Elevator to the shallows: spatial verticality and the questionable depth of social relations in Mad Men

Abstract

Set in the world of Madison Avenue advertising during the 1960s, a century after the earliest construction of vertical lifts in New York City, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men illustrates how central the elevator has become to the urban spatial imaginary, perpetuated in part through such cultural productions as Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment (a source of inspiration for Weiner). Like Wilder’s classic comedy, Mad Men stages several interpersonal encounters inside the cramped spaces of elevator cars, which are private zones of physical and verbal intimacy as well as public areas where individuals from different social classes come together, if only momentarily. Inspired by the work of Andreas Bernard (author of Lifted, which focuses on literary and cinematic representations of elevators), I explore the contradictory aspects of this prominent yet overlooked type of human conveyance, looking at the fleeting personal exchanges that take place inside vertical lifts on Mad Men as well as on other television programs. As Bernard states, because it combines ‘freedom of access while stopped and hermetically sealed impenetrability while in motion’, the elevator cab is ripe for interpretation as a means through which to tell the story of the modern metropolis and its demographically diverse inhabitants.

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