Personally, I love Mad Men. I think it's a great show and I definitely see how it can relate to Gray Flannel. I think when someone mentions the 1950's/early 60's, you mind tends to go to rock-n-roll, poodle skirts, and Happy Days - the quintessential Norman Rockwell painting. Yet this two pieces speak to the discontentment of the middle-class masses.
In both examples there really is a sense of the discontented gap between one's work life and one's home life. Tom Rath wants to have that pulling desire to spend time with his family, but he is rather complacent towards them. At the end of the book, he makes a conscious decision to choose the job that will keep him closer to his family, but as I stated in class, I didn't really buy the ending to the book. I would have been happier to see him accept his unhappiness and move on.
Anyway, I think this disconnect is portrayed elegantly in the Mad Men pilot. When you first see Don Draper, he is in a bar, smoking and drinking, his only care what to pitch at the Lucky Strikes meeting. As the episode goes on, you see that all of the secretaries in the office worship him and he has a convenient "relationship" with a greeting-card designer in the village (while simultaneously flirting with a Jewish department store heiress). I assume from a male perspective, this life would be "the dream." But at the end of the episode, you see the silhouette of a man getting off the train at Ossining, driving up to a picturesque white Colonial house, and Don Draper walks through the door. He goes upstairs to kiss his beautiful wife, and checks on his two children asleep in bed. As the camera pans out, you see mother, father, and children framed in a Norman Rockwell look-alike. Does this count as the ideal model of 50's family life when we have been privy to his disconnected "city behaviors"?
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