Song of the Indian Guest
Okay, it's the Season 2 premiere and Matt Weiner has a hit on his hands. This is a big change from last year when he was taking this terrible chance. So what does he do with it.
Well, he puts the words below into Don Draper's mouth. Don explains to creative how to sell Mohawk Airlines:
That Indian. That's not about the majestic beauty of the Mohawk nation. It's about adventure. Could be a pirate, a knight in shining armor, could be a conquistador getting of a boat. It's about a fantastical people who are taking you someplace you've never been.We're all terribly up to date, we don't need to be told about meta-language. These are Weiner's words to the creative staff behind Mad Men. The second season was all about Don the adventurer striking out and taking us with him. As he later says to Peggy, "You are the product—you, feeling something—that's what sells."
And just in case those hints weren't enough, when Don meets Betty coming down the stairs at the Savoy lounge, we hear Rimsky-Korsakov's "Song of the Indian Guest" as she comes down the stairs. This song comes from an opera about a man who leaves his wife in search of adventure! And this isn't the last reference to heroes who run away in search of adventure this season (there is a doozy coming in a later episode).
I'm blogging this after the fact, of course, we all know this is the real plot line and we don't have to pretend otherwise. Man searching for something only he isn't sure what it is. It seems like adventure but it also seems like home. Or, as Don reads from Frank O'Hara
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
(Funny thing, if you'd Googled "Frank O'Hara" and "writer" before this episode, you would have been asked, Do you mean John O'Hara? Soon after this episode was aired, though, all the copies of Meditations in an Emergency at the local library here were stolen.)
A man is in a bar somewhere
Although this episode begins by introducing the other characters first, it's Don Draper we are waiting for. The first mention of him is an enigmatic shot of the lock on his door being changed.
The man himself first appears in a bar. Don makes his first appearance in a bar just like last year. It's an oddly timeless bar just like last season. And Don is still the Sinatra-like anachronism still wearing the hat. The whole Mohawk airlines thing makes me think of the classic Sinatra album Come Fly With Me and the individual episodes of Season 2 are a lot like the various songs presenting different types of escapes only to discover home is where he wants to be. This is an old theme in literature. It's the theme of The Odyssey.
It's also one reading of the Bible. A people in perpetual solution of a homeland.
Ugly Betty
Don's problem (and I suspect Weiner's too) is that Don's wife is a dud. One of the great mysteries is how such an interesting guy ends up with such an incredibly vapid woman. The usual explanation—that he might have been so beguiled by her youth and beauty that he didn't notice she had little intelligence and less character—doesn't hold here because Don Draper is the kind of guy who could have done better.
And we can't really blame January Jones. Consider who unappealing Betty Draper is sexually speaking. This isn't an accident. For a woman who looks like January Jones to appear unerotic on screen is an achievement something like making water feel dry. That has to be intentional.
We get an interesting subplot in which Don and Betty meet an old roommate of hers who turns out to be a call girl. Immediately we brace ourselves for some sophomoric meditation on marriage and prostitution but Weiner turns it around brilliantly. As Betty and Francine discuss it later, it's painfully obvious that both women secretly wish they were like whores. They wish they had that power.
Actual whores don't have that power but this is what they imagine. There is something terribly right about that. I remember back in the 1980s when I was at university some feminist women I knew became all curious about but also disappointed in strippers, prostitutes and porn. They couldn't believe these women could be so ordinary as they soon discovered them to be. That is a recurring, and natural, insecurity. We all worry about others having a sexual mystique we could never achieve. Women who actually have sexual mystique and power never become whores or strippers (although not a few do become models).
What's telling about Betty (and this is hardly a flaw unique to her) is that she is more interested in her public sexual persona than actually being any good in bed. So when we see her appear at riding school or coming down the stairs at the Savoy lounge (although Rimsky-Korsakov does all the heavy lifting in the Savoy scene), she is exotic and appealing. But as soon as she takes her clothes off we begin to see that she couldn't possibly deliver on that promise.
She gives a clinic on how not to behave in the bedroom here. And then she kills it forver with the classic stupid line after the sex doesn't work for Don: "I wish you would just tell me what to do." Free advice, don't ever do this. What a man wants is for you to want. Telling him you care so little that you are willing to go through the motions to please him is the very opposite of erotic.
The point is then underlined when she orders room service. She has no idea what she wants. And when she finally settles on something, she doesn't give any thought to what he might want. His original order—Vichyssoise and a BLT—was at least an attempt to get something she'd like as well as his own preference of the sandwich. Betty, as usual, thinks only of herself.
When Don cheats on Betty again, it is with a woman who actually likes sex and has very strong desires. She doesn't need to ask herself what she wants. She wants and it shows.
And the MacGuffin?
It's the thing that everyone assumes the show is about. Culture!
It seems so important and everyone I read commenting on the show seems to think they are being terribly learned about the culture of back then and why it had to be replaced. But to repeat the point, Matt Weiner isn't even trying to get the cultural details right. Just two examples
No adman in 1962 would have said "the Mohawk nation". He would have said "tribe".
The one interior place a man was supposed to wear a hat was on the elevator (because you take up too much room if you carry it). The scene where Don makes the man telling the crude sex story take his hat off is brilliant but it wouldn't have happened on an elevator. Not to mention that people didn't talk on elevators back then.
And notice that each of the three seasons so far turns on political events not fashion or culture.
The real action is on the relationship between wanting a home and what that really means.
There is more to say about Peggy and Roger (who, as noted before is now got full status) but later. If the show can buy exotic appeal by inserting Rimsky-Korsakov tunes, so can I.
Next post is here.
(Oh yeah, Season one begins here if you are interested.)
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