The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV: Production Design and the Boomer Era 9781501331411, 9781501331442, 9781501331428

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV Production Design and the Boomer Era

ALEX BEVAN

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Alex Bevan, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Mad Men, 2013 Lions Gate Television/DR/Collection Christophel/ArenaPAL All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3141-1 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3142-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-3143-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to my favorite person, Luc.

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Contents List of Figures  x Acknowledgments  xii Preface  xiv

Introduction: Touring the Mad Men Set  1 Interventions in production studies  2 Revising authorship  6 Deconstructing the “text”  8 Methodological interventions  9 Interventions in memory studies  13 Quality television and identity politics  15 Chapter breakdown  19 Notes  23

PART ONE  Sets  29 1 TV Suburbia and Remembering the Sitcom Set  31 Introduction: The nostalgia of recycled sets  31 The sitcom studio lot as living archive  33 My Universal Studio tour and narrativizing fantastic space  41 Conclusion: Industry nostalgia and the sitcom home  45 Notes  47

2 Office Sets and Nostalgic Modernism in the TV Workplace  49 Introduction: Differences at work  49 What the modernist office set says about fantasies of self and home  51 The politics of taste in television production design’s reinventions of modernism  55

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“Bad taste” and gender identity in the corporate modernist set  59 The industry background of reinventing the boomer years  61 Conclusion: Retro modernism as shorthand  71 Notes  72

PART TWO  Props  77 3 Prop Talk: A Behind-the-Scenes Look  79 Introduction: The importance of props  79 Press about props  82 The popular legitimation of the prop industry and digital tensions  88 When props become the whole story: Historical time travel  94 Conclusion: Digital era prop talk  97 Notes  98

4 Prop Stories: Media Props in Narrative Context  101 Introduction: Props tell stories  101 The Polaroid camera as narrative device  103 The home movie as historical conduit  107 The nostalgic anticipation of digitality in Mad Men  111 Old media props in other period dramas  119 Conclusion: The privileges of time travel  126 Notes  128

PART THREE  Costumes  131 5 Making, Renting, and Telling National Histories through Costume  133 Introduction: Clothes tell stories  133 Costume design as gender historian  135 Telling history by disrobing  140 From the maker’s perspective  145 Other examples of television fashion doing gender history  153 Conclusion: When words fail, costumes do not  160 Notes  161

Contents

6 Costume Countermemory: Marginalized Television Voices and Chicana Retro  165 Introduction: Questioning nostalgia’s whiteness  165 The postwar “New Look” and nostalgia television  170 Ugly Betty’s aesthetic, narrative, and industrial diaspora  173 Clashing vintage patterns and “bad” taste  176 The Western Costume Company and costume bricolage  184 Bad taste in nostalgic costume design  189 Conclusion: How far we’ve come?  197 Notes  200

7 Conclusion: Nostalgic Failure  207 When nostalgia goes bad: The Playboy Club, Aquarius, and Pan Am  207 Draper fatigue  211 Nostalgia in 3D  213 Notes  215 Bibliography  218 Index  238

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Figures I.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1

“Person to Person,” May 17, 2015, Mad Men  3 “Pilot,” October 3, 2004, Desperate Housewives  33 “Pilot,” October 3, 2004, Desperate Housewives  34 “Next,” September 25, 2005, Desperate Housewives  35 Bewitched (2004)  42 “How Betty Got Her Grieve [sic] Back,” September 27, 2007, Ugly Betty  52 2.2 “Everybody’s Been Burned,” May 28, 2015, Aquarius  67 2.3 “The Doorway, Part 2,” April 7, 2013, Mad Men  68 3.1 Photograph taken by author at History for Hire Prop Warehouse ( June 23, 2014, Los Angeles). Shows suitcases used on the set of Titanic (Paramount, 1997)  89 3.2 Photograph taken by author at History for Hire Prop Warehouse ( June 23, 2014, Los Angeles)  90 4.1 “Marriage of Figaro,” August 2, 2007, Mad Men  108 4.2 “The Wheel,” October 18, 2007, Mad Men  116 4.3 “Pilot,” September 29, 2013, Masters of Sex  122 4.4–4.5 “All Together Now,” November 10, 2013, Masters of Sex  123 5.1 “Christmas Comes but Once a Year,” August 1, 2010, Mad Men  137 5.2 “New Amsterdam,” August 9, 2007, Mad Men  138 5.3 “Maidenform,” August 31, 2008, Mad Men  141 5.4 “Souvenir,” October 4, 2009, Mad Men  144 5.5 “Episode Four,” October 17, 2010, Downton Abbey  155

Figures

5.6 5.7 6.1 6.2

“Episode Six,” October 26, 2014, Downton Abbey  156 “Chestnut,” October 7, 2016, Westworld  159 “Pilot,” September 28, 2006, Ugly Betty  170 “Fire and Nice,” March 10, 2010, Ugly Betty  171

6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 7.1

“Be-Shure,” December 11, 2009, Ugly Betty  177 “The Clock,” February 6, 2013, The Americans  191 “Comrades,” February 26, 2014, The Americans  192 “The Oath,” April 24, 2013, The Americans  194 “Pilot,” September 25, 2011, Pan Am  209

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Acknowledgments T

hank you to everyone in the industry who was so generous and open to sharing work with me. I’m truly humbled by the warmth and trust of those working in art direction and costume design. This could not have been written without you. Thank you Regina Stewart for placing me in contact with people. Thanks to Bonnie Nipar, Janette Kim, and Charles Gooden and Daniel Bertin at ABC for talking with me and sharing their contacts. Thank you to Janie Bryant and Eduardo Castro whose extraordinary talents are only rivaled by their kindness. Thank you to Pam and Jim Elyea of History for Hire, Inc., for talking with me, letting me roam around their prop warehouse, and giving me key insights into the prop industry. They also bought me lunch and invited me to a wrap party, which is more glamor than I’m used to as a mealy mouthed academic. Thanks to Keith Marvin and Dan Schultz at Prop Heaven for the visit and chat. Thank you to Western Costume Company and the invaluable words of Eddie Marks, its owner, and Bobi Garland, its head research librarian. Thank you to Sony Pictures Prop Warehouse for letting me walk around. Thanks to Rosemarie Knopka of the Art Directors Guild Research Library and Archive, and to Archie D’Amico, Ellen Brill, and Kathy Orlando for their guidance and time. Thanks to Carlos Barbosa for being so generous with his time during very busy a pre-production schedule. Thank you to Ellen Freund and the crew I met that day that somehow found time in the very last phases of production to talk to me and give me such a unique insight into a very special show. Your crew is truly made of magic. I’m indebted to the mentorship of Professors Diane Negra, Jake Smith, Lynn Spigel, Scott Curtis, Jeffrey Sconce, and Hamid Naficy. I also want to thank new friends and colleagues at the University of Queensland in Brisbane who helped me through the final stages, particularly Tom O’Regan, Nicholas Carah, Dan Angus, and Lisa Bode. Thank you to the BLAT research group at the University of Queensland and its members Tom O’Regan, Lisa Bode, Nat Collie, Skye Doherty, and Caroline Wilson-Barnao. Thank you Professor Brian Lucid and Professor Julieanna Preston at Massey University for fostering my growth as a researcher. Thank you to Vanessa Gerrie for helping with copyediting.

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I want to thank Bloomsbury Press for their professionalism, promptness, and transparency in communication. Thank you to Susan Krogulski and Erin Duffy for weathering my email pestering and Katie Gallof for seeing the potential of this project and cheering me on. Thank you to my peers and friends who have been huge supports over the years, particularly those who listened and helped us through two challenging international moves: Radha O’Meara, Darrny Wolfsbauer, Karl Kane, Grant Bollmer, Jo Bailey, Miriam Ross, Kathleen Kuehn, Shannon Friday, Nick Holm, Lucy Langston, Sy Taffel, Jo Vitkovitch, Tanya Marriott, Garry Buckley, Hannah Hamad, Ian Huffer, David Gurney, Brendan Kredell, Hannah Gerrard, Jason Roberts, Elizabeth Lenagan, Neha Kamdar, Elizabeth Nathanson, Hollis Griffin, Cary Elza, Catherine Clepper, Dan Bashara, and Linde Murughan. I also want to thank all of my students over the years who continue to teach me as much as I teach them. Also thank you to anyone who has ever been a blind peerreviewer of any of my publications—I’m indebted to the kind words and constructive criticism of those generous, anonymous people. Lastly, thank you to my family. In particular, I want to thank my brilliant brother Rhys Bevan, my dog Iggy, and my wonderful husband Luc Miknaitis for seeing us through this journey.

Preface P

rominent men’s rights activist, Jordan Peterson, claims that the last time gender roles truly benefited society was in the 1950s.1 He argues that the increase in mass murders perpetrated by white men in Western countries could be curbed by a system of “enforced monogamy” in which every man is assured a wife.2 Indeed, across English-speaking countries in particular, the baby boom years retain a symbolic potency, especially in the late twenty teens as men’s rights activism and alt-right political movements increase in visibility. What first made me want to write this book was my love for these television shows, which I read as self-aware reflections of American pastness. Their nostalgias were complex and riddled with contradiction, and their aesthetics and design elements were equally dense and political. However, in preparing it for publication, the timeliness of a book on US nostalgia in the context of the global rise of ethno-nationalism feels equal parts an opportunity and a burden. The political weight of these shows about white yesteryear has never felt more important and pressing. The main argument of this book is that the design that goes into these nostalgic shows and the creative processes underlying it reveal more complex, meaty cultural politics than simple celebrations or castigations of the past. Rather the shows are sober reflections on past eras and their gender, racial, and class inequities. Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15), Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006–10), Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004–12), and even industry disappointments like Pan Am (ABC, 2011–12) and Aquarius (NBC, 2015–16)—these American shows are “troubled,” to borrow Professor Tom O’Regan’s term for them. American television drama, traditionally, has been “troubled,” starting with the early teleplay network anthologies of the 1940s. I’m also publishing the book at a “troubled” time in American history and, indeed, world politics in the context of mounting political fractures between conservatism and progressivism. At first, I wrote an admittedly melodramatic and churlish preface about how, progressive design politics and meanings aside, I should have seen these shows as the inevitable death knell of a democracy in rapid decline. I circulated the preface in my research group at the University of Queensland

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and my Australian colleagues were a little taken aback by my Americancentric, emo kid bitterness (my words, not theirs). I was waxing nostalgic for my own Obama-era first encounters with boomer nostalgia, which, in the wake of the 2016 election and Brexit, now seem callow. In an email exchange about the preface, Lisa Bode writes of Mad Men: I concede that the show can be seen in retrospect as emerging from a naively optimistic view of history as socially progressive (rather than cyclical and involving a constantly shifting dialectic between reactionary conservatism and liberalism). But in doing so it presents an argument or desire (through the emotional attachments we are encouraged to have to the rising fortunes of Peggy and Joan) for the way things *should* be … That said, I don’t think Mad Men is totally optimistic: the ending of the show indicates that progressivism as a cultural mood can be co-opted and sold back (‘I’d like to give the world a coke’) by the privileged white man in advertising, and that everything is always provisional (history is just like TV in that way).3 Lisa refers to the end sequence of the series in which our boomer, patriarchal protagonist and advertiser extraordinaire, Don Draper, ends his crippling struggle with sex addiction and alcoholism by recovering in the most unlikely of places—a hippy commune. Happily for him, this moment of personal recuperation coincides with and catalyzes the inspiration for the epitomic 1971 Coca-Cola commercial, which the series implies Don Draper authors. Mad Men and other TV forms of gender and racially charged national nostalgias center on critical views of the past premised, not necessarily on the assumption that society has progressed, but on the way “things should be,” as Lisa put it, even while they admit this is not exactly the way history went down. What followed in the research group meeting was a robust conversation about Mad Men, MeToo, toxic masculinity in academia, the internationalization of quality television, gun violence, climate change, fake news, the parallels between Trump and Italy’s Berlusconi and Australia’s Joh Bjelke-Petersen, how angry we are that we’re talking about Trump this much, and finally The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2017) as a fear-of-the-future bookend to Mad Men’s fear-of-the-past. TV boomer nostalgia in “troubled” shows is, without doubt, polysemous. Shows like Mad Men accrue biographies of their own in public history because they archive an ever-shifting array of popular meanings and associations. I can’t anticipate what this moment of American nostalgia on television might mean in coming years. But their design is political and these shows crystallize an important moment in popular thinking about

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“the American Dream,” at which point we acknowledge that this spectral presence in American national identity never existed and, indeed, has no place in our future.

Notes 1 Nellie Bowles, “Jordan Peterson: Custodian of the Patriarchy,” New York Times, May 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordanpeterson-12-rules-for-life.html. 2 Ibid. 3 Lisa Bode. Email message to author, April 24, 2018.

Introduction: Touring the Mad Men Set

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his book is not about authorship and yet it’s all about authorship. This book is about the many designers who make the material objects we see on television, who usually fall under the heading of the “art department.” There is no scholarly ethnographic study on television art direction or production design to date. Within production studies, ethnographies tend to focus on directors, writers, actors, and producers as the primary authors of media. When these studies talk to people behind the scenes, they tend to target top executives in talent agencies, marketing firms, or the architectures of corporate sponsorship instead of the fashion intern working at the costume rental workshop or the Art Director Guild librarian. I want to open up the television image to new modes of analysis and interpretation: What stories do coffee tables and wallpaper tell? Authorship is not something that belongs to someone or even a group of people; authorship is a porous and dynamic field of relations among various meaning makers whereby a hat, handbag, or set of curtains can tell sometimes resonant and sometimes competing narratives alongside direction and writing. I also want to turn television studies toward other disciplines like the history of design and social science methods of learning about maker cultures. In my fieldwork for this book, I go to hot sets and talk to people. I visit prop warehouses and interview the families that own them. Moreover, I use these interviews alongside textual and discourse analysis, rather than separately from them. The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV covers many kinds of TV nostalgia for past iconic periods in American and British history, but its primary texts are scripted “quality” American shows that are nostalgic for the postwar period. Mad Men figures largely in the book; however, I want to stress that this is not a book about Mad Men. The book is about a cohort of television texts that participate in a similar form of nostalgic aesthetics. I use “boomer nostalgia”

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to refer to the postwar period between 1946 and the late 1960s, in particular the millennial discourse on the significance the period holds for hegemonic American history. The book’s key impacts include its interventions in the scholarly fields of production studies, memory studies, and quality television and identity politics. The next section traces these interventions while also recounting my experience of touring the Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15) set on its final day of shooting in June 2014.

Interventions in production studies I came to the Mad Men set not knowing what to expect. My questions concerned the creative process behind the sets and costumes that I had studied in the context of the broader contemporary trend of nostalgic television. How would watching people work change my reading of the series and my analysis of its aesthetic? Mad Men is a primetime cable drama set in the 1960s that follows its protagonist, Don Draper, through his personal travails, professional successes, and sexual exploits at a New York advertising firm. Mad Men’s plot concerns the general malaise of its predominantly white, middle-class characters. Their desires and hopes for the 1960s are routinely disappointed as the series deconstructs the millennial nostalgic imagining of postwar America. Nostalgia for the postwar period of the late ’40s through ’60s pervades contemporary American media. Nostalgia for this period is a part of mainstream culture: pinup girl hairstyles, skinny ties, snarky refrigerator magnets, the renewed fetish for vinyl records, and the streamlined retroism of Apple products. Because of its critical acclaim, Mad Men is an obvious example of the popular infatuation with the aesthetics of the boomer period. I wanted to speak to the people who created the aesthetics of the period for television. This led me to a meeting with the prop master, Ellen Freund. I ride the elevator up at LA Center Studios to the Mad Men art department, which is a cluster of small offices that serves as shared work space for the production designer (the general overseer of the a television program’s set aesthetic), the prop master (the person in charge of hand props), the set dresser (the person in charge of props that appear on screen, but are not handled by the actors), the food artist, and the graphic designer (who recreates all the period labels and signage). For Mad Men’s much lauded and meticulous attention to detail, the office is disarmingly small and intimate. It is clear that people work closely, each person sitting within earshot of the other. Ellen takes me down to the sound stages, each of which houses a group of different sets, including Betty’s kitchen, Roger’s hotel room, Joan’s apartment, the main of the ad firm, and Don’s apartment. Each sound stage has its own prop room from

Introduction

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which suitcases, restaurant menus, coffee mugs, and period toilet paper are readily accessible. Because it is one of the final days of shooting, the sets are in disarray, most in partial stages of disassembly. People carry props out of the sound stages for storage in Lions Gate warehouses. Ellen and the crew chat about their next gigs and the wrap party as we walk through. Ellen also adds the finishing touches on sets. One of the final scenes is scheduled to be shot in Roger’s hotel room where Ellen has three large clothing trunks stacked in the corner. She places period-accurate Grand Central Station tags on the luggage and it is clear that someone in Roger’s life either re-enters his storyline in the final season or departs from it. My visit includes the Mad Men office set, which, at this stage, is a tangle of wires and chipboard. Little do I know at the time that this state of deconstruction was actually written into the script itself, as Mad Men’s offices are slowly disassembled both within the narrative (because the firm relocates its offices) and as part of the production schedule and closing down of the series (Figure I.1). Ellen wanders the set with a palpable sadness at seeing it being torn apart in front of her. It is clear that she loves working at Mad Men and peer banter on set indicates that the production crew gets along. Having toured a few sets while in production, I can say that this kind of atmosphere is not always the case. Ellen says Mad Men’s internal harmony is very much owing to the tone set by Matthew Weiner (the creator) and Dan Bishop (the production designer). The only area that remains curiously intact on the office set is Dawn’s desk, which was preserved in total as if the character left it to go lunch. Dawn is one of the few African American secretaries in Mad Men. As the series proceeds through the early 1960s and the height of the Civil

Figure I.1   “Person to Person,” May 17, 2015, Mad Men.

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Rights Movement, the tension around the increasing visibility of blackness at the firm builds. I ask why Dawn’s desk was left untouched in the middle of exposed aluminum studs, wiring, and chipboard. Ellen does not know but finds it similarly perplexing. I suggest that perhaps the crew had difficulty letting go of the project and she agrees there was a good deal of that. Vince Gilligan, the creator of the highly lauded cable TV series Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–13), once said, “The worst thing the French ever gave us is auteur theory.”1 While this castigation is a little strong, it does point to a discrepancy between academic theory and the way that television creatives see themselves and their work. In the industry, the “auteur” translates to people “above the line,” a term appropriated from budgeting spreadsheets and line production schedules referring to directors, producers, writers, and actors. “Below the line” work is the focus of this book and the term refers to everyone else. I was, at first, interested in how nostalgic TV art direction (sets, props, and costumes) shapes and is shaped by larger historical discourses on gender and technological change in the context of America’s perceived decline as a global power. But as this project matured, I became more convinced that people working below the line could shed light on this dynamic. The book therefore draws on first-hand interviews with the people who make nostalgia TV in order to draw these connections between popular discourse and what eventually translates to screen in terms of material design. I argue that the aesthetics of nostalgia TV tell stories of their own about historical decline and progress. No one in media studies has published first-hand interviews with the people working on the television shows discussed here and no one has discussed production design by including physical visits to warehouses, studio lots, and prop trucks. From this viewpoint, it was very exciting to be doing this kind of fieldwork. The impetus has always been to trouble traditional, patriarchal definitions of authorship and high art. My polemic is to explore the storytelling capacities of art direction and costume design when the traditional logic of popular criticism and academic scholarship interprets costumes and sets as subservient to screenwriting. David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson’s seminal book, Film Art, reflects this attitude toward costume by devoting 6 pages to costume out of a 500-page volume that routinely attributes decisions in design to “the filmmaker” or director.2 While there is value to strictly formalist interpretations of film and television (I heavily rely on Film Art for textual analysis in both research and teaching), it is also undeniable that a certain subset of creative workers have been under-credited and understudied in both scholarship and popular media culture. Speaking with below the line workers is a necessary component of media studies. Auteur theory, as a body of academic literature and prevalent

Introduction

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Western-centric attitude, interprets any piece of media as the product of an individual creator. It emphasizes directors, producers, and writers as the primary authors. My research foregrounds the decisions of people working in production design, who it suggests carry just as much weight as those working in traditionally more acknowledged roles. We need a nuanced understanding of the tandem workings of production design and narrative. I try to integrate first-person accounts of the design process using industry terminology, and I’ve tried to avoid offering historical/archival accounts or visual analysis in isolation. This is why the book addresses these subjects synchronously: nostalgia for bygone America and how it is located within contemporary gender and racial discourses, television production design, and an ethnography of the production design and costume design industries. “Production design,” “art direction,” and “costume design” have varying definitions due to different organizations of creative labor which depend on the media project, corporate organization, and country. This book uses production design and art direction fairly interchangeably. Formally speaking, however, production design usually refers to the more design-based aspects of the art department and art direction refers to more managerial and business issues. Costume designers work on the fashions appearing in the production. Depending on the project, they can have varying degrees of autonomy; in some cases, they work under the umbrella management of the art director/ production designer and in others they are an entirely external department that collaborates with the production designer and art director in designing the overarching aesthetic.3 It’s noteworthy that on some productions, the entire department team shares and contributes to the same idea boards (the digital, sometimes physical collection of images, fabric swatches, and anything else that might evoke the overall aesthetic of the show). On shows like Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15), the people in the art department work so closely together that it’s difficult to parse out a clear division of labor. The main production designer, Dan Bishop, is the key figure in charge of the aesthetic coherence of the whole, while sub-departments like graphic artists, food artists, prop masters, and set dressers are in charge of more focused elements of the show’s appearance. The show’s creator Matthew Weiner has daily interactions with the show’s art department. This is not always the case, however. Some productions are more hierarchical with one-way, top-down communication. My point is that the division of labor under the umbrella terms of production design and costume design very much depends on the dynamics unique to each production and the personalities at play. In practice, the roles are far more fluid that we’d expect by looking on IMBd pages. For the most part in the book, I refer to art direction since this is the role with which most of the people the book mentions would have most interaction with. But I generally

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use art direction and production design on a case-by-case basis, depending on the specific context and set of skills in discussion. The book blends industry studies and ethnography with narrative and visual analysis to explore overdeterminations among nostalgia, design cultures, creative labor, and the historical contexts of post-feminism and the digital transition. Withstanding the many historical shifts from the periods they reference to the present, nostalgic shows routinely position gender politics and technology as privileged markers of historical progress and regress, with racial politics being the penultimate marker of this teleological view of history. The book’s primary texts are nostalgic for the postwar era, but I also include reality “time traveling” series that recreate Western frontier cabins in Montana and Victorian homes in suburban London, and film contemporary families recruited to inhabit these foreign environments. As a collective, these nostalgic TV series construct their respective past eras as placeholders for gender, racial, technological, and declensionist discourses of the present. In the case of nostalgia TV, the economies of creative labor (the work processes and time constraints of its designers) shape how history is retold through costumes and sets. Understanding media production contributes a unique understanding of the pop cultural phenomenon that many of these “quality” shows are, Mad Men being an obvious example. Media studies scholarship has responded to the success of this program by racing to account for its popularity, albeit within a narrow demographic of wealthy, white, Western viewers.4 The predominant methods applied to quality nostalgia televisions series, thus far, are based on textual and discourse analysis. The step back that industry studies forces us to take, as scholars, practitioners, and viewers, is particularly valuable at such moments when the publicationdriven instinct is to hurry. Historiographically, this book comes out of a rapid growth in production studies. This burgeoning subfield of media studies draws attention to the social and political economies of work attached to the media we consume.5 In essence, production studies asks how media are made. I see this book participating and expanding upon two main directions in industry studies literature: reinterpreting and deepening understandings of authorship and deconstructing the text.

Revising authorship Vicki Mayer’s body of scholarship is central to production studies’ long-term goal of destabilizing traditional academic understandings of authorship. In

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Below the Line, Mayer looks at the unrepresented and hidden labor of belowthe-line workers, including people working on television set assembly lines.6 Her book sets below-the-line work within the larger contexts of globalization, post-industrial labor, and the industry’s self-constructions at the critical juncture of digital transition. Mayer’s work questions what belongs in the category of creative labor and I owe much of my research to her examples of media scholarship, which have motivated me to get out there and talk to people. Other authors explore below the line. Two edited anthologies, Production Studies and Production Studies: The Sequel!, lay out foundational debates in the field around destabilizing single authorship by outlining the limits of creative agency in media production.7 The book’s chapters are, however, largely micro-level studies that are rich in detail but narrow in scope. The second anthology treats “specific sites and fabrics of media production as distinct interpretative communities, each with its own organizational structures, professional practices, and power dynamics.”8 While impressive in its international coverage of industry practices and granular in its level of detail, Production Studies: The Sequel! is sprawling due to its commitment to contextual specificity, which produces an artificial separation among micro, meso, and macro studies of media production. This book also challenges a tendency in production studies to keep interview material and textual analysis fairly separate as methodological tools. Derek Kompare, Derek Johnson, and Avi Santo’s edited anthology, Making Media Work, complicates and elucidates the complex relationships among management, creative, and the idea of “creative autonomy.”9 While the anthology departs from studying the traditional authorship to writing, directing, and production, its focus on decision makers like managers, talent scouts, studio executives, and casting directions still indicates a predilection in production studies to target those at the top rather than those making “smaller” decisions in rental warehouses, workshops, and unions. Rosalind Gill, Stephanie Taylor, and Mark Banks’s anthology Theorizing Cultural Work historically unpacks the popular discourses around creative work that emerge in the postindustrial era. Commendable in the breadth of its scope, it traces the Western discourse of creative work back to the Art and Crafts Movement. However, the book silos its interview material from the texts that creators make. Many commendable industry ethnographies problematize “above-/below-the-line” work, notions of authorship, and previously understudied professions (like writers who contributed to scripts but are dropped from the writers room by the time of broadcast or screening).10 I see this book as adding to and expanding this exciting literature while keeping also textual analysis and interview material in conversation with one another.11

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Deconstructing the “text” Macro-level industry studies blur textual boundaries by delivering bigger pictures of the working pressures, fissures, and harmonies that come to bear on creative labor at industry-wide, economic, and politic levels. David Hesmondhalgh and Michael Curtin’s bodies of work are foundational in this regard. Creative Labor is broad reaching and maps the subjective experiences of creative work across television, magazines, and music, particularly in terms of what constitutes “good” and “bad” work and work experiences.12 Curtin’s Distribution Revolution uses ethnographic material to explore the “disruptiveness” of technological shifts like the move to streaming services. He captures the experiences of digital innovators, creative talent, and top executives who respond to the streaming services economy; however, in doing so, his study focuses quite heavily on people with more traditional definitions of power. John Caldwell’s groundbreaking approach marries industry studies with textual analysis, but likewise focuses on top executives.13 Stuart Cunningham’s Hidden Innovation offers a bird’s-eye view of “creative labor,” exploring the impact of humanities-based innovative and creative thinking across business, science, and the arts.14 Within this subcategory of macro industry studies, promotional industries have attracted intense scholarly attention. Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson’s Promotional Screen Industries gives shape to a new group of creatives called “intermediaries,” a term they borrow from Aeron Davis that refers to the people and texts involved in marketing material and promotional culture. Promotional culture becomes more important in a digital streaming era that dramatically redefines traditional commercial space.15 Helen Powell’s edited anthology, Promotional Culture and Convergence, echoes this claim, arguing that marketing assumes greater importance in a neoliberal economy that is dependent on consumer access to information and user feedback.16 These macro-level studies make varying uses of ethnographic material and effectively decenter the media studies text from the singular television series, the film, or even the commercial. By tracing the field of pressures and flows that shapes creative content in a digital economy, these books suggest that media texts are porous, shifting entities. This, in turn, implies that authorship is equally nebulous, multidirectional, and indiscrete. The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV     participates in these ongoing discussions in production studies by continuing to decenter cultural constructions of authorship and text. The decision to interview people below the line is also in conversation with the popular and academic discussion that widely criticizes Hollywood’s institutional whiteness and patriarchy. Albeit, Variety reports that the racial and gender diversity of crew members working below the line is not markedly better than the grim figures characterizing above-the-line work, relatively speaking, below the line is more inclusive.17 While this is no ringing

Introduction

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endorsement of below-the-line hiring practices, it does add another reason to study these overlooked forms of creative labor. This is especially important when academic, industry, and popular studies of Hollywood’s diversity all indicate biases in how authorship is defined. Most industry studies of gender and racial inclusivity focus on above-the-line workers, thus failing to include the forms of authorship and identity that below-the-line labor contributes. The 2016 and 2017 Hollywood Diversity Report by UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies surveys the racial and gender demographics of leading actors, directors/creators, and writers, but accounts for no one else in the crew.18 The 2016 Annenberg School of Communication’s Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment assesses “behind the camera” labor in film, television, and digital series, but only includes writers and directors.19 Amid the heavy criticism directed at Hollywood’s disproportionately white and masculine above-the-line work, we might be overlooking areas of creative labor in which gender and racial minorities do have creative impact. Areas like art direction, however, are discounted because those roles and form of authorship are devalued. Criticism of the top tiers in creative industries is completely valid and should continue, but we are imbedding our own biases through what we count as “authorship “in the evaluative process itself. During the course of this project, I’ve encountered steady push back toward my claim that studying below-the-line labor has feminist import. Each year, I give a lecture on production design in my big introduction to media studies class and, each year, the moment I mention “props” and “costumes” at least five dudes inevitably head for the door. Tell me this is not a gendered issue. When dominant culture does not value below-the-line work, these roles will continue to be feminized, under-acknowledged, understudied, and underpaid when they play such critical roles in the media texts that we love. In addition, false hierarchies in media production labor also reinforce discriminatory practices that keep women and minorities from breaking into traditionally more venerated and male-dominated above-the-line roles like writer, director, and producer. A more diverse media industry starts with celebrating the work that people do at all stages of production as well as ensuring heterogeneous representation at the “top.”

Methodological interventions Returning to my tour of the office set, a tall man in full costume saunters through the wreckage of the ad firm set. Ellen introduces me to John Bishop, the production designer, who is in wardrobe because he has a cameo in one of the final episodes: a kind of insider thank you. We next go outside to Ellen’s

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prop truck (the trailer that houses all of the props she owns and brings with her from one project to another). She leaves me there while she delivers a suitcase to a hot set. The trailer is filled from floor to ceiling with carefully labeled drawers. One group of drawers has characters’ names on them. This is where Ellen keeps all of the hand props belonging to each cast member who reappears across episodes. They contain items their characters keep on their person. I open one drawer to find Peggy’s glasses and another to find Don Draper’s wallet. I opened the wallet to find a childhood photo of John Hamm, the actor who plays Draper, which serves as a convincing substitute of a picture of his character’s son. I wonder why they don’t have a picture of the actor who plays his son on the series. But then, this is the type of prop that never receives much screen time. It doesn’t have to be accurate to the storyworld because what takes precedence is its effect on the actor, the type of mindset it offers John Hamm so that he can become Don Draper. I somewhat stumbled into ethnography when a fellow graduate student dared me, half in jest, to try to contact the costume designer for Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006–10), Eduardo Castro. I took the dare and found the people working in television production design easy to track down and talk to. I think this is owing to the fact that production design is an understudied and overlooked area of TV studies and popular criticism, albeit primetime cable dramas and their expanding production budgets and artistic clout are beginning to change that. The book brings attention to this untapped archive of television design cultures as a neglected area of media and industry studies. TV design is an important arena for memory work and constructing national identity in ways that reinforce television’s status as a collective mnemonic tool. The book’s interview subjects include Janie Bryant (the costume designer for Mad Men) and Eduardo Castro (the costume designer for Ugly Betty), alongside set dressers and production designers from Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives, Aquarius, and Mad Men. I use my visits to sets, prop warehouses, and costume rental companies to place my textually and historically based arguments in industry context. Overall, I’ve conducted over a dozen interviews with people working across all levels of art departments, from head production designers to prop warehouse managers. People in TV production and costume design have been enormously generous with their time and open in chatting about their work; they assume that their jobs are unglamorous and often anticipate that outsiders will see them as boring. However, I would argue that TV designers’ self-deprecation is medium specific. Television is still battling historically stubborn labels like “wasteland” and “idiot box.” Indeed, the production design crew can be marginalized even within their TV programs. I’ve seen this first-hand from

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watching how members of the art department continue to work tirelessly on event planning their own wrap parties for the rest of the show’s cast and crew. They are under-appreciated and they rarely enjoy breaks. This project began with asking why nostalgia for boomer America is so prevalent on millennial television. In the process of answering that question, it became clear that the contemporary popular debates around gender and race, and television’s infatuation with mid-century design are key players in the cultural phenomenon of millennial TV nostalgia. If I was going to address the work of individual designers working in television and analyze how design contributes to the nostalgic recreation of boomer America, then I had to talk to actual designers to see what the design processes are and how they bear the impressions of their creators’ attitudes toward the boomer era. While purely aesthetic analyses of television programs open up many possible meanings, industry fieldwork and oral histories are equally valuable because behind every article of clothing or piece of set dressing, there is a designer working under a deadline and making decisions for immediate, practical purposes. And these decisions are not always dictated by aspirations toward “great art” or supporting the story. Casual discussions at conferences leave me with the impression that scholars are dissuaded from industry ethnography and interviewing for fear that their subjects won’t reinforce the same reading; designers tend to act nonplussed at the array of meanings that academics attribute media texts. This resistance on the part of designers should not be eschewed as a disappointing absence of critical distance, but integrated into an understanding the cultural situatedness of design. I try to incorporate, rather than dismiss or mitigate, creative voices and their perceptions of their own work. Yet, as with any ethnographic project, my own subjective positioning bears acknowledgment as a factor shaping my object of study. Many of the people I talked to stressed their subordinate positions within the creative industry. I gather that none of them would call themselves authors for industry-specific, political reasons. People routinely reminded me of the supremacy of the writer and director in the projects they worked on, which left me feeling conflicted about how to represent this deference in my accounts. How do I mitigate what below-the-line designers tell me with what I want to write and what I believe about the real authorial power of their positions within their field? I have utmost respect for their work. Yet, would they agree with the arguments I’m making here and what responsibility do I have to them in making such arguments? Or are their expressions of loyalty and deference to direction and writing part of the rote diplomacy and disclaimers of doing interviews in the entertainment industries? It is most likely that these feelings and statements, which underplay their own work, are part of the complex politics that describe the labor that goes into making television.

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV

Practical Ethnography defines ethnography as “making meaning of details,” which sounds like a pretty innocuous description.20 However, like many other recent ethnography texts, Practical Ethnography acknowledges the deeply entrenched imperialistic history that the method belongs to, which mostly involved white anthropologists traveling to colonial territories to “study” and “observe” native populations.21 The field is defined by this tension between classical ethnography, which dangerously presumes the impartiality of the observer, and poststructuralist ethnography, which veers toward the opposite extreme in asserting that the observer has no authority.22 In Social Knowledge and Interpretation, Isaac Reed offers a balanced middle ground in the form of interpretivism: Good social science is concerned with developing case-specific causal accounts that derive their authority from in-depth explication of the cultural contexts of action. Interpretivists build maximal interpretations that explicate landscapes of meaning—the historically grounded, discursive sense-systems motivating action and forming the ways in which people act.23 My interview process and write ups of interview content are interpretivist in that they endeavor to connect the particular to the general while also letting go of the idea that I have access to the truth of what is being communicated or what is really going on.24 I came to my subjects with a set of questions about how they work and their contributions on these particular television shows. Inevitably, I went off script as conversation developed organically. I took notes or recorded conversations with people’s permission. I would then integrate the interview material as it seemed pertinent while writing each chapter. In the context of production studies, scholars tend to avoid using the term “ethnography.” Mayer calls her work “ethnographically-inspired,” borrowing Liz Bird’s term.25 John Caldwell describes his work as an “integrated culturalindustrial approach” that combines “practitioner interviews and fieldwork observation with institutional research and textual analysis.”26 This reticence is understandable. Putting the shoe on the other disciplinary foot, no media studies scholar appreciates the anthropologist who decides to dabble in our field and speak at conferences with a complete lack of familiarity of the major theories and discourses. However, this disciplinary shyness can hinder nurturing transdisciplinarity among methodologies and fields. Whatever initial blunders come with working in unfamiliar disciplinary terrain are worth the rewards. As stated before, my interpretivist, case study-centered approach to interviewing integrates ethnography with textual analysis. This means that the

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chapters can be non-narrative and messy. Their organization and the way they read may feel like pulling on a string and unraveling a sweater if that sweater is Mad Men, for example. You may not have a recognizable sweater at the end and it might look a mess, but you can now see the string. Each chapter “unravels” by tracing the origins and confluence of historical references and meanings that a wristwatch or mid-century chair might present. The chapters are therefore not neat and tidy. To use another analogy, the book reads a bit like exploring a network gofer holes that begin at the surface level with various design objects in television series. My research process then shows they are discursively, historically connected.

Interventions in memory studies As I watch Ellen and others work, and witness how they make creative decisions that ultimately translate to screen, I wonder how much of their own multilayered, highly mediated and intergenerational nostalgia inflects the nostalgia the series itself shapes toward the boomer period. There are strange parallels between the nostalgia of the crew that day and the nostalgia that the series constructs around the boomer era. The spaces of Mad Men’s production are mired in nostalgia not only for that era, but for the experience of generating the series’ historical sensibility. Regardless of the age of the person doing the remembering and whether or not he or she has direct experience with the postwar era, nostalgia for the boomer years in contemporary popular culture is strongly attached to the appreciation for the material design of the period. This attachment is, in part, endemic to nostalgia overall (as David Lowenthal, Susan Stewart, and others in memory studies observe), but this relationship between nostalgia and material memory also applies the people who literally produce the nostalgia we consume: their relationship to the material set dressings and clothes, how they procured them, how they made them, whether they were working under a harsh deadline, whether the item is owned by them or Lions Gate, and how happy they were when they were working.27 The television series I discuss are not easily categorized under singular labels of retrograde or progressive, white guilt or historically recuperative, patriarchal thumb-sucking or feminist intervention. The dominant theories on nostalgia understand it as a form of “cultural amnesia” or the severance of the individual from a sense of place and origin.28 However, more recent work in memory studies tries to recuperate nostalgia from these negative connotations.29 Nevertheless, few scholars have concentrated on the aesthetics of nostalgia in media and their relationship to historical memory.30 In contrast to nostalgia

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scholarship grounded in trauma theory or postmodernism, this book argues that nostalgia on current TV displays historicity in its form of visual memory work. This book challenges theories on nostalgia that see it as stagnating, regressive, or a reversion to outdated gender and racial politics, and the technophobic longing for a bygone era. Instead, I argue nostalgia is an important form of historical memory and vehicle for negotiating periods of historical transition. At stake in understanding the millennial intensification of boomer nostalgia is a firmer understanding of the interplay among whiteness, gender politics, national memory, and media technologies. Nostalgia is the critical and self-reflexive longing for the past at the same time that there is the acknowledgment of the impossibility and undesirability of restoration.31 The past is always reworked in the process of its re-presentation through production design and costuming. Postmodernist memory studies colors nostalgia as regressive or evidence of collective trauma signaling a deterioration in once healthy national memories and culture. Trauma-centric memory studies borrow from Freud and other psychoanalytic theories to suggest that popular media erases and revises the past in order to avoid or elide unpleasant historical “truths.” Poststructuralist revisions of these interpretations of nostalgia proffer that there was no historical “truth” or intact national memory to begin with. The key problem with postmodernist approaches to memory is their prelapsarian assumptions that historical memory was better to begin with. They, thus, fall into the same logical pitfall of the object they critique. Popular culture was never any better or worse than it is now.32 When postmodernist memory interpretations are applied to shows like Mad Men and Desperate Housewives, they entirely elide the historicity retained in set design and costume. The weddedness between design references to that era and its racial and gendered social histories shows that nostalgia can be an active and complex space for identity politics wherein visual culture retains the historicity that popular and academic criticism often accuses it of lacking. For example, Fredric Jameson critiques nostalgia for lacking historicity.33 These views are also reflected in more popular literature like Jenny Diski’s “Unfaithful: The False Nostalgia of Mad Men” in Harper’s Magazine, which somewhat perplexingly contrasts Mad Men to films made in the 1960s (as if the series aspires to simulate how 1960s media saw the 1960s rather than how millennials see the period in retrospect).34 This skepticism toward Mad Men’s brand of nostalgia and the viability of its historical authenticity also inflect Gary Edgerton’s edited anthology on the program, whose articles either use Mad Men as a measurement tool for social gains since the 1960s or to critique the historical veracity of its depictions of 1960s counterculture.35 While interesting in their own right, the articles offer reading strategies for Mad Men rather than critical analysis, mostly because such discussion around

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historical accuracy and measurements of social progress are already part of Mad Men’s nostalgic discourse. Indeed, the legibility of boomer nostalgia in contemporary television relies on destabilizing a constructed collective popular memory of the boomer TV sitcom. That is, boomer nostalgia in the 2000s is defined, not by the desire to merely return to the past, but by the very deconstruction of golden age America. Poststructuralist memory studies pays attention to the cultural context of nostalgia rather than dismissing it as mere escapism. The most recent work in this area rethinks collective memory in the wake of major social transformations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, like the fall of communism and the Cold War, postcoloniality, the LBGTIQA civil rights movement, and post-postmodernism.36 As alternative histories and counterhistories come to the foreground, memory scholars revise previous theories of nostalgia and entertain how it can be recuperative, reflective, and attached to a variety of publics, not just reactionary conservatives. A subcategory of memory scholarship focuses on object studies, in particular how the status of the mnemonic object may be shifting with the digital transition.37 While these different methods of revisiting nostalgia are encouraging, the US election of 2016 and the success of Trump’s campaign that rested on the slogan “Making American Great Again” give me pause. In 2016, conservatives successfully mobilized and reframed American nostalgic discourse, as they have before in the Reagan era. Conservatism continues to focus on the boomer period as a golden era in history (for middle-class white hetero men). At this historical moment, we need to pay particular attention to discourses of whiteness and white memory, and how these are then mobilized by the top percentiles and consumed by the rest. I think there is still a wide range of meanings attached to nostalgic TV shows, which is what makes them interesting texts. And I do not believe that everyone making and consuming these shows wanted to “make America great again.” But I think it’s important to bear in mind that, while competing narratives may be present in theses texts, the overall political-economic architecture and underpinning of these shows is highly privileged. Even as polysemous texts, they nevertheless belong to a cultural and political moment that weaponizes nostalgia for boomer America.

Quality television and identity politics Returning once more to my Mad Men day, the visit culminates in a trip to the costume department, where Janie Bryant is fitting someone in a curtained section of a room shared by two research assistants and two tailors. The

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV

space is dominated by floor to ceiling clothing racks that house the costume collection. I chat to the tailors as Ellen delivers two prop handbags to go with Joan’s swimsuit in one of the final episodes. Ellen and the costumer make the call to go with a floral print handbag. Mad Men participates in at the same time that it galvanizes the mainstreamification of boomer retro and vintage in contemporary fashion. And this resurgence of high waistlines, pincurled hair, and Hollywood-red lipstick is deeply attached to an ongoing post-feminist recuperation and repositioning of beauty culture in feminine and feminist identity that began in the 1990s.38 Janie Bryant’s selfbranding and outspoken celebration of beauty culture relies on the post-feminist re-embrace of fashion as a point of empowerment and self-exploration. Part of this revisionism requires reconsidering the boomer past that the second-wave critique of beauty culture responds to. In this vein, Mad Men explores both the liberating and oppressive aspects of mid-century beauty culture: both its uncomfortable girdles and potentially liberating celebration of torpedo bust lines. The academic conservation on “quality television” is shifting from analyses of the texts themselves to their distribution, production, and audiences. Rather than the quality of the text itself being a point of discussion, scholarship has turned its attention to the production of the discourse of quality television in the post-network era. I contribute to this scholarly arena by looking at the popular conversation around art direction, which has played a key role in the television industry’s legitimation strategy. “Quality television” is also defined by historically revisionist polemics in the digital age, ones that take up past iconic periods in national history and revisit them through countertellings and counterpublics. Indeed, high-quality art direction, identity politics, and revisionist histories seem inextricably bound in millennial quality television as components of the same taste-based language distinguishing television as an important art form. Some quality television scholarship reproduces the same taste distinctions it claims to study. Albrecht’s Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television treats cable television’s representations of masculinity as a “discursive assemblage,” but then assigns problematic descriptors like “artistic risks” and “narrative complexity” to quality TV series that demand further unpacking.39 Paul Johnson’s “Walter White(ness) Lashes Out” similarly normalizes the attachment of masculinity to quality television, arguing that Breaking Bad operates as a “repetitive allegorical enactment of trauma by metonymizing the financial crisis and the election of Obama as crimes against a white, male American body politic.”40 While the article analyzes the white male victimhood at the center of the series, it under-theorizes the potential ties between this victim discourse and notions of “quality.”

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The most convincing scholarly works on quality television and identity politics historicize the quality discourse itself and its historical attachments to identity and television.41 Elana Levine and Michael Z. Newman argue that the television legitimation process depended on the industry’s distanciation from its low-brow, feminine associations in popular culture.42 Generally, the fewer the episodes a television show has, the more its narrative centers on white male anti-heroes; the more television publicity foregrounds a solitary, white, male author, the more artistic credit it receives in popular and industry discourses.43 In response, I’d like to cast scrutiny on television’s own industry and academic processes of self-legitimation that hinge on promulgating constructions of single authorship. In relation to how the texts I study fit into the category of “quality television,” let it be said that they are about white people … lots and lots of white people. The shows feature white characters and target white, wealthy viewers.44 Whiteness needs to be studied as the hegemonic voice in the global mediascape if for no other reason than because whiteness’s power stems from its very invisibility as a discourse.45 As part of the onus of the heading of “quality,” white TV heavily invests in the integration of neoliberal constructions of multiculturalism and diversity. This is not without precedent. Henderson’s Love and Money argues that, as niche programming expands in the 1990s, mainstream television represents queerness “in straight terms” and cable programming offers an outlet for more graphic depictions of queer sexuality.46 Henderson traces television’s internal process of bringing “stories and characters into line with dominant discourse for dominant and nondominant audiences alike.”47 The mainstreamification of queerness in wealthy nations means that television has needed to strategize how to make queer representation appealing for both heteronormative and queer audiences. This book covers television shows that fixate on offering representations of gender, queerness, and racial identity in white, straight, and post-feminist terms. Post-feminism is characterized by the ambiguity and confusion voiced, in part, by younger generations of feminists who are somewhat at a loss by the internal contradictions and prismatic fragmentation that typify contemporary definitions of feminism.48 These intergenerational tensions between feminists have broader contexts. TV boomer nostalgia is steeped in discursive tensions around ideas of the American Dream, the role of whiteness in writing that dream, the representation of difference on television, and intergenerational resentment toward the baby boom cohort whose legacy is rampant income disparity, the promulgation of imperialism in new forms (i.e., drone warfare, industry convergence, surveillance culture), and a dying planet. Older generations, in response, bemoan the performative, political apathy, and relentless entitlement of millennials. Recent scholarship on post-feminism

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broaches the topic from the postindustrial economy, consumer culture, and neoliberal discourse.49 I’m using the term post-feminism not because I necessarily agree with its tenets, which include the celebration of choice, sexuality, and the articulation of femininity through consumption, but because it calls up the debates within feminism that I want to engage. A major pitfall of academic scholarship on post-feminist media is the refusal on the part of scholars to separate post-feminist scholarship from its object of study, tending to label both as “bad.” Too often scholarship on post-feminism makes value judgments on ideas of progress and regress in feminist media when it should, in fact, study how these media construct ideologies of progress and regress. The television series’ post-feminist revisions of feminism and its larger context of 1960s counterculture never enter nostalgia TV series at “full volume.” Rather, characters’ encounters with feminism and counterculture are fleeting and skeptical. For example, in Mad Men, Peggy has a short-lived, sexually charged friendship with the cool girl in the office downstairs who wears a white leather jacket and takes Peggy to artists’ loft parties. Quality television’s some might say skeptical and others might say politically conservative engagement with the volatile topic of feminist history is perfectly in line with its post-feminist context. In terms of the kinds of stories art direction tells in the shows discussed here, shifts in gender history and technology are privileged over others. The television shows’ internal nostalgic discourses are, at times, painfully aware of the histories that television from that era elides or erases from national memory: proto-secondwave feminism, depictions of Americans of color, urbanity, working-class life, and families who cannot afford for mothers to be housewives. In response to that history, Mad Men gestures toward inclusivity or recovering these histories, albeit clumsily and noncommittally in the form of Don Draper’s stoic refusal to take part in racist and sexist office banter. The show’s somewhat tokenistic and limp gesture toward inclusivity reflects what it anticipates dominant audiences can tolerate at this historical moment. That said, this book resists simply dismissing these TV shows as racist, classist, and sexist. Contrary to accusations that series like Mad Men entirely depoliticize feminism, I use the set design of the series to show how they engage historical-gendered debates.50 To be clear, I’m not studying these shows because I think they are paragons of political responsibility and progressivism. I study them because I think they are interesting expressions of the confluence of the discourse on quality television, art direction, and constructions of identity that are shifting in response to hegemonic definitions of thoughtful reinterpretations of history. Aspects of TV design constitute key vehicles for nostalgia in contemporary popular culture. Understanding how television constructs gendered history and memory is important because TV is a persistently undervalued medium that serves as a principal site for writing and, indeed, teaching popular history.

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Understanding how television constructs and renarrates its own gender and media history is thus vital to understanding the relationships among screen technologies, identity, and historical memory at large.

Chapter breakdown The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a different area of art direction: sets, props, and costumes. The first two chapters on set design cover two iconic television tropes: the suburban exterior set and the interior office set. Chapter 1, “TV Suburbia and Remembering the Sitcom Set,” introduces the idea that mise-en-scène is not a wholesale entity attached to a single authorship. Rather set design is a hodgepodge of living, working pieces that I argue have archival properties. The chapter studies the studio lot and set history of the series Desperate Housewives and covers the historical design references the show makes through their unique blends of boomerera architecture, interior design, and contemporary trends in design. The chapter argues that the nature of set design is already palimpsestic because designers are often working with pieces from preexisting sets, or at the very least, new sets that change to accommodate camera movement and simulate how a fictional environment changes over time. The chapter studies how the palimpsestic qualities of set design and set management interact with and reinforce the nostalgic aesthetics of the sets and set dressings. Chapter 2, “Office Sets and Nostalgic Modernism in the TV Workplace,” introduces the idea that certain periods in history are mobilized to tell certain stories about identity politics and technology on quality television. The chapter uses the example of the modernist office space and its attachments to white patriarchal masculinity in crisis. The chapter also considers why, within boomer nostalgia, mid-century modernism has become wedded to television depictions of the workplace. Ugly Betty’s set for the main office, for example, figures prominently in its narrative world. Similarly, Mad Men weds modernism to professionalism, coding it as a decidedly masculine aesthetic. These quotations of modernism show how boomer nostalgia’s multiple aesthetic strains carry different gendered associations and communicate specific messages about the history of gender in the workplace. To add an industry perspective, I’m integrating interviews with the set dresser for Ugly Betty, Archie D’Amico, and the production designer for Aquarius, Carlos Barbosa, who has experience working as both an architect and a production designer for period television. Aquarius is an NBC primetime drama set in a 1967 Los Angeles police department and, presumably, the network’s bid to compete with Mad Men.

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Chapter 3, “Prop Talk: A Behind-the-Scenes Look,” concentrates on set dressing and hand props (props that actors hold or handle) as components of nostalgic production design. It also discusses how props are talked about in popular discourse about the show and such conversations invoke historical narratives. In addition to drawing on my tour of the Mad Men set, I draw on visits to three prop warehouses in Los Angeles: History for Hire, Prop Heaven, and Sony Pictures Property. Mad Men uses History for Hire frequently since the company specializes in antique hand props. Chapter 4, “Prop Stories: Media Props in Narrative Context,” covers nostalgic anticipation and television’s meditations on the phenomenology of pre-digital media in order to illustrate how theories that root nostalgia in regression or trauma do not account for nostalgia TV’s historically self-aware discourse. The book studies how shows incorporate nostalgic discourse into set dressing to argue that nostalgia, as a visual and narrative language, serves an interrogative function. Boomer nostalgia is less interested in the period itself as it is examining presentist popular imaginings of the boomer era. Old media becomes a kind of archaeology of nostalgic American affect for the postwar period. In the context of the book, Mad Men models the main “nostalgic orientation” for the book as a series that invites a specific form of historical engagement with and critique of boomer America. The chapter explores how old imaging technologies reappear in boomer television nostalgia and become mobilized as conduits for historical reflection upon the nostalgic discourse of the show itself. This is achieved through associating old media with what I term “nostalgic anticipation,” the projective nostalgia one anticipates when looking back at the present moment. In boomer nostalgia, this usually takes the form of how that text will treat large-scale historical events the viewer knows must take place. The narrativization of old media also suggests historical parallels between that era and contemporary times, addressing the affective differences between analog and digital technologies that mediate historical and personal memory. These thus interrogate the digital transition and shifts in gender ideologies since the 1960s. The props tell stories that treat the relationship between technology and personal as well as collective memory, wherein the boomer era stands as a historical marker for when imaging technologies entered the home en masse, and dramatically changed the popular ideals of home and family. Alongside Mad Men, I also study a different iteration of boomer television nostalgia and its use of media as props in Masters of Sex (Showtime, 2013–16). I extend my arguments to nostalgic television that recreates other periods, but continues a similar investment in prop culture and prop narratives, using shows like Frontier House (PBS, 2002) and 1900 House (Channel 4, 1999–2000), like The Knick (Cinemax, 2014–). Across these examples, props are centerpieces in

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episodic and sometimes series-wide narratives, in which props are omens of and placeholders for the transition to digitality. The final section is on costume design and begins with Chapter 5, “Making, Renting, and Telling National Histories through Costume.” The chapter addresses how costume is mobilized in television narratives of the popular histories of feminism, race, and gender. The chapter offers readings of television costume design that, contrary to most of the scholarship to date on television costuming, are grounded in ethnography as well as fashion history rather than relying solely on textual analysis. I argue that Mad Men’s costume design narrates and troubles post-feminist accounts of gender history. In conjunction with analyzing the costume designs of Mad Men, I use my tour of Western Costume Company, a rental company and library that specializes in period costume, to place the series’ costumes in a broader industry context. My interviews with the company’s head research librarian, Bobi Garland, and owner, Eddie Marks, complicate the readings of Mad Men by raising the pragmatic constraints placed on “historical authenticity.” The chapter also includes extended analyses of the costume designs for Mad Men as well as an interview with the head costume designer, Janie Bryant, who comments on the nostalgic politics and the design processes. Chapter 6, “Costume Countermemory: Marginalized Television Voices and Chicana Retro,” applies a different tactic to the whiteness of nostalgia scholarship by presenting a case study where popular memory of 1950s and ’60s American suburbia becomes explicitly racialized.51 Ugly Betty has a unique brand of retro. The chapter traces the costumes’ historical references back to the gendered/class associations to 1950s and ’60s street fashion as well as current trends of quoting the period in hipster street fashion. The chapter also explores the racial/ethnic meanings mapped onto references to and nostalgia for boomer-era design by looking at the costuming for Betty, a young Latina writer from Queens who is working as an editor at a Manhattanbased fashion magazine. Pairing 1950s and ’60s retro with the racial and class politics of Betty’s story presents a notable exception to popular and academic understandings of boomer nostalgia that construct it as predominantly white and middle class. The chapter also integrates an interview with the costume designer for seasons one and two, Eduardo Castro. A repeated criticism of shows like Mad Men and Desperate Housewives is that they are prescriptively white, heteronormative, and classist, in effect, repeating the whitewashing that 1950s and ’60s television naturalized to begin with.52 However, there is another cycle of racial and class elision that happens when popular and academic criticism overlooks the texts that pair references to boomer America with otherness. The chapters on costume illustrate, through Ugly Betty and Mad Men’s costuming, how boomer nostalgia becomes “messy” when

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV

an understanding informed by design forces us to extend the category of boomer nostalgia to texts that address difference. In Mad Men’s case, this is an alternative retelling of white America and, in Ugly Betty’s, it is the narration of Chicana diaspora. The book covers television shows considered to be “quality” programs, but what happens when bad TV makes nostalgia? The conclusion argues that the design reputations attached to shows like Mad Men are separate from the storyworlds of the series. I end with what I term “Draper fatigue” or the exasperation with Mad Men’s protagonist expressed by many viewers over the last two seasons. Don Draper was held up as a paragon of masculinity at the show’s beginning; in 2009 he was voted by AskMen magazine to be more influential to contemporary male identity than Barack Obama.53 But his steady decline into alcoholism and sex addiction, and his failure to develop further has soured the relationships of many fans. I set the popular discourse of “Draper fatigue” within the context of current debates about post-feminist masculinity, in particular the struggle to recuperate a definition of straight masculinity that also supports a progressive politic.54 Much of the attention around the series has been redirected from the waning allure of Draperism to the series’ much heralded production design and creative integration of key historical events into its storyworld. According to popular online criticism, certain narrative elements of the show fail in the last two seasons, while its “look” continues to garner praise. In keeping with this theme of narrative failure, the chapter looks at the short-lived series Pan Am (ABC, 2011–12) and The Playboy Club (NBC, 2011) as primetime network attempts to compete with Mad Men by offering their own revisionist looks at this period in American history. Both shows were ultimately canceled within one season. What constitutes bad nostalgia? The chapter ends with considering why these Mad Men alternatives fail to capture the public’s imagination as well as the industry reasons for their cancellations. The book concludes by reiterating that nostalgic production design is a key shaper of the stories told on contemporary TV. Because the book concentrates its ethnography on the individual contributions of creative workers in the industry, the closing chapter broadens the conversation to include the larger industry trends behind boomer nostalgia that play a part in generating nostalgic America on television. As the industry changes of the past fifteen to twenty years have been studied at the macro levels of corporate mergers and legislation, and at the theoretical levels of the potentially democratizing or neoliberalist rhetorics attached to digital media, we need to heed to how these changes affect media culture at micro scales of the way people work and, more specifically, the way that people design. Often academic and popular discourses on creative work construct its processes as opaque, promulgating

Introduction

23

narratives of being touched by the muse and “it just came to me.” This crypticness needs to be dispelled because the creative process is historically contingent and subject to the same politics that shape communications legislation, gender, and racial ideologies, how we define “good” and “bad” media, and how we think of the past. In this sense, sets, costumes, and their design cultures provide lenses for looking at present nostalgia for the baby boomer era, discourses on nationhood, gender, class distinction, and at a fundamental level, how we think of creative labor in the age of convergence.

