The Foreign Language of Mad Men

[Paul Mackin]

On 3/22/2012 10:56 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> How easy is it to recreate 60s language?  Not so easy, it turns out.

It's not easy if the writers didn't experience the period first hand and 
they probably wouldn't still be in so arduous a line of work if they 
had. But to me anachronisms and mistakes in language usage aren't the 
most glaring "problem." I'm a big fan of the show but am constantly 
reminded of how impossible it is the give an adequate feel of the 
past--even a past as recent as the 60s. To overcome the difficulty the 
writers have to take simplistic short cuts. Some examples involve 
smoking, drinking, and littering.  True, people did more of these bad 
things back then than now, but to depict this seems to require ludicrous 
exaggeration. This makes the show seem too self congratulatory, and of 
course the result just doesn't feel like the 60s. We didn't think of our 
behavior back then as quite so egregious, but we probably would have if 
we'd have had Don and Betty Draper around to show us how silly we looked.

P

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> http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/the-foreign-language-of-mad-men/254668/
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> LK
>