Desire and its Discontents

From Debra Rienstra

We are approaching the Season 5 finale of the AMC series Mad Men in a couple weeks, and although some fans have been dissatisfied with this season, I have continued to enjoy the show. I particularly like this well-crafted drama’s way of evoking a blend of delicious moral outrage and nostalgic fascination. Theresa Latini mentioned briefly in her last post that the show’s setting—Madison Avenue in the 1960s—provides an effective platform for examining shifting gender roles, especially male disorientation in a world where the rules keep changing and the naughty boys feel the rug of male privilege getting more and more wrinkled up under their feet.

If you’ve never watched the show, this past Sunday’s episode, “The Other Woman,” would make a pretty good introduction. It may be one of the best examinations of gender politics the show has achieved so far. The episode is neatly constructed around the agency’s efforts to win the Jaguar account, which is fabulous because, meta-dramatically, the Jaguar car serves to refract the series’ main theme: desire.

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