... taking Mad Men to the movies

Everything after the NEXT sentence contains spoilers for Mad Men, so read with caution. The boat sinks at the end of Titanic.

Early in this, the third series of Mad Men, Peggy shows Don a clip from Bye Bye Birdie, a film based on a popular musical. They are planning to do an ad for Patio soda based on it. Don claims to have not seen the movie. "You see everything," Peggy says.

There's actually not much evidence for that in Mad Men. Off the top of my head I can think of maybe one or two times that we've seen someone actually watch a movie. I do think there is a time in the first series when Don uses that he went to the movies as an excuse for something, so there might be a joke there.

What is interesting though is that I've found that movies play a certain important part in progressing its tale of America in the 60s, though it's almost all in the background.

Let's start with the obvious - the opening credit sequence of a falling silhouette is pretty obviously a nod to Vertigo. As well many of the scenes and wardrobes evoke Hitch's movies - it would be quite easy to see January Jones (Betty Draper) playing opposite Jimmy Stewart as the icy blond. These are quite obvious.

In the second season, however, there was a little shift. There was a scene involving Betty and her brother in a study. There was a large picture on the wall, and he walked in through a window. This was actually a deftly constructed scene from a movie popular in the early part of that era. Now, I have to admit that I can't remember the film, but I do remember reading a blog post about how that scene was constructed. If someone knows where it is I'll update this post and give you a tip of the Tigers cap. (Somehow I think it was Laura)

All that got me to thinking: Is Mad Men trying to also show the changes in America during the 60s not just in luscious set design and costumes, but also filming techniques?

This third series is giving me more and more reason to believe that. I want to look at three particular scenes that indicate the shift in tone.

The first in the fourth episode. Don and Betty go to talk to Sally's (their daughter) teacher about a fight that she was in at school. During the conversation there is a cutaway shot to Sally, face filling almost the entire screen, against a black background, wiping blood across her face. Blood is nothing new to Mad Men, but this type of cut-away shot is. Most shots on the show are long and in deep focus. This was brief, jarring and disturbing.

The second was in the sixth episode. As soon as Ken brings a lawnmower into the offices you just know something bad is going to happen. Someone getting their foot cut off is not on the top of the list. But, a shot of the blood spraying over four of the main characters IS very unexpected. It's worth noting that this scene juxtaposes two striking events: the severing of the foot, but also the blood on the clean outfits of the staff - outfits that are part of a meticulous wardrobe that the show is lauded for and it one of its trademarks. It's almost as if it were saying "Take THAT, Camelot!"

The third was the entire seventh episode, that start with at the end and then spent the hour showing how the characters got to that end - one of which involved Don meeting and being robbed by a very early prototype of the characters that Beatty and Dunaway would play in Bonnie and Clyde.

You could go into Betty's dream sequence while giving birth to baby Gene and how she starts in a Douglas Sirk like suburbia before progressing into a nightmarish proto-Lynchian universe.

So, what does this mean?

It appears that Mad Men is not going to simply tell the story of America in the 60s by just tossing around newspapers and someone turning on the TV at the right time. It's also going to show the change in visual language at the time. It was the rise of the French New Wave and American Art House films. A lot of the old rules were either being broken or willfully ignored. This, as much as the music and fashion, set the tenor of the times.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the images and storytelling of the series evolve more and more over time to reflect those changes in popular culture as well as "mainstream" culture.

Let's keep watching. Until then, bye bye birdies.