The action of the film, such as it is—Sokurov is never really interested in strong narratives—follows the events that will make the humble truth of the emperor’s observation plain even to the most fanatically loyal of his household. Again and again, he shows himself blind to the realities of the historical situation. During his morning military meeting, he responds to what is clearly a crushingly dire report from his minister of the army by quoting a poem written by his grandfather, the emperor Meiji: “Sea to the north and to the south, to the west and to the east / waves whirl up.” This the emperor interprets, to the obvious anguish of his perspiring ministers, to mean that “peace on favorable terms to my people is the only peace; let the sea continue to rage.” (Hirohito really did recite a poem by Meiji at an imperial conference, but it was clearly pacifist in its implications.)
Later on, clad in a white coat in his laboratory, he delivers an ecstatic monologue about the virtues of the hermit crab—an animal to which he bears an uncanny resemblance: “the crab can cover himself … it lives at shallow depths and doesn’t migrate very far”—which leads to a grotesquely self-serving account of the reasons for Japanese military aggression in Asia:
Migration … migration … yes, it never leaves its shores. Migration … Settled. Settled. Distant migration … migration of species … migration. Emigration! Discrimination! Unfair immigration laws! I remember … Wake up! I remember about the causes that brought about the Great Asian War … When the American government forbade Japanese immigration, which occurred in the State of California in 1924, that discrimination became a serious cause of anger and indignation among our people, and the military rode this wave of protest.
It is not the last time in the film that the emperor, who seems to grow smaller and more awkward during his final hours as a god, rather pathetically attempts to deflect any accountability for his interventions in history. Later on, when he finally meets with a bemused and condescending MacArthur, he seems to think that his assertion that he wasn’t actually Hitler’s “friend” will absolve him of responsibility. The crab can cover himself.
Hirohito’s interest in marine biology provides Sokurov with a fruitful thematic and visual leitmotif: images of fish glide through the film, marking its most emotionally and politically significant moments.
The most striking of these is in a sequence representing a daydream the emperor has while resting alone in his study. He’s been leafing through some photo albums: family albums, whose pictures he tenderly kisses, as well as albums containing photos of Hollywood stars—one of whom, Charlie Chaplin, he will be compared to later in the film. Suddenly he has a vision of American bombers morphing into wiggling, demonic catfish that rain fire on his dominions. (Earlier, before urging the army to continue fighting, Hirohito the biologist observes that the na-muzu, or catfish, protects itself by sinking to the bottom of the water.) Before, his disquisition on hermit crabs was the vehicle for our appreciation of his historical arrogance; now, only after his beloved fish are conflated with bombers, does the enemy’s destructiveness become real to him. This is the moment when he acknowledges defeat. All this inspires Hirohito to attempt a poem of his own, a cliché verse that inadvertently echoes certain sentiments we find in Russian Ark: “The spring sakura [cherry blossom] and the January snow,” begins an early version, “neither lasts long.”
The marine motif is present even in the countenance of Hirohito, to whom Sokurov has given a peculiar tic: over and over again he purses his lips and moves them laboriously, soundlessly—the face you’d make if you had to act out “fish out of water” in a game of charades. For he is, indeed, a fish out of water, a man who on this day seems at home neither in the divine nor in the human element.
Another recurrent motif that suggests the devolution of Hirohito from god to man is an embarrassed physicality; Sokurov stages a number of excruciatingly awkward encounters between the emperor and his subordinates. There is the marvelous opening scene with the valet, during which the old man has great trouble buttoning his master’s shirt, and an exquisitely anguished scene in which there is tense and prolonged confusion about where to seat the director of a scientific institute who has come at Hirohito’s request in order to discuss a question of long-standing interest to the emperor: Could his grandfather Meiji have seen the northern lights, as he once claimed? No, says the scientist, with anguished embarrassment, after which the emperor observes that the poor man probably hasn’t eaten all day, and sends him off with a chocolate bar, a gift from the victorious Americans.
The emperor’s cluelessness is underscored in two deftly tragicomic scenes with MacArthur, during which the Japanese keeps parrying the American’s blunt questions with replies that are either dazzlingly evasive or staggeringly banal:
“What’s it like being a living god?”
“I don’t know what to tell you. Of course the Emperor’s life is not easy. Some of his habits and hobbies are taken skeptically. Take the catfish for example … with whom shall he share his admiration for its perfection?”
There is, too, a splendid scene in which the emperor agrees to have his picture taken by a group of US Army photographers, who react with dismay, and then amusement, to the unprepossessing, Chaplinesque figure in a suit and a fedora who answers to the title of “emperor.” They had thought that his chamberlain, magnificently attired in a morning coat and tails, must be this august figure.
