Emerging Dynamics in Audiences' Consumption of Trans-media Products by Carmen Spano

Author:Carmen Spano [Spano, Carmen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781785275166
Google: xz4QEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2020-11-27T04:03:57+00:00

It gradually becomes apparent that everything in Mad Men always means something else (Stoddart 11), and offers multiple interpretations. Indeed, what we are constantly reminded of is that many of the driving ideas and powerful slogans created in the 1960s to justify the legitimacy of basic notions—such as the ideal American family and the American Dream—were, essentially, the product of effective advertising. If in the beginning, when James Truslow Adams employed the expression for the first time in his book The Epic of America (1931), the American Dream referred to “the freedom people had to determine their place in the world” (Booker and Batchelor 24) subsequently “as the decades of the mid-twentieth century unfolded, […] the American Dream soon became entangled with broader notions of what is meant to be successful in a capitalist system” (Booker and Batchelor 24; my emphasis). In this regard, the America of the 1960s as the content of Mad Men becomes symbolic of a period that had a worldwide resonance (via, for instance, popular culture narratives) and that, simultaneously, preserved a specificity that belongs to the American nation, its traditions and cultural values. Indeed, the first two quotes in the following grouping point out how the Italian fans position themselves as removed from the American culture. The ambivalence here lies in the realization that the 1960s represents both a nationally specific and a globally (across the West) shared historical past—that is, a precise extent of time in the history of the United States as well as a period whose historical events have had international sociocultural repercussions and influences:

– “I found the series very representative of the ‘American style’ […] It is interesting because it represents a different world; I think that if they had presented the same story, set in the same period in Italy, it would have been way less interesting for us! I liked the setting and the characters, and things like the costumes and the hairstyles too.” [IT]

– “The American events of that time have not been experienced by us in the same way they have been experienced by the American people.” [IT]

– “Even if the events represented in Mad Men are from the American history, they are events that had an international resonance, like the Kennedy assassination and the presidential campaigns.” [IT]

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