Television audiences and transnational nostalgia: Mad Men in Israel

Cosmopolitan memory and transcultural proximity

Although the original context for nostalgia is geographical and national dislocation, nostalgia’s spatial dynamics have not been extensively theorized or investigated. In fact, the spatial dimensions of nostalgia have been progressively de-emphasized in comparison with its temporality (Pickering and Keightley, 2006): in contemporary social psychological research, for instance, nostalgia is defined exclusively as ‘a sentimental longing for one’s past’ – having ‘parted ways’ with research into ‘home-sickness’ in the late 20th century (Sedikides et al., 2008: 304–305). Another factor is the dimensional asymmetry of nostalgic return. Spatial return may not be practical, but it is possible; in modern secular chronology, temporal return is simply not an option. The impossibility of temporal return is thus the source of nostalgic sadness and melancholic desire, and also the precise site of nostalgia’s resistance to the modern temporality of irreversible linear progress.

It is thus perhaps unsurprising that the spatial dimensions of nostalgia have been relatively neglected, despite substantial changes both to lived spatial experience and to institutional and abstract renderings of space, among them mass international travel and mobility, the expansion of globalized media systems, and the emergence of transnational media audiences. Yet, these changes are crucial for several reasons. First, because the ambiguity of ‘home’ in the nostalgic desire to ‘return’ encompasses and privileges the idea of the ‘homeland’. As nostalgia takes form as a collective, cultural malaise, it is the nation – the national territory and national past – that becomes a key ‘natural’ lost object of nostalgic yearning (Robertson, 1990). What happens to nostalgic longing when the very boundaries and cultural viability of the nation as a distinctive ‘home’ appear to be in flux and doubt?

The second reason for the significance of globalization and related processes is that texts designed to be heavy with nostalgic reverberations for local audiences have become available for consumption, and increasingly popular, among distant viewers. The potential global distribution of national lexicons of nostalgic motifs and signs – and the consequent construction of nostalgia as a transnational if not global sentiment – then becomes an intriguing possibility.

Finally, these changes in spatial relations have been accompanied by new thinking in neighboring domains of research. In particular, work on collective memory and media audiences proves particularly suggestive for understanding possible shifts in the parameters of nostalgia. Levi and Sznaider’s (2002) analysis of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ is one such example: a transnational memory-structure, fed by the mediation and representation of certain events (such as the Holocaust) beyond the national cultures that directly experienced them, enabling them to be ‘remembered’ by populations ostensibly distant from their occurrence. At a more micro-social level, Szerszynski and Urry’s (2002) research on ‘cultures of cosmopolitanism’ and ‘banal globalism’ – where for ordinary (British) people everyday leisure and work are routinely lived, and reflexively experienced, as intertwined with global and local images, texts, themes, and narratives – provides another useful basis for understanding nostalgia as a potentially transnational sentiment. Finally, research on transcultural television audiences (Stehling, 2013) and cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 2007) might unravel the potential structuring of nostalgic connections between distant locations and memory-frameworks for specific sub-national audience groups, helping to explain why some (but not all) viewers, in faraway places, long for and identify with a past that isn’t ‘theirs’.

Mad Men and nostalgia

Since its first broadcast in 2007, Mad Men has gained, over six seasons, a solid following of ‘maddicts’ (Warner, 2011), generating more entertainment industry buzz than most other drama shows of its time (Woods, 2012). Mad Men has been touted as exemplary of a new wave of ‘quality’ television dramas with large production budgets, critical social and political depth, challenging and morally ambiguous characters, and complex narrative arcs (Mittel, 2006; Newman, 2006). Like other such dramas, Mad Men has also attracted considerable scholarly attention, covering everything from its treatment of 1960s social and political mores (especially in relation to gender) to its powerfully nostalgic visual effects and the perceived believability of its period style (Edgerton, 2011).