And finally, one of the best scenes that Sokurov has ever filmed: the climactic encounter between Hirohito and his wife, the empress Nagako, who has been brought back to Tokyo from her family’s refuge in the countryside. (This indulgence was granted Hirohito once he recorded the speech in which he relinquished his divine status.) The two spouses come together in a small room and there ensues a beautifully staged bit of business about the empress’s hat, which she has trouble removing and which her physically shy and emotionally awkward husband finally frees of her lacquered hairdo, with some difficulty. The clunky physicality of this business, our awareness of the tension between his human self and the elaborate protocols of behavior of which he has now been stripped and without which he seems helpless to move—the scene concludes with the emperor rather woodenly laying his head on his wife’s breast and keeping it there, once again a bit too long—is the final proof of the claim he had made at the beginning of his day: that his body is like everyone else’s.
The point is not to defend Hirohito by somehow humanizing him, as some critics have claimed. If anything, The Sun makes us all too aware, not for the first time in this director’s work, of the catastrophic disproportion between the character of a man and the nature of the role he played in history. Sokurov’s eccentrically beautiful and finally overwhelming film concludes by emphasizing that disproportion—one that, in the end, doesn’t escape even his own wife. In their final moments together before they run out of the room to see their children—and after being told by the chamberlain, pointedly, that the young man who recorded the emperor’s speech has committed hara-kiri—Hirohito delightedly announces to Nagako that he has abandoned his divinity. “Basically, I felt uneasy … not good at all” is the lumpy way he sums up his motivation. To celebrate this moment of “freedom,” as he calls it, he recites for her the finished version of the poem he had started earlier in the afternoon:
Snow in winter looks like the sakura in March.
Time is indifferent and erases them both.
There is a moment’s pause during which, we imagine, the dreamy world of the poem dissolves into a startled awareness of reality. And then the empress asks, “Is that all?”
—The New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010
THE MAD MEN ACCOUNT
SINCE THE SUMMER of 2007, when Mad Men premiered on the cable channel AMC, the world it purports to depict—a lushly reimagined Madison Avenue in the 1960s, where sleekly suited, chain-smoking, hard-drinking advertising executives dream up ingeniously intuitive campaigns for cigarettes and bras and airlines while effortlessly bedding b
eautiful young women or whisking their Grace Kelly–lookalike wives off to business trips in Rome—has itself become the object of a kind of madness. I’m not even referring to the critical reception both in the US and abroad, which has been delirious: a recent and not atypical reference in The Times of London called it “one of the … best television series of all time,” and the show has repeatedly won the Emmy, the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the Writers Guild of America Award, and the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Series. (A number of its cast members have been nominated in the various acting categories as well.) Rather, the way in which Mad Men has seemingly percolated into every corner of the popular culture—the children’s show Sesame Street introduced a Mad Men parody, toned down, naturally, for its tender viewers—suggests that its appeal goes far beyond whatever dramatic satisfactions it affords.
At first glance, this appeal seems to have a lot to do with the show’s much-discussed visual style—the crisp postwar coolness of dress and decor characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s. Mad Men hardly started this fad: for the past decade at least, a taste for the sleek lines of “midcentury Modern” has been evident everywhere from the glossy shelter magazines to your local flea market. But the series has certainly crystallized and given focus to this retro aesthetic. It’s not only apartments; consumers themselves want the look. The clothing retailer Banana Republic, in partnership with the show’s creators, devised a nationwide window-display campaign evoking the show’s distinctive 1960s look and now offers a style guide to help consumers look more like the men and women in the drama; a nail-polish company is currently hawking a Mad Men–inspired line of colors. The toy maker Mattel has released dolls based on some of the show’s characters. Most intriguingly, to my mind, Brooks Brothers has partnered with the series’ costume designer to produce a limited-edition Mad Men suit—which is, inevitably, based on a Brooks Brothers design of the 1960s.
Many popular entertainments, of course, capitalize on their appeal by means of marketing tie-ins, but this yearning for Mad Men style seems different from the way in which, say, children who are hooked on the Star Wars series long to own Darth Vader action dolls. The people who watch Mad Men are, after all, grown-ups—most of them between the ages of nineteen and forty-nine. This is to say that most of the people who are so addicted to the show are either younger adults, to whom the series represents, perhaps, an alluring historical fantasy of a time before the present era’s seemingly endless prohibitions against pleasures once taken for granted (casual sex, careless eating, excessive drinking, and incessant smoking), or younger baby boomers—people in their forties and early fifties who remember, barely, the show’s 1960s setting, attitudes, and look. For either audience, then, the show’s style is, essentially, symbolic: it represents fantasies, or memories, of significant potency.
I am dwelling on the deeper, almost irrational reasons for the series’ appeal—to which I shall return later, and to which I am not at all immune, having myself been a child in the 1960s—because after watching the fifty-two episodes of Mad Men that have aired thus far, I find little else to justify it. We are currently living in a new golden age of television, a medium that has been liberated by cable broadcasting to explore both fantasy and reality with greater frankness and originality than ever before: as witness shows as different as the now-iconic crime dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, with their darkly glinting, almost Aeschylean moral textures; the philosophically provocative, unexpectedly moving sci-fi hit Battlestar Galactica, which among other things is a kind of futuristic retelling of the Aeneid; and the perennially underappreciated small-town drama Friday Night Lights, which offers, to my mind, the finest representation of middle-class marriage in popular culture.
