Mad Men is a show for trainspotters. The spotter may favour three piece suits and pencil skirts over anoraks but they are spotters none the less. Keen spotters will tell you which James Bond novel appears on the cover of Playboy in Episode 6 of Season 4 and which 1960s spy drama Sally Draper watches in Episode 5.
Spotters who are watching closely will have noticed a framed engraving on the wall of Lane Pryce’s office. Pryce is a late-comer to the series: a model of the stuffy, tweedy, conservative Englishman. He's the man who balances the books. Marooned on Manhattan Island, a long way from home, Pryce decorates his office with a reminder of the old world. His chosen artwork: the final plate of William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress.
Published as a series of eight engravings in 1735, The Rake’s Progress charts the decline and fall of a young man corrupted by money, women, booze and dice. He is aided in his descent by a cast of sycophants and toadies, prostitutes and card sharks, bailiffs and jailors.
At the beginning of the series, our anti-hero Tom Rakewell inherits the fortune hoarded by his miserly father. Coins spill from the rafters of his dirty living room with its cracked window panes and greying whitewash walls. Newly wealthy Tom is already being measured for a new suit.
In the second plate Tom is surrounded by salesmen. A landscape designer proposes a garden in the French style. A jockey presents the cup won by Tom’s racehorse. Maestros insist that hunting, dancing, fencing and music are indispensable to the man of taste and fortune.
Tom develops less refined tastes. In plate three, we find him in a bathhouse late at night canoodling with a syphilitic prostitute. He is drunk and slack-jawed. His socks have fallen down, his shirt hangs loose. The whore has stolen his watch.
And it gets worse. He is arrested in the street for non-payment of debts. He marries an ageing, cross-eyed dowager then squanders her fortune at the gaming house. In the penultimate scene he is incarcerated in the Fleet unable to pay even the beer-boy.
The final print which hangs on the wall of Pryce’s office has the Rake writhing on the floor of Bedlam Hospital for the Insane. The pursuit of ‘stuff,’ the company of whores, gin and cards has ended in tragedy. A salutary lesson for the womanising, whiskey drinking, salesmen of Madison Avenue?
Or just a clever pun at the expense of a Mad Man?
1 comment:
If I knew how to use this and I could get that thumb thing on the face book I'd "like" it. A lot.
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