Notes   1 Brett Martin, “Inside the Breaking Bad Writer’s Room: How Vince Gilligan Runs the Show,” The Guardian, September 2013, https://www.theguardian. com/tv-and-radio/2013/sep/20/breaking-bad-writers-room-vince-gilligan.   2 David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 184–190.   3 The Art Directors Guild, “About the Guild,” www.adg.org.   4 See Szalai’s article in the Hollywood Reporter, which cites Nielson ratings indicating that 48 percent of Mad Men viewers in 2009 earned over $100,000 (Szalai, “Cable Shows with the Wealthiest Viewers,” Hollywood Reporter, July 25, 2010).   5 See Miranda Banks, John Caldwell, and Vicki Mayer, eds., Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 2; Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Derek Johnson, Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (New York: New York University Press, 2013).   6 Mayer, Below the Line.   7 Miranda Banks and Vicki Mayer, eds., Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); Miranda Banks, Bridget Conor, and Vicki Mayer, eds., Production Studies, The Sequel!: Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries (London: Routledge, 2015), x.   8 Banks, Conor, and Mayer, Production Studies, The Sequel!, x.   9 Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare, and Avi Santo, Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 10 See Johnson, Media Franchising for this insight into the fluidity of the writers’ room. 11 Conor, Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice (New York: Routledge, 2014).

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV

12 Sarah Baker and David Hesmondhalgh, Creative Labor: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (New York: Routledge, 2011). 13 Caldwell, Production Culture, 2. 14 Stuart Cunningham, Hidden Innovation: Policy, Industry and the Creative Sector (QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2013). 15 Aeron Davis, Promotional Cultures: The Rise and Spread of Advertising, Public Relations, Marketing and Branding (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 100–101; Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson, Promotional Screen Industries (New York: Routledge, 2015), 4. 16 Helen Powell, Promotional Culture and Convergence: Markets, Methods, Media (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1. 17 David S. Cohen, “Artisans So White: Minority Workers and the Fight against Below-the-Line Bias,” Variety, August 2016. 18 Ralph J Bunche, Hollywood Diversity Report: Busine$$ as Usual? (UCLA: Center for African American Studies, 2016), 1; Bunche, Hollywood Diversity Report: Setting the Record Straight (UCLA: Center for African American Studies, 2017), 1. 19 Marc Choueiti, Katherine Pieper, and Stacy L. Smith, Inclusion or Invisibility?: Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment (USC: Annenberg, 2016), 3–4. 20 Sam Ladner, Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2014), 12. 21 Ibid., 15; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press, 2012). 22 Mats Trondman and Paul Willis, “Manifesto for ‘Ethnography,’” Ethnography 1, no. 1 (2000): 6–7; Becker, “Response to the ‘Manifesto,’” Ethnography 1, no. 2 (2000): 257–260. 23 Isaac A. Reed, Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 5. 24 Ibid., 5–6. 25 Mayer, Below the Line, 26. 26 Caldwell, Production Culture, 10. 27 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 28 Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country; Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995); Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 29 Meikel Bal, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Dartmouth, MA: Dartmouth University Press, 1998); Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (New York: Verso, 1995); Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

Introduction

25

30 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia; Christine Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009); Elizabeth E. Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 31 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 8. 32 Founding texts in postmodernist memory studies include Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country; Huyssen, Present Pasts; Huyssen, Twilight Memories; For more recent memory scholarship integrating trauma theory into their work, see Susannah Radstone, ed., Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Dennis Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation, and Memory (New York: Routledge, 2011). Trauma studies rely on psychoanalytic explanations of compulsive behaviors as symptomatic of repressed past traumas that cannot be integrated into the conscious mind. Trauma studies usually focus on the displacement of memory onto other objects or behaviors until that memory can be narrativized or given representation. Narratology also has an interest in memory studies, particularly for structuralists, who view collective memory as conforming to predetermined patterns of representation and cognition. While memory has been an object of interest since the Classical era, it assumed new importance with the advent of modernity in the nineteenth century and following the First and Second World Wars. The social, economic, and political transformations that accompanied industrialization were feared to compromise individualism, humanism, and previous conceptions of time, space, and narrative. One example of how trauma theory is applied in nostalgia studies is Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, and her book on Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero, which studies how American encounters with terrorism are processed through material culture, in particular through kitsch, tourism, and consumption in general. Her description of the “comfort culture” of 9/11 teddy bears and hand-woven Afghan rugs depicting the fall of the Twin Towers implies a collective and subconscious emotional regression, weakness, and struggle. 33 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 19. 34 Jenny Diski, “Unfaithful: The False Nostalgia of Mad Men,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2012. 35 Gary R. Edgerton, Mad Men: Dream Come True TV (New York: I.B Tauris, 2011). 36 See Kirk A Denton, Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013); Venelin I Ganev, Twenty Years after Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, ed., Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (Stanford, CA: Stanford

26

The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV University Press, 2007); Reiko Hillyer, Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2014); Daniel Levy, Jeffrey K. Olick, and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (New York: Routledge, 2013); James Mark, The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011); Amy Mills, Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Wen-Chin Ouyang, Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011).

37 Banash, Moist and Sturken, eds., Contemporary Collecting: Theory and Practice (Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2013); Guffey, Retro; Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia. 38 In popular culture, definitions of post-feminism are predominantly rooted in the historical teleology of gender relations within the family unit (i.e., generalizing and prescriptive assessments of gender progress to the tune of “domestic divisions of labor are approaching equivalence!” or “the division of household work has never changed!” which are encouraged by feminist works like Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift). Post-feminism is the reconsideration of traditional ideas of femininity it views the second wave as too readily dismissing. Post-feminism was in academic vogue in the early 2000s and has since receded from scholarly debate in feminist media studies even though at conferences the term remains a point of heated intergenerational tension (Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007]; Angela McRobbie, "Post-feminism and Popular Culture," Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 [2004]: 255–264.; Amanda D Lotz, “Post-Feminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes,” Feminist Media Studies 1, no. 1 [2001]: 105–121; L. S. Kim, “‘Sex and the Single Girl’ in Post-Feminism,” Television & New Media 2, no. 4 [2001]: 319–334). 39 Michael M. Albrecht, Masculinity in Contemporary Quality TV (New York: Routledge, 2015), 5–6. 40 Paul Johnson, “Walter (White)ness Lashes Out: Breaking Bad and Male Victimage,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 1 (2017): 15. 41 See Ron Becker, Gay TV and Straight America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Jonathan Cohn, “My TiVo Thinks I’m Gay: Algorithmic Culture and Its Discontents,” Television & New Media 17, no. 8 (2016): 675–690; Raquel Gates, “Activating the Negative Image,” Television & New Media 16, no. 7 (2015): 616–630; Herman Gray “Recovered, Reinvented, Reimagined: Treme, Television Studies and Writing New Orleans,” Television & New Media 13, no. 2 (2012): 268–278; Elana Levine

Introduction

27

and Michael Z Newman, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2011); Amanda D Lotz, Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 42 Levine and Newman, Legitimating Television, 5. 43 Jorie Lagerwey and Taylor Nygaard, “Broadcasting Quality: Re-centering Feminist Discourse with The Good Wife,” Television & New Media 18, no. 2 (2017): 107. 44 See endnote 3. 45 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), 44. 46 Lisa Henderson, Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 58. 47 Ibid., 58. 48 E. Ann Kaplan and Devoney Looser, Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 49 For discussions about the intersections between post-feminism and neoliberalism: Sarah Banet-Weiser, AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Alex Bevan, “How to Make Victory Rolls: Gender, Memory, and the Counterarchive in YouTube Pinup Hair Tutorials,” Feminist Media Studies, published online on March 16, 2017: 1–19; Amy Shields Dobson, Post-Feminist Digital Cultures: Femininity, Social Media and Self-Representation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Brooke Duffy, “The Romance of Work: Gender and Aspirational Labour in the Digital Culture Industries,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (2016): 441–457; Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds., New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjecticity (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Michelle M. Lazar, “Entitled to Consume: Postfeminist Femininity and a Culture of Post-Critique,” Discourse & Communication 3, no. 4 (2009): 371–400; Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009). 50 Alex Bevan, "TV Nostalgia for the Boomer Home and Housewife," PhD, Northwestern University, 217. 51 Marcus’s Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004) and Sprengler’s Screening Nostalgia focuses mostly on white media representations of nostalgia for the postwar period. 52 Some essays in Edgerton’s anthology adhere to this trend (Edgerton, Mad Men: Dream Come True TV). For example, Akass and McCabe express concern at the limits of gender progress in the twenty-first century by discussing the limits of female representation in the show (Akass and McCabe, “‘Mad Men’: The Best of Everything”). Perlman’s essay in the anthology argues that Mad Men’s fleeting allusions to Blackness reaffirm dominant narratives of the Civil Rights Movement, in effect, containing

28

The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV Otherness (Allison Perlman, “The Strange Career of Mad Men: Race, Paratexts, and Civil Rights Memory,” in Mad Men: Dream Come True TV, ed. Gary R. Edgerton [New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011, 209–225.]).

53 Lily Oei, “Don Draper Is AskMen.com’s Most Influential Man of 2009,” Mad Men Blog, October 6, 2009, http://blogs.amctv.com/mad-men/2009/10/dondraper-most-influential-man/. 54 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); R. W. Connell, Masculinities: Second Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

PART ONE

Sets

30

1 TV Suburbia and Remembering the Sitcom Set

Introduction: The nostalgia of recycled sets This chapter considers nostalgic set design, specifically the television studio lots and set histories of media texts that recreate the sitcom suburb. In popular representation, the aesthetics wedded to the boomer period are inseparable from television art direction’s ongoing iterations of them. Television reworkings of the sitcom home and family historically signal changing social divisions between work and home. For example, from the opening credits of the original Leave It to Beaver (CBS/ABC, 1957–63) to those belonging to Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004–12), the head-on, exterior shot of the suburban homestead is an essential part of the visual vocabulary TV uses to historicize and reevaluate hegemonic definitions home, work, and family. The television visual vocabulary of the suburban home and family morphed with corresponding changes in real suburbs, namely, the postwar movement of the white middle class out to the suburbs, otherwise known as “white flight.” As such, Desperate Housewives and other examples tap into these long-standing cultural associations and questions through set design, which tries not so much to reproduce American mid-century suburbia as it does to look like a television boomer sitcom set. This chapter focuses on nostalgia for the boomer years. This is because, when it comes to set design, allusions to the boomer home and television sitcom suburb worm their way into the designs of ensuing eras. As later chapters argue, the use of boomer nostalgia in television design is less so homage to a specific era than a visual rubric that raises a certain set of debates in popular discourse. I also explore the industry trend of set recycling, which explains why the sitcom suburb sets look similar. Not only does this iconography have symbolic reasons why it is revamped time and time again, but there are material

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and pragmatic reasons as well. I trace set recycling and studio lot reuse in Desperate Housewives and find that, from a production standpoint, set recycling is as much industry based as it is design based. Recycling sets is a routine practice because physical studio space and time are limited resources. In effect, television, by necessity, references and rehashes its own design. Designers often work with pieces from preexisting sets or, at the very least, new sets that transform over the duration of a program to accommodate camera movement and simulate how a living environment changes over time. Bewitched (2004), the remake film of the original sitcom series from the 1960s, does this at a meta-level because the film’s story is set in the narrative context of producing a television show. In Desperate Housewives, references to the boomer sitcom are quite literal. The studio lot for Desperate Housewives formerly served as the main location for many beloved ABC boomer-era family sitcoms. The camerawork and plot make the set design both a major character in the series and an important medium for commenting on the boomer sitcom paradigm. The series’ production design, therefore, offers a convincing case for the show’s broader narrative strategy: an exploration of suburban dystopia through a meta-reflexive dialogue with the boomer television past. This chapter also situates the recycled sitcom set within the broader cultural iconography attached to the postwar suburb in popular imagination. The advantages of set recycling and participating in the cultural rubric of the sitcom suburb aesthetic determine these nostalgic set designs in contemporary television. I also extend my analysis to how the media industry presents its own version of studio lot history on the Universal Studio Tour, which includes the shooting location for Desperate Housewives as well as other historically iconic television and film representations of American suburbia. The Universal Studio lot history is narratively and commercially mobilized in how the television industry writes its own history, all the while self-reflexively flagging the artifice of this image of boomer-era America. This exploration of set design shows that nostalgia TV is propelled, not by historical accuracy, but by a different set of concerns: the production time frame, the physical functions of the set, and the aesthetic the design team aspires to achieve. Set design uses the resources at hand while entirely aware of the historical references being used. Nostalgic design does not aim to restore the past. Different impressions of “pastness” are shaped by industry constraints as well as semiotic desires for a certain look. Even when there is the desire to recreate the past, it’s rarely straightforward. Rather, it’s usually an amalgamation of present and past needs and values colored by logistics as well as aesthetic leanings. Inherent palimpsestic qualities of television set design and set management interact with and reinforce the nostalgic aesthetics and messages of the sets and set dressings.

TV Suburbia and Remembering the Sitcom Set

33

This chapter explores the narrative consequences of this interplay between industry practices and long-standing popular aesthetic rubrics, like the sitcom suburb. The key takeaway is that the set design on whatever television show you watch is a matrix of old recycled set pieces, location history, and cultural associations; it is the fabric of various decisions shaped by time and budgetary constraints, long hours, and interpersonal relationships. A set is a living, breathing organism as complex as any person, only their “work” might span centuries, as in the case of the Universal Studio lot.

The sitcom studio lot as living archive The set of Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane is comfortingly familiar yet disturbingly perfect. Its production design conjures an image of suburban utopia: a winding street with pastel-colored gables, impeccable lawns, and white picket fences. Much like the series’ characters, the set becomes part of the critical and promotional discourse attached to the show. Representations of the dystopic suburb and gender politics intersect through the set design among other facets of the series. The history of the actual studio lot in Desperate Housewives suggests a “haunting” of the neighborhood set by the boomer television past. Wisteria Lane bears a palimpsestic relationship to the boomer TV suburb at both narrative and material levels. “Colonial Street,” the location used for Wisteria Lane, is one of the oldest lots at ABC studios (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1   “Pilot,” October 3, 2004, Desperate Housewives.

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV

Its refurbishment and redesign self-consciously reference its television past and frame Desperate Housewives as continuing a tradition of TV negotiations of female domesticity and gender relations within the context of the idyllic American nuclear family and home. Recycling sets is a common practice in Hollywood as a cost- and time-saving measure. Because camerawork usually requires that walls be mobile, sets consist of pieces rather than complete rooms. Traditional television sets also tend to exaggerate aesthetics in order to compensate for the flattening effect cameras have on interior design and architecture. Sometimes sets are not only reused, but also composed of different parts gleaned from disparate old sets.1 One could say there is something inherently ephemeral and perpetually haunted about studio sets. Set designer Eugene Lourie complains that, even after remodeling, an old set tends to retain a presence that often stifles creativity.2 The history of the Universal Studio lot where Desperate Housewives is shot, whether known to the audience or not, is a part of the show. The creative minds behind the show consciously reference the boomer-era television sitcom. The combination of the logistics of set production and designer’s intent shape a place that hovers between the inherent surrealism of real suburbia and popular memories of the fictional boomer television sitcom. The history of the studio lot itself contributes to the presence of the past in Desperate Housewives. Colonial Street was originally the same lot used in Leave It to Beaver (CBS/ ABC, 1957–63). To add to the uncanny feel, Mary Alice’s house is the actual Cleaver home (Figure 1.2). Mary Alice is the housewife whose suicide serves as the main plot instigator of the first season. The Applewhites are the first

Figure 1.2   “Pilot,” October 3, 2004, Desperate Housewives.

TV Suburbia and Remembering the Sitcom Set

35

Figure 1.3   “Next,” September 25, 2005, Desperate Housewives. African American family to appear on Wisteria Lane and, symbolically, their house was originally used for the filming of The Munsters (CBS, 1964–6). Both the Munsters and the Applewhites are unfortunately historical stand-ins for “otherness” in white, heteronormative suburbia (Figure 1.3).3 Each of the houses on the studio lot carries the imprint of a boomer television past that overdetermines how its current occupants are read and placed within this history of depicting American middle-class suburbia. Entertainment Weekly looks at each house’s unique TV past. The discussion stresses the initial disrepair of the set and the extensive renovations the various houses needed. The article says of Ida Greenberg’s house: “The moreoften-seen-than-heard elderly neighbor lives in what’s called the Delta House (based on the one in Animal House (1978) but only used in the short-lived TV spin-off). It was newly landscaped and repainted for Housewives; even so, it doesn’t get too many close-ups. ‘It’s like getting close to an aging movie star,’ says Walsh.”4 The article gives the impression of a haunted site or aging woman holding onto the last selvages of youth. One of the featurettes on the DVD box set of the first season, Dressing Wisteria Lane, displays a picture of the Munster house next to the Applewhite’s for direct comparison and a sense of continuity in TV history.5 The studio lot’s ties to the boomer-era sitcom are key to the series’ overall anachronicity, which is perpetually caught somewhere between the 1950s and the millennial era. The Wisteria Lane lot becomes a character in and of itself in the series, figuring prominently in the show’s narrative and cinematography. The street is the main setting for action: characters run back and forth between

36

The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV

houses to spread rumors and meddle in each other’s affairs while struggling to sustain public façades of familial bliss. The public space of the street and private space of the homes blur when episodes conclude with revelations of family secrets or personal humiliations tending to occur on the street and its front lawns. It seems no place is safe or private on Wisteria Lane. At the same time, the series centers on deeply hidden secrets that characters struggle to keep under wraps and behind closed doors. The pilot episode’s cinematography privileges the street as a central narrative device (“Pilot,” October 3, 2004). It opens with a crane shot descending as Mary Alice exits her home (the original Cleaver house). The majority of episodes open with an establishing crane shot of Wisteria Lane that lowers slowly to the ground. In the pilot, a montage captures the house chores Mary Alice performs before committing suicide, most of which take place outdoors (tending the garden and painting wicker furniture on the front lawn). In each shot, the Cleaver home figures prominently as a poignant backdrop for her decision to kill herself, as if to suggest that her “inheritance” of this TV symbol of suburban utopia is too heavy a burden. After her suicide, the episode returns to the same crane shot to show her neighbors dressed in black and convening at the Cleaver home after Mary Alice’s funeral. Each housewife is introduced in turn as she exits her home. Thus, an exterior shot of each house is wedded to the first impression of each character and the model of historical female domesticity she represents. Flashback montages also featuring exterior shots of the homes give background information on each character as she is shown exiting her house. Gaby descends the front steps of her ostentatious Victorian, which sports a bright, yellow exterior with ornamental flourishes like intricate gables and doric columns. The brashness of the home’s design, typical of New Urbanist architecture, is meant to reflect her own tendency to flaunt her good looks and money, which, for Gaby, compensate for an unhappy marriage. Bree Van de Kamp and family are introduced entering the Cleaver home with a shot taken from the interior of the house looking out the front door. Bree’s flashback montage shows off her austere colonial house while she reupholsters furniture on its front lawn. A low-angle shot of her violently plunging a knife into the back of an old armchair makes her body and the exterior of the house tower over the camera. The exterior of the home is painted royal blue with white accents and an interrupted, slanted cornice above the front door. The stark contrast between darks and lights in the home and on its exterior connote sterility, tumultuousness, and severity. Bree’s perfectly coiffed and flipped retro hair match her home; nothing is out of place. After the funeral, the episode returns to the crane shot three more times: twice to show a return to normalcy on the street after the suicide, and

TV Suburbia and Remembering the Sitcom Set

37

once more, at the close of the episode when the four housewives gather outside the Cleaver home determined to discover the reason for Mary Alice’s suicide. Thus, identical crane shots punctuate the narrative arc of the episode, bookending the whole episode as well as marking separate narrative chapters. According to urban planning historian Dolores Hayden, this aerial view of the boomer suburb is iconic of that era in American history as well as present conceptions of the boomer-era American dream of 2.2 [white] children, station wagon, and picket fence.6 The aerial image of the boomer suburb is ubiquitous in allusions to the period in popular media. It’s also strewn throughout history books on 1950s and ’60s America and print ads from the period selling mortgages and home appliances, particularly those targeting returning GIs and their wives.7 This aerial image and the exterior view of the boomer home are wedded to this era and the television sitcom itself. For example, the credit sequence of Leave It to Beaver closes with an exterior shot of the Cleaver home. The opening credits for Father Knows Best, another iconic family sitcom (CBS, 1954–60), feature an identically composed exterior shot of the family suburban home. Later sitcoms used a similar vocabulary to parody their boomer origins, including The Munsters, Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97), All in the Family (CBS, 1968–79), and Married … with Children (Fox, 1987–97). The aerial shot of the suburban neighborhood and the exterior shot of the boomer sitcom set are part and parcel of boomer nostalgia’s iconography from the postwar era to the present day. Desperate Housewives calls on these cultural paradigms by repeatedly showcasing such shots in its cinematography and narrative. This visual vocabulary predates the twentieth century. Desperate Housewives belongs to a long history of dystopic representations of suburbia dating back to the beginnings of the suburb in the early 1800s. Suburban development attracted harsh censure from farmers in the early nineteenth century.8 From their perspective, suburbia was a failed attempt by the middle class to simulate an authentic, rural lifestyle. Concerns about suburbia producing brainwashed, conformist drones in search of a sanitized experience of the country are, indeed, as old as the suburbs themselves. They were renewed in the 1950s with the postwar exodus from American cities. Novelizations of the dystopic suburb like William H. Whyte’s Organization Man (1956) and John Keats’s Crack in the Picture Window (1956) lament the effects of suburbia upon political, racial, and cultural diversity and personal happiness. More recent iterations of this discourse include films like American Beauty (1999), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and The Stepford Wives (1975/2005). The films portray suburbia as a pastel, homogeneous, and plastic space where houses are perfectly kept and inhabitants are perverse,

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV

roboticized versions of the Andersons from Father Knows Best (CBS, 1954– 60), perhaps suggesting that the Andersons were perverse to begin with. High-key lighting, monochromatic palettes, and exaggerated, mass-produced vernacular architecture paint suburbia as hyperreal. The dystopic suburb in contemporary popular media is Frankensteinian: a misguided class and racially exclusive ambition to create a world from collective, reified memories of television suburbia.9 The dystopic suburb is so widespread a popular discourse that by the time American Beauty spun its own version in 1999, critics had grown exhausted with the trope. David Gates writes: “It’s been a dark year for suburbia … We’re way beyond boozy malaise … cheeky irony … or liberal outrage (the ‘Twilight Zone’ paradigm of jowly bigots hogging the fallout shelter). We’re starting to suspect everybody in every dream house on every Sunnyvale Circle and Meadowbrook Lane is secretly crazy.”10 Dolores Hayden’s A Field Guide to Sprawl reinforces this popular critique of the dystopic suburb, highlighting its repetition, abstraction, homogeneity, and artifice as blights upon the American landscape.The field guide is an annotated guide to realty terminology and idioms coined by developers, which are accompanied by Jim Wark’s photography.11 Wark powerfully illustrates what critics find most damning about the suburbs: identical houses arranged in clusters, small plots of land, a lack of trees and sidewalks, large uniform spaces like parking lots or big box stores, and the overly eclectic vernacular architecture characteristic of New Urbanism, which clumsily fuses French chateau, Renaissance palazzo, Classical temple, and Spanish mission.12 The aerial photography further abstracts what is already an abstract space by virtue of its uniform aesthetic. Hayden’s selection and annotation of the photographs and the Wark’s style conform to a long tradition of representing the dystopic suburb. Even if this tradition targets preexisting qualities of suburbia, it cultivates its own aesthetic that exaggerates certain features of suburbia: the abstract, the hyperreal, the robotic, the repetitious, and the identical. Desperate Housewives follows in the same aesthetic vein, yet mocks parts of the dystopic suburb. The designers of Wisteria Lane highlight the set’s fictitiousness and its very quality of studio set-ness. Production designer  Thomas A. Walsh states that they tried scouting actual suburbs as possible locations, but none were suitable because they looked too uniform and artificial.13 Wisteria Lane remains unanchored in any particular time period, neither representative of suburbs today nor quite the model of 1950s and ’60s sitcom suburbia. It is unquestionable, however, that the set bears connections to the boomer burb. In the words of series creator Marc Cherry he wanted, “something iconic—a throw-back,”14 and, “an everyplace that was neither a red state nor a blue state.”15 Cherry adds, “It’s not quite like real life. We built

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an idealized neighborhood.”16 Walsh reiterates this intention behind the design for Wisteria Lane by saying, “We were trying to be a little bit retro in terms of classic conventional America.”17 Both Cherry and Walsh go on to mention drawing inspiration from classic 1950s television shows like Father Knows Best.18 Desperate Housewives’ narrative treatment of the suburban set, its visual resonances with other dystopic representations of mid-century suburbia, and Mary Alice’s voiceovers thematize feminist memory, loss, and more specifically, television itself. The series opens with the suicide of Mary Alice and her voiceover narration in subsequent seasons becomes a defining feature of the series. Her observations on Wisteria Lane are threaded through memories of her past life and experiences. The ubiquity of her voiceovers, which punctuate each episode, guarantees that a sense of the past, memory, and even death are continually mapped onto the narrative events and physical spaces of the series. Because it is from the perspective of the afterlife, Mary Alice’s narration imparts an omniscient knowledge of the series’ narrative. She also possesses intimate knowledge of the housewives’ past lives and their present thoughts. From a screenwriting point of view, her voiceover provides a convenient narrate device. Whatever the practical efficiency of this narrative approach, however, Mary Alice becomes a large part of the series’ nostalgia and ironic tone. Mary Alice’s omnipresence makes her a mother figure for the housewives. Indeed, her suicide catalyzes the narrative events of the entire series. Her narration, through content and accompanying camera work, relates the individual stories of the housewives to each other and their individual pasts. Mary Alice’s narration entertains thoughts of what was, what is, and what could have been, contributing to the slippery sense of pastness that is a defining feature of Desperate Housewives. Granted other television shows make use of similar temporal manipulations and slippages (the soap opera is a strong example, usually drawing out plot lines to cover days and even weeks of daily programming), Desperate Housewives’ anachronicity and allusions to TV housewives of the boomer past coincide with an ambiguous treatment of the boomer sitcom suburb as an idyllic representation of the American, white middle class. The individual memories of the leading female characters and a collective remembering of the boomer past, as portrayed on television are, therefore, closely associated. Desperate Housewives fits into a pattern across contemporary depictions of the boomer housewife that make self-conscious use of television images and both invoke and construct a television past. The show treats the boomer sitcom suburb as a rubric or vocabulary that assesses current states of gender identity and idyllic images of white middle-classness, albeit its deconstruction takes place entirely within certain representational boundaries when it

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comes to race, class, and ethnicity. However, this rubric is not divorced from its past historical media contexts. Rather, the nostalgic white suburb and its attachment to the boomer sitcom are central to Desperate Housewives’ commentary on the unviability of this perfect ideal. The studio lot carries the literal and figurative palimpsestic ghosts of the boomer sitcom, linking the show at physical and thematic levels to this television tradition of conveying postwar suburbia and gender relations. This haunting of the set by past iconic boomer television sitcoms is a part of Desperate Housewives’ highly ironic and camp sensibility toward the white, middle-class, suburban American dream. The representational power of the oneric sitcom suburban home and an interest in its status as a set appear elsewhere in nostalgic American media. The film remake of the boomer sitcom Leave It to Beaver is shot in the original Cleaver house set, also on Colonial Street. The Cleaver home set is cemented in popular media as a stand-in for heteronormative family as well as outmoded classist definitions of US leisure, work, and gender. It is, at this point, an historical set that has been used in multiple nostalgic depictions of American family since the 1950s. It figures prominently in the movie poster for the Leave It to Beaver remake as an important connective device between the film, its original series, and the set of debates around changing definitions of family and home they invoke. The sitcom suburban home set as a symbol recurs in DVD menus for boomer nostalgic media. The DVD menu for the film remake of the original sitcom, The Addams Family, foregrounds a perverse, gothic version of the oneric family home.The original series and its remake center on the fish-outof-water premise of an oddball family in a generic sitcom suburb who do their best to fit into white, middle-class American life despite their macabre sense of humor and decor. The original series and the film, made three decades later, resist and queer the sitcom Cleaver suburb of the 1950s. The Addams house, the same set used in both the original and the film remake, symbolizes this queering by making the typical sitcom home uncanny.19 It features decrepit gables, peeling paint, and Victorian decor in place of the mid-century colonials and split levels that dominated new suburbia of the postwar era. In this case, the semiotic function of the set design translates from the original sitcom to the 1991 remake. Moreover, it is the same set piece, at Hollywood Center Studios in Los Angeles, that is recycled years later in the remake. Desperate Housewives’ DVD menus for seasons three and four also feature the Cleaver home, which appears both in the original Leave It to Beaver and serves as Susan’s house in Housewives. The season three DVD menu screen portrays blue skies over the house set and season four’s menu features overcast skies. Season six’s DVD menu

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screen contains an animated version of the Cleaver home on top of a hill. The recurrence of the sitcom suburban home as an abstract symbol (and in many of these cases, the DVD menu references to the Cleaver house set) suggests that the sitcom home is emblematic not only of the nostalgic discourse on suburbia we’ve been discussing, but also the television set-ness and the performance of domestic roles in the home and suburb. The house’s appearance specifically in DVD menus seems significant. While DVD menus are tangential to the main text, they perform an important discursive function as marking the narrative themes the main text addresses before the audience has chance to see anything else. The fact that the sitcom house set appears in so many ancillary texts belonging to nostalgic media suggests that it signals a specific ongoing historical debate about television representations of family and suburbia, one that places the viability of this model for happiness in question. The emphasis on the house’s status and function as a set reinforces that this depiction of contentment and home is fake.

My Universal Studio tour and narrativizing fantastic space Self-labeled fantasies of home and happiness are main themes in boomer nostalgic television and film. Emphasizing the set-ness of a set becomes one of the visual and narrative strategies nostalgic media use to cosmmunicate the idea that the boomer television image of nuclear heteronormative family was never real. In Desperate Housewives, the boomer house set is narratively linked to queering suburban white America and questioning its historical veracity. In other texts, the sitcom home is tied to similar themes. In the 2005 film remake of NBC’s 1962 original sitcom Bewitched, the boomer house set is the poignant backdrop for moments in the story when fantasy and diegetic reality blur. The original series follows Samantha in her efforts to masquerade as a suburban housewife when she’s in fact a witch. This similar fish-out-of-water premise as The Addams Family effectively queers postwar suburbia through the eyes of this proto-feminist suburban skeptic as she strives to cater to her mortal husband’s domestic expectations of her. The remake takes a different direction by making the film about the television remaking of the 1960s Bewitched, the main twist being that Isabel, the actor in the story of the film who plays Samantha, is really a witch masquerading as a Hollywood television actress playing the role of a 1960s housewife (which just so happens to mirror her own life situation). The film

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follows the production team’s struggles to remake Bewitched as well as Isabel’s budding on-screen/off-screen romance with Jack (Will Ferrell). The confusing premise of the film ensures that the blurring together of fantasy with reality becomes a recurring theme. Isabel (Nicole Kidman) fantasizes about living a mortal/normal life, much like Samantha from the original series. In reality, her own normalcy is inherently fantastic, as she possesses limitless magical powers that act as both a help and hindrance in her projects of seeking Hollywood fame (its own kind of fantasy) and a relationship with Jack. More importantly, the house set in the TV remake within the film is the locus point of the film’s climaxes. Jack and Isabel’s first date takes place on the studio set of their house for Bewitched, the remake within the remake. Jack and Isabel cavort and dance about the set, playing house (Figure 1.4). When Jack decides to accept Isabel at the end of the film, they are reunited by magically being drawn back to the studio set. The final scene shows them driving up to the front of a house in the suburbs, an exact replica of their studio home. This play between the “real” house and the TV house set raises larger questions about the role of fantasy within the original series and its remake. By showing Isabel and Darrin falling in love on a stage set built to look like the sitcom boomer house, the film implicitly reflects on the contemporary performances of domesticity and straight coupling surrounding the boomer sitcom image of family and home. This image is fantastic but popular culture finds recycling it to be a useful and therapeutic process, nevertheless.

Figure 1.4   Bewitched (2004).

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Fantastic and real worlds cross-contaminate when the television show that Jack and Isabel are making within the film begins to manifest itself in Isabel’s daily life during her off hours. During her new gig, Isabel falls for Jack. Aunt Clara from the fictional 1960s Bewitched television series magically appears in her home and casts a love hex on Darrin. When Darrin has misgivings about the relationship after Isabel tells him she’s a witch, Uncle Albert from the 1960s original magically appears. He convinces Darrin to stay in the relationship and drives him (in a magic car no less) to meet Isabel at the studio lot. Fiction thus seeps into the real world as old boomer television physically manifests in the film’s present. The recurrence of this theme reflects how the film situates itself via old television. The choice of remaking Bewitched within the film distinguishes this particular film adaptation. It has the effect of objectifying television studio set itself and treating it as a fantasy world unto its own that, on occasion, bleeds into daily life. Spigel’s Make Room for Television describes the anxieties surrounding the entrance of television into the postwar home. The fearful response to television related to its perceived effects on domestic space and routine. The book shows how popular discourse surrounding the advent of television in the home voiced a concern that TV invited the dangers of the outside world into the presumed sanctity of the home and distracted housewives from their domestic duties.20 Boomer television is therefore closely aligned with anxieties of crosscontamination between public and private, and male and female spheres. The Bewitched film exaggerates such cross-contaminations by having the boomer sitcom physically enter the real world, whose veracity, in turn, is also placed in question. By extension, the bleeding of reality (present-day Hollywood) into fiction (the Bewitched storyworld) is analogous to the relationship between the boomer past and historical present. By physically conjuring the sitcom characters in the real world, Bewitched suggests that the two eras, despite their separation in time, wrestle with enduring questions of love, domesticity, and gender. Bewitched, the film, plays with this gap between reality and fiction, and past and present by, at some points, collapsing it completely and, at others, exaggerating difference. Binaries of reality/fiction and past/present become tools for situating the present via the boomer television past. Fantasy is, at root, an alternative reality to the present or musing on the possibilities for the future.21 As such, fantasy reflects how a culture conceives itself via its historical and national past. In the case of the boomer nostalgic texts that foreground the sitcom house as a set, the thematization of fantasy construction on American television becomes their method for processing present concerns and frustrations, and confronting concerns and disillusionments with past representations of family. Bewitched frames the boomer sitcom as an iconography rooted in fantasy. That is, the boomer sitcom

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is positioned as the trace of the historical reality that was boomer America. The era itself can never be fully accessed. We can, however, look at it through the refracted images that are the boomer-era sitcom. Bewitched is obsessed with the disjoint between reality and image; its entire story surrounds Isabel’s confusions of fiction with reality, television stage sets with real sets, and the television dates she has with Darrin with the actual dates she has with Jack. By placing present reality and the boomer image in question, it also places the original sitcom in question. Boomer nostalgia repeats that the boundary between the real and the fake is fluid. This is true particularly of boomer nostalgia in set design. Yet, a paradoxical need to distinguish between reality and artifice also crops up in nostalgic media. The back and forth movement between the two theses extends to the extradiegetic, corporate framing of the historical set of Wisteria Lane itself through Universal Studio’s Tour of Colonial Street. Going on the official Universal Studio Tour ride by oneself is awkward. On a June day that is uncharacteristically swampy for Los Angeles, I wedge myself on the studio tour tram between two large families after receiving the stink-eye from sweaty, cranky parents for being bumped to the front of the line.22 My in-the-flesh experience with Colonial Street was mediated through the self-consciousness of going to an amusement park alone as the weirdo, notebook-toting loner on a summer theme park ride. A convoy of four to five tram cars inch their way along the studio path around the backlots to Jimmy Fallon’s voiceover narration of the tour, supplemented by the tour guide’s scripted antics. The tram passes by historic sound stages, Classical Hollywood-era actors’ bungalows now repurposed as administrative offices, the Psycho (1960) house, a set that can simulate a flash flood, and the backlot called Courthouse Square which appears in numerous television shows and films (including Back to the Future [1985], To Kill a Mockingbird [1962], and Gilmore Girls [WB/CW, 2000–2007]). The portion of the ride including “King Kong 360 3D!” puts the trams on a mechanized platform that bulks and tilts as a 360-degree projection of a fight between King Kong and two T-rex dinosaurs ensues around you. This immersive experience, designed by Peter Jackson, includes dinosaurs spewing “snot” and “saliva” (later identified as water) at the audience during the brawl. Toward the end of the tour, the tram and its slightly damp riders turn onto Colonial Street and the Desperate Housewives theme music plays in between snippets of dialogue from the series. As the tram passes each house, the tour guide gives information about which housewife lives there and the television families that have preceded her. Comparing my version of the ride with tourist videos of the same tour found on YouTube, some guides emphasize the history of the backlot more than others, but they all consistently stress

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that the street has been in use for a long time in television and film before its association with Desperate Housewives. The tour guides also emphasize how each home has been altered and tailored to the project of the hour. The tour guides point to various pieces of the set and distinguish between what is real and fake: the flowers are fake, the grass is real, some of the houses have real interiors that can be entered and others do not. A recognition of the lot as an ongoing site for recycling and reuse, redressing and redesigning hyper-mediated ideas of suburbia is deeply embedded in the studio tour. The tour also foregrounds another theme characterizing popular treatments of nostalgic set design: acknowledging the speciousness of the very categories of real and fake. And so, quite appropriately, this is how I experienced my first physical encounter with the set I had been studying for years: sweaty, covered in dino saliva, and sandwiched between weeping children. There is always something disappointing about meeting something or someone of historical significance in the flesh. The houses are designed to look good on screen, but not in person. In person they look small, flat, and just a little bit off. The vacant stares coming from the tram audience indicate that Colonial Street is slightly less exciting than flash floods and spitting dinosaurs, that is until the tram turns off of Wisteria Lane where it stops due to delays experienced by the tram in front of us. We therefore sit for forty-five minutes with stilted bids at conversation by the tour guide: “So did you guys also know that … .” The ride’s stall outside of Colonial Street seems a poetic end to the tour of a suburb that is modeled and remodeled after media images of an ideal suburbia that never really existed. Mid-century America and its reincarnations have always been better on television, even though, based on the studio tour and the set discourse in Desperate Housewives itself, the physical backlot and its history still have significant draw and sway over popular imaginings of what happiness looks like.

Conclusion: Industry nostalgia and the sitcom home A November 2013 issue of Perspective Magazine, the trade publication for the Art Directors Guild, closes with a piece on Forty Acres studio lot in Culver City, outside of Los Angeles. Established in 1918, the lot hosted sets for King Kong (1933), Gone with the Wind (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), Rebecca (1940), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Chinatown (1972), The Andy Griffith Show (CBS,1960–8), the pilot for Star Trek the original series (NBC, 1966–9),

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and Batman (ABC, 1966–8). The piece ends: “Hundreds of designers built wonderful sets at Forty Acres, and when it was torn down to build an industrial park in the early 1970s, we lost an important part of our history.”23 The short piece on Forty Acres is typical of the section the magazine calls “Reshoots,” in essence an obituary for sets, props, and backlots. The article illustrates how set history is a large part of the industry’s consciousness and discussion. Not only are sets used and reused as part of industry practice, but designers are highly aware of the history of the locations and set pieces they work with. Desperate Housewives’ invocations of the boomer sitcom suburb are not only part of its internal discourse on millennial identity politics, but they are part of the very sets themselves. Perhaps “haunting” is not as fit a description of the physical and aesthetic impact of boomer-era design upon contemporary sets as “infection.” The viral presence of the sitcom suburb infects contemporary television architecture and set dressing in ways that mutate and morph, but never entirely rewrite or elide their television-rooted ideological origins. This book foregrounds the material histories of everything that appears onscreen. Design languages tell stories of their own. Whether set in the 1960s or the early 2000s, these series use set design in similar ways to tell stories about intergenerational friction, gender, class, and racial struggle, divisions between home and work identities, and how television shapes all of the above. Whether reinvigorating an old studio lot or creating sets from scratch to look like something out of past, the set designs draw on boomer-era interior design and fashion. This chapter addresses the meanings an old studio lot or older set piece carry with them onto the screen. Tracing the recycled studio lot offers a different approach to television analysis in general. During the Universal Studio Tour, we passed by other iconic television and film sets that reappear across numerous texts because they still have cultural currency. Universal’s Courthouse Square serves as the town square in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Inherit the Wind (1955), Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985), and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman (CBS, 1993–8); Universal’s “Mexican Street” is used widely as a vaguely “ethnic” backdrop in Three Amigos (1986), Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Shameless (Showtime, 2011–), and Heroes (NBC, 2006–10).24 Mexican Street also comes with the advantage of being able to reproduce a flash flood. We could analyze television and film texts according to iconic studio lots and even pieces of sets that are used and reused. This would change the way we conduct television and film studies as a whole. Even as digital tool sets are able to create whole environments, these iconic sets are still in use and the physical set is far from being outmoded. Turning scholarly attention to the material histories of the design we see on screen offers a fundamentally different, industry-sensitive perspective of media.

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Notes   1 Juan Antonio Ramirez, Architecture for the Screen: A Critical Study of Set Design in Hollywood’s Golden Age (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc., 2004), 102.   2 Ibid., 102.   3 Jerry Rice, “Where the Streets Have No Shame: Series Lives on a Backlot Avenue That Includes Structures Built ‘Bonzo,’ ‘Munsters,’” Daily Variety, January 16, 2009, A7.   4 Ibid.   5 “Dressing Wisteria Lane: Costumes and Set Designs,” Disc 3, Desperate Housewives, First Complete Season DVD. Created by Marc Cherry (Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2005).   6 Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth 1820– 2000 (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 5.   7 In particular, the aerial photography of William Garnett became iconic for the dystopic suburb (D. J. Waldie, “Beautiful and Terrible: Aeriality and the Image of Suburbia,” Places Journal, February 2013, https://placesjournal.org/article/ beautiful-and-terrible-aeriality-and-the-image-of-suburbia/).   8 Ibid., 22–23.   9 Physical space, particularly domestic architecture, is often connected to the uncanny. According to Anthony Vidler, the memory of a fictional, oneric home haunts the modern experience, the house becoming an “instrument for generalized nostalgia” (Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992], 66.) Modernity’s large-scale changes, including mass urbanization and uprooting large populations from their ancestral homes, instilled a generalized sense of loss. Vidler explores the postmodern renditions of the nostalgic, collectively imagined home that is rooted in this loss. 10 David Gates, “The Way We Live Now: Bashing the Burbs,” New York Times, October 3, 1999, Section 6. 11 Dolores Hayden, A Field Guide to Sprawl (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), 86. 12 The popular discourse around the dystopic sitcom suburb on television comes back around to shape architecture itself. The architectural movement called New Urbanism brings suburban characters so maligned in popular criticism to cartoonish extremes through its postmodern mélange of various architectural vernaculars. Paradoxically, neighborhoods designed in this ostensibly flexible style often institute rigid zoning laws. Robert A. M. Stern, Andreas Duany, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk belong to this school of suburban architecture. Robert A. M. Stern worked with Caesar Pelli, Philip Johnson, Charles Moore, and a host of other esteemed architects in designing a Disney-commissioned, New Urbanist small town called Celebration, Florida (1997). Its zoning laws are notoriously stringent, containing clauses that

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV dictate what color curtains can hang in residents’ windows (Hayden, Building Suburbia, 209–216).



Duany and Plater-Zyberk designed a much less autocratic New Urbanist project at Seaside, Florida, known for its retro small town American architecture (pre-1945) and pedestrian-friendly urban planning. In a case of dizzying simulacra, Seaside served as the location for The Truman Show (1998) (Ronald Kates, “New Urbanism Meets Cinematic Fantasyland: Season, ‘The Truman Show,’ and New Utopias,” Studies in Popular Culture 23, no. 2 [2000]: 93). How ironic that a film about a man who discovers he is the star of his own reality show and that his hometown is nothing but a television studio set is shot in an actual town designed to adhere to the unsettling perfection of popular memories of the early-twentieth-century suburb and small-town America. The location is perversely mobilized in the film to question the intactness of the distilled memory of boomer television suburbia. The discourse on the dystopic boomer suburb thus extends to realworld architecture and television production design, as well as film and TV narratives.

13 Connie Adair, “The Houses of Wisteria Lane: When Creating Desperate Housewives’ Homes, Designer Tom Walsh Left Nothing to Chance,” Calgary Herald, May 28, 2006. 14 “Dressing Wisteria Lane.” 15 Jennifer Armstrong, “Road Trip,” Entertainment Weekly, May 19, 2006, 44. 16 Ibid. 17 Rice, “Where the Streets Have No Shame.” 18 Ibid. 19 “The Addams Family (1964–1966)” and “The Addams Family (1991),” www.imdb.com. 20 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for Television (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2–3. 21 Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard and Robert Scholes. Originally published as Introduction a la literature fantastiques by Editions de Seuil, 1973 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 33–38. 22 Alex Bevan, Universal Studio Tour, June 26, 2014. 23 “Reshoots,” Perspective, November–December (2013): 80. 24 “The Studio Tour,” 2015, www.thestudiotour.com.

2 Office Sets and Nostalgic Modernism in the TV Workplace

Introduction: Differences at work The suburban homestead is not the only TV set associated with “happiness.” Heteronormative family, middle-classness, and boomer nostalgia are also inscribed in spaces where families supposedly do not belong: the modernist corporate office. As suburbs expanded in reality and on American television, the corporate office saw similar transformations with the advent of postwar Fordism and the early impact of digital technology and ways of organizing and managing data.1 Added to this, women exited the workplace in droves after the war and then steadily filtered back into offices as second-wave feminism gained popularity.2 These concurrent historical transformations were also mediated and shaped by television’s images of the workplace, particularly in the late 1960s when workplace sitcoms gained prominence. This chapter turns to Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006–10) with a focus on the set design of its office spaces. While its set is not the product of recycling in the same ways that the boomer sitcom was in the last chapter, Ugly Betty’s design strategy recycles and transforms the aesthetic conventions from boomer-era modernism to narrate how characters relate to home and work life. ABC’s Ugly Betty is an hour-long network dramady about a vintageobsessed Latina from Queens who works as an administrative assistant at a New York fashion magazine to realize her dream of becoming an editor. The show is about her quirky family, failed relationships, and the class-, genderand race-based discrimination she faces at the Mode fashion magazine, which she mostly experiences through racially coded comments on her loud, “out there” fashion. In Ugly Betty, the sets have as much to say about Betty’s relationship to her predominantly white, classist environment as the narrative

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does. Later chapters consider the resistant meanings of Betty’s use of midcentury vintage clothing. This chapter considers how the set design of her office space engages the series-long polemic around issues of “difference” in the hegemonically white and patriarchal workplace. It also opens this interpretation up to other television texts that use corporate modernism to foreground contemporary neoliberal discourses around multiculturalism and diversity in the workplace. In Ugly Betty, the high-modernism of the set clashes both visually and economically with Betty’s brash use of vintage from the same period. The set uses expensive vintage pieces from trusted vendors while Betty’s clothes are mostly second-hand thrift store purchases. Setting the office in the context of larger art historical and architectural movements expands upon the racial, ethnic, and class conflicts between Betty and her work environment as the series plays this out using both aesthetic and narrative languages. Ugly Betty’s office set is rooted in mid-century modernism. I trace the office set’s look back to its era of origin and the historical debates that informed its design. I also pay attention to specific set pieces and the industry background of the set as a whole by interviewing various designers affiliated with Ugly Betty. Few media scholars look at how television set at this level of detail and by tracing aesthetic histories associated with specific styles of interior design and architecture. This level of granularity is needed to parse out Ugly Betty’s design narrative and to collect its various levels of meaning in how the series tells its story through design. It’s also necessary in order to appreciate how design is the product of daily, pragmatic decisions centered on production schedules and the constraints of physical space. The chapter traces the retro modernist office across multiple contemporary television texts, in which corporate modernism becomes just as iconic as the boomer suburb in signaling a certain set of debates around class, race, gender, and work and leisure. Modernism and vintage chic are the two primary aesthetic strains in Ugly Betty’s set and costume design, and they also signpost historically situated ideologies around individualism, gender, and race in the corporate workplace, private and public spaces, and identities. The same binary that pits mid-century modernism against counterculture, vintage, and individualism appears in NBC’s Aquarius. The network’s answer to cable period dramas, Aquarius, is a crime investigation drama set against the cultural backdrop of 1967 and culminating in the 1969 Charles Manson murders. Aquarius and Ugly Betty’s quotations of modernism show how boomer nostalgia’s aesthetic conventions carry different gendered associations to communicate certain messages about the history of “difference” in the workplace. The look of television has been historically saturated with modernism from its beginning, as Lynn Spigel’s TV by Design discusses. I argue that modernism constitutes a visual language from the boomer era to the present

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for a now seventy-year-old discourse on identity at work, at home, and the interrelationship between the two. Modernism has never completely gone away, but rather, the expression and reworking of its principles have shifted with various historical and cultural contexts. At television’s nascent stages, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, modernism was strongly associated with the sociocultural transformations that television and other technologies proffered at that time.3 It was also strongly associated with negotiating politics of difference: gender, racial, class, and political4 modernism continues to carry these popular associations through to the contemporary period. In addition, it’s no coincidence that the 1950s is a significant historical origin point of the digital revolution. Modernism on television has and continues to serve as a discursive vocabulary for navigating the digital transition in the most prolonged version of its history, from the birthplace of early computers and their impact in the workplace, to the contemporary digital environment.

What the modernist office set says about fantasies of self and home In Ugly Betty, the set design offers another connection to boomer retro that extends and elaborates upon the show’s politics. The show uses modernism’s attachments to debates on whiteness, patriarchy, good taste, and consumer culture as a kind of foil for Betty’s fashion, which the show codes as low brow and feminine. The office set, in which most of Betty’s experiences with discrimination take place, plays on boomer-era modernism not necessarily as an object of longing and desire, but to highlight Betty’s gender, race, and ethnicity. Furthermore, modernism is used to signal experiences of belonging and not belonging. At first glance, Mode’s office space looks more like the interior of a Stanley Kubrick spaceship than a Manhattan workplace (Figure 2.1). The original design by Mark Worthington was modeled after Apple’s iPod. Worthington wanted a minimalist, futurist aesthetic with clean lines.5 Others have compared the set to a 1960s game show or Austin Powers (1997).6 Mode’s color palette is dominated by white with orange accents. Almost all lines are rounded or curved, giving it a flying-saucer look. The set is governed by a fluidity of both vision and movement. Almost all of its offices have at least one glass wall so that sight lines remain open. For example, from the editor’s office, one can look straight across the writers’ desks to the conference room at the opposite end of the floor. This integrates Ugly Betty  ’s theme of image manufacturing into the very design and layout of the office. Everyone is always on display. Their images are in perpetual states of hypervisibility and becoming.

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Figure 2.1   “How Betty Got Her Grieve [sic] Back,” September 27, 2007, Ugly Betty. The Mode set is “activated” through various cinematographic, editing, and blocking techniques. Fluidity, movement, hypervisibility, and media saturation are thematized through cinematographic choices like wide-angle lenses, which frequent scenes focusing on Betty’s reactions. The wide-angle lens emphasizes not only the general self-reflexivity and camp aspects of Ugly Betty, but also the hypervisible and curvilinear space of the set. Shot-reverse shot sequences that take place across multiple rooms reinforce Mode’s sight lines. When characters are not surveilling the space around them, they move rapidly through the set and are followed by steady-cam shots that exaggerate the fluidity of the space. Flow characterizes this space, which affords the easy visual and physical access of almost everyone in the office to each other as the curves of one room bleed into the next. Complementing these themes of hypermobility and hypervisibility, the set is infused with constant media coverage of itself, Mode Magazine. The two private offices belong to Daniel and Wilhelmina, the magazine’s leading editors. Daniel and Wilhelmina’s offices are constantly tuned into fashion news television shows, which are viewed on plasma screens that blend into walls. For example, when Sofia (Salma Hayek) rejects Daniel’s proposal, he cannot escape fashion television and magazine coverage of the humiliation (“Sofia’s Choice,” January 11, 2007). Not only is his broken heart on display for prying eyes at work, but it is also the subject of all the media consumed by the same people in that space. Wilhelmina’s ensembles are symbiotic with the interior design. At times, when she is most powerful in the series and closest to her ultimate goal of controlling the Mode Magazine, her clothes

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echo the color palette of the set. For example, at the beginning of season three (“The Manhattan Project,” September 25, 2008), Daniel goes missing and Wilhelmina takes over editing the magazine. She and her assistant enter the space in matching black and white ensembles. During Daniel’s absence, she lowered the temperature of the office to her liking, which is as frigid as her demeanor. All the orange color accents of the set are erased and the lights dimmed to reflect this more somber period at Mode. In other words, the high-fashion individuals who “belong” in this industry look like they belong in the Mode set. In contrast, Betty’s clashing, colorful outfits and vintage items stand in opposition to the uniformity, minimalism, and sparseness of the set and Wilhelmina’s austere look. Mode is strikingly dissimilar to Betty’s home, which embraces warm colors, clutter, knick-knacks, and souvenirs from Mexico and Queens. Betty and her Queens home stand in direct violation of all tenets of International Style modernism, which stresses functionality, sparse ornamentation, consistency, regularity, and universality or the belief that these values epitomize “good design” for everyone. The Mode set and its quotation of the mid-century modernist office are an extension of the magazine’s function and ideology, which is to reproduce standards of hegemonic beauty. The spatial and visual politics of the Mode office directly contrast with Betty’s excessive vintage ensembles. The Mode set, therefore, visually diagrams the narrative themes in the world of fashion, which include heightened visibility, reflexivity, extreme insulation, and beauty culture and self-representation. Modernism has been a dominant presence in design and architecture since the 1930s, but its various iterations between then and now reflect transformations in technology and the relationship between human vision and space. Mode partly falls into the masculine-coded discourse of modernism, which includes rational organization, technological progress, and visual and informational transparency. Betty’s fashion acts as a foil to this rubric: it is female coded, irrational, decorative, and excessive. It is located at once in the present and the past. It is bodily and curvaceous. Betty’s character and her fashion, however, mostly exist in tension with the retro modernism of Mode, where information and gossip circulate freely and values are assigned based on surface appeal only (a different kind of modernist transparency). Retro design and its current appropriations in fashion and architecture are polysemous media for working through present questions of ethnic and racial identity, commercial definitions of beauty and beauty culture, and individualism and collectivism within increasingly mediasaturated environments. This popular framing of modernism, which signals a certain set of cultural debates around “difference” and “identity,” is not new to television. In fact, Lynn Spigel has shown how modernism in domestic architecture is central to what

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television symbolized in mid-century America in terms of how it re-scripted domestic space and definitions of home and work.7 Television and architecture’s coterminous popularization of modernism began with The Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 exhibit on Mies van der Rohe.8 The International Style emerged from Germany’s Bauhaus school of architecture and design, which stresses surface over volume and function over form. According to this style, a building exterior should reflect its inner structure and avoid ornamentation at all costs. The possibilities of steel-reinforced concrete eliminate load-bearing walls, thus freeing the façade. Mies van der Rohe and other architects in this school prize minimalism and transparency of design over excess and ornament. The bandwindow (one continuous window that wraps around a building) and regularly placed steel studs replace cornices, molding, and sculpture. The Mode office follows in this tradition of International Style modernism.9 It is uniformly white with the exception of carefully placed orange accents. It uses glass and the open-floor plan to maximize flow and visibility. Apart from the furniture, the architecture includes little embellishment. Le Corbusier’s publication of Towards a New Architecture in 1923 (which became available in English in 1927) was a key voice in the widespread adoption of the International Style in America. Le Corbusier posits a machine-inspired, streamlined aesthetic that adapts patterns and motifs from automobiles and factory machinery to architecture and interior design.10 Contrary to the International Style’s attitude toward embellishment, streamlining took on an almost ornamental form in the tail fin cars of the 1960s, where it serves more aesthetic than functional purposes. Le Corbusier’s machine aesthetic also appears in industrial design in the 1950s and ’60s home. Streamlining infuses all parts of domestic decor in the postwar period, informing the shape and look of refrigerators, toasters, cars, furniture, shoes, and architecture. That said, the average 1950s home would realistically have had a combination of both modern and older stylistic traditions.11 So a modernist open-floor plan may have coexisted with plush, Victorian-style chairs. Mode’s openness and streamlined forms reference mid-century modernism. Furthermore, the narrative themes of defining good and bad taste make these quotations more pointed than random stylistic choices. The historical and cultural resonances of modernism present Mode as the engineer of good taste and Betty, as both a political and aesthetic mismatch. Ugly Betty  ’s office also quotes mid-century modernism through its fluid, streamlined set dressings. The set incorporates two of Arne Jacobsen’s chairs, the Egg chair, and the Swan chair (1958). Jacobsen was a Danish interior designer and architect who worked in the 1950s and ’60s at the height of the International Style. His designs later had great impacts on Ikea’s aesthetic and philosophy of bringing good design to the middle and working class. Jacobsen’s designs possess curved, sweeping

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lines and plain surfaces. The candy-colored chairs (a bright lime green and tangerine orange version appear on the Ugly Betty set) are in keeping with the color strategy of Mode’s production design, which employs bright, psychedelic, accent colors that punctuate the white, blank, minimalist architecture. The set uses Tulip chairs designed by Eero Saarinen, who also comes out of the same Scandinavian, mid-century, modernist movement and employs the same elements of fluidity and color accents. Two of the most attentiongrabbing pieces on the set are designs by Verner Panton (also from Denmark). One is a pair of wall elements from the Visonia exhibit (1967) and the other is an orange Panton chair, which appears in the conference room en masse. The wall elements are red foam chairs that face each other. The seat of the chair sweeps upwards into a dramatic swirl before meeting the ceiling. They are distinctive pieces, particularly when set against the white space of Mode. The Panton chair is one piece of molded plastic whose seat folds back onto itself before meeting the floor. Panton’s work is from the end of the boomer era and his work is heavily influenced by psychedelia and the space-age futuristic designs of the 1960s. Like Saarinen and Jacobsen, he worked primarily with molded plastic and foam, but also dabbled in inflatable furniture. The bright colors, organic shapes, and curved lines of his furniture are in keeping with the late modernism of the 1960s and provide an important transition from high-modernism into the psychedelic designs of the 1970s. The last modernist influence in Mode’s production design is Dieter Rams, the German industrial designer whose work from the 1950s and ’60s is the primary inspiration for Apple’s aesthetic of the 1990s and 2000s.12 Rams believed that good design means minimalist ornament, functionality, transparency, and plain surfaces. His industrial design for radios, shelving, calculators, and other items is startlingly similar to Apple’s design for iPhones, computers, and accessories. His influence appears in Mode’s whiteness, simple lines, and visual and functional transparency. The set itself is not consciously retro because it looks so contemporary. This is because the Mode set is the product of a wider resurgence of mid-century modernism in architecture and design of the 2000s and 2010s.

