The Fainting Couch for Best Supporting Actor

Click here to see a slide show of Betty Draper's Mad Men redecoration [2].

When Mad Men [3] isn’t praised for its staggeringly meticulous set and costume design, it’s accused of being too attractive for its own good. Earlier this month, in Slate’s TV Club, Patrick Radden Keefe wondered whether the AMC hit [4] is nothing but a guilty pleasure, “a delicious but ultimately meaningless immersion in style over substance.” Last fall, in an essay for the London Book Review [5], Mark Grief even went so far as to suggest that “the low sofas and Eames chairs, the gunmetal desks and geometric ceiling tiles” are shiny decoys distracting us from the plot’s inadequacies. Period-specific details—from clocks to consoles to carpets—may be laudable showmanship, the critique seems to go, but they don’t really count.

Sunday night’s episode was Matt Weiner’s jujitsu-like retort: Our furniture, he said, via the cunning deployment of a few chairs and lamps, really matters. The tutorial begins the moment Don walks into his newly redecorated living room to see what Betty and her decorator have cooked up and is subtly underscored with odd moments of object-fetish (Peggy caressing the Hermes scarf from Duck, Henry fondling the silver matchbox that tumbles out of Betty’s purse at the coffee shop, Conrad Hilton’s dismay at Don’s lack of desktop accessories).

Watch the staff of DoubleX spend a day drinking like Mad Women.

Then, just in case we missed the point, the theme is hammered into our skulls when Betty impulse-buys a Victorian fainting couch and positions the monstrosity directly in front of the fireplace. (“That’s your hearth, darling, that’s the soul of your home,” her decorator had explained in the first scene. “People gather around a fire even if there isn’t one.”) In a show obsessed with sets, that chaise longue is the first piece of furniture to have its own cameo.

Keep in mind: The Draper surname is a nod to the famed decorator of the era, Dorothy Draper. And what Weiner is saying with his impeccable sets is that all of these seemingly superficial material things—the god-awful antiques we inexplicably fall for, the “tasteful” end tables and sofas selected for us by paid experts—are legitimate expressions of who we are. Used correctly—that is to say, digging beneath the notions of what we collectively remember or imagine or wish the 1960s looked like to uncover what was actually available and common at the time, then entering into the minds of the characters to really figure out which choices they, personally, would make—set design is just as revealing as any line of dialogue, visually describing not only individual personalities and their relationships to one another but societal truths, too.

Weiner has been telling us this all along, but never so blatantly as last night. Until now, he’s been content to let the delectable tension between the show’s two primary settings—the offices of Sterling, Cooper, and Don and Betty Draper’s home—do all the talking. That sleek, masculine workplace is our idealization of the 1960s, the way we want to remember our best selves; Betty’s feminine, conservative décor (it’s all her doing, of course) is the everyday reality we’d rather forget. Every time Don strides manfully through the back door and into his knotty pine-paneled, plaid-wallpapered kitchen we’re meant to feel this incongruity. Doesn’t this sharp specimen call for a Saarinen table? Where are the Herman Miller chairs?*

As last night’s redecoration of the living room made clear, the mod ‘60s won’t be coming to the Draper household anytime soon—which is exactly as it should be. The Danish modern style most of us associate with the era was indeed ubiquitous, but only among those who wanted to telegraph an artistic, progressive way of living. For all of Don’s supposed good taste (and I say “supposed” because outside of his suits, which for all we know are chosen by the sartorially gifted Betty, we have no other evidence), and a lone-wolf stance we like to mistake for agency, when really we know it’s just craven selfishness, there’s nothing outré about him. He’s just another hard-drinking, philandering husband and father in plaid short sleeves, as Sally’s teacher points out in that fantastic eclipse scene.

More significantly, he’s an arriviste. While Pete Campbell, who grew up old-money, can therefore risk jettisoning its trappings for a more hip decor, Don needs to cultivate and project an image of tastefulness, with an expensive-looking house presided over by a classy looking wife (who, Lord knows, isn’t much more than a card-carrying daddy’s girl, nostalgic traditionalism incarnate). What Don wants is whatever a woman who looks like Betty would want, hence his unquestioned relinquishment of all things domestic. Even Betty was surprised by his complete indifference to her new décor scheme; “All you do at work all day is evaluate objects. I would like the benefit of your eye,” she says. Thus prodded, he exasperatedly suggests moving the end table and lamp to the other end of the couch (“I think he’s right,” concedes the lady decorator, hands clasped over her breast), clearly annoyed to be bothering himself with women’s work.

Set decorator Amy Wells wanted the original Draper décor to look like a page torn from a 1955 House & Garden, which, along with House Beautiful, would have been the shelter magazine of choice for a woman like Betty, an East Coast denizen of the upwardly mobile upper middle class with an outsize concern for appearances. The 1950s were the high age of the signifier, as former House & Garden editor-in-chief Dominique Browning described it to me over lemonade recently. “It’s hard to believe this now,” she said, “but labels were all-important then. Everybody knew exactly what it meant that you purchased X or Y, and these magazines, along with professional decorators, played a crucial role in guiding insecure housewives through these decisions.” Her prediction when I asked her to guess what the new décor would be: “A mix of new and old pieces, and slightly more sophisticated than before.”

She was exactly right, of course. The current season is set in 1963, which means the Draper interior is at least eight years old, and now that Don is making more money, ripe for a redo. “Don and Betty are becoming a wealthier, more stylish couple,” Wells told me over the telephone, “but they’re still traditional people in a lot of ways, so I needed to figure out how to reflect that.” Her solution: A mix of old and new pieces, with an emphasis on high-end labels—a silk Dunbar sofa, Drexel end table, Dupioni silk curtains. The coral and apricot hues were very popular at the time, and have the advantage of popping off the dark-blue walls (a plus for television). The black-and-white cane print on the high-backed side chairs is especially fashionable and goes a long way toward reviving the room without being too advanced.

And that Victorian fainting couch, all baroque dark wood and pale rose damask? “Oh that damn thing is ugly!” Wells laughed. “I kept saying to Matt, ‘Are you sure?’ and he kept saying, ‘It’s perfect! It’s hideous!’” Which I interpret to mean that it’s the perfect objective correlative for a woman defined by her beauty who, for perhaps the first time in her life, is making an unschooled attempt at expressing herself. Cruelly, even this maneuver is an exercise in conformity. “We discussed this for months and we decided antiques were ‘expected.’ Look around. You have ruined the whole room,” her enraged decorator complains. Poor Betty can’t get out of her own way—as the choice of a chaise longue designed for lightheaded, over-corseted women might indicate.

Sometimes I wonder how much the critical resistance to the significance of décor in Mad Men is a product of the very industry Don was helping to transform at mid-century. Fifty years later, we’re a nation of veteran consumers, too savvy to be hoodwinked by advertising (or so we like to think), yet incapable of stopping ourselves from wanting all those things for sale that we don’t actually need. As a result, we are locked in constant battle with our own stuff, hating ourselves for possessing so much of it, as if the objects we’ve bought somehow snuck into our homes by nefarious means. There’s a song called “Taste,” by the very 21st-century band Animal Collective, that captures this fearful ambivalence with a single, plaintive refrain: “Am I really all the things that are outside of me? Would I complete myself without the things I like around?” The answer, of course, is both yes and no, and that’s a very uncomfortable duality to accept.

*Correction, September 29, 2009: This piece originally asked, "Where are the Henry Miller chairs?" Thanks to commenter Madman [6] for the catch.