Studiously Uncool (2)

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

NB: I think that the fairly obvious goal of the creators of Mad Men, to, as the NYT put it, explain "why the 1960s had to happen" will not be met.  I think that the narrative got away from them and it got away right from the beginning. However, I think in failing, they have inadvertently done something else very right. 


The very fact that the NYT felt the 1960s needed to be justified tells us that something has begun to unravel. What I think the series does is to track a cultural tragedy. It does so successfully because it gives us two prime representatives of male virtue who by their very style expose the emptiness of the boomer moralistic fantasies about themselves. 


At this point, there are two Mad Men. There is the pathetic shallow failure it most likely will end up being or there is the potential triumph it might pull off against all odds.

Falling Man
The credits are perfect. The reference to the Falling Man is audacious but spot on. And it tells us something very important about the show to follow. This is not just a series about the 1960s. It is a looking back to try to make sense of events. No matter what the creators think they are doing, Mad Men is and only can be an attempt at theodicy. Like Chronicles and Kings in the Bible it is an attempt to give moral meaning to a catastrophe. Far from justifying the 1960s, it has to tell us how our culture went wrong beginning in the 1960s. If it doesn't do this, the series will fall apart.

The guy who plays Pete Campbell summed it up perfectly in this quote to the NYT:

“There is a large portion of America that doesn’t feel about America the way we did in 1960, and I think we want to know why we don’t,” said Mr. Kartheiser, 29. “We want to know what went wrong.”

I don't know where the "we" comes from here as Vincent Kartheiser wasn't born in the 1960s, but he is right. That is what the show is about: Why did God allow his chosen people to be slain by barbarians?




Make it another Old-fashioned, please.
The bar in the opening scene is interesting. It's fuzzy, a little distant. It might be, as one critic claims, a high class bar but I doubt it. (She also reports Draper as drinking Manhattans—a girlie drink—so it's pretty obvious she doesn't have a clue anyway.) The really interesting thing about the bar where we first meet Don Draper is that it shows a culture that was developed over several decades. This is a 1950s bar but the style we see here has traces of the 1940s, 1930s and 1920s. And it is a culture where Don Draper doesn't really fit. We see him as an isolated figure—like someone out of an Edward Hopper painting. This feeling is enhanced by separating Don from the crowd. He is isolated and alone and we first see him from behind. The cigarette smoke in the place has made the background blue-grey so it looks to us like the other customers are as distant as mountains seen from the plains.

And he starts a conversation with a black man who is working as a busboy. That's an important touch. This man is an older man and he has been working all his life and he is still on the bottom. When his boss sees he is talking to Don he rushes in thinking that "Sam" (only one name and a diminutive at that and is it his real name?) might be bothering the customer.

Midge
 The bar scene ends with Don Cherry singing that all he wants is "a band of gold to prove that you are mine." Draper surveys the bar, and it is clear that he is the only person alone and seemingly the only unhappy person in the place.

With that image and refrain in our heads, the very next thing we see is Don Draper knocking on a door and that door being opened by a woman we will soon know as Midge Daniels and most decidedly not as Mrs. Don Draper. (Nit pick: The camera pans back to show us this is an older, slightly seedy building but the paint is, while old, unblemished. Next episode, we will see it again and the paint will be all peeling.)

Don is upset about the challenge he has due to new restrictions on tobacco advertising. At one point he says "No more, low tar, low nicotine, filter trip ...." That, quite frankly, is crap. Cigarette ads bragging about low tar, low nicotine, filters, light taste were still running decades after 1960s. Don't believe me? Check this ad from the 1980s out. There are hundreds more like it.

To some extent, events seen from a distance are like objects seen from a distance: everything gets compressed and things seems closer together than they really are. That said, there is no excuse for this. This tells us something really important about the attitude this series takes towards historical accuracy: They aren't even trying to get it right. We need to keep that in mind. Every minute of "history" this series is reworked to make a moral point.

There is, as lots of people have noticed, one aspect of history the series does get right and that is style. Someone, I can't remember who, once said that Hollywood always gets the historical costumes and décor right and everything else wrong, and that is more or less what happens in Mad Men.

There are two really important things about this scene with Midge. The first is that she sets the pattern for the kind of women Don Draper will fall in love with: independent, smart, fast-talking brunettes with jobs. The second is that Don Draper is not happily married. We don't know for certain yet that he is married the first time we see this scene but we do know that, whatever his status, he can't be happy. He even goes so far as to say he should marry Midge. At which point she makes it clear how little that idea appeals to her by kicking him out.

(NitPick: it's is odd that Don steps out of bed with a woman he has been having sex with wearing boxer shorts. They had no trouble showing us enough of the sheet slipping to confirm that she is naked.)

Peter Campbell and Peggy Olson
I won't say much about Peggy for now other than to note that "Peggy Olson" with it's echoes of Jimmy Olsen is perfect.