With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant excellences except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the direction is unimaginative.
Worst of all, in a drama that has made loud claims to exploring social and historical “issues,” the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then rather synthetically resolving (or simply walking away from) various species of extreme personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable and carefully established conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.
That a soap opera decked out in high-end clothes (and concepts) should have received so much acclaim and is taken so seriously reminds you that fads depend as much on the willingness of the public to believe as on the cleverness of the people who invent them; as with many fads that take the form of infatuations with certain moments in the past, the Mad Men craze tells us far more about today than it does about yesterday. But just what is it in the world of the show that we want to possess? The clothes and furniture? The wicked behavior? The unpunished crassness? To my mind, it’s something else entirely, something unexpected and, in a way, almost touching.
Mad Men—the term, according to the show, was coined by admen in the 1950s—centers on the men and women who work at Sterling Cooper, a medium-size ad agency with dreams of getting bigger; when the action begins, in the early 1960s, the men are all either partners or rising young executives, and the women are secretaries and office managers. At the center of this constellation stands the drama’s antihero, Don Draper, the firm’s brilliantly talented creative director: a man, we learn, who not only sells lies but is one. A flashback that comes at the end of the first season reveals that Don is, in fact, a midwestern hick called Dick Whitman who profited from a moment of wartime confusion in Korea in order to start a new life. After he is wounded and a comrade—the real Don Draper—is killed, Dick switches their dog tags: the real Don’s body goes home to Dick’s grieving and not very nice family, while Dick reinvents himself as Don Draper. (In the kind of cultural winking in which the show’s creators like to indulge, the small town in which Dick Whitman’s family await his body is called “Bunbury,” the term that the male leads in Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest use for their double lives.)
This backstory, as rusty and unsubtle a device as it may be, helps establish the pervasive theme of falseness and hypocrisy that the writers find not only in the advertising business itself but in the culture of the 1960s as a whole just before the advent of feminism, the civil rights movement, and the sexual liberation of the 1970s. (In a typical bit of overkill, the writers have made the ingenious adman the son of a prostitute.) The four seasons that have been aired thus far trace the evolution of the larger society even as the secret that lurks behind Don’s private life becomes a burden that is increasingly hard to bear. Female employees become more assertive: one secretary, Peggy Olson, who’s not as pretty as the others, becomes a copywriter—to the dismay of the office manager, a redheaded bombshell called Joan Holloway, who’s a decade older and can’t understand why anyone would want to do anything but marry the boss. One of the fabulously hard-drinking executives finally goes into AA. The firm considers the buying power of the “Negro” market for the first time. And so on.
Meanwhile, Don wanders from career triumph to career triumph and from bed to bed, his preternatural understanding of what motivates consumers grotesquely disproportionate to any understanding of his own motives; back home, his gorgeous blond wife, Betty, a former model from the Main Line, is starting to chafe at the domestic bit. All this plays out against some of the key historical events of the time: the Nixon–Kennedy race (Sterling Cooper is doing PR for Nixon), the crash of American Airlines Flight 1 in March 1962
(a character’s father is aboard, triggering a crisis of conscience as to whether he should capitalize on his family’s tragedy to help land the American Airlines account), and, inevitably, the Kennedy assassination, which ruins the wedding of a partner’s spoiled daughter.
As I have already mentioned, the actual stuff of Mad Men’s action is, essentially, the stuff of soap opera: abortions, secret pregnancies, extramarital affairs, office romances, and of course dire family secrets; what is supposed to give it its higher cultural resonance is the historical element. When people talk about the show, they talk (if they’re not talking about the clothes and furniture) about the special perspective its historical setting creates—the graphic picture that it is able to paint of the attitudes of an earlier time, attitudes likely to make us uncomfortable or outraged today. An unwanted pregnancy, after all, had different implications in 1960 than it does in 2011.
To my mind, the picture is too crude and the artist too pleased with himself. In Mad Men, everyone chain-smokes, every executive starts drinking before lunch, every man is a chauvinist pig, every male employee viciously competitive and jealous of his colleagues, every white person a reflexive racist (when not irritatingly patronizing). It’s not that you don’t know that, say, sexism was rampant in the workplace before the feminist movement; it’s just that, on the screen, the endless succession of leering junior execs and crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal “sexism” doesn’t work—it’s wearying rather than illuminating. People—liberal-minded young people in particular, in my experience—keep talking admiringly about the show’s “critique” of the hypocrisies of advertising and the shallowness of consumerism, but simply to show a lot of repellent advertising men acting repellently does not constitute a meaningful critique; it’s a lazy one-liner. As I watched the first season, the characters and their milieu were so unrelentingly awful that I kept wondering whether the writers had been trying, unsuccessfully, for a kind of camp—for a tartly tongue-in-cheek send-up of 1960s attitudes. (I found myself wishing that the creators of Glee had gotten a stab at this material.) But the creators of Mad Men are in deadly earnest. It’s as if these forty- and thirty-somethings can’t quite believe how bad people were back then, and can’t resist the impulse to keep showing you.
Waiting for the Barbarians Page 7
