Don, Betty and Jackie Kennedy: On Mad Men and Periodisation

Prudence Black; Catherine Driscoll

doi:10.5130/csr.v18i2.2764

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Published: Sep 17, 2012

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v18i2.2764

Keywords:

period TV, style, 1960s US, politics

Prudence Black

University of Sydney

Catherine Driscoll

University of Sydney

Abstract

Why is it that we watch Mad Men and think it represents a period? Flashes of patterned wallpaper, whiskey neat, babies born that are never mentioned, contact lining for kitchen drawers, Ayn Rand, polaroids, skinny ties, Hilton hotels, Walter Cronkite, and a time when Don Draper can ask ‘What do women want?’ and dry old Roger Sterling can reply ‘Who Cares?’ This essay explores the embrace of period detail in Mad Men finding it to be both loving and fetishistic, and belonging, like all period film, to the politics of the present.

Issue

Vol 18 No 2 (2012): Secular Discomforts and On Mad Men

Section

On Mad Men (Peer Reviewed)

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Author Biographies

Prudence Black, University of Sydney

Prudence Black is an ARC DECRA fellow in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her book The Flight Attendant’s Shoe was published in 2011.

Catherine Driscoll, University of Sydney

Catherine Driscoll is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research has focused on cultural sustainability in Australian country towns and methods for rural cultural studies, media classification and minority, cultural studies' debt to pragmatism and phenomenology and he intersection of fan culture and online culture. Recent publications include The Australian Country Girl (2012, forthcoming) and Teen Film: A Critical Introduction (2011).

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Prudence Black, University of Sydney

Catherine Driscoll, University of Sydney