Book Excerpt: Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America

This story is a part of our Mad Men Takeover. Season four of the series premieres on AMC this Sunday, July 25.

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Below, an excerpt from Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s new Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America. Here, the author sets up the excerpt…

Beyond Mad Men’s top-notch writing, complex characters, hypnotic design (really, the fusion of all these elements is the highest caliber of art, and it’s so titillating to witness a renaissance in such an unlikely medium, isn’t it?), there’s an all-engrossing mood that permeates the show. That mixture of anxiety, instability, and tectonic cultural shifts that shook loose a whole generation feels congruent to this moment in history. So while the show is about “back then,” it feels very “now” because it also depicts the inception of our modern sensibility. Mad Men recreates a period of historic transition when the cultural trends and social mores that have dominated the second half of the century are percolating and bubbling toward the surface. It was a move away from Eisenhower virtues and towards wry minimalism. In other words, like Volkswagen said in their iconic ad, “think small.”

For this book I chose the subjects that had the greatest amount of relevance to the show. Rather than fact-check and expose anachronisms of the show (there are, indeed, a few) I wanted to focus instead on what the show got right. I also chose topics that would interest Mad Men fans, design junkies, history buffs, and pop culture enthusiasts, you know, we chosen few. Enjoy!

Polaroid: More powerful than memory alone

The challenge, presented by the Eastman family to the creative team at Sterling Cooper is to take a clunky Kodak gadget, a slide projector, and make it exciting. “Technology,” Don tells the men from Kodak, “is a glittering lure but there’s the rare occasion where the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash.” Don cuts the lights, the slide projector flickers on the wall, and begins to court the room’s sense of sentimentality with snapshots from the Draper family’s photo album: Sally and Don napping on the couch surrounded by toys and torn up Christmas wrapping; Bobby in a red wagon being pulled down the sidewalk by his sister; Don, eyes closed, resting his cheek on top of Betty swollen baby belly; a candid shot of Betty and Don kissing at a New Year’s eve party.

“Nostalgia,” Don says over his family slide show “literally, means ‘the pain from an old wound.’; It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called ‘the wheel,’ it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels — around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.”

Delicate, potent and beyond flash, Don’s pitch to Kodak is high art; it fulfills the promise of the advertising medium as instant and emotional. It was likely inspired the beloved Polaroid campaign of the mid-sixties by Doyle Dane and Bernbach. “Everybody says, ‘Well, Polaroid. How can you miss? It’s a natural for advertising. All you have to do is show it,’”; remarked an art director for DDB. “They forget that BBDO had the Polaroid account for five years, and it looked like shit.” The ads were cheap looking and marketed the bulky camera with text heavy spreads made that explained the new technology of “instant photographs.”

The team at DDB decided to focus on the pictures instead of the process. They hired photographer Howard Zieff to shoot a series of homespun pictures that depicted had the feel of a candid shot of typical but essential American life: of barefoot kids catching toads, family dinners in messy kitchens, daughters giving living room dance recitals. To best communicate the simplicity of the product, the copywriters used only sentence: “It’s like opening a present.”

According to Robert Glazter author of The New Advertising, Polaroid’s television ads perfected the campaign: Some of them have brought viewers to tears by their portrayal of sentimental, touching moments, which is rather an accomplishment in sixty seconds of commercial time. It’s even possible to say that these commercials on occasion, touch art, for, like art they have nonlinear communication with their audience, an instant recognition of a situation.

In other words, they were like Don’s pitch.

The recognition was instant and Polaroid sold millions of cameras for the first time in 1961.