Having recently discovered and immensely enjoyed the first few episodes of the TV show “Mad Men,” I’ve been thinking about that show’s putative deeply ironic take on the era and settings portrayed in another popular TV show, “Leave It To Beaver.” Don’t laugh; I’m serious. My conclusion is that MM, like LITB, goes too far, but that there’s a rationale for doing so. LITB went too far in presenting an unrealistically rosy picture of what a “traditional” family looks like. MM, in its turn, goes too far in portraying the “dark side” of LITB. Both shows are entertaining; both shows succeed despite their falsity because of the need their falsity addresses: finding safety and comfort in the here-and-now.
LITB is usually talked about with a wink, which is a mistake. LITB does not deserve to be maligned for the way it portrays a post-War American family. The scenario and themes of LITB are profound and deserve to be talked about. Furthermore, I believe that they connect to MM in direct ways and that the deeply ironic tone of MM actually overemphasizes the kinds of human depravity that LITB purposefully omitted. The truth about 1960 probably lies somewhere between LITB and MM.
What I’ve never heard analyzed in LITB is the family’s social stratum, the kind of omission one never sees in discussions of, say, Austen or Eliot. That’s an odd omission, since LITB takes place in a time period (approximately 1957-1962) of extreme social mobility made possible by the fallout (the dislocations, we might say) from WWII. It’s just this kind of recent-past period of change that Austin, Eliot, and other authors use to illustrate their concerns about social mobility.
LITB was created to help people and families shattered by WWII understand how to adjust to a new, unprecedented American social structure. Yes, it was a salve, but in the best sense, that of something to heal wounds that were still quite fresh. I don’t believe that it was an anaesthetic, which is the usual charge against it.
The early episodes of LITB drop some hints about the Cleavers that I believe are crucial to understanding why LITB was created:
Perhaps the single most important thing that we learn is that Ward Cleaver is a WWII Navy veteran, having been in the Pacific theater. We don’t know precisely what he did and saw (he’s described as having been in the engineering corps (the Seabees)), but that’s not as important as the fact that he’s a man of middle age of a manly, more or less conservative and conformist disposition who played his part in the War. He now works as a mid- or upper-level white collar manager of some kind, suggesting that he benefitted from the GI Bill. But he’s still in a uniform, right?
Another interesting hint is dropped when June's upper-class aunt comes to stay with the Cleavers and attempts to impose brahmin order on the household. From this, it seems clear that June Cleaver has come from an upper or upper-middle class background. The way the aunt grates on Ward suggests that he comes from a more "sensible" middle-class or perhaps even lower background. I suspect that most people watching the show assume that Ward went to college on the GI Bill and that this permits him the upward mobility to get a pretty, accomplished, educated wife (June went to college and, indeed, met Ward at college).
In Ward, then, is a man's man that a lot of people from that era probably related to, and as importantly, a man that American society’s leaders of this era – veterans – could identify with strongly. I offer the personal reflection that when I was a kid, I thought of Ward Cleaver as stern-but-fair, and I thought of him in the same company as WWII-veterans that I knew (uncles, neighbors, my parents’ bosses, Shriners, Masons, etc).
I believe that Ward Cleaver is being held up, in LITB, as a model for other American men of his ilk to emulate in order to help them understand and deal with the problems of the “home front.” Think of LITB as a sort of finishing school for PTSD-afflicted vets.
I also believe that the Cleavers are being held up as a promise or reward to aging veterans, showing them what the peace dividend could be – a beautiful wife (yes, I groove on June Cleaver, and my wife torments me with this fact), apple-cheeked, obedient children, a great house, a stable job, a good car. I see nothing wrong or naïve about offering to scarred veterans of a horrendous war a vision of domestic peace and tranquility that helped them deal. We rightly cringe at the implicit shackling of these adults in their sex-defined roles, but that’s our privilege two generations later. The privilege for a war-scarred veteran was, precisely, to get his wife out of a war factory and into a quiet domesticity. I don’t think we can judge the impulse behind the creation of LITB or the people who enjoyed it for what it was.
Likewise with Mad Men, which probably overdoes the sexism, racism, and homophobia of its era. The impulse here, I believe, was to create a show that makes us feel better about our own era of misguided imperialism that has left us embarrassed, culturally embargoed, and guilty collectively of torture and war crimes. I believe that the reason for the popularity of MM is that it gives us a way to rehabilitate our self-worth. At least we’re better than they were back then, seems to be the message.
The central character in the early episodes of MM is Don Draper, a mysterious, supremely manly figure who seems to be a decorated veteran (interestingly, of Korea not WWII) and who by 1960 is a senior executive at a Madison Avenue ad firm. The first few episodes dwell mainly on the smokey, philandering, boozing, and bossing life that Draper leads. He’s a picture-perfect post-war American Dad as well as a womanizer, liar, manipulator, and bastard (both literally and figuratively, it appears). To everyone around him, he appears to have everything and to be living the American dream, yet he’s oddly unhappy most of the time. As we learn more about Draper, we learn that there’s a dark side to almost every aspect of his public persona. He turns out literally to have another identity.
It occurs to me that LITB’s Ward Cleaver is a potent father character in part because he always reins in the darkest side of his character (manifest in the show as him blowing his stack fairly regularly). In MM, Don Draper is hopelessly unable to control his darkest impulses. Appearing to be the perfect, handsomest, strongest-jawed Dad, he is in fact a failure as a father and a husband. He’s only a success in two areas: work, where he’s in the image-making business, and womanizing. That is, he succeeds in duplicity, not faithfulness. In one episode, he will try to whisk his beatnik Village mistress off to Paris with the bonus check that he might have used to fulfill his wife’s request for a summer cottage. This is far, far from the persona of Ward Cleaver.
Why does MM make a character like Don Draper its central character? Why does MM’s creator deem such a subject worthy of focus over a character like Ward Cleaver? I come back to my earlier point: because we want to believe that Don Draper is no longer ascendant in our cultural moment. We are better than that; we’ve come a long way; we’re not the bad-guy torturers shown in Abu Ghraib videos, not really.
Is this justifiable, is this the salve we need, is this our analogue to LITB? I enjoy MM, but I wonder. LITB, and other shows of its ilk, like Andy Griffith, offered warmth. MM offers cool, often cruel, irony; it’s an icy cocktail. Perhaps the only way we can generate warm feelings about ourselves now is to mock the greatest generation. While we torture innocents, they dodder off harmlessly into senility, easy, undefended targets for our cruel, sophisticated irony.
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