Mad Men’s relation to the past has been perhaps the main concern among academic commentators, the acuity – or absence – of its critique of historic injustices and vices frequently taking center stage. On the one hand, Mad Men’s smoky, alcoholic atmosphere has encouraged claims that its pleasures are primarily escapist and potentially retrograde. It is a ‘regressive yet attractive U.S.A.’ (French, 2011), evoking ‘nostalgia for a world where men chain-smoked, wore suits and drank Martinis for lunch’ (p. 550) with ‘fetishistic fidelity to period detail’ (Taveira, 2012: 293) while creating ‘retro-lushness’ (White, 2011: 150). It transforms today’s medical and moral vices into yesterday’s shimmering luxuries, inviting viewers to identify with the patriarchal social norms and gendered aesthetic codes of the period (Kraus, 2011), attracting and seducing viewers with its glossy nostalgic exterior (Kraus, 2011). Jerome De Groot (2011) has argued that Mad Men constructs a ‘historic illusion’, an imagined, fictional perception of ‘history’ based on the televised image, lacking concrete roots in memory or reality.

Yet, opposing these claims are interpretations highlighting Mad Men’s implicit criticism of the past. Butler (2011) suggests that Mad Men has ‘little patience with nostalgia’ (p. 55), aggressively exposing the period’s vices through an ‘uncomfortable discourse of the era’s misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, racism and class prejudice’ (p. 55). A conflict arises: while viewers might like to think misogyny and racism are matters of the past, they are still able to enjoy a world where these views are front and center, making Mad Men a ‘guilty pleasure’.

Man Men, in sum, evokes moral and evaluative ambivalence among critics: with regard to its nostalgic effect, its ‘historicity’, and its presumed impact on viewers. Does it feed an escapist, aestheticized desire for past norms and behavior that have lost their legitimacy? Or does Mad Men dismantle old myths, granting the viewer a sober encounter with the past or even with the present and the future? Does the series dramatize a critically productive form of cognitive dissonance between the norms of yesteryear and the taboos of today?

It is perhaps no accident that these opposing evaluations can be discerned within the intellectual history of nostalgia itself. As briefly noted earlier, the concept of nostalgia was constructed in medicine and psychology long before its appearance as a motif in popular culture. In 1688, the term ‘nostalgia’ was coined by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer to account for ‘the sad mood originating from the desire for return to one’s native land’ (Boym, 2001: 3) among Swiss mercenaries located in distant countries. But the spatio-temporal asymmetry of ‘returning home’ made nostalgia ripe for conceptual expansion and appropriation as the descriptor of a broad cultural malady in an era of increasing mobility and dislocation.

Svetlana Boym (2001) connects these conceptual changes to the historic shifts from pre-modern to modern conceptions of temporality. From the 17th century, a ‘new temporality’ emerged in which time was increasingly understood as a linear axis of self-development and progress. Nostalgia, longing for the past, was portrayed as an archaic, unhealthy side-effect of modernity. In the 19th century, however, nostalgia was recuperated as part of a romantic imaginative sensibility that resisted aspects of modernity: nostalgia was melancholic precisely because it expressed ‘a sentiment of loss and displacement’ borne of time’s irreversibility while displaying ‘romance with one’s own fantasy’ of impossible return (Boym, 2001: 21). Allowing one to dwell on temporal loss, nostalgia challenged the moral confidence of linear progress. Rather than a malady, nostalgia became a ‘cure’ for the trauma of change (Sprengler, 2009). This capacity for conceptual and diagnostic recuperation is central to Boym’s own theoretical refinements, in particular her notion of ‘reflective nostalgia’. Opposed to ‘restorative nostalgia’, which involves a clear-cut desire to replace the present with the past, reflective nostalgia permits perceptual and emotional conflicts and contradictions, and suggests critical ways of ‘inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones’ (Boym, 2001: 42). Where restorative nostalgia promotes the homogeneity and regression of the self, reflective nostalgia offers multiplicity and, perhaps, growth.

However, such relatively positive conceptualizations of nostalgia (see also Pickering and Keightley, 2006) have not been prominent in analyses of media texts and popular culture, where the best-known use of the term is in relation to the ‘nostalgia film’, deployed most famously by Fredric Jameson (1991) as part of a critique of postmodern simulation. The ‘nostalgia film’, according to Jameson, doesn’t presume to recreate the past but functions as a pastiche that produces pastness as a generic and aesthetic effect while blocking access to any real history (Jameson, 1991). Nostalgia is conceived as the aesthetic mode that replaces genuinely expressive or authentically referential access to the past and as the sign of mourning for the loss of these very experiential and cultural capacities. ² Attempting to recuperate nostalgia despite Jameson’s critique, Dika (2003) asks whether this pastiche is nevertheless capable of provoking productive forms of proximity, involvement, and identification among viewers. This question brings us closer to a renewed concern with nostalgia as an emotional and social phenomenon rather than a purely textual one, and hence to our empirical research on viewers of Mad Men.