The politics of taste in television production design’s reinventions of modernism High-modernism is rooted in historically specific political ideologies. Penny Sparke’s As Long as It ’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste analyzes modernism’s gender associations from the Victorian to postwar periods in America and Britain.

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She traces this discourse back to an historical series of cultural responses beginning with the impact of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The midnineteenth-century proliferation of mass-production and factories caused a separation of spheres or the division of domestic labor from masculine-coded, blue- and white-collar labor. These massive shifts spawned the Victorian “cult of domesticity” or the belief that the housewife and home stood for innocence, nature, sanctity, morality, and spirituality in the face of an inevitable transition to mass-production and consumption culture. In this context, home and femininity stood for what was not mass-produced: craftsmanship, memory, and tradition. According to Sparke’s history, home and femininity thus became associated with comfort, frills, upholstery, and rich textiles.13 Sparke argues that the first attack on this feminine sensibility in home decor and fashion came from nineteenth-century art schools and the first museums in Britain and America, whose purpose was to educate people in good design.14 Excess fabric, gilding, cut crystal, and tasseled lampshades were all bad objects according to this school of thought. From the late nineteenth century onwards, scientific efficiency reordered the home as well as the factory, in part, due to the influence of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his published studies on workflow, labor management, and productivity. Perhaps Catherine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (1841), a how-to book on the correct layout of domestic space, best represents early versions of this intrusion of masculine-coded advice into feminine space.15 Sparke argues that these attacks and the enormous pressure to modernize both home and work spaces jeopardized women’s voices in the home and the expression of their individual tastes and preferences. Academic critics also contributed to weeding out Victorian frills and fluff. In 1939, Clement Greenberg associated kitsch with the threat of fascism. He saw kitsch as an autocratic tool for brainwashing the masses.16 Russell Lynes published an infamous article in Harper’s Magazine in 1949 that clearly laid out the differences between low-brow, middle-brow and high-brow tastes, and equated low art with excess and entertainment value without substance.17 However, Sparke shows there were occasional voices of dissent. The Art Deco movement of the 1920s and ’30s and Art Nouveau of the late nineteenth century heralded the return of ornament to design. The flowing lines and nature themes of Art Nouveau also experienced a revival in the late 1960s, mostly in response to the confining tenets of modernism.18 Based on this history, Ugly Betty’s use of boomer-era modernism has gendered underpinnings that resonate with the series’ narrative, which focuses on feminist struggles within a patriarchal institution. Betty’s frills and mismatched ensembles and the reactions they receive at Mode are progeny of this longer historical discourse that opposes ornament and good design.

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Definitions of bad/feminine and good/masculine taste in interior design and architecture are always intertwined and historically co-determinative. Reinhold Martin traces the mid-century rise of what Martin calls the “organizational complex,” a grid-based form of architecture and interior design that represented changing attitudes toward social organization, corporate identity, and the relationship between the individual and the collective.19 After the Second World War, the office environment was redesigned to foster a more intimate connection between the individual and the corporation. This change was meant to ease the reintegration of returning soldiers into peacetime society. The organizational complex diverged from a Taylorite framework by instilling the feeling of a corporate family. The physical and cognitive experiences of the office space were meant to be flowing, flexible, and transparent. Buildings were meant to create continuities among departments and between the interior and exterior.20 Companies were divided into harmonious, symbiotic departments, which demanded a balance between distinguishing the individual from others and integrating him or her into the brand or corporate whole. This architectural shift was also echoed in the office use of psychological personality testing for determining employee placements in new corporate organization.21 Martin links these methods of corporate management and evaluation to the coinciding birth of computer technology, both of which reflect an emerging discourse on individualism, community, and data flow.22 IBM buildings from the 1960s reflect the organizational complex and its principles of information flow and transparency. Martin claims that these principles originate in early cybernetics theory, which studied the structural parallels among the human nervous system, data flow, and intra-office communication. The introduction of cybernetics into office organization offered not only a new corporate dynamic, but a new symbiosis among architecture, digital technology, and the body.23 Similar principles can be found in Ugly Betty ’s Mode office. By virtue of its retro modernism, the set invokes the organizational complex. Mode favors open sight lines, mobility, and a hyper-intercommunication between departments through the rampant spread of rumors. Martin links modernism to television and the reconceptions of information flow, individualism, and collectivity that were part of its emergence.24 He writes, “In the new landscape, architecture becomes one among many interchangeable media, all of which receive and transmit organizational patterns.”25 Television enters the home around the same time that nascent digitality (in the form of the computer) re-scripts attitudes toward corporate hierarchy and data flow. Architecture reflects and informs technologically and socially determined understandings of visuality and cognition. For Martin, architecture, corporate organization, computer technology, and television are all a part of the same mid-century discourse. This discursive

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shift also informs reorganizations of the family home, according to Martin, which adopt the open-floor plan and extend ideas of intra-organizational communication within the family. The organizational complex, thus, originates in a fundamental shift in people’s relationship to screen technologies. In this sense, the language of modernism shaped and was shaped by how baby boomers negotiated new media. Contemporary television invokes the same language of modernism at a historical moment when people’s relationships to space, social activity, TV, and other screen technologies are dramatically changing. Ugly Betty’s narrative themes of image-manufacture and media make this connection even more compelling. Like other elements of boomer visual culture studied in this book, boomer-era modernism becomes an analytical and representational tool for externalizing technological and social change in national history. In this specific case, modernism acts as a placeholder for hegemonic class, gender, racial, and ethnic homogeneity on TV as Betty struggles against both her physical and ideological environment. Contemporary architecture extends the organizational complex that Martin historicizes. It shares modularity, simultaneity, controlled entropy, and neoliberal choice in common with the mid-century discourse. One major difference, however, is that current design prefers technology to be invisible. For example, flat screen televisions are meant to blend into walls, creating the feeling that media is one with the physicality of the home. In contrast, Eliot Noyes’s designs for IBM’s offices in the 1960s placed early computers in almost temple-like architectural settings, where the machine dominated the center of a completely white room located at the heart of the building. The computer was positioned as monolithic and inscrutable, whereas the aim in contemporary architecture is for technology to be unnoticeable and in such complete symbiosis with us that it acts as a secondary, internal nervous system.26 This is certainly present in the design for Mode, where image-manufacture is a product of the set itself as well as the people in it. The set becomes the ultimate image-making machine in the show by framing and organizing people’s interactions. In the set, the material technologies of image reproduction, such as the computer, the television, the camera, and the printing press, are entirely erased. Martin’s history provides an important key for relating Mode to mid-century modernism, especially in terms of how the organizational complex positions the individual and the collective via technology. If the set architecture in Ugly Betty and its historical origins stress freedom of movement, data flow, and a symbiosis between individual and corporation, this makes Betty’s struggle to assimilate all the more pronounced. In the context of Sparke and Martin’s argument, Betty’s fashion and its relationship to Mode’s space have very gendered messages that go back to the origins of modernism, digitality, and

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television. Betty’s mobilization of bad taste, kitschy colors, and loud patterns align her with female-coded design traditions of excess that descend from the Victorian “cult of domesticity.” Loud colors and clashing patterns are two of the design tendencies that were coded as feminine and thus came under attack by modernists from the Victorian era onwards. However, the use of color in her Queens home is also associated with a feminine counter-movement to modernist teachings in the 1950s, which came in the form of two-toned cars and appliances.27 Betty calls on this tradition and its feminist underpinnings when she provocatively combines a 1950s-style skirt with a blouse from the 1980s and enters the modern, impeccable, white space of Mode.28

“Bad taste” and gender identity in the corporate modernist set The nostalgia in Betty’s outfits contrasts her appearance with the modernist production design. This is most explicit when Betty’s ugliness becomes too much for her environment to handle (“After Hours,” October 5, 2006). In “After Hours,” she is assigned to review a new Manhattan hotel. Betty enters the lobby to check in and, asked to wait, she sits in a modernist chair consisting of a clear, plastic orb with a narrow rectangular opening on one side, all of which balances on a small pedestal. As she nestles into the chair through the small aperture, it falls off its stand and rolls across the lobby floor with Betty inside. Betty’s class, ethnic, and gendered conspicuousness are reiterated throughout the series and sometimes represented with this degree of literalness. Even when she rises to the height of her success, she is still unique and visually distinctive from her coworkers and their office space. One of the strongest examples of Betty’s antagonistic relationship with boomer modernism bookends one of the last seasons when her braces are removed inside the Guggenheim Museum, an iconic example of modernism designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1959 (“Million Dollar Smile,” March 24, 2010). The museum is composed of stacked, concrete rings that gradually become larger toward the top of the building. The gallery is organized along a spiral staircase that lines the interior of the main building, forming a conical void at its center. As one descends through the gallery (visitors are supposed to take an elevator to the top and follow the spiral staircase downward), views of fellow patrons on the other side of the staircase become as much a part of the experience as the art itself. The Guggenheim is a highly collective, communicative, and visual space. It is modern in its modularity,

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transparency, minimal ornamentation, and streamlined form, but it also very organic, the shape of the building itself resembling the spiral of a seashell. Betty goes to the Guggenheim because she schedules a photoshoot of the million-dollar bra on display at the museum’s vintage undergarment exhibit. She enters the central void of the spiral at the ground level. In what amounts to some very unfortunately timing, her braces set off the metal detector at the same time Betty screams her friend’s nickname across the gallery, “A-bomb.” In response, security throws her to the ground and she hits her head, beginning a dream sequence of an alternative reality where Betty never had braces because she was born with perfect teeth. In this parallel universe, Betty is pretty and, corrupted by vanity and ambition, becomes Wilhelmina’s protégé instead of Daniel’s. Betty is mean and cold-hearted, leaving countless broken hearts, family relationships, and good friendships in the wake of her climb to the top. Betty recovers consciousness on the floor of the Guggenheim, newly appreciative of her “ugliness.” Later on in the episode, while managing the photoshoot, she mistakenly thinks that Wilhelmina has stolen the million-dollar bra and is smuggling it out of the museum underneath her dress. She spots Willy descending the spiral staircase and the next sequence follows Betty as she runs down the gallery of the Guggenheim while keeping Wilhelmina in sight on the other side of the spiral ramp. The sequence emphasizes Wilhelmina’s comfort with navigating the museum as she saunters downward in contrast to Betty’s mad scramble to catch up with her. Betty closes in and tears Wilhelmina’s shirt off, only to discover that she does not have the bra. Backing up in horror at publicly disrobing her superior, Betty collides into the actual million-dollar bra behind her. Her braces adhere to the bra and Betty must have the braces removed at the gallery in order to save the prized undergarment. The episode ends with one of the most anticipated events of the series, the moment when Betty removes her braces. The Guggenheim, as an emblem of high-modernism and good taste, is a fitting symbolic venue for this highly significant and final phase of her transformation from geekdom to gorgeous. The episode’s cinematography takes full advantage of the Guggenheim’s visual and spatial dynamics, placing characters that are in conflict with each other on opposite sides of the museum’s spiral-shaped ramp. Betty’s encounter with the physicality of the museum itself is aggressive, from being wrestled to the lobby floor and chasing down nemeses, to literally being entangled in art before her final transformation. Her fantasy of an alternative life is an extension of the sleek, modern, and fashionable space of the museum and the high-brow art patrons in it, but it is a fantasy that she ultimately weighs against the “old Betty.” In the end, she retains parts of both personae. The removal of the braces is a step in the direction of the white minimalism of the Mode office and the Guggenheim.

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But Betty symbolically rejects this other life story, represented here through mid-century modernism and Betty’s parable-like dream, by returning to her Queens home at the end of the episode to celebrate her new smile with her family. The Guggenheim episode is a succinct summary of Betty’s relationship to boomer modernism in production design. Ugly Betty’s wacky fashion sits in conflict with the tenets of modernism, which hold that good design and beauty should be universal, homogeneous, and non-ornamental. These languages historically carry messages of either conforming to or resisting the hegemony of white, middle-class, straight patriarchy. They are used here to tell a different story of assimilation, diaspora, the arbitrary assignment of value to taste cultures, and counter-beauty.

The industry background of reinventing the boomer years There is a strong presence of retro modernism in contemporary design, but retro modernism is not necessarily thought of as “retro” by designers; it’s just in keeping with millennial trends. Because its set and costume design are progressive and trendy, Ugly Betty’s form of nostalgia is implicit. Because present design is an extension of the organizational complex and retro modernism is so deeply embedded in current trends, the show’s nostalgia goes largely unlabeled. The set decorator, Archie D’Amico, was clear about crediting Mark Worthington for establishing the central design approach for the series in the pilot episode. The Mode scenes for the pilot were originally shot at the Woolworth Building in New York City, but the set was moved to Los Angeles for the first and second seasons, then returned to New York for the third and fourth seasons because of tax exemptions. Archie comes from a background in painting from Miami University. He then worked in advertising and designing windows for Neiman Marcus. This job trained his eye for working in color, space, and depth, which translated well to television set dressing. For Ugly Betty, D’Amico worked with various vendors in the Los Angeles area (like Design Within Reach, Kartell, and Ikea) to procure pieces for the office and home sets. In our interview, he shed light on how stressful television production schedules can be. His process in Ugly Betty would be to collect images based on reading the script and he then had seven minutes with Mark Worthington at the end of the day during which they decided on a few images. He then procured items based on that conversation.29 The modernist aesthetic was already established by the time that D’Amico came to the project, yet it was a clear and consistent language the series used throughout and part

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of D’Amico’s job was to protect this consistency, keep items organized and inventoried, and, most importantly, remain within budget. Mark Worthington had, according to D’Amico, a clear idea of what he wanted and a keen eye for architectural trends.30 Especially in a project lasting multiple seasons, it becomes very important to maintain a consistent aesthetic across episodes, unless an aesthetic shift is included purposely to reflect narrative changes. The crossover between cutting-edge architecture, interior design, and television set design is not new. Lynn Spigel writes about how television worked to familiarize a postwar American public with the tenets of modernism by thematizing modern design in its narrative themes and art direction.31 Set design from the boomer era began an ongoing tradition of both mocking and exploring modernist interior design and architecture. The strongest expressions of this discourse are found in series that spoof the corporate modernist office space like Get Smart (CBS, 1965–70) and Batman (ABC, 1966–8). For example the credit sequence for Get Smart, a television parody of James Bond films, follows the protagonist secret agent as he wrestles with the high-security doors to his high-tech, modernist, underground workplace, characterized by smooth unadorned surfaces and muted colors. Get Smart clearly apes the high-modernism so prominently featured in James Bond films from the 1950s and 1960s, exploring the fundamental ineffectiveness and even inhumanity of modernist design. Batman carries on a similar dialogue with modernist art and architecture, as Lynn Spigel observes, in storylines that feature the Joker as dangerously dabbling in pop art and its iconic comic book blurbs that annotate fight scenes.32 I would argue that Batman’s cave also problematizes the complexities of how humans relate or fail to relate fully to modernism. The batcave is high-modernist by design: it’s filled with high-tech gadgetry, smooth, unadorned metal surfaces, carefully distributed red color accents, and the batmobile itself epitomizes the streamlined aesthetic of the postwar era. However, the cave’s central purpose is clandestine, thus contradicting the central tenets of modernist transparency that form should follow function. Lynn Spigel’s TV by Design discusses the convergence of modernist art and postwar television, however, I argue this dialogue between set design and modernism, particularly the modernist office set, continues in boomer nostalgic media like Aquarius, Ugly Betty, and Mad Men. If modernism is far from dead in art and architecture, then television is far from being done with it. This crossover between architecture and television intensifies in a digital age where computer-imaging skills are becoming highly valued in television production design. Television and film are increasingly seeking out architects to join art departments because of their construction and engineering backgrounds as well as their experience in AutoCAD, a digital drafting program.33 Corporate interior design was a booming field until the

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recession of 2007. Since then, architects have been transitioning to television and film. In recent years, television and film production design have been in closer dialogue with contemporary architecture and interior design than before. Many designers prefer to keep one foot in each camp, alternating work between architecture and set design.34 The overlap between workers in architecture and production design result in television sets with trending architectural aesthetics like Worthington’s. Worthington’s studio was filled with books on contemporary corporate architecture and vaguely resembled the Mode office space itself.35 The set for Mode was so highly acclaimed that Interior Design, a respected trade magazine, wrote an article on Worthington. The Mode set nurtured a strong dialogue with contemporary modern architecture, attracting substantial attention from architecture and interior design communities. Worthington’s invitation confirms just how innovative the Mode set is. It also reiterates the fruitful exchange between architecture and television set design. In terms of its context in television production design, Mode is indicative of a greater trend in network and cable television to improve production design in order to compete with premiere channels like HBO and Showtime, as well as movies and Broadway. The connections between architecture and set design are also, no doubt, linked to the US economic recession of 2008 in addition to the progressiveness of television production design within the context of the art world at large.36 Production design for television attracts increasing attention by wider design communities and is placed on equal footing with art, theatre, film, and architecture. Retro modernism in architecture and production design is not limited to the nostalgic longing for mid-century architecture. Rather, it is a language so in vogue in the millennial era that it barely qualifies as retro. The historical trajectory of modernism in architecture and television production design is less a story of stops and starts, but more an ongoing narrative theme that reexamines, recycles, and reinvents itself to shape haptic experiences of the corporation, the community, individualism, and difference.37 Mid-century modernism in set design foregrounds and advances narratives themes of image-making and image-consumption. Modern architecture has historically coincided with large-scale transformations in people’s relationships to screen technologies, the International Style, and the organizational complex emerging when screen technologies began to dramatically transform the home and work environment. Ugly Betty’s modernism falls into this longer tradition of modern architecture negotiating and processing changes in the relationship between media (specifically television) and society. Other millennial television series rely on mid-century modernism to align themselves with “quality” programming and contemporary architecture,

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and forward a nostalgic rhetoric that questions the political ideologies of both the present and the boomer past. NBC’s Aquarius centers on detective Hodiak (David Duchovny) as he pursues Charles Manson’s escalating criminal activity between 1967 and 1969’s infamous murders. NBC’s bid at a quality show like Mad Men, Aquarius spared no expense on production design in hiring architect Carlos Barbosa as production designer. In addition to his own architectural practice, Barbosa had already worked in film and television, heading the designs for 24 (Fox, 2001–10), Magic City (Starz, 2012–13) and Studio 60 (NBC, 2006–07) before coming to NBC. When I interviewed him during the series’ pre-production, Barbosa said he had a great degree of autonomy in Aquarius. While some productions (usually film) had more directorial intervention in the design process, television has multiple directors who work in concert, thus usually leaving the production designer greater independence. Having worked on period pieces in the past, he commented that what distinguishes designing for a series set in a different era is that the designer can “play” within a prescribed set of rules, as if learning a foreign language.38 The pronounced nostalgia for the 1960s in production design is tantamount to a trend, according to Barbosa, much like “mafia or vampires.” The period is aesthetically “powerful” since the 1950s and ’60s marked a dramatic shift in the way that everyday objects looked.39 When I observed an affinity for Richard Neutra (a Californian prominent modernist architect) in his own work, Barbosa argued that there was a “common consciousness” bridging Neutra and his work, but not a common style since every project is different.40 This does not discount, however, the fact that the reinvention of modernism is a theme in his architecture and production design. Upon further reflection about boomer nostalgia in contemporary popular culture, Barbosa entertained how new technologies in architecture might be influencing trending retro modernism. He expressed a concern about the decline in craftspersonship with the introduction of digital technology to design. For a television production designer, the appeal of recreating the 1960s is that the aesthetic is already there, in wholesale form, waiting to be cut and pasted.41 This book argues that there’s more at hand than copying and pasting when it comes to designing a period series. However, Barbosa’s observation gives me pause. During fieldwork, I also happened to meet the head research librarian of the American Art Directors Guild, Rosemarie Knopka. She states that in addition to maintaining the collection which houses books and archival materials, part of her job is to be a first port of call for art directors doing initial research during pre-visualization (the design process of visualizing and planning scenes before shooting them using animated or physical models, storyboards, sketches, and a range of other media).42 An art director will be

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designing a series set in the 1960s Los Angeles, for example, and email the library asking for a collection of pertinent images. She composites an idea board collating the images she selects for the art director from library sources. Contrary to hierarchical notions of authorship that privilege above-the-line creators, someone as seemingly remote from the television text as the Art Directors Guild’s librarian takes quite a decisive hand in shaping the look for entire film or television show. Not only does this illustrate how many hands collaborate on the design and, therefore, story of a media text, but it also suggests that period pieces, in particular, might lend themselves to digitality, which scans, prints, copies, and composites in such a way that can be emailed and re-emailed to whomever wants an idea board for 1960s Los Angeles. Perhaps the digital tools at our disposal endear us to past aesthetics that have more pronounced cohesion and reproducibility. In touring Aquarius’s art department and the set while it was in construction, I saw the idea boards created for the series, organized under categories like “police stations” and “graphics.” An idea board is a term used in design practices for creating, collecting, and arranging images usually (on a pin board or poster) of past design and artistic precedents and sources of inspiration that will inform the project. Barbosa walked me through Stage 6 at Paramount where the Manson home and police station were being built. What struck me during this walkthrough was that these were buildings, not sets, the main differences being faux marble finishing and an absence of real plumbing, etc. Walls are also, quite importantly, moveable. However, Barbosa clearly designed the spaces for the blocking and flow of handheld cameras.43 The increasing conflation of architecture with TV set design, the latter of which is moving farther away from theater set design at this point, is partly due to the prominence of single-camera series in place of the multi-camera soap or sitcom. The single camera has allowed sets to become more like real enclosed architectural spaces and has thus attracted and sought out the integration of outside architects into production design. Barbosa reinforces this, saying that he has met production designers with all kinds of backgrounds including dancers, stage set designers, and graphic artists, however, those at the forefront of television art direction are most likely architects by trade.44 Modernism and boomer nostalgia in Aquarius result from a combination of this overlap between contemporary architecture and television set design, in addition to the overdetermination of digital design tools and the aesthetic traditions that attract us. There is a clear synergy between camerawork and set design in Aquarius. The careful attention paid to recreating late 1960s Los Angeles is celebrated through the camerawork for the series itself, which lingers on shots of set dressing and set design sometimes at the risk of stalling the narrative flow of

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the show. The tight framing of many of the scenes in season one of Aquarius also reinforces aspects of design. The camera rests on an anonymous go-go girl twice during a scene when Hodiak questions people at a hip nightclub (“Everybody’s Been Burned,” May 28, 2015). The camera betrays a nostalgic curiosity about her costume, in all of its white-booted glory and the dislocated, spastic dance movements true to the period. A seemingly nonnarrative shot of a mid-century, Vistosi-style chandelier composed of large white plastic discs introduces a scene in a high-modernist Los Angeles home.45 Hodiak visits the home because its owner, Ken Karn, hires him to find his daughter who ran away to join the Manson cult. The shot of the lamp appears again when the episode returns to the Karn home later that night to continue the investigation of her disappearance. Episode four largely takes place in a strip club and, regardless of the narrative events that happen there, camera time is lavished on the naked body of one stripper who is painted head to toe in a paisley pattern (“Home Is Where You’re Happy,” June 11, 2015). The camera’s interest is not merely sexual in this case, but also nostalgic, as it lovingly inspects the topographies of psychedelic print and female nudity. The dialogue, at times, makes its own references to the set dressing around it. When Hodiak confronts one of his suspects on draft dodging to avoid Vietnam, he says, “I fought [in World War II] so we could sit here free on plastic slip covers” (“Home Is Where You’re Happy,” June 11, 2015). Through camerawork and dialogue, mid-century set design and set dressing are bound up with the series’ interrogations of national identity, American masculinity, professionalism, and morality as Hodiak ventures deeper into Manson’s world and its perversions of Flower Generation ideologies of free love, mind-altering drugs, and communal living. In Aquarius, modernism appears in Karn’s home and Hodiak’s own apartment. In addition to the glass disc chandelier, Karn’s home features floor to ceiling windows that overlook the valley and streamlined furniture (Figure 2.2). Glass recurs throughout the home as a central feature in the production design. While transparency is a key tenet of mid-century modernism, in this case it symbolizes a poignant contradiction as decorating a home that hides so many secrets within the series’ narrative. Karn struggles to hide his homosexuality, which Manson uses to blackmail him in return for Karn’s financing his aspiring music career as well as his silence on Manson’s sexual exploitation of his daughter. The Karn home’s modernism and its architectural ethos of transparency, rationalism, and universality thus become wedded to the crisis of mid-century masculinity and its refusal to face emerging counterculture. Aquarius paints both the boomer generation and 1960s youth culture as similarly misguided. The boomer parents cling to established ideas of racial segregation, heteronormative sexuality, and political conservatism, and their

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Figure 2.2   “Everybody’s Been Burned,” May 28, 2015, Aquarius. children embrace political progressivism that never quite works out in practice (according to the series). Free love in Aquarius frequently results in the sexual exploitation of women under a different form of patriarchy; Karn’s daughter, Emma, runs from her father and into the arms of another man who pimps her out to his friends. The intergenerational tension in the series is neatly encapsulated in one scene when Emma has a fight with her mother. After Emma storms out of the room, her mother turns to a framed photo of herself as teenager with her mother in the 1950s, suggesting that intergenerational strife and uneven social transformations are transhistorical (“A Change Is Gonna Come,” June 18, 2015). The series makes more direct connections between the 1960s and presentday American racial discourses by including a brush between Black Panthers and detective Hodiak (“A Change Is Gonna Come,” June 18, 2015). The Black Panthers refuse to help Hodiak in his investigation until the police address a homicide case in which the police killed a black man with a choke hold, a clear reference to the public discourse of the twenty-teens around police brutality against Americans of color. Within the context of Aquarius’s project to link nostalgia for the late boomer period to present-day politics, production design’s quotations of modernism are linked, as they are in Ugly Betty, to discourses around the crisis of hegemonic masculinity and professionalism. A central message of the series is that Hodiak, like the protagonist of Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15), is a victim of his time. In Ugly Betty, Betty’s political misgivings about working for the fashion industry are narrated through her visible resistance to the

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white modernist spaces of Mode. In Aquarius, the design languages of both modernism and counterculture signify the hypocrisy of presentist views of history in which ideological self-righteousness and historical exceptionalism blind characters to the potential for social change. Perhaps Mad Men offers one of the most convincing examples linking high-modernism to masculinity in mid-life crisis. In the series, Roger Sterling (played by John Slattery) is one of the advertising firm’s original partners. He is a philandering cad with annoying charm, a big mouth, and the maturity of a twelve-year old. His frequent alcoholic benders and sexual adventures land him in repeated trouble and depressive episodes in the series. Roger’s office redesign in season two is the one of the first times high-modernism is introduced in the series’ sets (Figure 2.3). White furniture, black carpeting, two large op art pieces, a white mushroom top lamp, and an Eames chair distinguish Roger’s office, which is the major stage for the remainder of his personal crises in the series. Mad Men ties the advent of modernism in interior design to its own version of masculine mid-century dystopia, in which middle-aged white men are aware that times are a-changin’ and they self-medicate by drinking and smoking themselves into stupors. At points, Mad Men nurses a similar pathos that Aquarius harbors for perplexed straight white men who fall “victim” to their times in so far as they are unwilling to trade totalitarian power for predominant patriarchal hegemony. Much like the manspreader in an airplane who bristles at sharing one arm rest with an adjacent female passenger, trading in complete domination for prevailing authority is, indeed, a unacceptable compromise to such men. These male

Figure 2.3   “The Doorway, Part 2,” April 7, 2013, Mad Men.

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characters and, to some extent, the shows themselves therefore construct the expectation of onlookers’ sympathy. Modernism in set design offers a similar backdrop for self-pity for Don Draper’s character. When Draper moves to the city, gets divorced, and then remarries, he starts life anew in a swanky open-floor plan apartment with a dropped floor and wrap around sofa. The Draper living room set is highly lauded by interior design communities and television viewers and was featured in Interior Design magazine, just like Ugly Betty’s modernist office set. Despite the fresh beginnings, this home set sees Draper’s decline into sex addiction, alcoholism, and eventually to the dissolution of his second marriage. In Mad Men, modernism in the home and particularly the office are languages for the misguided tenets of the style: good [masculine] design is universal, less is more, and form should follow function. Whitten Overby’s “Miss Representations: No Room for Blackness or Feminism on Mad Men’s Sets” makes a similar argument on the series’ use of mid-century corporate architecture: It is thus within the public and private spaces of the skyscraper office that Mad Men’s white, straight males make the final creative decisions that dictate their agency’s future. Echoing this fictional spatial narrative, the creative culture of twentieth and twenty-first century architecture has been almost entirely white and male, in part explaining how that demographic’s most popular corporate architectural style continues to dominate design culture—like normative, homogenous bodies producing like normative, homogenous spaces. Corporate modernism’s history is one long Great Man Theory.46 Overby argues that the show’s half-hearted inclusions of the histories of the feminist and civil rights movements are eclipsed by the overwhelming patriarchal modernist spaces, which both literally and symbolically refuse to make room for difference. Lynn Spigel’s TV by Design traces the overlapping histories of boomer modernism and television wherein television served as an important publicity tool for familiarizing a Cold War-era public with cutting-edge design of the time. Modernism on television in the 1950s and ’60s hosted postwar anxieties around women entering the workplace and negotiated new definitions of collective identity and individualism in the context of emergent counterculture. The quotation and nostalgic reinventions of mid-century modernism in contemporary television are still attached to the same popular discourses; however, they’ve shifted in Ugly Betty to include a skepticism toward the patriarchal presumptions that modernism once elided. In Mad Men

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and Aquarius’s case, while modernism admits its patriarchal underpinnings, the series are equally hostile and bleak in their treatments of boomer-era counterculture. In short, modernism encapsulates white masculinity’s past mistakes, its present crises, and its anticipated future pitfalls as the modernist premises of transparency and universality wind up working for no one. A recurring tropic image in Aquarius, Ugly Betty, and Mad Men is the figure of a single, white, straight patriarch standing in the middle of a modernist office looking lost. It is almost too frequent to effectively cite, but examples can be found in Aquarius’s “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” May 28, 2015, and Mad Men’s “Lost Horizon,” May 3, 2015. It is a powerful image for hegemony, but also one that suggests that the tonic cocktail of historical reactionism, uncompromising claims to power, and self-pity ultimately leave men alone. The television trope of lonely men being lonely in an office set inspired by mid-century design appears prominently in other millennial programs set in the present like 24 (Fox, 2001–10) and Nip/Tuck (FX, 2003–10). Nip/Tuck is a male-centered melodrama about the latently queer relationship between two plastic surgeons as they grow their practices in Miami and Los Angeles. The series’ critically acclaimed production design borrows heavily from modernist office space design. Their offices are predominantly white or beige with color accents. Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chairs (1929) feature prominently in the waiting room. Many of the rooms include backlit apertures: fish tanks, the staff kitchen has opaque backlit cabinets with glassware in them, and the surgeon’s names are framed and backlit above the reception desk. There are many light sources and framing devices here for characters to pose in front of while talking. However, counter-intuitively, mirrors, windows, and media screens are nowhere to be found in the office. Nip/Tuck’s office is entirely insular and uniform, like a theater. This logic extends to the show’s domestic spaces. Both surgeons struggle to find happiness in the series, as the lines between work and home irretrievably blur, and each man fails to find a true sense of self while fueling a beauty culture that rests on artifice, illusion, and the impossibility of gratification. 24 follows its protagonist, Jack Bauer, as the key operative in a secret counter terrorism unit. Each episode unfolds in real time to thwart the next imminent terrorist threat. The offices are located entirely underground, marked in the landscape by only a concrete bunker opening. Once inside, however, the space opens up into a series of suspended glasses boxes and cubicles that have ready visual access to each other. All walls are glass that double as media screens when information needs to be projected. Both 24 and Nip/Tuck’s office spaces are reminiscent of Ugly Betty’s Mode, and there

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are industry reasons for these similarities. Carlos Barbosa is the production designer for both Aquarius and 24. Ellen Brill is the set designer for both Nip/Tuck and Aquarius. There is an industry network of people who specialize in retro modernist design. These designers’ bodies of work attract projects that are looking for a similar aesthetic because they are narratively similar or wish to invoke a certain discourse around identity at work that is historically intertwined with the visual vocabulary of modernism. The offices in 24 and Nip/Tuck adopt the modernist tenets of transparency and minimalism to turn their occupants inward toward one another. Workers look at each other and they look at information about other people, but the office spaces are in constant states of information interpretation. The irony in all of these office spaces is that they appear to forward doctrines of transparency and collaboration when, in fact, their work environments are filled with in-fighting and subterfuge. They flippantly co-opt the language of the modernist open plan work environment in order to show that these tenets are ultimately false. It is also no coincidence, that these workplace dramas heavily interrogate gender roles in the millennial era, with special attention to masculinity in Nip/Tuck and 24. The modernist office set recalls a historical set of debates about delineating private and public space, home and work that reach a culmination point in mid-century design. These ongoing interrogations about identity at work and home still play off the language of modernism, which, in these series, stands in for homogeneity, the illusion of transparency, the prominence of media in daily life, and the speciousness of historical narratives of progress.

Conclusion: Retro modernism as shorthand At the historical advent of television, modernism was a central design language shaping both on-screen and off-screen offices. Millennial recreations of midcentury modernism are also central in television nostalgia. Mad Men, Ugly Betty, and NBC’s Aquarius all mobilize nostalgic reinventions of modernism to invoke television discourses on feminism, racial, and class politics and position identity in the present-day corporate workplace. Modernism is the foremost design language television uses to reference its own historical intervention in these popular debates. Millennial television connects modernism, anxieties around the blurring of public and private space, and the entrance of new screen technologies into the home in order to address parallel social transformations in a digital era. In millennial television, modernism is the language that stands for patriarchy, the racial and class elision of “good taste,” and the whitewashed history of mid-century America: when American was supposedly “great.” It

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signals the shifting cultural values of the past half century and movements toward an inclusivity and diversity that some may see as fragmenting what was a unified and healthy, white, middle-class America. This chapter has broader applications for nostalgic television, the history of design, and cultures of creative labor. The industry ethnographic component shows the currency of modernism across contemporary television production design, architecture, and interior design. It also shows that design trends across these sites reinforce each other, as designers hop from one medium to another. This is particularly true in the aftermath of the millennial economic recession and with the corrosion of the traditional television season and steady network employment. Analysis of mise-en-scène or any aspect of design on television should therefore pay heed to what is happening concurrently in design broadly speaking, regardless of which era the series gestures to. Modernism appeals to television designers, because, in popular Western culture, it is an easily identifiable, culturally legible, and readily reproducible language that communicates a lot in a single environment. We should, however, pay attention to how it is mobilized in different periods and contexts. This method of analysis could apply to other television set iconographies. What might an interrogation of the “gothic” or “fantasy drama” set iconography uncover and how might this change the histories of television already told? Design history and industry studies offer alternative ways of exploring familiar television texts and well-weathered scholarly terrain. They also offer new perspectives for studying the representations of identity politics on television, which continues to confine itself to semiotic and narrative analyses, in combination with gender and critical race theory. This methodological imbalance in television studies ignores certain television histories by ignoring the design traditions and the exchange between television and the design industries.

Notes   1 Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Spaces (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 2–5.   2 Lisabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003), 112–165.   3 Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2–3, 28–32, 47.   4 Ibid., 37–43, 155–156, 241–248.   5 Rob Owen, “Tuned In: Sitting Pretty on the Set of ‘Ugly Betty,’” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 18, 2007.

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  6 Roger Catlin, “Ugly Betty’s World: American Ferrera Brings Big Apple Pizazz to Her Show’s Faux New York Office,” Hartford Courant, February 27, 2007.   7 Spigel, Make Room for Television, 103–104.   8 Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 12–13.   9 Henry Russell Hitchcock and Johnson Johnson, The International Style (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 10 See Le Corbusier’s design manifesto espousing the tenets of modernism and the machine aesthetic in “Towards a New Architecture.” 11 Penny Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora, 1995), 175. 12 Jesus Diaz, “Braun Products Hold the Secrets to Apple’s Future,” Gizmodo, January 14, 2008, http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-holdthe-secrets-to-apples-future. 13 Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink, 27. 14 Ibid., 78–79. 15 Catherine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, For the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School (Boston, MA: T. H. Webb, 1842). 16 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939): 43–49. 17 Russell Lynes, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1949, 19–28. 18 Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival, 29–63. 19 Martin, The Organizational Complex, 2–5. 20 Ibid., 93. 21 Ibid., 111. 22 Ibid., 140. 23 Ibid., 21–22. 24 Ibid., 7. Martin argues there is an inherent organicism to cybernetics and the organizational complex. Martin claims the organic was always a part of modernism. The early work of Mies van der Rohe and other high-modernist architects shows a proclivity toward the organic. Rohe’s 1919 design for the Friederichstrasse skyscraper is a good example, its shell-like and vaginal contours providing a contrast with his later grid-based architecture (endnote 43). Indeed, this tension between the organic and the mechanic always plays a part in Le Corbusier’s work. His design for the church at Ronchamp, for example, exhibits a heavy, mushroom-top cornice that creates a tension with the geometric rigor of the fenestration. While Martin’s reading of modernism includes the influence of organic form in otherwise grid-based architecture and explains the more psychedelic characteristics of the Mode set, it does not entirely debase the argument that Betty’s wardrobe is at odds with her environment. Both the organizational complex and high-modernism assume the tenets of “good” design to be universal, while Betty’s style centers on the idiosyncratic, obtuse, and individualistic.

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25 Ibid., 75. 26 Ibid., 231. Eliot Noyes’s corporate architecture of the 1960s posited very period-specific relationships between workers, information, and vision. In the early to mid-1960s, Eliot Noyes designed sets for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as well as office buildings for IBM in Los Angeles and Garden City, NJ. His work was heavily influenced by Walter Gropius, Charles and Ray Eames, and Saarinen, the power-hitters of highmodernism. He was also Marcel Breuer’s student (Breuer was a German architect and designer who came out of the Bauhaus school in the 1920s and ’30s). Noyes later moved to America where he started working in corporate design. John Harwood argues that as one of the main architects for IBM, Eliot Noyes was concerned with translating European modernism to new ideas of information technology and communication (Harwood, Lee, “The White Room: Eliot Noyes and the Logic of the Information Age Interior,” Grey Room 12 [2003]: 5–31). His office buildings for IBM are fortresses from the outside, minimalist and imposing structures that vacillate between extremes of limited fenestration to all-glass exteriors, between solidity and transparency. However, inside, Noyes maximizes transparency, visibility, and a sense of internal cohesion as he creates a visual narrative for the ideas of information exchange enabled by the first computers. Noyes’s interiors were organized as simultaneously functioning, glass-encased departments that crowded around a central hub; all workers were meant to be visible to each other, while the outside world is hidden from view. 27 Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink, 176–194. 28 However, from Martin’s research, the more organic qualities of the set are explained by the long-standing tension between the organic and synthetic that is inherent to modernist corporate design and organization. The organic half of this equation is often subsumed by modernism’s mechanic and grid-based aesthetic. The Organizational Complex may suggest that Betty’s integration of the messy, the clashing, the loud, and the feminine into her wardrobe is not as discordant with high-modernism as it would seem. Indeed, this reinforces the ambiguous relationship the series creates between Betty and her workplace, which, like nostalgia, hovers among antagonism, longing, and playful exchange. 29 Archie D’Amico (set decorator for Ugly Betty). Interview with author. June 25, 2014. 30 Ibid. 31 Spigel, TV by Design. 32 Ibid., 259. 33 The shift in skillsets from analog-based methods like draftsmanship to digitally based ones like using 3D imaging has been part of an ongoing conversation in Perspective Magazine, the Art Directors Guild trade publication in Los Angeles. An article that particularly lauds the advantages of introducing AutoCAD into production design is in the December 2007 issue (Haye, Aaron, “Digital Set Design Infiltrate the Kingdom,” Perspective: The Journal of the Art

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Directors’ Guild and Scenic, Title and Graphic Artists, November–December 2007, 42–45). 34 Carlos Barbosa (production designer for Aquarius). Interview with author. June 26, 2014. 35 D’Amico. Interview with author. 36 Bobi Garland (research librarian at Western Costume Company). Interview with author. June 24, 2014. 37 Mode’s production design belongs to other artistic traditions besides modernism. As mentioned before, streamlined looks adopted more ornamental functions as the baby boomer era wore on. This became especially apparent in 1960s futurism, an offshoot of modernism fueled by the popular interest in space exploration. Futurism integrated organic forms, like blobs, asymmetrical shapes, boomerangs, flying saucers, and Vitra Nelson star designs into furniture, architecture, and art. Futurism emphasized speed and sleekness in its curved and arched lines. The introduction of plastics, Elizabeth Guffey notes, also had a great influence in space-age design, lending designers a much broader range of shapes and colors to work with (Guffey, 67). Mid-century futurism organic shapes, circular and spherical forms, plastics, bright color accents, and folded surfaces. (“Folding” in architecture refers to walls that curve into the ceilings and floors, and nonlinear surfaces that are used to maximize volume and give the interior and exteriors an organic and warped look, almost as if the rooms were melting.) Futurist homes are also hyperinsulated. This was, in large part, informed by the projects themselves; the Dymaxion Deployment Unit and the Underground Home were specifically designed to be fallout shelters (Colomina, Domesticity at War, 41–42, 280–281). Even if not directly, the threat of nuclear war shaped the sense of paranoid insulation and protective-ness that characterized boomer-era architecture and design. Similarly, Mode is a very insulated space where glimpses of the world outside are rare. For all the glass incorporated into its interior, Mode’s windows are not a focus of its set design or camera work. Of course, this is partly because Mode needs to be a functional set and not an actual building, but the sense of enclosure is reinforced both by the camera work and the design, both of which stress hypervisibility within Mode by blocking visual access to the outside. Mode also takes on many organic, curved lines in its interior (the “doughnut,” or the large, circular reception desk located in Mode’s lobby, exemplifies this feature). The lighting in Mode is dominated by track lights that run along walls and shelving that gives a sense of internal luminescence and emphasizes curved, white surfaces. It also exaggerates the sense of insulation. This introversion serves as implicit commentary on the hypermediated and insulated narcissism that define how Mode produces and consumes its fashion ideology. In his research on smart homes, Davin Heckman makes a connection between minimalism, futurism, and media (David Heckman, A Small World, Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008], 43). This strengthens the chapter’s argument that Ugly Betty’s quotations of these boomer-era design languages carry narrative import because they shape and are shaped by

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV popular discourses on consumer culture and imaging-technologies from the postwar era onward. Heckman argues that by eliminating ornament, minimalism focuses the inhabitant’s attention on home media. First, Mode is an office and not a suburban home; however, the architectures of the home and office are increasingly blurring in a new media landscape where telecommuting and remote access (which makes the worker always “hooked-in”) are shaping new relationships between private and public, and domestic and professional arenas. Heckman posits a conflicted inhabitant torn between passivity and activity in the new media home and office (2008: 43). As mentioned before, Mode’s workers in Ugly Betty activate the set through their constant motion, yet they are also caught in constant states of looking and being looked at. The minimalist design of the Mode set foregrounds tensions in how new media are integrated into physical space and changing definitions of work and leisure. Mid-century minimalism and futurism are present in Ugly Betty’s office design and how it is activated, through blocking, cinematography, and editing.

38 Barbosa. Interview with author. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Rosemarie Knopka. Interview with author, June 25, 2014. 43 Carlos Barbosa, “Designing 24,” Perspective: The Journal of the Art Directors’ Guild and Scenic, Title and Graphic Artists, December–January (2009/2010), 40–47. 44 Barbosa. Interview with author. 45 Vistosi is one of the oldest glassmakers in Italy, dating back to the fifteenth century. In the 1950s, the company, however, led a wave of new modernism in lighting designing, collaborating with designers like Sottsass, Peduzzi Riva, Michele De Lucchi, and Angelo Mangiarotti (Coolhouse, “Designers: Vistosi,” Coolhouse Collection website, accessed January 15, 2017, http://www. coolhousecollection.com/designers/). 46 Whitten Overby, “Miss Representations: No Room for Blackness or Feminism on Mad Men’s Sets,” Flow 22, no. 2 (2015), http://www. flowjournal.org/2015/11/miss-representations/.

PART TWO

Props

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3 Prop Talk: A Behind-the-Scenes Look

Introduction: The importance of props Props figure prominently on nostalgic television. They play pivotal roles in key scenes and sometimes behave as characters onto themselves. Moreover, they contribute to the series’ own meta-commentaries and self-reflections upon nostalgia for the American past. Using the case study of Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15), this chapter covers the process of how props get to screen and how the show’s popular discourse treats this process as a story in and of itself. Mad Men, a television melodrama set in 1960s America, has been wildly successful, resonating powerfully with viewers since its debut in 2007. The series moved to AMC from a network associated with movie re-runs to quality, must-see television. The chapter focuses on the popular discourse around Mad Men props that has grown alongside the series and asks what is really being talked about when popular print and online media bicker about prop anachronisms (e.g., was the flat top beer can in last week’s episode historically accurate or did beer companies begin using pull-tabs by then?). These debates, which can become surprisingly heated, are really discussions about the relationship of personal memory to collective memory, the significance the postwar period holds for American identity, and the technological shift to digitization. These more latent themes appear in the popular discussion around the show’s props as well as in Mad Men’s narrative. These meditations also inflect the process of production; that is, the creative process of how props are curated and prepared for the screen. Props, like so many other aspects of production design addressed in this book, are not just props in nostalgic programs. They are not inert objects merely there to provide a pleasant appearance and buoy an actor’s

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performance. They are narrative organizing principles that are central to the series and its popularity. I’m choosing to focus on Mad Men because of the breadth of popular press that the show’s production design garners. The series cultivates a culture of “prop-awareness” and interest partly because of the attention the program legitimately lavishes on its production design and partly because the series emerged at the very beginning of a slew of “quality” single-camera programs, historically based and otherwise, that generated a popular interest in television production design: Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004), The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007), Deadwood (HBO, 2004– 06), Lost (ABC, 2004–10), Rome (HBO/BBC, 2005–07), Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006–10), Dexter (Showtime, 2006–13), and The Tudors (Showtime, 2007– 10). These series elevated popular opinion of television as “serious art” and honed viewer’s attention to detail through the budget, expertise, and publicity they devoted to sets, costumes, and props. I draw on the online presence of journalism on Mad Men’s props across trade publications as well as more generic news platforms. I also integrate interview material with the series’ main property master from 2009 to 2015, Ellen Freund. In conjunction with her public statements about the series’ approach to set dressing, I draw on my own interview with Ellen Freund and guided tour through the Mad Men set on the final day of shooting in June 2013. This chapter uses the fieldwork I conducted at Los Angeles-based prop warehouses known to be industry favorites for period productions. Together, these sources provide a broad scope for the prop industry context of period dramas on cable television. We should not lose sight of Mad Men’s props culture as part of a larger shift in television that mediates nostalgia through props and other aspects of design. The end of the chapter discusses other cases of popular props fetishism through relatively early television subgenre of reality television centering on “historical time travel,” wherein contestants are flung into designed home environments carefully modeled on the past in which the cast is meant to assume assigned historical roles. Cases such as 1900 House (Channel 4, 1999–2000) and The Edwardian Country House (Channel 4, 2002) focus on props to a great extent. The contestants use of and interactions with props become the primary narrative focus of the programs. Like Mad Men, they also embed an interest in the professionals behind the scenes. In many of the reality programs, the “social historians” or “art directors” are characters unto themselves who interface with cast members throughout the series. This shows that the professionalization of props industry people in popular discourse has been ongoing in “quality” programs since 1999, when 1900 House first aired on British television.

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Props in Mad Men and these other examples cultivate a viewer interest in detail and material objects. The chapter’s analysis of the popular discourse on Mad Men’s props finds that much of the discussion returns to a few main themes: arguments about historical authenticity and whether or not the show “meets” these standards, the behind-the-scenes labor that goes into curating the props, and how digitization has affected the props industry. This last theme may be least expected. Mad Men narratively thematizes technological progress, moving through the advertising firm’s first responses and adjustments to the computer age through the integration of copy machines, computers, cable television, and quantitative market research among other 1960s technological shifts that heavily affected corporate workplace culture. It’s not surprising, then, that the presence of old props on screen and proto-digital media props, in particular, would generate interest and discussion around the history of digitization and its affects on labor culture. My key point is, however, that these discussions about historical progress in popular culture are mediated through props as material objects that center and cohere popular discussions around technological history. The chapter argues that its programs’ prop-centered discourse, or “prop talk,” contributes to their multilayered, complex nostalgias, which elude labels of regression, escapism, or a response to the historical “traumas” of the past seventy-odd years.1 The heading of historical “trauma” is popularly applied to everything from the social inequity of women and Americans of color to, as some might see it, the “oppressive” impact of civil rights movements and feminism on white patriarchal America. The internal contradictions, conflicts, and complexities in discussions happening through props support a central message of the book that production design matters in generating such polysemy on popular histories. This is particularly true of a Trump-Brexit neoliberal era marked by extreme political divisiveness around definitions of social “progress.” Props add another layer to these shows’ nostalgic commentary on the past. The production and narrative context of props suggests that television occupies a special role in cohering and questioning national identity. While the media publicity focused on props has grown with the influence of period series like Mad Men, whose aesthetic garners as much attention as its characters, media studies scholarship tends to overlook props, the debates they inspire, and the interpretations they invite. If props are mentioned in scholarship, it is usually within the contexts of film mise-en-scène if at all. It’s therefore important to turn attention to the small objects that tend to be overlooked as peripheral to the overall aesthetic, but are nevertheless deeply important to the story and its wider cultural impact.

