A work that is very successful because of the impact of its novelty provokes so many imitations that after a while it seems less original than it was. In the arts of great commercial resonance there is no shame in copying, nor almost any discrediting of it. And the imitators, repeating almost always superficial features of the original work, cheapen it and make blunt what was sharp, and predictable what was very recently unheard of. When Raymond Chandler created his detective Philip Marlowe he had the close and admirable memory of Sam Spade and of the nameless agent of the Continental of Dashiell Hammett, both equal in the surgical coldness of their gaze towards the world. Dashiell Hammett’s prose is transparent, icy and cruel like a dry martini Raymond Chandler can also be laconic and very effective in his accounts of violence, but by finding the voice and point of view of Philip Marlowe he enriched the dry outline of the police story with a wealth of nuances and a critical depth of observation of reality that are even more suggestive because they are soaked in humour.
Thanks to cinema, or because of it, the visual imitations of Philip Marlowe have been as innumerable as the literary ones. The hero who surprised with his originality is now the irremediable prisoner of his parody, of his exhausted caricature, with a wardrobe of tobacco and alcohol, of solitary masculinity. And yet, it is enough to return to the best stories and novels of Chandler to find the old, unworn novelty, the brilliance and precision of the style, so often disfigured by bad translations, the humor and sarcasm, the bitter look at the corrupting power of money, which buys politicians and has justice and the police at its service. I have reread Chandler and I discover that he is better than I remembered, and deeper and more politically sharp than I could appreciate in my youth.
It took me much less time to get back to Mad Men, But the surprise has been just as powerful. I was lucky enough to watch episodes as they were broadcast, on Sunday nights, with that weekly interval that maintained the suspense from one installment to the next, plus the long wait of six months until the start of the next season. This prodigious creation by Matthew Weiner was so original and was so successful from the beginning that it unleashed a trail of imitations: with more or less talent, more or less money, people have tried to emulate his meticulous recreation of the sixties, the clothes, the furniture, the domestic objects, the hairstyles and the haircuts; they have also sought the effect of the infinite strangeness of a past that is not really so distant. The series have been filled with people who smoke and atmospheres thick with tobacco smoke, with incessant drinkers, almost always with an aestheticism that wants to resemble that of Mad Men, but it lacks the sharpness of the critical but not frowning gaze of Matthew Weiner, who, in addition to a chronicle of that time, carried out a search for his own lost time, the world of adults he knew in his childhood.
Without fanfare, with extreme subtlety, Weiner and his extraordinary team of collaborators – a work so personal is also a complex collective creation – portray a society in which ideas and behaviors that in our time have become scandalous, unacceptable, even criminal are completely normal: pregnant women who smoke and drink alcohol, children who prepare cocktails for their parents, gynecologists who smoke in the office and treat a patient with sinister crudeness, harassers with impunity at work, jokers who tell dirty jokes about women, about homosexuals, about Jews, about blacks, all always smoking, always drinking strong liquor, in the office and at lunch, and driving afterwards with a cigarette in their lips. A family goes on a picnic in the countryside, in a picture of advertising happiness, and when they get up from the grass the mother naturally dumps her checkered tablecloth full of food waste and plastic containers.
For young people, all of this is unacceptable, although somewhat implausible. Those of us who remember that time and the following decades well can attest to the truth of what was narrated, but above all, we can draw its most alarming conclusions. Not a single one of those blunders or abuses seemed wrong to almost anyone, not even to many of those harmed by them, who were so accustomed to them that they saw them as part of an immutable normality. What will not long after become unacceptable, scandalously obvious, is that most people do not approve of it, they just do not see it. Many of us, young people in the seventies and eighties, did not see the tobacco smoke that always surrounded us, nor did we smell its stench on ourselves and on those around us. And our eyes, clouded by smoke, our noses anaesthetised, did not perceive the foul odour of machismo and homophobia, which were just as omnipresent, in every moment of daily life, in the jokes that made us laugh and those we told. The worst prejudices, such as the toxic substances that poison our air and water, are not noticed by anyone, or almost anyone, only by a few radical spoilsports, often condemned to eccentricity or silence. In the 1930s, colonialism was as normal for the French left as for the right, and only the courageous voice of Simone Weil was raised against it. There were times when someone who did not smoke or drink seemed suspicious to us, and when one could be progressive and be suspicious of the demand for women’s equality. Someone came back from the United States and told us indignantly about the first restrictions on tobacco, an affront to personal freedom as severe as the inappropriateness of using certain words, or telling jokes about Chinese people, cripples, black people, and gays. There was a time when jokes about AIDS patients were also told.
So now, looking back Mad Men, I wonder what a series made in 50 years about our present will be like, as faithful as this one to the fragile archaeology of the everyday and the ephemeral. The art directors will have to create sets of city streets invaded by enormous cars. There will be no babies in the arms of a father or a mother with a cigarette in their mouth, but it is likely that viewers will be perplexed and shocked to see children just a few years old or even months old plugged by their parents into screens that alter their brains more seriously than tobacco smoke. They will search second-hand shops for enough mobile phones to distribute among the hundreds of extras who walk through a park or occupy the subway cars, all of them dressed in their shocking clothes, with their picturesque haircuts and anachronistic tattoos, all of them strangely hunched and possessed by the glow of a tiny screen, immersed in it, like those suffering from an epidemic of sleepwalking. There will be huge store displays with doors always open and air conditioning at polar temperatures, and there will be junk food advertisements that our adult grandchildren will miss as much as the advertising for strong cognac and tobacco that we saw in our childhood.
I go out into the street after watching a new episode of Mad Men And it seems to me that I am already watching the future series, that I am an extra in it. We have the pride of living in a present that is better than the past, but we are all dressed in period costumes, inside and out, and we don’t know it.
#Archaeologies #present