Methodology

Four focus groups were held in May and June 2012, designed around the following characteristics: devoted Israeli viewers of Mad Men (men and women), aged 25–35 years. Mad Men, at the time of the focus groups, was already popular among Israeli audiences, appealing mainly to younger, web-literate, trend-conscious viewers. While Israel’s cable company HOT bought the show and had aired it weekly in season since 2007, downloading and video on demand (VOD), available at HOT for free since 2010, were increasingly preferred. ³ Several online blogs appeared in leading Israeli websites, recapping and analyzing the episodes, and helping to create a lively discourse around the show – among them ‘Zman Mad Men’ (‘The Time of Mad Men’) by Gadi Lahav, at the time the chief editor of Walla News (one of Israel’s foremost news websites), and ‘Coffee + TV’ by Ido Yeshayahu, one of the focus group participants. Additionally, Mad Men–themed Purim parties became a staple in 2010–2013: in 2011, the police had to shut down a party at the Design Gallery organized by the Tel Aviv bar ‘Ha Prozdor’ due to an overabundance of guests (Ganor, 2011).

The focus group participants were recruited through a Facebook status post, addressing friends and friends of friends who religiously watch Mad Men. The recruits were divided into four groups of four to five people each; each group met once in Tel Aviv over the course of a 2-month period (from the meeting of the first group to the meeting of the last). The meetings were approximately 1:20 hours long and were recorded, with the participants’ permission, using an iPhone recorder.

The decision to conduct focus groups was derived from the subject-matter: talking about a favorite television show is an everyday group dynamic, and focus groups, being the closest research tool to a conversation (Morgan, 1996), were a natural choice. Encouraging involved, informal exchanges was crucial to our quest for reactions, conflicts, and associative thinking. Having said that, it would be naive to overlook some well-known concerns. First, while focus groups can provide great insight, access to some of the most personal, intimate data can be constrained by the group setting, and indeed, this problem became evident for the topics of fantasy and identification. Another important detail emerged from the all-female group – without male presence, many shyness barriers were removed and women spoke more freely than in the mixed groups. A similar practice with an all-male group, led by a male researcher, would add greatly to the data in the future.

The choice of age and nationality was based on the very concept of nostalgia: aiming to put as much cultural space and time between the participants and the show as possible, we chose Israeli viewers young enough not to have lived through the 1960s. This parameter was meant to stretch the geographic and the cultural gap in order to test nostalgia and collective memory. Nevertheless, the participants’ age wasn’t the only factor they had in common. In part thanks to the social-media-based recruiting process, they all shared geographic and professional characteristics: the vast majority lived in Tel Aviv, which is usually considered Israel’s leading cultural and commercial hub. Additionally, all were educated to university level (all possessed a BA, while a quarter of the participants had Masters degrees in humanities disciplines and three were currently engaged in graduate studies); all but two worked in ‘creative’ occupations: an artist, a fashion business owner, a sports endorsements manager, two journalists, two music-industry employees, three in advertising, and so on. Excellent English speakers, well-informed consumers of popular culture, and frequent travelers, they were members of a young professional elite. As we discovered, these factors were not incidental to how participants related to Mad Men.

When everything changed: talking about the 1960s

Don Draper, the lead character of the series, is described as a self-made man with a vague past who can begin his life anew over and over again – a description that also fits the United States in the 1960s at a historic moment of social and cultural breakdown (Hernandez and Holmberg, 2011). The motif of crisis and transformation, and the analogy between characters and the social whole, was clearly evident to the Israeli viewers, who repeatedly referred to the changes from the 1950s to the 1960s as a key topic. One participant described it as follows: ‘The seam between the reserved conservatism of the 50s and the total disintegration of the 60s’ (Reut, group 2), while another claimed, ‘Between 1955 and 1965 everything changed. Here came the beatniks, and then the 60s and everything we know now. The wish to fulfill yourself, to express yourself, all this individualism’ (Guy, group 1).