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Press about props Mad Men’s props are the focus of a large popular discourse on the show and its production process. Other themes running through this largely online dialogue on props include repeated mention of viewers’ personal memories, historical accuracy, a fetishistic interest in the materiality of props as objects, and finally the labor involved in procuring them for the show. Widespread interest in Mad Men’s prop world is clearly illustrated in museum displays of select pieces from Mad Men’s props and costume collections. The Museum of the Moving Image opened a full exhibit on the show in March 2015 that included series creator Matthew Weiner’s production notes dating back to 1992. His “exacting detail” is a recurring point of emphasis in the exhibit.2 The Smithsonian and National Museum of American History acquired some of the series’ props and costumes to permanently feature in the museum.3 More recently, Weiner announced he would donate all of the series’ production notes to the University of Texas, in effect, elevating the series’ work from entertainment to archive.4 These are strong indications of Mad Men’s impact on popular culture and constructions of nationhood that a national museum sanctions a series (which is, itself, a fictional reconceptualization of the past) as part of American history. Online publicity on Mad Men’s props appearing in industry-centric sites like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter focuses on prop materiality and historical accuracy. For example, prop master, Ellen Freund, uses historically accurate, hand-carved ice cubes in the cocktails on the show. A specialist Los Angeles bartender is the vendor who supplies the ice cubes, which are smaller and cube shaped in contrast to present-day ice cubes.5 Freund also uses an independent, non-industry collector located in Kansas to secure the series’ pens.6 It is details like these that grab viewer’s attention, as demonstrated in the vociferous online debate about such props for the show and their historical accuracy. Mad Men’s art direction is celebrated for its commitment to detail, which is reinforced by its publicity’s fascination with the series’ material minutiae. A video interview with Freund produced by Variety intercuts the interviewer, Elizabeth Wagmeister, handling props appearing on the show, which include restaurant menus, a matchbook, traveler’s checks, a bottle of vermouth, and a pink bouncy ball.7 The video’s suggestion that learning about props occurs through touch (even if it is vicarious) underlines the importance attributed to their objecthood. The video’s voiceover contains Ellen Freund’s comment that props help actors deliver performances. By way of example, the video then shows clips highlighting this actor-hand prop relationship. When discussing how the art department recreated TWA airline flatware, Freund

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recalls how Matthew Weiner was so excited that he insisted on including a close up of the props in the scene. This shot was sadly edited out of the final cut. An online interest in the production history of objects that sometimes don’t even make it to screen, evidences the degree of popular attention Mad Men’s prop world sustains. In effect, Freund’s attention to material detail catalyzes whole online discussions about the past and its merits relative to present-day values. The New York Times focuses on a select number of hand props it interprets as having particular cultural importance (e.g., a hardcover copy of Leon Uri’s Exodus, a bestselling novel covering the postwar emergence of Israel).8 After providing an account of each object’s popular historical impact, the article applies that background information to analyzing the prop’s narrative contexts within the series (e.g., the scene in season one in which Don appears reading Exodus). The article draws parallels between the historical cultural significance of Exodus, Don’s personal struggles with his own identity in the series, and the book’s incendiary subject matter in the context of a postwar America struggling to come to terms with the Holocaust. Weiner is quoted in the article as saying: “Their identity [Jewish Americans] is the same story as Don’s identity.” While drawing parallels between a depressed white patriarch and victims of genocide is somewhat of an overstatement, Weiner’s observation highlights the period-specific search for personal and collective identity that shaped the counterculture of the 1950s and ’60s. In this example, props carry greater significance than incidental details or facilitators of actor’s performance. Rather, props mediate a conversation on how history is retold and re-presented. The popular infatuation with Mad Men’s props extends to the production process and labor involved in their location, purchase, and delivery to the set. Publicity on the show emphasizes the speed of producing Mad Men, Ellen Freund stating that she has an average of five days to accrue the hand props for each episode.9 The popularity of the series and the growing number of shows seeking to emulate it complicate the prop searching process. Freund says the success of the show prompted a prop shortage caused by shorter turnover rates of boomer antiques on eBay and highly competitive bidding when there was once a limited demand on such items.10 Journalism on the series repeatedly emphasizes the art department’s labor, using “obsessive,” “unapologetic,” and “torture” to describe the design team’s work ethic.11 Not only are media critics and journalists enamored with the physical props, they are drawn to the prop team’s industry backstories. The show’s “obsessive” attention to detail caught the attention of the wider interior design community, which featured Mad Men in a 2014 issue of one of the industry’s top periodicals, Interior Design. In the article, Matthew Weiner

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describes the show’s production process as “fetishistic.”12 The recurring themes in media coverage of Mad Men’s props include materiality, historical accuracy, and a labor-intensive production process. I argue that the qualities attached to the props (their materiality, fidelity to the time period, and the fanaticism ascribed to the art department) relate to presentist discourses on the relationship of personal to collective memory, the significance of the 1950s and ’60s to American national memory, the series’ participation in popular nostalgia, and the technological shift to digitization. In tweets and posts attached to publicity pieces on Mad Men, prop historical inaccuracies constitute a substantial portion of the conversation. There is quite a body of journalism devoted to the subject: “Way Too Many Mad Men Inaccuracies” and “18 Mad Men Anachronisms Spotted by the Internet.”13 This subgenre of the show’s public discourse is characterized by tensions between individual memories of the time period and how the era is collectively imagined. Online exchanges between viewers on the historical accuracy of a sandwich bag can become surprisingly emotional, as inevitably one online commenter grounds his or her claim of Mad Men’s inaccuracy in his or her “more accurate” childhood experience of material consumer culture. Comments like these often snowball into viewers pitting postwar family memories against one another. One contributor states, “Give me a break. In the 1960s in the States everyone had those aluminum ice cube trays. I remember those very clearly because my father liked ice in his water all the time.”14 Another endorses this reading, “Fascinating article but one correction is needed. In America in the early 1960s ice cubes were made using a metal tray with a device made of square metal separators and a lever.”15 The next contributor redirects conversation toward praising the creators: “There is an authentic period table lamp with a tall center spindle made of walnut and mounted in a brass base that adorns the office set. It is identical in every way to the two lamps my mother had in her living room for years.”16 Freund herself mentions the feedback she got from one viewer who said that “the brown wax sandwich bag could not have been more perfect. It rings bells from childhood.”17 Oftentimes, viewer responses to online articles on props include meditations on the significance of the time period to the racially and class-exclusive American Dream: The astonishing attention to accuracy is the reason Mad Men is so believable. The hair, the clothing, the surroundings, the dialogue and demeanor, the use of COLOR itself … It’s all astonishingly true to the era … The ‘50s and early ‘60s was a unique time in American history. Full of manic survivor’s guilt after WWII, the tiny period of time between 1950 and 1966 was “starch-perfect” on the outside, rebellious and dramatic on the inside … I was a teen then and watched the adults … their “grown

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up” role playing, their rules of parenting, their idealism about marriage, home, work, and play … And the ambience, accessories and attitude they carefully maintained.18 This viewer from Santa Barbara, California slips easily between discussing the accuracy of the props, drawing on childhood memories, and voicing the hegemonic white narrative about postwar America that poses as universally shared and centers on the period’s internal contradictions between external perfectionism and internal upset. In this instance and others, the discourse around props syphons conflicting white feelings and attitudes toward the historical gains and losses occurring between the 1960s and the present. Other viewers in the comment section of the same article on props offer more direct prescriptions of the series’ potentially hazardous portrayal of the past: Some of the women I know make the mistake of thinking that Mad Men is a truthful, documentary like account of the period. They’ll say things like, “I watch the show and I’m glad that women now … ” The artefacts [sic] might be true to life, but that doesn’t mean that the show accurately portrays how men and women experienced life back then.19 In the case of this viewer, the discussion of props and historical accuracy facilitates reflections on feminism. From his point of view, the series’ commitment to historical accuracy effectively passes the series off as documentary, misleading many [female] viewers to exaggerate the gains made by feminism between 1960s and the present. Even more interesting, the viewer is writing from Melbourne, Australia and contributing to a UK newspaper article on Mad Men props. The patronizing sexism of this comment aside, it shows that the global scope of the discussion of Mad Men props only reinforces how these popular narratives of boomer America and the American Dream are internationally pervasive within white culture. Viewers and writers living in opposite hemisphere weigh in on the series’ portrayal of American history and its situation vis-à-vis popular (mis) conceptions of the boomer period. The friction between personal and collective American and white, international memory typifies press pieces on the props. An article by James Poniewozik in The Times evaluates the significance of the boomer period to the present day alongside discussing the series’ fastidious attention to detail in art direction, to which he ascribes an “OCD-like granularity.”20 In the style of many other articles on Mad Men’s props, Poniewozik lists aspects of art direction that could easily be dismissed as incidental: “The office Rolodexes are full of real vintage cards with retro Klondike-5-style phone numbers. The

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coffee tables are littered with day-and-date appropriate issues of the New Yorker and LIFE. If there’s a pile of papers on a desk, someone from the crew types them.” He asserts, “If the stuff is not the star of Mad Men, it’s at least one of the show’s biggest selling points,” and: The show’s eye candy is also brain candy; each object, reference, and décor decision is grounded in a specific philosophy of story, character and history … You’d expect Weiner to be steeped in the minutiae of history. What’s surprising is how much he says his writing is shaped by today’s events. In the 1964 of Season 4—which aired just after the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010—a market researcher [on the series] complains, “If they pass Medicare, they won’t stop until they ban personal property.”21 In the same vein as other prop-centric articles, this piece discusses the similarities and differences between the boomer period and the present day through a discussion of the series’ art direction, specifically its props. The article’s reflection on the series’ reinterpretation of history is catalyzed by Poniewozik catching Jon Hamm (who plays the series main character Don Draper) taking a break from shooting by pulling out his iPhone, “the modern equivalent of a 1960s cigarette break.”22 The contradiction of seeing a man in period costume using a smartphone leads Poniewozik to observe that the series’ narration of history is informed by the present: “The on-set mashup of rotary phone and smartphone doesn’t so much spoil the illusion of Mad Men as reveal what the show really is. Mad Men is a period piece, but one where the past haunts the present and the present haunts the past.” Discussion of props in popular media usually involves a parallel discussion of the progress and decline of America, and reflections on an imagined national but implicitly white, identity. Surely, this speaks to the semantic power of prop design, but it also suggests that props in nostalgic television serve a privileged purpose as historical conduits for debate about personal memory, nationhood, and white progressivist and declentionist discourses of nationhood. The tension between a perfect boomer America, that exists in popular imagination, and how America “really was” pervades online discourse around props. But this tension also worms its way into the production process itself or at least how Matthew Weiner and others discuss it publicly. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Freund recounts an example of the contradictory desires for historical accuracy and achieving a nostalgic look that will resonate with viewers. She says she went to Weiner with a mixing bowl and he responded, “Get me the mixing bowls with the clear bottom.” She gently refused: “Nuh-uh … not until 1972.”23 The subject of debate in this

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exchange is a bowl, but it is also a fictional image of postwar America, personal memory, and the relationship of both to historical accuracy. Weiner’s image of boomer America, in this case, was not quite commensurate with the reality of the time. In another interview, Weiner recounts telling the set design team to keep the wires attached to all lamps in the office set. He says, “In every picture of an office from 1930 on, the wires are cut off every lamp, because they look terrible.”24 Mad Men hones its publicity image to focus on what it anticipates makes the series unique: its allegiances to historical accuracy over personal memory and dominant nostalgic impressions of the period. There are, however, times when the design team must compromise on accuracy. Freund states that “sometimes—as with the series non-period typewriters—items are chosen for their looks rather than their accuracy.”25 Regardless of whether the prop used is period accurate or not, the discussion of this distinction has to do with a deeper questioning of the historical accuracy of the popular image of the boomer family based on a range of sources from the 1950s domestic sitcom to family photography from that era. It is no news that film and television bend the rules on historical accuracy. Adaptation studies almost universally dispels the myth that adaptations can be faithful to their sources, whether an original film or, in Mad Men’s case, a representation of a historical period.26 Within media studies and literary fiction, claiming historical accuracy is viewed as a red herring since any representation is an adaptation of an original text. There is no such thing as a loyal adaptation. While this is the position of adaptation studies, in popular discourse, historical accuracy is still of key concern and interest to media consumers. What exactly is being debated in these pervasive discussions about the historical accuracy of Mad Men’s design? On the surface of discussions in popular print and online journalism on the show, props are the center of interest. However, the debate centers on the responsibilities to accurately portray the past as well as the differences between then and now: Are people happier? Are people better off? Has technology really improved our lives? Have people made progress in achieving social equality? Mad Men’s first prop master, Scott Buckwald, states that “the 1960s aren’t as different from today as people may think. A lot of times people have the misconception that it’s totally different, and I know we had it from members of the crew. They’d say, ‘I didn’t know they had ball-point pens in 1960.’ I wanted to have T-shirts made that said, ‘This is 1960, not 1860.’”27 Buckwald refers to more than just props in this statement. When TV creators and viewers discuss props, there is a parallel discussion happening about the similarities and differences between the two time periods. “Would I feel at home in 1960s material culture?” is tantamount to asking, “Would I be able to identify with the concerns and aspirations of

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that time?” In the background of what can come across as nit-picking about glass-bottomed bowls, there resides another discussion about the politics of nostalgia and the responsibilities of nostalgic media to adapt an image of the past that viewers recognize as faithful. Props provide a material and visual anchor for such discussions about the interdependence between personal memory and memory that is constructed as collective, and between real and imagined depictions of the boomer years. Viewers are not discussing props or even the historical accuracy of these fictional accounts. Rather, they are discussing the boomer period itself and how historical change can be measured.

The popular legitimation of the prop industry and digital tensions The prominent public interest in Mad Men’s props extends to the behindthe-scene processes of designing for television. In a more general sense, viewers are curious about how Mad Men makes itself and, by extension, how it generates nostalgia. The prop warehouse, owned by Pam and Jim Elyea, is a resource that Ellen Freund routinely uses for the show. History for Hire, based in Los Angeles, specializes in renting period hand props to productions across the world (Figure 3.1). Their website’s short bio touts a 5,000-volume research library in addition to the thousands of warehouse items. It also promotes its team of experts: “Everyone on our team is an expert on at least one or more historical topics, ranging from what guitar and amp Elvis’ guitarist Scotty Moore played to the type of powder horn used at the Alamo”28 They also have multiple workshops that manufacture and restore hand props. Alongside providing an array of options for rent, the company will tell you about the history of the item you’re renting as well as training on how to use it (this is especially important if the prop is a functioning technology like a 1970s guitar amp).29 People working in the prop industry are represented in trade press as historians and researchers. The public interest in the design process attached to television shows like Mad Men highlights the innovative creative process and resourcefulness of its crew, certainly, but it also encompasses an interest in the research behind Mad Men and shows that are similarly lauded for meticulous set dressing and prop design. Treating prop warehouse employees and prop masters as historians is certainly fitting. All of Mad Men’s food comes from 1960s cookbook recipes.30 The art department has its own signage department so that labels, menus, posters, coasters, and anything bearing graphic design elements can be

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Figure 3.1  Photograph taken by author at History for Hire Prop Warehouse (June 23, 2014, Los Angeles). Shows suitcases used on the set of Titanic (Paramount, 1997).

reproduced if an original is not found (Figure 3.2).31 To add to this arsenal of resources, Mad Men also has access to Ellen Freund’s prop truck that she brings with her to new each project. It houses a sizable collection of props and antiques she’s accrued over the years based on her own interests and research.32 Furthermore, each prop specialist belongs to a wider community

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Figure 3.2   Photograph taken by author at History for Hire Prop Warehouse (June 23, 2014, Los Angeles).

of craftsmen, vendors, and peers that they bring to the table. Despite the enormity of Los Angeles, the prop community is quite small. Many of the prop warehouses I visited were second-generation institutions, including Prop Heaven, whose co-owner, Dan Schultz, has remained family friends with the Elyeas (of History for Hire) for decades.33 Art departments are distinguished, therefore, by a network of prop collections, knowledge, and craftspeople with narrow and highly specialized fields of expertise (Jim Elyea’s specialty is Vox amps and microphones). According to Dan, the element of competition in props is never all that cutthroat because, in the props community, knowledge tends to be highly specialized and, after all, it’s other people’s money that they deal with.34 An individual’s field of knowledge, therefore, is narrow but deep in ways that make him or her unique and indispensable. One source of competition, however, remains a concern in the prop community, which is the long-term effect of digital technology. This includes using online trading as a prop finding tool as well as the use of computerimaging in prop design through 3D printing and CGI inserts. Since the stories Mad Men tells focus on historical change, in particular technological change, this extra-diegetic popular interest in how the series’ production crew

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incorporates digital tools is, I argue, related to how the show itself treats advances in technology within its storyworld. Anxieties in response to the shift to digital technology frequently appear within these more general discussions about props, nationhood, and memory. The topic is most prominent in discussions about the production process and how the art direction team relies on both internet sources and physically visiting and rum-maging through antique stores. In Variety Online’s short film on props in Mad Men, Elizabeth Wagmeister asks Ellen, “How often do you go to the internet versus a collector to get the artifacts that you may need?” Freund responds: For most of our shopping the Internet plays an enormous part because of the time frame. Unfortunately, the popularity of Mad Men brought on a bunch of other shows set in the 60s. And all of the sudden people were buying things like Bayer Children’s aspirin bottles from the 60s and I was having to bid against them and pay crazy amounts of money. Or they were just gone.35 If the item cannot be found, the production team must replicate it. An article in The Independent reiterates these comments, stating that the show is a “product of the online era. Without the Internet to help her source materials and information, she [Freund] says it would be ‘virtually impossible’ to make a realistic budget and timetable.”36 Ironically, a series that recreates the past like Mad Men is only possible through present-day media technology. This is particularly true for television, whose rapid production schedule necessitates using eBay and other trading websites, whereas filmmakers have more time to replicate period pieces in-house. It’s equally ironic that the speed and accessibility of online media have, at times, the unexpected effect of creating added challenges for the prop team, like Mad Men making the online trading world of 1960s collectibles highly competitive. Of course, this dependence on online trading is coupled with inescapable physical realities. As Freund states, sometimes the crew resorts to replicating props from scratch, refinishing or renovating existing props that have imperfections. After all, the prop must be sturdy enough to be handled. Mad Men also relies on idiosyncratic collectors nationwide, like the Kansas-based pen collector, to supply the show with period accurate hand props. These collectors are history buffs with deep commitments to holding onto bits of material culture that most others see as expendable and uninteresting. Mad Men, thus, equally depends on the virtual spaces of competing bidders for 1960s aspirin bottles as much as it does the oddball collector or hoarder who refuses to throw them away. Wider debates about the impact of digital technology on the material, social world are ever present in such discussions about props and the pop culture interest in the process of production design.

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The digital shift not only shapes the production process behind nostalgic television and the popular discourse surrounding its props, but it is acutely felt in the art direction community overall. The impacts of virtual design strategies like computer-generated images have been greeted with equal measures of excitement and trepidation as art directors see the possibilities that computerenhanced sets offer as well as the jobs they could displace. This gives an added dimension to the trade magazine and popular press coverage of Mad Men’s prop world as conflicted attitudes of production designers toward digital technology are implicit in the journalism on Ellen Freund’s prop hunting process. The American Art Directors Guild’s trade magazine, Perspective, has been covering the industry’s ambivalence toward the integration of digital technology and computer-generated imaging into design in particular. Issues ranging from October 2007 to April 2014 provide a strong sample of the attitudes and concerns around the subject. In “Tiptoeing into the Digital Age,” visual effects supervisor Syd Dutton writes about his first experience with a digital paint program: “There it was, the confessional of the future and me, an ignorant sinner and quite happy to remain that way for the rest of my life. I sat down without any instructions and stumbled around for a while, happy to leave in the end and return to my brushes and oil paint.”37 Even after adjusting to digital painting, he still has concerns that production designs are not more deeply involved in the post-production process when “someone has to keep the imagery consistent and unified until the end, and it most often falls on the shoulders of an overburdened director, his editor and sometimes even an assistant effects editor.”38 In 2008, writer and digital artist Peter Plantec anticipates the move to 5D, a term that was in vogue in the art direction community at the time. If 4D refers to time, then 5D refers to haptic media experiences, meaning experiences that involve embodied interactions with the media text. Plantec captures the technological moment in 2008: “You now stand with your bare toes curled over the screaming edge of change, and you’re about to leap”; however, “artistry and technology are hooking up as never before, yielding new and exciting collaborative work environments that will enhance your entire future.”39 By 2009, other voices try to demystify the novelty of digitality and place it in historical context: William J Mitchell, professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, wrote that there will be a time when we won’t talk about computeraided design but only about design. The machines will be an intrinsic and transparent part of the process. Clearly that time isn’t yet here, and until it is, digital tools for visual media will continue to produce a mixture of apprehension and enthusiasm.40

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The article, by art director Vlad Bina goes on, however, to express concern that in practice the physical set designer and the digital set designer are not cultivating the close working relationship that is required by “hybrid” set design (design that includes “real” and virtual elements). By 2012, 3D printing enters the conversation as a means of producing both models of sets and props. 3D printing set models can capture an unprecedented level of detail. The art director for Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–), Karsa Farahani, writes about the reasons for using 3D printing in set design: “Where previous versions produced model surfaces with a more terraced look, the new technologies created a look that was ten times smoother, through layers as thin as a fifth of a human hair.”41 When applied to hand props, 3D printing offers other advantages: “You can get the feel of a prop before the final design is approved. If it’s too small, you just program the printer to make the model ten percent bigger. You can’t do that any other way.”42 Taking into account Freund’s substantial efforts to avoid replicating props rather than purchasing authentic ones, 3D printing promises to revolutionize prop design by making replication affordable and time efficient. When all the Bayer children’s aspirin bottles from 1962 are gone from eBay, one could simply print one out. The seemingly limitless potentials of digital prop and set design are tempered, however, by industry voices that remind Perspective’s readership that art direction still relies heavily on traditional handmade crafts. Avatar’s (2009) supervising art director, Seth Reed, says: I still did the same thing I always do in managing the Art Department: drawings, models, illustrations, budget, schedule, coordination with the producers, graphics, construction; but the job also includes translating into the physical world the Art Department’s virtual mo-cap [motion capture] work. It’s great to design virtual environments, to models sets in 3D and to create previsualizations; but often these things still need to be built. At that point, we are back to practical matters: how would this really stand up, or how could that really be built?43 A more even-keeled reaction to the entrance of digital technology into art direction appears in a 2014 interview with Alfonso Cuaron, the art director for Gravity (2013): “You know, in the end, the technology thing … I mean it worries me a little bit when people are talking about which are the real sets, which are not … This is a movie, nothing is real … everything is fake. And everything is created by the same group of people, just with different tools.”44 That said, the steady relaxation of anxieties around digital art direction is only really voiced by people working on the most technologically experimental productions like Avatar and Gravity. This opinion, therefore, does not necessarily reflect the

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concerns of those who, by nature of their productions, are still more reliant on the time restraints and physical practicalities of the material world, like Ellen Freund. This is especially pertinent to television, which, in contrast to film, still operates on a more condensed production schedule even with the disappearance of the traditional season from cable programming. The overriding tone toward digital art direction and its effects on props is perhaps best described by the response I got to the question during a lunch I had with a group of people working in prop warehouses and television production design in Los Angeles. “Are people nervous about the impact CGI will have on television production design?” No one answered, people stared at their salads, and someone changed the subject. I think it’s no coincidence that at this particular point in the advancement of 3D printing and digital technology, that shows that fetishize the material world and strong senses of “past-ness,” like Mad Men and Game of Thrones, are so intensely popular and generate so much public discussion about design. It’s at this historical, technological juncture when viewers and makers alike are enraptured with the process of curating and designing the physical world, whether fictional or not.

When props become the whole story: Historical time travel There is a subgenre of nostalgic television in which props dominate whole storylines: the historical time travel reality program that places cast members into recreated environments from the past. One of the earliest examples of this type of program is Channel 4’s 1900 House, which relocated a 1999 family of five to a Victorian town house in London and required them to live entirely according to the social rules and technological limitations of 1900 for a period of three consecutive months. The popularity of 1900 House quickly spawned similar shows in the United Kingdom and United States, each of which transplanted modern families into past environments: The Edwardian Country House, Frontier House (PBS, 2002), and Colonial House (PBS/ Channel 4, 2004). According to the social historian for 1900 House, the objective of the program was “putting the flesh on a small chapter of human history” (“Rude Awakening,” June 19, 2000). While the families’ audition clips show them voicing nostalgia for the program’s respective periods in history, much of the series’ narrative content promptly dispels popular nostalgia for the periods by showing just how difficult daily life was: the families struggle with hygiene, staying warm, cooking, doing laundry, and adjusting to outdated

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gender ideologies. True to the genre of reality TV, this subgenre displays an abject curiosity in putting the casts through bodily and psychological strain. Most notably, much of the dialogue revolves around struggles with antique props that people in wealthy countries have forgotten how to use in order to complete simple household tasks like boiling water. The centrality of props in this TV subgenre is apparent from the opening minutes of the first episode of Frontier House, a PBS program that recreates the struggles pioneers faced during the Holmstead Act of 1886. The program recruits cast members and then assigns them to plots of land and wood cabins in Montana. The show introduces each family as they riffle through a chest of costumes and props associated with the characters they will embody for the next five months (“The American Dream,” April 29, 2002). Curling irons, hats, a bag of marbles, playing cards: the chest of props serves to get the families “into character” and acquaint them with some of the items they will be using on a daily basis. Reskilling cast members on how to use old technology becomes a focus point of each historical time travel series. In 1900 House, the family’s seasonlong battle with maintaining a cast iron range becomes a saga unto itself. Modern means of temperature control are not at their disposal and they must keep the range lit throughout the day and night, while also timing meals around firing it up to full strength. Their fraught relationship with the range comes through in their nightmarish anthropomorphic references to it as the “big beast” that rules the house (“The Time Machine,” June 12, 2000). Other props-related skillsets the families acquire include how to use baking soda as toothpaste, how to use “soap jelly” to wash dishes, how to use a chamber pot and outhouse, how to boil clothes, how to use a straight razor, how to maintain a chicken coop, how to use a hand-pumped vacuum cleaner, and how to use a sanitary napkin and belt. Cast members frequently complain about the difficulty of using nineteenth-century household technology. In Frontier House, the Clume family complains about the production team’s assembly of the historically accurate props: the razor is not sharp, the hats don’t fit, and tea comes in brown paper rather than a container (“Promised Land,” May 6, 2002). Although historical time travel reality series gravitate toward periods before or around 1900, props figure prominently across much of nostalgic television, whether these programs are set in the boomer era or not. Props are oftentimes a central focus of scenes and whole narratives, as material aids for characters and audience members to experience history. For characters’ and audiences alike, props in nostalgic television are objects of great affection and bitter resentment. Heated discussion and scenes are closely associated with props because they are conduits for viewers and characters to voice opinions about the past and its relationship to the present. They also mediate, what are oftentimes, emotional

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discussions about people’s relationships to history. Props encapsulate the tension between rose-colored glasses nostalgia for the past and the harsher historical realities of what hygiene and domestic labor actually demanded. In addition to channeling and structuring the character’s narrative engagement with the historical period in time travel reality TV, much like Mad Men’s prop talk, the discourse around these props similarly professionalizes and legitimates below-the-line work. In 1900 House, most of the first episode is devoted to showing the material recreation of a Victorian era middle-class townhouse by following the work of social historians, project architects, contractors, horticultural historians, and art directions as they gut, rebuild, and decorate a Victorian townhouse. The show introduces the social historian before anyone else in the series. He moves through the home with the project architect before its refurbishment and they have a discussion about what needs to be modified in order to make it authentic to the period. The house they choose for the television program existed during the Victorian era and has since undergone modifications. They excitedly peel back carpet and wallpaper to discover authentic tiling and period wallpaper underneath. They discover original parts of the home’s gas lighting system under layers of plasterboard. The episode follows the social historian as he uses publications of the time, mostly the Sears catalogue, to recreate the 1900 interior. The art director goes on a cross-country hunt for linens and period kitchen appliances that must also be in working condition. A large part of the series is devoted to transforming the house into a period set with working props even though the series does not use the terms “set” and “prop.” The behind-the-scenes laborers arguably have equally important roles as the family members who inhabit the series. In Frontier House, the cast members undergo a training period by “experts” on the period before they are released onto their Montana farms. They are taught survival, domestic, and farming skills by an “animal handler,” a “tools person,” and a “domestic life historian.” They are taught how to fire rifles, how to wash dishes, how to milk cows, how to keep period stoves and cook on them, and how to slaughter animals. The cast is also taught how to use periodaccurate birth control (condoms made of animal intestines), which they then collectively refuse to use while on the project. Much like the 1900 House, the behind-the-scenes people occupy an omniscient presence through watching the cast members wrangle nineteenth-century technologies. The Clumes blame the “historians” and the “handlers” for their own failure to flourish on the frontier and, unlike the other families on the show, they must resort to overspending on extra food in order to feed the family and compensate for a failing farm (“Promised Land,” May 6, 2002). Food is one of the most important props in historical time travel programs. Period-accurate food and the labor involved in making it become key focuses

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of conversation among the characters. For the time travelers, nineteenthcentury cuisine proves to be pretty unpopular as characters shy away from their morning porridge and what, relative to contemporary cooking, prove to be rather tasteless dishes. The food artist on Channel 4’s The Edwardian Country House (broadcast on PBC as Manor House) occupies a central role in the series’ narrative. Manor House casts contestants as either servants or nobility while they work to keep the house running at all levels of the social hierarchy for multiple months. During this social experiment, characters in service roles often have more contact with domestic props and old technology than the gentry in the program. In a strange way, the servants act as halfway points between behind-the-scenes props experts and narrative characters as they struggle to learn how to keep the house running with Edwardian-era technology. The series goes through three different scullery maids after two women quit because the job of Edwardian-era dishwashing for a manor house proves to be too much for modern-day cast members. The chef not only must use a nineteenth-century kitchen, battling many of the same issues with the cast iron range as other historical time travel shows, but he must prepare dishes that are accurate to the time period and this social class. Monsieur Dubiard tests the manor family’s patience as he recreates Edwardian delicacies that are repugnant to contemporary taste buds, like boar’s cheek and a variety of off-colored meat terrines. The tensions between the master of the house and the chef erupt in the series’ final episode when the chef reproaches Sir John for refusing to eat his labor-intensive Edwardian concoctions. He then accuses Sir John of damaging the integrity of the show’s project to accurately recreate this period (“Winners and Losers,” May 28, 2002). In Manor House and other examples of historical time travel reality television, there is a concerted narrative focus on the labor and expertise involved in curating the props required of the projects. The “experts” are only half “behind-thescenes” as many occupy central roles in the series’ cast and plot lines. These characters work to legitimate below-the-line professions in the media industry in similar ways that occur through series like Mad Men and other examples of television nostalgia that have reputations for meticulous production design.

Conclusion: Digital era prop talk The amount of “prop talk” or discussion about the material stuff of nostalgia television rivals that associated with the series’ storylines and characters. Publicity around the show and popular discourse gravitate toward a few themes. One is historical accuracy as the cathartic site for how people relegate their personal nostalgias with the visions of bygone America and Britain

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generated by the shows. Another theme focuses on prop industry people as researchers and historians to the extent that their creative process becomes collapsed into the narrative of the program. Lastly, the documentation of prop curatorship across popular press and the series’ own publicity returns to issues of digitality. Ironically, it’s only in a digital age that productions can achieve the kind of granular attention to detail that is so lauded in Mad Men and programs that have similar reputations of exhaustive historical research, like 1900 House. Social tensions around the digital transition are especially heightened in reality television time travel programs, in which props seem to take over the story. These are extreme examples of the kind of “prop culture” I argue permeates contemporary quality TV. In the historical time travel series, reskilling people in how to use old technologies occupies the better part of the programs. Furthermore, social historians and art directors (people with knowledge about how to source and work with the props) occupy central roles in the casts. Television has a bad reputation, historically speaking, and tends to be associated with the thinning out, reification, and dematerialization of values and culture. Counterintuitively, in the digital era, TV is the medium through which people can experience some of the most intimate and informationheavy connections with material objects, history, and labor. While wealthy countries undergo huge historical cultural shifts in what it means to work and what it means to have “real” and “meaningful” connections with people and things, it is not surprising that television content is turning its storytelling powers to matters of objects, cultures of making and finding, and how we weave it all into personal and collective histories.

Notes   1 Alex Bevan, “Nostalgia for Pre-Digital Media in Mad Men,” Television and New Media 14, no. 6 (2013): 546–559.   2 Cynthia Littleton, “‘Mad Men’: A Guided Tour of the New York Exhibit with Creator Matthew Weiner,” Variety, March 31, 2015, 15.   3 Roger Catlin, “Don Draper’s Gray Suit and Fedora Are among ‘Mad Men Props’ Donated to the Smithsonian,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 27, 2015.   4 Jim Vertuno, “Don Draper and ‘Mad Men’ Archive Land at University of Texas,” Associated Press, January 12, 2017, accessed June 2, 2015, http:// bigstory.ap.org/article/bf56a12c562f4fc4b662140ca5fcdc33/don-draper-andmad-men-archive-land-university-texas.   5 Philip Jankowski, “Passion for Pens,” Associated Press, January 12, 2017.   6 Ibid.

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  7 Variety Artisans, “A Perfect World,” Variety Artisans: Episode 23 (May 12, 2015).   8 Gilbert Cruz, Dave Itzkoff and Kathryn Shattuck, “‘Mad Men’ and Its Love Affair with ’60s Pop Culture,” New York Times, April 3, 2015.   9 Kristie Lau, “Specially-Sourced Ice Cubes and Handmade Cigarette Boxes: How Mad Men Crew Spend $15000 an Episode Creating Sixties Look,” The Daily Mail, April 25, 2012, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ femail/article-2135180/Specially-sourced-ice-cubes-handmade-cigaretteboxes-How-Mad-Men-crew-spend-15-000-AN-EPISODE-creating-Sixties-look. html. 10 Variety Artisans, “A Perfect World,” The Daily Mail, April 25, 2012. 11 The Independent, “Why Mad Men Is Top of the Props,” The Independent, September 6, 2010. 12 Interior Design, “Welcome to 1969,” April 25, 2014. 13 Bill Tragos, “Way Too Many ‘Mad Men’ Inaccuracies,” The Huffington Post, March 28, 2012, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ bill-tragos/way-too-many-mad-men-inac_b_1386155.html”; Gwynne Watkins, “Eighteen Mad Men Anachronisms Spotted by the Internet,” The Huffington Post, March 28, 2012. 14 Kansa, comment on Dunbar, “Revealed: The Incredible Attention to Detail on TV’s Most Stylist Period Drama Mad Men.” 15 Jenny, comment on Dunbar, “Revealed.” 16 Polly Dunbar, “Revealed: The Incredible Attention to Detail on TV’s Most Stylist Period Drama Mad Men,” The Daily Mail, September 25, 2010. 17 The Independent, “Why Mad Men Is Top of the Props.” 18 Lau, “Specially Sourced Ice Cubes and Handmade Cigarette Boxes.” 19 Mark Richardson, comment on Polly Dunbar, “Revealed: The Incredible Attention to Detail on TV’s Most Stylist Period Drama Mad Men,” The Daily Mail, September 25, 2010. 20 James Poniewozik, “Mad Men’s Conquest of Cool,” Time Magazine, November 11, 2006. 21 Cruz, Itzkoff, and Shattuck, “‘Mad Men’ and Its Love Affair with ‘60s Pop Culture.” 22 Poneiwozik, “Mad Men’s Conquest of Cool.” 23 Lacy Rose and Michael O’Connell, “Even Don Draper Couldn’t Invent This Story,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 20, 2015, 44–51. 24 Interior Design, “Welcome to 1969.” 25 Will Dean, “From Ice Cubes to Tea Cups,” The Guardian, September 8, 2010. 26 Early adaptation studies address the transition from novel to film while placing emphasis on dispelling notions of the inherent cultural bereftness of cinematic adaptations of literary classics. (Dudley Andrew, “Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore [Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000], 28–37; Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV to the Passion of the Christ [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007], 6; Robert Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. J. Naremore [Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000], 63). In general there is a strong consensus in adaptation studies that placing value on an adaptation’s fidelity to the source text is misled and presentist.

27 Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis, “‘Mad Men’ Prop Master Scott Buckwalk Explains How He Re-Creates the ’60s,” Collectors Weekly, October 15, 2009. 28 History for Hire, Inc. Prop House website, accessed June 1, 2013. http:// www.historyforhire.com. 29 Ibid. 30 Ellen Freund. Interview with author, June 28, 2013. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Dan Schultz. Interview with author, June 24, 2013. 34 Ibid. 35 Variety, “A Perfect World.” 36 The Independent, “Why Mad Men Is Top of the Props.” 37 Syd Dutton, “Tiptoeing into the Digital Age,” Perspective: The Journal of the Art Directors Guild and Scenic, Title and Graphic Artists, October–November (2007): 39. 38 Ibid., 40. 39 Peter Plantec, “The Screaming Edge of Change,” Perspective: The Journal of the Art Directors Guild and Scenic, Title and Graphic Artists, June–July (2008): 31. 40 Vlad Bina, “5D Medium and the Message,” Perspective: The Journal of the Art Directors Guild and Scenic, Title and Graphic Artists, August–September (2008): 32. 41 Susan Karlin, “3D Printing,” Perspective: The Journal of the Art Directors Guild and Scenic, Title and Graphic Artists, February–March (2012): 41. 42 Ibid., 44. 43 Judy Cosgrove, “Real Steal,” Perspective: The Journal of the Art Directors Guild and Scenic, Title and Graphic Artists, April–May (2012): 60. 44 Andy Nicholson, “Nothing Is Real,” Perspective: The Journal of the Art Directors Guild and Scenic, Title and Graphic Artists, March–April (2014): 21.

4 Prop Stories: Media Props in Narrative Context

Introduction: Props tell stories Props carrying great narrative weight in nostalgia television tend to be analog imaging technologies that, within their storyworlds and broader popular discourse, signal socio-technological transition. Nostalgic series offer a selfreflexive critique of the role that screen media and technological change play in forming personal and collective memory. By extension, these examples provide an ongoing commentary on how imaging technology impacts memory and constructions of nationhood. The previous chapter argues that the anxiety around the digital transition both exists in the popular consciousness and looms large in the minds of the makers of nostalgic production design. The social trepidation typical of historical periods of technological change permeates the prop industry and is ultimately reflected in Mad Men’s highly publicized and debated commitment to accuracy and material authenticity. Not only that, but the series’ material constructions of nationhood are attached to historically located concerns of the digital transition. This is particularly true of how the series treats analog imaging technologies. This chapter treats three scenes in Mad Men that model the series’ narrativization of media screen technologies, which reflect the same themes found in the popular discourse on the series’ props. In these scenes, props act as nostalgic tutorials, providing instruction and reflection on the same relationship between social histories and technological change, and tensions between personal and collective memory found in the print media and online coverage of the series’ prop world. Mad Men pays special attention to pre-digital imaging technologies and mobilizes old media, in the forms of the 8-mm camera, the Polaroid, and the Kodak slide projector to narrate a nostalgia for the baby boom past, while at

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the same time highlighting (through the point of view of its protagonist) the more dystopic and depressing side of white, middle-class domesticity which becomes wedded to the contemporary loss associated with the end of boomer generation dreams. Old media props in Mad Men mark plot points when characters engage history and wrestle with what they oftentimes consider to be unwelcome historical changes tied to concomitant technological change. Mad Men links pre-digital media to its story’s historical location on the cusp of countercultural change. In the series, the close associations between old media and complex forms of personal and collective memory invite a historical parallel to be drawn to the contemporary transition from analog to digital imaging technologies and contemporary nostalgia for a self-admittedly idyllic memory for boomer America. The previous chapter discusses how similar parallels appear in the extra-diegetic popular press on the props themselves. Scenes containing analog imaging devices coincide with the most important narrative insights into the protagonist’s personal history. The props also work narratively in these scenes to bind his individual story to the metahistorical story the series tells. Don Draper is a middle-aged, solitary, white patriarch who struggles with commitment in his interpersonal relationships, however, proves wildly successful as an ad man until his depression, sex addiction, and alcoholism encroach upon work and home life. A mysterious and stoic man with a dark past, Draper reluctantly leads Mad Men through the 1960s, moving from picture perfect suburbia and a family of four to an equally troubled marriage with a much younger, much hipper woman in a sleek, highmodernist penthouse apartment. Professional and personal peaks and rock bottoms mark the series-long dramatic rollercoaster centering on Don and his search for personal happiness and love. In Mad Men, nostalgic access to the boomer period and Don’s ideal of boomer period happiness are heavily mediated because encounters between characters and history are almost always negotiated through imaging technologies like television and photography. These encounters with history through media technology tend to color Don Draper as a bemused onlooker, the ideal historical conduit for contemporary white, middle-class consumption because of its open-endedness and ambiguous takes on the period’s sexism and racism. Draper represents an unchanging and emotionless witness to history that frowns on media frenzy and national mourning. At the level of daily routine, he never partakes in office humor involving misogyny or racism, but he also does not stop them from happening. In this way, the character and his emotional relationship with imaging technologies provide a guilt-free historical conduit for viewers in the present-day, political-divisive climate. Similarly to the previous chapter, this one focuses on Mad Men as a case study because of the robust popular discourse its production design has

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cultivated, and because media technologies recur as objects of narrative significance across the program. However, there are other examples of media technology hand props occupying privileged narrative roles in other cases of nostalgic television. In examples like The Knick (Cinemax, 2014–), Masters of Sex (Showtime, 2013–16), Frontier House (PBS, 2002), and 1900 House (Channel 4, 1999–2000), props pull a lot of narrative weight, occupying substantial screen time as objects of interest and symbolic significance in stories of social progress. While these programs depict eras spanning from the 1880s to 1970s, and represent both television cable dramas and reality television, they demonstrate a similar investment in the historical accuracy of the material objects on screen and a curiosity around how people use them. Moreover, old technology props and television representations of big social shifts in history tend to coincide. This is because, in the context of nostalgic television, old technologies have come to signal a specific set of historical changes and questions. Old imaging technologies play privileged roles within their narratives. They are neither superfluous nor unnoticeable. The scenes covered here heavily thematize old technologies and bind them to narrative moments when lines between personal memory and collective memory blur. Old media props become narrative organizing principles and aesthetic fulcrum points for key scenes. In this way, props hold a similar function within narrative contexts as they do in the context of the popular discourse on production history. This chapter talks about programs that position old imaging technologies as conduits for historical reflection for their users and consumers (both their fictional characters and the audience that these series construct). Nostalgic television positions props as nexus points for popular discussions about national memory and historical reflection.

The Polaroid camera as narrative device Historical crisis is usually inserted at the end of Mad Men’s seasons in order to tie together individual plot lines. Using Draper’s detached viewpoint of 1960s history as a trans-historical adhesive, the series binds its projected audience to Draper and personal memory to collective mediated memory, positing mass media is the main vehicle for experiencing or bearing witness to history. In the case of Don Draper, old imaging props are written into his character, the series’ construction of history, and its theories about the way people experience history in process. The series suggests that part of this process is the visual documentation of family life and connection of personal

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experiences to larger historical events. The series, however, reminds the viewer of the fickleness and unreliability of these connections between individual and collective history, alternatively reinforcing and then deconstructing audience expectations of how boomer America is represented. Mad Men suggests that the construction of nostalgic memories of boomer America cope with the aftermaths of the countercultural revolution and Vietnam War. More recent historical traumas of 9/11, the decline of America as a global economic power, the broadening income gap from the 1970s onwards, and the economic recession of the late 2000s are also implied in the bitter part of this bittersweet image of pre-decline America. One such encounter with history that sutures personal to collective histories occurs later in the first season, when Don pays a visit to his mistress and unexpectedly finds himself smoking pot in the middle of a beatnik party (“The Hobo Code,” September 6, 2007). He begins taking photographs of guests with a camera he finds in the apartment. At the same time another member of the party flips through a family album belonging to Draper’s mistress. After taking the first Polaroid, Don stumbles to the bathroom and experiences a flashback to his childhood. In it, his family agrees to hire a homeless man to work for the day in exchange for a meal and small wage. Ten-year-old Don listens to the vagabond talk about the freedoms of remaining unattached to material possessions and locations. The man teaches him the “hobo code,” written signs that homeless people use to mark which house has good food, where good stories are told, and which houses to avoid. The code tempts Don with a coveted sense of community and freedom because at home he is the product and constant reminder of his father’s infidelity with a prostitute. When the homeless man leaves the next day and Don’s father refuses to pay him, the sign of the dishonest man is branded on a fence outside their house. When Don returns to the present, he uncovers the developing Polaroid, a picture of his mistress and a friend. Upon studying it, he understands she is in love with someone else. In this scene, Don’s traditional attitudes clash with the countercultural preaching of the beatniks. Don confronts his girlfriend about the photo and her “infidelity,” saying, “Everyday I make pictures where people appear to be in love. I know what it looks like.” She responds, “It looks like a magazine.” There is a slippage in the exchange between what is real and what is not, as sexual fidelity becomes analogous to media’s capacity for authentic representation. After all, they are arguing more about the photo than the sex being had. Furthermore, the hypocrisy of Don’s anger suggests that he’s hurt by more than just her rejection. He attaches an authenticity to the Polaroid that he is unable to capture in his mass-produced images or indeed his own life. The beatnik’s conversation with Don devolves into a hackneyed political argument about the ethics of advertising. Don’s personal brand of nihilism

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claims there is no big conspiracy and that the universe is indifferent to human ethics. He swaggers out of the apartment after one of the beatniks says he can’t leave because there are cops in the hallway. Don responds, “You can’t. I can.” As Don predicts, the officers outside the apartment don’t think to stop a seemingly innocuous white man in a suit and fedora. Draper’s life choices allow him the mobility of the vagabond that the scene’s proto-hippies lack because of their public image. Mad Men links advertising to the embeddedness of stereotypes and identities in popular culture, and the insemination and circulation of public opinion and collective history. Advertising and old media cement connections between personal and collective interpretations of history: the meeting place between popular fantasies of happiness that are presented as universally accessible. Don sees “big” history in the making and the germination of the countercultural movements of the 1960s and ’70s. The coincidence of the beatnik altercation with the childhood flashback associates his experience of the past to his present experience of history, from the Great Depression to the earliest hints of feminism and left-wing political unrest. Don Draper’s propensity to run away from his problems and into the arms of other women is his means of breaking ties with the generation before him and his unsavory origins, yet he fails to connect to his own generation (the boomers) or indeed future cohorts (the hippies). Much of Don Draper’s personal struggles with personal accountability therefore become metaphoric for collective responsibility for utopic representations of boomer America that elide the period’s uglier social and political dynamics. Don is unmoving, stubborn, and impenetrable in his elusiveness and uncompromising in the belief that advertising should privilege the independence of creative talent. His moral code does not, however, preclude his manipulating people’s emotional responses to national media events for professional or personal gain. In contrast to those around him, Don is wooden in the face of large historical shifts, only displaying emotion when solipsistically remembering his own past. These moments of personal reflection, however, most often coincide with “big” historical events, like the Cuban Missile Crisis. While Don is contemptuous of collectively shared, national moments of loss or fear, he hypocritically uses such opportunities to privately and cathartically relive the traumas of his childhood. The series’ depictions of Don’s own nostalgia construct him as the primary sympathetic point of identification for the audience during moments of historical crisis and model a method for dealing with the traumas of history through Don’s heavily mediated negotiation of his painful past. In effect, the series binds personal memory to collective historical memory, both of which are activated through the insertion of some kind of pre-digital media. The series also reminds us that history is experienced through the lens of personal autobiography. In the end,

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Mad Men characters notice that “history” is happening only when it affects them personally or they can fit it in their own life narratives. Don, however, is not the sole historical nexus point between the series, its historical narrative, and its projected audience. History is usually experienced as mass media events in the series consistently linked to the omniscient television and radio. In this way, the series also generates a historical consciousness that is separate from Draper’s point of view. Don repeatedly frowns upon children and women’s attachment to television in times of historical crisis. For Don, the materiality and durability of the photographs and other pre-digital imaging technologies contrasts with the flow of television. Television is tied to collective memory in Mad Men, repeatedly uniting disparate characters and narratives during historic television moments like Kennedy’s assassination in 1964 (“The Grown-ups,” November 1, 2009) and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 (“Meditations in an Emergency,” October 26, 2008). During these events, Don disdains television and cautions his wife, children, and coworkers against overexposure to news coverage. There is something decidedly anti- or pre-televisual about the way Don preserves and edits his family memories and media exposure. Set against the continuous flow of images on television, the photograph, the slideshow, and the 8-mm camera represent a certainty and immortality for Don. In the series’ portrayal of Kennedy’s assassination, the television shapes the primary spaces of emotive response and collective experience. The assassination coincides with the wedding of the daughter of one of the firm’s partners. The family decides to go through with the wedding against its better judgment. The national narrative of Kennedy’s assassination is that it was a historical media event producing a shared television time and space. Mad Men repeats this narrative as wedding guests and hotel staff appear glued to the television instead of celebrating in the banquet hall. Don refuses to watch the television, urging his wife and children to turn it off throughout the episode. The series continues its theme of interweaving personal and collective crises when Betty asks Don for a divorce in the midst of the media frenzy, clearly equating moments of historical and character-centered narrative upheaval. In contrast, the Cuban Missile Crisis provides a more ambiguous example of how Don relates to historical change. The second season uses the event to narratively bring various storylines to a crescendo: earlier Betty and Don separate, Betty hooks up with a stranger at a bar, mounting sexual attractions between characters come to heads, the ad agency is bought by a British company, and Betty discovers she is pregnant and considers aborting. Much like the political dynamic of the Cold War, their lives return to normalcy at the season’s close when the status quo is restored shortly after a moment of panic. In the final episodes, television coverage of the Cuban Missile

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Crisis is the background noise to individual crises. At the height of political tensions between the USSR and the United States, Don writes Betty a letter trying to win back her love, banking on the doomsday milieu to save his marriage. In the episode, Don dismissively tells people around him not to believe everything they hear on the news and, that should a bomb drop, their deaths are predetermined. The Cuban Missile Crisis is an example where Don participates in history but his response mimics his profession; he manipulates surrounding media and historical settings to buy people’s trust and emotional investment. Don’s sordid abuse of historical circumstance casts skepticism on experiences of history that are constructed as nostalgic and collectively shared. In this case, not everyone’s memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the same. The event is not painted as a point of national solidarity.

The home movie as historical conduit Using the sociopathic apathy of Draper as a historical onlooker, Mad Men constructs an antiseptic nostalgia toward the boomer era and attaches it to old media. Painting Draper as an unmoved bystander navigating a sea of blabbering historical emoters, the series situates old media at the fulcrum point for personal and collective memory. In doing so, it reminds us that history and nostalgia are subjective. Mad Men’s insertion of imaging technologies in order to narrate key points in boomer-era history incorporate nostalgic anticipation: the projective nostalgia one anticipates when looking back at the present moment. In boomer nostalgia, this usually takes the form of how the series will treat large-scale historical events the viewer knows must take place (like the Cuban Missile Crisis). Nostalgic anticipation is particularly pertinent because most Mad Men viewers’ experience of these events is mediated in some form of another, whether they lived through the historical events, experienced them on live television, or whether they are younger viewers who experienced the retellings of these events in a variety of mediated formats. In this way, Mad Men posits that the personal experience of history is always inscribed within collectivity and mediation, echoing similar themes in how popular discourse discusses the props more generally. Media technologies like the television occupy central roles in nostalgic anticipation. The series extends characters’ relationships to old media to shape a more general model of historical retrospection showing how some personal and historical memories intersect. Old media props are often attached to moments when the series is itself most reflexive about its own nostalgic discourse and cultivation of nostalgic anticipation. Another scene illustrating how props act as meta-narrative devices occurs in Mad Men’s episode “Marriage of Figaro” (August 2, 2007), which opens the

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day after one of its protagonists’ many extra-marital affairs. The family hosts a birthday party for their daughter. As Don begins filming a home movie, we see alternating shots of a medium shot of Don filming and his view through the 8-mm camera. Rather than being represented as a literal point-of-view shot, the later appears as if an 8-mm film were projected onto a black backdrop, a gesture to popular nostalgic memories of family screenings (Figure 4.1). While filming the party, Don accidentally captures his newly divorced neighbor, Helen, flirting with Chet, whose wife and children are in the other room. Swiftly changing gears and avoiding the interaction, Don moves into the dining room where he encounters another intimate moment between a husband and wife. He puts the camera down and leaves the party to pick up the birthday cake. Don, however, never returns home and, rather, pontificates in his car beside the railroad tracks, the cake melting in the seat beside him. I’ve argued elsewhere that, in this scene, “the use of the 8 mm camera invokes patriarchal domestic narratives, their failures, and the relationship of these failures to historical memory at large,” because, “home movie making itself encompasses reflections on memory and a prospective or anticipatory nostalgia that comments on how the series situates itself via historical memory for boomer America.”1 Don’s disillusionment is played out in his extramarital affairs and the episode flags the 8-mm scene as a moment when he is confronted with the potential consequences of infidelity. The episode examines memory through the themes of infidelity and deceit. The episode begins with Don’s childhood friend on the train commute to work recognizing him as Dick Whitman, his true identity. During the Korean

Figure 4.1   “Marriage of Figaro,” August 2, 2007, Mad Men.

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War his commanding officer, the real Don Draper, is killed and Dick switches dog tags with him, assuming his identity in a desperate move to dissociate himself from his painful childhood and rural upbringing. The episode is also a space where Don reflects upon his sex addiction as his way of resisting and dismantling the perfect boomer home. Later in the episode, Don dangerously flirts with having yet another affair. The theme of infidelity continues in the subplot of Chet and Helen’s flirtation at the party. Infidelity and heterosexual romantic love are routinely positioned in the series as fantasy scripts, much like they are in the beatnik scene. Characters try to find love during the series only to find themselves performing popular definitions of what love should look like. As a result, characters often find their existent relationships either failing to conform to these scripts or inauthentic. Thinking that Helen’s children lack a father figure, Chet offers to “toss the ball around the yard” with them. Helen quickly defuses Chet’s interest, “I’m sure eventually I’d get so used to your Sunday visits I’d join you at the beach, just the four of us. Then one night, you’d drop us off at the house and walk me in with an umbrella. The kids would go to sleep and we’d laugh about all the funny things that happened at the beach that day.” Chet stops her and protests he doesn’t want his wife getting the wrong idea. Coyly and flashing a knowing smile, Helen protests that there must have been some misunderstanding. At this point they stop to wave at Don’s camera. It is unclear whether Helen’s completion of Chet’s narrative is meant to flirt back or a clever way of saying no. The effect however is making fun of the triteness and scriptedness of his advances. Don’s home movie is a narrative composed of similarly clichéd and misrepresentative family moments. Helen disrupts his cinematic fantasy sequence by displaying her command of the language and images of patriarchal narration and, moreover, her ability to manipulate and mock them. In the scenes featuring the 8-mm camera and the Polaroid, imaging technologies as props narrativize the interdependence between popular ideas of love and popular media. In this way, Mad Men employs love and sexuality to deconstruct the supposed “golden age” of American family and wholesomeness. If old media function to show how Don does not fit into the cultural script of the boomer sitcom family, they also show how straight romance is a form of role-play that is socially governed and sometimes unfulfilling. Moreover, definitions of romantic love and familial happiness are heavily mediated through imaging technologies, which become regular auto-therapeutic tools for Don in the series. The narrative themes of the episode (adultery and the not-so-happy boomer family) play out largely through the prop of the 8-mm camera. Alongside its narrative import and the dialogue surrounding its use, the cinematographic rendering of the 8 mm reveals more about the series’ nostalgic orientation and

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attitude toward the boomer American Dream. The alternating shots between Don filming and the camera’s view are a familiar strategy for representing the act of filmmaking (Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera originates this trope). In this narrative context, the shot pattern has additional import a tactic comparison between the present and a projected future: Draper constructs a home movie in anticipation of what he would like to see when he revisits the film years from now, a kind of nostalgic anticipation that is part of the series’ larger modes of address, particularly when it comes to large historical events. Isn’t this anticipation the way everyone makes a home movie? We are directed not merely by the need to record what happens at the event, but by how we want to remember that event in the future, perhaps even silently composing how we will narrate the film upon its first screening.2 Filming life at home is effectively the anticipatory construction of future family memories. Because Don’s film and family memory accidentally embed a reminder that his marriage is unhappy, home movie making both generates and unravels patriarchal domestic fantasies. In a similar fashion, nostalgic anticipation is the projected viewing mode the historical narrative of the series cultivates by building up to its portrayal of important moments in history, which the audience is primed to expect. The nostalgic affect associated with the media props is the same as the series’ attitude toward narrating history. As a prop, the camera links the popular disillusionment with the fantasy of the boomer sitcom home and the series’ nostalgic positioning via this popular fantasy. Home movies are an interesting intersection between private fantasy and public pressures. Certainly, popular definitions of family happiness shape the home moviemaker’s private desires. In addition, the home movie maker experiences a temporal shift in anticipating how future audiences (both private and public) will view the film. There is no way of knowing who will consume the film being made: it could be grandchildren, one’s future self, or antique dealers rummaging around a thrift shop. Will these future audiences see the current moment being filmed as genuine and happy? The act of home movie making thus invites rumination on definitions of happiness, family, and how these institutions and values will change over time. Making the home movie is, therefore, as much a process of negotiating social pressures as it is the hurry to capture an intimate and authentic moment. Home movie making offers a microcosm for the temporality of nostalgic memory because it inscribes the past and future into the present moment.

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Annette Kuhn claims the family photo or home movie holds “the promise of a brighter past in the future if we only seize the chance today to consume the raw materials of our tomorrow’s memories. This past-in-the-future, this nostalgia-in-prospect, always hooks into, seeks to produce, desires hinging on a particularly kind of story—a family story with its own forms of plentitude.”3 Similarly, I argue that there is a temporal trialectic generated through the home movie in terms of the people performing for the camera and the filmmaker himself or herself. The filmmaker watches events as they happen through the camera from the point of view of a projected future; at the same time there is the palpable present being captured, which also occupies the status of the past from the point of view of the projected future self. The home movie as a prop and narrative device is therefore particularly conducive to nostalgia. This temporal simultaneity makes filming the home movie, appearing in the home movie, and watching it later on inherently nostalgic experiences because home movies engender a consciousness of remembering the present from a future point of view. The very making of home movies embeds nostalgic watching. Even Helen’s completion of Chet’s thought participates in the same kind of temporal shifting. She narrates the story of their falling in love from a point of view of looking back on it at a future point in time, that is, after they’ve fallen in love and are having an affair. In some sense, Helen’s meta-home movie parallels Don’s, both in its temporal shifting and in its trite and sentimental narrative (falling in love through trips to the beach and getting caught in the rain). This is to say, the temporal consciousness that occurs in Don’s home movie and Helen’s narrative draws awareness to the series’ nostalgia for boomer white America, the construction of patriarchal narratives, and the inevitable failure of these narratives. The 8-mm camera becomes pedagogical in the series and Mad Men uses temporal phenomenology of home movies in order to instruct nostalgic viewing of the series itself.

