"The Spirit of the Future" DVD commentary
If "The Innocent's Progress" is a character-driven show-biz story, and "The Pretty Horsebreaker" is a hard-boiled detective story, then "The Spirit of the Future" is a fairy-tale romance, complete with chivalrous knight, evil baron, good witch and lady of the lake.
It starts out with a "boy" (this is the vague age business I talked about earlier) ( Read more... )
It starts out with a "boy" (this is the vague age business I talked about earlier) ( Read more... )
Comments 3
Hmm. There's something unsixtiesish about that show, though I can't quite put my finger on it. It's sort of like reading Sir Walter Scott: you're getting the Middle Ages, but filtered by the nineteenth century.
It does seem to be awfully hard for historical writers to find a balance between "The past was rosy clean" and "Look how inferior those primitive people of the past were" (*smug look*). I think the only way to avoid that is to immerse oneself in the past, till one begins to think like people of the past.
"I had much rather know what I should feel like if I adopted the beliefs of Lucretius than how Lucretius would have felt if he had never entertained them." --C. S. Lewis.
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Part of it is that the show is meant to highlight the nastier elements of the era: the drinking, the smoking, the casual sexism, racism, classism, able-ism, etc. The characters are living in the period, but the direction is modern.
Another aspect of it is that we today tend to think of the 60s as either the cool, mod weirdness of The Avengers or the revolutionary/psychedelic hippie culture. Most of the characters in Mad Men are conservative (politically and culturally) and still expect the world to operate more or less as it did in the 1950s, but with cooler stuff. The increasing realization that they are out of step with the world is another major theme.
You are right about the "chronological snobbery" the show sometimes can fall into (a phrase I think either CS Lewis or Tolkien coined). But that sort of "off" quality is part of the show. I watch it with an anthropological eye.
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Not those of us who grew up watching sixties sit-coms during children's hour. :) My immediate point of reference was Bewitched, since that show also featured an advertiser. But really, it's hard to avoid advertisers in TV shows of that time period - they were like the urban cowboys of the early sixties. So I thought that aspect of the story was very authentic.
The nastier elements of the era didn't seem terribly anachronistic to me either. Bewitched, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and probably lots of other shows of that era had subtle references to racism. It was a time when TV shows were pushing the envelope ( ... )
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