Participants described the innovation, cultural richness, and possibilities of the 1960s as ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘original’, characterized by a shift from ‘sleepiness to awakening’ (Odelia, group 4). Conspicuous consumer prosperity, new directions in music, and fashion that predate what ‘we know now’ were widely discussed. The topic of change, which is a salient feature of Mad Men’s plot, elicited nostalgic notes of envy and yearning: ‘There’s something about the outbreak of more provocative music, something tempting. Today there’s a feeling that everything is wide open, no art is radical’ (Yael, group 3). Another participant put it this way: ‘They lived in a world of absolute truths – men were men, women were women, everyone knew that art is groundbreaking. Today, because of post-modernism, everything is liquid and acceptable, nothing is absolute’ (Hila, group 3). Ways of dealing with overwhelming change were also important: ‘They had social innocence, everything was virginal. We don’t have that naivety about dilemmas, like women’s rights’ (Vicky, group 4).

As responses to queries about why participants like watching the world of Mad Men, these comments are tonally nostalgic – they convey regret about distance (and more especially, difference) from the past. However, there is no longing for past values or codes. It is nostalgia for a time when a change in values was possible, for the turning point when things shifted. Needless to say, this nostalgic object is ‘lost’ – the participants consistently denied the possibility of such fundamental change occurring in their own era.

These comments also exemplify an interesting pattern of comparison which emerged, completely unprovoked, throughout the group discussions, where frameworks for judgment were derived from the series and applied to everyday life: ‘To see the gap between now and then – everything that’s unacceptable now was ok, like smoking in the elevator, being secretive about an abortion. It’s so interesting to see how we advanced’ (Danielle, group 1). The contrasts between time-periods and lifeworlds informed participants’ interest in what, in other circumstances, might be seen as mundane details of office hierarchy and behavior: a black man working the elevator, the inevitable smoking and drinking, sleeping on the sofa in the middle of a work day. Homophobic and anti-semitic attitudes were noted, as was the complete lack of environmental awareness.

Contrasts concerning gender distinctions and the status of women were extremely prominent subjects of discussion: ‘They wanted a woman to be the little housewife, like Pete’s wife, or a promiscuous slut – the roles were clear’ (Hila, group 4). Viewers protested against the advertising firm’s attempt to ‘pimp’ Joan in order to win a new client account and Roger’s night with much younger twins. Or as one participant put it, ‘Mad Men presents a very realistic world, but we’re far enough from it to look upon it with a certain dismay, like looking at an old photo of yourself’ (Tal, group 4). Although this reveals the participants’ ability to ‘demythologize’ the past, it also exposes the affective bond between the viewers and the very past they are subjecting to critique: for this Israeli viewer at least, Mad Men is like looking at old photo of yourself.

Other comments provide sobering criticism of the present without relinquishing the sense of continuity with the world of the past:

I do like things that aren’t politically correct and are said and done as is. Nothing is really different now – but back then, if someone slept with a bunch of men, she would be called a slut for it. Today she wouldn’t necessarily be called that, but would be treated just the same. (Reut, group 3)

This is a powerful quote, as it directly favors the ‘straight up’, ‘telling it like it is’, unvarnished attitude attributed to Mad Men’s era. The contemporary concealment of offensive attitudes and behavior, packaging them as unclear, unmentionable, and (politically) incorrect, was a frequent topic: the all-female group, for example, agreed that today’s woman is still expected to be thin and a good cook, even if nobody explicitly says so. Another participant mockingly compared the unconcealed prejudices of Mad Men to the tokenistic symbolic politics of the 1990s: ‘Remember Power Rangers? They had a black, Asian character, just for the sake of it, and it was clear as day and stupid’ (Yaara, group 2). In the case of gender and ethnicity, it is not the 1950s or 1960s which the viewers condemned as rigid and inflexible, but the contemporary period, in its obsessive quest for a ‘political correctness’ that simply glosses over entrenched inequalities.

