This recording in which we teach you how to review a cult TV hit and by doing so also manage to a) examine society; b) examine society especially with regard to the state of the patriarchy, i.e., where feminism stands today; c) provide a masterclass on how cultural criticism works on the web; and d) make you want to be a better writer: Molly Lambert reviews Mad Men
Molly Lambert is a pop-culture blogger, a title that, not very long ago, would very frequently make me and my “print-centric? who, me?” mindset very much cringe. She was, when I first came across her work, the managing editor of a niche online magazine for literary types who also enjoy the Muppets called This Recording. She now writes for the phenomenal long-form sports writing site Grantland, where I’m convinced she is capable even of making a largely male audience care about Jennifer Aniston.
I had read This Recording once in a while for a while when I came across Lambert’s long, richly layered and heavily hyperlinked post called “Can’t be tamed: A manifesto”, which is a list of tips for being a successful woman in a boys’ club. It is also (kind of) a review of the AMC period-piece Mad Men. Kind of.
The manifesto is an outlier in Lambert’s This Recording work in that it’s peppered with screencaps of Mad Men, but not once does it refer to the show or its characters explicitly. Rather, it came about when even people who live under rocks and don’t own TVs like me were hearing all the time about the show, its loyal following and its anachronistic (or is it?) portrayal of women, given that several are raped by the end of the first season. More than a review, it’s a cultural response - a web-friendly enrichment of This Recording's audience's experience.
Lambert did do slightly more traditional Mad Men reviews, but none are anywhere near the standard you-should-go-see-this/you-should-go-see-this media consumerism criticism that is far too often tepid and almost always irrelevant in today's digital environment.
My favorite one (other than the stellar boys’ club piece) starts off by comparing the insufferable Stepford wife character Betty Draper to docile 2011 cultural stereotype Taylor Swift.
Lambert is not kind. She is foul-mouthed, sexually explicit, unapologetic. Her work doesn’t give two Julie Andrews about the artists’ work.
And this is why I admire her so – she’s an incredibly good information synthesizer. She writes with authority on how the small parts add up to the whole, be it of a Mad Men episode itself or how Mad Men represents/fits into overall American (pop) culture.
It's mainly about feminism. But it's also about music, books, film -- all of our media, and it's about how all that media still portrays a still deeply troubling relationship to/with women. Again, it's all about the complex layers of experience that our cohort has with media, which, to me, makes it a brilliant example of what cultural criticism should be, especially in this day and age in which it increasingly isn't -- value in to itself.
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Mad Men, by the way, is brilliant, too. I finally decided to finally devote a few hours to it after hearing Jon Hamm's reading from one of my favorite works of poetry, Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency, which, it turns out, becomes a major plot point:
But my New York School love aside, it's brilliant because it's deeply character-driven, and, in this reviewer's opinion, Peggy Olsen and Pete Campbell are two of the most interesting characters on TV in a long, long time.
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