The nostalgic anticipation of digitality in Mad Men Nostalgic anticipation describes Mad Men’s overarching form of historical reflection. Mad Men’s narrative climaxes coincide with iconic historical media events: Kennedy’s assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Monroe’s suicide. Mad Men’s plot and paratexts (like the portion of its website devoted to the history of the 1960s) cultivate a nostalgic anticipation surrounding how the series will integrate important historical events that the audience

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and the show itself know must happen.4 The show encourages a speculative viewing position that wonders how the Mad Men storyworld will document history. Nostalgic anticipation, therefore, permeates many texts referencing the boomer television suburb and family perhaps because the American national narrative ingrained in popular culture and memory is that this golden age inevitably wanes. Operating with this knowledge, analog media props encourage a longing for the images of this era that is mixed with trepidation surrounding their accepted mortality. The recurring narrativization of media props in Mad Men suggests that the death of this class and racially exclusionary image of the American Dream is as inevitable as the death of the analog image that we know to have already taken place. Hand props provide the narrative impetus for characters’ reflections on nostalgia and memory. As the chapter discussed earlier, props also organize and sustain similar reflections in the publicity Mad Men attracts. In both forums, props catalyze and mediate reflection upon the disjoint between a constructed image of the perfect, suburban, nuclear family and the harsh truths of Don’s failing marriage, frequent absence from home, and tenuous connection with his children. Mad Men strongly associates old media technologies with the moral crises of its main characters. In the home movie scene, the 8-mm camera is an antenna for domestic fantasies informed by a blend of pop culture references (like the classic 1950s and ’60s sitcom) and what is popularly constructed as “real life” back then. Through its portrayal of Don Draper as an adman working in the early 1960s and the insertion of pre-digital media into his world, Mad Men paints the family celluloid archive as a complex and overdetermined expression of domestic fantasy, historical narrative, and memory. The previous chapter argued that the trade journals and popular coverage of the series’ props show a mix of unease and attraction toward the impact of digitality on production design. The narrative contexts of media productionrelated props reiterate similar reflections on the history of technological change. In other words, old media props in the series are attached to presentist discourses on the digital transition. The narrative incorporation of old media as hand props at moments when the series is most self-reflexive about its meta-historical commentary encourage historical parallels between that era and contemporary times. In part, these parallels address the affective differences between analog and digital media as vehicles for both historical and personal, familial memory. Hand props interrogate the digital transition, and the relationship between technology and memory. In Mad Men’s line of inquiry, the boomer era stands as a historical marker for when imaging technologies entered the home en masse, and dramatically changed the popular ideas of home and family.

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The technological shift marking the 1950s is similar to the digital transition in dramatically altering boundaries between work and home. In the case of the digital revolution, lines between public and private, work and home life are continually re-drawn with the rise of telecommuting, omnipresent interpersonal communication, the growth of dual income households, and the necessity of joint parenting. The housing crisis of 2008 dramatically reshaped suburbia (in some cases, like Detroit, turning whole cities into collections of vacant lots). Popular memory of baby boom America, therefore, holds particular significance at this historical moment because it represents a bygone era whose economic prosperity planted the seeds of the institutional greed and entitlement ultimately causing the economic recession. And yet, its images of prosperity, racial inequality, and gender normativity are still arguably persistent aspirations for some. The digital transition is a phantomic presence in Mad Men, as the series invites meditation on how imaging technology has changed and how it has altered the collective experience of national crisis. Media technology props usually appear when Don attempts to manufacture a convincing representation of familial happiness where there is none. These scenes, like the 8-mm camera scene, usually end in his failure to achieve commensurability between the boomer popular image of the white middleclass nuclear family and his knowledge that he and his family are not, despite appearances, happy. Symbolically, this internal emotional struggle takes place against shots that emphasize the materiality of the media prop in that scene. The emphasis is usually placed on the media prop’s analogness, its reliance on tangible indexical means of recording (namely celluloid). The Kodak scene portrays Don as a failed puppeteer of analog imagery (“The Wheel,” October 18, 2007). Draper is asked to design a campaign for Kodak’s slide projector. Don’s marriage is on the rocks at this point in the series. Don’s coworker, Harry Crane, is also experiencing marital difficulties in the episode and he is so moved by Don’s Kodak’s pitch. In an effort to breach the distance between them, Betty urges Don to spend Thanksgiving weekend with her family instead of working, but he refuses. She asks why he can’t make her family his own. As Don puts together his Kodak pitch, he looks through the shoebox of photographs his estranged brother sent him earlier in the episode, photographs that reveal his family origins and true identity. Inspired by the reminiscence, Don writes his Kodak pitch around slides of personal family photographs of his wife and children: Technology is a glittering lure but there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in house at a fur company. This old pro, copywriter, Greek, named Teddy and Teddy told me the most important

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idea in advertising is new [sic]. Creates an itch [sic]. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. He also talked about a deeper bond with the product, nostalgia. It’s delicate but potent. Slideshow begins. Teddy told me that in Greek nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels— ’round and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved. There are many levels of nostalgia in this speech alone: Don’s nostalgia for his early days as a copywriter, nostalgia for his family when it was intact, and a collective vicarious nostalgia for family. Don’s speech acknowledges that as technology advances, the “glittering lure” of new media and nostalgia for simpler times attached to old technologies pull us in opposite directions. While set in 1959, the speech could just as easily apply to the technological climate of the digital turn and, thus, it invites parallel critique of digitization. The show cultivates a nostalgic yet skeptical viewing position. But Don’s newfound appreciation for his family, achieved through this mediated and very public retrospection, is sadly never carried into action. After the Kodak presentation Don commutes home. The episode ends with his coming home and catching the family just in time to join them for Thanksgiving. However, this appears to have been a fantasy as we cut to Don coming home to an empty dark house because his family has already left. Season one ends with him sitting alone on a gloomy staircase, the camera tracking out to Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963). The insertion of Dylan bears an important reminder that the historical milieu of the first season is on the precipice of cultural and political change. Don sits in the dark of his empty home contemplating the family narratives he carefully constructs at work, including the meta-narrative of his false identity as Don Draper. These narratives, however, have clearly failed in historical reality. “Don’t Think Twice” speaks to the parallel inevitability of large-scale change in the United States and the ultimate tarnishing of boomer dreams as they are revised and/or replaced by the up-and-coming Flower Generation. As a season denouement, the Kodak scene invites connections between technological change (whether from one analog medium to another, or the present shift from analog to digitality) and nostalgia for a more “real” time when family connections were “stronger.” At the same time, the series’ framing of Don’s nostalgia, expressed entirely through analog imaging technology, acknowledges and highlights the false construction that a more “real” or

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“stronger” family ever existed. Old media, nostalgia, and the counternarrative potentials of each are positioned as memory tools for integrating more painful personal and national narratives. The prominence of analog imaging technologies is more than just a narrative motif in the series. The scenes discussed here foreground the physicality and objecthood of the props. The materiality of old media is wedded to authenticity, while new media are constructed as ephemeral and potentially deceptive.5 Old media, however, for all their truthfulness, are positioned as equally duplicitous. For one, Don’s media images of family, while assigned the label of authentic emotion during the Kodak presentation, are in fact modeled after the advertising images he creates daily. These questions of authenticity apply to the content of the images as well as their medium, the still photographic image. As an archive that Don carefully constructs, the Kodak wheel is an artificial representation of the Draper family. As much as the series questions the validity of this familial narrative, it questions the veracity of the still photographic archive as an accurate representation of home life. The scene’s references to the materiality of the slides indicate a fetishistic interest in the medium itself, much like the interest expressed toward the props more generally in the series’ publicity. The material specificity of the slideshow, the projected photograph, and how it is used in this scene intuit specific observations on historical memory, television, nostalgia, and the American boomer family. The scene focuses heavily on the slide projector’s temporal and material attributes. The slideshow sets the pace of Don’s speech. The clicking and whirling sounds of the machine punctuate his talk. Close-ups focus on the slides falling into and out of position as light is projected through them, calling attention to the sounds, material, and mechanics of the device. Long shots of the room and close-ups of the slides are lithographed with cigarette smoke, imbuing the slides and the family moments they capture with an additional ethereality (Figure 4.2). The clutter and clunking of the machine aside, the suspended smoke and flickering lights draw attention to the slides as physical and terminal objects that, like memory, deteriorate and decay. Ephemera and objecthood go hand in hand. The relationship between ephemera and materiality is linked to the nostalgia for old media technologies and associated with the domestic sphere and the role of father as family historian in particular. Ephemera and materiality also suggest the opposing fickleness and indelibility of personal and historical memory, and the dynamism of their construction, deconstruction, and revision.6 The Polaroid beaktnik scene discussed earlier uses photography props in a very similar way, reinforcing the way Mad Men binds personal memory to the intimacy and unreliability of the pre-digital image. Polaroid photograph is unique for not having a negative or source index that is reproducible. The

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Figure 4.2   “The Wheel,” October 18, 2007, Mad Men. Polaroid, like a painting, exists as a singular materialization of the moment. Don witnesses a lovers’ exchange that exists only in memory and the photograph in his hand. There is no other piece of evidence to compare it to. There is no doctoring or editing. The Polaroid makes this moment and the truth of his lover’s affections for another undeniable for Don. At the same time, this affective moment is undercut by Don’s shameless exploitation of hackneyed family moments for professional gain and advertising purposes. Or are these seemingly “authentic” private moments shaped by advertising images of the boomer family? The scenes of Don’s home movie, the Kodak Wheel scene and the beatnik encounter question the authenticity of the analog photograph in the context of the self-censorship associated with the family album. Similar discourses have been applied to the digital image: Is this a real picture or is it doctored? is this image lifted from a completely different context through cutting and pasting? Mad Men’s treatment of analog media and the anxieties around their veracity are historically situated in a cultural context where digitality and its relationship to reality are common sources of anxiety and under constant scrutiny. The analog media scenes from Mad Men are rather macabre renditions of the boomer nostalgic family: the Kodak slideshow captures family nostalgia but is set in a sterile corporate office; the home movie is Don’s scripted family memory gone wrong; and the Polaroid captures the love that wants but

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constantly eludes him, not to mention it involves an extramarital relationship. The scenes speak to nostalgia for a certain kind of family event and interaction. Their internal dissonance, however, speaks to an acceptance that this type of family event was and is no longer common place. The Kodak scene also upsets notions of the family screening by highlighting, in true melodramatic form, the dissonance between masculine emotional affect and the socially demanded performance of masculine professionalism and control. The other dissonance in the scene is the incommensurability between Don’s slideshow narration and his real family life, which is rapidly unraveling. It is a fantasy of familial bliss, or a counternarrative to reality. The counternarrative possibilities of the slideshow can be extended to broader themes of rewriting history and counternarration. Slideshow narration detaches verbal accompaniment from the photographer, as other people can and do participate in narrating slides at family screenings. Thus, different family members and friends can offer counternarrations of their own.7 These strategies of counternarration are an integral and inherent part of the home movie as well as nostalgia. Counternarratives are built into the home movie’s visual vocabulary and viewing practice. In the Kodak scene, Don reframes and recontextualizes images of his family to situate them within a happy, cohesive narrative. Through showing the disjoint between Don’s public image and his private reality, the series demystifies and undermines popular narratives of boomer America that naturalize the suburban nuclear family. We only know that his happy, imaginary past family does not align with his discordant, present one. In fact, the nostalgia he creates at the Kodak presentation depends on the present loss of this imagined familial bliss, just as the nostalgia for the boomer past relies on an American sentiment that its presumed naiveté and wholesomeness has been lost. Mad Men’s Kodak scene takes quotidian images of the boomer family and idyllic home life and casts them as dreamscapes in the American imagination and nostalgic objects that never existed, rooted in advertising images that have somehow been caught up in historical memory. Scenes featuring a vinyl record player similarly opportunize Don’s fraught relationship with pre-digital media, albeit this time it is auditory media. Mad Men prominently features its vinyl copy of the Beatles’ Revolver, especially given the millennial resurgence of vinyl record collecting culture, the notoriously high price tag on licensing rights to Beatles’ songs, and the scarcity of Beatles originals recorded in mono (“Lady Lazarus,” May 6, 2012). Don plays the “Tomorrow Never Knows” from the 1966 album known for being among the first to herald the era of psychedelic rock and the synthesizer in mainstream music culture. In the episode, Don experiences an age gap in taste culture between himself and members of his creative team as well as his

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much younger wife. When his mentees pitch a “Hard Days Night” parody for a television commercial for Chevalier, Don wonders when music has become “so important.” Megan quits her job at the firm as a copywriter to pursue a career in acting, much to Don’s chagrin. The change in career exacerbates the growing rift in their marriage. Don comes home to Megan cooking dinner to news coverage of the Vietnam War and as she leaves to attend her first acting class, she gives him Revolver and tells him to play “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The song is set to a montage of different characters from the show and their activities that evening, ending with Don sitting in a lounge chair listening to the record. Surprisingly, Don turns the record player off in the middle of the track, walks off to bed, and the episode fades to black, a provocative and cheeky waste of the rights to the Beatles song which cost AMC $250,000.8 The scene continues Mad Men’s tradition of wedding old media to historical shifts and Don’s skepticism toward change, whether Megan’s career transition or groundbreaking moments in rock ”n” roll. As usual, Don does not completely dismiss change. In fact, he seems largely unaffected by it. In contrast to people around him who react strongly to news events and shifts in popular culture, Don is bewildered and emotionally illegible. In the context of other scenes in the series that focus on Don’s reaction to the cultural history of the 1960s, this scene casts suspicion on how changes of historical significance are defined and to what extent historical progress/regress really happens. Mad Men fetishizes these iconic moments in 1960s American history, only to show the contingencies of their fetishization (which extends to Revolver’s iconic status in music history). Old media not only narrate this meditation but, according to the series, enable reflection upon such historical questions. Media props are tools for assessing historical position and questioning historical teleologies. Within the confines of its storyworld, Mad Men uses of old media props to negotiate its own retellings of “golden age” America. Mad Men inserts the Polaroid camera, the Kodak slide projector, and the 8-mm home movie to encourage a nostalgic orientation hinging on nostalgic anticipation (the series cuing the projected audience to expect certain familiar imagery and historical events associated with boomer history in popular memory) and a mapping of personal memory onto collective memory (the ways the series and films encourage an extrapolation of the family memories of their protagonists to collective memories of nationhood and old media themselves, which they portray as being universal). The narrative importance of these scenes depends on the temporal and material properties of analog media technologies to cultivate a viewing protocol which takes an interest both in what Mad Men does (provide a nostalgic representation of the postwar middle class) and how it does this in production. The character-driven introspective activities that the series maps onto old media become self-directed, implicating the series’

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own place in popular nostalgic for boomer America. These scenes intuit how to read the TV sitcom suburb, what purpose this image holds, and what role imaging media plays in memory making at individual and collective levels. In this way, the series writes itself into a popular history of boomer nostalgia and positions itself as providing directions on how to deconstruct the American Dream embodied by the sitcom suburb of the postwar period. Celluloid imaging technologies become narrative devices in key scenes, opening spaces and privileged moments for discussing nostalgic memory. As a part of set dressing, I consider these imaging technologies as highly potent props. While they are written into the narratives of the films/series, they present cases where production design comprises a primary narrative and aesthetic drive of nostalgic media.

Old media props in other period dramas Mad Men’s use of props is not an isolated instance of boomer nostalgia, especially in the context of a growing popular interest in television production design. More specifically, this book argues that period television programming shows a tendency toward telling histories of gender and, to a limited extent, race through props alongside other aspects of production design. A 1960 EKG machine, a 1900 cast iron stove, a Victorian wax cylinder gramophone, and medical device from Victorian-era cesarean procedures: these objects are the focal points of their respective episodes in period dramas and reality television shows. This section expands the discussion of props as narrative principles to a broader range of costume television from reality television programs that set contestants in 1883 frontier log cabins, to historical dramas set in the boomer era at the cusp of sexuality studies in medicine. Across these examples, old media props, home appliances, and medical instruments recur as center points in narratives that historicize the gendered, racial body. The historical time travel programs discussed in the previous chapter share a common theme of women experiencing extreme boredom in their newly assumed, domestic roles. Furthermore, much of this boredom and frustration is mediated through their interactions with hand props and period clothing that fail to live up to modern expectations of comfort and efficiency. In addition, as the men in the programs settle into their roles as patriarchs and dissociate from household labor, the props and costumes come to symbolize women’s oppression in these antiquated gender roles that anchor women to the house and domestic labor. Chanel 4’s 1900 House recreates a functioning middle-class Victorian household for a family of five. It’s not lost on the wife, Joyce, that most of the social historian’s instructions on how to run the

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house is directed at her. After three days of burned dinners using a cast iron range and one day doing laundry by hand, Joyce loses her cool at the gender discrepancies of the era, stating that “I’m jealous because he’s [her husband] a man and whether it’s 1900 or 1999, he gets the better deal” (“A Rude Awakening,” June 19, 2000). Later on, props continue to serve as focal points for the issues of gender inequality raised by “time traveling” to the Victorian age. Joyce complains of aches, pains, and shortness of breath due to the daily requirement of wearing a corset as she also conducts the household labor (“A Woman’s Place,” June 26, 2000). Later in the episode, Joyce and her daughter are barred from joining the family in going swimming because, according to the rules of the program, they wouldn’t have had access to tampons in 1900. Eventually, the social restrictions and the drudgery of working with period accurate props motivate Joyce to hire a maid to alleviate some of the labor. Even then, while the husband, Paul, is at work each day, Joyce expresses a general boredom with her housebound role (“A Woman’s Place,” June 26, 2000). When producers give her a bicycle, Joyce experiences temporary relief and observes how freeing the invention must have been for women of the time. When visitors come over and peruse the home’s furnishings and dressings, Joyce states that people naively wax nostalgic about the era and “sanitize Victoriana” because they fail to realize how difficult living in the time period as a woman really is (“A Woman’s Place,” June 26, 2000). Joyce takes up researching the women’s suffrage movement. As she lapses into depression, her maid, Elizabeth also becomes unhappy. Working full weeks of fifteen-hour days, Elizabeth begins researching the history of domestic service and takes issue with Paul’s tone of voice with her while she is working. Ultimately, Joyce’s parallel research into women’s rights leads her to conclude that feminism of the time was a class-specific privilege and she fires Elizabeth because she can no longer justify exploiting her in order to curtail her own workload. In the series, gender politics become one of the governing narrative themes. The harshness of housework in the Victorian era, its technological constraints, and the unfair divisions of domestic labor instigate these plotlines. The catalyzing moments for such debate are characters’ struggles with using hand props as the symbolic and material causes of their discomforts. Gender tensions reach a similar climax through props in PBS’s Frontier House, which relocates three modern families onto frontier log cabins of the 1880s. The women of all three families express similar boredom in their housebound roles. One woman says, “I’m a woman of 2001 living in 1883 and I’m trapped as a woman of 1883.” As she entertains abandoning the project entirely, she thinks, “I’m sure [frontier] women weren’t pansies and I’m sure women wanted out” (“Til Death Do Us Part,” June 4, 2003). Homophobic slurs aside, her frustration is clear and it is mediated through

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props. Historical time travel television, which mostly focuses on domestic settings, privileges props to frame conversations among the characters about gender norms. Female characters on the shows routinely air frustrations at having to occupy period-accurate gender roles and such discussions usually take place after a particularly grueling session with the cast iron range or handpumped vacuum. Household objects, and home technologies in particular, set the stage for heated debates about gender both in narrative dramas like Mad Men and in reality TV that recreates historical time periods. In either case, gender disparity is strongly attached to domestic technology and hand props on nostalgic television. Much like the media props on Mad Men, medical instruments offer another curious subcategory of hand props that recur as markers of racial and gender historical “progress” on nostalgic television. Whatever the program, antique EKG machines and home movie cameras alike bear affinity for narratives centering on heteronormativity, queerness, and the changes seen over the past century in Western culture. Masters of Sex is a television drama set in the 1960s that follows the academic legitimation of sexuality studies in the research of Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson. From the first episode, the series pays notable narrative and visual attention to obstetric instruments in Dr. Masters’ offices and surgery rooms as gauges of medical progress. The first episode opens with the protagonist saving the life of a black woman who is hemorrhaging after giving birth in the “negro ward.” The doctor’s motivation to improve women’s health frames the overarching narrative of the series, which is Virginia and Masters’ pioneering research on the physiology of female sexuality and the biology of intercourse. The opening episode works hard to communicate that the series is a social retelling of a specific medical history that also captures a crucial moment in the history of women’s rights, feminism, and sexuality studies. The series casts the story of their research against the backdrop of the simultaneously repressive and exploratory sexual climate of the 1960s, during which a generational divide pits dominant ideologies of sexuality and sexism against more progressive notions of the emerging feminist movements and greater social tolerances of sexuality in general. Masters comes home in the first episode to watch Elvis’s historic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, shot from the waist up because his dancing was thought to be too lascivious (“Pilot,” September 28, 2013). Virginia encounters institutional sexism when she decides to enroll in college and the administrative assistant urges her to care for her family instead (“Pilot,” September 28, 2013). Obstetricians reference Freud’s differences between “mature” (vaginal) and “immature” (clitoral) female orgasm as the contemporary working theory on women’s sexuality (“Brave New World,”

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November 3, 2013). Masters curtly dismisses male surgeons who make misogynist jokes about the woman they are operating on because she is a sex worker (“Standard Deviation,” October 13, 2013). Characters casually discuss queer sex as “deviant” and the series explores the history of life in the closet during the boomer era as well as the use of aversion therapy as a barbaric mid-century “treatment” for homosexuality (“Love and Marriage,” November 17, 2013). The series reveals, in the form of flashbacks, that the sexual abuse of women has personal meaning for Masters who has his own history of childhood physical and possibly sexual abuse by his father (“Thank You for Coming,” October 20, 2013). Through its emphasis on women’s experience and queer history, Masters of Sex positions itself as the feminist answer to Mad Men, which is on predominantly about men and male straight sexuality in the 1950s and ’60s. The series’ key political project and its larger narrative of representing female and queer sexuality in mid-century America is underpinned by a lot of camera time devoted to period medical instruments. Because the research project covered in the series mostly focuses on documenting and studying sex, many scenes contain nudity, medical instruments, and analog media like projectors and super 8-mm film cameras. There are long, loving shots of the camera-vibrator that Masters uses to capture female orgasm on film (“Pilot,” September 28, 2013) (Figure 4.3). Slow panning shots of a 1960s EKG machine are intercut with explicit shots of a man and woman having vaginal intercourse (Figures 4.4 and 4.5). The shock

Figure 4.3   “Pilot,” September 29, 2013, Masters of Sex.

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Figures 4.4–4.5   “All Together Now,” November 10, 2013, Masters of Sex. value of Masters of Sex rests on the stark contradiction between the sanitized popular representations of the boomer era and the explicit sexual content for which the series is infamous. The series intercuts every sex act with shots of old technologies in some shape or form. This is because these old technologies are key mediators of the main story the series tells: drawing attention to parts of culture that representations of the time elide, which include queer men and women, the sexual and political oppression of women and queer populations, masturbation, and sexuality (both vanilla and kinky) as parts of daily life. It is not surprising that old medical and media technologies are a large part of

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telling this story because, within the context of sexuality studies, they were documenters that made these private moments and parts of people’s lives and bodies visible for the first time. Within the broader context of popular history, their documentary capacity could also work to keep these same moments hidden, as Mad Men’s narrative use of old media suggests. Thus, other examples of nostalgia television besides Mad Men position pre-digital media as documenters of gender progress and regress. In Masters of Sex, the connection is as much an aesthetic curiosity as a narrative theme. When Masters and Virginia are ready to develop their films capturing female orgasm, they have no other recourse but to go to a sex shop. During their visit, they come across a hand-cranked kinetoscope from the 1880s and they take turns watching this outmoded form of celluloid pornography while waiting for their own research-directed “porno” to be developed. This example shows a popular interest in pre-digital media technologies, but it also solidifies the larger thesis of the series, which is that technology, medicine, and social constructions of sexuality are always connected: an advance in one means a shift in the other two. A less obvious example of props-driven television nostalgia comes in the form of Penny Dreadful (Showtime, 2014–16), a fantasy-drama series that integrates iconic monsters and fables into the same storyworld, which centers on paranormal investigators working in the early 1900s. While the stories and characters themselves are quite fantastic (most have supernatural powers), the production design endeavors to be historically accurate and, like other examples discussed here, the design invests in pre-digital media and issues of gender equity. Penny Dreadful’s female investigator, Vanessa, is a spiritual medium who becomes possessed by dark forces in the second and third seasons. She sees a female psychologist who uses hypnosis in an effort to find the source of her ailments (“Good and Evil Braided Be,” May 15, 2016 and “A Blade of Grass,” May 22, 2016). During hypnotherapy, the doctor uses a wax cylinder phonograph to record the session. The doctor’s dialogue leading Vanessa in and out of hypnosis emphasizes the sound of the wax while the camerawork intercuts scenes from Vanessa’s dreams with shots of the phonograph as an object of visual historical interest. The phonograph is also the main documenter of Vanessa’s experience. It is revealed that Vanessa was brutalized and tortured during her stay at a mental asylum years before, during which she also encounters the dark forces that are a part of the series’ fantasy world. However, the revelation has as much to do with the medical history of hysteria in women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the “dark forces” that pursue Vanessa.9 The episodes show historically accurate medical treatments for female hysterics, including isolation, ice water baths, and restraints. The history of hysteria shows that the pathology was

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a crude misdiagnosis for a host of other disorders in women (depression, anxiety, dysmenorrhea, and epilepsy among others).10 Moreover, research shows the interdependent emergence of the disorder alongside celluloid media like photography and the phonograph, suggesting that the disorder and its documentation informed each other.11 Penny Dreadful alludes to the interconnected histories of American spiritualism, psychology, and media technology elsewhere in the series through the prominent insertions of period photographic cameras (“Séance,” May 12, 2014) and the phonograph (“Good and Evil Braided Be,” May 15, 2016; “A Blade of Grass,” May 22, 2016; and “And They Were Enemies,” July 5, 2015). These episodes underline the historical connections between media technologies as social and medical documenters, and the gendered and sexual shifts that were taking place at the start of the twentieth century. The historical setting of Penny Dreadful includes key shifts in women’s history, most notably the emergence of women as leaders in the American spiritualist movement, its coincidence with the nascence of firstwave feminism, and its patriarchal backlash.12 In medical fields, this took the form of pathologizing women who were unhappy in purely domestic roles, which Penny Dreadful addresses through the character of Vanessa.13 The Knick is a television drama about the history of surgery at the Knickerbocker hospital in New York in the early 1900s and shows a similar television kinship between medical instruments as hand props and telling the twentiethcentury history of gender and sexuality. While the show is less interested in the history of sexuality and gender than Masters of Sex, the historical oppression of women prevails as a theme in the series, which represents the dangers of early-twentieth-century childbirth and the disproportionately deleterious social affects that STDs, mental health disorders, and the pressures of marriage and reproduction had on women of the period. The first episode begins with a failed cesarean section that kills both mother and child. The head surgeon, despondent after the many failed attempts at the procedure, then commits suicide (“Method and Madness,” August 8, 2014). This opening scene propels one of the leading storylines in the first season, which is Dr. Thackery’s succession as head surgeon and his mission to invent the medical tools to advance the surgical field. Like the other examples discussed here, The Knick focuses heavily on medical instruments of its era as both interesting aesthetic objects with their own social histories and narrative organizing principles that structure stories about women’s health and social progress. The first episode shows the failed cesarean in graphic detail, with particular camera investment in first-generation cauterization machines. Thackery and team find the medical solution to the first operation’s failure in episode six, in which they make an inflatable bladder that stems blood flow from the placenta through trialing the device on sex workers, the only women of the time who would allow men

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to “experiment” with their bodies (“Start Calling Me Dad,” September 19, 2014). In the final surgery scene on a patient in labor shows the balloon being inserted into the vagina and then inflated, stemming the blood flow enough for doctors to then extract the baby without the mother hemorrhaging. The series routinely shows the interdependencies between medical instruments and the social history of women’s health and civil rights. In these cases of television nostalgia, hand props (media and medical hand props in particular) cohere larger, sprawling stories about gender, equity, and medical research.

Conclusion: The privileges of time travel It is not surprising that nostalgia for boomer America on television is heavily dependent on the material objects that appear on screen. The interest in objecthood is part and parcel of nostalgia itself. Cultural studies, memory studies, and popular cultural criticism traditionally contrast tactility and patina (the visible aging of an object in the form of wear and tear) with the supposed emptiness and soullessness of mass-produced objects.14 This opposition is historically tied to a crisis of modernity, wherein contemporary culture places function, efficiency, and the ephemeral over materiality, interpersonal relationships, and physical space. As a result of the historical shift to industrialization, people are alienated from the material world and each other. This anxiety is resurrected with new fervor during the digital transition. It is, therefore, to be expected that the media coming out of the digital-era reflect this modernist anxiety in the form of a formal and narrative curiosity around material objects and their histories. However, Mad Men’s plot lines and its extra-diegetic props discourse do not romantically label the 1950s and ’60s as having more materiality or a time when people were more in tune with their physical world. In fact, the series casts large doubt on this argument by coloring the boomer period as the nativity of contemporary relationships with mass-produced objects and images of happiness. According to Mad Men, the boomer era is no better and in many ways, worse, than today. In Mad Men’s family picnic scene, the Drapers finish their meal and then casually throw their garbage on the grass as they leave (“The Gold Violin,” September 7, 2008). The picnic not only marks a shift in cultural values, but also acts as a poignant metaphor for the (environmental) impact of the boomer period upon the present. While Mad Men’s engagement with familiar modernist cultural criticism is ambiguous at best, it’s fair to say that the status of the object in the series is bound up with personal and collective memory, and the act of questioning memory.

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Susan Stewart claims the souvenir serves the purpose of domesticating the outside world and wrangling it into a cognitively and tangibly digestible form.15 In a similar fashion, the Mad Men’s nostalgia for old props domesticate historical narratives from the cultural revolution to Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, which are daunting to take on for their cultural significance and the innumerable times they’ve already been represented in media. When props occupy the narrative foreground, they serve to anchor characters’ (usually Don Draper’s) personal memories to these larger historical shifts. Stewart acknowledges that the souvenir is partial and that it cannot possibly encapsulate the richness of the experience it signifies. Similarly, props consolidate the past and at the same time, leave it open to interpretation by acknowledging the partiality of Mad Men’s own representation. The fact that Mad Men, and the other examples discussed in the chapter, are TV also contributes to their representation of props with mnemonic significance. Television encourages a heightened interest in props because first, viewers are given the opportunity to explore the same props over many episodes and secondly, television is coming to be a nostalgic medium in its own right that denotes a certain physicality and prop-ness. Many scholars have written about the cultural symbolism of the TV console, citing the history of its social impact upon domestic space and leisure time as well as more the obscure signs of its iconic status, like its frequent quotation in modern sculpture.16 However, television’s medium specificity is becoming increasingly nebulous as viewers watch shows on all kinds of screen devices in all kinds of private and public spaces, and the traditional television season is quickly disappearing. Television consoles have become props in the millennial living room, symbols of togetherness when family members are, in reality, watching media in different rooms of the house on private screens. Of course, this observation is biased toward people who can afford multiple rooms and screen devices, but Mad Men is courting precisely this demographic.17 It is made for predominantly middle- to upper-class viewers. Mad Men figures broadcast television prominently within its narrative and it is itself a television show that generates a popular interest in the nostalgic politics of its props. In combination, these elements set the stage for reflections on changing media technologies and the history of television as a home technology. In any case, the way we talk about its props and the ways that props figure in the series say more about the fears and self-assuredness of the present than those of the past. We would do well to remember that retrospection on the histories of gender progress and regress is a privileged activity dependent on our class, race, location, and gender. African American families do not wax nostalgic for the 1950s. Queer publics do not yearn for halcyon days when gay marriage and sex were illegal. Historical time travel programs acknowledge the

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limitations to which certain publics can “time travel” when the cast and crew accept certain historical inaccuracies (like the use of modern birth control methods) over others (“The American Dream,” April 29, 2002). It would be unacceptable, by modern standards, for the contestants to be placed at risk by using period-accurate contraception. The series raises the contradictions of time travel and pits contemporary social values against those of the past with great poignancy. When the Clunes’ farm fails and they complain of hunger, the Crow Native American tribe offers to help the family kill and butcher a mule deer from Crow land. In an ironic and cruel twist, the production is occupying the very land that the Crow tribe lost in 1882, when they were forced off their land and one out of every three tribesper son starved to death. In this way, the program tacitly acknowledges that it’s replaying a history of white imperialism, only this time the Crow tribe sustains the descendants of their ethnic cleansers from over a hundred years ago. Not only that, but they feed the historical specters of their own genocide on very land of which they were dispossessed. In this way, some examples of nostalgia television address the limitations and pitfalls of historical reflection on social “progress.” Hand props may signal historical shifts, but the extent to which one can assign them values of “gain” or “loss” very much depends on one’s class, gender, racial, and geographic belonging. Props enable discussions and storytelling about the constructedness of national memory and reflections on the impact of technological change. The television series discussed here tell stories about technological change and voice a range of present-day fears and desires. Television is a privileged space for mediating the digital transition, cultivating memory, and making nostalgia. More specifically, props on television hold a privileged place in popular nostalgia. Props are more than props. They are open-ended statements on conflicted popular feelings about historical progress and changing technologies.

Notes   1 Alex Bevan, “Nostalgia for Pre-Digital Media in Mad Men,” 548.   2 Ibid., 549.   3 Annette Kuhn, “Remembrance,” in Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photography, eds. Jo and Patricia Holland Spence (New York: Virago Press Ltd., 1991), 17–25.   4 “1960s Handbook,” https://www.amc.com/shows/mad-men/, accessed June 1, 2012. Mad Men website.   5 In Haunted Media, Jeffrey Sconce draws connections between the historical contexts of emerging media technologies and popular fears of the

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paranormal or supernatural that are often attached to them. These public anxieties see old media as permanent, authentic, and more material where new media are viewed as ephemeral and unreliable, thus encouraging ghosts, magic, and occult to be mapped onto human/media technology interactions (Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000]). Roland Barthes’s 1980 discussion of photography resonates with these historically contingent fears when he ascribes a material indexicality and richer affect to celluloid still images (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hill and Wang, 1981]). A more alarmist iteration of this sentiment appears in Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on reproducible technology, in which he links the distractibility of cinema to mass mental and moral regression, and ultimately political extremism (Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt [London: Fontana, 1968], 214–218).   6 Roland Barthes claims that a photograph captures a moment in time both visually and indexically because it bears a physical relationship to its referent; light physically reflects off the object of study and impresses itself onto the negative, thus creating an lithographic stone or woodblock from which all photographs are reproduced (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5–7). The photograph, therefore, has an intensely physical relationship to what it depicts. Barthes’s Camera Lucida is a prolonged meditation on a photograph of his deceased mother. Photography’s morality/presentness, ephemera/material bind, or what Barthes’s calls a photograph’s “contingency” versus its indexicality, play key roles in its function as a mnemonic tool (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5, 80–81). Reflective nostalgia strikes a balance between the admission that one can no longer return to the past and the contrary longing for the past. This paradox parallels the mortality and elusiveness of the captured moment in photography and yet its tangibility as a physical, indexical object. Photography props in Mad Men resonate with the phenomenology of nostalgia. Furthermore, the centrality of old media props as conduits for nostalgia reflects that the boomer period represents more than a lost American innocence. Rather, it stands for a different, more physical relationship to technology.   7 Patricia Zimmermann and Karen Ishizuka’s anthology Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories focuses on the home movie’s oppositional potential. From Cuban American rediscoveries of childhood films that made their way to the United States, to home movies filmed in Japanese internment camps, the essays focus on home movies that offer counternarratives to the idyllic white, middle-class, cohesive family unit. Zimmermann states, “Amateur films negotiate between private memories and social histories” and that “as a cinema of recovery, home movies unsettle homogenous, unified official history by locating records as incomplete, fragmentary articulations of difference,” (Patricia R. Zimmerman, “Introduction: The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artefacts, Minings,” in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. R. Patricia and Karen L. Ishizuka Zimmermann [Berkeley:

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV University of California Press, 2007], 22). Zimmermann illuminates the political potential of the “dreamscapes” that home movies conjure. Zimmermann and other scholars featured in the anthology illustrate how formal qualities can hold subversive meaning. Home movies also have the potential to be renarrated after the fact of their making. Renarrations can happen at family screenings where other voices besides the filmmaker’s can be heard and, in the process, counternarratives are mapped onto the home movie and its associated memories (Roger Ordin, “Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach,” in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, eds Patricia, R. and Karen L. Ishizuka Zimmermann [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], 258).

  8 Rolling Stone Magazine, “‘Mad Men’ Paid $250 for Beatles Song,” May 8, 2012, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/mad-men-paid-250k-forbeatles-song-20120508.   9 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrère (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Nineteenth Century England (London: Virago, 1989). 13 Mark S Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Jean Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men: A History of the Struggle for the Control of Childbirth (London: Historical Publications, 1988); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives & Nurses: A History of Women Healers (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2010). 14 Linda Sardino, “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow,” The Journal of Design History 17, no. 3 (2004): 284. 15 Stewart, On Longing, 135–139. 16 Notable media scholars writing on the cultural significance of the television console upon home life, architecture and space, gender and race identity, and conceptions of the global and local include Lynn Spigel and David Morley (David Morley, Media Modernity and Technology: The Geography of the New [New York: Routledge, 2007]; Spigel, Make Room for TV [Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992]). 17 Szalai, “Cable Shows with the Wealthiest Viewers.”

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5 Making, Renting, and Telling National Histories through Costume

Introduction: Clothes tell stories In nostalgia TV, costume design is often the first visual reference point for big historical shifts. Nostalgic programming, therefore, mobilizes costume to punctuate and frame historically pregnant moments and characters on the cusp of large-scale cultural transformations like the Women’s Suffrage Movement or 1960s Counterculture. The costuming in the series discussed in this chapter becomes texts onto themselves, almost detachable from the shows. In the particular case of Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15), boomer fashion positions itself as visual shorthand for the millennial malaise toward the present day and the golden era, which is recreated as a utopic/dystopic pre-decline America.1 These associations are by no means actually collective. Rather, they are constructed by the series as collectively shared. In this book, nostalgia is defined as the recreation and repurposing of constructed imaginations of a collective past for the political and social purposes of the present. Mad Men attaches nostalgia to boomer fashion and the transformations in the gender and racial ideologies of its characters. The chapter argues that costume designs for Mad Men and other examples of nostalgic television offer retellings of the histories of gender and racial progress/regress. I use the term “boomer” to refer to the period between 1946 and 1969 in America. I use “boomer nostalgia” to refer to the contemporary nostalgia for the look and feel of that era. While there is a history of academic scholarship on mise-en-scène in film, particularly in genres like melodrama that traditionally rely heavily on scoring and visuals, television costume is not granted the same attention because TV

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cannot quite shake its reputation as a low-brow medium.2 And similarly to its film equivalent, the exiguous scholarship on television costume reads design semiotically. This chapter uses ethnography and fashion history alongside textual analysis as methodological approaches.3 The benefit of looking at costume from an ethnographic, historical point of view, rather than purely a narrative one, is that understanding the social histories of the articles of clothing provides a broader discursive context for their narrativization on nostalgic TV. Understanding the history of the shirt-dress or the crinoline, their gendered contexts of origin, and cultural inscription, for example, deepens an understanding of why these boomer relics appear at heightened moments of gendered and racial tension in Mad Men. Studying television costumes in the context of their designers’ understandings of creative labor and nostalgia also opens up alternative narrative readings of Mad Men, whereas academic analysis of the programs tends to focus on the narratives told through screenwriting.4 The chapter offers an interview with the head costume designer for Mad Men, Janie Bryant, who comments on the nostalgic politics and design processes in her work. The interviews and fieldwork in the creative industries show the material constraints and industrial situatedness of nostalgic TV design. Moreover, the industry studies component of this research supports the textbased reading of the costumes in showing that designer’s think quite a bit about historical transformation in costuming. The creative thought processes that go into costuming are hardly afterthoughts to the series’ narrative developments. This is especially highlighted in TV, in which costuming must change and evolve over multiple seasons. Costuming is in steady communication with story development, actors’ input through character design, and the governing look of a show. The interview material with Bryant suggests that mnemonic work is already encoded into the design processes for nostalgic television show. Bryant discusses historical consciousness and the compromises on historical accuracy necessary for costumes to complete the journey from sketchbook to screen. An example would be adjusting the shoulder width on a 1950s men’s suit because the actor thinks it looks too boxy.5 Bryant’s account of designing nostalgia foregrounds the idiosyncratic constraints of television production and period costume. Placing this information in conversation with the narrative contexts of the costumes themselves gives a more comprehensive look at television aesthetics. This historical methodology heavily emphasizes the cultural and material histories of boomer fashions in contrast to semiotic analyses of costume, which tend to read costume at a superficial level without addressing the histories of clothes and costume design. Clothes can and do tell stories of their own that originate neither with the audience nor the creators, but in

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the material histories attached to the styles themselves. In much the same way a family photo album archives the social imaginings of “home” shaped by members both past and present, an article of clothing indexes the socially situated desires and constraints of its makers, wearers, and spaces. The chapter’s methodological emphasis on material history is in communication with broader trends in media studies that underline institutional, industrybased processes of media production. In the context of the book, the examples of costume design discussed in this chapter provide a strong illustration of design playing a pivotal role in branding a program’s nostalgia. Design not only tells stories, but it intuits historical sensibilities. By directing viewer attention within scenes and positioning the characters and spaces of the shows in relation to their historical contexts, their production designs lead a “guided tour” not only of period aesthetics, but their significance for American contemporary history. Costumes, therefore, act as a nostalgic mediator between the present and the past. More than saccharine longings for a Leave It to Beaver America, the nostalgic texts discussed in The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV embed historical critiques of past eras in both the stories they tell and the ways they look. Mad Men undertakes the deconstruction of popular memory for the boomer era, in large part, through repurposing designs from the 1960s. But I argue that the series’ manipulations of visual cues from the past fall into a more widespread trend of contemporary TV fashion resuscitating boomer styles with the aim of historically critiquing their eras, what they stand for in national memory, and their relationship to the present day. Mad Men and other examples suggest that TV’s invocation of retro is a more complicated strategy than one of simple opposition to or reaffirmation of popular memory of America’s yesteryear.

Costume design as gender historian Mad Men is a primetime cable melodrama about whiteness and middle-class identity in 1960s American advertising. For many viewers, costume design is a major attraction of Mad Men. Indeed the “Mad Men look” is as talked about as the series’ characters and storylines in popular press.6 Mad Men’s costume design is a key storyteller in the series and its construction of nostalgia. As a storytelling device, Mad Men costumes tell and expand the series’ plot lines, sometimes becoming the primary focus of whole sequences. This is definitely the case of the extended sequences that include no dialogue but focus solely on its cast members quietly dressing for and undressing from the work day (“For Those Who Think Young,” July 27, 2008 and “Maidenform,”

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August 31, 2008). Costume design occupies high narrative importance at moments when the series is most self-reflexive about its nostalgia. At these points, fashion signposts cultural transitions in Mad Men’s storyworld as well as how the series positions itself via popular historical memory, in other words, how Mad Men sees itself as re-scripting the stories television tells about the 1960s. Intra-diegetically, Mad Men routinely weds historical moments of fashion transition with concurrent shifts in gender ideology and their impacts on characters of the show. Mad Men’s costuming cements connections between the look and style of the boomer period on television and stories of progress and regress, particularly in terms of gender and women’s history. The connections between historical revisionism and fashion, in fact, extend to Mad Men’s off-screen spaces: its quotations in street clothing and the creative process of the series’ costume design. Drawing on particular episodes and my own interview with Mad Men’s head costumer, Janie Bryant, I map connections between Mad Men’s costume design and memory work broadly speaking, finding that reflexive nostalgia is embedded in the design process of the show as well as the costumes as final products. Mad Men’s story begins on the cusp of the 1960s and the series is peppered with visual cues for the emergent Cultural Revolution. When and which characters transition to 1960s fashion by experimenting with beehives and miniskirts carry narrative weight in the series. In particular, Mad Men repeatedly associates feminist revisionist history with clothing. The first time Don Draper’s conservative suburban housewife sports a 1960s beehive is given symbolic significance when it coincides with their last ditch effort to save the marriage (“Souvenir,” October 4, 2009). In such cases, costume design serves as a tool for historical as well as narrative orientation. Betty’s beehive acts as a visual cue that the audience is seeing a different side of Betty and that the 1960s have arrived. The series often refrains from directly showing historical events in a documentary style of capturing the time and place of the event itself. Rather, the series covers the historical event remotely as its characters experience it via the mediation of television and radio. Fashion’s role as a point of historical orientation becomes even more important given that a mediated and indirect experience of history is built into the series’ narrative structure. Mad Men repeatedly uses seminal fashion shifts to signal both historical and personal moments of self-reflection and transformation. These examples suggest that fashion is a meta-narrative device that complicates plot transitions as well as the series’ own discursive attitude toward the period itself. The particular symbolic value of these fashion shifts reinforce other chapters’ claims that, in millennial television, the boomer period stands for a specific set of cultural shifts that are deemed highly relevant to the present.

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It’s always the brazen few who dabble in forward-thinking fashion while everyone around them raises an eyebrow. Similarly, select characters on Mad Men serve as fashion harbingers of 1960s counterculture and appear “in mode” before other characters have caught on to new styles. Jane Sterling (one senior partner’s very young, very spoiled wife) routinely appears in garish patterns from the 1960s that clash with the demure corporate modernism of the office workspace and the 1950s professional attire of its workers. Roger Sterling romances Jane in season three when the firm hires her as Don Draper’s secretary. In this season, she dresses in nondescript pencil skirts and blouses like the rest of the “girls” at the firm. After marrying the boss, however, she barges into the office unannounced, expecting former colleagues to fawn over her and her newfound wealth. Her pop-art-inspired clothes (their bright synthetic colors, her little sheath dresses, and eye-catching circle pattern textiles) overwhelm the midcentury modernism of the office, which is still very much trapped in the 1950s (“Christmas Comes but Once a Year,” August 1, 2010). Jane’s fashion thus acts as one of the earliest signals of the countercultural revolution in the series (Figure 5.1). Some characters in Mad Men are invested in change, while others are firmly entrenched in the past. Betty Draper (played by January Jones) is defined by the 1950s shirt-dress, which, from the waist up, is a tailored men’s dress shirt that fans out into a circle skirt and is usually worn with a crinoline (the 1950s-era petticoat). Another paragon of 1950s sitcom housewives, June

Figure 5.1   “Christmas Comes but Once a Year,” August 1, 2010, Mad Men.

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Cleaver (played by Barbara Billingsley), wears a shirt-dress when she sends her husband and children off for the workday in the opening credit sequence of Leave It to Beaver (CBS/ABC, 1957–63). It’s also a staple of Lucy Riccardo’s wardrobe on I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–7). This dress, which is so firmly wedded to the 1950s sitcom housewife, appears routinely in Mad Men (AMC, 2007– 15). Betty Draper, Mad Men’s epitomic 1950s suburban housewife, wears a shirt-dress when she finally asks her husband for a divorce (“The Grown-Ups,” November 1, 2009) (Figure 5.2). Contemporary television reincarnations of this 1950s fashion staple wed the shirt-dress to moments of feminist liberation, relying on popular symbolism as part of a more pervasive nostalgia for the boomer home and housewife in American mass media. Mad Men inserts the “shirt-dress” to invoke popular histories about gender and race in America and their mediation on television. The shirt-dress recalls the 1950s suburban housewife; it invokes whiteness; it intimates the oppression of certain publics and the total elision of others. After Kennedy’s assassination, Betty spends whole days in front of the television set at home in her nightgown and bathrobe. After witnessing Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder on live television, Betty dresses in a charcoal gray shirt-dress and slips out of the house to embark on the extramarital affair. Upon returning home, she tells Don that she does not love him anymore (“The Grown-Ups,” November 1, 2009).

Figure 5.2   “New Amsterdam,” August 9, 2007, Mad Men.

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Betty’s return to the shirt-dress not only signals the repossession of her sense of propriety, but coincides with her transition as a housewife from one patriarch to another. Betty’s redons the shirt-dress as she moves into the same gender role, only under a different roof. Head Mad Men costume designer, Janie Bryant, acknowledges the referential weight of the shirt-dress in our interview: Betty Draper is a housewife and her character is all about the façade of perfection and the classic shirt-waist dress that was so iconic of that period: the full skirt, pantyhose, and all the layers … and just the amount of time that goes into dressing and doing your hair and makeup and all of those rituals of the day. That is what her existence is about in contrast to the working girl in the office. There are still all the layers: the different layers of the foundation garments (I wanted to have that distinct silhouette for all the characters). The office is more business suits, more pencils skirts, more sweater sets, it’s more ensembles, it’s Peter Pan collars and bows and pleated skirts and A-line skirts; it has more of a business-minded setting.7 The designer chooses to associate the shirt-dress with Betty and suburbia and the pencil skirt and blouse with working girls and urbanity. The shirt-dress becomes iconic of gender oppression and patriarchy in the series, of prefeminist and anti-feminist ideas of women. This is one example of how the series foregrounds fashion to denote historical transitions in gender ideology. Betty is also one of the last characters to fully adopt 1960s fashion. Her resistance and stubborn adherence to the conventions of the 1950s align with her traditional gender politics. Her fashion stodginess toward shifts in gender ideology is particularly pronounced when, in season seven, she accompanies her son on a field trip and meets his younger, Flower-Generation teacher (“Field Trip,” April 24, 2014). The teacher clearly does not wear a bra and she leaves her blouse largely unbuttoned. Betty’s old-fashioned sartorial and gender politics are legible on her sour expression. Betty even attempts, unsuccessfully, to bond with another mother on the field trip by commiserating about the teacher’s unprofessional attire. In this case, connections between fashion and feminism are quite explicitly written into the script; in industry terms, this is called a “costume gag.”8 This encounter between hippie teacher and scandalized Betty supports Mad Men’s self-awareness of the storytelling capacities of costume and the social histories attached to fashions of the period. The open-bloused, braless teacher and Betty’s response historically anchor the episode, placing its events in a greater sociopolitical context of Women’s Liberation as well as more timeless themes of intergenerational tensions and conflicts based on different definitions of feminism. Even at

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the end of the series in 1970, Betty never fully embraces the 1960s in her costumes or moral code; she appears in shirt-dresses and cinched waistlines to the very end of the series (“The Forecast,” April 19, 2015). The uneven transition from the 1950s to the ’60s in Mad Men’s diegetic fashion world conveys “nostalgic anticipation,” or the term I use for how TV constructs viewer anticipation for how the story will incorporate historical events the viewer knows to expect. Characters’ encounters with countercultural fashion allow anticipation to build and encourage a scrutiny of what these transformations in gender and race politics mean for the characters in the show and the history of the twentieth to twenty-first century. For example, the first beehive hairdo in Mad Men is one way the series cues the advent of the Cultural Revolution. But its appearance encourages a meditation on these cultural transitions and their effects on characters in the show; if Jane is the first to wear pop art clothes, does that mean that she is really the first to be “liberated?” In this way, costume design navigates and, to a great extent, manages the nostalgic orientation of the series and the presentist ways it frames historical change. Mad Men adheres ideological changes to shifts in fashion. In many ways, the fashion inside the houses and offices of Mad Men tells the history happening outside. But costume in Mad Men also proffers alternative histories of the 1960s to those it constructs as popularly held. In this sense, costuming holds a discursive function as representing that which remains absent from dominant representations of the period—looks into the dirtier, grittier, and harsher realities of the Cleavers. In this vein, scenes of characters undressing and dressing are a recurring trope in the series to flag the larger project of telling untold histories. While these scenes serve narrative functions within each episode, their ubiquity warrants better explanation. In these scenes, Mad Men announces itself as “stripping” the boomer sitcom family and challenging any romanticizations of postwar America by showing the largely unglamorous and mundane routine of getting dressed and undressed for the day. This is a way that the series reflects upon the important role that costume holds in its popular identity and nostalgic discourse.

Telling history by disrobing The season two premiere episode (“For Those Who Think Young,” July 27, 2008) begins with a montage sequence of characters dressing for work. The sequence starts at the base of Joan’s back (Christina Hendricks) that tilts upwards as she zips her dress and looks into the mirror. She puts on earrings and a match on action dissolves to Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) putting on

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perfume. As she smooths out her hair, another match on action dissolves to Pete Dyckman Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) running a comb through his as his wife (Alison Brie) fastens his cufflinks. The short sequence introducing the second season acknowledges that costuming and a culture of retro are heralded aspects of the show. As season one ended with many of the characters’ lives unraveling, season two symbolically begins with the characters reconstituting themselves anew through the act of dressing for work (Figure 5.3). The act of getting dressed, of figuratively donning the boomer image of happiness and success associated with the 1950s sitcom, is notably absent from period TV representations of the suburban sitcom family. Everything is usually already in place in the 1950s sitcom. Houses are clean and characters are well groomed in The Donna Reed Show (ABC, 1958–66) and Leave It to Beaver (CBS/NBC, 1957–63), series now synonymous with an unrealistic portrayal of family. The act of showing boomer characters dressing is therefore counternarrative because it fills in a crucial moment in daily routine that has been erased from nostalgic sitcom imagery of boomer America.9 Patricia Zimmerman observes that the home movie serves a similar counternarrative purpose in national memory by showing the mundanity and ephemera of daily life, which tend to be left out of history books.10 In a similar way, Mad Men positions itself as revelatory, aspiring to uncover aspects of the period that have gone ignored or unexamined because they are not in keeping with the American popular imagination of the boomer family. Dressing sequences recur in episode six of season two, “Maidenform,” (August 31, 2008) which centers on the ad agency’s pitch to Playtex bras. The episode begins with a similar sequence of women dressing, however, the sequence is set to the Decembrists “Infanta” (from the album Picaresque, 2005). The Decembrists’ lyrics paint a surreal, orientalist image of a women being offered up in marriage, sacrifice, and exchange for material goods. The Mad Men sequence begins with a panning shot across Betty Draper’s back as she hooks the back of her conical bra while looking into a mirror. The shot

Figure 5.3   “Maidenform,” August 31, 2008, Mad Men.

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dissolves to a tilt up Joan’s reflection in a mirror as she smooths her slip over her corselette (shapewear that is one continuous piece from the bra down to a girdle ending at the upper thigh). The camera then pans across a different room, over a bed covered in discarded clothes, and comes to rest on Peggy’s profile as she pulls up stockings. The camera movement emphasizes fluidity and free movement, wedding women to domestic space. The cross-dissolves make the various bedrooms indistinguishable, suggesting a continuum of women’s domestic space. However, the actors’ actions emphasize the constraints of these pieces of vintage shapewear: their inflexibility and encroachment on bodily movement. The lyrics to the Decembrists’ song continue these themes of female oppression, as does the plot of the episode itself. Later in this episode, Peggy struggles to insert herself into the maledominated world of advertising and the development of the firm’s Playtex campaign. The men at the agency hijack the campaign and, against Peggy’s advice, they design the pitch from a purely patriarchal perspective, assuming that women want to see themselves as men see them. They begin with the premise that women fall into one of two categories: Jackies (Jacqueline Kennedy) or Marilyns (Marilyn Monroe). The creative team insists on this reductive stereotype that recalls the age-old patriarchal binary of virgin and whore. The team also excludes Peggy from their business meetings and socializations. She is proven right, however, when the Playtex representatives reject the ad because it does not market “fit”—the brand’s primary selling point and technical function of the bra. Playtex consoles the creative team, however, by taking them out to a strip club, which Peggy crashes in order to assert her place in this boys’ club. The scene ends with shots of women stripping as an uncomfortable counterpoint to the beginning of the episode in which women dress. The stripper dissolves to a shot of Betty Draper as she dons a nightgown in her bedroom before making breakfast for the family. The repeated scenes of women un/dressing suggest parity between the two actions. Women don symbols of their gender oppression when they squeeze into their nylon sausage-casings in the morning (which the patriarchs at the firm presume is done for male benefit) only to shed the same garments at night for male pleasure. The episode also reflects a modern-day curiosity in how women achieved the desired boomer-era shape, which favored hips, voluptuousness, and conical bust lines. The boomer female silhouette was largely a response to the gauntness of the wartime physique. Wartime food rations, which followed on the heels of the Great Depression, resulted in thin body shapes and malnutrition. This was particularly acute in France, the birthplace of the postwar, hour-glass aesthetic. The bust and hiplines that underwear of the time accentuates are, thus, a celebration of postwar prosperity and a return

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to a definition of “natural” female beauty epitomized by Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield.11 The advent of synthetic fibers in the lingerie industry also helped create this highly sculptural shape. The history of mid-century women’s underwear was also affected by the pervasive streamlined aesthetic popularized by modern architects like Le Corbusier and Richard Neutra, and industrial designers like Dieter Rams.12 Streamlining governed the overall look of the 1950s. According to this school of design, function should take precedence over form; the object or building’s aesthetics should be transparent of the purpose they serve. The streamlined look is present in the wasp-waisted shapewear of that day. A strong example of the intersectionality between streamlining and underwear is Howard Hughes’s contribution to women’s underwear. Hughes, an aeronautical engineer by profession, designed Jane Russel’s bra for the 1943 film The Outlaw (1943), which became iconic of torpedo bust lines.13 In effect, men re-engineered the female body. This period look, however, bears a post-feminist revisionist interpretation as a more “natural” form of female beauty and body acceptance. This reappropriation of boomer-era beauty is particularly strong in millennial feminist adaptations of the postwar pin-up look, which wed a “big is beautiful” feminist message of empowerment to the historically patriarchal look.14 The history of women’s postwar underwear and its complex gender polemic, both then and now, offers insight into Mad Men’s scenes of disrobing. The potential empowerment and imprisonment offered by the 1950s “vavavoom” look have long social histories that haunt these sequences of women squeezing into and out of highly restricting yet undeniably erotic pieces of shapewear. The counternarration offered by costuming here operates at two levels. The dressing sequences clearly offer a critique of the patriarchal control of women’s image and ideological assumption that women’s desires revolve around male sexual pleasure. Because boomer-era sexual mores prevented the inclusion of images of women in underwear on television (and for those viewers whose grandmothers do not keep potpourried drawers of corselettes and girdles, and thus, lack a first-hand experience with boomer underwear) Mad Men also provides an answer to the question: “What are they wearing underneath all those layers?” This question nicely parallels the concomitant ideological questions of the episode: “What were/are women really thinking?” and “How did women then and how do women now really see themselves?” These un/dressing sequences are part of the series’ meta-project of de/ constructing the boomer era. In the act of undressing women, the series participates in a project of greater feminist import, which is the literal and figurative disassembly and deconstruction of the image of the perfectly quaffed and stereotypically submissive 1950s housewife. Undressing these characters from the past becomes a visual metaphor for revising history by including the

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parts that were written out of it and the scenes that mainstream television denied representation. Scenes of undressing in Mad Men are tantamount to pulling back the veil that concealed both convoluted underwear and, as Betty Friedan would have it, the “feminine mystique” attached to the period: a repressed feminine dissatisfaction with the boomer-era American dream.15 Scenes of disrobing continue in other seasons in the series. Season one includes a scene of Don and Betty returning from a party and drunkenly undressing before flopping into bed (“5G,” August 16, 2007). The scene includes a long shot centered on Betty’s shapewear as Don discards his dinner jacket and sleeps in his shirt and tie. In season three, “Souvenir” follows Don and Betty on a business trip to Rome, which contains her makeover into a Fellini goddess with a slinky black dress and what is, even for the standards of the time, an enormous beehive (“Souvenir,” October 4, 2009) (Figure 5.4). After they retire to their hotel room, Betty undresses to reveal a different type of underwear than her usual style. To go with her 1960s fashion-forward look, Betty wears a strapless black bra and panties rather than a full-figure corselette or more constraining forms of shapewear. This is the first time in Mad Men Betty is seen wearing a strapless bra. Albeit this article of intimate apparel came into vogue in the 1950s, Betty is so old fashioned in her choice of underwear that she often wears a girdle (the

Figure 5.4   “Souvenir,” October 4, 2009, Mad Men.

