“‘Ya know I can’t believe I even thought about getting back together with you! We are SOOO over!”
~Rachel, re-breaking up with Ross on Friends (Episode 4:01; The One With the Jellyfish)
In a discussion about the possible origins of the term ’self-worth’, Rondi commented about the anachronistic “1960, I am SO over you“.
First of all, Rondi, don’t second guess yourself. This one is absolutely undebateably out of step with the era. Is it POSSIBLE that a woman in 1960 could have put those words together in that sequence? Sure, it’s technically possible. But it screams Today. It screams it so loudly that I wonder if it was deliberate.
There have been some language glitches throughout the series… (even if, as Monique R pointed out, self-worth turns out not to have been among them). But this, this I am SO over you business, seems too obvious for Weiner not to have noticed. Remember, he’s not us. He doesn’t see it once on TV. Or five times, if we’re obsessive. He spends time with the script, and then he watches the words come to life, and then he’s around while it’s being edited. AND he’s a self-professed fetishist when it comes to the accuracy of this show. It’s hard to imagine this one getting by him.
So I now engage in a bigger question; what is the viewpoint of the show? What is the voice? Was this moment a mistake, or was it a nod to now?
Last summer I performed in a workshop; a first iteration of an original musical about the Manson Family. (You heard me right; a Manson Family musical.) It was written by Brad Forenza, a young man (good friend of mine) in his 20’s.
Brad and I discussed at length the issue of era-accurate vocabulary. He had naively included phrases, expressions and actual words that were out of step. A real gone cat (too early); It sounds lame (way too late, not dissimilar from I am SO over you), yuppie (not invented and its evolution is too well known). Even dickhead needed to be called into question.
We discussed what the voice of the show should be. If it was to be modern, if he wanted the viewpoint of the story to be a look backwards from here and now, he would need to somehow establish that; be boldly anachronistic.
This was handled quite uniquely in the Tony award winning musical Spring Awakening, in which all the dialogue is appropriate to its late 1800’s German setting. But the music is rock music, and the lyrics and staging are current (actually, more punk than now). They sing into hand-held mikes and rock out like stars. The lyrics clearly establish this ‘out of time’ quality so that the audience knows, without question, that it is deliberate. Lyrics like: “It’s like, just kiss some ass man“, “I don’t do sadness“, and “I go up to my room, turn the stereo on…” leave no one wondering if it was a mistake, only wondering, perhaps, why.
But that’s live theater, and musicals at that. You have a lot more artistic license. Mad Men has extremely ‘period’ vocabulary. So if Weiner did this deliberately, he also did it subtly. And I am wondering why.
In the New York Times Center interview, he offers us a clue.
As my sister pointed out in her live blog that night,
Weiner’s most important quote, he says: “This is not one of those movies. This is not The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. This is about the people who watch those movies.”
Weiner talks about this very scene (from Long Weekend, btw):
She (Joan) says, I want to look like Doris Day in Midnight Lace and I want to be Kim Novak in anything.
(This is me quoting Weiner, who is paraphrasing from the episode.)
(Carry on.)
Just take the names out put in whoever it is now… nobody’s playing an attitude…the clothes change…
but it’s really take Doris Day out and put Keira Knightley in.
There are two themes that keep repeating. One is that all of these characters are really alive, not just caricatures. The other is that while in many ways we, the royal we, the global we, have changed so much since 1960, in many ways we really haven’t. Perhaps this was a little wink from Joan that she’s not so different from us, after all.
I think Matthew Weiner and his peeps are doing a tremendous job of not giving the show an appearance of self-awareness. But it is storytelling, and we, now, are the audience. And it is through that funnel that the show can be so startling. So if Weiner used one very anachronistic line to underline that to us, I’m okay with that.
January 25, 2008 at 2:18 am
I have the same issue I had with your other anachronism discussion. Take a look at he very Doris Day Movie mentioned here and you will hear her use the “so over” phrase. as you will in other songs and movies from as far back as the thirties. It is a teenage exaggeration and like many pieces of our slang is older than you think. When you assert these things you make yourself look like an expert, but no one is using anything other than their ears here. That’s not what they are doing on the show.
January 25, 2008 at 6:51 am
Hunh. Iiiinteresting. Well, that makes me want to kill myself a little.
But I won’t.
Looks like Pillow Talk and Midnight Lace this weekend.
(But I’m right about dickhead, aren’t I?)
January 25, 2008 at 9:24 am
You are such an amazing writer…
As a non-viewer, you offer quite a perspective on the show and its draw.
And your insight is, as always, attractively distinct.
Thank you for sharing it.
January 25, 2008 at 10:15 am
Monique, neither Roberta nor I are experts, and we’re not selling ourselves as such. This is a fan site. We hope an excellent fan site, but that’s for our readers to decide.
I’m sure you’re right about the movie quote; it’s been at least 2 years since I last saw Pillow Talk, and I’ve never seen Midnight Lace, but I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of your memory.
Nonetheless, the use of “so” in this way does scream “today.” It may not technically be an anachronism, but it is jarring.
Listen, I saw the movie Zodiac last night, and they were talking about faxes in the 1970s. And yes, faxes existed. And some people had them. But the rural cops made faces at the urban cops for thinking they had such high-tech stuff. Faxes existed but were out of place in 1975. I have a song recorded in the early 1930s that uses “rock and roll.” Nonetheless, it’s not a phrase that belongs in a 1930s period piece.
We’re not linguists and we’re not hunting for the earliest citation. We’re writers and we’re working from our ears for language.
