Realism, Mimesis, and the Commodity in Season One of Mad Men

This article focuses on one scene from the episode entitled “The Wheel”, in which a machine allows the characters to time-travel, within a series which does the same. Michael Taussig’s theories on mimesis, expressed in his book Magic and Mimesis, will be used here to argue that what is being faithfully rendered in Mad Men is a particular relationship to the commodity, and the way in which the commodity is used to recapture the past. Don Draper’s epiphany in the “Carousel” scene becomes the spectator’s, and the healing power of the object is close to the impact of the series which manages to reactivate a past era for the audience