Pete Campbell, OTOH, is an odd duck, clearly set up to give us bad feelings about his character. Ken Cosgrove tells us that compared to Campbell, he is a boy scout. Just in case we might think Campbell is a smooth operator, we quickly learn that he is socially clumsy with men and only a few degrees short of a rapist in his dealings with women.

Oddly, that is perfect for Peggy who, clearly looking to get rid of her innocence as quickly as possible—and I wouldn't be surprised to find her virginity as well—has sex with him this episode.

Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway
And now we meet the second and third most important characters in the series. I don't think the creators planned it that way and that is interesting. I don't think they even planned for Don Draper to be quite as admirable as he has turned out to be. What he and the other two have in common is charisma. Every time one of them enters a scene, it sparkles. If we can't at least hope to see one of them soon, we'll give up.

Why is that? I don't think it is entirely to the actors credit. All three are good but they have also been given really good characters to work with and here I think we begin to see the series slipping away from its creators control for all three are characters of the past and not of the coming 1960s. More on that as we go along.

For now, we can just note the interesting parallel that both Roger and Joan are mentors and that neither is particularly cuddly about it. They encourage their charges by scaring them.

Okay, one more detail. One thing I don't think the creators anticipated, is that the relationship between Roger and Don is the most important one in the series. It is far more important than the relationship Draper has with his wife or any of his lovers. And that is because, whether intentionally or not, this is a show about male virtue. The creators very successfully establish that Joan Holloway and Betty Draper (whom we have not met yet) are types whose day has past and a good thing too. With Don and Roger, the feeling is exactly the opposite; we think, how did we ever lose this?

I know some readers will be not feel much admiration for them but, if you don't, ask yourself a  question. Can you imagine a boy in his late teens or early twenties seeing this show and deciding he wants to be like Don Draper or Roger Sterling? It's not hard is it? Now ask yourself whether there is a single female character you can imagine girl in her late teens or early twenties wanting to model herself on? Why not?

Salvatore Romano
 The show makes one ghastly misstep in Salvatore. Everything about this character and the actor playing him is wrong. A gay man passing in 1960s would do the part flawlessly. He'd have to. Anything less than perfect would have been physically dangerous. Bryan Batt plays Salvatore as a queen in a  suit. He is so obviously gay it hurts.

Before casting the part, Matt Weiner should have spent a lot of time watching the video below and he should have made it clear to anyone auditioning that they should watch it too.



That is what a gay man successfully passing as straight in the early 1960s looked like.

By the way, there is also a great missed opportunity. Instead of a gay Italian guy passing as straight, they should have gone with a gay Jewish guy passing as both straight and a WASP. It would have been perfect. Oh well.

(NitPick: When Salvatore feels the need to prove is manhood at one point he does so by asserting that he is Italian. In 1962 he wouldn't have. By the values of that era being anything less than 100 percent American would have made him more suspect, not less, and Salvatore would have known that.)

Rachel Mencken
Rachel isn't identical to Midge. Because besides going for smart and independent, Don also goes for women who share a quality with him. A quality Rachel Mencken will soon identify.

Don Draper and Rachel Mencken play the single most important bit of dialogue in this show. It begins with Don asking Rachel why she isn't married. She gives a number of reasons but goes on to say it is because she has never been in love and let's go from there.

"'She won''t get married because she has never been in love'. I think I wrote that; it was used to sell nylons."

"For a lot of people love isn't just a slogan."

"Oh, you mean love, you mean big lightning bolt to the heart where you can't eat and you can't work  and you just run off and get married and make babies. The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't exist. What you call 'love' was invented by guys like me to sell nylons."

"Is that right?"

 "I'm pretty sure about it. You're born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget."

And we might wonder why he never forgets.

The most important thing here, however, is that this is a guy whose life is about virtue and not modern duty and rule morality.He is resisting rules and he isn't "cool" about it.

The second most important thing here is that Don has had several opportunities to tell Rachel that he is married and has let every one of them go by. In the last scene, where we find out for the first time that he is married and has children, we can safely assume that he is unhappily married. Don is the sort of guy who tries to do the right thing all the time, despite his lack of enthusiasm for rules, so he won't leave Betty but he doesn't like her right from the start. How aware he is of this and how aware his creators are of it, we don't know.

Here I think the show blunders into the truth because, for all the gestures in the direction of feminism taken here, it is men who start the sexual revolution. It is because men were unhappy with the range of roles open to women that things started to change. Feminism was very much a response to this culture: a very powerful response but a response.

Finally, there is the quality Rachel says she sees in Don and the quality that all of the women Don Draper really loves, as opposed to his wife whom he does not love, share. I'll let her say it:

"I don't think I realized it until this moment, but it must be hard being a man too."

"Excuse me?"

"Mr. Draper, I don't know what it is you really believe in, but I do know what it feels like to be out of place, to be disconnected, to see the whole world laid out in front of you the way other people live it. There is something about you that tells me that you know it too."

Flash back to the end of the opening scene in the bar. There was Don, disconnected, surveying the bar and seeing the world laid out if front of him the way other people live it. This is what Don Draper is about.

If you are joining me here, this series starts here.

The next post in the series is here.