People often miss the texture and the frame of a piece of media, going straight to the central content. The difference between the content of a story and its form and what the form is doing is something that I admittedly think about a lot. There was a nice description in The Watch podcast recently about the difference between story and plot and how audiences may come for the plot but the story is why they stay and find some meaning in it. The film critic Mark Kermode also has a recurring idea about the difference between the universal and the particular and that it’s the stories that are told with great particularity for place or character or idea that have a universal resonance. Conversely, perhaps it is when a plot aims for universality without earning it through its world and details or sheer stylistic verve that we feel the cringe of someone trying to impose their pat philosophy upon us, a world view without much of a view.
Secondary commentary (as opposed to media criticism) on media seems to often mix up plot, story and form in ways that end up presenting the content of a form as truth, when it is, inherently, always a lie – it is always a representation, refracted through writers’ minds and refracted through production. This seems to particularly happen when talking about the costuming and signalling of class and sophistication in film and television. The discourse turns towards the signifiers of aesthetics: quiet luxury, stealth wealth, and (with a massive dose of cringe) ‘old money’. If we go back in time a bit, we’d be talking about prep and rich WASPs. Suddenly, the Internet is awash in talk of cashmere gauges and the ironic awareness of brands we are not supposed to have ever heard of. A secret code for the very rich is invented and decoded all at once. Affiliate links to luxe shirting abound. Meanwhile, wealth under capitalism is actually pretty simple – it is the possession of more money than other people. Taste and style are not relevant to this equation and if the vulgarity that emerges from that brute fact seems unjust, perhaps we should address the conditions of that injustice, rather than trying to decode a meaningless code. Wearing a $4000 nondescript baseball cap won’t enrol you into ‘stealth wealth’ unless you actually have the wealth.
There’s nothing wrong with engaging with text on a surface level, but I find that much of my pleasure with a text is when it has moments that snag the mind from breezily consuming the aesthetics and reveal the tension between an experience of artifice and immersion. It is fascinating to me that the fictional characters of Lydia Tár (née Linda Tarr) and Don Draper (né Dick Whitman) are emblematic of this drive to decode the style of wealth, precisely because their characters are not paradigms of the ultra rich but strivers from humble backgrounds desperately avoiding their pasts. Both change names and tailor their suits and demeanour into the people they want to be. Both are undeniably talented and surrounded by people who will succeed without talent because of their wealth and family names. Both use their attractiveness and status to win fragile loyalties and are literally haunted by people they have hidden and hurt and lost and pushed to suicide by their neglect.
We respond to the impeccable construction of their personas and how perfectly they move through the world in them. Pretender characters, like Don Draper and Lydia Tár are compelling, I would argue, because through their fakery they seem like the most authentic, most self-assured and self-possessed people out of everyone around them. The personas persist more powerfully than the ‘real’ Dick or Linda – even when their constructed worlds fall apart, this is depicted as a fallen state, rather than a return to original form, because their persona is the thing that seems more true to who they really are ‘inside’. It’s the artifice that makes them seem more real. We wish we could pretend with such style, so that if we were characters in a TV show or movie, people would talk about us like we were real.
In the Psychoanaliterature podcast, Judith Butler states that the surface of text is always rippled. I think that these characters ripple the surface of the texts they appear in by being the means by which the artifice of the medium can appear. Everything in the frame is constructed but it has a genre language and a visual code through which it immerses the viewer into accepting its particular aesthetics as real-enough for the viewing experience. In Mad Men and Tár, explore different aspects of mythology making – within the characters and within the settings in which the fakers thrive. They thrive because their personas make them recognisable as the paradigm characters of their settings – figures that embody an era and are seen as carrying it forwards by their will. They are not just people. They are masters of their time and, it seems at points, the future. Only people who are faking it can seem to be mastering their time. You need to be slightly outside of things, like the filmmakers lurking beyond the frame are outside of their text but controlling everything that appears within it.
It seems an obvious point to make, but neither Mad Men nor Tár nor another show like Succession are factual documents of an era or class. They are constructions of fantasies. Isn’t it interesting that some of our highest fantasies is just to be the greatest pretender? What does it say about the ruthlessly simple hierarchy of capital (more capital = more power) that the only way through is pretending?
Other relevant reading:
Jessica Defino on the connection between ‘quiet luxury’ and ‘clean girl’ as ‘aesthetics’: https://jessicadefino.substack.com/p/quiet-luxury-beauty-clean-girl-aesthetic
Other gripes:
When you are an annoying academic (me) and hate seeing the term aesthetics being used in a way that just means ‘a look’, rather than all the other things that actually exist in in how people are using the term, even if unintentionally: a framework of judgement that can produce and reproduce class and other relations. There’s the potential for freedom and radicality in many of our common concepts but we keep diverting it towards consumption.