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Popular Culture Review
both a mythic father (thus, from the scene behind glass) and as a (feminine)
subject interrogating his place with/in the Other. The series as it stands is
Draper’s search for desire itself and, like Odysseus, searching makes him heroic.
Ultimately, the appeal of Mad Men may be the fact of its double nature
bolstered by Don Draper’s existential dilemmas. The work of Mad Men is the
work of Don Draper. The series is a Good Place that we might wish to return
to—a fantasy of a simpler and more stylish time, an enjoyment that we have
since lost.5 But it is also a Place That Can Never Be, a presentation of time that
could never exist as we experience it, a 21st century 1960 that displays for us
what we always have been missing from behind one-way glass.
University of Texas at Arlington
Timothy Richardson
Notes
1 Some exceptions to this would be The Shield on FX, HBO’s The Sopranos, and others
in which sexism/racism are combined with 21st century explicitness so that the former is
a kind of the latter.
2 An obvious example with this move in a series set contemporarily would be The
Sopranos (the shows share an executive producer), where we’re dealing for the most part
with an alien subgroup who don’t live by the same rules we do (this portrayal is one
reason Italian American anti-defamation groups were upset), so one way of imagining the
people of the past would be as an ethnic and cultural minority.
5 For more on trauma and the construction of cause after the fact, see Richardson, JAC
24.2.
4 Lacan, Encore: The Seminar o f Jacques Lacan, 79. It is in this way we should
understand Lacan’s proclamation that woman is not-whole; she is not wholly defined by
the phallic signifier.
5 It is difficult not to notice the rampant cigarette smoking in the show, for instance. On
this topic, executive producer Matthew Weiner responds: “I’ve been shocked by the
reaction to the smoking in the series. People are in cultural de