Despite the best efforts of Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, America still hasn’t found its inner Tom Hanks dad who can hug it and make 9/11 all better—evidenced most recently in that film’s quickly scrapped subway ad campaign, which attempted to forge some more pleasant associations with images of the burning World Trade Center by playing them on a constant loop with a U2 song. Unfortunately that didn’t work, leading to some New Yorkers now expressing similar complaints about the new billboards for Mad Men, as seen above, which the families of 9/11 victims have branded as insensitive for the way they evoke memories of those who leapt to their death that day.
Naturally, the network has denied any such allusion, noting that the image—recognizable from the show’s opening title sequence to fans, but not so much to those who aren’t—has been in use since 2007, and is intended only “to represent a man whose life is in turmoil,” in one of those fancy college-boy “metaphors” the show likes so much. And as such, they’ve made no intimations that they plan to remove it—which isn’t surprising, considering they also haven’t addressed complaints from those who saw the show’s recent print campaign and were unwittingly reminded of the movie Mannequin. It’s still too soon.