Significantly, almost no one mentioned what for an external observer is perhaps the most obvious gap – the fissure between Mad Men’s spatial and cultural location and the location of its viewers. While comparing the present and the past, the participants drew no boundaries between the show’s social and historical framework and their own time-frame as a non-American audience: discussions about ‘then’ and ‘now’ occurred almost exclusively within a unified, transcultural mental field, in which present-day Israel is a natural extension of 1960s America and the two are seamlessly connected and comparable. As Danielle, quoted earlier, says, ‘It’s so interesting to see how we advanced’ (our emphasis). This use of ‘we’ performs an unreflexive identification between the Israeli viewer and the past of another country whose memory she can only share vicariously; moreover, the claim that ‘we advanced’ since the 1960s is a marker of the ‘simultaneity along time’ (Anderson, 1983: 24) that characterizes the temporal movement of an imagined community based on the assumed synchronous progress of its spatially dispersed members. Only in this case the imagined community far exceeds the nation.

Having said that, awareness of geo-cultural distinctions did occasionally emerge, sometimes in revealing ways. Mad Men’s nostalgic representation of power and class differences led to a curious dialogue in group 2, in what became one of the very few direct references to Israel in any of the discussions:

This rare exchange not only draws on the racial power disparities in Mad Men’s American past in order to question local, historical Israeli ethnic prejudices. It also offers a critique of nostalgia itself as a politically inflected form of affect, one in which ‘the good old days’ only really applies to the privileged groups who produce it as a discourse.

This awareness of the political stakes of nostalgia for constructing the desirability of only one, usually privileged, version of the past was not accompanied, however, by agreement that Mad Men’s narrative appealed mainly to one, largely privileged, social group in Israel. When a participant in group 4 suggested that the show’s magic only works on ‘left-wing Tel Avivians’ (Vicky), she was contradicted by other participants who claimed that their relatives outside Tel Aviv were equally addicted to the series. Moreover, there was no agreement about the extent to which Mad Men is liked by Israelis not because of class or ethnic affiliation, but for reasons of experience or even ‘national character’: when casually asked in group 1 whether they live in ‘a Mad Men world’, one participant argued that ‘There’s a big difference between Israel and the States. Israelis are far less phony’ (Guy, group 1). On another occasion, a participant told the group she watched a season of Mad Men in New York, where it is ‘perceived completely differently – Americans grasp the beginning of capitalism in the show, they understand more than Israelis how Mad Men plants the seeds of the reality they live in today’ (Liron, group 4). In other words, it is only when residing in the location where the past of Mad Men actually took place that the strangeness of these viewers’ sense of inclusion in its performance can become apparent to them: only by traveling to the home of Mad Men can they recognize that this past is not simply theirs.

On the whole, however, such moments of recognition were scarce. Instead, we can speak of a double structure of transnational nostalgia that was barely challenged. The first ‘dimension’ of this double structure consists of an unreflexive identification with the past of Mad Men as part of a shared cosmopolitan memory framework: Israeli viewers yearn for an American past that they treat, more or less unproblematically, as their own. Yet, this very process of seamless identification and longing – this articulation of the American past as their own lost object – creates the conditions for the second ‘dimension’ of transnational nostalgia: the conscious application of the motif of deep historical change to the Israeli present, denigrating – through comparison with the (American) past – the merely ‘superficial’ changes of the contemporary era and its duplicitous rhetoric of political correctness. This is no merely intellectual comparative exercise, however. Crucial to the felt power of its critique of contemporary conditions is the affective charge that moves across these two dimensions, from identification to comparison, and that is utterly dependent on the ability of Israeli viewers to adopt Mad Men’s past as though it is their own and as though its loss were their own.

The whiskey and the bathrobe: nostalgic identification

The concept of audience identification is central to this double structure. Notwithstanding its complexity and controversy (Smith, 1994), identification can be defined as ‘a mechanism through which audience members experience reception and interpretation of the text from the inside, as if the events were happening to them’ (Cohen, 2009), and it usually designates high emotional involvement with the narrative and its characters (Hoffman and Buchanan, 2005). An important component of identification assumes a diminishing ‘psychological distance’ between the viewer and the fictional protagonists based on a perceived similarity between the characters and the viewer’s social roles, behaviors, and motivations (Wilson, 1993). Given the temporal distance of Mad Men’s narrative, and the spatial dislocation of its Israeli audience, tapping questions of identification raises important points.

