Computer-generated text analysis shows that many anachronisms creep into the dialogue. (via The Atlantic)
(You guys can be all happy about the new season starting – since I watch it on DVD, I’ve got months to wait. Months!)
That was obvious from the first episode, which through all pretense of historical accuracy out the window.
Mad Men was never meant to be a documentary. It’s a stylish drama with “inappropriate” comic bits…
And I’ve got cable, so I’ll be seeing the new season very soon now!
That’s a fascinating article. It’s not just about catching anachronisms, but about what different phrasing says about the evolution of the culture, such as with the need to/ought to distinction.
Due tell.
Mad Men is justifiably famous for doing exactly the opposite, for laying claim to historical accuracy to a much greater degree than most historical dramas. The article is very interesting because it points out the places where they didn’t think to look for historical accuracy. What’s most interesting is that no other humans did, either; it took a computer to find the discrepancies.
Unless, of course, you’re referring to their admittedly absurd idea of a society in which people’s ability is judged based on genetic characteristics such as sex or skin color ;).
I’ve always been bugged with how mild racism is portrayed, and even then always in such a way as to make Don look good. Several times I thought they were going to do an audience shocker and have Don say something horrible to modern sensibilities, but it never happens.
I think the silliest example of this was the episode with one of the agents taking his black girlfriend(who is grinning like a loon) to an office party and not one awkward comment is heard. Remember this is contemporary with Look Who Is Coming To Dinner where a civil rights advocate cannot stand the idea of his daughter marrying a decorated surgeon.
My impression was that his black girlfriend was a trophy, a “Look how groovy I am” status symbol, and he was revelling in shocking everyone, and nobody in the office wanted to be a square, so they were keeping their shock to themselves. But it’s been awhile since I saw it–am I misremembering?
Nope that’s pretty accurate.
The show is not going to get everything right in terms of period. No piece of entertainment ever does. Does that mean we through the whole thing out? Nope. We’d throw out Shakespeare along with everything else.
I’ll admit I don’t remember those details, but I wasn’t giving it my full attention.
The problem is real fans sell the show on documentary level accuracy, but then when people complain it isn’t meeting that goal say hey its entertainment.
*Or at least some fans I have talked to.
I disagree with some of those nitpicks. I certainly knew the phrase “loose lips sink ships” as a kid in the '60s. Maybe I heard it in cartoons made in the '40s, but it was definitely a well-known expression. (And indeed, I knew it without the “might.”) And “match made in heaven” sounds to me much more like 1962 than 2012.
In the first season, Weiner used the period loosely to suggest the times, pretty much as every other writer of a period piece does. I’m sure he was shocked to find that viewers were obsessively parsing every word, every stick of furniture, and every image for accuracy. It’s to his credit that the last three seasons have risen to that level. Whenever people talk about the inauthenticity of Mad Men they use the first season as examples. Maybe they all stopped watching then, but it’s more likely that they just don’t have as many nits to pick later on.
The article about language is interesting - but only as an article about language, not as an article about Mad Men. Seeing how the language evolves in almost invisible ways tells us a lot about the bath of words we are exposed to and how quickly the changes occur. I don’t think Benjamin Schmidt expects for a minute that any of the writers use a computer to comb through the ngrams viewer to check every phrase, although some of the commenters there believe he’s saying that. Being completely accurate would sound stilted and would call attention to the language used rather than its being invisible, used to “avoid defying credulity” in his term. That’s hugely, tremendously more important than strict accuracy. It’s what Mad Men is very good at.
I love language and analysis, but I still didn’t care about any of this.
Me neither. The article found surprisingly few anachronisms, and nothing that I’d call egregious. The stuff they found was banal and common, not pop culture stuff like “Right on!” or fist bumps.
I think that’s the writer’s point, though. Pop slang is obviously going to be glaringly different era to era, you can usually spot it right away, and most of it is meaningless. Instead the writer is looking for the subtle, undetectable, yet revealing changes in language… the ones found within the “steady drumbeat of discourse,” to paraphrase the article. These differences actually may speak to significant changes in the zeitgeist. At least it’s an intriguing proposition.
But the grad student who wrote the thing managed to get published in The Atlantic–which got some hits by hitching its wagon to a popular show.
Hey, Ken Cosgrove got a story published in that same magazine–a middle brow triumph!
The problem is that the people in Mad Men can be using a specialized language which is quite distinct from what would be published. “Feel good about?” I can see admen who work on creating feelings using that more than the general public. Sure that phrase isn’t used in “The Twilight Zone” - but few characters in that show had a lot to feel good about.
I’m old enough to have lived through that era, and I’ve always known “Loose Lips Sink Ships” probably from WW II era Warner Brothers cartoons. Those characters lived through WW II - some fought in it - so them using WW II slogans is hardly out of character.
“Due” tell?
Anyway …
Mad Men frequently fails in the prop department. The most infamous one is the wrong model of Selectric typewriters. I catch them all the time. In one episode Glen had a copy of Metal Men which hadn’t even debuted yet. The PR department for the show overstates their actual capabilities in getting things right.
Subtle snark.
Yes, that was a hilarious example. I did think the piece was interesting even though I’m not a Mad Men watcher (maybe one day) - not so much because the show is falling down on the job but because the trends in language can be meaningful and telling in their own right. A few of the phrases seem jarringly modern to me, but it’s not realistic to expect the writers to go over every script with a linguistics program, and for the most part it’s acceptable for a show to use anachronistic language. You do wish that maybe shows wouldn’t go out of their way to advertise their period-accuracy if it’s not accurate.
Right, that occurred to me too. It sounds like the digital database he’s checking is mainly from scripts and published material. Mad Men is actually trying to represent real life, not old movies or tv shows.
Going by printed material archives only, one would think that the f-word wasn’t used in the 1950s when obviously it was used quite a lot.