Mad Men: Season 5 poster controversy

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On September 11, 2001, Richard Drew took a picture. He was a photographer for the Associated Press, and he'd been dispatched to downtown New York, where the twin towers of the World Trade Center were on fire — were, indeed, already ruins, even before they fell. When he staked out his place near the police perimeter, however, Drew focused not on the fire but on the falling. People were jumping out of the towers in droves, and after they jumped, they fell. Drew pointed his lens at them and followed them down. He shot them en masse and he shot them individually, and at 9:41 AM he shot a man in a white shirt and black pants tumbling in the air, scrambling in the air, but appearing to manage one blessed moment of consonance before completing his fall out of the camera's view. This photograph — the photograph of a man falling 1,000 feet headfirst somehow righting himself before joining the ruin — is the photograph that appeared the next day in the New York Times and in newspapers all over the world. It had no title, and after readers protested its publication, it was withdrawn from view.

Six years later, AMC broadcast the first episode of its drama about the Golden Age of Madison Avenue, Mad Men. The title sequence portrayed a man — the stark silhouette of a man — in a suit and a tie, falling from the window of an office tower. Was the image a reference to Drew's photograph? Absolutely. Did the entire show exist within the peculiar set of quotation marks that 9/11 furnished, and travel back 50 years in order to reckon obliquely with the last ten? It did, which accounts for the almost forensic nature of our fascination with it. The show doesn't merely begin with a sequence portraying a man's fall. The show begins with a man's fall to tell us that it's about a man's fall — to tell us that as it begins, it will also end.

And now AMC stands weirdly accused of making reference to 9/11, in its promotional poster for Mad Men's fifth season, set to commence on Sunday, March 25. On the one hand, the poster is merely a continuation of the art that has accompanied the show since its inception — a bit of shorthand that refers as much to the viewing public's impatience to get Mad Men back after its extended hiatus as it does to the existential consequences of Dick Whitman impersonating a dead man named Don Draper. At the same time, the poster dispenses with the corporate context specific to Mad Men, indeed with context altogether, and, by concentrating on one falling man, seems out to remind viewers that the show is really about the Falling Man... that for all its American-Century trappings, it's set squarely in the age of American decline.

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