Now that Jessica is back in school, we're using our gift months of Netflix to order the television not included in our basic cable. With the endless pressure of homework, tests and papers, she prefers episodes to feature length movies. I get into The Closer, since I'm an action drama kind of guy. And, if not for the action, I can get into the techno-clever plots and the stretch acting. By nature, in terms of movies, I'd rather watch a Bond or Bruce Willis throwaway. In other words, I'm not too much into cinema, perhaps because of my overbearing literary bent. Movies are entertainment. Right?
            We just watched the extra on the third disk for the first season of Mad Men. I think I've caught four or five of the episodes so far. To some extent, I can take it or leave it. But I have this nagging feeling as I watch them that something is not quite right, not on. From the first, my response is, 'where are the maniacs'? There's a great deal of potentially manic behavior in the scripts, but the character presentations are generally too cool. For one thing, Madison Avenue was popper land. And this was before inhalers. I'm talking about yellow jackets and black beauties. Truck drivers and ad men, doing their Dexedrine for their diverse diversionary purposes. Truck drivers drive all night, running double logs. Ad men do it for the brainstorming edge, the final punch that puts them into the tomorrow of programming, the 'creative' moment that pushes them ahead of the curve, culturally.
            But it's not just Madison Avenue. And it's not just pills - depressive housewives (and who can blame them?) making themselves happy with 'mother's little helpers'. But the manic and depressive range of the culture - but particularly the manic - is a little more evident, a little more obvious, in 1960. If the cultural fascination with Freud becomes endemic (and not just 'highbrow' and 'bohemian') at this point, it expresses the peculiarly neurotic flavor of the culture at the time. 'Neurotic', now there's a buzzword before 'buzzword', but a clichéd flag that has largely fallen into disuse. But neuroses were not only real, they were common. The whole culture evinced a more openly pressured psychology. Migraines were a sign of seriousness, not sickness. Alcohol was very purely a medicine, because the 'rat race' was a rat race, a pressure cooker. And one was allowed to let the pressure show. 'Being cool' might be considered a virtue. But the maniacs in every 'creative' field of endeavor were not only tolerated and accepted, but often openly, if backhandedly, honored. Neuroses were commonly worn like badges.

            But what prompts me to write, finally, is that in the 'hobo' episode, Don Draper has a flashback to his childhood when his stepfather or adoptive father cheated a hobo out of a quarter, and the hobo supposedly left the hobo sign for a liar on their gatepost. Obviously, in the context, this is intended as a deeply formative moment in Draper's life. The only problem: wrong generation. Draper's generation grew up during the Great Depression and came to maturity during the Second World War. A child of the Depression might remember an act of this kind, but he would have understood it. The sense of individual justice, in a child, is a product of relative prosperity and security, not of deprivation, want and the enforced sense of duty, that came with the Depression and the war. Justice was a national hope, not a personal issue. The peculiarly premature 'maturity' of that generation can be characterized in such microcosmic marks as the radicals for the WW II expression 'snafu'. You did your duty, no matter what. But, as my father admitted, perhaps a quarter century later, his generation came back from the war feeling that they had 'done their bit' and now they were going to do something for themselves.
            And while, as a general rule, discipline meant that one did not make a show of it, nevertheless manifesting a driving force in terms of personal ambition was not unacceptable. Moreover, the enforced psychological repression of the 30s and 40s found its release across the culture in a range of driven and neurotic behaviors.

            I was 14 in 1960, and I remember the psychological ambience. It was our generation that had the sense of injured justice. Our parents mouthed the platitudes of an idealism that had not only made the ordeals of their youth bearable, but as pragmatic action had apparently resuscitated the economy and helped defeat fascism. But their ideals were relatively meaningless in the practice of their present lives. They were serving an economic society not only of uniformity, but of essentially amoral uniformity. And psychologically, they themselves had had little space or time to reflect. Psychologically, they tended to be relatively immature and oppressive. The displacements of war and depression had become an element of national character. My mother read cookbooks like novels in order to learn how to cook. I grew up thinking spaghetti was a casserole. And mothers needed books to tell them how to bring up baby. The good doctor recommended that crying babies should be left in their cribs to cry themselves to sleep.
            Perhaps the so-called culture wars have deluded us into the presumption that the 60s did not radically change us as a people. Perhaps it wasn't just the drugs. What fascinated us about the first James Bond flick was his total cool. Like Hemingway's heroes, Bond came out of the pulp fiction of the 30s and 40s. But the pulp fiction 'cool' hero was harsh and cynical, aggressive and a 'masher'. The elegant 'cool' - including the 'cool' violence - with an essentially aristocratic self-possession, was an altogether new psychological model. And, for those of us whom the drugs failed to shove into clinical disintegration, the 'cool' of cannabis became a reasonable alternative.
            Now, I suppose, we are into an oppression of 'cool'. And perhaps we can assign the rage and violence that manifest regularly on the street to this self-repression of 'cool'. But 'cool' is now normative in a way it was not in 1959 and 1960.

            One watches the special on the disk for Mad Men, and remembers some of the incredible little gimcracks and devices of the era. One or two of the women seem to be on target, psychologically, although a wide range of neuroses was endemic in women as well, whether married or single. But, among the male characters, a certain neurotic edge is altogether missing.