<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Thursday, March 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

Linkedin Pinterest

TV series examine counterculture, its impact

'True Detective,' 'Mad Men' offer cynical observations

The Columbian
Published: July 13, 2015, 12:00am
2 Photos
Elisabeth Moss, from left, Jon Hamm and Rich Sommer appear in &quot;Mad Men.&quot;
Elisabeth Moss, from left, Jon Hamm and Rich Sommer appear in "Mad Men." Photo Gallery

If the 1980s were a sharp backlash to the sweeping social changes of the 1960s and ’70s, the last year has revived debates about the results of the sexual revolution.

The Supreme Court’s recognition of a right to marriage equality has the New York Times’ Ross Douthat pondering how we conceive of freedom, happiness and the relationship of one to the other. In considering the rise of affirmative consent laws, Judith Shulevitz looks at how we’ve handled sexual liberation and suggests that “the more casual sex becomes, the more we demand that our institutions and government police the line between what’s consensual and what isn’t.”

In this moment of meditation on the victories or consequences — depending on where you’re coming from — of changes in American sexual life, it has been interesting to watch well-regarded pop culture examine broader strains of countercultural thinking from the same era.

Both the last season of “Mad Men” and the current season of “True Detective” have told stories about New Age culture and the human potential movement, which suggested that helping people exercise their full capabilities would transform society. The shows’ conclusions, at least to this point, are not particularly optimistic. At worst, they imply that schools of thinking that were meant to supplant religion and psychology are just as capable of doing terrible damage.

In “Mad Men,” the New Age movement proves powerless against the powers of commerce. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) initially finds himself at the Esalen Institute at the behest of Stephanie (Caity Lotz), the niece of the late Anna Draper (Melinda Page Hamilton). Don feels a responsibility to Stephanie, who has been buffeted by the changing social mores of the 1960s and ’70s, becoming homeless, getting pregnant and ultimately giving up a child. Going to Esalen with Stephanie is a way for Don to keep an eye on her and to give her something she wants; he doesn’t go there intending to be enlightened himself.

But enlightened he ultimately is; “Mad Men” ends with Don meditating on a cliffside, before the show fades into the “Hilltop” Coca-Cola ad, one of the most famous advertising campaigns of all time, which the show suggests Don would ultimately create. As I wrote at the time, it was a cheery image with an unnerving message. Instead of being fundamentally changed by the sexual revolution or the civil rights movement, as he might have been, Esalen perfected Don as an ad man.

The best version of Don Draper, it turns out, isn’t one whose impulse to Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) bloomed into full-fledged championship of gender equality in the workplace. It’s not one whose instincts toward racial equality made him some sort of meaningful civil rights advocate. All that work and all that social upheaval, and what results is a television spot? That’s a downer that even a mindfulness session with a truly gorgeous view couldn’t help me get over.

If New Age thinking was merely naive on “Mad Men,” it’s actively malignant on “True Detective.”

In a recent episode of “True Detective,” we got a more detailed look at why Detective Antigone Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams) dislikes her father, a guru named Eliot (David Morse), who sometimes lectures at the Panticapaeum Institute, a retreat that looks a bit like Esalen. It’s not just because, as he declared pretentiously to Ani in the first episode of the season, “I am not comfortable imposing my will on anyone, and I haven’t been since 1978.” He even refused to act to prevent Antigone’s mother from committing suicide.

That would be bad enough, but, as we learn when Ani and her colleague, corrupt cop Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell), visit the doctor (an extravagantly coiffed Rick Springfield) who was treating dead Vinci city manager Ben Caspere, Eliot also used to run an alternative community called the Good Place. The doctor, who has a vulturish air, tells Ani that he briefly studied the Good Place because he was interested in the social theory behind it.

But from Ani’s perspective, the results of the experiment were disastrous. “Two are in jail now,” Ani tells the doctor of the children who lived in the community. “Two committed suicide. How’s that for social theory?” “And the fifth?” the doctor asks. “She became a detective,” Ani says sourly, suggesting that just because she’s alive, out of prison, working and in a position to lecture her sister (Leven Rambin) about having webcam sex for a living doesn’t mean Ani has ended up in a particularly functional place herself.

The Good Place’s body count may not yet be as high as the one racked up by the satanic sex cult from the first season of “True Detective.” But it has certainly destroyed human potential; whatever Eliot helped actualize in other people, his teachings have extracted a grim cost.

Don’s detour to Esalen and Morse’s guru wig on “True Detective” both appear goofy at first glance. But even if the self-actualization movements of the 1970s feel a little embarrassing, they hold important questions for us today. Debates over abortion, sexual liberation and marriage equality are, after all, just subsets of a larger argument about individual freedom and the value of established taboos and priorities.

At a moment when pop culture’s silence on abortion and embrace of gay rights are settled, predictable stances that mine little new intellectual territory, it’s at least intriguing to see “Mad Men” and “True Detective” reach back to find another framework they can use to explore the gains and costs of casting aside old norms.

Loading...