The virtues in mad men
You haven't thought this through
This, of course, is the line that Don uses on Pete when Pete tries to blackmail him with his past. We might ask ourselves the very same question about the creators of this series. For example, if I'd been at the writer's meeting to discuss this episode, I would have raised the following issue:
To take the reverse order, The MacGuffin in Mad Men is Don's secret identity. The central moral point is establishing him as some sort of Moses figure who will lead people to the promised land of the 1960s. A promised land he will not, presumably, be able to enter himself.
The problem, of course, is that this is a soap opera. That means it just keeps on keeping on until it is canceled. Every season the show has to give it's all. Some individual episodes can afford to digress but the show will mostly have to revolve around this central moral issue over and over again without ever fully resolving it. Matt Weiner has come up with a neat way to deal with this in that it is the penultimate show of each season that deals with the resolution of the big conflicts. This final show is more a tableau without any particular plot advancement.
The seasons they go round and round
And thus we get the Kodak Carousel slide projector. There is a great subtle criticism of it here. "What is the benefit of this thing," asks Don. It's a very good question as there was none and yet when Kodak introduced it, everyone bought one. The reviewers at photography magazines all talked about this novelty as if it were a major technological advancement just like Kodak wanted them to. You almost wonder sometimes if the real reason for some episodes in this series isn't to put the screenwriters' quandaries about how the show should advance into the mouths of characters.
So we have a bunch of slides in this episode with no advancement or resolution.
Portraits of four marriages
First we get Pete and Trudy. Having commented endlessly about the shallowness of Pete's character, we begin to see him showing some real depth here. He's beginning to see through his father in law. Not in the sense that he is beginning to see the man as an impostor, more in the sense that he is beginning to see that some of his own desires are morally acceptable. He is beginning to see that the fact that you want something does not make that desire evil. That you you do not need to simply accept the done thing as correct.
What he fails to see, at least so far, is how much of his maturity he owes to his wife. Jane Austen makes a big point of how marrying the right person can morally improve even very unpromising people and Pete is a good example of that.
Don, interestingly enough, is at another stage of the same process. There is a lovely moment talking about the upcoming weekend with her family when Betty turns to Don and says, "I don't think you don't want to go," and he says, "I'm sorry, was I unclear about that."
Okay, it's a post feminist age and we're used to taking the desires of women as always justified and those of men as always questionable. And Don has committed the cardinal sin of not being true to his authentic identity; even worse, the sin of rejecting and hiding this identity. And yet, who could possibly not be on his side on this one?
Then there is Francine and Carlton. She confides with Betty after finding out about Carlton having an affair and Betty's reaction is all about herself. It's really quite astounding how little feeling Betty has for any other human being. Even her own children's struggles are just another excuse to focus on herself.
Finally, we have poor Harry and Jennifer Crane. It's telling that Harry is the only guy we have seen pay a significant price for his infidelity. This is perhaps because he has the only truly committed marriage of any of the characters. And thus one of those real-life truths: those who recognize their sins as sins often seem to suffer more for them. Betty's lack of virtue never leads her to suffer for her sin because she is so utterly self-centered she never sees anything as her fault. Ultimately, she loses herself. Harry suffers and suffers horribly.
An interesting side question here is how Jennifer found out about his tryst. There was nothing to stop Harry from simply lying.
Confidence
The character I will miss most in Season 4 is Ken Cosgrove. He is far more interesting than Pete Campbell to me. We have a delightful subplot concerning he and Peggy this episode, a delightfully male subplot. Ken and Peggy are auditioning women for radio spots and Peggy decides the best-looking of the women sounds most confident.
She is wrong of course. We get this lovely bit of dialogue.
I wonder if any of the female actors caught the point. It's one of those things that is perhaps more clear to men. The pursuit of sexual power through beauty ultimately buys a woman very little. And you can see it for yourself by looking at very sexy women, they, as Ken says, never behave confidently because they never are confident.
I have compared this show to a minstrel show in that we have people assuming masks to play the different part. Nowhere is this clearer than with the women. Do an image search for any of the female principals. What will strike you is the extraordinary lengths they go to to make sure that they do not look in real life like the characters they play on the show.
This is odd because one of the features of television stardom is that the character is much more famous than the actor playing the character. Typically, the person playing the role assumes aspects of the character in order to please the public (and actors, having little confidence, are usually painfully keen to please the public). Not here though. Here the characters are masks just like minstrel show characters.
A picture of unhappiness
The rest of the show is mostly devoted to showing us a picture of Don's unhappiness. And yet, and yet, and yet. What actually happens? For all the pseudo-psychological claptrap that people saddle their explanations of Don Draper with, what we see is a guy functioning and functioning very well.
I don't mind saying it again, the real effect of this show is that men want to be like Don Draper and women want to have a man like him. That is the odd conflict. If the post 1960s world is such an advance, why do we so love Don Draper and his cool behaviour? Don is not morally perfect but he shows us real virtue over and over again. It is something only he and two other characters (I'll get to them in a minute) do.
