The virtues of mad men
The Gold Violin
Ah, the gold violin: perfect in every way except you can't play music on it. Deep don't you think? Me neither. Although it did make me think of Betty Draper.
Is the Rothko in this episode real? I'm sure the answer to that is on-line somewhere. Oddly I can't bring myself to care the tiny little bit it would take to find out.
Okay, a brief digression about Serge Gainsbourg. Gainsbourg dreamed of being a writer of serious jazz-influenced French chanson. For a while he was stuck in a hit-factory writing pop songs for young girl stars. He'd be given a concept based on some English-language hit and told to crank out the French language equivalent.
One day, probably inspired by the Chordettes hit Lollipop, one of the suits told Gainsbourg to write an innocent kiddies song about a girl who likes lollipops. That would be "sucettes" en Français. Gainsbourg complied and produced a song that somehow got all the way to the top of the pops before the record exces realized he'd heavily larded the song with oral sex references. A little less funny is that the young woman who sang it also didn't make the connection until she was a national laughing stock.
This episode features a Serge Gainsbourg song called Couleur Café (originally all about the joys of inter-racial sex) with rewritten lyrics so as to be a jingle for Martensen's coffee.
I mention this because it provides a nice reminder of what 1960s youth rebellion was really about. Teens and young adults had unprecedented wealth and freedom and that led to a bit of a cultural explosion. It was mostly a lot of sex, drugs and rock and roll accompanied by a fair amount of acting out and an explosion of juvenile crime.
Matt Weiner, as I have mentioned before, likes to think about the 1960s in purely political terms. The cultural stuff is just decoration for him, the really important sixties references are always the political ones. And thus we have a mention of the Port Huron statement here and that—not the baroque opulence of 1960s teendom—that is given as the inspiration for the new youth-oriented advertising.
Not surprisingly, fiction based on Weiner's confused and incoherent understanding of the 1960s turns out to be pretty confusing itself. For starters, read the the Port Huron Statement (make sure you have a big bottle of painkillers handy it's painfully badly written) and try and figure out what it has to do with anything at all in this episode. And how does it connect with the Martensen's jingle?
It doesn't. So we have another episode of pure filler that serves only to set us up for something coming. We get a bit more teaser on the next big Don Draper flashback and we get some interesting insight into Jane Siegel.
Youth rebellion
The one credible example of youth rebellion in the episode is Jane Siegel convincing some of the guys to sneak into Bert Coopers office to see his new Rothko. Joan Holloway finds out about it and confronts Jane. A really fascinating scene in which both Joan and Jane are revealed to be rather ugly personalities ensues and Joan fires Jane.
Oddly enough, when Jane outsmarts Joan by going up and crying to Roger to get her job back, my sympathy was entirely with Jane. Not because there is anything admirable about her—there isn't—but because Joan was so petty and creepy.
One of the best things about this series is that it scatters a lot of dots around and leaves it for us to connect them. The whole nature of the Jane-Joan relationship is one of these. Last episode the theme was mirrors. People seeing themselves reflected back in mirrors and in others and not liking what they saw. And how could Joan not see herself in Jane? Jane is crasser—not to mention younger and better looking—than Joan but she wants the same things in life. We see this in her persistent refusal of the younger executives. She wants the big time.
That's the virtue point in this episode. The end you aim at is the single most important determinant of your virtues. Joan is confronted with a character with exactly the same understanding of happiness and she really, really doesn't like her.
[Roger, by the way, has an odd code of his own. He asks Jane where she lives and she tells him to spy in her file. He refuses to do so. That's a nice touch, for all the creator's obvious distaste for Roger there is a real moral code at work here and we are free to disagree with them about his moral worth.]
Weiner and the rest of the team don't seem to see is that Jane is the convincing face of youth rebellion here. Joan Holloway represents everything that young women of that era hated. And because he doesn't see it, he lets a tremendous opportunity go to waste. For better or for worse, when the Jane Siegel's came up against the Joan Holloway's the Jane Siegel's triumphed. Not on this show, however.
Worse, the Rothko episode is mostly here as a lead up to a painfully stereotypical scene in which Ken and Sal connect over the Rothko. I love television where the gay character always comes to see what he really is by a slow realization that he is "different'.; difference always consisting non-sexual things such as a love for Broadway shows and serious art and interior decoration. Pardon me for being so crude but I can't help but think that realizing you are gay is far more a matter of realizing that you are sexually attracted to other men.
Jimmy "Seinfeld" Barrett
Jimmy Barrett is another one of those characters that doesn't belong in the era because he is really from our time. He is like a character from Seinfeld. Indeed, dare I say it, the resemblance in character to Jerry Seinfeld himself is astounding. He is amoral, nihilistic and yet also emotionally childish running around getting upset and hurt when other people treat him in the same mocking yet manipulative way he does them.
Here he acts all hurt and tells Betty about the affair that Bobbie and Don had. Then he confronts Don about it. It would be convincing if we could rid ourselves of the suspicion that Jimmy knew all along and allowed it to go ahead to help him get his TV deal. Instead it looks like he pimped out his own wife and wants now to have the moral righteousness of the innocent victim too.
What Don has done is, of course, reprehensible and we're now set up to see what will come of it too bad we had to sit through two absolutely crap episodes now for about ten minutes of actual plot development.
Season 2 blogging begins here.
The next episode blog will be here.
(Season one begins here if you are interested.)