Doing the research to check: Is this really an anachronism? Is fascinating, and the Gods know I really appreciate your input in that regard (that’s why blogs have comment areas; to encourage participation). But I’m not going to discount the “ear” entirely either.
January 26, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Don’t discount anything, this is a discussion, and I LOVE your blog. It’s just weird to see such confident assertions of things based on what sounds right today. It’s like thinking people didn’t say f**k or f**ker back then because it’s not in literature or movies. They did. They’ve been saying it since the 1200’s according to the OED. So our ears are unreliable. And yeah, I’m sure they make a lot of mistakes on the show. This one didn’t take me out of it personally. Love love love this blog and MAD MEN!!!
January 26, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Monique, your praise is much appreciated.
I am older than I look.
I was born in 1961, which means that no, I wasn’t speaking the vernacular of 1960, but I am not far from it. In a suburban household in the early and mid-sixties, “The Sixties” and the “groovy” and the “hippie” and all that permeated only slowly.
In the world of my youth, men no longer wore hats, but they didn’t wear jeans. Women paid careful attention to this year’s hemline, and pulled out the sewing machine obediently. Girls and boys took different classes (shop for boys, cooking for girls) and girls were not allowed to wear pants to school. So I do have a sense of it.
One thing that is important, and which you obliquely refer to, is that movies didn’t necessarily reflect slang. I’m not talking about saying fuck, I’m talking about colloquial speech. Films were expected to be somewhat more proper.
By the way, Monique, literature is much more reliable than movies in that regard. The Hayes Code didn’t touch novels, which were frank and racy. Homosexuality and abortion and all sorts of things were in the novels of the day.
January 26, 2008 at 3:39 pm
That’s a really interesting HUGE topic, the changeover from movies and TV not accurately reflecting slang to where we are now. I know that part of what has excited me about a new movie or show has been that it feels more right (to my ears, again) than anything had, previously. Sixteen Candles did that, and later, My So-Called Life, and in fact, Friends. It was the tone and vocabulary itself that was the draw.
That’s another thing that is fascinating and fresh about Mad Men (again, going back to, this isn’t one of those movies, but the people who watched them). This is the first time we are viewing this era with the slang back in place. The movies and TV of the times didn’t. Far and Away, from a few years back, tried to feel like one of those movies, not like real life. This is the first time we’re looking at what we’re looking at. The first time we’re viewing, onscreen, Betty Draper say, from within her hangover, Shit!.
January 27, 2008 at 10:30 am
Great insight.
I was just thinking about this yesterday. Arthur and I went to see Juno on Friday night (see it! See! It!) and this is a movie that has been criticized for having a too-precious, too-self-aware teen slang. But what I thought was, those critics aren’t Buffy fans.
Whedon knew that if he tried to mimic current teen slang, it would (a) not sound quite right and (b) be dated the minute the episodes aired. So instead, he invented his own teen slang, a Buffyverse slang, and it sounded fresh and right without in any way reflecting the way people talk. I thought Juno did that. It sounded right without necessarily being a study in sociological linguistics (and it passed the Bring a Real Teenager With You test).
Mad Men needs to sound right and feel right. And it does.
The reason I found “1960 I am so over you” jarring is because I actually remember when I noticed people had started saying that. “So” shifted in language.
Now, if I think about it, in the mid-1990s, “so” went from stressing adjectives (“I am so tired,” “I am so hungry”) to emphasizing verbs (I specifically remember hearing Danny Bonaduce on the radio around 1996 saying “I am SO suing” and being struck by how weird and funny that phrasing was, and discussing it with a co-worker). “I am so suing,” “I am so kicking your ass;” I don’t think these were said until the 1990s. While “over you” is not a verb, it is a slang phrase, and “so” on top of a slang phrase feels more modern than it actually is.
January 27, 2008 at 10:55 am
‘Tis true what you say about Buffy. This probably applies to all the ones I mentioned as well; when you, as the writer/creator of a movie/show/universe, develop language tone and slang that is close to reality but has the qualities (tight, insular, not-questioned), it comes off as That’s just the way we talk (only BETTER). Every fictional universe of any quality has its language; this serves as its soundtrack. I think a lot of times we like movies and shows based on liking the music. NYPD Blue and Law and Order; two New York City cop shows from around the same time period. Both felt ‘real’ in different ways. Totally different music.
Is Mad Men how they REALLY talked? Maybe kinda sorta probably mostly… as much as any show that gets it right, but again, it has a music to it.
February 6, 2008 at 1:31 pm
“The other is that while in many ways we, the royal we, the global we, have changed so much since 1960, in many ways we really haven’t. Perhaps this was a little wink from Joan that she’s not so different from us, after all.”
Soooo true … I’m with you, Deborah/Roberta.
And to prove the point, what perspective does MW give us when Joan delivers the line? Looking in the mirror.
The next line … “Shalimar?” Boom, we’re back in 1960.
Love the show. Cool blog.
DJ
September 29, 2008 at 9:10 pm
I just googled this phrase after watching the madmen dvd and being quite annoyed with the ever modern “so” sneaking in. I can’t imagine this was deliberate on the part of the creator. I can see how when reading the writer’s script this may have appeared innocuous. However, the actor’s choice when delivering the line was to accentuate the “so” in a way reflective of modern vernacular. If this were read without emphasis on the “so” it may have sounded less conspicuous.
Of course, even if the creator had missed the “so” on scirpt, he would have had the chance to edit it out…so….who knows what he was thinking. But it sure as hell took me out of the era and the story.