Jennifer O’Meara
@jomeara.bsky.social
1.5K followers 430 following 65 posts
Associate Prof. in Film Studies & Research Ireland Laureate, Trinity College Dublin. Digital theory, screen voices, sound, immersive tech and synthetic media.
Associate Prof. in Film Studies & Research Ireland Laureate, Trinity College Dublin. Digital theory, screen voices, sound, immersive tech and synthetic media.
![‘Undeveloped property’: Mad Men, crisis, and real estate
Martha Shearer
ABSTRACT
Mad Men is perhaps the preeminent example of nostalgia television of the last 20 years. And yet its version of the Sixties is relatively uninterested in what Fredric Jameson has characterised as that decade’s ‘shared feeling that everything is possible’. Instead, its primary concern is the feeling of being unmoored in history, encapsulated in the falling man of its title sequence, but also in its formal shifts between delay, deferral and slowness and the shock of historical and narrative events. As a number of scholars have observed, that slowness calls attention instead to the image and to space, and especially to production design. In this essay, I argue that the show increasingly calls attention to that space as real estate, with seasons punctuated with domestic and commercial real estate sales and acquisitions, real estate transactions as major plot points, and the introduction of real estate agent and property developer characters in its final season. I suggest that real estate, in both aesthetic and narrative terms, is critical to the show’s ambivalence about the future, caught between optimism regarding the expansion of global capitalism and knowledge of crises that follow, both in the 1970s and in 2008.
[now attentive and loving readers of my posts will know that there is a typo in there that they've told me is getting fixed, and if you, dear reader, notice it can I please assure you that I am not illiterate, cheers]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:lb7qv32i2gf7egofrrumuk23/bafkreia74b3bhnoflnpnjsmghzl22p2tbc5l3hkqf7l7by7rvazdz3efe4)
