements. It explains that while several recent television programs including the award-winning series Mad Men have provided caricatured portrayals of the counterculture, anti-war, and Black Power movements, independent films such as Cesar Chavez and Chicago 10 have celebrated collective protest. The chapter concludes that these recent portrayals of sixties-era activism reveal ongoing contestation about the decade, its legacy, and the role of dissent in contemporary politics. While the bad sixties endures in popular culture, other memories of dissent are resources for imagining empowering models of social justice organizing.

O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” poems detail the poet’s movements through the city during periods of leisure. In this chapter, Bernes argues that such leisure periods are usually, implicitly or explicitly, circumscribed by periods of work. This is especially true in Lunch Poems, where the conceit of the book is that many of the poems were written during his “lunch hour.” O’Hara’s lunch-hour pastorals are not so much opposed to the workday and its unfree time of getting things done as they are a space for an alternative kind of work. This chapter proposes that we see O’Hara as poet of service work as much as poet of consumption, reorienting ourselves to the presence of labor (his own and others’) within the poems. In particular, Bernes argues, O’Hara adapts the resources of the lyric poem to the transactional space of service work.

The main elements of the Freudian uncanny - re-animation of the dead, doubles, repetition compulsion, omnipotence of thought - can also be seen as a catalogue of the key techniques of cinema, the magical thinking on which the affective effect of cinema is predicated. So as explore the Gothic at the heart of cinema's theorization of its own epistemological, psychological and aesthetic concerns, this chapter begins with the flashback scenes in the TV series Mad Men. Montage (and especially superimpositions) perform the spectral haunting at issue, notably how the past overshadows and encroaches upon the present and how the distinction between material and psychic reality, body and mind comes to blur. Given that, like much current cinema, Mathew Weiner's show is a genre mix, the chapter finally moves back into cinema history to explore the Gothic at the heart of film in Alfred Hitchcock's unique splice between film noir and melodrama.

Discussion of the importance of artistry, be it through artistic creativity, surgical prowess or filmmaking choices, with an examination of the identity crisis experienced by post-war American middle class working men.

In 1930, Time magazine’s cover proclaimed John Dos Passos the most important writer on the Left in the U.S., and classified him along with Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner as one of the most important of the “Lost Generation” writers for his innovative modernist novels of the 1920s and 1930s. But by 1938 he had cut ties with leftist organizations in the U.S., begun publishing in anti-Communist journals, become estranged from leftist friends such as Hemingway and playwright John Howard Lawson, and was ostracized by leftist critics for expressing his conviction that Communism was the paramount threat to individual liberties and democracy. Thereafter, his books were often criticized as ideologically doctrinaire, their style as falling far short of his earlier achievements, which had adapted into dynamic narrative the visual devices of cinema. John Dos Passos and Cinema explores these political and critical transitions through the lens of the writer’s little-known work, much of it archival, in the medium of film itself. As a novelist, he had used film as a subject and stylistic source; as screen writer, he evolved his methods directly from the cinema’s visual language, demonstrating how potently the medium could be manipulated for political and commercial profit.