We see two crucial things here. We see creepy Betty again pursuing Glen Bishop like she was some sort of emotional child molester. I know some people read this scene as proof of how isolated and alone Betty is but, damnit, she is an adult and Glen is a child and her behaviour towards him is inexcusable. What we actually see on the screen is a little boy showing more emotional and moral maturity than a married woman. Put yourself in Helen Bishop's place, wouldn't you do just exactly as she has and keep your son from this creepy woman?
Which brings me to the other thing: the beautiful slide show and Don talking about it. What we see on the screen, of course, are portraits of happiness. What we are aware of is just how unhappy the Draper marriage is. What this show will not do—because no modern show could possibly do this—is accept the degree to which that unhappiness is the fault of Betty Draper. No, I'm not saying Don is blameless. His affairs are appalling. But we can see, even if the screenwriters cannot, that Betty Draper is a lousy wife and a lousy mother
And that is significant because, as I have said many times before, Betty Draper is not an early 1960s character. She is not typical of that era, she is typical of our era. A point that a commenter inadvertently makes below. Betty is the sort of person who expects the world to take her seriously but refuses to act in a morally serious manner. This is where the minstrel show aspect of the show pays off in a big way. Because Betty is an obvious mask, her character can afford to be more real in other ways. The twenty-something and thirty-something men and women watching this show don't have to imagine some far away time and setting to see a Betty Draper. We all have to deal with both women and men of her type now. She is 100 percent 2010.
It's Don Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway we need the show to help us visualize. These three characters—all obviously intended to be anachronistic to our world—that we admire the most. I don't think the creators pictured it working out this way. They haven't thought this through.
You haven't thought this through
This, of course, is the line that Don uses on Pete when Pete tries to blackmail him with his past. We might ask ourselves the very same question about the creators of this series. For example, if I'd been at the writer's meeting to discuss this episode, I would have raised the following issue:
Okay folks, we had this big showdown between Don and Rachel last episode. He shows up suddenly and begins talking about running away. She refuses him because this is not about being in love with her but all about him. Okay, fine. But don't you think we undermine that just a tad if we learn this next episode that Rachel has dealt with the situation by running away? That she has abandoned the store makeover that is so terribly important to her and rushed off to join a cruise?There is a larger point here as well. If you watched Dawson's Creek or any of the other new soaps that took off from it, you will know that these shows all turn on a central moral point and a MacGuffin. The central moral point of Dawson's Creek was about growing up and leaving things behind. The MacGuffin was about whether Dawson and Joey would fall in love.
To take the reverse order, The MacGuffin in Mad Men is Don's secret identity. The central moral point is establishing him as some sort of Moses figure who will lead people to the promised land of the 1960s. A promised land he will not, presumably, be able to enter himself.
The problem, of course, is that this is a soap opera. That means it just keeps on keeping on until it is canceled. Every season the show has to give it's all. Some individual episodes can afford to digress but the show will mostly have to revolve around this central moral issue over and over again without ever fully resolving it. Matt Weiner has come up with a neat way to deal with this in that it is the penultimate show of each season that deals with the resolution of the big conflicts. This final show is more a tableau without any particular plot advancement.
The seasons they go round and round
And thus we get the Kodak Carousel slide projector. There is a great subtle criticism of it here. "What is the benefit of this thing," asks Don. It's a very good question as there was none and yet when Kodak introduced it, everyone bought one. The reviewers at photography magazines all talked about this novelty as if it were a major technological advancement just like Kodak wanted them to. You almost wonder sometimes if the real reason for some episodes in this series isn't to put the screenwriters' quandaries about how the show should advance into the mouths of characters.
So we have a bunch of slides in this episode with no advancement or resolution.
Portraits of four marriages
First we get Pete and Trudy. Having commented endlessly about the shallowness of Pete's character, we begin to see him showing some real depth here. He's beginning to see through his father in law. Not in the sense that he is beginning to see the man as an impostor, more in the sense that he is beginning to see that some of his own desires are morally acceptable. He is beginning to see that the fact that you want something does not make that desire evil. That you you do not need to simply accept the done thing as correct.
What he fails to see, at least so far, is how much of his maturity he owes to his wife. Jane Austen makes a big point of how marrying the right person can morally improve even very unpromising people and Pete is a good example of that.
Don, interestingly enough, is at another stage of the same process. There is a lovely moment talking about the upcoming weekend with her family when Betty turns to Don and says, "I don't think you don't want to go," and he says, "I'm sorry, was I unclear about that."
Okay, it's a post feminist age and we're used to taking the desires of women as always justified and those of men as always questionable. And Don has committed the cardinal sin of not being true to his authentic identity; even worse, the sin of rejecting and hiding this identity. And yet, who could possibly not be on his side on this one?