The Gold Violin
Ah, the gold violin: perfect in every way except you can't play music on it. Deep don't you think? Me neither. Although it did make me think of Betty Draper.
Is the Rothko in this episode real? I'm sure the answer to that is on-line somewhere. Oddly I can't bring myself to care the tiny little bit it would take to find out.
Okay, a brief digression about Serge Gainsbourg. Gainsbourg dreamed of being a writer of serious jazz-influenced French chanson. For a while he was stuck in a hit-factory writing pop songs for young girl stars. He'd be given a concept based on some English-language hit and told to crank out the French language equivalent.
One day, probably inspired by the Chordettes hit Lollipop, one of the suits told Gainsbourg to write an innocent kiddies song about a girl who likes lollipops. That would be "sucettes" en Français. Gainsbourg complied and produced a song that somehow got all the way to the top of the pops before the record exces realized he'd heavily larded the song with oral sex references. A little less funny is that the young woman who sang it also didn't make the connection until she was a national laughing stock.
This episode features a Serge Gainsbourg song called Couleur Café (originally all about the joys of inter-racial sex) with rewritten lyrics so as to be a jingle for Martensen's coffee.
I mention this because it provides a nice reminder of what 1960s youth rebellion was really about. Teens and young adults had unprecedented wealth and freedom and that led to a bit of a cultural explosion. It was mostly a lot of sex, drugs and rock and roll accompanied by a fair amount of acting out and an explosion of juvenile crime.
Matt Weiner, as I have mentioned before, likes to think about the 1960s in purely political terms. The cultural stuff is just decoration for him, the really important sixties references are always the political ones. And thus we have a mention of the Port Huron statement here and that—not the baroque opulence of 1960s teendom—that is given as the inspiration for the new youth-oriented advertising.
Not surprisingly, fiction based on Weiner's confused and incoherent understanding of the 1960s turns out to be pretty confusing itself. For starters, read the the Port Huron Statement (make sure you have a big bottle of painkillers handy it's painfully badly written) and try and figure out what it has to do with anything at all in this episode. And how does it connect with the Martensen's jingle?
It doesn't. So we have another episode of pure filler that serves only to set us up for something coming. We get a bit more teaser on the next big Don Draper flashback and we get some interesting insight into Jane Siegel.
Youth rebellion
The one credible example of youth rebellion in the episode is Jane Siegel convincing some of the guys to sneak into Bert Coopers office to see his new Rothko. Joan Holloway finds out about it and confronts Jane. A really fascinating scene in which both Joan and Jane are revealed to be rather ugly personalities ensues and Joan fires Jane.
Oddly enough, when Jane outsmarts Joan by going up and crying to Roger to get her job back, my sympathy was entirely with Jane. Not because there is anything admirable about her—there isn't—but because Joan was so petty and creepy.
One of the best things about this series is that it scatters a lot of dots around and leaves it for us to connect them. The whole nature of the Jane-Joan relationship is one of these. Last episode the theme was mirrors. People seeing themselves reflected back in mirrors and in others and not liking what they saw. And how could Joan not see herself in Jane? Jane is crasser—not to mention younger and better looking—than Joan but she wants the same things in life. We see this in her persistent refusal of the younger executives. She wants the big time.
That's the virtue point in this episode. The end you aim at is the single most important determinant of your virtues. Joan is confronted with a character with exactly the same understanding of happiness and she really, really doesn't like her.
[Roger, by the way, has an odd code of his own. He asks Jane where she lives and she tells him to spy in her file. He refuses to do so. That's a nice touch, for all the creator's obvious distaste for Roger there is a real moral code at work here and we are free to disagree with them about his moral worth.]
Weiner and the rest of the team don't seem to see is that Jane is the convincing face of youth rebellion here. Joan Holloway represents everything that young women of that era hated. And because he doesn't see it, he lets a tremendous opportunity go to waste. For better or for worse, when the Jane Siegel's came up against the Joan Holloway's the Jane Siegel's triumphed. Not on this show, however.
Worse, the Rothko episode is mostly here as a lead up to a painfully stereotypical scene in which Ken and Sal connect over the Rothko. I love television where the gay character always comes to see what he really is by a slow realization that he is "different'.; difference always consisting non-sexual things such as a love for Broadway shows and serious art and interior decoration. Pardon me for being so crude but I can't help but think that realizing you are gay is far more a matter of realizing that you are sexually attracted to other men.
Jimmy "Seinfeld" Barrett
Jimmy Barrett is another one of those characters that doesn't belong in the era because he is really from our time. He is like a character from Seinfeld. Indeed, dare I say it, the resemblance in character to Jerry Seinfeld himself is astounding. He is amoral, nihilistic and yet also emotionally childish running around getting upset and hurt when other people treat him in the same mocking yet manipulative way he does them.
Here he acts all hurt and tells Betty about the affair that Bobbie and Don had. Then he confronts Don about it. It would be convincing if we could rid ourselves of the suspicion that Jimmy knew all along and allowed it to go ahead to help him get his TV deal. Instead it looks like he pimped out his own wife and wants now to have the moral righteousness of the innocent victim too.
What Don has done is, of course, reprehensible and we're now set up to see what will come of it too bad we had to sit through two absolutely crap episodes now for about ten minutes of actual plot development.
Season 2 blogging begins here.
The next episode blog will be here.
(Season one begins here if you are interested.)
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