Exploitative

The virtues of mad men
Maidenform
I've noticed watching this series again that it's a bad sign when the makers feel the need to use a contemporary song. It's not just that there are lots of great songs from the period they could have used whereas the contemporary tune they picked is an insufferable piece of crap bad enough to make you wish you could ship the group responsible back to be tried under the legal system of  Nicholas I. It's rather that the choice is a dead give away that the writers are lazily imposing their own values on the past rather than even trying to understand how another era might have been or how the people in it might have thought.

For example, there is a fashion show at a country club during this episode. The models featured are all a little chubby. Ah yes, those fifties women so much fatter than today's women. All the available data shows that baby boomer women grew up to be 10 to fifteen percent fatter than their mothers and that the current generation have the highest levels of obesity in history but the important thing is to flatter the pride of the generation watching the show.



But that is nothing compared to one extraordinarily crude moment. Pete Campbell meets a lingerie model who has been auditioning for a spot in the Playtex campaign that is the centerpiece of the episode. She takes him to her place and turns on the television so that her mother, whom she lives with won't hear her daughter having sex.

The narrator on the television show (Godfrey?) reads the poem "High Flight" while the couple make out. As the poem reaches the final lines, Pete goes up the woman's skirt, reaching his hand between her thighs so that, just as the narrator says "touched the face of God", Pete is touching her ... well, I'm sure you can figure it out.

This isn't an accident. The scene is carefully edited to make sure that the two things coincide. So the question we have to ask ourselves is, which era has the cruder, more exploitative attitude towards women: the early 1960s or the era that carefully constructed this scene in an attempt to show us how bad they were "back then"?

Jackie and Marilyn
And does anyone on the staff actually watch their own show? The campaign put forward for Playtex contrasts two supposedly archetypal women: Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. Okay, even if we forget that Jackie was famous for being elegant and was nobody's idea of a  sex symbol. Has anyone noticed that the show we are watching is based on the contrast between an ice-queen blonde WASP who is beautiful but clearly a disappointment sexually and a series of independent brunettes who all come from somewhere just outside respectable society. (So far we have had a Bohemian artist, a Jewess and a former dancer and next season we get a sort of proto-flower child.) There is also the contrast between Betty who has never grown up because she hasn't had to and Don's other lovers who all grew up early because they did have to.

Does that sound anything like Marilyn Monroe-Jackie Kennedy? Neither of those women ever grew up and in both cases the sexual image appears to have been more meaningful than the reality (they are both Betty Drapers).

The contrast we have actually seen on the show is not like that at all. It's far closer to the thirties contrast between Ginger Rogers (the Right Bank girl) and Myrna Loy (left bank). If they'd really wanted to pick a matchup that would have made sense in that period, they should have gone with Grace Kelly (conventional) versus Audrey Hepburn (convention-breaking). Especially given the trouble they have already gone to connect Betty Draper with Grace Kelly.

But Marilyn and Jackie are the women from the early 1960s that later generations obsess about so that is what we get. Unfortunately, the contrast there is, as Paul Kinsey rightfully points out, between Cherry (Marilyn) and Vanilla (Jackie), which is to say two kinds of sexual illusion. The entire show up until now has been about another contrast, between an illusion men may think they want to marry and the sort of women they'd rather actually have sex with.

By the way, when Peggy rightfully senses that the supposed binary Jackie-Marilyn comparison doesn't include her, Don suggests Irene Dunne. This is perfect because it is wrong. Irene Dunne was from another era at that point, and we quickly learn that the suggestion only makes sense to Freddy Rumsen. The other guys don't know who Don is talking about. But it is just the sort of comparison an older guy would come up with in such a situation.

Unfortunately, Dunne was a brilliant comic actress and that only highlights the mediocrity of Elizabeth Moss in the part of Peggy. But, unlike Bryan Batt, she at least has a good part to play and that makes up for a lot (although you do have to wonder how much more the writers could have done with her character if they'd had more talent to work with).

Easily the worst show in the series so far.

I think the makers knew this too. One thing this episode does is keep teasing us with scenes that feel like they have to end with a flashback to Don's earlier life but then failing to come through. We get the flashback next episode. They knew they were just coasting, just filling time until they got back to the important issues.

And there is also this interesting summary of  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence from Pete Campbell, "It goes along for a while and then it takes a turn and ends up exactly where you thought it was going.

If only this episode had managed that. It keeps threatening to make a turn and ends up going nowhere at all. We end up with Don staring at himself and ominous music playing.

The virtue question
Don leaves Bobbie in this episode. It's an odd moment because she makes up some lie about having heard how great he is from some other woman. Don quickly sees that she is trying to reduce him to her level and walks out.

That isn't what the writers intend us to see. They imagine that Don is actually upset because others, including Bobbie, see him correctly and that pains him. As I've said before, that is the central assumption behind the creation of the show: that the worst thing you can be is inauthentic. But, over and over again, the show proves unintentionally otherwise. Don Draper is a convincing example of virtue.

By the way, in the exchange with Don, Bobbie delivers the line that would have made the basis of a far better Playtex ad: "I wanted it and I got it and it's better than they said."

Season 2 blogging begins here.

The next episode blog will be here when there is a next episode.

(Season one begins here if you are interested.)