Crashed but didn't burn

The virtues of mad men
The New Girl

The title most obviously refers to Jane Siegel the new girl at the office. Not a very interesting character but a great example of how the show works. You know Jane don't you?

I knew Jane back in university. I was foreman of a student painting crew and she was part of it. I won't say she worked for me because I don't remember her doing any work. She was unfireable because the boss liked her. To the best of my knowledge, she never had sex with the boss. She didn't need to.



I saw her again a  few years ago when I did some work for the company that employs her now. I was being given a tour of the office and we were shown the IT support group and there was my "Jane Siegel"pretending to get a lesson in how to use Excel from the IT geek while actually getting him to do her work for her.

That's how the show works; Mad Men pretends to be about back then but it's actually about right now. And the historical references all work because we all grew up under the shadow of the 1960s generation and we have all had their cultural experiences shoved down our throats all our lives.

Jane Siegel is absolutely up to date just like Betty Draper is. Only a post-feminist world could produce someone quite like her. (Which isn't to say there weren't people sort of like her before, she is just more like the current variation on the type than she is like the pre-feminist variation.)

The other new girl
The new girl we all care about is Peggy Olson and the title is really the excuse for a whole lot of retroactive context. We learn a whole lot about the relationship between Peggy and Don. We get fresh insight into why he is such a father figure for her.

Peggy being pregnant but denying it even to herself to herself in Season 1 is all just cover for the abortion plot line the show's creators don't dare run. There was a recent case, BTW, of a body builder being pregnant and not knowing it until she went into labour, so it can happen. No doubt the crack research team verified that before Weiner allowed the sub plot in.

But the really important thing is not the pregnancy and the birth but the denial. After it has happened, Peggy behaves more like a woman trying to deal with guilt of having had an abortion. The Peggy Olson story is really a Peggy Atwood story and the nice college graduates who watch the show  have all had Surfacing or one of its many derivatives shoved down their throat at one time or another. Even one of the Alien sequels was really about post-abortion guilt.

And here the writers have made good use of the material they had. Here they use an accident Don Draper has while driving drunk as a pretext to reset the context of last season retroactively. There is a problem though and it's a big one.

Pleasantville
The thing about a television show, any television show, is that everything snaps back to normal again next episode. The characters can have any adventure the writers want but next episode starts with everyone back where they started. And thus Don can take off with Bobbi Barrett and wreck the car, get charged with drunk driving and have to call Peggy to (literally) bail him out and yet nothing about their lives really changes.

It's like a rock song. The harmony is static so the lyrics can never really go anywhere. We can get seventy-two verses of extra detail but in the end the singer is still stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.

Still, it's so nice to see a car roll off the road and down a hill and not burst into flames. They always seem to in movies even though they rarely do in real life.

Anyway, Don (rather too passively to be really believable) comes when Bobbi calls and they have a discussion in the bar and then ride out to her beach place to have sex on the sand only they wreck the car and end up in the drunk tank. That part is boring. The really good stuff is what Bobbi says in the bar. She talks about how she broke out of being just a housewife to become her husband's manager. It's a great story of self-liberation.

It's a much better story than Peggy's actually. It pretty much has to be because Peggy has to keep on being Peggy whereas Bobbi is only around for the season. There is a lovely bit where, after telling Don how she did it, Bobbi says,

"This is America, pick a job, then become the person who does it."

Later, she will repeat this thought in other words to Peggy,

"You have to start living the life of the person you want to be." 

I  know, consider the source. But the source isn't a real person, the source is just an actor playing a part and this is actually terribly good advice. It is exactly what Don has done and it is what Peggy needs to do.

And biography is irrelevant here. This is televisionland so everything has to be bigger just like it does in porn. But that bigness is just for visual efect. You don't have to built like a porn star to have really great sex and you don't have to have a secret identity like Don Draper to remake your life.

Consider the car wreck. The car doesn't need to get wrecked for this plot to work. They could just have been weaving down the road and been pulled over by a police officer. That would actually have been considerably more lifelike. What really happens here is that everything gets exaggerated without, as I say, actually being blown up.

So lets review the plot again. This episode is really about women living in our decade. They go to university (Jane Siegel is, we are told, a college girl) they do binge drinking, have irresponsible sex, flash their breasts and lingerie all over the place just like Jane.  They impulsively have sex with men and are deeply hurt when this sex does not make the men love them as Peggy did with Pete Campbell. Maybe they have even had an abortion they feel guilty about.

Now they are in the workforce and they are faced with impostor syndrome. How do I make it? They could dress like sluts in the office just like they have been doing at university but somehow they know better. Well, they watch Mad Men and get some terribly good advice:

Pick a job and become the person who does Pick a life and become the person who lives it.

That is good solid advice. Forget all that crap their parents believed about figuring out who you really are and what your values really are. Look around you and see the people you really admire and then figure out how to become the sort of person who lives their life.

Small stuff
When we see the inside of Peggy's apartment, it has African art just as Pete and Trudy Campbell's apartment has. There is even a nice cut from a scene with the art behind Peggy to one with the art behind Pete.

So Peggy likes the same sort of African art that Pete does. Or did that work the other way around. Does Pete have this stuff on the wall of his apartment with Trudi because he saw it on the wall of Peggy's bedroom? There are a lot of ways to be unfaithful and only a few of them involve sex.

There is also a nice cut where the camera in Peggy's apartment goes behind a a big ugly armchair and the screen goes black. It's a nice bit of visual vocabulary. Whether we have been conscious of it or not, this is always a prelude to the camera coming up behind Don or a Don surrogate.

And when the camera does come up behind Don we are back in the hospital where Peggy is being held because the doctors don't believe she is mentally competent because she is still in denial about having been pregnant and giving birth. Here is a bit of their conversation,

"What do they want you to do."

"I don't know."

"Yes you do. Do it. Do whatever they say. Peggy, listen to me. Get out of here. And move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened."

There is a perfection to that. It's not true, of course, but it explains the tie between these characters perfectly. This is how they both deal with crises. And not just them.

Season 2 blogging begins here.

The next episode blog will be here.

(Season one begins here if you are interested.)