First, the double structure of transnational nostalgia requires identification with place and time rather than primarily with character. Israeli viewers effectively imagine themselves – in an involuntary, non-effortful manner – in the same temporal and spatial continuum as the ‘situation’ of Mad Men, 1960s America. Moreover, participants seemed not to identify with some of the principal characters, preferring instead to deliver judgment on them (usually negatively). Thus, while Don Draper was initially characterized by his capacity for ‘reinventing himself’, participants most frequently perceived him as rigid and anachronistic compared to the overall transformations of the period. ‘He’s old world’ (Adi, group 2), ‘He was the young one at the beginning of the show, but as the beatniks took over he started looking old, old-school’ (Guy, group 1). Other characters, too, were deemed failures in adapting to fundamental social and cultural shifts: Roger, a symbol of an even older generation, was called ‘pathetic’ and ‘seeing his values crumbling’ (Tal, group 3). Joan Holloway, the lead secretary (and later a partner in the firm) – represented in the show’s earlier seasons as the hypersexual object of lecherous male desire – was ‘old fashioned’ and ‘stuck in the old world’ (Adi, group 2). Overall, these negative judgments reveal not only how highly the participants value change but also that change is both narratively and interpretively constructed in ways that privilege a sense of historic possibilities for underlying transformation over mere character or plot development. The viewers appear to be identifying with an underlying diegetic-world structure – the 1960s as an era of transformation – which they take as a benchmark against which characters are assessed. Identification with the situation of a protagonist is achieved while retaining psychological distance from the character himself or herself.

The participants were also unanimous on a related point: none of them wished to ‘change places with a character’ when specifically confronted with this question by the group moderator. In fact, they expressed concern that they ‘lack the tools to deal with it’ (Hila, group 3) and suggested they might just ‘visit for a day’ (Guy, group 1). In other words, they would prefer to be sightseers rather than residents, taking a tour of the era without truly inhabiting it. Among male participants, there was a curious tendency toward changing places, for no more than a day, with Ken Cosgrove, a relatively minor character described as ‘cool’. This can be interpreted as an easy route for managing the imaginary journey back in time, which satisfies historic curiosity but doesn’t threaten the self with harmful possibilities. Others were deeply pessimistic about the benefits of changing places with a character:

If I were a woman in that era I’d probably be miserable like Betty – she gave up to perfectionism – or I’d be a lesbian by choice, anything not to be a part of a man’s world. And these choices are extreme. (Odelia, Group 4)

These comments suggest active tensions in the constitution of nostalgic viewing between judgment and identification, comparison and desire: recognizing the era’s benefits while realizing that becoming a part of its reality would be distinctly unpleasant. Furthermore, the general atmosphere of Mad Men’s world was perceived to be rather grim: ‘depressing’, ‘damaged’, ‘rotten’. The word ‘desperation’ was frequently used to describe characters as well as the participants’ feelings about Mad Men altogether. ‘It comes to show you everything is fragile – everything you think is stable, like family and work, is due to fall apart’ (Danielle, group 1).

Peggy Olsen was the key focal point of identification for female viewers, as the character was ‘written for women’ (Hila, group 3). ‘Peggy’s quest for greatness’ (Hila, group 3) rang true for many female participants, who complimented her for being ‘progressive’ (Liron, group 4), ‘a precedent’ (Danielle, group 1), ‘ahead of her time’ and ‘ambitious’ (Yael, group 3). It is interesting to note that Peggy is far from popular among her fictional colleagues in the show. Identifying with her therefore undermines assumptions about female viewers’ preferences for popular, admired characters (Turner, 1993).

Moreover, it again suggests that nostalgic identification primarily occurs at the level of the diegetic world and its principal traits – particularly the centrality of profound historical change: identification with Peggy is based on admiration for her ability to move with, or even ahead of, the transformations of her era. Peggy thus embodies the ambivalence of nostalgic responses to the show: she becomes the subject of identification for demonstrating characteristics most closely aligned with the present-day attitudes of her female viewers while at the same time providing a comparative vantage point on viewers’ own nostalgic sense of having lost what Peggy possesses: the possibility of personal and historical transformation.

