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16.02.2012

The age of innocence

madmen

The Fifties and Sixties are here again. At least on TV, where a new generation …

The Fifties and Sixties are here again. At least on TV, where a new generation of “nostalgic” series such as Mad Men is bringing that era vividly back to life.

 

The trend actually started a few years ago in Hollywood with Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002), which depicted a colorful decade and the great expectations of a still-innocent America.

 

Revolutionary Road (2008) by Sam Mendes, taken from Richard Yates’ masterpiece, is set in the same years and yet suggests a very different perspective, focusing on conformism and alienation in the States during the mid-Fifties.

 

Mad Men seems to stand between those two extremes, and that’s probably why it got so hugely successful. On the one hand, we can enjoy the vision of a naive world full of opportunities; on the other hand, something already seems to foresee the troubles and the dangers hidden behind the great economic boom.

It is not by chance, then, that the main characters in Mad Men work in advertising: could there be a better metaphore for the effort of appearing  always at one’s best?

 

The gushy smiles of the Fifties’ ads are just another manifestation of the same conformism that leads one of the protagonists, Don Draper, to avoid asking himself questions about himself, and that drives his wife Betty to quietly accept an outdated idea of marriage.

 

Quite the same setting and atmospheres are at the heart of a couple of new “revival” TV series, The Playboy Club and Pan Am. This time, though, the retro inspiration has not brought the expected success in terms of audience and quality: while the first series was cancelled after just three episodes, the second will hardly make it to the second season.

 

Nevertheless, there’s no need to worry for the future of the Sixties on TV : on March 25, Mad Men will be back with a brand new season.

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