Season 5 of Mad Men Has Critics Talking About Ads

September 11, 2001:

I was in my English class, freshman year of high school in Sandusky, Ohio.  I was 15, worrying about reciting a monologue of Romeo and Juliet.  Then, as the TV droned in the background, I happened to look toward the screen just as a plane careened into  one of the towers of The World Trade Center in New York City.

Richard Drew, a photographer for the Associated Press was at work, and in fact, had been sent to lower Manhattan where the towers I couldn’t look away from on a TV screen, were aflame not miles away from where he was.

That day, a simple click of a shutter froze something in time that no one wanted to remember.

While other photographers focused their lenses on the burning, the ceaseless billowing plumes of smoke and fire lapping at the crumbling towers, Drew couldn’t tear his eyes away from the falling.  And when a photographer is fixated, his lens captures it.

People were falling, tumbling, jumping and plunging like little figurines, almost unreal, as if computer animated, a cruel trick of the eyes.

But Drew followed their decent.  He clicked the shutter over and over, rapid fire.  According to a source at Esquire Magazine, who ran his story after the tragedy occurred, at 9:41 AM he captured the path of a  a man in a white shirt and black pants “scrambling in the air”, but at one split blink of an eye, he seemed to attain a moment of “consonance” before his journey ended.

This photograph of the man in the white T-shirt, in his 1,000 feet of descent was the photo that encapsulated the events of 9/11/01 the day after.  Every major news source plastered it on their front pages.  And outcry from readers was so sever that the image disappeared not long after.

Six years passed.  We forgot some things and remembered, always remembered this.  Six years passed and AMC created a new show, so authentic is was bone-chilling.  Mad Men recaptured, in every aspect, the lives of the ad men on Madison Avenue during the Golden Age.

Being the nearly manically obsessive fan of Mad Men that I am, the opening sequence is forever engrained in my head, along with the tune that follows…duh dum, duh dum, duh dum, duhh duh dummmm (ok if you watch the show, you can hear it.)

There isn’t much to it, an almost Bansky like stenciled silhouette, of a man  (perhaps Don Draper?  Or more abstractly the Don Drapers of society) in a suit and a tie, standing in his office, taking a few steps to set down his briefcase before everything around him begins to disintegrate and float downwards.  Then we see ads tumble, then the man tumbling from the window of his office, past an array of ads of lit up faces, red painted nails, long legs paired with stockings and garters until we reach the larger than life sized tumbler of bourbon where he then continues his decent into a pile of more, well, ads.  The screen fades out, then back in to the silhouette, his back to us resting comfortably on a chic couch, one arm draped over the back.
Now, 4 seasons in, us mad for Mad Men fans have been waiting anxiously for season 5 to air after a year hiatus due to a discrepancy between the writers and AMC.  Finally, March 25^th is our day.  But the new promotional poster has caused a similar uproar as the photograph of the falling man now nearly 11 years ago.  The question on our mind is “Was the image a reference to Drew’s photograph?”

Tom Junod of Esquire says:

Absolutely. Did the entire show exist within the peculiar set of quotation marks that 9/11 furnished, and travel back 50 years in order to reckon obliquely with the last ten? It did, which accounts for the almost forensic nature of our fascination with it. The show doesn’t merely begin with a sequence portraying a man’s fall. The show begins with a man’s fall to tell us that it’s about a man’s fall — to tell us that as it begins, it will also end.

Ok.  I respect his opinion but, there are quite a few holes in both sides of the story.  Do I think that the poster is a reference to the photo and is thus insensitive to 9/11?  Possibly.  But I think what needs to be asked is, was it intentional?  In this case, my answer is no.  That’s not to say that I think it was the best choice for a promotional poster.  I do believe that someone, as us millenials so often say, “dropped the ball” on this.  You would think that more thought and scrutiny would go into an ad, more research perhaps, before releasing it.  I can see the startling similarities but what does not match up for me is that this image is a part of an entire opening sequence that began years ago when the show began.  I came upon the poster at the Holland Tunnel subway station.  It stopped me, abruptly, not only because I knew exactly what it was when I saw it, but also because, admittedly, it is a disturbing image and left many questions for me.

Now that AMC is  accused of making this reference to 9/11, one cant help but compare both sides.  Though it could have nothing to do with 9/11, the poster does in fact suggest that the show really is about a man’s fall, and that can be taken in an infinite number of ways.