The centrality of this ‘situational’ or historical form of identification seems to leave little room, then, for viewers to indulge in overt fantasizing about themselves as characters. However, in the all-female group, some wishful thinking still took place as an interesting dialogue unraveled:

As a woman, I’d love to be a little Betty, a little Megan. You want Peggy’s sass and Joan’s sex-appeal. Betty makes me want to put on a bathrobe and cook. (Adi, group 3)

The show makes me want to drink whiskey in the office! (Reut, group 3)

See, it’s exactly the modern women’s dilemma – you look at Mad Men and want to be the male executive drinking the whiskey, and on the other hand you have the desire to cook and serve. Look at Adi, she’s a fucking entrepreneur, I’m sure she’s going all day from the whiskey to the bathrobe. (Yaara, group 3)

This exchange reveals further complexity in the show’s structure of nostalgic longing: female viewers’ cross-gender and transhistorical desire enables pleasurable identification with the patriarchal role-distinctions of the period as well as facilitating its reflexive critique as politically problematic. The women seem to enjoy the fact that they can identify with different kinds of 1960s gendered experience and behavior, including that of the men: Reut’s comment about wanting to drink whiskey in the office shows how her somatic imagination moves unhindered across the gender divide. The sarcasm of Yaara’s closing sentence (‘Look at Adi …’), however, takes this in a critical (and possibly self-critical) direction, strongly implying that in reality the contemporary life-experience of today’s empowered women does not entirely resemble the pleasurable powers of men in the 1960s, recognizing the affective attraction of a ‘restorative nostalgia’ that has not escaped ‘the desire to cook and serve’.

Conclusion

From its opening season, Mad Men stirred nostalgia-oriented discussions: some commentators suggest that it provides viewers with the escapist, cathartic pleasures of political incorrectness; others that it offers sobering encounters with the past and a critical perspective on the present. Additionally, the particularly ‘American’ quality of its nostalgic references combined with its success among non-American audiences invite consideration of nostalgia as a potentially transnational phenomenon. With these themes in mind, we put Mad Men at the center of focus groups of Israeli viewers.

What we found is complex. We have already described the double structure whereby nostalgia operates through the seamless transnational identification of Israeli viewers with the cultural memory of others while nevertheless enabling comparative critical reflexivity about the past and their own present. There are reasons for wondering to what extent this primary affective connection between these particular Israeli viewers will be reproduced for other – less privileged, less conspicuously ‘Westernized’ – Israelis, as well as for other non-US audiences around the world whose relationship with American culture may be less intense and pervasive. In other words, one direction of thought is that the structure of nostalgic desire for an American past may be a facet of Israel’s long-running encounter with ‘Americanization’ (Azaryahu, 2000; First and Avraham, 2009). The findings about nostalgia’s double structure certainly seem to confirm Avraham and First’s (2003) observation that Israelis’ ‘dream-identity’ – the symbols and collective values that implicitly orient their social and cultural affiliations – is not monolithically national, but interleaved in complicated ways between a core layer of national language and geopolitical residence (Hebrew, Israel) and an affective-symbolic realm of self-projection and fantasy that is significantly US-oriented.

What is it about the world of Mad Men that our Israeli viewers were nostalgic for? What was the substance of their transnational nostalgic desire? Not the decadence or patriarchal norms of the period, but the very presence of visible boundaries and rules and the way they were disrupted by the profound social and cultural shifts from the 1950s through the 1960s. The viewers were nostalgic for historic transformation per se. They used this nostalgia to lament the lack of hope for change today resulting from the apparent absence of serious limitations and norms in a manner reminiscent of Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’: the apparently radical fluidity of social–political structures and of the everyday lifeworld (Bauman, 2000) on a global basis. Moreover, the viewers expressed a wish not just for change, but to be ‘naive’ and ‘surprised’ by change, just like the characters from Mad Men. This is a ‘prelapsarian’ nostalgia, the yearning for a yearning untainted by the fall into postmodern irony.

