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At the Museum of the Moving Image in New York it was possible to visit the exhibition "Matthew Weiner's Mad Men" dedicated to the famous TV series "Mad Men" created by Matthew Weiner, author of "The Sopranos".
The exhibition retraces the series and says goodbye in style. Opened in mid-June and extended until 6 September 2017 to the delight of fans of the series and the curiosity of those who have not seen it, the exhibition is an immersion in the creative process that has helped to make Mad Men an international success. Movies, props, notes and photos will tell you how an idea can be transformed into a series. The refined aestheticism, which contributed to its success, materializes before our incredulous eyes as we enter Don Draper's office, full of smoke and alcohol or Betty's Sixties kitchen, full of pop products and suffocating patterns.
But let's take a step back and talk about the series. Precipitated from the top of the Madison Avenue skyscrapers in the Sixties' consumerist and hedonist New York, the hero of the series is an advertising agent of enormous talent and great intuition. Family father and hardened seducer, Don Draper spends his time smoking cigarettes and inventing slogans to sell more cigarettes in a series that is nostalgic for the fabulous Sixties but also recalls how misogynist, racist and homophobic that era was.
Don Draper manipulates illusions and solicits emotions he doesn't "share" while lighting up another Lucky Strike and drinking too much scotch in a meticulous and manic office like the series. Decades of experimentation in design, which interprets with armchairs and sofas, flowers and coloured plastic, fluorescent light and ready-to-wear the profound change in society and social relations, the Sixties make Mad Men an incredibly scenic and obsessive series that it is now possible to "visit" by going to the exhibition.
Dipped in the confidential notes of its creator and in the preparatory work of the authors, the visitors participate in a past era, conducive to nostalgia, a time and a work that is nothing more than a slow fall, that we would never like to end and yet that ends soon, answering the many questions that like Draper we ask ourselves in the silence of our living rooms. Because the pact that Mad Men makes with the public is of the utmost urgency and languor, because within that dimension we have been drawn once and for all, because the American dream, despite its ambiguity, does not stop infecting the collective imagination.