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1910s elastic version of the corset that, by the 1950s, incorporated synthetic fibers) or corselette (a one-piece corset and bra).16 The trip to Rome is, therefore, the first time that Betty lets her waist (and her sexual inhibitions) go. During the trip, Betty and Don also engage in a little uncharacteristic role-playing to spice up the marriage. Whatever titillation Mad Men offers in showing characters defrocking, these scenes also offer history lessons in women’s postwar underwear. The scenes thus serve as poignant analogies for the series’ deconstruction of the popularly constructed boomer image of the happy boomer sitcom family.

From the maker’s perspective The use of costume in Mad Men takes part in the larger series’ project of deconstructing the boomer dream. However, the intimacy between costume and ideological inquiry appears elsewhere in Mad Men’s discourse, including popular literature written about its production design. Janie Bryant’s book, The Fashion File, describes her creative process and instructions on translating the Mad Men look to commercial, contemporary clothing. Comparing the book’s advice with the interview with Bryant, it’s clear that the disassembly and scrutinization of the boomer sitcom home and its gender roles extend to Mad Men’s paratexts as well as its process of production. In fact, Bryant’s discussions of designing for Mad Men strongly invoke the same post-feminist discourse that other chapters argue is sutured to boomer-era aesthetics on television. Bryant’s comments show how the design process of nostalgic TV inscribes memory work, suggesting that the discourse of TV boomer nostalgia extends beyond the boundaries of the screen and television set, to the design studio. The popularity of Mad Men and its impact on mainstream fashion came as a surprise to its creators, according to Bryant. The show’s success, however, played a key role in launching Bryant as a brand name and, since then, she has expanded her work to writing books on fashion and developing her own clothing line.17 In Bryant’s book, The Fashion File: Advice, Tips and Inspiration from the Costume Designer of Mad Men, her fashion advice combines various periods and styles with a sense of playfulness. A historical curiosity accompanies the book’s descriptions of Bryant’s favorite pieces from her own wardrobe. These accessories and clothing items punctuate the book’s fashion tips on how to shop for foundation garments (the elaborate underwear that provides the structure for these period looks) and choose clothes that best suit the reader’s figure (the book addresses the reader as female at some points and male at others, including sections on achieving the Mad Men look

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for heteronormative men and women). Each item of Byrant’s is gleaned from a different period in fashion history. One caption to a photo of a ring says, “Over the years, I have developed my own list of the best vintage pieces that date back to various periods. These items all marry effortlessly with modern looks, which is always key. A 1960s chocolate diamond and mother-of-pearl cocktail ring, and my unique Victorian watch fob.”18 Oftentimes, Bryant will include how she procured the item in the caption and describe its historical use. Together they offer a history of vintage collector’s acquisition. The book hovers between the assertion of more stable identity markers (what body type are you?) and suggestions of a mobile femininity alongside adding vintage into one’s wardrobe, which demands the ability to integrate distinct periods into a cohesive look and the freedom to look to the past for inspiration.19 It asks, “Are you a Betty [the prim and proper suburban housewife on Mad Men] or a Joan [the sexy, smart, Marilyn-like, working girl character on the show]?”20 However, these character descriptions are not rigid identity markers. Rather, the book impresses a fluid fashion and gender identity that can move as freely among these characters and body types as it does history. This attitude toward fashion echoes many of the teachings popularly associated with post-feminism in the ways it privileges self-determination, choice, and diverse interpretations of feminism: Who do you want to be today? Straight-forward [sic] or mysterious? Demure like Betty or commanding like Joan? Defining your intention and the image you want to cultivate is the first step to honing your style. With the right clothes, you can be whomever [sic] you want to be. And you can change your “character” from day to day, depending on your needs and whim.21 Whereas predominant fashion advice emphasizes the need to foster a consistent and distinctive personal style, Bryant eschews this pressure, instead forwarding a playful and mutable femininity and feminism.22 For those who can afford it, the retro of Mad Men comes with a sense of critical distance and ironic play. This mutable approach to heteronormative femininity dovetails with the retrospective sensibility found in boomer nostalgic television. Post-feminism and nostalgic retrospection bear analogous flexibility and ambiguity toward the boomer period. Bryant’s book also echoes millennial reinterpretations of the feminist movement and its bearings on women’s choice. Whereas the second wave advocated for women’s choice and in some ways dictated what women’s choices should be (i.e., career over family, abortion over keeping the pregnancy, anti-beauty over beauty culture), post-feminism offers a more neoliberal definition of feminism and empowerment that can include wearing high heels and choosing home over a career. Post-feminist sentiment is present

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in Bryant’s fashion advice: she encourages women to enjoy beauty culture and its potential for exploring different types of femininity.23 Mad Men’s success accompanies a remarkable resurgence of boomer styles in street clothing (clothing that one could encounter on a day-to-day basis rather than clothing belonging on runways and in magazines). The coincidence of these two trends as well as Bryant’s descriptions of her own work suggests the series’ costume design is embroiled in larger post-feminist discourses which play out, in part, through fashion. The post-feminist recuperation of beauty culture relies on historical revisionism in order to retell second-wave feminism’s proto-history, representing the patriarchal ideology and social inequities that mid-century feminism responded to.24 Memory plays as large a role in Bryant’s retro self-styling as it does in the series itself. She describes memories of dressing up as a child in her mother, father, and grandmother’s clothing. In Bryant’s case and for children born between 1940 and the mid- to late 1980s, boomer clothing is likely found in either grandmothers’ or mothers’ wardrobes. For the Flower Generation and generations X and Y, boomer fashions are automatically inscribed within family memories, childhood, and the early games of dress-up that serve as significant indoctrinations into gender roles.25 Bryant also explains in our interview that her love of vintage and period fashion stems from her childhood experiences of watching old movies with her mother. As a thirty-something millennial at the time of her book’s publication and our interview, her nostalgic affective engagement with the postwar period parallels that belonging to the industry-coveted 25–54-year-old cohort, most of whom will not have firsthand experience with the era, and whose nostalgia for the boomer years is mediated in some shape or form. Bryant’s research for the show’s costuming is based, in part, on clothing appearing in old photographs she collects from both her own family and garage sales and online antique dealers.26 Family memories of childhood games of dress-up are part of Mad Men’s design process. Far from an emotionally detached and historically ignorant pillaging of past styles, boomer styles in Mad Men’s costuming and their extra-diegetic fashion cultures are synonymous with historical awareness, recuperation, and family memories. As much as memory work is thematized in the narratives of these series, memory work is a part of the creative labor for the series. The series’ nostalgia is crafted by the combined efforts and interplay among multiple departments, not one all-knowing, all-powerful author. Cases like Mad Men force the redefinition of people working in the art department as authors. In addition to archiving family photography, Bryant collects clothing from costume shops, vintage stores, industry resources like Western Costume Company, and old newspapers to research fashions from the 1960s.27 She then recreates the items anew in her studio. Most pieces, therefore, are either

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full replicas or amalgams of items gleaned from various sources. The practice of making clothing in studio is somewhat of a rarity in television where, for budgetary or scheduling purposes, costumers largely buy from stores and then tailor items to fit.28 Mad Men’s costuming uniquely incorporates revisionism and rewriting into the production process; each piece is fabricated based on vintage items or Bryant’s original designs. Thus, designing and sewing an ensemble always leaves room for editing along the way because each piece is made in studio.29 Perhaps this explains why costume design, because of its inherent palimpsestic qualities, lends itself so easily to nostalgic affect. Handling or seeing an old article of clothing produces as strong of an affective response as does a familiar scent or tune.30 The material objects in Mad Men and other nostalgic programming are important vehicles for cultivating nostalgia. This also means that they are central to the historical reinterpretations that are a part of nostalgia. Bryant’s research and design processes incorporate keen senses of time and history. She purposely writes this sense of historical time into the costuming for individual characters by having articles of their clothing recur in multiple ensembles over the duration of the series. In other words, a character’s favorite broach may accent multiple outfits during a season. Bryant also uses costuming to indicate the generation and age of the character (i.e., what fashions they grew up with and what articles they may have inherited from a mother or father): Bevan I noticed there’s such a huge presence of history on the show and huge historical benchmarks punctuate the show. Do you ever dress people to reflect those historical changes? Are there abrupt changes in costuming for different characters as the seasons progress? Bryant Yes. As we’ve seen, Peggy [the plucky secretary turned copy writer on the show] has had a real transformation. You can see that from season to season. And different characters come in who are more modern or more old-fashioned. There’re so many different characters on the show and their costumes are varied by different periods. Think of Mrs. Blankenship [an older secretary at the advertising agency]. She wears all those really oldfashioned 1950s suits with their lace collars. All of her blouses are very 1940s. Even some of her accessories are from the 30s and 40s. So that character is very old fashioned in contrast to Megan [Don’s second wife], who is more modern and contemporary—more on the pulse of what’s going on in ’65. Then there’s everybody in between because my philosophy about the show is being conscious of what happens in reality, that is, you own pieces in your closet that are older and then you buy new pieces. Those pieces come together and you mix all the pieces. I always like to

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incorporate the pieces from seasons past and mix that with new pieces for the season that’s happening. The principal cast’s closets are combined for all four seasons. I think it’s nice for the audience to recognize garments, recognize accessories and costumes that they’ve worn in seasons before.31 Thus, a palimpsestic sensibility governs costume design and understanding the characters themselves as they presumably recombine and add to various articles in their wardrobes that reflect narrative and historical arcs in the series. Costuming, here, is narratively positioned and designed as a mnemonic tool. Clothing might be a better conduit for cuing cultural shifts than words because it can materialize the mere hint of something new and different; it can express affective nuances that are too subtle for dialogue. Mrs. Blankenship’s lace collar might convey as much as her sour expression about her attitude toward younger generations at the firm. The examples gleaned from Mad Men episodes and Bryant’s description of her work show how fashion constructs itself as a medium for engaging and re-scripting historical memory. This kind of historical and gender awareness in retro costuming differs greatly from Jamesonian postmodern views of nostalgia that consider such quotations of past styles to be purely superficial and devoid of any narrative or meta-narrative meaning.32 Bryant’s self-aware approach to crafting an individual look, not only for the show but for the average person who may buy her book, depends on historical reflection, not only upon the historical context of the original piece of clothing, but its medium specificity (did that piece come from a photograph or a vintage store?) and its contemporary integration into a mosaic-like fashion, gender, and historical identity. This strategy extends beyond the fictional characters to the fashion cultures that have developed alongside the series. Street fashion and commercial reinterpretations of the Mad Men suit indicate both its cultural capital and imbrication in popular debates around shifting gender ideologies. Janie Bryant’s successful brand attests to the high demand for boomer styles. The popular success of Mad Men fashion and retro culture has turned her into a fashion celebrity.33 In our interview, she talked about the mainstreamification of a retro look, illustrated by the proliferation of Mad Men parties and dressing up “Mad Men style” for Halloween. She asserts that after a period of casualness in mainstream fashion, people want to learn how to dress-up again on a daily basis. In answer to why she thinks this period resonates with audiences today, she says: It is a beautiful period for men and women. Our lifestyles have been so casual for so long that people yearn for the knowledge of how to dress up again and to really understand that dressing up makes such a difference

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in life when you can look in the mirror and feel so great about yourself. I think the older generation has nostalgia for that and the younger generation wants to be educated in how to get it. The other reason is that people look back on that time and think that it was the period of Camelot in American history. It’s right before the loss of innocence in American government through Vietnam, social unrest; we have Civil Rights (the bulk of which was going on then). The assassinations and all of these things that happen in American history come to head and really start to change. The period of Mad Men, now and in earlier seasons, is that period of Camelot leading up to what comes later, which is the fall of innocence. At this point, Kennedy is already dead, already assassinated, but that is one of the first events to happen that starts this period of social unrest.34 Bryant’s interview and Mad Men show kinships between a prelapsarian ideal of American society and clothing as means of reflecting on national narratives of progress and regress. Wrestling with vintage (including the complexities of its procurement and integration into a whole “look”) becomes synonymous in Mad Men texts and paratexts with the white struggle to process and integrate alternative memories of nation, family, and gender into histories about the present and the past. Social inequities based on gender, race, and class, of course, predated the 1950s, however, the baby boom period, in contemporary popular imagination, stands for the point in time that white hegemony was made aware that they existed. Mad Men’s costuming carries historical revisionism and meditation toward the past through into its design. It follows, then, that adaptation governs the resultant looks, since they rely on reappropriation. This adaptation, however, is not random but purposeful in ways that align with the series’ nostalgic attitudes; certain elements of boomer fashion are resuscitated and reinvented while others are not. This is clearly at work in the Brooks Brothers’ Mad Men suit and Banana Republic’s Mad Men-inspired line. Brooks Brothers and Banana Republic have Mad Men collections, constituting ancillary texts that conduct similar forms of memory work as the costume design in the series itself. If mediated memory plays a strong role in contemporary resuscitations of boomer fashion, the sartorial editing that is a necessary part of reinventing period looks betrays its own historicity or the historical location in which the editing takes place. As with Bryant’s Fashion File and the symbolic value of clothing in Mad Men’s narrative, the commercial clothing lines affiliated with the show carry similar impressions of contemporary gender and racial discourses. The Brooks Brothers’ Mad Men Edition suit, priced at $1,000, was designed by Janie Bryant and launched in October 2009. The suit features a sharkskin gray, two-button jacket. When compared to the iconic gray flannel

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suit of the late 1950s and early 1960s (epitomized by Gregory Peck’s costume designed by Charles La Maire in the 1955 film adaptation of Sloane Wilson’s Man in the Grey Flannel Suit), the Brooks Brothers’ version is a more slim and sleek fit, showing that some features of the 1950s original were maintained while others (like front pleats) were not.35 Therefore, the adaptation is exactly that, an adaptation or reinterpretation of the 1950s suit that marries contemporary trends toward a slim fit with some of the simplicity of the 1950s modernist version. Nostalgic fashion should never be judged based on historical accuracy because that is rarely its goal. Moreover, when the Brooks Brothers Edition is compared with the suit worn by Don Draper in the actual series, it is also a slimmer fit. While Bryant’s designs for the series’ suits are, in general, slimmer fitting reinventions of the historical originals, her iteration for popular consumption is even sleeker. The commercial version of the Mad Men suit is an exaggeration designed to appeal to the consumer’s desire for those aspects of the Don Draper suit that are so celebrated: sleekness and simplicity. Both the men and women’s Mad Men clothing lines in Banana Republic and Brooks Brothers favor a slimmer fit than the series’ costumes actually depict, indicating another example of how boomer retro in commodity culture offers a reinterpretation, not restoration, of the period look. This is particularly pronounced in Brooks Brothers’ interpretation of the 1950s men’s work suit, which is highly tailored to achieve as close a fit as mass production can offer. In contrast to its more roomy historical precedent, the updated suit appears austere and minimalist. Sleeker fits in Western clothing are tied to periods of economic hardship or countercultural expression. Women’s attire in the 1940s featured a very plain A-line skirt that made a minimal use of fabric, indicative of the wartime restrictions. The 1960s returned to a more fitted look with beatnik fashion, which favored capri pants, sensible and easily maintained haircuts like the Vidal Sassoon five-point cut, and a rejection of 1950s shapewear like the crinoline skirt and dreaded girdle.36 In the case of pop art, cool jazz era, and beatnik fashions, the sleeker look was a refutation of the perceived material excesses and attachments of boomer parents. In similar form, the millennial reinvention of boomer-era fashion, which maps austerity and slimness onto the original look, coincides with a generational critique of the excesses of the late-twentieth-, early-twenty-first-century parents whose legacy is a global economic recession and irreparable ecological damage.37 Ironically, the Mad Men lines are making the boomer look more austere when the boomer look itself was a response to the gaunt, fabric-restrictive look of the 1940s. While Mad Men’s costumes are routinely heralded for their fidelity to the times, this is not, in fact, what they do. Historical accuracy is not the primary concern in the reinvention of boomer design. The Mad Men suit is designed

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to appeal to the desire to look like the characters on the show, not their reallife historical equivalents. Bryant’s design process is always a reinterpretation of boomer fashions that she gleans from a variety of sources and then edits for the contemporary consumer. The fact that the commercial lines are inspired by the series and not necessarily the time period, presents another degree of removal from historical accuracy. Presentist perspectives on the historical lessons of the boomer period are inscribed in such seemingly minor adaptations. As boomer styles are translated in costuming for the series and redesigned for clothing stores, the original looks undergo multiple changes guided by commercial and creative interest of the companies and designers, as well as fashion industry projections of what consumers like about the show’s designs. While the idea that adaptations reinterpret their historical precedents is nothing new to media studies, taking stock of how Mad Men sizes up against the “historical truth” of the boomer era seems to be a central theme in the series’ own nostalgic discourse. Just as Mad Men’s costuming cannot be divorced from current gender discourses, the multiple sartorial reinterpretations of the boomer men’s suit cannot be separated from the series’ own overarching narrative on masculinity and the history of patriarchy. During the series, the protagonist, Don Draper, fumbles his way through the large historical shifts of the 1960s, including the birth of the civil rights and women’s movements, the beginning of popular criticism of the Vietnam War, and the genesis of 1960s counterculture. A slightly bewildered, but stoic onlooker, Draper never engages the historical trends happening around him. More often than not, he simply bears witness to them. This makes for an appealing point of identification at uncomfortable moments when the show explicitly depicts 1960s racism, sexism, and political conservatism. Mad Men effectively offers the white, straight, masculine, and sympathetic, if highly sanitized, view of American postwar history. Don Draper’s unwillingness to participate in overt sexism and racism also serves a therapeutic function, whereby white guilt, as the series constructs it, comes to some terms with and regrets the uglier aspects of postwar patriarchy.38 If the series tries to reconstruct traditional masculinity in this presumably more enlightened progressivist light, then the Mad Men suit similarly reconstructs white male professionalism to align with adaptation, change, and flexibility. Addressing male readers, Bryant foregrounds using accessories like handkerchiefs, different tie knots, and bow ties to break the monotony that can sometimes characterize traditional male professional attire.39 This analysis of Mad Men’s costume design, its commercial adaptations, and Bryant’s observations on design suggests a strong attachment among boomer retro on TV, contemporary post-feminist, millennial discourses about heteronormative femininity and masculinity, and ideas of a prelapsarian American modeled

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after the 1950s sitcom suburb. The commercialization of Mad Men fashion and the design of the series’ costumes are not wholesale reproductions of the clothes of the late 1950s and early ’60s, but rather a process of selecting and reinterpreting features and nostalgic meaning that the present moment maps onto boomer-era fashion. These reinventions are anchored to historical discourses on white post-feminist masculinity and femininity whose key concern is mediating traditional gender signifiers against a contemporary awareness of political pasts.

Other examples of television fashion doing gender history There are other examples of nostalgic television that mobilize costume design as a historian in programs or, at the very least, use costume to accentuate and draw attention to key moments in gender history. This television practice is, by no means, confined to representations of the boomer period and America’s conflicted feelings toward the historical trajectory of gendered civil liberties. Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15) is a British television drama that follows the scandals, losses, and gains of a family of landed aristocrats and its servants between 1912 and 1925. Its production design garnered almost as much critical attention as Mad Men’s, and its nostalgia for various eras in history is similarly mixed, at once, longing for the antiquated social protocols and traditions of a dying aristocracy, and repudiating the entitlement of landed nobility and social inequalities it sustains. Criticism of wealth and aristocracy comes in the form of “mouthpiece” characters that voice distain for the Grantham family and signify historical moments in progressivist political movements that the series embeds in its storyworld. Among the family’s three daughters, Sybil is the most rebellious and forward thinking; she joins the women’s suffrage movement, identifies as socialist, and absconds with the family’s Irish chauffeur. Very early on, the series characterizes Sybil as a scandal-prone, budding feminist and the character most closely aligned with the social transformations of the twentieth century (“Episode Four,” October 17, 2010). One of the clearest, visual enunciations of her role in the series comes in the form of her participation in one of the more revolutionary fashion trends of her time: bloomers. Bloomers, also known as Turkish trousers, were invented in response to the popularization of the bicycle in the late nineteenth century. If women riding bicycles were not scandalous enough, the call for a style of clothing that suited the new form of transit and exercise was outright unthinkable. Any kind of clothing that separated women’s legs was regarded as immodest (unless it

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came in the form of underwear).40 And so entered the bloomers, a wide-legged, low-crotched, loose-fitting trouser that, when worn standing, looks like a skirt. Think of them as the precursor of Hammer pants. Dress reformers also called for the disbandment of the corset in conjunction with bloomers.41 While the exact inventor of bloomers is unclear and often speciously ascribed to suffrage leader Amelia Jenks Bloomer42 they made their first public appearance on the 1894 cover illustration of Harper’s Bazaar.43 Bloomers did not quite take off as a fashion trend the way its proponents intended. They attracted such public harassment and ridicule that the style waned, even though it was still used as a form of active wear.44 As much as they were targets of street harassment in the early twentieth century, bloomers were also objects of cool. One San Francisco businessman opened the “Bloomer Café.”45 Bloomers don’t reappear in popular street fashion until 1914 when wartime demanded women wear trousers, which were often called “bloomers” even though they were the straight-legged pants more familiar to us.46 Downton Abbey contextualizes Sybil donning bloomers within the series’ broader themes of reactionary and progressivist politics. Episode four takes place in 1912, by which time bloomers had arrived as a fashion controversy. The family patriarch, Lord Grantham, talks to his eldest daughter Mary about the importance of preserving dynasty and patrimony in the form of the familial estate. While she is the eldest child, Mary cannot inherit the estate because she is female and so she is pressured by the family to marry the estate’s legal heir, a distant cousin. Early in the episode, the newly hired chauffeur talks to Sybil about women’s rights and gives her suffragette pamphlets. Sybil complains to her sisters about the unfairness of corsets. She hires a dress to be made in London but refuses to give details about what it looks like. The dress arrives and Sybil is shown opening it and happily starring into the package, but the reveal is delayed until the end of the episode when she wears the “dress” to dinner. Anticipation builds in the drawing room as the family sits and waits for Sybil to come down. When Sybil enters, we see the bodice first and then the camera tilts down to reveal the turquoise bloomers (Figure 5.5). Shot-reverse shots show Sybil posing in the bloomers and the family’s horrified reactions to them. The last reaction comes from the chauffeur, who peers (a little creepily) into the drawing room through the window outside. He nods approvingly and the episode ends. In following episodes, Sybil has many heated debates with her father over the dinner table about social progress and politics as her flirtation with liberalism and her relationship with the chauffeur become more serious. Sybil’s storyline ultimately ends in rejecting the family through her elopement with a “commoner.” This journey begins with her fashion foray into bloomers, a costume choice that signals a historically specific set of debates and tensions around women’s rights and social equity.

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Figure 5.5   “Episode Four,” October 17, 2010, Downton Abbey. A similar moment when costume is used as a narrator and historical benchmark takes place later in the series when Mary gets a bobbed haircut (“Episode Six,” October 26, 2014). Unlike Sybil, Mary is the most politically conservative of the three Grantham sisters. However, her worldview is fraught with contradictions: while she believes in the preservation of the family estate and aristocracy as an institution, she’s also the first among her sisters to have sex outside the confines of marriage. Over the seasons, Mary experiences loss through multiple deaths in the family and she slowly assumes more control over running the family estate. She reenters the dating scene in season five after losing her husband to a tragic car accident, and in the episode, she entertains multiple suitors. Even after rejecting one man, who goes on to propose to another woman, Mary still wants him to pine for her. She therefore gets a new haircut to remind him of what he is missing. Mary announces to the family that they have a surprise in store that evening. When Mary, like Sybil, comes down to dinner, she reveals her flapper-era bob (Figure 5.6).

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Figure 5.6   “Episode Six,” October 26, 2014, Downton Abbey. As with the bloomers scene, shot-reverse shots switch from Mary flaunting her new do, to the family’s mixed reactions. Her mother says, “We are really living in the modern world.” Her grandmother says blithely, “Oh it’s you! I thought it was a man wearing your clothes.” Meanwhile in the servants’ quarters, Mary’s maid expresses her admiration of the haircut as “setting women free.” The origins of the bob haircut can be traced as far back as couturier Paul Poiret’s 1908 collection, which disbanded corsets and cut all the models’ hair short.47 Early on, the cut was therefore connected to other feminist principles in dress reform that sought to liberate movement. Coco Chanel was one of the first people to wear the haircut in public, non-exhibition contexts. The story goes that in 1917, her gas heater explodes and burns her hair off. Chanel takes scissors to her locks in order to make it in time to the opera and appears for the performance in a short skirt and bob haircut that scandalizes patrons.48 Bobbed hair gains more popular traction in 1919 as part of the postwar rise in women’s disposable income and the dismantling of social mores like corsets and women smoking in public.49 The bob horrified onlookers as being too masculine. It was also known as “la garçonne,” or boyish man or bachelor.50 Another term attached to the haircut is the “Jeanne D’Arc,” which only further cements the hairdo’s feminist subtext through its association with this gender-bending historical icon.51 Hairdressers were among the bob’s greatest dissenters because they feared that the look’s low maintenance might put them out of work.52 In

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collaboration with medical professionals and the Catholic Church, hairdressers warned of the bob’s threats to women’s moral fiber and basic hygiene, some claiming the style encouraged female baldness and dirtiness.53 From its birth, the haircut was firmly entrenched in feminist discourse. News stories of the bob’s heyday told of husbands leaving their wives over the cut, locking them in the house until it grew out, and even murdering them.54 The most popular piece of fiction about the bob is a 1922 novel by Victor Margueritte called La Garçonne, in which the protagonist shears her hair off after discovering her fiancé’s infidelity. She then goes on a sexual adventure of self-discovery that includes queer encounters and pregnancy out of wedlock.55 The bob is therefore always latently feminist by virtue of its historical discourse and long-standing attachments to women’s liberation, or as some might have it, women misbehaving. As with the bloomers, Downton Abbey situates the bob haircut as a progressivist symbol in the narrative context of the series. In the same episode, the second butler, Thomas, experiments with a quack doctor’s treatment to “cure” homosexuality by injecting himself with a mysterious tonic that makes him ill. The real doctor who treats him tells Thomas to find peace with himself as he is. Feminist themes reverberate in the episode through one servant’s post-traumatic journey following her rape earlier in the season. She talks to her husband in the episode about how they can deal with the trauma. The episode concludes with Mary participating in a horse race. In contradiction to her new look and the fact that she is riding with mostly men, she insists on riding sidesaddle. As she joins the crowd of male riders, two older female bystanders talk about the “crazy” things they did when they were young. The music swells as Mary jumps the first fence and the episode fades to black. While saccharine and predictable, the episode clearly positions hair and costume to “dog-ear” this moment in Mary’s trajectory and the series-long commitment to showing the emergence of the Women’s Movement in early twentieth-century English aristocracy. Returning to previous chapters’ case studies of historical time travel reality television, Colonial House offers a different iteration of nostalgic television using costume to punctuate its narrativizations of gender politics. Colonial House (PBS/Channel 4, 2004) recreates the physical environment and living conditions of a pilgrim settlement in Maine, USA. It casts participants who inhabit the settlement and farm a corn crop while they are filmed. Characters are randomly assigned roles of governor, pastor, shareholders, and servants; all married women share the statuses attached to their husbands and take on the domestic roles as homemakers. Unmarried woman are automatically cast as servants. The modern-day work ethic begins to conflict with the punishing manual labor demanded of farming and domestic chores circa 1628

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and participants start to sleep in late and neglect the crops. In response, the governor enforces a new set of stringent rules in the settlement that are historically closer to the cultural values of the original pilgrims. These include punishments for swearing, refusing to attend the Sabbath, and women appearing in public without corsets or head caps (“Harsh Reality,” May 17, 2004). The camp descends into rebellion as participants flagrantly defy his orders and instead choose the punishments of spending hours in the stockyard or wearing letters that stand for their encroachments. The pastor’s wife approaches the governor and announces her refusal to wear the cap in public because, while historically accurate, it conflicts with her present-day feminist politics. She chooses to wear the punishment letter on her clothing instead of adhering to his rules. The project of Colonial House brings two different historical ideologies into conflict: the historically accurate social values, living conditions, and daily lives of pilgrims, and the worldviews of contemporary participants coming from a range of political perspectives across the United States and United Kingdom. While the politics and backgrounds of the contemporary participants are diverse (the governor is a southern Baptist minister and the pastor is a west coast university professor), they conflict with many of the central tenets the pilgrim mindset, especially when it comes to governance, religion, class, and gender. In view of how difficult the enforcement of the rules becomes, the governor loosens his edicts and allows people to remain on the settlement with some modifications for twenty-first-century Western values. In the episode, the cap and corset are costume choices but also sources of participants stonewalling the governor’s orders. The cap and corset are not only uncomfortable, but they are symbolic of a gender regression to the pilgrim era that some participants disagree with. The program explores the viability of recreating an entirely faithful pilgrim settlement with contemporary participants, whose gender politics and investment in the program’s project are tested to their absolute limits. Downton Abbey and Colonial House offer alternative examples to Mad Men in which television costume design marks a specific scene, character, or storyline as historically significant. Usually these moments carry feminist import. At the very least, costume, like other aspects of design in the book, represents and narrativizes a historical shift in these programs. Oftentimes, the costumes that signal change catalyze characters’ conversation about history and the verbal articulation of the transformations underway. However, Westworld (HBO, 2016–) offers a special case of nostalgic television drama that models characters’ relationships to history through costume, and, by extension, the projected audience’s consumption of history through costume. Westworld remakes the 1973 film original (MGM, 1973). Both take place in a

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futuristic theme park populated by human cyborgs that recreate the Western frontier for wealthy tourists. Visitors engage in all genre of debauchery in the park assuming that all moral codes are suspended when interacting with cyborgs whose artificial memories are erased at the end of the day. Tourists rape, pillage, murder, and torture as the series slowly discloses the cyborgs are, in fact, sentient and capable of remembering. In terms of the costume dynamics I’m exploring in this chapter, one scene in Westworld stands out as particularly relevant to the broader nostalgic discourse the book analyzes. Episode two centers on one new client’s induction into “life” at the park (“Chestnut,” October 7, 2016). After he exits the tram that takes him to the visitor center, the first stage of his introduction and “getting into character” is a costume and prop room that is customized to his preferences and interests. The beautiful cyborg in charge of his induction leads him into a futuristic white room, where racks of leather jackets, fringed shirts, cowboy hats, guns, whips, and boots await his selection (Figure 5.7). She offers him sex before leaving him to build the character he will “play” in the park from the costumes and props. Once outfitted, he boards a steam-train to the park grounds and, at that point, the vacation begins as he is “in character.” This scene dramatizes how quality nostalgic television situates props and costumes for audience engagement overall. While we don’t actually don costumes and handle props, we are encouraged to engage the historical

Figure 5.7   “Chestnut,” October 7, 2016, Westworld.

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periods through them and through the characters’ relationships to these pieces of material history. Like Westworld visitors, audience members of nostalgic television are constructed as “consuming” history through visual culture, learning to read and anticipate the ebb and flow of social progress through changes in the look and feel of these material worlds. It is all the more symbolic that, when Westworld cyborgs are retired for the day, they are stripped bare of their clothing and props. The theme park’s headquarters are underground and populated with naked cyborgs and human corporate cogs dressed in nondescript white lab coats or easily forgettable iterations of business casual. In this drama series, human (and cyborg) identity is only really constructed and realized through a repeated engagement with and replaying of history. And when the characters, and by extension, audiences re-inhabit the world of the present, they are naked and anonymous.

Conclusion: When words fail, costumes do not Many nostalgic programs walk a fine line between condemning and longing for the values of the eras they reincarnate. They give no explicit direction or commentary on how the audience should view the past. As audience members, we can identify with characters who believe bloomers to be an abomination just as easily as we can align ourselves with those who believe they herald women’s liberation. Whether or not one sees these narratives as telling tales of social decline or relating moments in history that work toward collective social good, the costumes articulate and harness more liminal desires and sensations, conflicted feelings toward historical change that offer a more open-ended engagement with points in time when change is undeniably imminent. In his adaptation of Gramscian hegemony theory, Raymond Williams introduces the idea of “structures of feeling,” loosely defined as “a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period.”56 In contrast to ideology and hegemony, structures of feeling have particular bearings on art and aesthetics, which, “cannot without loss be reduced to belief systems, institutions, or explicit general relationship, with or without tension, as it also evidently includes elements of social and material (physical or natural) experience which may lie beyond or be uncovered or imperfectly covered by, the elsewhere recognizable systematic elements.”57 Williams’s structures of feeling capture ideas in formation and emergent ideologies before they are even articulated. He writes, “The idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions—semantic

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figures—which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming.”58 Nostalgic TV strategically foregrounds costume at moments that question historical teleologies around social equity. Many of the scenes discussed here feature little to no dialogue and, instead, let the clothing take over. Fashion becomes its own meta-historical discursive device in nostalgia television. In the instances this chapter discusses, costume design captures something within the storyworlds of these characters that is not quite yet verbalized, a generational zeitgeist or possibility of rebellion that we only recognize because we know how these stories play out and how history unfolds. Perhaps, like Williams claims, this is because our visual worlds oftentimes capture structures of feeling before we’ve had a chance to discuss them verbally. This is why material histories attached to the designed object and space are perfect conduits for rewatching history on television. Audiences can recognize the visual cues of precipitous change before the changes occur. Nostalgic costume allows us, as audience members, to “be in the know,” and to participate in a visual language that the characters are only beginning to decode for themselves. Characters navigate their own attitudes toward cultural changes through clothing, even if this is nonverbalized and perhaps even unknown to themselves.

Notes   1 Bevan, “TV Nostalgia for the Boomer Home and Housewife.”   2 For discussions of Sirk and mise-en-scène, see Fred Camper, “The Films of Douglas Sirk,” Screen 12, no. 2 (1971): 44; Thomas Elsaesser, “Documents on Sirk,” Screen 12 (1971): 8–14.   3 Articles on television costume design tend to be specific to certain series (Sarah Gilligan, “Fashioning Masculinity and Desire in Torchwood,” in Illuminating Torchwood: Essays on Narrative, Character and Sexuality in the BBC Series, ed. Andrew Ireland [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009], 153–164) or specific time periods in television costuming (see Patricia Cunningham, Heather Mangine, and Andrew Reilly, “Television and Fashion in the 1980s,” in Twentieth-Century American Fashion [Dress, Body, Culture], eds. P. Cunningham and Linda Welters [Oxford: Berg, 2005], 209–228.) An industry perspective on costume design for television is offered by Richard La Motte, Costume Design 101: The Art and Business of Costume Design for Film and Television, Second Edition (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2010), 101. Most literature on costume design, however, concerns film. See Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, eds., Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations, and Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2001).

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  4 Gary R. Edgerton published an edited anthology on Mad Men (Edgerton, Mad Men [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011]). Its articles focus on the series’ narrative and in particular its gender and racial discourses. One chapter offers insight into the show’s aesthetics: Butler, “‘Smoke gets in your eyes’” which analyzes the aesthetics of the series in relation to Hollywood cinema of the 1950s and its contemporary television dramas. The book, however, largely neglects the impact the series has had on today’s mainstream fashion and interior design.   5 Garland. Interview with author.   6 The art department for Mad Men remains a major attraction and a key part of the series’ celebrity status. The notoriety of the show’s production design is reflected in its track record for winning the Art Directors Guild Award for Excellence in Production Design each year from 2007 to 2010 (“Past Awards,” Art Directors Guild, accessed June 1, 2017, http://www.adg.org.). Janie Bryant was awarded the Costume Designers Guild Award for Excellent Costume Design for Television Series in 2009 (“Awards,” Costume Designers Guild, accessed June 1, 2013, http://www.costumedesignersguild.com.). The series has also been nominated for numerous awards at the Creative Arts Emmys from 2008 onwards for make-up, hairstyling, costume design, and art direction. Trade journals catering to broader design communities have also taken notice of Mad Men’s allure (see Edie Cohen, “Conquest of Cool,” Interior Design 79, no. 14 [2008]: 51–54.)   7 Ibid.   8 Bonnie Nipar. Interview by author. June 25, 2014.   9 Bevan, “How to Make Victory Rolls,” 1–19. 10 Patricia R. Zimmerman, “Introduction: The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artefacts, Minings,” in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, eds. R. Patricia and Karen L. Ishizuka Zimmermann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1–27. 11 Richard Dyer explains how Marilyn Monroe resonated with 1950s fashion favoring a more “natural” feminine beauty in “Monroe and Sexuality,” in Heavenly Bodies (New York: Routledge, 2004), 17–63. 12 Henry Russell Hitchcock, The International Style, trans. Lovell, Kemp, and Ive, Dieter Rams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 13 Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Dressed (New York: Harper Design, 2007), 140. 14 Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls is a comprehensive history of the feminist affiliations with the pin-up from its earliest years until now. 15 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1963). 16 Susannah Handley, Nylon: The Manmade Fashion Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 50–51. 17 Janie Bryant (costume designer for Mad Men). Interview by author. September 20, 2011. 18 Janie Bryant, The Fashion File: Advice, Tips, and Inspiration from the Costume Designer of Mad Men (New York: Grand Central Life & Style, 2010), 87.

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19 Bevan, “How to Make Victory Rolls,” 137–139. 20 Ibid., 3. 21 Ibid.,15. 22 One example of this would be the advice given contestants on What Not to Wear (TLC, 2003–13), a series that focuses on making over the wardrobes of fashion “failures.” The show helps each contestant to achieve a uniform, professional wardrobe and in the process usually eliminates traces of personal style or nonmainstream fashion. 23 Negra and Tasker, Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture; Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Diane Negra, “‘Quality Postfeminism?’ Sex and the Single Girl on HBO,” Genders 39 (2004); McRobbie, “Postfeminism and Popular Culture”; Lotz, “Postfeminist Television Criticism”; Kim, “Sex and the Single Girl in Postfeminism”; Elspeth Probyn, “New Traditionalism and Postfeminism: TV Does the Home,” Screen 31, no. 2 (1990): 147–159. 24 Bevan, “How to Make Victory Rolls,” 108 and 181. 25 Bryant. Interview by author. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Nipar. Interview by author. 29 Ibid. 30 This close relationship between materiality and memory is discussed by David Lowenthal in his discussion of historical relics and their alteration and/or restoration in “How We Know the Past” and “Changing the Past” (Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, 185–262 and 263–362); perhaps the most seminal example of a theorization of the connection between materiality and memory is Proust’s account of eating a tea-soaked madeleine and recalling his childhood memories of growing up in Combray (Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1 of The Swann’s Way: Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Originally published as A la recherché due temps perdu [Gallimard, Paris: Biblioteque de la Pleiade, 1954] [New York: Vintage, 1982], 48–51). 31 Nipar. Interview with author. 32 Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Gregory Peck’s costume in the 1956 film adaptation of Sloane Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit was designed by Charles La Maire. 36 Craig Teper, Vidal Sassoon: The Movie, Phase 4 Films, 2010. 37 Bevan, “How to Make Victory Rolls,” 9. 38 A strong example of Mad Men’s mediations of painful aspects of US racial history is its infamous Black-face scene in which Roger Sterling darkens

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV his face with burned corn and serenades his fiancé at a party with “My Old Kentucky Home” (“My Old Kentucky Home,” Mad Men, Season 3, Episode 3, aired August 3, 2009).

39 Bryant, The Fashion File, 137–162. 40 Jill Fields, “Erotic Modesty: (Ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in open and Closed Drawers,” Gender and History 14, no. 3 (2003): 497–515. 41 Julia Christie-Robin, Belinda Orzada, and Dilia López-Gydosh, “From Bustles to Bloomers: Exploring the Bicycle’s Influence in American Women’s Fashion, 1880–1914,” Journal of American Culture 35, no. 4 (2012): 316. 42 Ibid., 323. 43 Fields, “Erotic Modesty,” 500. 44 Ibid., 501. 45 Ibid., 500. 46 Ibid., 507. For other histories of bloomers, refer to Elizabeth Ewing, Dress and Undress: A History of Women’s Underwear (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1990), 104; Gayle V. Fischer, “‘Pantalets and Turkish Trousers’: Designing Freedom in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States,” Feminist Studies 23, no. 1 (1997): 111; Gaines and Herzog, Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body. 47 Steven Zdatny, “The Boyish Look and the Liberated Woman: The Politics and Aesthetics of Women’s Hairstyles,” Fashion Theory 1, no. 4 (1997): 369. 48 Steven Zdatny, Fashion, Work and Politics in Modern France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 61. 49 Ibid., 61. 50 Zdatny, “The Boyish Look,” 369. 51 Zdatny, Fashion, Work and Politics, 61. 52 Ibid., 63. 53 Zdatny, “The Boyish Look,” 369. 54 Zdatny, Fashion, Work and Politics, 64–65. 55 Zdatny, “The Boyish Look,” 367–368. 56 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 131. 57 Ibid., 133. 58 Ibid.

6 Costume Countermemory: Marginalized Television Voices and Chicana Retro

Introduction: Questioning nostalgia’s whiteness For the most part, TV nostalgia is blindingly white. It’s about white people, white memory, and whitewashed reincarnations of the past. In its most progressive forms, it is apologetically, self-reflexively white. In particular, television homages to the sitcom suburb recycle whitewashed histories of postwar America and effectively write people of color out of national memory. Series like Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15) have tried integrating representations of Americans of color, but rather tokenistically; characters of color are often tangential to main plotlines. This chapter asks how nostalgic television design operates when it privileges racially marginalized perspectives. Television representations of the boomer era told using voices of color are few and far between. The chapter uses Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006–10) as its primary case study. The show is set in the millennial era but adopts a mid-century retro aesthetic that reads as camp. I also discuss The Americans (FX, 2013–), which is set in 1980s Washington DC, to explore the political polysemy of the language of camp and “bad taste” in nostalgic costume design. Both series are examples of nostalgic costuming that offer their own commentaries on hegemonic American history, national memory of the postwar era, and its Cold War aftermath. Ugly Betty is a re-appropriated Columbian telenovela called Yo Soy Betty, La Fea (RCN, 1999–2000). Rebroadcast on Telemundo, Betty La Fea had the highest American ratings of any Spanish-language program in its time slot. Other countries made their own versions; there is a Russian Betty, a Turkish

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Betty, a Czech Betty, a Dutch Betty, and a Chinese Betty, among others.1 The American Ugly Betty’s executive producers, Salma Hayek and Ben Silverman, bought the rights of the telenovela and asked Silvio Horta (the writer for the Columbian original) to write the pilot script. The chapter discusses Ugly Betty as a counterexample to claims that boomer nostalgia is uniformly white, arguing the series explores early millennial tensions around racial identity and its construction within the white-dominated fashion industry. The chapter argues that Ugly Betty’s costume design highlights the intersectionality of race, gender, and class dynamics in its protagonist’s workplace and, by extension, on mainstream, white-dominated television. While set in the early 2000s, Ugly Betty references boomer fashions of the 1950s and ’60s, and provides another case study in the book where boomer styles track industry constraints and historical discourses onto the television set. While the designers of Ugly Betty do not aspire to historical accuracy in the same ways that the costumers for Mad Men do, they repurpose boomer styles and bank on many of the same associations between nostalgic fashion and narratives of social progress/regress, particularly television’s mediation of such narratives. Unlike Mad Men, which remains largely about white hegemony, Ugly Betty inverts associations between boomer fashion and whiteness by applying it to Chicana, diasporic identity within the wider context of globalization. Broadcast on ABC, Ugly Betty’s racial politics are products of a hegemonically white US media industry. However, the strong representation of Latino voices in its production and the show’s race politics merit reading its costume design through the framework of marginality (its producers, creator, the primary screenwriter, and the costume designer for seasons one and two are Latino). The show’s narrative centers on the racial and class assimilation of a young Mexican American in a white, male-dominated industry, Betty’s style and its roots in the Chicano Arts Movement carry a socioeconomic, ethnic thrust. Betty wrestles with conflicting desires to fit into her new world and to preserve ties to family and her Chicana, Queens identity. The primary visual site for this struggle is her fashion, where Betty blends a Chicana aesthetic with one that liberally quotes boomer fashion: both the conservatism of the postwar suburban housewife shirt dress and the 1960s countercultural boutique mod look that historically followed it. I back up my aesthetic analysis of Betty’s vintage hodge-podge using interviews with the series’ head designer for the first two seasons, Eduardo Castro. In addition, I visit one of his favorite costume resources in the Los Angeles area, the Western Costume Company (a costume rental house used by Mad Men and Ugly Betty), and thus expand my ethnography to people working at a previously hidden level of the costume industry.2 I draw on an interview with Bobi Garland, the research librarian at the Western Costume

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Company. The interview with Bobi Garland illuminates the industry branches that work alongside designers in realizing a look. Costume collections like Western Costume, which manufacture nostalgic politics of their own, constitute the other creative voices working in TV that media scholarship tends to overlook. The integration of boomer styles into costume designs for Betty is far from arbitrary. These decisions are purposeful and culturally situated within boomer nostalgic discourse, while also working within the limitations of designing for television (e.g., quick pace; budgetary concerns, etc.). A similar look into the production processes of Ugly Betty’s costume department reveals that the show draws on many of the same resources used by Mad Men’s head costume designer, Janie Bryant. The chapter explores what forms of memory work nostalgia television shares at the level of creative labor and resources, and how these might inform the role of costume in their respective metanarratives about nationhood and politics of identity. This reading of Ugly Betty supports other chapters in drawing connections between designing nostalgia for television costume and participating in memory work at larger discursive scales. It also continues the discussion of how nostalgic designers are networked through many of the same archives and resources that provide the same foundational “library” of materials from which designers assemble the looks of both series. Through textual readings and an ethnography that reaches multiple levels of the costuming industry, I look at the aesthetic lineages of Betty’s styles, a costume archaeology if you will, to consider the polemical potential of Betty’s vintage chic. The series’ fashion inscribes feminist historiographic discourses, that is, how separate sects of feminism have conflicting perceptions of the movement’s history. Moreover, the racial coding of Betty’s ensembles counters popular and academic criticisms that the series elides issues of race and ethnicity. A historically sensitive reading of Betty’s fashion illuminates the more multifaceted aspects of boomer nostalgia. In this case, the language of television boomer nostalgia assumes different attitudes toward the period rather than uniformly bemoaning the loss of the 1950s/1960s or reductively aping the classic television sitcom family. Lastly, I integrate The Americans into the discussion of nostalgic costume as an example that treats a different set of American memories by focusing on the Cold War of Reagan America. While the cast of The Americans is homogeneously white, it presents a surprising case of constructing Otherness through the perspectives of Soviet spies embedded in white American suburbia in the 1980s. I argue that camp nostalgic recreations of period looks appear in both Ugly Betty and The Americans as textual strategies for defamiliarizing normative white America and national memory that is unilaterally white,

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straight, and bourgeois. While the series is a nail-biting drama centering on Cold War espionage, its costume design self-reflexively apes 1980s fashions and the era. These design moments of rupture or self-referentiality mobilize nostalgia in similar ways that Ugly Betty’s costuming does; both series align camp costume nostalgia with characters experiencing a misalignment or political dissonance with mainstream, white American culture, whether that character is a Russian spy operating under the cover of an American suburban housewife or a Chicana, working-class aspiring writer struggling to break into fashion journalism. The chapter challenges the presumed whiteness and patriarchy of boomer nostalgia found in scholarship on the subject.3 The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV covers other television examples that similarly question historical teleologies of racial and gender progress. Many of my examples reflexively racialize the popular memory of 1950s and ’60s American suburbia or, at the very least, acknowledge the significance the period holds in popular imagination as the genesis of the Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Movement of the 1960s and ’70s.4 TV nostalgia’s racial and gender politics are not, however, without their collar-tugging moments. Mad Men and other depictions of postwar suburbia discussed in the book are, for the most part, prescriptively white, heteronormative, and classist, in effect, continuing the omission of “Otherness” that the 1950s and ’60s suburban family sitcom naturalized in the early years of television.5 There is, however, something missing from this impression of contemporary nostalgia for boomer America which sees TV nostalgia for the boomer period as simply omitting the impact of identity politics upon American history. The presence of boomer nostalgia in television design highlights rather than hides the whiteness, gender, and class reification of American memory for that historical period and American television more generally speaking. While acknowledging the more problematic aspects of TV boomer nostalgia’s identity politics, this chapter considers what boomer nostalgia includes as well as what it omits from representation. Popular representations of boomer nostalgia are disproportionately white, but this does not mean that all TV representations of boomer nostalgia are bereft of racial discourse. White hegemony relies on an invisibility that naturalizes whiteness as racially neutral or the absence of racial identity.6 Jennifer Esposito, in “What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty?” argues that, while the show mentions race at points, whiteness is never subjected to equal scrutiny as Latina identity. In effect, race is sublimated while whiteness is naturalized as the norm against which Betty is defined.7 It is true that the narratives of individual episodes in Ugly Betty rarely take on the issue of “whiteness” in the same explicit terms that Latina identity is the butt of office jokes and a frequent source of embarrassment for Betty. In that sense, the

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writing for the show does not apply the same scrutiny to whiteness as it does to Chicana ethnic identity. However, I argue that the production design of Ugly Betty is at the center of the series’ deconstruction of whiteness and Western beauty. Race has everything do to with the show and race has everything to do with whitewashed popular constructions of white America. Esposito’s argument echoes Gayatri Spivak’s seminal question, “Can the subaltern speak?” Can Otherness (racial, gender, class, or otherwise) define itself outside the language of the dominant codes of representation?8 Must we think of expressions of Otherness (a term that is problematic in itself) as necessarily existing outside or inside dominant codes of representation? Otherness is a process of negotiation. Racial politics are negotiated, in part, through Betty’s fashion. Her clothes are routinely labeled by her more fashionable coworkers as ugly, loud, or tacky, and such headings tacitly adhere “bad” aesthetics to Chicana identity.9 Chicana beauty shirks Western aesthetic principles like moderation, symmetry, and the conservative use of color. Betty’s vintage hodge-podge of patterns and resuscitation of old items of clothing respond to these tenets of Western hegemonic fashion. Ugly Betty comments on the naturalization of whiteness and the marginalization of Chicana identity on television, but does so through its aesthetics. Before an analysis of these aesthetics, there is a case to be made, however, that the series is also racialized by virtue of its industry history as a telenovela and how its storylines reference the show’s own production background. One level of racial and class elision occurs at a historical level in the whitewashed television image of the 1950s and 1960s. However, the scholarly neglect of boomer nostalgia’s representations of Otherness suggests that there is an additional cycle of racial and class elision happening at the level of academic criticism when it overlooks texts that do pair references to boomer America with TV’s constructions of difference and racial otherness. Scholarship addresses what series like Mad Men neglect to show in terms of fully fleshed out representations of the experience of Otherness in 1960s America. This does not mean that scholars should support the continued disproportionate representation of white Americans on TV. However, I proffer that, given the current disproportionately white mediascape, we mine these representations for the statements they make on Otherness even while this television’s constructions of the Other problematically lumps together anyone who does not fit into a white, middle-class mold. This chapter explores what nostalgic TV has to say through costume design. In other words, scholarship’s assumption that boomer nostalgia in the millennial era is a monolithically white discourse overlooks examples like Ugly Betty, which invokes postwar aesthetics in a Chicana, feminist context.

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The postwar “New Look” and nostalgia television At first, Betty’s fashion bears little relationship to the fashions of the 1950s or ’60s. In the series’ premiere, Betty begins her first day at Mode magazine wearing a bright red poncho with “Guadalajara!” in large lettering on the front. A black polka-dotted orange blouse pokes out of the top of her poncho and an unfitted plaid pencil skirt flanks the bottom (Figure 6.1). Her pearl necklace (a gift from her deceased mother) has a pendant in the shape of a “B” and three big dangling pearls. Her hair is long and disheveled. Her bangs are wiry and untamed. Her hirsute eyebrows point in every direction. Her braces and big-rimmed red glasses hide her unmade-up face. She is hired as an executive assistant. Her employer thinks that she is the perfect professional fit for his son, Daniel, who has a habit of sleeping with pretty secretaries. Betty is essentially hired for her ugliness. However, as Betty’s “ugliness” evolves in the series, a more integrated style takes shape. Vintage blouses, full skirts, clashing patterns, bulky sweater vests, and tights with pumps mark Betty’s “geek chic” phase.10 This middle style lasts until the third season when Pat Field takes over as costume designer. To create this middle style, Eduardo Castro went to vintage stores in the Los Angeles area and amassed a huge wardrobe of the loudest patterns from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s (Figure 6.2).11 In my interview with him, Castro describes Betty as a particularly “well-written

Figure 6.1   “Pilot,” September 28, 2006, Ugly Betty.

Costume Countermemory

Figure 6.2   “Fire and Nice,” March 10, 2010, Ugly Betty.

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character” saying that he “loved the way Betty came out of vintage stores and stock, and it was all kinds of ‘off.’”12 However, toward the middle of the first season, boomer silhouettes and patterns begin to make a presence in Betty’s wardrobe. Betty flourishes as an executive assistant and is ultimately promoted to features editor. She goes through multiple romances and slowly befriends the staff at Mode. Her fashion combines fitted tops, tight waistlines, and full skirts that are reminiscent of Christian Dior’s postwar 1947 New Look. These quotations of Dior’s revolutionary style come with an attendant gender history that complicates the series-long plot line of Betty’s struggle to embrace heteronormative standards of feminine beauty. Dior’s New Look shocked the world with its pinched waistlines, sloping shoulders, and calf-length full skirts. Controversy around the look centered on its shameless consumption of fabric, which flagrantly defied the stringent wartime restrictions that existed throughout Europe and the United States from 1940 to 1945.13 Patriotic associations with the restrictions, however, carried over into the postwar period as women persisted in attaching good citizenship to the economic use of fabric. This connotation of “excess” is exactly what made Dior’s collection so scandalous and seductive: his dresses were seen as wasteful and self-pampering. The New Look is primarily characterized by its full-bodied skirt, which had lots of movement and excessive amounts of fabric. Together with an emphasis on torpedo bust-lines, the New Look’s circle skirt spelled a re-feminization for women in contrast to the relative austerity of the wartime look, which featured A-line skirts and boxy jackets with big shoulders. The more professional wartime aesthetic was meant to appeal to women who were entering the workforce en masse at the height of the war. At the close of the war, however, a combination of government propaganda, commercial advertising, and mass layoffs of women from blue- and whitecollar jobs pressured women to return home.14 The concurrent shift in gender ideology, thus, became associated with the sensual Dior dresses because they marked a return to a more curvaceous, traditionally feminine figure as well as more traditional gender roles. Many feminist scholars and some designers, like Coco Chanel, thought the Dior look demeaned women and the progress they made in public spheres during the war. In covering this history, Elizabeth Wilson makes a historical connection between the birth of secondwave feminism and the New Look, arguing that the feminism was, in part, fueled by the strong reaction against the New Look and its popularity: the New Look was heavily criticized for reintroducing a corseted aesthetic after women went years without it.15 In popular fashion memory, Dior’s New Look therefore carries associations of feminization, excess, and conservative gender roles. But this does not

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mean that Betty conforms to the stereotype of a 1950s sitcom housewife. In fact, the marriage between this form of boomer retro and a Chicana aesthetic complicates the show’s racial message.16 Betty takes popular associations between Dior and re-feminization and gives them a different spin. Many of her ensembles take their silhouettes from the boomer period and Betty’s full figure compliments the pinched waistline, emphasized bust, narrow shoulders, and full skirt of the New Look. In her context, this full-figure shape from boomer fashion negotiates her environment of starvation-thin women. Her outfits emphasize her difference rather than disguise it, a far cry from the re-imprisonment of women’s bodies attached to the memory of the New Look. In this way, the series’ costuming for Betty re-scripts popular history by mapping new, feminist associations onto an old-fashioned look that popular discourse attaches to postwar, shackled housewives and picture-perfect suburbs. Ugly Betty employs the New Look aesthetic and its attendant history to realign Betty’s “excessive” gendered and racialized body via the institutional production of white beauty, which is her place of employment. The pinched waistlines in both series are imprinted with these conflicting feminist debates about the industry production of beauty.

