How to Watch Television, Second Edition. Группа авторов

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      FIGURE 5.3. Don nixes the plan for a hairspray commercial after seeing a storyboard that evokes widely circulated photos of the convertible in which President Kennedy was shot.

      This short scene also illuminates Mad Men’s central preoccupation. It is a program about consumer products and the imagery attached to them through advertising. Moreover, Mad Men is obsessed with objects and their representation, and—by extension—with humans and their representations. Just as Don, who was born Richard “Dick” Whitman, has styled himself as “Don Draper,” so has Don mastered the ability to style products in a way that satisfies his clients and increases their revenue. One could even say that Don is a designer of his own mise-en-scène (his clothing, hair style, walk, the spaces in which he chooses to live and work, and so on), but, of course, Weiner and his crew and cast have actually constructed the mise-en-scène for both Draper and Mad Men.

      The way that Mad Men is filmed and cut is distinctive, but unlike the show’s mise-en-scène, its cinematography and editing do not mimic 1960s television. “The Grown-Ups” calls attention to this difference by giving glimpses of live, black-and-white television from 1963: Mad Men clearly does not look anything like As the World Turns. Rather, it uses a mode of production associated with contemporary high-budget, primetime dramas (e.g., Lost, The Sopranos, and the CSI programs) and with theatrical films. This single-camera mode of production allows for more precise visual control than is possible in the multiple-camera mode of production that was used by As the World Turns throughout its long run. That precision is evident in the final shot of “The Grown-Ups,” where cinematography is used both to build a mood and develop characterization. After saying goodnight to Peggy in the main Sterling Cooper office, Don enters his own private office and hangs up his hat while the camera shoots him through the doorway. The camera then arcs slightly to the left to reveal a liquor cabinet as Don walks into the room. Not bothering to remove his coat, Don reaches for a bottle and begins mixing a drink (figure 5.5). The scene then cuts to black and the end credits roll while Skeeter Davis is heard singing “The End of the World”: “Don’t they know it’s the end of the world ’cause you don’t love me anymore?”

      FIGURE 5.4. Mad Men relies on the viewer’s associations with this photograph of the Kennedy motorcade.

      Episode director Barbet Schroeder and episode director of photography Christopher Manley use framing and camera angle to signify Don’s isolation. Keeping the camera outside the room and surrounding Don with the frosted-window walls of the doorway frame have the effect of both emphasizing his remoteness and distancing us from him. As shown above in figures 5.1 and 5.2, Mad Men often shoots from a low camera angle that incorporates the ceiling in the frame. This shot is just below Don’s eye-level, looking slightly up at him, which brings the ceiling into the top of the frame, blocking it off. The low-key lighting of the office—an aspect of mise-en-scène—works with the framing to blend Don into the darkness. In many TV programs and films, low angles emphasize the size and bulk and even heroic nature of a person or object, but in Mad Men the low angles more often make the ceiling close in on the characters, accentuating the repressiveness of their work and home spaces. In short, this scene’s cinematography and mise-en-scène collaborate to generate an atmosphere of entrapment, despair, and alienation.

      Mad Men’s implementation of the single-camera mode of production allows for editing patterns that would be difficult or impossible in the multiple-camera mode used by soap operas. A breakdown of the kitchen scene previously described in which Don and Betty exchange no words (posted on criticalcommons.org) illustrates this point, and illuminates the narrative significance of characters looking at other characters.

      As edited by Tom Wilson, the scene begins in the hallway as Don comes downstairs and walks through the dining room to the kitchen door. There, he pauses, unseen by his family. We see a point-of-view shot, over his shoulder into the kitchen. The next shot is a reverse angle from inside the kitchen, but not from anyone’s point of view as he is still unobserved. We return to Don’s point-of-view shot as he enters the kitchen and announces his presence: “Good morning.” The children respond, but Betty pointedly does not. We cut to her point of view of Don even though she is looking down at the stove and not at him. The camera stays behind her, panning and tracking with Don as he crosses the room. During this short walk, he looks directly at her, but she does not return his gaze. The camera movement comes to a rest from nobody’s point of view, showing Betty, Don, and the kids; she looks straight ahead, and he and the children look at each other. The camera stays objective for four medium shots, with the fourth shot offering a subtle bit of camerawork. Bobby looks at Sally, and when she turns around to look at Betty, the camera pulls focus from him to her—a distance of just a few feet. In terms of narrative motivation and the emotional rhythm of the scene, Sally needs to be sharply in focus as it is her look that motivates the next cut to Betty in a low-angle subjective shot where she looks back toward Sally and the camera. The scene concludes with a camera angle very close to the earlier one from Don’s point of view, showing the entire kitchen as he sends one more unreturned look in Betty’s direction before leaving.

      This close examination of the ordering and framing of shots in the kitchen scene shows how important characters’ looks—that is, whom they look at rather than how they look to others—are to this episode, the program, and television drama in general. And this dance of looks is achieved largely through editing, as in the eye-line match cut from Sally to Betty. Multiple-camera programs can also be fundamentally about looks, but this single-camera scene contains shots that would be too time-consuming or troublesome to capture during a multiple-camera shoot. Specifically, the camera has been moved to several positions well inside a four-walled set, showing us the Draper kitchen from virtually every angle. Multiple-camera shows, with their three-walled sets, cannot bring the camera as close to the characters’ perspectives as Mad Men does. A seemingly simple shot such as the low-angle, medium close-up of Betty with a camera positioned deep inside the set would be nearly impossible to achieve in a multiple-camera production, whether that production be As the World Turns in 1963 or a twenty-first-century multiple-camera program such as Two and a Half Men.

      FIGURE 5.5. Cinematography is used throughout Mad Men to build mood and add to characterization rather than to mimic the visual style of the multicamera dramas of the day.

      Much like Douglas Sirk’s melodramas in the 1950s, Mad Men makes sophisticated use of visual style—mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing—to mount a critique of American consumer culture. The mise-en-scène of “The Grown-Ups,” in particular, is about the significance of objects and about characters gazing at them and at each other. Built around looks at television sets, the episode provides an implicit commentary upon the medium’s increasing social significance in the 1960s and the terrors that it would bring into our living rooms. Betty’s horrified gaze as she watches the killing of Oswald from her suburban couch can be extrapolated to the viewing of televised violence of the Vietnam War and the assassinations to come in the later 1960s. On a personal level, the emotional and narrative power of looks—both returned and unreturned—is featured repeatedly in Mad Men. And its mode of production allows the program’s crew to maximize that power through creative cinematography and editing. The sleek look of Mad Men and its reproduction of 1960s modernity might initially draw us to the program, but it is the characters’ looks at one another that weave the emotional fabric of its stories. By dissecting the program’s style, we can better understand Mad Men’s СКАЧАТЬ