While it is difficult to know how the personal circumstances of the participants may have been tied to such a yearning for change, their longing was framed by an atmosphere of cultural and social ennui, combined with jaded cynicism, that pervaded the group discussions: a sense that the changes and possibilities associated with the information age are fake and formulaic. Moreover, while the transnational nostalgia of these Israeli viewers can be interpreted in positive, cosmopolitan terms, it is also built around an obvious ‘structuring absence’: positive identification with the American past of Mad Men implies negative identification with Israeli collective memory, and with representations of Israel’s past, as resources for contemporary critique and potential transformation. Most glaringly, the topic of the violent conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world – and its long history as a defining feature of life (and death) in Israel – was barely mentioned in any of the focus groups. While this is characteristic of the ‘buah’ (Hebrew for ‘bubble’) that middle-class Israelis (particularly in the Tel Aviv area) have constructed as a psycho-cultural protective barrier around themselves since at least the Second Intifada in the early 2000s (Frosh, 2007), it also perhaps suggests that – like dreams – the ‘dream-identity’ of transnational nostalgia with an American past involves forms of repression, projection, and displacement away from the most existentially and politically challenging aspects of the viewers’ lived reality. Notwithstanding this fundamental lacuna, however, it is still worth noting that this ‘dream-identity’ did not remain entirely unconscious, as the comments linking the racialized structure of Mad Men’s nostalgia to Israel’s own ethnic politics reveal: it was amenable to discursive articulation by viewers that afforded critique of the inequities of the past and the present as well as of the politics of nostalgia itself (who defines what constitutes ‘the good old days’).

This skepticism toward nostalgia also characterized the viewers’ reactions to the restorative possibility of ‘returning’ them to the world of Mad Men itself. Confronted with the option of actually being transported into the time of the diegesis, the viewers offered grim prognoses about their ability to survive. Hence another dual process occurred, as viewers judged the era desirable but denied themselves a hypothetical part in it, except as day-trip visitors: there is psychological distance from most of the protagonists and a separation of narratives and emotional experience.

The findings, then, propose an alternative to the figure of the nostalgically lost viewer, unable to reconcile present and past and lacking mechanisms for coping with the cognitive dissonance evoked by a nostalgic product or text (Boym, 2001; Loventhal, 1990; Sprengler, 2009). On the contrary, the viewers who emerge from the focus groups are erudite and self-aware, leveraging nostalgia to ask profound questions about many, though not all, of their own conditions of life and socio-cultural horizons. They shift between past and present, escapism and awareness, adopting nostalgia as an available resource while ignoring the geographic origins of the nostalgic trigger. Such responses better suit notions of nostalgia as a reparative symbolic and narrative mechanism, assisting in the reflexive process of piecing together the self in a ‘liquid’ world.

This seems to be a slightly different breed of nostalgia from Boym’s concept of ‘reflective nostalgia’ or at least an important extension of it. While Boym describes reflective nostalgia as a positive, flexible state of mind that enables conscious reflection on an experienced past and its loss, the engagement of Israeli viewers with Mad Men suggests a more properly selective nostalgia. Mad Men was actively selected and adopted as a source of nostalgic reference despite its obvious distance from personal frameworks of memory and experience. Moreover, unlike reflective nostalgia, which appears to arise unbidden, selective nostalgia seems motivated; it has a rationale and serves a purpose: coming to terms with disappointments about the present and exposing the flaws of contemporary society. Like reflective nostalgia, it feeds on details, but these too are treated selectively: nostalgic desire is mobilized for particular characteristics of Mad Men’s diegetic world that help viewers spotlight contemporary ills through a comparative procedure, while potentially undesirable attributes of the past are excluded from nostalgic yearning. In short, selective nostalgia can be deliberately utilized as a critical tool; it resembles a therapy session far more than a daydream.

Selective nostalgia, then, combines viewers’ cognitive, emotional, and interpretive encounters with the televised past in ways that are both affecting and critical. In the case analyzed here, the critical possibilities of nostalgia are themselves enabled – paradoxically – by the apparently unreflexive cooption of someone else’s televised past as a collective mnemonic resource. An antidote, then, to both the inauthenticity attributed to the postmodern nostalgic text and to claims that nostalgia is inherently conservative, Israeli viewers’ engagement with Mad Men reframes nostalgia not simply as a way of using media texts to cope with a dislocating present, but as a potential tool for recovering lost energies of socio-historic transformation.