Waldorf Stories
Well, I have to eat some crow. I predicted the show would not do well this year and so far I have been very wrong. Mad Men has gone from strength to strength this season. Every episode has been brilliant and every episode has been a bit better than the one before it. There has not been a weak episode all season.
"I'm going to tell everyone in the comments that you were squealing like a girl during the scary parts."
That threat came from the Serpentine One sitting behind me doing real work while I watched "Waldorf Stories".
The scary bits, by the way, was that horrible scene in the boardroom when Don started tossing off possible slogans for Life cereal while drunk. Not horrible as in bad but horrible as in inspiring horror. "Make it stop, make him stop," was what I squealed.
Fans of the Beats will recognize the technique of embarrassment. Someone would stand up at a reading—someone who was supposed to be great like Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg—and instead of reading great literature, they'd read a list of intimate details that would make everyone cringe with embarrassment. And just when you think you can't stand it anymore, you realize that this irritation is the point.
Here is a musical example. You've walked into a club to await a show to see someone you've been told a is great jazz musician, an inspired genius. And then he sits down to play and he starts playing like a first year piano student. He only does it for 45 seconds by the stopwatch but it feels like an eternity. You just want it to stop.
And then he shifts gears and you realize that irritating motif is the basis of something much deeper. It's as if embarrassments are really the foundation of everything important. And they are in a sense. Everyone, even the very greatest, starts off being embarrassing and no matter how far we get, that embarrassing jerk is still inside us, waiting to get out. That embarrassing jerk isn't someone we used to be, it's who we still are and virtue, real virtue, is a matter of making that embarrassing jerk do impressive things.
We hate to be reminded of this.
That's why I was squealing like a girl during the scary bits. And I was.
Two exceptions
There was just one embarrassment after another this episode. The first is the no-talent jerk being interviewed by Don and Peggy in the opening scene. He had this complete lack of talent and chutzpah going for him. Oh, that an a tendency to try and pull silly power stunts. And then we watched as Roger, Don, Pete, Duck, Peggy and others did exactly the same thing over and over again.
That is another brilliant literary technique. Whoops, I forgot to start at the beginning. This episode uses, shat shall I call them, "parallel lives" maybe, yeah, this episode uses parallel lives over and over again. We've seen the parallel between Roger and Don before. But we probably weren't ready to find out how closely the most embarrassing character in the episode would be a parallel to Don.
(Notice, BTW, that we are, as I said before, no longer getting flashbacks to Dick Whitman. The flashbacks are now to early Don Draper.)
Anyway, there were two exceptions this episode in that these characters worked through the embarrassments. I mean Peggy and Pete. They did not rise above them. Rather they plowed right into the embarrassments and out the other side.
There was interesting sexual undertones to both. The way Peggy cuts Stan Rizzo down to size in the hotel room is obviously sexual but something similar happens in the boardroom between Pete and Ken Cosgrove. Watch it again and look at how Pete seals his victory by leaning back in the chair. It seems too smug in a sense because it is so transparent but that is the whole point. The only reason Pete doesn't conclude the interview by saying "now blow me," is because he doesn't have to.
Two more thoughts about Peggy. The Serpentine One regularly talk about our conflicted feelings about feminism. Speaking only for myself, I would love to be able to declare myself a feminist but feminism keeps getting bogged down in a lot of radical left wing crap that undermines the real issue.
We saw another kind of feminism in Peggy this episode. A feminism that has much more to do with real life and it's embarrassments. When Peggy says to Stan Rizzo that he is staring at women who can't stare back when he reads Playboy that's something really important. And we can see what a knife edge she is walking. If Stan had, if you'll pardon this, risen to the challenge morally, instead of just physically, that scene would have played out very differently. Peggy is vulnerable and she knows it—everything Stan says to mock her cuts right to the bone—and she is counting on Stan being too embarrassed himself to see it.
The lost weekend
There was so much brilliant about this episode I couldn't begin to comment on it so I'll hit just one more. It was this episode that really showed us how Don is going to fall in a believable way. It isn't alcoholism. That would be dramatically boring as alcoholism is a disease and no alcoholic is morally responsible for a disease.
Drama and literature avoids this by dodging the truth and acting as if addiction is caused by moral challenges. That is bogus science but good drama. Anyway, the real issue is the thing Don is trying to escape from.
By the way, I love the way the writers are using their own embarrassments as strengths. One of the really stupid bits in the show has been the repeated use of Don's various conquests not as dramatic advancements but as voyeuristic distractions to keep the groundlings amused. Here they turn that into a strength by letting the meaningless of it all wear us down.
The really revealing moment, meanwhile had already happened back at the bar before the last weekend. I mean the bit where Don tries to pick up Faye Miller and she turns him down. What he doesn't see is that Faye really cares about him. She doesn't love him just yet but she cares about him and he cannot see that what he really needs is love and to stop drinking.
Peggy, of course, loves Don but we see the nature of that love changing. She is slowly becoming the one with the upper hand. Don's attempts to be the senior partner with her increasingly come across as bluster. Her confrontation with him had her clearly assume the adult role in a way that I'm not certain he can do anymore.
Peggy and Pete
Everyone and his dog has recognized that the show is headed towards a new generation. If Bert and Roger are Samuel and Kind David and Don is Solomon, who gets to be Isaiah and who gets to be Jeremiah? My guess is Peggy and Pete respectively. But we'll see.
Okay, I'm off to read what others have said about this episode.
By the way, that great jazz musician playing like a beginner with no potential on purpose just to make us cringe? For a whole forty five seconds? I wasn't making that up. Here he is:
Season 4 blogging begins here.
For anyone crazy enough to go even further :
Season three blogging begins here.
Season two, if you are interested, begins here.
Season one begins here.
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