#mattweiner

Emily Nussbaum is really worried that the changing landscape of how we consume television is increasing the creepy and obscured practice of product integration, or writing advertisements for corporate products into popular tv shows. Commercials are all fucked up so now everyone has to be sneaky about ad sales burrowing into our brains. Wow, what an illusion the gospel of digital utopia has been. We’ve enthusiastically thrown away our privacy and integrity and now everything sucks but we still watch it, noooooooo...

Well product integration is not only super-prevalent now (there are corporate deals on Mr. Robot, the anti-corporate show) but it was on fucking Alfred Hitchcock presents. Corps fuck up storylines if they don’t like them, they’re conservative and dickheaded. Emily’s intellectual sparring partner here is St. Matthew Weiner of the Mad Men cult, who reportedly loves product integration and thinks we’re mature enough to handle it. He is become Don Draper, destroyer of worlds. And he wants to make sure people don’t think he sold the ending to Coca-Cola (spoiler alert, even though the only human who hasn’t watched this is me). 

Em thinks this is bananas and gets in the way of basic creative potential for tv when it’s tied to these guys, brings up the great point of “Wouldn’t we all be mad if we found out our favorite novels or musicals or fucking paintings were sponsored by laundry detergent? Why don’t we hold tv, our best friend, pretty much the only one we feel close to and consoled by, to the same standard? Is our cynicism making us fucking dumb?”

Mad Men is a wonderful television experience. If you’re about to watch it or you have watched it I find that “Morals and Dogma” is a useful TV Guide when watching. 

These men don’t take no for an answer, they build these big businesses, these empires, but really it’s all based on failure, insecurity, and an identity modeled on some abstract ideal of white power. I’ve always said this is a show about becoming white. That’s the definition of success in America—becoming a WASP. A WASP male.

The driving question for the series is, Who are we? When we talk about “we,” who is that? In the pilot, Pete Campbell has this line, “Adding money and education doesn’t take the rude edge out of people.” Sophisticated anti-Semitism. I overheard that line when I was a schoolteacher. The person, of course, didn’t know they were in the presence of a Jew. I was a ghost. Certain male artists like to show that they’re feminists as a way to get girls. That’s always seemed pimpy to me. I sympathize with feminism the same way I identify with gay people and with people of color, because I know what it’s like to look over the side of the fence and then to climb over the fence and to feel like you don’t belong, or be reminded at the worst moment that you don’t belong.

Take Rachel Menken, the department-store heiress in the first season ofMad Men. She’s part of what I call the nose-job generation. She’s assimilated. She probably doesn’t observe the Sabbath or any of these other things that her parents did. That generation had a hard time because they were trying desperately to be buttoned-down and preppy and—this is my parent’s generation—white as could be. They were embarrassed by their parents. This is the story of America, this assimilation. Because guess what, this guy Don has the same problems. He’s hiding his identity, too. That’s why Rachel Menken understands Don, because they’re both trying desperately to be white American males.

Of all of them, Peggy is my favorite. I identify with her struggle. She is so earnest and self-righteous and talented and smart, but dumb about personal things. She thinks she’s living the life of “we.” But she’s not. And every time she turns a corner, someone says, “You’re not part of ‘we.’ ” “But you all said ‘we’ the other day.” “Yes, we meant, ‘we white men.’ ”

Mad-Men-Schöpfer Matt Weiner versucht sein Glück jetzt auf der großen Leinwand. Für seine selbstgeschriebene Dramedy You are here hat er sich bereits komödiantische Talente gesichert und Owen Wilson und Zach Galifianakis für die Hauptrollen besetzt. Es geht um einen Mann (Wilson), der mit seinem bipolaren besten Freund (Galifianakis) auf eine Weltreise gehen will. Der Freund ist allerdings ziemlich unreif, soll aber ein großes Vermögen erben, was zu Spannungen führt. Weiner hatte das Script Anfang der 2000er Jahre, also vor seinem großen Erfolg mit der Serie Mad Men geschrieben und kann es jetzt umsetzen. Neben den beiden Hauptdarstellern, die mit ihm befreundet sind, steht er mit Comedienne Amy Poehler in Verhandlungen, die ihm ebenfalls freundschaftlich verbunden ist. Sie soll Galifianakis' geldgeile Schwester spielen.