Then there is Francine and Carlton. She confides with Betty after finding out about Carlton having an affair and Betty's reaction is all about herself. It's really quite astounding how little feeling Betty has for any other human being. Even her own children's struggles are just another excuse to focus on herself.
Finally, we have poor Harry and Jennifer Crane. It's telling that Harry is the only guy we have seen pay a significant price for his infidelity. This is perhaps because he has the only truly committed marriage of any of the characters. And thus one of those real-life truths: those who recognize their sins as sins often seem to suffer more for them. Betty's lack of virtue never leads her to suffer for her sin because she is so utterly self-centered she never sees anything as her fault. Ultimately, she loses herself. Harry suffers and suffers horribly.
An interesting side question here is how Jennifer found out about his tryst. There was nothing to stop Harry from simply lying.
Confidence
The character I will miss most in Season 4 is Ken Cosgrove. He is far more interesting than Pete Campbell to me. We have a delightful subplot concerning he and Peggy this episode, a delightfully male subplot. Ken and Peggy are auditioning women for radio spots and Peggy decides the best-looking of the women sounds most confident.
She is wrong of course. We get this lovely bit of dialogue.
Peggy: Say something to her. Make her feel beautiful. You know, the confidence that comes with beauty.All of this takes place in a control booth so the woman they are talking about can't hear them even though they can hear her. This is a lovely touch just like real life. The beautiful woman is always aware that she is being looked at and judged but can't know exactly what others are thinking of her. That's why Ken is correct to say "a woman who looks like that will never sound confident".
Ken: Peggy, a woman who looks like that will never sound confident because she never is confident.
I wonder if any of the female actors caught the point. It's one of those things that is perhaps more clear to men. The pursuit of sexual power through beauty ultimately buys a woman very little. And you can see it for yourself by looking at very sexy women, they, as Ken says, never behave confidently because they never are confident.
I have compared this show to a minstrel show in that we have people assuming masks to play the different part. Nowhere is this clearer than with the women. Do an image search for any of the female principals. What will strike you is the extraordinary lengths they go to to make sure that they do not look in real life like the characters they play on the show.
This is odd because one of the features of television stardom is that the character is much more famous than the actor playing the character. Typically, the person playing the role assumes aspects of the character in order to please the public (and actors, having little confidence, are usually painfully keen to please the public). Not here though. Here the characters are masks just like minstrel show characters.
A picture of unhappiness
The rest of the show is mostly devoted to showing us a picture of Don's unhappiness. And yet, and yet, and yet. What actually happens? For all the pseudo-psychological claptrap that people saddle their explanations of Don Draper with, what we see is a guy functioning and functioning very well.
I don't mind saying it again, the real effect of this show is that men want to be like Don Draper and women want to have a man like him. That is the odd conflict. If the post 1960s world is such an advance, why do we so love Don Draper and his cool behaviour? Don is not morally perfect but he shows us real virtue over and over again. It is something only he and two other characters (I'll get to them in a minute) do.
We see two crucial things here. We see creepy Betty again pursuing Glen Bishop like she was some sort of emotional child molester. I know some people read this scene as proof of how isolated and alone Betty is but, damnit, she is an adult and Glen is a child and her behaviour towards him is inexcusable. What we actually see on the screen is a little boy showing more emotional and moral maturity than a married woman. Put yourself in Helen Bishop's place, wouldn't you do just exactly as she has and keep your son from this creepy woman?
Which brings me to the other thing: the beautiful slide show and Don talking about it. What we see on the screen, of course, are portraits of happiness. What we are aware of is just how unhappy the Draper marriage is. What this show will not do—because no modern show could possibly do this—is accept the degree to which that unhappiness is the fault of Betty Draper. No, I'm not saying Don is blameless. His affairs are appalling. But we can see, even if the screenwriters cannot, that Betty Draper is a lousy wife and a lousy mother
And that is significant because, as I have said many times before, Betty Draper is not an early 1960s character. She is not typical of that era, she is typical of our era. A point that a commenter inadvertently makes below. Betty is the sort of person who expects the world to take her seriously but refuses to act in a morally serious manner. This is where the minstrel show aspect of the show pays off in a big way. Because Betty is an obvious mask, her character can afford to be more real in other ways. The twenty-something and thirty-something men and women watching this show don't have to imagine some far away time and setting to see a Betty Draper. We all have to deal with both women and men of her type now. She is 100 percent 2010.
It's Don Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway we need the show to help us visualize. These three characters—all obviously intended to be anachronistic to our world—that we admire the most. I don't think the creators pictured it working out this way. They haven't thought this through.
It's Don Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway we need the show to help us visualize. These three characters—all obviously intended to be anachronistic to our world—that we admire the most. I don't think the creators pictured it working out this way. They haven't thought this through.
ReplyDeleteYou find them more admirable than Betty? Oh MY GOD!!
Yes I do. All three are the sorts of people you can rely on in a crisis whereas Betty is a helpless feeb, a lousy mother and utterly lacking in self-awareness.
ReplyDeleteWhat is it that you find admirable about her?