Ugly Betty’s aesthetic, narrative, and industrial diaspora Betty’s integrations of the New Look are not whitewashed, empty quotations of a fictional American boomer past because Ugly Betty is strongly diasporic in its narrative content. Betty is a Latina with one foot in Queens and the other in Manhattan, a different kind of diaspora from her father’s. Ignacio Suarez was exiled from Mexico when he fell in love with Betty’s mother, who was the girlfriend of a notorious cartel boss. The Suarez couple flee the country once the infidelity is discovered, settle in Queens, and have two children. Ignacio chooses to keep his past life in Mexico a secret from his daughters. Betty and her family make a return trip to Mexico when her father is deported for living in the United States illegally. In the meantime, Betty’s trip to Mexico becomes a search for her maternal grandmother and family roots. In “A Tree Grows in Guadalajara” (May 10, 2007), Mexico is portrayed as a kind of dreamscape in which Betty experiences visions, serendipitous encounters with people from her father’s past, and prophecies from the village soothsayer that lead her to her grandmother’s rural home. While these plot points fall within an orientalist tradition of representing the non-Western world, similar qualities also characterize diasporic media. For one, Mexico shares characteristics

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of openness, spatiality, and dream-like qualities that, according to Hamid Naficy, epitomize portrayals of the homeland in diasporic cinema.17 When Betty relocates to London at the end of the series, her father gives her a farewell speech in the final episode comparing her immigration to London with his coming to America. These smaller narratives and the ongoing theme of Betty’s struggle to fit in with Manhattan fashion comprise meta-themes of Latin American diaspora and struggles with assimilations.18 The diaspora of the Suarez family parallels the series’ own meta-history; Ugly Betty was originally a successful Columbian telenovela created by Fernando Gaitán. Ugly Betty’s telenovela origins are periodically referenced in the series. Betty’s father watches telenovelas during many of the scenes shot in the Suarez home. The second season opens with a telenovela parody featuring Betty, her boyfriend, Henry, and his pregnant ex-girlfriend Charlie (“How Betty Got Her Grieve Back [sic],” September 27, 2007). The parody begins with a love scene between Betty and Henry. Charlie walks in on the lovers, fires a gun, and the dream ends before we know who the victim is. The actors speak in Spanish with English subtitles, the costumes and set are dominated by bright colors and excess (in the number of accessories or ornamental flourishes in the ensemble like ruffles and frills), and the acting style is histrionic (by Classical Hollywood standards). These aesthetic aberrations from the series’ usual format are nods to the telenovela format, particularly Western impressions of the telenovela. Ugly Betty’s telenovela roots are additionally present in the show’s thematization of border crossing, a recurring theme in South and Central American telenovelas.19 Border crossing is both a narrative trope and a generic trait because telenovelas have strong global appeal. Telenovela stories traditionally mediate discussions of nationhood, history, postcoloniality, and globalization.20 They focus on class relations within the context of modernization and the stories often center on the victimization of the working class. Telenovelas have been very successful as trans-global exports and the programs are designed with cross-cultural appeal in mind.21 As an endemically hybrid genre that draws on both local and global industries and audiences, telenovela stories revolve around themes of border crossing, diaspora, and assimilation.22 It is no coincidence, then, that narrative themes in Ugly Betty reflect this industrial context: border crossing, liminal identities, and conflicts between the pressure to assimilate and the desire to keep the memory of the home country alive. If Ugly Betty is a diasporic text by virtue of its telenovela origins and its diasporic narrative themes, then the liminality describing Betty’s fashion has racial, ethnic, and diasporic meanings. Betty navigates the pressures to be “fashionable” while retaining her own sense of style, which is shaped by

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telenovela aesthetics, definitions of beauty shaped by her diasporic community in Queens, and her own departures from hegemonic white good-looks. Her character uses the politics of vintage to play with the in/visibility of her race in the professional sphere. Her New Look-era vintage assumes and rewrites items of clothing that have been discarded as no longer fashionable. Betty counters the inherent ephemerality of fashion by hanging onto and revitalizing these old pieces of clothing, which then become incorporated into entirely new outfits, and seeing this process in each outfit gestures to the larger theme of the series: first-generation Mexican Americans reshaping identity after immigration. Memory is an essential part of vintage just as questions of memory, nation, and identity are essential parts of both the telenovela and Betty’s strategy to working at Mode. Ugly Betty embeds its ethno-global origins through references to the Chicano Art Movement, the term given to Mexican American art of the 1960s and ’70s that was closely associated with the contemporaneous political movement, El Movimiento, which focused on cultural reclamation and Mexican American civil rights in the United States.23 The Chicano Art Movement also assigned aesthetic conventions to the Mexican American, postwar, diasporic experience. As such, the movement plays a role in how the series constructs its diasporic aesthetic and the white hegemonic view of Betty’s fashion, particularly when Betty’s clothes are labeled as wacky or loud. Rasquache is a subcategory of the Chicano Arts Movement with aesthetic ties to Betty’s appropriations of vintage, and more broadly, tensions in Mexican American national identity. Rasquache (or Rasquachismo) is a derogatory Mexican term for impoverishment (similar to “ghetto” in American English). However, the term was repurposed by the Chicano Arts Movement of the 1970s to describe media that recycle low-brow culture, discarded objects, and debris to convey a diasporic message. It is often humorous, ironic, reflexive, and consciously kitsch, often contrasting Chicano Art aesthetics with Western standards of good taste.24 Rasquache employs clashing patterns and mismatched materials to express the Chicano diaspora.25 It interprets assimilation as a process of holding onto bits and pieces of Mexican identity while combining them with mass-produced objects and ephemera from the host consumer culture. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto defines rasquache as “a sensibility attuned to mixtures and confluence … a delight in texture and sensuous surfaces … self-conscious manipulation of materials or iconography … the combination of found materials and satiric wit … the manipulation of rasquache artifacts, code and sensibilities from both sides of the border.”26 Paintings and murals incorporate plastic, glitter, tires, broken plates, and domestic décor.

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Rasquache illustrates how kitsch, vintage, and bricolage compliment a diasporic message. Betty’s pairings of dissonant patterns and colors, vintage, and her incorporation of found jewelry and family heirlooms share commonalities with rasquache’s use of materials and themes. Betty employs dissonance to highlight what makes each fabric or object unique. The conscious use of kitsch embraces working-class taste culture rather than disguising or hiding it. Betty often matches vintage items from different historical periods (for example, a 1980s top with a 1950s shaped skirt), echoing the anachronism seen in rasquache art and its palimpsestic treatment of identity and history. Rasquache and Betty’s fashion wrestle with the desire for and paradoxical rejection of assimilation, as their visual tensions communicate both love for and skepticism toward the host country and the country of origin. Rasquache and Ugly Betty’s costume design have aesthetic and tactical resonances, as well as similar approaches to ethnic and historical identity.

Clashing vintage patterns and “bad” taste Rasquache is one founding principle of Betty’s aesthetic. Another is the New Look. Yet another is the mismatched, loud vintage patterns she wrangles into ensembles in order to achieve a rasquache look that challenges normative, Western assumptions about what makes “good” fashion, which usually includes tenets like balance, symmetry, moderation, and nuance. If anything, this chapter demonstrates that mining the fashion archeology of “bad taste” in costume is a complex process of untangling multiple layers of historical references, fissures, and reappropriations. Betty’s appropriations of 1960s vintage is another layer of this equation of what constitutes her “bad taste” at Mode. If rasquache relies so heavily on recycling what is old, then how does this intersect with Castro’s vintage strategy on the show, and what potential polemic does vintage embed in this context? Betty’s co-optation of boomer styles cultivates both a distinct fashion and a certain degree of antagonism toward her place of work. By necessity, dressing in vintage rejects the premise of cutting-edge fashion, which demands constant change and consumption. This sartorial strategy thus, imbeds a class critique by declining to economically contribute to the fashion industry’s cycle of consumption. At the series’ end, Betty’s wardrobe reflects the two primary silhouettes of the 1950s and early ’60s: the pencil skirt and the full circle skirt (borrowed from Dior’s New Look).27 In the final episodes of the series, Betty’s braces are removed and her glasses are changed to a less obtrusive, rimless pair. She becomes a features editor, has the braces removed, and Mode reassigns her to London to start a magazine

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targeting young adults. However, her style is still quirky and falls in the category of “loud” vis-à-vis her coworkers. In “Be-Shure” (December 11, 2009), Betty wears a plaid, red blouse with a big bow, a red belt, black tights, pumps, and a high-waisted black pencil skirt. In general, the look is late ’40s retro (Figure 6.3).28 While the two final seasons are designed by Pat Field, not Castro, the vintage theme continues. Oppositional fashion is a subject of ongoing debate.29 From one point of view, fashion is inherently resistant because new trends form in response to old ones.30 Fashion is new only because it flouts tradition, therefore making it inherently oppositional.31 Wilson takes this a step further and argues that fashion is inherently parodic and contradictory because it must inevitably quote and respond to past modes.32 For Dick Hebdige, the dialogue between present and past materializes in the bricolage characterizing fashion subcultures. Bricolage refers to the rearranging and repurposing of signs to reorganize, understand, and comment on their cultural environment.33 In fashion, this involves usurping aspects of past styles and framing them in different contexts.34 Resistant fashion is therefore never entirely removed from mainstream fashion. Betty is a bricoleur of sorts, collecting affordable vintage items and integrating them into fashionable looks that combine styles from the 1940s,

Figure 6.3   “Be-Shure,” December 11, 2009, Ugly Betty.

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’50s, and ’60s. Betty’s adoption of some boomer elements has a resistant underpinning because she mobilizes popular associations between that era and retrograde gender and racial politics, while the series’ narrative aligns the maturation of her style with feminist and diasporic meaning. Hegemonic constructions of femininity are dislocated in vintage because vintage forces a historical consciousness and distance from signs of femininity, leading some scholars to privilege vintage as uniquely oppositional. Kaja Silverman suggests that retro has oppositional power because it is inherently ironic and demands a distance between the wearer and clothing. In her words, this strategy works to “denaturalize its wearer’s specular identity … [and] inserts its wearer into a complex network of cultural and historical references. At the same time, it avoids the pitfalls of a naive referentiality; by putting quotation marks around the garments it revitalizes, it makes clear the past is available to us only in a textual form and through the mediation of the present.”35 Vintage foregrounds the languages of fashion and femininity so often naturalized as inherent beauty or hip clothing. This interpretation, however, invites the pitfalls of reductivist, neoliberalist definitions of oppositionality that automatically place any divergence from the norm under the heading of political subversion (i.e., Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture or John Fiske’s Television Culture).36 After all, if all fashion is subversive, then subversion and fashion are meaningless. That said, Betty’s resultant looks are a far remove from the heteronormative, white, middle-class, suburban associations with boomer fashion. Bricolage describes the piecemeal adoption of past styles (the skirt shape from one era and the patterns from another), which describes Betty’s ensembles because they are not adapted wholesale from the boomer era. Given its evolution over the course of the series, Betty’s fashion is more a site of negotiation than opposition. Certainly, there are oppositional elements, but the same provocative elements also function in concert with quotations of contemporary styles to mitigate the demands of her workplace with her desire to stand out. Betty uses boomer retro toward a similar end in confronting her coworkers’ definitions of distinction. Castro himself outlines the class-based import of making Betty a vintage girl: What happened with Betty was she came from a modest area of Queens and she had very little understanding of the world of fashion, but as she moves forward through the series, she starts off with very simple little items: her little blue jacket with the faux fur collar was a thrift store purchase and for the entire first season we kept it. And there were vintage pieces that worked from little vintage places. Honestly we moved quite fast and we found pieces that had a feel of that [vintage] but are actually quite modern and designery [sic], but are not meant to show that off.37

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By sculpting her individual look, she still invests in the world of fashion, but her look is sufficiently unorthodox for her coworkers to understand that she does not “buy into” what the magazine preaches. Her ideas conflict with the premise of Mode as much as her outfits clash with those of her colleagues, but she finds ways of inserting her ideas (through writing and clothing) into the world of high fashion. Foregrounding the languages of female beauty and fashion is Betty’s strategy for disrupting the reproduction of the patriarchal messages in fashion culture. At the same time, she seeks validation from the magazine, even if this comes in the form of disdain. The piecemeal aspect of Betty’s costuming and its aesthetic and cultural connections to rasquache are part of the recycling and repurposing endemic to costuming for television. At multiple points in our interview, Castro stressed the speed of working in television, which necessitates understanding the timeline attached to each clothing item: How long can I rent this item for? How long will it take to make this jacket? Does this price tag justify purchasing this dress when it will only appear on screen for two minutes? Will this look good on camera or on a small portable screen like a smartphone? I might not use this belt now, but I’ll buy it and bank on using it in future projects. Castro mentions purchasing and storing fabrics for future projects before he even knows what they’ll be.38 He also mentions how “a lot of elegant pieces that are in the stores or designer show rooms you may find very unique and wonderful but, a lot of times, I may like it, the actor may like it, but the camera won’t. Sometimes some pieces just do not translate because they are too fashion forward and they may look messy on camera.”39 Designers thus must be able to take mental stock of their wardrobes at all times in order to determine how they can piece together a costume or look within budget. Within this look, some items may be purchased, some made, some already owned, and some rented. Bevan Do you have some kind of method for when you go out or do you make costumes in house? Castro We made a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff. First season, we made over half of Vanessa’s [Vanessa Williams, who plays Wilhelmina Slater] clothes. We made a lot of blouses. Because we decided to go ivory [for Williams’ costumes], we were limited. So a lot of times, there were situations like one instance when she had brought in a skirt from New York that I really really loved. It was a brown skirt so we couldn’t use it. We were under the gun, as we always are. So scheduling [according to the original design for the costume] changed and we copied the skirt and we made a blouse. It [the sewing] started at 7:30 in the morning. We have two different shops that were building these items … At 3:30 they were delivered and at 4:00 we were on the set shooting.40

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The time constraint of television production is still one of the main points of medium distinction, even in an era of high-production value “quality TV” that no longer conforms to traditional season schedules. Because of abrupt changes in production schedules as well as the rapid rate of TV production relative to film, television costume design demands a bricolage approach, flexibility, and resourcefulness. In combination with Ugly Betty’s references to Chicano art, television costume design is informed by a methodology particularly open to counter-readings and counternarration because it necessitates decontextualizing and recontextualizing clothing. One could say that the temporality of designing for television lends itself to polysemy in ways that film and theater do not because an ensemble is rarely made in studio from start to finish. More often than not, a costume is composed of different pieces from various past contexts (vintage, second hand, studio or designer owned, and tailor made). The overdetermined meanings endemic to vintage clothing and working in television further complicate the reading of Betty’s wardrobe. How does the bricolage strategy necessary to television production interplay with the vintage bricolage that distinguishes Betty as someone who must be resourceful in sculpting her own cutting-edge looks from second-hand clothing? Betty’s bricolage is a strategy for coping with the racial and class homogeneity of her environment. Her loudness in fashion is one way of combating a Latina stereotype by appropriating and modifying its origins, which come from a different standard of beauty and a design sensibility that favors primary colors and juxtaposed patterns. Betty’s Chicana sensibility also stems from a uniquely diasporic aesthetic because it integrates elements from the past and present, homeland and host country, and Queens and Manhattan. In these ways, Ugly Betty’s vintage shares similar methodologies to rasquache art. Digging further into this costume archaeology of bad taste via retro appropriation: Betty’s deployment of “gaudy” fashion combinations and rasquache has tactical and visual resonances with the readymade revolution of 1960s Europe and America. Her ensembles integrate period boomer styles with those of the generation that historically responded to 1950s conservatism. Betty’s manipulations of the “boutique look” are another way the series draws on and frames the boomer era and what it stands for in popular visual memory of the period: a rigid American ideal beauty, family, gender, and race that is impossibly homogeneous.41 Betty is a fan of layering loud patterns and discordant fabrics. Eduardo Castro acknowledges the prominence of 1950s and ‘60s patterns in Betty’s costumes when he mentions using pieces designed by Tory Birch, a contemporary designer who re-appropriates boomer-era designs. He states:

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Torry Birch has a very very interesting way of making 50s and 60s patterns very very modern. But in Betty’s eyes, when we put them on Betty and pair them with a skirt or a sweater vest which we may have made, they are quirky. They tend to wind up quirkier than chic. I remember we put her in an Estrada blouse, a very expensive Estrada blouse, not because it was expensive but because it had ruffles and it had all of this movement that was kind of interesting and was meant to go on a skinny body. But we put it on Betty and paired it with a Marc Jacob’s skirt and it wasn’t meant to be chic. The pieces themselves were interesting and then we mixed it up. Through Betty’s eyes, she thought it was pretty when it was quite a little mess.42 Castro points to the deliberate aesthetic and economic disharmony in Betty’s outfits. They are meant to clash. They are meant to elude categorization as either designer label or thrift shop purchase. Indeed, a vicarious pleasure comes across in the interview when Castro recounts these deliberate conflations of high and low culture. Placing designer pieces meant for fashionthin bodies onto an “average” female figure compounds this disharmony. In addition to rasquache, the fashion conventions of clashing patterns and colors have historical origins in the readymade revolution, pop, the introduction of the first synthetic fibers, and the class connotations attached to each. Readymade clothing effectively made fashion more economically accessible. It is no coincidence that around the time the readymade became dominant, street fashion began dictating couture design rather than the other way around. Readymade means clothing that is pre-made, fit to uniform sizes, and sold in department stores or boutiques. Before readymades, there were no uniform sizes. Rather, women made their own clothing, had clothing made for them by tailors, or bought secondhand. Of course, department stores were transformative in making readymades available to the general public. Muslin dresses were the first form of readymade to become available in 1845 at Bainbridge of Newcastle (muslin is a cheap, light fabric usually used to make mock copies of clothing before the final item is sewn out of the desired material).43 By 1883, factories produced readymade clothing for both men and women, but these were not entirely readymade because they were still made to measure (they were mail ordered using exact measurements and any alterations would be continued via mail). This was a long, expensive process and low-income consumers still primarily wore secondhand clothing. This continued into the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, during which made-to-measure clothing was only available for middle- to upper-class consumers.44 In 1950, for example, 60 percent of women in France either made their own clothes or had them made.45 However, the United States provides a stark contrast with over 90 percent of women buying off the rack by 1951.46

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In 1949, Dior was the first to break into the readymade world when he made his patterns available to vendors that could either order a canvas copy (a model used for mass-production) or a Dior original. Reproductions were sold under the Dior label around the world.47 This marked a significant relaxation in couture standards, making brand names available to a broader spectrum of incomes. The class-specific ability to walk into a department store and buy a Ralph Lauren polo shirt is the result of Dior’s move into readymades. While such changes in the fashion world might seem inconsequential to the majority of consumers, the readymade’s challenge to the world of haute couture bore a symbolic class value that had a lasting impact. The Western world was dramatically impacted by the increased availability of readymade clothing in department stores. The postwar-era readymade was indeed revolutionary for US fashion at a class level and thus allusions to the transition to the readymade and boutique culture in Ugly Betty carry a class message. The rise of “boutique culture” and the practices of shopping for vintage clothing developed alongside the readymade revolution. While couturiers dabbled in the readymade industry, boutique stores thrived on it. The 1960s brought row upon row of independent boutique clothing stores in urban areas, London’s King’s Street becoming an iconic location for such retailers. Tired by the world of haute couture, Mary Quant and other designers opened stores selling vintage and readymades to the up and coming Flower Generation. Their clients were young, rebellious, and had little patience for mail order clothing or department store fittings. Instead they wanted the quick purchase: to consume the newest trends and then discard them at the onset of the next mode. Sixties fashion featured square sheaths, brightly colored tights, de-accentuated waistlines, loud colors and patterns, disposable paper clothes, and a flapper revival that favored waif-like bodies. Sixties fashion centers on the ephemeral nature of consumption and youth culture, and boutique stores were very successful in catering to the youth of their time. Readymades or vintage clothing, formerly seen as cheap or low-brow fashion, offered trendy ways to shop. Boutique stores, like Betty herself, revolutionized fashion hierarchy and subverted haute couture. Betty’s mobilization of vintage and affinity for boutique-era prints are tied to the readymade’s history, particularly when seen in context of the class-based reasons she turns to these styles. With the rise of boutique stores, power changed hands when independent, small-house designers and street fashion became dominant voices in the fashion world. Furthermore, the vintage sold at boutiques made stylish clothing accessible to buyers from a wider range of economic means.48 However, it is important to note that while Western women and men of means gained greater access to fashionable clothing,

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these items were made off the backs of sweatshop workers, a practice that remains relatively unchanged. The readymade revolution “democratized” only one part of the world by imprisoning others. While the readymade revolution transformed shopping for middle- to upper-class Western women, it worked as a new form of imperialism in the form of sweatshops for everyone else. When taken in the context of the readymade’s history and Ugly Betty’s developing global origin story, her reliance on relics from the 1960s readymade revolution, which the show repurposes as vintage, has added import. In a sense, the series borrows clothing artifacts from the dawn of sweatshop imperialism. Recasting them as vintage at a higher cultural capital critiques the wastefulness of contemporary fashion consumption that fuels sweatshops. Attaching these readymade antiques to the Chicana body on US, white-dominated, network television also suggests an inversion of the fashion global hierarchy in which nonwhite laborers clothe white bodies. The readymade revolution inscribes a larger critique of designer culture and the relationship between distinction and fashion. Ugly Betty draws on the mod look, which is nested in this historical critique. Furthermore, the costume design process for the show itself incorporates the subversion of haute couture. Castro repeatedly mentions how many times the costume design for the show is impossible to read in terms of what is “designery” and what is not. He says, “I’ve done work so many times when you take a piece that is 10 dollars and you put it next to a piece that is 2,000 dollars and you really can’t tell which one is which. It’s not about the cost. It’s about the look.”49 He writes about dressing Vanessa Williams in everything from a 150-dollar dress to a jacket with 600 dollars worth of crystal buttons. He recalls one instance when the costume department rented diamond jewelry for Williams’s character in one episode. They rented a safe and a security guard. When it came time to shoot, they wound up using earrings from the American big-box store, Target, and the diamonds never made it to the screen.50 Castro regards working in television as designing purposefully and instinctively within predetermined set of parameters. Thus, the designer for a show whose central message is one of class subversion emphasizes the opacity of designer status in television costume design. Ugly Betty’s costume designer takes particular interest in the blurred lines between haute couture and street clothes. In addition, Betty’s ensembles draw on a fashion-based movement whose look is shaped by an internal critique of haute couture. In combination, these elements of the series’ costume design make a strong case for its revitalization of boomer fashions carrying a class politic as well as a racial one.

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The Western Costume Company and costume bricolage Betty’s hodge-podge fashion looks arbitrary and “bad,” but, in fact, as we’ve seen, it contains layers of references and material histories. Under the heading of “badness,” there is a very purposeful identity polemic. This is not to say that viewers must know fashion history in order to fully access Ugly Betty’s meaning, but that popular notions of “bad fashion” hinge on the accrual and naturalization of cultural meanings attached to material aesthetics. This chapter mines those cultural meanings to understand how costume design contributes to television nostalgia for the American past at discursive levels. The final piece of this puzzle explores how nostalgic television discourse extends to the politics and material realities of costume research and manufacture. Betty’s costumes themselves “archive” fashion history and harness cultural associations in order to mobilize them toward a class and racial politic. The process of “designing cultural meaning” in a costume, of treating the costume as a material archive for popular histories, in fact, begins in the institutions and recourses that Castro and other nostalgic costume designers use. The Western Costume Company has been a Hollywood institution since 1912, responsible for outfitting some of the most iconic films and television programs in American media history, including Gone with the Wind (1939), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and The Sound of Music (1965).51 It is also one of the go-to sources Bryant mentions for working on period costume design.52 Bryant’s affinity for Western Costume is reflected in the parking space the company reserves under her name at the time of my visit in June 2014. This next section considers how the structure, organization, operation, and identity of Western Costume Company inflect the work of designers like Bryant, as well as design for period television more broadly speaking. My findings at Western Costume through touring its facilities and talking to the people who work there reinforce the previous claims that historical accuracy is not always achievable in period costume design. Western Costume also reiterates that historical consciousness plays a part in the working process of costume designers. A look into the real-life workings and materiality of a living archive like Western Costume shows that industry factors beyond the oral histories of television’s above-the-line creators need to be considered when determining what governs the look and feel of American nostalgic television. In June 2014, I roamed Western Costume’s cavernous, sweltering warehouses filled with racks of clothes dating from the 1820s to the 1980s while chatting with Bobi Garland, the company’s head research librarian.53 An

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assertive woman with a severe bob haircut and a Joan Crawford-deep voice, Bobi is the primary guide to the company’s wealth of books, archival magazines and photographs, and costume collection. The items in the costume collection are available for costume designers for remaking them in their own studios or to rent for actors to wear (although this is only for principal cast members). Garland’s familiarity with the collection is evident. When she first started working there, she used to close her eyes, turn her back to the racks, and run her hands along the fabrics of the clothes to see if she could identify them based on touch.54 Alongside housing irreplaceable pieces of screen history (like Scarlet O’Hara’s green “curtain” dress from Gone with the Wind) the company also maintains a millinery shop, textile shop, dyeing station, shoemaker, tailoring department, and an entire subdepartment specializing in military uniforms. The company can research and replicate or manufacture any fabric that costume designers want from a mere swatch or photograph.55 The building contains multiple fitting rooms flanking its central hallways before one walks into the main warehouses. The research library itself, housed on the second floor, is an impressive collection organized to cater to costume designers’ needs. Files of photographs, magazine images, stereoscopic slides, and clothing patterns are categorized by actor, film, war, decade, and article of clothing as well as more specialized subgenres like “NYPD 1920s.” The costume designs produced from research done here are as much a product of what librarians choose to put in these files and their cataloguing protocols as their patrons’ ideas.56 The organization of the library infers that designers come in and use a film, actor, or war as their inspiration or at the very least a jumping-off point. This has the unintended effect of Hollywood costume design reinforcing itself, if period costumes are based on previous designs for the same era or a similar collection of photographs. However, period costumes are ongoing permutations rather than regurgitations of the same ideas. The particular sentiments and needs of the time of creation inform the design of an article of clothing set in the past. Presentism and a historical/industry awareness of how others approach recreating the past shape both costume design and the library itself. The company’s maintenance of a research library on its premises also encourages a historical consciousness on the parts of designers and costumers: you could look up photographs of a 1930s day dress, go downstairs to see if the collection houses an example, pull it, and then order it to be made there. The main warehouses are filled with racks of clothes and costumes from floor to ceiling. Cabinets house hats and shoes at the perimeters. The clothes are organized according to color, decade, article of clothing, and fabric (“1930s day dresses cotton” labels one rack, which is organized along the

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color spectrum). Once pieces are copied, their copies are hung next to the originals. Bobi says that the warehouses are meant to show designers their “options” and that is the key service that the company provides.57 Given this, the job of the people who work there is to know where everything is and to put things back where they belong, Bobi informs me as she shakes her head and removes a misplaced white shirt from the black section of one rack. This environment achieves a careful harmony between chaos and organization, laying the groundwork for a meta-historical consciousness, awareness for the way one’s predecessors and contemporaries treat history. Seeing copies of clothes next to originals and the act of wandering and browsing among various periods of history and types of clothing maximize the potential for historical reflection and industrial self-reflexivity. At the very least, whether it’s the designer, librarian, or an intern pulling an item from the warehouse, browsing, rummaging, and the process of locating an article in the racks is a large part of the nascent stages of a design project. Bobi balked when I called the warehouses an “archive” because she thinks of them as very much in use, “archive” connoting a retirement from circulation from her perspective.58 The collection is perpetually in motion and palimpsestic because pieces are rented out, they are sometimes returned damaged, they are mended, remade, and rented out again. The collection also transforms with each new acquisition; Western absorbs other rental collections with the aim of expanding its own, but it also tries to preserve the integrities of the new lots. Business decisions like these are motivated by gaps the collection needs to fill. For example, many of Western’s newer acquisitions targeted east coast US companies because most of Western Costume’s original holdings rely on west coast vintage, and thus lacked winter coats. The addition of the Dyckman Young Collection filled this gap. In some cases, the acquired lot carries a prestige that merits its own category in the warehouse. The Dyckman Young Collection is given its own place in the warehouse because of the reputation that it garnered prior to its incorporation into Western. One major division in Western’s collection is gendered, with women’s costumes stored separately from men’s. An unintended effect of catering to costume designers’ needs is that the historical and gender categories ordering the collection work to reinforce and perpetuate their own versions of history. If the section named “gowns of the 1920s” at Western Costume serves as the common primary source for designers specializing in period attire in Hollywood TV and film, then Hollywood reproduces the aesthetic of that collection and its particular version of fashions of the 1920s. The strength of the company’s reputation among costume designers in the film and television industries is, in large part, owing to the professional background of its present-day owner, Eddie Marks, who was a costume

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designer before entering the rental business. He remarks how this background gives him a strong understanding for what costume designers need. One of the most important industry demands the company focuses on, according to Marks, is “rebooting” the collection. By that, he means acquisitions of new inventory that keep the collection fresh and fill gaps.59 This, in theory, should work to counteract the issue of the designers regurgitating Western’s own take on history. However, what Marks acquires inevitably reflects his vision of the collection’s needs and period costume in general. Marks acquired some notable lots: Helen Larson, Dorothy Wavers, Leathers and Treasures, and Patty Noris’s collection. Some renters, like Noris, sell their collections to pursue careers in design. Each lot that Western Costume acquires has its own unique attitude toward archiving fashion. The shape of each collection reflects its owners’ opinions of what kinds of articles are representative of fashion history. Western Costume’s historicity is thus comprised of the voices of multiple fashion historians, each working to capture and repurpose different periods of time in American and European fashion and costume. This industry reality only reinforces that there are many extraneous constraints and interesting possibilities offered by the rental/archival sectors of the costume industry. Other costume warehouses have similar approaches to the internal organization of their collections. Upon visiting Sony Studio Pictures Property and Set Dressing, I found the costume collection, while more contemporary in date, is similarly organized according to article, size, fabric, and whether the items exists in multiples. Sony’s collection is organized into men and women’s areas of the warehouse, with categories like “contemporary cocktail dresses strapless.”60 Curiously ethnicized categories including “squaw,” “Japanese men,” “periodic [sic] hispanic shirts,” “gaucho pant liners,” “middle eastern women,” and “men’s ethnic and pirate belts” might explain how major studios arrive at costume designs that reify ethnic/racial categories. This is as much the product of creative demands as it is the functionality of the costume warehouse. If enough scripts include descriptions for “middle eastern women,” then this description becomes a category in costume collections. While Sony’s collection was slightly less methodical in organization, it follows a similar logic. Sony organizes its costumes according to catalogue headings that designers and costumers find most useful: gender, era, type of clothing item, and fabric. In the cases of Sony and Western Costume, the material and archival realities of rental costume collections work alongside the creative demands of costume designers in governing the look and feel of period costume on nostalgic television. Besides the archival realities of rental warehouses, shifting attitudes toward body size compromise the historical fidelity of costume adaptations or boomer fashions. According to Bobi Garland, body types have changed so dramatically

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since the boomer years that the styles of that era necessitate alteration to fit present-day actors. Either actors are too rail-thin and need padding to get boomer bust and hip lines, or actors are too large; people are generally taller and waist lines and bust lines are larger, to say nothing of the effect that silicon implants have had on actors’ bodies.61 Compromises are also necessary when actors themselves are reluctant to wear boomer-era styles as they were historically worn. Bobi noted how she’s seen male actors insistently pulling their trousers down in fittings and on set when the waistlines of the 1950s were worn much higher. In media set in the postwar period, actors might also express concern about the shoulders being too wide on a 1950s-era men’s suit.62 Small alterations made to accommodate such concerns are dictated by contemporary aesthetics and idea of how clothes should fit today’s bodies. In addition to the diplomacy of the fitting room, demanding time constraints also place limitations on designers, according to Bobi. In the old days, Garland says, you could measure a good costumer by counting the number of pins he or she had on their clothes. The fewer pins the better because a skilled costumer knows how to pick costumes for actors’ bodies from the start, thus necessitating fewer alterations. The major transformation Bobi has witnessed in the industry is that designers are granted less time to conceive, assemble, and fit a wardrobe for television.63 Costumers come to Western Costume needing pants to be hemmed six inches (a very large amount) because the increasingly unreasonable time constraints render the skill of choosing the right pant for the right body obsolete. Bobi says there is little time for inspiration and browsing the collection when designers are working under such conditions. Oftentimes, designers and costumers have interns or people at Western retrieve clothes for them without even setting foot inside the warehouses. These time shortages are primarily the product of decisions made by upper management in media industries.64 It is increasingly the case that the people at the top of media production lack the industry backgrounds and thorough understandings of production processes that they had in the past when producers began at entry-level positions in production and worked their way up. In recent years, producers are people with backgrounds in law or business who decide to venture into the media industry. These shifts are covered in John Caldwell’s industry study, which finds that an entrepreneurial approach to media production has shifted the career profiles of the people at the top from being craft based to being business based or, in other words, industry outsiders.65 What implications do these findings have for analyzing nostalgic television costume design? First, the fact that both Mad Men and Ugly Betty’s costume designers heavily use the same resource that specializes in period costume supports my reading of Ugly Betty’s retroism. Retro appears in Ugly Betty in part because of the period resources that Castro uses. Second, understanding

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the organization of Western Costume by period and gender also clarifies why Ugly Betty’s affinities for the boutique era and New Look would be selfreinforcing. If you’re browsing 1960s blouses, chances are that you would find one loud patterned silk shirt next to another, explaining how Betty’s period look may have accrued not only through purposeful design but also through the archival organization of its resources. Third, the shows’ reliance on this resource explains how period looks are shaped by archival realities: a period look is never an historically accurate love letter to the era of origin, but rather a palimpsestic accrual of how modern designers view the past. If each section of the Company houses period pieces as well as designers’ reinventions of them, historical consciousness and a reflexivity around what it means to “remake” old items is embedded into the archival resource itself. Lastly, this understanding of the Western Costume Company offers a different interpretation of the strong trend of nostalgic quality TV in the millennial era. TV nostalgia in production design is a product of historical discourses attached to the present, surely. But it also may be a trend for less glamorous and cerebral reasons: industry networks. Costume designers in Los Angeles know each other and they know the Western Costume Company. Perhaps the prevalence of nostalgic costume on television is owing to these industry networks that pass through the Western Costume Company as much as it does a contemporary appetite for rehashing white histories of the past. Bobi Garland stressed how she sees her role as supportive and not creative. While this assertion reflects the company’s long-standing commitment to costume designers, the company’s presence and historical consciousness is imprinted on countless film and television texts. Western’s deference to and respect for the work of designers and the power of screenwriting aside, the institution participates in engineering nostalgia on screen. As a living and working brand, Western’s archival treatment of history comes to bear on how designers like Bryant and Castro do research, what they find, and, thus, what they create. The institution’s organization and international reputation inscribes historical consciousness for the costume industry and designing period clothing into the work of the people who pass through and rely on its resources.

Bad taste in nostalgic costume design Thus far “bad taste” and how it’s mobilized in television nostalgia has had specific racial and class politics within the context of Ugly Betty. But does bad taste have broader applications in nostalgic costume design? Is there something about how kitsch functions in representations of American pastness that performs a more general job of communicating misfit or misalignment

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with what are seen as transhistorical “core American values?” My fieldwork at Western Costume Company already points to such broad applications because it finds that this network of costume designers shares common archival, material resources. Looking at a series that recreates a different era in American history, I find that “bad” taste and tackiness is a costuming strategy for (mis)aligning characters with American heteronormative whiteness more generally. The addition of this alternative example may seem rather arbitrary. However, it’s an important counterpoint to Betty because “bad” fashion on television is never only another way of signaling characters of color. It oftentimes signals a departure from the strictures of Western taste and this can also be applied to white characters who are not conforming to “appropriate” fashion and behavior. In The Americans, camp in costume signposts the characters’ Otherness vis-à-vis the setting of 1980s bourgeois America. The series follows two undercover Russian KGB operatives masquerading as a middle-class family of four in the suburbs of Washington DC during the Cold War. Elizabeth and Philip were recruited to assimilate as American travel agents and divest their Russian identities and culture to conduct secret missions for the KGB. Their true identities remain hidden from their American-born and -raised children. The drama follows their conflicted identities as people in an arranged marriage who struggle to keep their Russian political allegiances alive while also feeling the draw of the country they’ve been living in for decades. Like many of the other examples in this book, the series is lauded for its careful attention to production design in recreating its period, in this case, Regan-era America. When they are living their middle-class life, Philip and Elizabeth appear in the staples of a 1980s wardrobe: turtle necks and highwaisted, pleated trousers. However, when they go on missions, they don disguises that are, to the contemporary viewer, tacky. In an otherwise serious drama series, the disguise costumes in The Americans offer wonderful moments of dark levity, as Elizabeth and Philip appear even more stilted in unkempt wigs, large framed glasses, and obviously fake moustaches, than they do in their “casual” day wear. The beauty of the costume design for the series is that no one looks entirely comfortable in their “natural” clothing, and the disguises are just a hyperbole of the normal fare that is 1980s costume. Characters’ clothes appear slightly misfitted or they are snug in the wrong places. Jackets and blouses hang off bodies at awry angles and characters walk stiffly in a symphony of synthetic fibers. Albeit, this kind of “fit” is somewhat endemic to fashion from the 1980s, the series heightens this aspect of the period. The costume strategy for the series has the effect of making every outfit appear a little “costumey,” ultimately denaturalizing Americana in general through a Soviet perspective.

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The Americans’ disguises only accentuate the discomfort and misfit of their normal everyday clothes as cartoonish apings of stock “looks” from the 1980s, from emo kid to working girl in suit and sneakers. The campiness of the disguises adds a nearly inappropriate level of comedy to the scenes they appear in, which are oftentimes the most violent and brutal in the series when Elizabeth and Philip must use abhorrent tactics to fulfill missions. At moments when the series has worked hardest to curate audience sympathy for the central characters, camp disguises grace the most emotionally turbulent scenes in which we see Elizabeth and Philip commit cruel acts of violence. At times, they even wrestle with the costumes themselves as moustaches and wigs are set askew in the middle of torturing and murdering their enemies. Camp, then, has the effect of dissociating the audience from the violence, as well as highlighting the internal dissonances the characters feel around what they must do in order to close a mission and their own misgivings which side, the USSR or United States, has moral superiority in the Cold War. Early on, the series is quick to deglamorize espionage by showing its brutality in graphic detail. In “The Clock” (February 6, 2013), Elizabeth and Philip must plant a bug in the home of the Secretary of Defense. In order to do so, they coerce the Secretary’s maid to plant the bug by breaking into her home, injecting her son with poison and withholding the antidote until the bug is operational. For this undertaking, Philip wears a black mustache and track suit, straightens his curly black hair and greases it forward on his head (Figure 6.4).66 The disguise

Figure 6.4   “The Clock,” February 6, 2013, The Americans.

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makes him look like a tertiary character from a mob movie, offering a strange comical dissonance to Philip’s cruelty. The second season opens with Philip in full disguise as an American arms trader who is collaborating with Afghani dissidents at a meeting in a private room at a restaurant (“Comrades,” February 26, 2014). Philip performs a thick Southern accent and wears a blonde shoulder-length wig, sunglasses, and a camel skin coat with brown leather accents on the lapels. The disguise looks like a Halloween costume of a third-tier, professional, black jack player (Figure 6.5).67 In the scene, the Afghanis give Philip a knife that they killed a Soviet soldier with and he shoots everyone in the room after premising it as a message from Russia. In hand-to-hand combat, his wig is torn off. He exits the restaurant through the kitchen, where he meets a young Afghani dishwasher. He has the boy back up against a tiled wall where he shoots him without hesitation. As Philip exits the building, he puts on a cowboy hat, and gets into his car which blares country music upon starting. Philip tosses the hat aside and turns the music off to drive away. The costuming for this scene and the narrative engagements with it outline a masquerade and then rejection of an American cowboy stereotype, complete with camel jacket and cowboy hat. Philip wears the costume to complete the mission but as the job wraps up, piece by piece, the “cover” is disassembled after his Soviet identity is revealed: wig, cowboy hat, country

Figure 6.5   “Comrades,” February 26, 2014, The Americans.

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music. The scene continues the conflation between camp disguise and hyperviolence, between 1980s hyperbolized nostalgia and the painful realities of Cold War espionage, which has a history of being glamorized in popular media representations like James Bond. The scenes that incorporate disguises also mark narrative points when Philip and Elizabeth are most conflicted about their national and cultural identities. As the series progresses, the status of “truth” becomes steadily murkier as they see their children mature in American culture and they feel routinely abandoned by the KGB. Perhaps the most repugnant crime Philip perpetrates is the pedophilic seduction of the fifteen-year-old daughter of the FBI director. Over the course of season three, Philip earns her trust and affection to bug her father’s home. Philip test the limits of his morals as the KGB and his wife sanction his sleeping with the underage target to keep the relationship alive long enough to secure information. These episodes are truly the most difficult to watch in the series, as Philip wrestles with his morals and procrastinates raping the fifteen-year old, who is the same age as his own daughter. His disguise for this mission is Jim, a character Philip designs after a fifteenyear old’s impressions of adulthood and coolness; Jim smokes pot, listens to Pink Floyd, and entertains Kimberly’s pontifications on the real meaning of life. He wears a brown shoulder-length wig with a center part and gold-rimmed tinted glasses. In “Born Again” (March 4, 2015), Jim wears a maroon sweater, jeans, and black leather jacket. In short, he reeks of obsequiousness, wannabe coolness, and a pretense of “you can tell me anything” that secures the trust of underage victims. In the episode, Philip stalls Kim’s sexual advances by urging her to indulge in taking a bath. While she’s bathing, he lets another spy in the back door to install a bug in her father’s briefcase. Kim comes out of the bath early and Philip stalls her again by asking her to wait in the bedroom for a “surprise.” He pons the earrings off his accomplice and gives them to Kim as the surprise. When she then drops her towel to the floor, Philip must stall having sex with her again. This time, he uses religious conversion as an excuse, saying that he’s abstaining while doing some soul searching. Instead of sex, Philip/Jim suggests they pray together. While the moral reasons for Philip delaying to rape Kim are the “right” ones, the tactics he uses are skin-crawling. Philip only uses religion as an excuse because he’s been exposed to this rhetoric through his real daughter’s conversion to Born Again Christianity in the series. Philip/Jim’s placation of Kim, then, has abject incestuous undertones as he adopts his fifteen-year-old daughter’s ideology to stall the sexual advances of the fifteen-year-old target in front of him. In the context of these reprehensible scenes, the disguise comes as somewhat of a relief since it effectively defamiliarizes the face of one of the

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series’ central characters. However, the disguise, as tawdry and unnatural as the rest, also emphasizes the fakeness of Jim as a character. In addition, the costume’s misfit and artifice heightens the internal conflict that Philip is going through in the episode as he tries to reconcile the pressures from boss with his own moral code. The episode offers another example of how the series mobilizes camp nostalgic costume to accentuate various levels of dissonance within American memory writ large. This includes fissures between popular memory of Cold War espionage, which is sanitized, and the stomach-churning realities that The Americans explores, and the destabilization of dominant American-centric definitions of right and wrong, ally and enemy, homeland and foreign ground. Among the many morally repugnant activities that Philip engages in while in disguise, his performance as “Clark” is among the worst manipulations of another human being’s feelings and sovereignty. Clark’s character is a CIA clandestine operative who befriends, woos, and marries Martha, an administrative assistant at the FBI to convince her to bug the building. The Clark disguise includes nondescript suits of muted colors, block color ties, stripped dress shirts, a gray wig with a comb over and receded hairlines, large gold wire-rimmed glasses, long brown side burns, and pale makeup that makes Philip look cadaverous (Figure 6.6).68 While Clark does not exactly look like the stud, sex-god that Martha sees him to be, the fact that so

Figure 6.6   “The Oath,” April 24, 2013, The Americans.

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underwhelming a disguise and bland a character could seduce someone into committing treason makes Martha’s story all the more tragic. Clark’s manipulations of Martha take place over multiple seasons as she is the longest standing source of information for Elizabeth and Philip in the series. Martha is a quiet, shy, dowdy character whom Clark convinces to live separately from him and keep their marriage a secret from her friends and colleagues. Martha’s patience is at an end in season three; however, when Clark’s visits become infrequent, he refuses her pleas to have children, and finally, the FBI discovers the bug and launches an investigation to find the mole. As Clark realizes he’s in danger of losing his most valuable source, he makes a final bid for her trust in “March 8, 1983” (April 22, 2015). As Martha packs her suitcases to flee her job and relationship with Clark, he takes off his Clark disguise piece by piece: the wig, side burns, and glasses. Presumably, Philip will spin this off as a disguise necessary to his CIA job, but the gesture of revelation is powerful enough to keep Martha from leaving. It also reinforces the symbolic weight of the disguises in The Americans overall, as pieces, that, while unconvincing and silly at first encounter, can make the difference between life and death, and a mission’s success and failure. Considering the success of the series and its pertinence in the contemporary American political landscape, marked by undeniable evidence of Russia’s interference with the 2016 Presidential election, it’s surprising there is not a greater academic literature devoted to this show. The articles that do treat the series discuss similar themes of political dislocation and ruptures in national identity. Stephen Shapiro frames the series in a larger television context of quality subscription television dramas realigning dominant class identity with workingclass ideologies.69 He writes, “Over the past fifteen years, contemporary subscription television dramas have functioned as a medium in search of narrative forms wherein the middle-class viewer, experiencing a collective class decline, can imagine, accommodate, and practice a new class alliance, one where the middle-class learns to accept the loss of their aspirational desires, often through tales of bare survival in gothicized urban and rural settings, in order to align their interests with those of the laboring or lower class.”70 He mentions The Wire (HBO, 2002–08), The Fall (BBC Two and RTÉ One, 2013–), Carnivale (HBO, 2003–05), and Treme (HBO, 2010–13), as operating similarly with regard to The Americans. Shapiro, however, adds that this “return by middle-class audiences to the generic narratives associated with low brow taste within the safety of high-production, subscription television can be now seen as itself an indicative features of the ongoing rearrangement of the composition of class alliances.”71 In other words, the only way the American bourgeoisie would experiment with blue-collar sympathy is if it comes in

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quality entertainment packaging, which is where nostalgic TV production design thrives. I would argue that nostalgic design is a crucial mechanism of this class realignment. Shapiro, however, observes the class narrative refocusing comes in the form of introducing the presence of the working class and “altering the visual optics of subjectivity” in a way that places the audience’s objectivity in question.72 He argues that subscription television, such as Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–13), The Americans, and Homeland (Showtime, 2011–), “rehearse the move from alignment with one social bloc to another … sometimes pitched as alternating national or sexual identities … these series highlighting the blurring of social certainties,”73 reminding viewers that “they, too exist within a mutable period of historical transformation, rather than a Fukuyakamesque end of history.”74 Shapiro’s arguments about The Americans suggest that the series’ amorphous moral compass and its cultivation and then deconstruction of sympathies for its main characters play into a larger class dynamic whereby contemporary television reflects and responds to shifting loyalties of middle-class America. In this context, the series’ costume design mobilizes “bad” disguises that represent various 1980s fashions to denaturalize the 1980s fashions and roles the characters inhabit in their everyday life. The disguises also work to distance or dissociate the character from his or her actions, which are usually violent and traumatic, as well as the constructed audience, from that the central characters. In this way, consciously camp nostalgic costume design engages its own TV metadiscourse on identity, political allegiance, and morality. In Ugly Betty, camp and “bad” taste in costume design fulfil similar narrative functions. Betty’s tackiness distances her from her environment and places dominant constructions of taste in question by denaturalizing high fashion and normative, white, professional attire more generally. While, at first glance, The Americans may seem like an odd piece of this nostalgic puzzle, the series illustrates how nostalgic costuming and particularly the camping of past styles can signify points of difference, Otherness and (mis)alignment with dominant codes of dress, and by extension, dominant histories of the past. These themes of “not fitting in” are critical to the language of nostalgic production design and how it works in concert with narrative. Baring these thematic resonances between Ugly Betty and The Americans, I would argue The Americans’ costuming remains in conversation with the postwar aesthetic that Ugly Betty references, even if at a remove. The Americans’ Cold War storyworld is the direct political progeny of the postwar fallout, which includes the division of spheres of influence and military technology between Russia and America following the Second World War. Helena Goscilo and Margaret B. Gosclio’s Fade from Red analyzes media depictions of Russia in the post–Cold War era. According to their work, the

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final phase of US media fascination with Russia sits between 1990 and 2005 and is characterized by representations of ex-enemies that are nostalgic for the Cold War, particularly as détente takes affect and US policy shifts to other parts of the world like the Middle East.75 So, The Americans’ nostalgia for Soviet Russia has media precedents that suggest a similar long-standing longing for the grit and glamor of the Cold War, although the series places more emphasis on the grit. Matthew Flisfeder finds that the American penchant for political “end of days” media and nostalgia for Soviet Russia is tied to the end of capital following the meltdowns of 2007 and 2008, the growth of a culture of debt, and a post-production framework in the West. In this context, communism reemerges as both a threat and an object of fascination for mainstream media. He argues that The Americans indicates a “sentimental attachment to the past hysteria of the Communist threat inside the US during the Cold War.”76 Of course, the Trump administration’s entanglements with Russia have renewed a popular perception of communist threat and Cold War-era tensions. In this new political climate, The Americans’ representations of “ex-enemies” take on a different color, not as vestiges of the past but as oracles of another Cold War. The Americans, in much the same way that Mad Men and other examples of television nostalgia in the book, reexamines the past, not to paint it in rosecolored glasses, but as cynical prognostications of how easy it would be to regress across all social and political levels. The disguises’ comical recreations of ’80s glamor and the grisly scenes they punctuate serve as potent reminders that a return to this past is undesirable.

Conclusion: How far we’ve come? Alongside other elements of design discussed in the book, costuming in TV nostalgia highlights the centrality of production design and costumes in telling stories about nationhood and memory itself. A historical and social critique is inscribed in the retroism of Ugly Betty and other examples of nostalgia seen in this chapter that is attached to the series’ meta-narratives as well as the social histories of the clothes themselves. Nostalgic costume plays with the distance between the era of origin and its new context, and between the self and clothing item. The historical import of Betty’s adoptions of specifically ’60s boutique-style patterns adds, complicates, and expands the critique of the class exclusivity that is the series’ premise. Overall, the manipulation of boomer-era styles in Ugly Betty evidences that nostalgia in fashion can assume new meanings and currency that rely on, but are not limited to, the original ideological foundations of boomer-era looks, which include the

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postwar refeminization of women exiting the workforce and returning to the home, and the countercultural response of boutique culture. Retro stylings have a different meaning when they are worn by a Chicana character. Within the contexts of the political message of the series and its industrial background as a diasporic text authored by Latino writers, directors, and designers, the series’ costume aesthetic is racially inflected. Betty’s fashion is negotiatory. In the narrative and industrial context of a diasporic telenovela-turned-sitcom, her style and its rasquache sensibility carry a racial and ethnic message centered on the struggles of defining diasporic national memory and the conflicting allegiances to host versus home country. Because of her fashion’s methodological and aesthetic resonances with rasquache, the assumption of boutique patterns not only carries a class politic, but it expresses the difficulties of being Chicana in an image-obsessed profession dominated by whiteness and haute couture. Betty integrates boomer-era fabric and textiles into her outfits but does so using a rasquache logic of clashing patterns and materials, and recontextualizing readymade and vintage garments. What other characters in the storyworld label as “bad taste” is a deliberate class provocation in the series and an important strategy Betty uses to remain “visible” or competitive in her professional sphere. I trace this bad taste back to its boutique store and readymade revolutionary roots. Then I trace her ensembles’ archival roots back to the costume resource that Eduardo Castro and other nostalgic designers like Janie Bryant of Mad Men consider to be among their most valuable. Quotations of boomer fashions on television are imprinted with industry constraints as well as with the cultural memories for television of the era and its class, race, and gender constraints. When a costume enters a hot set, it tracks in with it the social histories attached to the clothes themselves, the industry context of their production or reinvention, and their reappearance elsewhere in that program. Ugly Betty gives nostalgic costume a privileged storytelling role as articulating what often cannot be captured in dialogue—the zeitgeist of a historical moment and its mediation through characters’ embodied experiences of different aspects of identity, primarily race, gender, and class. In many ways this is because clothing can communicate a person’s location along these registers of distinction more succinctly than the written word. The discussion of The Americans entertains how “bad taste” can be extended more broadly in nostalgic costume on television as a strategy to signal not fitting in with what are considered the heteronormative values and lifestyles of the time. Costumes tell complex narratives because each outfit contains a veritable archive of cultural references. Sometimes the narratives they tell carry political messages. Ugly Betty offers complex representations of race, class, diasporic identity, the politics of TV globalization, and feminism. Pairing 1950s and ’60s

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retro with the racial and class politics of the 2000s, the series uses retro to show that Betty shops vintage and to call up popular histories of the New Look and the readymade. These quotations thematize transformation, compromise, adaptation, repression, rebellion, and the exchange between past and present that are central to stories of diaspora. They also send a problematic message that assimilation or, at least, empty gestures toward assimilation are the only methods of combating white hegemony. As discussed in prior chapters, Mad Men positions costuming as a narrative device and point of historiconostalgic orientation and engagement with teleologies of identity politics. The costume designs for both Ugly Betty and Mad Men highlight permutation, assimilation, and reinterpretation as aesthetic choices and political treatments of the histories of gender and racial progress/regress. Changes in fashion in the series earmark historical shifts in gender, class, and racial ideologies. Nostalgia TV, by and large, tends to favor these facets of identity and attendant political histories over others. In TV nostalgia, as a cultural discourse, history is primarily defined by the politics affecting class, race, and gender. Television’s quotation and alteration of past fashions is wedded to revisionist histories that boil down to these contradictory sentiments: “look at how far we’ve come” and “look at how little we’ve changed.” The articulation of such sentiments, through representations of race and gender, excludes and elides other queries of equal historical importance. Might other aspects of US society serve as important barometers for historical “progress” and “regress”: the relationship of religion and state, American imperialism, the national treatment of healthcare and education, the increasing income gap? In Ugly Betty, and the majority of nostalgia on millennial television, however, costume design figures prominently in the storylines and art direction. Mad Men, The Americans, and Ugly Betty all align TV design and past aesthetics with social histories of gender, race, class, and the historical portrayal of these categories on American television. The storytelling capacity of costume in Ugly Betty and what its designer tells us about the creative processes, show that design is more than just a means of echoing existing narratives in the main text. What implications does this chapter have for media studies analyses of period looks on television broadly speaking? First, media scholarship on costume design should not end at narrative and semiotic interpretation; it should incorporate fashion history and historical references within ensembles. Secondly, know your costume designer and know the resources they use. Thirdly, a period look is never straightforward. Rather, it’s a tangle of references to and reimaginations of the past that rests on many individuals, the popularity of silicon implants and waistlines, industry networks, and rhythms of production. These are material facts that shape how series retell

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history which should be taken into account by scholarship. Lastly, if anything, this chapter’s affinity to tracing details and for hunting down the aesthetics of bad taste and nonconformist nostalgic costume suggests that authorship is a web of interlocking roles, tasks, references, histories, and industry ties.

