In March 2015, the launch of Mad Men’s final season was announced, and it was promoted as “the” cultural event of the year”. This is precisely what Lacan noted in 1970 when he announced that we would all soon be Lacanian: “The ascent to the social zenith of the object I have called small ‘a’ would suffice (…) because, when one doesn’t know what saint to commend oneself to, (…) one buys anything” 4. Fed by the spread of mass media, Hollywood’s star system, and the transnationalization of the economy, advertising would give birth to a new world. Therefore, Mad Men’s spectators are invited to discover that behind flower power, the sexual revolution, the beatnik poets, and Woodstock, in the system’s hard core, the most powerful tool of cultural domination was being honed: modern advertising. This was clearly represented by the advertising agencies on Madison Ave., and by their mostly Republican clients, an exchange which led to the consecration of the American way of life as the hegemonic cultural model of the late 20 th century. One of Mad Men’s interesting traits is, precisely, that it takes the romantic memory of the sixties and deconstructs it, thus reflecting that, if counterculture did actually exist, it was the effect of a sexist, racist, religious and imperialist American ideology. The characters are organized around an advertising agency and the fictional events are intertwined with the historical and social events of the decade. The story takes place in the 1960s, at the peak of modern advertising’s rise to glory 2, when marketing, the empire of images, and consumer capitalism began to transform human life.

Mad men meaning