Penitents?

The virtues of mad men
 Driven by preppy guilt

The Serpentine One was reading John P Marquand's Wickford Point and she mentioned to me that she found it odd that Marquand is so consistent in his satire of the very society he was a part of. And it's not as if he spent his actual life rejecting this world. He came from a prominent family and married into an even more prominent one. He spent his life accumulating wealth in classic East-coast upper-middle class style and ended up living in a mansion on a property of a little under 500 acres.

There is an early Anthony Powell novel that has a line in it that I have always loved. In the story, a young writer has been dumped by his girlfriend for another writer. The appeal of the other writer is that he cares about the working class as evidenced by his embrace of Marxism. Anyway, the jilted writer says of this other guy, "Yes, he understands the working class. You can tell he does because he is making certain he'll never be a part of it." (Like a lot of Powell's dry humour, this cuts both ways.)

Marquand is of the opposite phenomenon. He spent his entire life attacking the upper-middle class culture of East Coast while simultaneously making sure he would be part of it. And it's not just him. The New Yorker's entire existence is based on mocking the very values it is most determined to uphold. After a while you begin to wonder if the whole stance of attacking their own culture isn't really a clever way of keeping the riffraff out.

Penitents
Anyway, to the second episode of Season 2 where we see this same phenomenon beginning to work itself out in the life of our various characters. We see people desperately trying to live certain kinds of life only being dragged down by guilt at ... well guilt about what exactly? And how is atonement to be achieved. This is a big theme in art these days. There is even a novel with that title.

But what exactly is sin and what is atonement?

For example, we learn in this episode that Paul Kinsey stole a typewriter from the office and sat by while a young woman was almost fired for his infraction. And yet he feels no guilt about this. What really troubles him is the sense of not being authentic. The sense that he is just a poseur playing at being a hipster.

Peggy, meanwhile, has had a  baby she has never acknowledged. But again, her entire moral interest is in fitting into the office. What troubles her is never really feeling part of it because she is a woman in a male world.

Finally, we have little Bobby who has traced a drawing out of a book and passed it off as his own work. Francine and Carlton come over for a bridge party and the incident is discussed:

Francine: The book says that they begin fibbing at this age. They want to see if they can make it come true.

Betty: I don't need a book to know what little boys do. (Followed by a significant look at Don.)

Again, the real sin here seems to be failing to be authentic. To which my answer is, but he did make it come true. He is Don Draper. Everyone who follows the show knows that. No one imagines that he is still really Dick Whitman hiding in the Don Draper role.

Old fashioned
Having taken advantage of my position of blogging in hindsight to mock those who have gotten things gloriously wrong, let me take a moment to praise Alan Sepinwall who get it right:

Don has always resisted the flash of the new. His entire career is built on older values. Again and again, he's given chances with his ad campaigns to look forward, and again and again he chooses to look back. 

And he is very old-fashioned. To return to the John P Marquand theme, Draper is very much a  convert to the east coast, upper-middle class culture. He can't afford the sort of ironic stance of Marquand. He has to embrace these values and he does.

The really nice example of which in this episode is his handling of the Mohawk Airlines issue. It's not just that Don is the only one who operates according to the old rules its the way he faces the man from Mohawk. He doesn't try and defend what has happened. He lets that man think he has betrayed the values. Imagine Pete Campbell in the same situation. He'd have blamed his colleagues and said he hadn't supported the decision. Don just takes it because that is the old east-coast way.

Which is what makes the contrast with Pete Campbell so interesting. The creators have not done much with Pete yet. The little we know is that he has consciously rejected the very values Don seeks to embrace by getting disowned by his family to pursue a career in advertising. It's an unusual sort of rebellion. Is there a historical model for him?

In this episode we learn that Pete's father died in a plane crash and seems to have died insolvent. There is an encounter with the family which is odd because no one knows how to behave. This is odd because if there is anything that is supposed to define the east-coast preppy set it is that they always know what to say and how to dress. Weiner has made them something else.

Meanwhile, Don Draper is the guy who always knows how to dress and behave and always knows what to say. The guy playing the role (Don) handles it better than the guy (Pete) who inherited it. There is a deep lesson here.

I don't think Weiner himself sees it though. For him the ultimate sin is about being inauthentic.

Nitpicks
It may be simply that he doesn't know any better.  It maybe that he has read the New Yorker and Updike and seen Margot at the Wedding and thinks he knows what it was really like based on that the way a lot of people write knowledgeably about the Vietnam war based on having seen a bunch of movies and having read Michael Herr.

There are certainly no end of weird mistakes and anomalies. Mr. Campbell is supposed to have spent his way into bankruptcy on the oysters, travel and club memberships. That's a lot of oysters. And these people didn't travel, they summered at the place their grandfather bought for $35 decades ago. Finally, the club memberships weren't that expensive. It was the initiation fees that were prohibitive precisely so that guys like Pete's dad could keep up the memberships at little cost while making it hard for others to get in.

Marquand was at least mocking a world he understood. Weiner is mocking a world that is as unreal to him as Oz.

The show also gets Catholicism wrong. First there is the simple matter of rising and going to the communion rail. Catholics just get up en masse and shuffle forward. The show has them getting up in an orderly way row-by-row like Episcopalians.

More importantly, there is Peggy's decision not to receive communion. In terms of strict theology, she does the right thing. If you have a major sin against your soul, you should not receive until you have obtained absolution. But Peggy isn't supposed to believe this, she even says this doesn't matter to her. She is only going so as to please her mother by appearing to be part of the community. But by not receiving, she is signaling that she is not in communion with the others. Once and she could tell others that she accidentally ate something before mass but week after week of not receiving and she would have everyone talking about her.

And the confessional really is absolutely secret. She doesn't actually have to confess her sin if she doesn't really believe it's a sin. Her mother and sister need never know. And Peggy Olson should both know this and be cynical enough to do it.

The problem is probably that Weiner doesn't know any better.

Season 2 blogging begins here.

The next episode blog will be here .

(Oh yeah, Season one begins here if you are interested.)