Mad Men is the ultimate story about what it means to be an American. The first two seasons were incredibly well-written. They were strong not because of the story or the soap-opera relationships between the characters. It was interesting because we were watching the birth of Guy Debord’s spectacle and what would become Jean Baudrillard’s simulation. Those early seasons had characters who were little more than shells, ghosts, moving across a field of magazines and television, either sending or receiving the message, “You are nothing without the things you don’t have.”

The show took the viewer behind the curtain to reveal the people who created the media-saturated world we live in today, but it also revealed the condition that society was in at the time – the growing alienation that made consumerism such an inevitability. The show was about all the characters, and the country they lived in, growing up and losing their innocence.

The main character, Don Draper, was a narcissist. That’s not an assessment, it’s the premise of the show. A narcissist is someone who creates an identity and prizes it above all other things. Every moment is spent perpetuating that identity, trying to get everyone to believe it. The show gave him an interesting back story, but the man at the ad agency called Don Draper was a constructed fake identity, one which he protected zealously. And like all narcissists, he’s convinced himself that’s who he is. He often sabotaged his job, health and his relationships with only transient anxiety. But when his real/original identity was threatened to be exposed, he almost went bananas. That’s Don Draper. That’s America.

Another character was Roger Stirling, an older advertising executive with dry wit. Roger fought in WWII, but in the Pacific against the Japanese. His personal story arc showed how that war had divorced America from its history and convinced Americans that they no longer had any use for tradition their ethnic roots in Europe.

A great scene for Roger was when his mother died, and it didn’t seem to affect him. But then he later admitted: “I don’t feel anything. At all.” He thought his lack of feeling was a pathology, like there was something wrong with him, which was why he said those lines from an analyst’s couch. Yet when his shoeshine guy died, Roger broke down into wretched sobs. It turned out that he did contain the correct amount (quantity, not quality) of emotions, they just came out at the wrong time.

That’s America: massive anxiety when nothing seems wrong; insomnia when you are exhausted; rage at some meaningless country in the Middle East; lust for the woman who smiled at you just the right way; mourning your shoeshine guy. The question for Roger was not why he felt sadness, the question was why this emotion didn’t come out at the right time? Why was the emotional energy being displaced?

The answer is that since his emotions were going to come out one way or another, it was much easier for them to come out over his shoeshine guy and say that the tears were really about his mother or his own mortality, than to let them come out when the tears were clearly about his mother or his own mortality. Saying it isn’t the same as feeling it. Saying it allows him enough wiggle room to disavow it. Like saying “I love you.” This is the essence of America: the things you say matter more than what you do.

The show was swimming in deep psychological reflection. Consider the complete and utter sidelining of Don Draper’s son. In every scene showing Don’s son, he was always filthy, clothes dishevelled, dirt on his face, etc. But we never heard from him, he wasn’t an important character. But his sister was very important. Why? Because, as the show explained repeatedly, it’s all about exploring “What do women want?” with the presumption being that men simply want women. The truth within each character’s tragedy is that what they all really want is love and meaning, but that isn’t on offer in the world of consumerism. You can buy anything in America except what matters.

At no point did I find myself wanting to empathise with any of the characters in the show, nor was it possible for the show to make them likable. Every single character in Mad Men is loathsome, sick and broken. Their lives were tragic and deserved to descend into the abyss without interruption. They reflect the society they built, the equally sick, loathsome and broken consumerist fantasy.

Which brings up The Sopranos, another TV drama about terrible Americans pretending to be good people. The Sopranos was the last in a long line of mafia stories in film and television, starting with the original Scarface in the 1930s and then to The Godfather, the remake of Scarface and Goodfellas. The gangster was presented first as an unjustly wronged and misunderstood reactionary, then as a family-oriented, loyal, even aloof figure set against a corrupt WASP-dominated society. Then in Goodfellas, the gangster was presented more authentically, as a hard drinking, hard living “blue collar guy.”

Far too many people thought the gangsters were depictions of real men. But Goodfellas, for example, was subversively undermining exactly that image. Scorsese depicted gangsters as pigs, gluttons and brutes. Nearly every single scene of Goodfellas included food in it. And a certain kind of food – cheap, unhealthy comfort food in gross amounts. The characters were always eating and drinking. And there was no respect, there was only fear. What they called respect was only a thinly veiled threat of brutal violence. Do what I say, or I’ll kill you.

That’s what Goodfellas was really about. That’s what America is. Gangsters are not the bullies, they are the bullied. They are the people who have been so beat up by everyone that they don’t have a shred of self-confidence or dignity left. They eat like pigs to soothe their depression. They easily say that violence is “business, not personal” because nothing is personal to any of them. They are incapable of relating to others as people. Considering the immigrant history of America, you can understand this mindset, but it doesn’t excuse Washington’s behaviour.

These shows and movies accurately depicted gangsters, and the people who are enamoured of that lifestyle, as gluttonous, depressed narcissists and sociopaths. The Sopranos drove this point home at the ending of the series. Of course Tony Soprano got shot. He was a horrible monster that destroyed the lives of everyone around him. Why would anyone want him to live in the end?

There was no redeeming the character who allowed Christopher to die, beat his mistresses, killed his cousin and a million other little evils. The fact that people were upset by Tony’s well-deserved execution proved only that modern viewers have been trained to think that the main character must always be the hero. Again, this is the essence of America: the things you say matter more than what you do.

Great writing is often tragic. The purpose of tragedy is to purge us of our excessive emotions. This is the catharsis. We are not cleansed, we do not get closure, we only get relief brought on by perspective. Tragedy shows us characters who have suffered more than we have (or who cause others to suffer more than we could imagine). Tragedy allows us to see fictional people tormented by their demons, and through this process we can purge our own.

Tragedy was a story style invented by Europeans. But America is explicitly, proudly, not European – even anti-European. The Americans fought a war of “Independence” just to separate their history from Europe. Shows like Mad Men and The Sopranos are decent attempts by American to write tragedies, but there’s always something hollow, something fake, in the results. That’s because the quintessential American story is the reality show.

Reality shows are about the audience. The audience can neither become famous nor infamous. These shows, absolutely every single one of them, are about letting the audience sit in judgment of the people on the screen. The more acutely the judgment can be felt, the more successful the show. The audience criticises the business acumen of people forced to generate thousands of dollars in a few days on The Apprentice, the audience chastises the duplicity of competitors on Survivor, the audience mocks the families on Supernanny, and the audience giggles at the incompetence of novice miners in Gold Rush.

Never mind that the audience has nothing going on in their lives. Never mind that people criticising the lemonade stand idea on The Apprentice are themselves either unemployed or have never run a business. Never mind that the audience watching Survivor has probably never been outside in the heat for more than an hour before running for the air conditioning. Never mind that the audience watching a show about dysfunctional families should be spending that time reading to their children instead.

Speaking of children, at his mother’s funeral, Mad Men’s super-rich Roger Stirling tried to give his grown daughter a jar of water from the river Jordan, she accepted it but conveniently left it behind a minute later. What she really came for was his cash. He gave it to her and then said he loved her. You know, like a metaphor…

Originally published on The Good Oil.