Notes   1 Anne Marie De La Fuente, “‘Ugly Betty’ Grows into Swan around Globe,” Variety, February 6–12, 2006, 28.   2 Eduardo Castro. Interview by author, July 16, 2012.   3 Kent A. Ono, “Mad Men’s Postracial Figuration of a Racial Past,” in Madmen, Madworld: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 300–319; Greg Dickson, “The Pleasantville Effect Nostalgia and the Visual Framing of (White) Suburbia,” Western Journal of Communication 70, no. 6 (2006): 212–233; Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years; Daniel Marcus, Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).   4 See Marcus, Happy Days which focuses on white filmic representations of nostalgia for the postwar period.   5 Akass and McCabe, “The Best of Everything”; Perlman, “The Strange Career of Mad Men.”   6 Richard Dyer, “The Matter of Whiteness,” in White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–14.   7 Popular versions of the academic argument made by Jennifer Esposito include Marker Sawyer quoted in Bennett, “‘Ugly Betty’ Just Plain Ugly,” in which Sawyer (the director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics) claims that the program perpetuates racial stereotypes.   8 Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 271–313.   9 In terms of precedent for this analysis of Betty’s class location and her costume design, academic discussion linking class, gender, and mise-enscène occurs primarily within the context of film melodrama. Linda Williams discusses conflations of class and gender with excessive fashion in Stella Dallas (Linda Williams, “Something Else besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 (1984): 2–27) Similarly, melodrama’s alignment of excessive femininity with excessive style has been pointed out by Barbara Klinger in her analysis of Written on the Wind (Barbara Klinger, “Much Ado about Excess: Genre, Mise-en-Scène and the Woman in Written on the Wind,” Wide Angle: A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism, and Practice 11, no. 4 (1989): 4–22).

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10 Lola Ogunnaike, “Fashion Backward: Ugly, Done Just Right,” New York Times, October 19, 2006, 19. 11 Ibid. 12 Castro. Interview by author. 13 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams (London: Virago Press, 1985), 80–82. 14 Coco Chanel survived the war by barricading herself in a room at the Paris Ritz with a Nazi officer. Afterwards, she reopened her business in 1953 and focused on sensible, sporty jackets and straight skirt ensembles in response to Dior. Chanel’s professional and casual ware has dominated women’s work attire in the West since the postwar period (Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 44). Betty dons many Chanel-like jackets in the show, often combining them with large circle skirts that Dior would have used (no doubt a pairing that would nauseate both Dior and Chanel, who were bitter rivals.) 15 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams 40. 16 Jennifer Esposito, “What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty? An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial (?) Representations on a Television Sitcom,” Television and New Media 10, no. 6 (2009): 521–535. 17 Hamid Naficy’s An Accented Cinema argues that diasporic texts traditionally favor, at both narrative and formal levels, interstitial spaces and subjects. The emphasis on the liminality of the diasporic experience and the pull between two different cultures are manifest in themes of epistolarity, border crossing chronotopes, the contrast between boundless homeland versus the claustrophobic host country, formal self-reflexivity, and the insertion of liminal spaces like motels and public transit systems. These themes are present in Ugly Betty in its formal self-reflexivity and idealization of the boundless homeland in the episode set in Mexico. The series develops a self-consciousness toward fashion, race, and beauty through Betty’s clothes and Mode’s production design. Ugly Betty also has highly selfreflexive cinematography and editing, using frequent wide-angle lenses, steady cam shots, and campy editing effects, like wipes and irises, to cut between scenes. Ugly Betty’s reflexivity has as much to do with Betty’s consciousness of her image as a Latina, Queens, working-class transplant as it does the broader issues of the production of hegemonic beauty; the two are indisputably related. 18 Race is mentioned frequently in Mode’s office humor; however, it rarely becomes the subject of extended conversations between characters. Rather, Betty’s Latina ethnicity and race are the constant butts of Mark and Amanda’s jokes. Amanda, the haughty, superficial receptionist, asks Betty if she’s delivering something when Betty enters the office on her first day. As the series progresses, Mark (an executive assistant) and Amanda’s racial ignorance persists, whether sarcastic or in earnest.

With the ulterior motive of eliminating her as competition for a man they both like, Amanda tries to score Betty a date by placing an ad on craigslist describing a “plus-size chica,” (“Plus None,” November 6, 2009). In the final season, when Betty’s fashion includes more monochromatic ensembles. Her colleague Mark comments, “Where are all the polka

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV dots, butterflies, and Mexican blankets?” Betty’s body type, ethnicity, and fashion are frequently conflated in office humor. Race is made more visible in later iterations of Betty’s fashion sense, which highlight voluptuousness, which, according to her coworkers and popular media more broadly speaking, is wedded to the failure to adhere to white beauty. Her blouse and skirt combinations move from being untucked and roomy to narrow and fitted. However, whether hidden under “Mexican blankets” or celebrated with waist-cinching silhouettes, her body is either the butt of jokes or the loudness of her outfits is repeatedly connected to American Latina stereotypes of brashness and excess.

19 Ana M. Lopez, “Our Welcomed Guests: Telenovelas in Latin America,” in To Be Continued … Soap Operas around the World, ed. Robert C. Allen (London: Routledge, 1995), 265. 20 Ibid., 257. 21 However, for the country of origin, the main profit in the telenovela industry is in advertising local products, so creators must balance local references (characters on a Venezuelan soap mentioning locations within the country) with global translatability (young Latino Americans living in the United States may not get such a local reference).

Telenovelas are under constant pressure to satisfy both local and global audiences. For example, a Venezuelan telenovela must speak to both its immediate local consumers and, potentially, Peruvian immigrants based in Denmark. This is frequently balanced by integrating local settings while, at the same time, smoothing accents to appeal across Latin and Hispanic diasporic communities. Multinational casts that also draw on dubbing artists and joint productions between two or more countries are also increasingly common (Daniel Mato, “Transnationalization of the Telenovela Industry, Territorial References, and the Production of Markets and Representations of Transnational Identities,” Television & New Media 6, no. 4 (2005): 427–428).

22 Lopez, “Our Welcomed Guests,” 265–268. Since the 1980s, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Columbia, and Argentina have emerged as leaders in telenovela exportation. The United States, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe as well as other South and Latin American countries are large telenovela consumers. Because so many telenovelas are now joint productions, Miami has become a base camp of sorts for production and distribution. Telemundo, for example, signed a five-year contract with a Columbian telenovela production company, Caracol TV, during which ten telenovelas would be produced with moderated input by Telemundo. As of 2005, RCN was the first multinational media conglomerate to lead the world in telenovela production. Transnational media companies are highly interested in telenovelas because of their international popularity. Companies like Telemundo and RCN openly aspire to sculpting a kind of pan-Hispanic identity that appeals to many different Latin and South American diasporic subjects. Venevision Continental calls it an “iberoamerica: a world without borders,” (Mato, “Transnationalization of the Telenovela Industry, Territorial References, and the Production of Markets and Representations of Transnational Identities,” 440). Indeed, many national production companies

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hope to go global like Grupo Cisneros, which was originally Venezuelan but as of 2,000, has been based in Miami and exporting telenovelas and Latino content to over forty countries (Mato, “Transnationalization of the Telenovela Industry, Territorial References, and the Production of Markets and Representations of Transnational Identities,” 440). TV Globo of Brazil was the first of these companies to go global in 1975 when it began exporting content to Portugal (Lopez, “Our Welcomed Guests,” 259). 23 For a more complete history on El Movimento and mid-century Mexican American art see Marin, Chicago Visions. 24 Clement Greenberg defines kitsch as a form of populist art that totalitarian regimes implement in order to appeal to the common man. These regimes imitate folk art in an effort to appear authentic and accessible to the masses. For the totalitarian regime, the avant-garde is an anathema because it is only legible to the elite and educated few, and tends to criticize dominant institutions (Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”). Since Greenberg’s indictment, however, kitsch has come to frequent works of avant-garde artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. In this context, only the very artistically educated can “get” kitsch. When wielded and consumed with some selfreflexivity and irony, then kitsch is deemed “okay” and avant-garde. It therefore presents a double standard depending on whether or not the consumer is aware that the piece is kitschy. He or she has cultural distinction if aware of their status as kitsch objects. For example, an avid and serious collector of ceramic angels is “laughable” if he or she is not aware they are ridiculous items that are mass-produced that sell the appearance of craftsmanship. Of course, placing one attitude as superior to the other is not the focus here. The important distinction lies in the consumer’s awareness of the object’s or objects’ status as kitsch. Betty’s consumption of kitsch clothing, like the rasquache artist’s use of trash, is self-aware, particularly in later seasons. This is not to say that her use kitsch is superior, but that she is aware and encouraging of the disdain her clothes provoke from her more fashionable coworkers. 25 Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “Chicano Movement/Chicano Art,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. I. Karp and S. D. Lavine (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 133–134. 26 Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “Raquachismo: a Chicano sensibility,” in Chicano Aesthetics: Rasquachismo (Phenix, Aruz: MARS, Movimiento Artiscico del Rio Salado, 1989), 5–8, 7. 27 The calf-length pencil skirt or H-line outfit (a long, fitted skirt that is high waisted and hugs the hips and thighs) was most fashionable during the New Look period (June Marsh, History of Fashion: New Look to Now [London: Vivays, 2012], 50). In addition to the pencil skirt, Betty’s outfits also feature many bow-top blouses, which were popular for women’s blouses in the 1940s and later revitalized in the 1980s. Many of Betty’s blouses could be vintage ’80s fashion, which, in turn, was nostalgic for the 1940s—a kind of boomer-era nostalgia by proxy. 28 Ibid.

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29 The first fashion theorists associated clothing trends with class distinction. Frederic Simmel and Thornstein Veblen argued that fashion was little more than a badge of upper-class status that the working classes slavishly emulate. Recent scholars like Elizabeth Wilson question this theory, arguing that it does not fully explain the historical shifts that fashion takes (Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 52). Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” The American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (1957): 541–558; Thornstein Veblen, “Chapter 7: Dress as an Expression of Pecuniary Culture," in The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. Originally published in 1899 (New Delhi: Aakar Books, 2005), 126–141; A discussion of these conflicting theories can be found in Herbert Blau, Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion (Theories of Contemporary Culture) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 70–112. More current fashion theorists and historians like Wilson and Hebdige challenge conservative cultural theorists, like Veblen, and similar class-based interpretations of fashion, instead, arguing that style can be counter-hegemonic (Dick Hebdige, Subculture [New York: Routledge, 1979], 104; Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 47–66). 30 Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, eds. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, trans. Andy Stafford (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006). 31 Ibid., 116. 32 For example, the zoot suit emerged on the American west coast in the 1940s among Black and Latino youth. The suits used copious amounts of cloth, with pant legs that reached the ground and boxy jackets that came down to the knee. The popular image of the “pimp” suit is the diluted progeny of this originally resistant style. Like the New Look, the zoot suit openly disregarded wartime fabric restrictions and its surrounding controversy ultimately incited race riots in 1943 when returning white servicemen from the Pacific war attacked zoot suiters in multiple urban areas across the west coast, eventually spreading to a nationwide wave of hate crimes (Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 198–199). 33 Dick Hebdige, “Style,” in Fashion Theory: A Reader, ed. Malcolm Barnard (New York: Routledge, 2007), 258. 34 Hebdige, Subculture, 104. 35 Kaja Silverman, “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) 139–154. Silverman preemptively defends her argument against postmodern claims that vintage is nothing more than an empty quotation of different styles, which, in turn, become de-historicized through their mixing and matching. Silverman states that retro avoids “naive referentiality” by placing the clothing in quotation marks. It is inherently historically consciousness (Silverman, “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse,” 150). 36 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006); John Fiske, Television Culture (New York and London: Methuen Press, 1987). 37 Castro. Interview by author.

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38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Castro states, “What makes television unique from any other venue—For example, Coleen Atwood [an Oscar winning film costume designer] has three to four months to create a dress for Snow White [one character in Once Upon A Time (ABC, 2011–), the series Castro was designing at the time of the interview]. I had three to four days. In three to four days, the instinct has to be right. I had to get it conceptualized, drawn and sketched out, manufactured and put on screen” (Castro. Interview with author). 41 Marnie Fogg, Boutique: A ’60s Cultural Phenomenon (London: Mitchel Beazley, 2003) 42 Castro. Interview with author. 43 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 146. 44 Ibid., 152. 45 Gilles Lipovetsky, “Fashion and History/Fashion in History,” in Fashion Theory: A Reader, ed. Malcolm Barnard (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 76–84. 46 Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) 118. 47 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 87. 48 Ibid., 89. 49 Castro. Interview with author. 50 Ibid. 51 “History,” Western Costume Company website, accessed June 20, 2013, http://www.westerncostume.com. 52 Bryant. Interview with author. 53 Garland. Interview with author. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Freidrich A. Kittler and Michel Foucault discuss how the institutionalization, technologization, and archivization of information, in fact, shapes the production of knowledge. In other words, technology and institutions of power inflect how we encounter the world and collect knowledge about it. See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoggrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Originally published in German as Grammophone Film Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkman & Bose, 1986) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. Originally published in French as L’ordre du Discours (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971) (New York: Pantheon, 1982). 57 Garland. Interview with author. 58 Ibid.

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59 Eddie Marks (owner of the Western Costume Company). Interview with author. June 24, 2014. 60 Sony Pictures Studios Property/Set Dressing, visited by the author. 61 Garland. Interview with author. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Caldwell, Production Culture. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Stephen Shapiro, “Realignment and Televisual Intellect: The Telepraxis of Class Alliances in Contemporary Subscription Television Drama,” in Class Divisions in Serial Television, eds. Sieglinde Lemke and Wibke Schniedermann (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 70 Ibid., 178. 71 Ibid., 196. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 197. 74 Ibid., 199.

75 Helena Goscilo and Margaret Boz·enna Gosclio, Fade from Red: The Cold War Ex-Enemy in Russian and American Film 1990–2005 (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2014), 6–8. 76 Matthew Flisfeder, “Communism and the End of the World,” PUBLIC 48 (2013): 110.

7 Conclusion: Nostalgic Failure

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ithout exception, designers in this book stress the importance of screenwriting in producing good production and costume design. I was at first perplexed by the ubiquity of this comment in the industry, but came to conclude that these statements are part of Hollywood’s political correctness as well as the complexity of these particular series and the production process. The ruling ideology is still one that continues to privilege the authorial hand of directors, actors, writers, and producers instead of the people working below the line. Throughout the book, I cast scrutiny on this attitude. While I don’t want to undermine the opinions of people who graciously shared their time with me, I want to challenge the idea that they hold no authorial control because I’m in a political position to do so. Moreover, the book’s evidence points to the contrary. If we are to assume that design is political and tells a story of its own that shares equal status in determining the success of a nostalgic television program or film to writing or directing, the question remains, what happens when strong design is not supported by good writing? And what characterizes the design and writing belonging to series that are dubbed nostalgic failures? What happens when television fails to recreate the past in either storyline or appearance?

When nostalgia goes bad: The Playboy Club, Aquarius, and Pan Am NBC’s The Playboy Club (NBC, 2011) aired a total of three episodes before the show’s prompt cancellation. The series follows the original Chicago Playboy Club’s “bunnies” and “key holders” (or clientele) as they swing their way through the early 1960s and cover up a string of infidelities, sexual assaults, and even murder. This, of course, is set to the background of Hugh Hefner’s geriatric, croaking voiceover about how the bunnies were, in fact, the era’s

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archangels of feminism: “It was the early 60s and the bunnies were some of the only women in the world who could be anyone they wanted to be” (“Pilot,” September 19, 2011). The Playboy Club’s representation of sexism is a bit too unfiltered to be as funny or reflexive as Mad Men’s. Perhaps this was one reason for the program’s demise. Excuseless lines in the show’s writing (e.g., “He’s the only man who ever stuck his hand up a skirt looking for a dictionary” to describe men who date smart women) are not clever enough to be funny and too misogynist to be clever. In the context of nostalgia TV, sexism is often recast as sardonic or framed as “unfortunate” in place of being simply offensive to present sensibilities. But for us to congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve come, it seems we need sexism to be slightly more implicit or at least we require the insertion of one character whose skepticism serves as an important point of identification for today’s “enlightened” viewership. While the costumes and sets of The Playboy Club are meticulously done, popular criticism said the characters were flat, the storyline hackneyed, and the misogyny too thinly veiled.1 NBC’s other bid at replicating Mad Men, Aquarius, fell similarly flat. Aquarius (NBC, 2015–16) takes place in 1967 Los Angeles and follows an alcoholic, divorced detective (played by David Duchovny) as he hunts down Charles Manson for the crimes that precede the eventual cult murders in 1969. The series, therefore, has a strong premise that fosters the kind of nostalgic anticipation talked about in previous chapters: we all know how the story is going to end and the pleasure lies in how the show covers that history. When initial reviews came back as negative, the network dumped the whole first season on Netflix with minimal publicity. This was sorely disappointing to the series’ producers.2 Like The Playboy Club, Aquarius looked “right” but didn’t screen well according to popular criticism. Aquarius received a lot of bad press, but The Observer published among the most scathing reviews, saying it couldn’t care enough to muster full-out hatred. In “I Watched All of Aquarius So You Don’t Have To,” Drew Grant says that the show’s problem was that it tries to be “everything at once: a case of the week drama that tackles (seemingly) all the racial and social issues at play in 1967, but also half the time we’ll be wrenched out of that program to watch Charles Manson (an incredibly mush-mouthed Gethin Anthony, nee Renly Baratheon) as he builds his increasingly enraptured ‘Family’ into a devoted worshipers.”3 Drew states bluntly, “David Duchovny is not Jon Hamm,” and claims that the “nostalgic ambiance of the show only takes your so far.” He concludes with “the show belongs to no one. It’s hard to imagine the person out there who felt strongly that this show was necessary; equally hard to figure creator John McNamara for caring much about whether you ‘liked’ his take on Manson one way or another.”4 Reinforcing the writing-centric logic

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espoused by my industry contacts, the online press around nostalgic failure on television stresses that aesthetics cannot carry a story that is lacking. ABC’s answer to Mad Men came in the form of Pan Am (ABC, 2011–12), which follows a group of 1963 female flight attendants and how they escape the confines  of boomer-era patriarchy by traveling the world and, on the side, conducting Cold War-era narking for the CIA. They are also subjected to mandatory weigh-ins and girdle checks before boarding any flight. Pan Am is utterly ridiculous and gloriously camp. The pilot opens with a flight crew turning up one flight attendant short. Headquarters hurriedly call Maggie (Christina Ricci) as their backup, offering to fly her in via helicopter from the Pan Am building in Manhattan. We see Maggie, decked in hepcat attire in her Greenwich Village apartment, juggling the important phone call while also correcting a bearded hipster at a typewriter on Hegelian philosophy (just to make sure viewers know that she’s, you know, smart). During the cab and helicopter rides, Maggie transforms from beatnik to stewardess-glam before sauntering onto the plane. As the plane takes off into the sunset to swelling music, two male pilots beam at each other with perfect teeth and crew cuts as their hands run over the highly sexualized controls between them. In Pan Am, everyone is attractive, the costumes are perfect, and the digital backgrounds featuring Rome, Paris, and New York are depressingly bad (Figure 7.1). With a premise as ridiculous and soapy as Desperate Housewives (also on ABC), it’s surprising the series was cancelled. It seems the series had a loyal audience but ultimately one too small for ABC to substantiate funding, even though Sony made efforts to transfer the series to Amazon.5

Figure 7.1   “Pilot,” September 25, 2011, Pan Am.

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Like other cases of television nostalgia in the book, Pan Am thematizes gender memory as one of its leading meta-stories. The end of the pilot episode ends with a jilted pilot commiserating with his peer because a stewardess rejected his marriage proposal. His friend explains that these belong to a “new breed of women” that prefer to “take flight” rather than settle down. Reiterating the hand-fisted metaphor, the jilted pilot then states the importance of “grounding them.” The concluding sequence shows a little white girl longingly peering out the terminal window to the string of Pan Am girls in matching uniforms boarding the plane (Figure 7.1). Historicizing white feminism and illustrating its multi-generational trajectory dominate the television shows in this book. In each case, this coincides with an emphasis on period costume and production design because design tells part of this gendered story. The morphology of the waistlines in women’s fashion becomes symbolic of the continuity and fissures among boomer-era proto-feminism, distinct feminist waves, and ensuing forms of historical backlash. According to television, clothing is a conduit for exploring the perceived historical genesis of today’s white-gendered challenges and achievements. Both design and storyline are ways that Pan Am explores white feminist history, but the program’s nostalgia places equal weight on a presentist remembrance of mid-century corporate America. The program is, after all, named after a now bankrupt airline company that, in its heyday, was the leading commercial airline carrier in the United States. The dialogue is peppered with little expository monologues about what Pan Am means and represents as a brand. When staying in Berlin during John F. Kennedy’s seminal “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Maggie worms her way into an exclusive press reception party by showing up with her crew in uniform and insisting that Kennedy loves stewardesses. Upon gaining entry, she triumphantly looks into the camera and says, “We’re Pan Am.” Like so many others, this series revisits the past periods and assesses what is “better” and what is “worse” off than today. Pan Am also engenders a kind of corporate nostalgia for pre-recession, pre-decline America. The way Pan Am constructs it, this period in American corporate history was a time when big brand names had integrity and “meant something.” Mad Men treats boomer-era advertising in a similar fashion, painting it as a romantic time for American corporations in stark contrast to now, when Freddie Mac and Enron are synonymous with “too big to fail,” bailouts, growing income inequality, and oligarchy. In Pan Am, the company’s iconic modern building in downtown Manhattan appears in multiple scenes. The Pan Am building, designed by Emery Roth & Sons, Pietro Belluschi, and Walter Gropius in 1960, is emblematic of high-modernism and the International Style in architecture. It now acts as the headquarters for MetLife, but remains

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symbolic of the boomer era and its changing ideas of the corporation as they were reconceived through art and architecture. While modernism preached transparency as one of its central tenets, the design of this building is now associated with the eventual decline of a former corporate giant whose bankruptcy is sutured to the American conflict in the Middle East due to the gas crisis of the 1970s. Pan Am’s corporate demise is therefore tied to the rise of international terrorism and an American reliance on foreign oil. The TV show, Pan Am, works through many of the same national insecurities around the historical impact of sociopolitical progressivism, technological transition, and American identity in the context of the millennial financial crisis. Costume and production design are two strategies for this process; however, the campness of the series, in combination with its network context, ultimately cost it a wider audience.

Draper fatigue Aquarius, Playboy Club, and Pan Am suggest that one can’t have design in lieu of a supporting narrative. However, design-sans-narrative arguably works in short stretches for already established programs like Mad Men. When design carries narrative weight and this story is compelling, then design can sometimes shoulder the narrative burden during a period of bad writing. Mad Men’s protagonist, Don Draper, was held up as a paragon of masculinity at the show’s beginning; in 2009 he was voted by AskMen magazine to be more influential to contemporary male identity than Barack Obama.6 But his steady decline into alcoholism and sex addiction, in addition to the criticism that the character fails to develop over the course of the series, soured the relationship many fans had with the show. By season six, Draper’s seemingly bottomless decline and character inertia was attracting a steady stream of online criticism and viewer numbers were dropping.7 My own encounters with “Draper fatigue” involved many male colleagues who expressed exasperation during season five and six’s ceaseless streams of attractive women hopping into Don’s bed. They were also frustrated with Don’s inability to come to terms with his long-standing depression and traumatic childhood. This sentiment is echoed in popular online press reviewing season six. The Huffington Post says that Mad Men “is getting a bit repetitive. Weiner has got to come up with more than just moving the characters forward in time doing the same things … The tromp of doom aura around the Draper character is getting repetitive almost to the point of parody, given the relatively lightweight setting of the show.”8 Remotepatrolled is particularly harsh on Don’s infidelities: “At this point Don’s cheating has gone

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beyond caddish behavior and into the realm of pure unpleasantness.” Vulture summarizes season six: Sank so low this year that he can’t go any further, and he screwed up at work so much that you couldn’t say, “Well, his personal life is a disaster, but he’s great at his job” … He was almost a zero this year. The mystery and allure are gone. Now he feels more like a collection of fiction writers’ notes for a character than a real person. Don Draper was always a construct, of course, but now he feels like one and plays like one. We see through him. He’s old and tired, as both a man and a character. We’ve had enough of him. The review goes on to claim that the character is a series-long metaphor for America and outmoded American masculinity: “We get tired of Don, and America gets tired of guys like Don, at the same time that everybody gets tired of Don, including Don.”9 Then, there is the “Don Draper Staring Blankly” tumblr whose “About” page simply states that “‘Don Draper Staring Blankly’ is a project by Dan Brill, who recently noticed that almost every episode of Mad Men ends with Don Draper staring blankly.”10 The posts began in April 2015, suggesting that Draper fatigue extended to season seven. The was an overwhelming frustration with Don Draper in season six and, to some extent, seven, as viewers became fatigued with watching the slow predestined demise of hegemonic straight white masculinity. Part of the popular disgust with Don is because representations of mental illness in white straight men still harbor a certain stigma. While true that suffering white masculinity is one of the favorite themes of Western media (i.e., Citizen Kane [1939]), Mad Men’s depiction of Don reaches a kind of rawness that few others do. Don is truly pathetic and hard to watch in season six. Viewers can almost smell the alcohol-laced sweat on his permanently clenched jawline. Mad Men carefully built up the character as a paragon of masculine virility, success, and power. Then later, the series shows him shakily divulging his childhood sexual trauma during an advertising pitch at the end of season six, after which, he is promptly fired. If this was the show’s trajectory, why did viewers come back in season seven and why did some endure the one-man pity party that is Don Draper? More than a few of the male viewers I talked to said the only reason they kept watching the show was for the design. Much of the attention around the series was redirected from the waning allure of Draperism to the series’ much-heralded art direction and creative integration of key historical events into its story world. At some level, certain narrative elements of the show were seen as failing in the final seasons, while its look continued to garner

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praise. In a review of season six, The Telegraph mourns the loss of Mad Men of seasons prior: Behind the smoke rings of nostalgia, the gorgeous outfits, the clinking of ice cubes in mid-morning cocktails, the macho banter and the wigglings and gigglings of tight-waisted, sexpot secretaries, lay a parable of social change. This was life before political correctness, before notions such as sexism and homophobia had entered the mainstream consciousness. A measure of the extent of the change better nostalgia is the criticism the show still gets in some quarters for portraying things as they used to be.11 In a kind of dizzying ouroborotic irony, Mad Men viewers became nostalgic for the old Mad Men because it offered a better nostalgia for an old fictional America. By season seven, however, the series had recuperated its critical acclaim and audience. In a surprisingly bold move, the series ends with an image of Don meditating in a hippie wellness colony in California, which then cuts to the iconic Coco-Cola commercial of 1970 (“Person to Person,” May 17, 2015). The discussion around the meaning of the cryptic ending could fill a whole other chapter.12 Suffice it to say, popular reception of the finale was positive and delivered a semblance of closure to the Don Draper/America suffering-­but-learning-from-it storyline. Of course, in a Trump-Brexit era America, the “learning” remains to be seen. Draper fatigue provides an interesting study in character design, but it also provides a strong illustration of the narrative importance of the series’ production design. Negative reviews of season six mentioned both an exhaustion with Don and an enduring appreciation for the look of the series. While the season reached a point of stagnation in terms of character growth, it retained a highquality and carefully researched aesthetic. The only forward momentum in the season arguably came from the costumes and production design, which changed to reflect the series’ progress through the late 1960s even when the characters themselves did not. Costumes and production design show the forward march of history, as the series’ characters and their plot points either relent or resist its critical mass. Of course, one of the main arguments of this book is that the “forward march of time” narrative, as told through design, very much depends on the politics of the present or time of making.

Nostalgia in 3D The December 2015 issue of the Art Directors Guild trade magazine, Perspective, covers “Nostalgic Television in a Digital World” through the case study of Amazon’s Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street (Amazon, 2014–16). Created

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by David Anaxagoras, the series is the millennial recreation of the boomer-era fantasy sitcom that focuses on a Leave It to Beaver family that encounter strange other worldly happenings in humdrum American suburbia. The article describes Kristan Andrews’s production design for Normal Street as the “timeless present” that combines craftsmen-style, mid-century and contemporary design elements. Because the show was funded through an open call for submissions on Amazon and involves a first-time writer, there were limited resources for making the pilot. Production design operated under a tight budget and relied heavily on digital tools, including 3D modeling and drafting programs like Sketchup as well as DIY low-fi methods like collage and drawn animation sequences. Amazon released the pilot free of charge for one month and used viewer data to then make the decision to finance the first season. The changing climate of television production increasingly favors online production companies like Amazon and Netflix that employ this financial model. In turn, creators are increasingly asked to introduce the look for an entire television series in the pilot using a very limited budget. Blending traditional crafts-based methods with digital imaging programs is the new basis for television production and costume design in a production model based on online streaming and illegal downloading. This method of production calls for more use of soundstages and limited location changes, which are costly and might hinder the coherence of a strong aesthetic. A look that is neither here nor there, but something slightly nostalgic and fantastic, slightly past and present, is particularly suited to these new methods. Michel Gondrey-like paper collages and animation sequences blended with 3D-printed or digital-inserted props profit from a timeless aesthetic that can be characterized as patchwork rather than uniform. Blending bits and pieces of pastness into the present describes the design strategies covered in this book. However, mixed media and design hodge-podge is not just reflective of a millennial attitude toward history and historical teleologies. Rather, this nostalgic aesthetic is shaped by the technologies and production models that are in vogue, which include hybrid skillsets in design as well as stricter budgetary restrictions for pilots. Exploring the impact and integration of 3D imaging in production design, art direction, and costuming is ripe for future research. Digital imaging technologies are dramatically changing the production process and the resultant looks of the media we consume. There is an increasing rift in the creative media industries between the “pencils” and the “power users,” that is, between designers who rely on more traditional craftsbased, analog methods for bringing media to our screens and those embracing computer-imaging tools to aid in the design and manufacture process of everything from videogames and apps, to television and jewelry.13 This tension is particularly felt in design areas that traditionally rely on the production of a tangible art object, like television and film set and props, costumes and

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fashion, and industrial design. To date, humanities consider the impact of 3D technology on film; however, very little in media studies or design history scholarship addresses the impact of computer-imaging technologies on art direction (responsible for the material aesthetics in theater, game, television show, and film).14 Art direction attached to traditionally “lower” art forms like gaming and television are particularly neglected.15 Moreover, little scholarship relates the shifts occurring in media art direction to tandem technological and culturally driven transformations happening in other design industries, like graphic design. In terms of nostalgia on television, I’ve argued that the technological and sociopolitical climate of contemporary television informs the turn toward America’s yesteryears as candidate bookends or points of genesis for the mid-decline America of now. Future projects would explore in greater depth how the digital transition informs the ubiquity of nostalgia alongside other aesthetic trends on current television. Greater attention to the industry histories of TV production design and costume remains an important future trajectory in media studies, particularly when television has emerged at the forefront of taste-making, quality media, and creative experimentation. Traditional two-hour films seem necrotic by comparison, as the storymakers taking risks are increasingly found in television. Moreover, talking with the people responsible for making everything seen on screen and studying the creative processes behind all wearable and scenic material aids in understanding how media industries shape and are shaped by discourses around technology, society, and nationhood. How television looks and gets made tell stories just as powerful and lasting as those told through writing. Their makers are storytellers on par with anyone above the line. Just don’t tell them I told you so.

Notes   1 Meredith Blake and Phil Dyess-Nugent, “The Playboy Club: ‘Pilot,’” The A.V. Club, September 19, 2011, accessed September 20, 2015, http://www. avclub.com/tvclub/the-playboy-club-pilot-61952; Brian Lowry, “Review of The Playboy Club,” Variety, September 15, 2011, accessed June 1, 2017, http:// variety.com/2011/tv/reviews/the-playboy-club-1117946113/; Tim Goodman, “Review of The Playboy Club,” The Hollywood Reporter, September 9, 2011, accessed June 1, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/playboyclub-tv-review-237305.   2 See endnote 1.   3 Drew Grant, Review of Aquarius, “I Watched All of Aquarius So You Don’t Have To: A Season 1 Review,” The Observer, June 5, 2015, accessed on June 1, 2017, http://observer.com/2015/06/i-watched-all-of-aquarius-so-you-

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The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV dont-have-to-a-season-1-review/; Tim Goodman, "Aquarius: A TV Review," Hollywood Reporter, May 27, 2015, accessed September 9, 2018, https:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/aquarius-tv-review-798341; Brian Lowry, "TV Review: 'Aquarius'," Variety, May 26, 2015, accessed September 9, 2018, https://variety.com/2015/tv/reviews/aquarius-review-david-duchovnycharles-manson-series-nbc–1201501970/; Noel Murray, Review of Aquarius, “NBC’s Aquarius Balances a Hit-and-Miss Cop Drama with the Origin of the Manson Family,” The A.V. Club, May 28, 2015, accessed June 1, 2015, http:// www.avclub.com/review/nbcs-aquarius-balances-hit-and-miss-cop-dramaorig-219834/

  4 Grant, “I Watched All of Aquarius So You Don’t Have To.”   5 Jethro Nededog, “‘Pan Am’ Star Christina Ricci Weighs in on the Show’s Struggling Rating,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 7, 2012, accessed June 6, 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/pan-am-abcratings-christina-ricci-287622; “‘Pan Am’ Canceled: ABC Series Officially Grounded,” The Huffington Post, June 20, 2012, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/pan-am-canceled-abc-seriesdead_n_1612908.html.   6 “AskMen Magazine: Top 49 2009,” AskMen Magazine, October 9, 2009, http://www.askmen.com/specials/2009_top_49/don-draper-1.html.   7 William Bradley, “A Slumping Mad Men Heads to Its Season Finale,” The Huffington Post, June 19, 2013, accessed December 10, 2016. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/a-slumping-mad-men-heads-_b_3466622. html; William Langley, “Mad Men Is a Victim of Its Own Excess: After Glamourising the Louch Sixties, the Advertising Soap Opera Mad Men Has Nothing Left to Say,” The Telegraph, May 14, 2013, accessed June 1, 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9991900/Mad-Men-is-a-victimof-its-own-excess.html   8 Bradley, “A Slumping Mad Men Heads to Its Season Finale.”   9 Matt Zoller Seitz, “Matt Zoller Seitz on Mad Men Season 6: Everyone Gets Tired of Don, Including Don,” Vulture, June 26, 2013, accessed May 23, 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/mad-men-season-6-review-overview-mattzoller-seitz.html; Eleanor Barkhorn, Ashley Fetters, and Amy Sullivan, “The Mad Men Season 6 Finale: Dick Whitman’s Revenge,” The Atlantic, June 24, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/06/the-i-madmen-i-season-6-finale-dick-whitmans-revenge/277142/. 10 Dan Brill, “Stare Blankly at Images of Don Draper Staring Blankly,” The A.V. Club, April 25, 2015, accessed May 8, 2014, http://dondraperstaringblankly. tumblr.com 11 Langley. “Mad Men Is a Victim of Its Own Excess.” 12 Kat Rosenfield, “Mad Men Series Finale Recap: What Happened to Don Draper and Everyone Else (Spoilers),” US Magazine, May 18, 2016, accessed May 23, 2017, http://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/mad-menseries-finale-recap-don-drapers-fate-revealed--2015185; Ashley Lee, “‘Mad Men’ Creator Matthew Weiner Explains Series Finale, Character Surprises and What’s Next,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2015, accessed

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June 1, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mad-men-seriesfinale-matthew-797302; Joanna Robinson, “Jon Hamm Explains What Don Was Smiling about in That Mad Men Finale,” Vanity Fair Magazine, May 18, 2015, http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/05/jon-hamm-mad-menending-explained 13 The term “pencil” is used by digital set designer Aaron Haye in the Dec 2007 issue of Perspective magazine, the trade journal published by the Art Directors Guild in Los Angeles (Haye, “Digital Set Design,” 42). The term “power users” to refer to art directors who are comfortable with digital tools appears in an article in the same issue written by Peter Rubin, a concept artist who addresses working with digital painting software (Peter Rubin, “Painter X: A Tool for Weaving?” Perspective: The Journal of the Art Directors Guild and Scenic, Title and Graphic Artists December (2007): 36). 14 William Paul, “Breaking the Fourth Wall: ‘Belacoism,’ Modernism and a 3D Kiss Me Kate,” Film History 16, no. 4 (2004): 229–242; Ray Zone, Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3D Film 1838–1952 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); Philip Sandifer, “Out of the Screen and into the Theater: 3D Film as Demo,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 3 (2011): 62–78; Miriam Ross, “The 3D Aesthetic: Avatar and Hyper-Haptic Visuality,” Screen 53, no. 4 (2012): 381–397; John Belton, “Digital 3D Cinema: Digital Cinema’s Missing Novelty Phase,” Film History 24, no. 2 (2012): 194; Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Miriam Ross, 3D Cinema: Optical Illusions and Tactile Experiences (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 15 Exceptions to this include Terry Byrne, Production Design for Television (New York: Focal Press, 1993); Georgina Shorter, Designing for Screen: Production and Art Direction Explained (Wiltshire: Crowood, 2012); Spigel, TV by Design. Most literature on costume design concerns film: Gaines and Herzog, eds., Fabrications; Bruzzi and Gibson, Fashion Cultures; Adrienne Munich, Fashion in Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Jonathan Faiers, Dressing Dangerously : Dysfunctional Fashion in Film (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Helen Warner, Fashion on Television: Identity and Celebrity Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Djurdja Bartlett, Shaun Cole, and Agnes Rocamora, eds., Fashion Media: Past and Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

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Index ABC studios 32–3, 49, 166, 209 above-the-line workers 9 Addams Family, The 40, 41 All in the Family 37 American Art Directors Guild 64, 92 American Beauty 37, 38 American Dream 17, 37, 40, 84–5, 110, 112, 119, 128, 144 Americans, The 165, 167, 190, 195–9 “Born Again” 193–4 Clark’s manipulations of Martha 195 “Comrades” 192–3 costume design of 190–7 nostalgic costume of 167–8 resonances between Ugly Betty and 196–7 “The Clock” 191–2 “The Oath” 194 analog imaging devices 102 technologies 101, 114–15 Anaxagoras, David 214 Andy Griffith Show, The 45 Animal House 35 Aquarius 10, 19, 50, 62, 71, 208, 211 art department, tour of 65 bad press, 208 camerawork and set design in 65–6 central message of 67–8 Karn’s home and Hodiak’s apartment 66–7 modernism in 64–8, 69–70 recurring tropic image in 70 1960s and present-day American racial discourses 67 sexual exploitation of women, 67 Art and Crafts Movement 7

Art Deco movement 56 art direction 5–6 computer-imaging technologies, 215 digital technology and, 93–4 entrance of digital technology into 93–4 Mad Men’s 82, 85–6 production design and, 5–6 television 1, 4, 65 and traditional handmade crafts 93 art director, 64–5 Alfonso Cuaron 93 Karsa Farahani, 93 production designer and, 5 Perspective Magazine, 45, 92, 213 Seth Reed, 93 social historians and, 98 Vlad Bina, 93 Art Nouveau 56 AskMen 22, 211 As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste 55 auteur theory 4–5 authorship 1, 4, 9 revising 6–7 Avatar 93 Back to the Future 44, 46 Banks, Mark 7 Barbosa, Carlos 19, 64–5, 71 Batman 46, 62 Beecher, Catherine 56 Belluschi, Pietro 210 Below the Line 7 below-the-line designers 11 below-the-line workers 4–5, 9 in Below the Line 7 designers 11

Index racial and gender diversity of 8–9 reports on 9 Bewitched 32 Aunt Clara from 43 boomer house set 41 and fantasy 43–4 film exaggerates 43 gap between reality and fiction 43 Isabel and Darrin falling in love set 42 Jack and Isabel’s first date set 42 television remaking of 41–4 Bina, Vlad, 93 Birch, Tory 180–1 Bishop, Dan 3, 5 Bloomer, Amelia Jenks 154 bloomers 153–4, 156, 157, 160 bob haircut, origins of 156–7 boomer America 15, 20, 86–7, 110, 126, 141, 169 construction of nostalgic memories of 104 contemporary nostalgia for 168 design process and nostalgic recreation of 11 historical memory for 108 historical reality 43–4 pair references to 21 popular narratives of 85, 117 popular nostalgic for 118–19 self-admittedly idyllic memory for 102 boomer nostalgia 1–2, 19, 20, 21–2, 31, 37, 44, 49, 107 aesthetic conventions 50 in Aquarius 65 contemporary nostalgia and 113 legibility in contemporary television 15 Mad Men’s props and 119 millennial intensification of 14 popular history of 119 popular representations of 168–9 reflection in contemporary popular culture 64 television 17, 145, 167 in television design 168 Ugly Betty and 166 whiteness and patriarchy of 168

239

Bordwell, David 4 Breaking Bad 4, 16, 196 Brill, Dan 212 Brill, Ellen 71 Bryant, Janie 10, 21, 134, 136, 139, 145–52, 167, 184, 189 book of 145–7 collecting cloths 147 Mad Men Edition suit designed by 150–151 memory role in retro self-styling 147 practice of making clothing in studio 148 research and design processes of 148–9 success of Mad Men 145 Buckwald, Scott 87 Caldwell, John 8, 12, 188 Carnivale 195 Castro, Eduardo 10, 21, 166, 170, 176–81, 188, 189, 198 Cherry, Marc 38–9 Chicana ethnic identity 169 Chicano Art Movement 166, 175, 180 Chinatown 45 Citizen Kane 45, 212 Colonial House 94, 157–8 computer-imaging skills 62–3 Convergence Culture 178 corporate interior design 62–3 corporate modernist set Batman 62 gender identity in 59–61 Get Smart 62 costume bricolage 184–9 costume design 5, 21 Colonial House 157–8 creative thoughts in 134 Downton Abbey 153–7, 158 as gender historian 135–40 and gender history 153–60 historical methodology in 134–5 Mad Men 133–53 nostalgic, bad taste in 189–97 overview 133–5 people in 10–11 Playtex campaign 142

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Index

readymade revolution 180–3 rise of “boutique culture” 182–3 television 133–4 Ugly Betty 165–83 Westworld 158–60 costume designers 5 Dieter Rams 143 Eduardo Castro 10, 21, 170, 178–81, 188, 189 Janie Bryant 10, 21, 134, 136, 139, 145–52, 167, 184, 189 Le Corbusier 143 Mary Quant 182 Richard Neutra 143 Tory Birch 180–1 costume dynamics 159 costumes aesthetic and economic disharmony in Betty’s 181 bloomers 153–4, 156, 157, 160 history women’s underwear 143 Mad Men 150–3 piecemeal aspect of Betty’s 179 as storytelling device in Mad Men 136 warehouses 184–8 Western Costume 166–7, 184, 186 women’s underwear 142–3 Crack in the Picture Window 37 Creative Labor 8 Cuaron, Alfonso 93 “cultural amnesia” 13 Cunningham, Stuart 8 Curtin, Michael 8 D’Amico, Archie 19, 61–2 Davis, Aeron 8 Deadwood 80 deconstruction of text 8–9 Desperate Housewives 10, 14, 19, 21, 46 Applewhites 34–5 boomer house set 41 boomer sitcom suburb 39–40 Cleaver home shot 36–7 crane shot of Wisteria Lane 36–7 designers of Wisteria Lane 38–9 DVD menus, house’s appearance 40–1

dystopic suburb in 38–40 and history of Universal Studio 34–5 Mary Alice’s house 34 Mary Alice’s narration 39 pilot episode’s cinematography 36 portray suburbia in 37–8 recycled set for 31–2 Wisteria Lane set 33–6 Dexter 80 Diski, Jenny 14 Distribution Revolution 8 diversity, of below-the-line workers 8–9 Donna Reed Show,The 141 Downton Abbey 153, 154, 157 Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman 46 Draper fatigue 211–13 Dressing Wisteria Lane 35 dress reformers 154 Dutton, Syd 92 dystopic suburb: in American Beauty 38 critique of 38 in Desperate Housewives 38–40 novelizations of 37–8 Wark’s photography of 38 eBay 83, 91, 93 Edgerton, Gary 14 Ed Sullivan Show 121–2 Edwardian Country House 80, 94, 97 Edward Scissorhands 37 Elyea, Jim 88 Elyea, Pam 88 Emery Roth & Sons 210 Entertainment Weekly 35 ethnography 5–6, 10–13, 21–22, 134, 166, 167 Exodus 83 Fade from Red 196 Fall, The 195 Fallon, Jimmy 44 Farahani, Karsa 93 Fashion File, The 145 Father Knows Best 37, 38, 39 feminism, home decor and fashion 56 Ferrell, Will 42 Field Guide to Sprawl, A 38

Index Film Art 4 Fiske, John 178 Freund, Ellen 2–4, 9–10, 13, 16, 80, 82–3, 86–7, 88, 91, 92 Frontier House 20, 94, 95, 96 climax through props in 120–1 hand props in 103 Game of Thrones 93–4 Garland, Bobi 166–7, 184–5, 186, 187–9 Gates, David 38 gender identity, in corporate modernist set 59–61 Get Smart 62 Gibbon, Gortimer 213 Gill, Rosalind 7 Gilligan, Vince 4 Gilmore Girls 44 Gone with the Wind 45, 184–5 Goscilo, Helena 196 Gosclio, Margaret B. 196 Grainge, Paul 8 Grant, Drew 208 Gravity 93 Greenberg, Clement 56 Gremlins 46 Gropius, Walter 210 Guggenheim Museum 59–61 Hamm, Jon 86 hand props 20, 83, 88, 91, 93, 103, 112, 119–21, 125–6, 128 Harper’s Bazaar 154 Harper’s Magazine 56 Hayden, Dolores 37, 38 Hebdige, Dick 177 Heroes 46 Hesmondhalgh, David 8 Hidden Innovation 8 high-modernism 50, 55, 60, 62, 68, 210 linking to masculinity 68–9 Hollywood Center Studios, Los Angeles 40 Hollywood Reporter 82, 86 Homeland 196 home movie as historical conduit 107–11 intersection between private fantasy and public pressures 110

241

microcosm offers for nostalgic memory 110–11 as prop and narrative device 111 1900 House 20, 80, 94–6, 98, 103, 119 hand props in 103 Huffington Post, The 211 Hughes, Howard 143 identity politics, quality television and 15–19 Independent, The 91 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 46 Inherit the Wind 46 Interior Design 63, 69, 83 International Style modernism 53, 54, 210 Jackson, Peter 44 Jacobsen, Arne 54–5 James Bond 62, 193 Jameson, Fredric 14 Jenkins, Henry 178 Johnson, Catherine 8 Johnson, Derek 7 Johnson, Paul 16 Johnson, Virginia, 121 Keats, John 37 Kidman, Nicole 42 King Kong 44–45 Knick, The 20 hand props in 103, 125 medical instruments in 125–6 Knopka, Rosemarie 64 Kompare, Derek 7 La Garçonne 157 Leave It to Beaver 31, 37, 135, 141, 214 Cleaver home set in 40 credit sequence, 37 Le Corbusier 54, 143 Levine, Elana 17 LIFE 86 Life on Normal Street 213 Lost 80 Love and Money 17

242

Index

Mad Men 1–4, 6, 10, 13, 18, 19, 62, 64, 71, 199, 208 access to Freund’s prop truck 89 analog imaging devices in 102 analog media scenes from 116–17 art department 2–3, 88–9 boomer-era advertising 210 characters as fashion harbingers 137–8 costume department 15–16 costume design 21–2, 133–53 costumes 150–3 Cuban Missile Crisis 105, 106–7 Draper fatigue 211–13 dressing sequences 140–2 food 88 “For Those Who Think Young” 140–1 forward-thinking fashion 137 historical crisis scenes in 103–7 ideological changes to shifts in fashion 140 impact on mainstream fashion 145–7 Kodak scenes 113–17 linking high-modernism to masculinity 68–9 “Maidenform” 141–3 “Marriage of Figaro” episode 107–9 media props on 121 modernism in 69–70 nostalgic anticipation of digitality in 111–19 office set 3–4, 9–10 old media props in 102, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124 plot 2 Polaroid beaktnik scene 115–16 portrayal of Kennedy’s assassination 106 postmodernist memory interpretations 14–15 prop specialist 89–90 props in 20, 79–98 recurring tropic image in 70 scenes featuring vinyl record player 117–18 scenes of undressing 140–5 seminal fashion shifts 136

special attention to pre-digital imaging technologies 101–2 street fashion and commercial reinterpretations of suit 149 workers in art department 5 Mad Men’s prop 20–1, 79–98 accuracy of 84–5 articles on 83–6 cultivate viewer interest 81 digital era prop talk 97–8 dominate storylines 94–7 effect of digital technology 90–4 importance of 79–81 legitimation of prop industry 88–94 and legitimation of prop industry 88–94 online publicity on 82–3 popular infatuation with 83–4 press about 82–8 press pieces on 85–6 shift in television 80 Magic City 64 Magnificent Ambersons, The 45 Make Room for Television 43 Making Media Work 7 Man in the Grey Flannel Suit 151 Manor House 97 Mansfield, Jane 143 Manson, Charles 208 Man with a Movie Camera 110 Margueritte, Victor 157 Marks, Eddie 186–7 Married … with Children 37 Martin, Reinhold 57–8 Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television 16 Masters of Sex 20, 121, 122–4 first episode of 121–2 hand props in 103 love and sex shots in 122–4 Mayer, Vicki 6–7 McNamara, John 208 media: on Mad Men prop 82–8 as props in Masters of Sex 20 Ugly Betty’s narrative themes of 58 media props 101–26 old 119–26 proto-digital 81 media technology props 113–15

Index Mitchell, William J. 92 modernism 49–72 in Aquarius 66–8 boomer-era 49, 51, 56, 58, 59 corporate 50 in design and architecture 53–4 high-modernism 50, 55, 60, 62, 68, 210 International Style 53, 54, 210 Mad Men and 19 masculine-coded discourse of 53 mid-century 50, 54, 55, 58, 63–4, 69 politics of taste in TV production design’s reinventions of 55–9 popular framing of 53–4 popularization of 54 in set design 69 on television 50–1, 57–8 Ugly Betty’s office set and 50 modernist office set: fantasies of self and home 51–5 Monroe, Marilyn 143 Moore, Scotty 88 Munsters, The 35, 37 Neutra, Richard 64 Newman, Michael Z. 17 New Yorker 86 New York Times 83 Nip/Tuck’s 70–1 Normal Street 214 nostalgia in 3D 213–15 nostalgic anticipation 20, 140 of digitality in Mad Men 111–19 media technology props and 113–15 nostalgic failure 207–15 Obama, Barack 22 Observer, The 208 old media props 119–26 Ed Sullivan Show 121–2 Frontier House 120–1 historical time travel programs and 119–21 1900 House 119–20 Mad Men 102, 119, 120, 121, 124 Masters of Sex 121, 122–4

243

narrative incorporation of 112 Penny Dreadful 124–5 oppositional fashion 177 “organizational complex” 57–8 Organization Man 37 Otherness 169 Overby, Whitten 69 Pan Am 22, 209–11 Paramount 65 patriarchal hegemony 68 Penny Dreadful 124–5 Perspective 92, 213 Perspective Magazine 45 Pirates of the Caribbean 46 Playboy Club, The 22, 207–11 Poiret, Paul 156 polaroid camera, as narrative device 103–7 Poniewozik, James 85, 86 post-feminism 17–18 Postmodernist memory studies 14–15 Powell, Helen 8 practice ethnography 12 production design 5–6 hiring of architect in 64 modernism and 55–9 overlap architecture with 62–3 retro modernism 63 production designers 2, 5 Carlos Barbosa 19, 64–5, 71 Dan Bishop 3, 5, 9 Dieter Rams 55 Thomas A. Walsh 38, 39 Production Studies: The Sequel! 7 Promotional Culture and Convergence 8 Promotional Screen Industries 8 “prop-awareness” 80 prop industry, legitimation of 88–94 prop stories home movie as historical conduit 107–11 old imaging technologies 103 overview 101–3 polaroid camera as narrative device 103–7 prop talk 20, 81 digital era 97–8 Mad Men’s 96

244

Index

prop warehouses 90 props act as meta-narrative devices occurs in Mad Men 107–9 centrality of 95 food as 96–7 hand 103, 120 Mad Men’s 20–1, 79–98. See also Mad Men’s prop media technology 113–15 occupying privileged narrative roles 103 as whole narratives 94–7 proto-digital media props 81 Psycho 44 quality television academic conservation on 16 attachment of masculinity to 16 and identity politics 15–19 Love and Money 17 post-feminism and 17–18 problematic descriptors for 16 Quant, Mary 182

set design 31–46 architecture and 63 modernism in 69 nostalgic 31–46 set recycling 31–3 set designer Archie D’Amico 61–2 digital 93 Ellen Brill 71 Eugene Lourie 34 physical 93 set recycling. See recycled sets Shameless 46 Shapiro, Stephen 195–6 Silverman, Kaja 178 sitcom studio, as living archive 33–41 sitcom suburban home set 39–41 Slattery, John 68 Social Knowledge and Interpretation 12 Sopranos, The 80 Sound of Music, The 184 Sparke, Penny 56–7, 58 Spigel, Lynn 43, 50, 53, 62, 69 Spivak, Gayatri 169 Star Trek 45 Stepford Wives, The 37 Stewart, Susan 127 Studio 60 64

Rams, Dieter 55 Rasquache 175–6, 179, 180, 181, 198 readymade revolution 180–3 Rebecca 45 recycled sets 31–3 for Bewitched 32 for Desperate Housewives 31–2 practice of 34 Reed, Isaac 12 Reed, Seth 93 reskilling cast members 95 retro modernism 61 in architecture and production design 63 of Mode 53 as shorthand 71–2 Revolver 117, 118 Rome 80 Roseanne 37 Russel, Jane 143

Taylor, Stephanie 7 Telegraph, The 213 Television Culture 178 Theorizing Cultural Work 7 Thompson, Kristen 4 Three Amigos 46 To Kill a Mockingbird 44, 46 Towards a New Architecture 54 Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, A 56 Treme 195 Tudors Wives, The 37 TV by Design 50, 62, 69 TV production, people in 10–11

Saarinen, Eero 55 Santo, Avi 7 Schultz, Dan 90

Ugly Betty 10, 19, 69, 71, 80, 165–6, 199 aesthetic, narrative, and industrial diaspora 173–6

Index aesthetic analysis of costume 166–7 antagonistic relationship with boomer modernism 59–61 Betty a vintage girl 178–9 Betty’s styles 167 Betty’s vintage hodge-podge 166, 169, 184 Chicano Art Movement 175 clashing vintage patterns 176–83 costume design 21–2, 50, 165–83 design narrative 50 diaspora of Suarez family 174 Dior’s new look 172–3 ethno-global origins 175 gave nostalgic costume a privileged storytelling role 198 Guggenheim Museum 59–61 high-modernism of set 50 integration of boomer-era fabric and textiles 198 Mode office 57 Mode scenes for the pilot 61 modernism 63 modernist office set, fantasies of self and home 51–5 office set, design of 49–72 plot of 49 postwar aesthetics 170–3 racial politics 166 readymade revolution 180–3 recurring tropic image in 70 representations of boomer nostalgia 168–9 resonances between The Americans and 196–7 retro appears in 188–9 retroism of 197–8 retro modernist set 50–1 set architecture in 58–9 telenovela roots 174–5 use of boomer-era modernism 56 Western aesthetic principles 169 underwear, women’s different type of, 144 Hughes’s contribution to, 143

245

mid-century, history of 143 postwar, history of 143 Universal Studio 32 Colonial Street 34, 40, 44, 45 Courthouse Square 44 history of 34–5 houses carries imprint of boomer television past 35 ties to boomer-era sitcom 35–6 tour of Desperate Housewives set 44–5 tour to 41–5 Uri, Leon 83 Variety 82 Variety Online’s 91 Vertov, Dziga 110 Wagmeister, Elizabeth 82, 91 Walsh, Thomas A. 38, 39 Wark, Jim 38 Weiner, Matthew 3, 5, 82, 83–4, 86 Western Costume 166–7, 184, 186 Western Costume Company 147, 166, 189, 190 in American media history, 184 and costume bricolage 184–9 Janie Bryant, 147, 184 Whyte, William H. 37 Williams, Raymond 160–1 Wilson, Sloane 151 Wire, The 195 Wisteria Lane set 33–6 crane shot of, in Desperate Housewives 36–7 designers of 38–9 Wizard of Oz, The 184 Women’s Suffrage Movement 133 Worthington, Mark 61–2 Wright, Frank Lloyd 59 Yo Soy Betty, La Fea. See Ugly Betty YouTube 44 Zimmerman, Patricia 141

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