The story-telling conventions Mad Men uses come from two sources—soap operas and comic books. That isn't surprising because the audience for this show grew up on soap operas like Dawson's Creek and movies based on comic books like Batman and Spiderman.
They also grew up on a steady diet of 1960s mythology from their parents and their university professors.
Retcon, for example, is probably the most common literary device. The context of facts is constantly being retroactively defined or redefined. Comic books and soap operas use this technique over and over again because they are making it up as they go along. They have characters and plot lines but—unlike a novel, movie or even a mini-series—they aren't headed for an ending. As a result, they tend to chew the same mythological ground over and over again. Retelling their own stories in new contexts.
Are the creators of Mad Men making it up as they go along? To some extent, yes, but not completely.
The significance of the title
So, what do we make of the title of this episode?
They actually use one piece of music from Figaro. Did they pick "Voi che sapete" simply because it sounds pretty the way "O mio babbino caro" keeps showing up in movies and television shows are are they more deliberate about it than that?
It's more complicated than it seems because, while some aspects of the Mozart opera do fit this episode, they actually fit some later episodes even better. It's as if they mean to introduce some themes here and then play around with them for the rest of the season.
Who is supposed to be Figaro in this episode anyway?
The opera contrasts two marriages. We have, the Count and Countess whose marriage is not going so well and is meant to represent the jaded outlook of a couple who've been through it. And we have Figaro and Susanna who are young and optimistic and about to get married.
And who is have Cherubino? Cherubino is just a page—so young his role in the opera is taken by woman to indicate his voice hasn't changed. I mention Cherubino because "Voi che sapete" is his song. He is in love or something with the Countess. he isn't really sure what it is but it is sweeping over him. We get a likely candidate for that role but not in this episode.
I'm ignoring the obvious question: who is Don Draper? I'm ignoring it mostly because he doesn't easily fit into the Figaro context. Where he does fit—as Harry Crane suggests to Pete Campbell—is in Batman. That point is underlined when Rachel is selecting cuff links for Don and picks ... Medieval Knights! Figaro signals the beginning of an enlightened era and everything about Don suggests a dark knight who operates according to standards of virtue from an older, darker era.
The Great Divide
This episode fits Figaro in that all takes place in one day and it does concern marriages and a various attitudes towards them. We have all sorts of cynical remarks and jokes and we have the presence of a divorced woman.
The episode divides almost in half between Don's life in the city and his life at home. The city part is actually about four minutes longer than the home part but the home part feels longer. This isn't surprising as it features Betty Draper and the story drags every time she makes an appearance.
Besides being an unsatisfactory character, she just doesn't seem to belong in Don's life. And that is one of the more interesting holes in the plot. The series will relentlessly retroactively reset the context of all sorts of aspects of Don's life but it doesn't do much with his relationship with Betty before their marriage. How did these two actually fall in love in the first place? We find out how they met and what they were doing at the time but we are never given any explanation of how they fell in love.
More precisely, we never find out why Don Draper fell in love with Betty. As we meet her she is dull, slow-witted, manipulative and neurotic. Despite being beautiful, she has as much eroticism as Liberace. We have no trouble at all seeing why Don cheats on her and no trouble at all seeing just how the women he has affairs with are more attractive to him than her.
What is left entirely to our imagination is, well, let me let Jane Austen ask the question:
[Mrs. Allen] was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them.Of course, Mrs. Allen is an incidental character in Northanger Abbey so that is enough context for that story. Betty Draper is supposed to be more than that. And yet, she never is.
And I'll think leave it there for now—all sorts of questions, no answers.
Peter
Oh yeah, Pete Campbell. There is an odd little recurring theme that occurs around Campbell. He always gets the trends right. The Volkswagen ad. negative campaigning, youth market, black market ... he always calls it right before anyone else does. At first glance, he is also the obvious Figaro character—that is to say the obvious one to represent positive social change-except that he is a creep. Every time the writers of this show want a character to express the emerging social attitudes—the ones that many fans want to believe had to come about because the old era was "soooo awful"—they put the new ideas in the mouth of this repulsive little slimeball.
Do the creators mean to be subversive? My guess is that the series is going to fail at justifying the 1960s because it's own creators have failed to see they are actually tracking a cultural tragedy. But maybe they do know it. Maybe the plan all along is to blow apart boomer mythology.
Nitpicking
There is lots of little things wrong, by the way. Others have already pointed out that while middle-class people did correct other people's children in the early 1960s but they never hit them. And even when middle-class people did punish their own kids, they never slapped them across the face.
The playhouse is wrong too. Sorry but I lived in that neighbourhood, Don Draper would have either built from a plan in a magazine or hired someone to build it. He would not have gone with prefab.
Magazines, by the way, are handled all wrong. The men at the agency should be devoted Esquire readers and I haven't seen a single mention of it. The only guy who seems to read Playboy is Salvatore who is obviously supposed to be over-compensating to hide his being gay. Whether modern viewers like theidea or not, reading Playboy was a normal thing to do in the 1960s and a lot of important ideas got aired in that magazine first. They did well to mention Reader's Digest in episode one but magazines are a major cultural influence in this period. You'd never guess that watching the show.
If you are joining me here, this series starts here.
The next post in the series is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment