Blowing Smoke
Judging this episode is difficult because nothing will really make sense until after the season finale, called "Tomorrowland" for whatever that is worth.
In the meantime, this episode ties a lot of themes together. The title "Blowing Smoke" recalls that of the very first episode, "Smoke Get in Your Eyes." Notice that the opening scene has Don sitting in a leather banquette having a conversation with a man whose mind he cannot change just as the opening of the very first episode did. And the decor is deliberately old-fashioned feeling for the era it is supposed to be set in. There is a classic feeling of Americana about this shot and we don't have the feeling of being in any particular era.
When asked to explain the challenges he wants help with the man from Heinz begins, "During the war ...."
And then we have a wonderful bit of dramatic irony: that is when a character says something that we know to be significant but they cannot know this. Think of a movie opening up with someone sitting in a deck chair and saying, "Nothing to worry about until we get to New York," and then the camera pans back to reveal that he is sitting on the deck of the Titanic. Well, the Heinz man's world has changed forever and he doesn't know it yet. He says that tastes are cyclical and that although Heinz Ketchup is currently dominating sales, beans will come back. We all know they won't come back.
Also recalling episode one, Don is helpless, desperate for a solution he cannot find and he runs into Midge in an odd scene where his marital status feels ambiguous.
Midge is an odd juxtaposition to Don because, right from the beginning, she has always had no trouble facing reality. She lies just as much as he does but she lies the way a person who accepts the truth lies. She just wants to fool you. Don, as we have discussed before, is not reality based. He wants to change the reality.
The historical theme
A while ago I speculated about which 1960s political event the season would be built around. There may be one coming yet but last night everything seemed to be about addiction and how hard it is to change our habits and that theme tied everything together. It goes to Don's personal struggles as he attempts to get his drinking and personal life under control. It goes to SCDP's reliance on Lucky Strike to cover their cash flow needs. It goes to Roger's inability to let go of his romantic dreams.
It goes to all the women characters inability to let go of certain expectations of them.
In this episode, addiction is most obvious in the heroin addiction of Midge. We forget that aspect of the 1960s so easily. The brutal facts of what drug use did in the 1960s is still hidden behind a wall of denial. I thought the slow breakdown we saw of Midge's lies was one of the most brilliant things the show has done. As always on Mad Men, we learned about who Midge is a long time ago and then she slipped out of the frame. When she returned what was stunning was how absolutely right it all felt. "Of course!" I thought, "this is exactly what would have happened to her."
It's exactly what happened to so many people between 1965 and 1971.
New York, New York
It's also what happened to New York and I have to wonder how that will play out. Nowadays New York looks pretty good but in 1965 it was a city spiraling out of control. For two and half decades it was a symbol of decay and failure. (A position it could easily lapse back into if current trends continue by the way.)
Related to this, of course, is another recurring theme of Mad Men and that is the collapse of progressive Republicanism. The Republican party was very much the party of university-educated progressives in those days, a situation that is exactly reversed these days. What happened is a delicate issue because what happened to the Republicans in the mid 1960s seems to be repeating itself today with the Democrats and I always hesitate to bring these things up because emotions are so strong about them.
But, here goes, what happened is that the university-educated progressives who were a major force in the Republican party in those days got into power and it turned out that they weren't much good at managing anything. Nothing better represented this than the disastrous mayoralty of John Lindsay, who is, of course, the guy that Henry Francis works for.
Tomorrowland
Progressives aren't driven by a lot of party loyalty and they switch back and forth. In 1965, hard as this may be to imagine for anyone born after 1980, Time magazine was as heavily biased in favour of the Republican party as it is today biased in favour of the Democratic party. What never changes is progressives' belief that careful planning and government management by university-educated professionals like themselves will produce a better life for everyone.
This dream goes way back in American politics but it has never worked. That doesn't mean it can't work. Most successful ideas get tried several times before it all comes together. Of course, most unsuccessful ideas also get tried several times before people finally give up on them.
In terms of Mad Men we'll never know as this era ended with a failure when Lyndon Baines Johnson announced he would not seek re-election—an event that is three years in the future as we wind up this season.
In a sense, what LBJ did was an incredible success. No other president since has done as much to change the country and his party. LBJ is the man who made the Democrats into the progressive party that attracts, as it does today, upper-middle class university graduates. But when he left office, he left a country and a party in tatters with Vietnam, race riots, the end of what had been decades of economic prosperity and hope and incredible political divisions.
Nowadays, people talk about political division and red-blue politics and hatred in politics but nothing we see today even comes close to what happened in the last half of the 1960s. The divisions, hatred and upheavals of that era were horrible.
Revolution in arts and advertising
As things were going a little crazy, artists were at loss about what to do. Pop artists wrote songs about "the revolution" but felt excluded. It was hard to tell who was real and who was a fraud. That is beyond the scope of this particular blog thread but I wanted to end up with what I thought was the most interesting line in the show last Sunday.
We have been watching the falling man opening credits for four years now without any clear idea of what they might refer to. In a sense, the reference is obvious as everyone knows the iconic 9/11 photograph but what has that image—once called "the most powerful image of despair at the beginning of the twenty-first century"—to do with the show we are watching.
The biggest hint so far was given by Vincent Kartheiser in an interview really early in the series:
“There is a large portion of America that doesn’t feel about America the way we did in 1960, and I think we want to know why we don’t,” said Mr. Kartheiser, 29. “We want to know what went wrong.”And that's it really. Progressives have been promising hope and change for decades now, first as Republicans and then as Democrats, but what we seem to be stuck with is increasing malaise.
But this episode we got—for what I am pretty sure is the first time—something inside the show itself that clearly referenced the falling man opening.
Peggy comes to Don's office to ask what they should do. She suggests what Don ultimately tries—"if you don't like what they are saying about you, change the conversation." But in the meanwhile the conversation goes like this:
Peggy: "You always say if you don't like what they are saying about you, change the conversation."And, really, for all the talk about change and revolution, that is all art can ever do.
Don: To what? What they are saying about us is true."
Peggy: "And there is nothing we can do?"
Don "Sure there is. We're going to sit at our desks and keep typing while the walls fall down around us because we're creative, the least important most important thing there is."
We'll see how this works out next week. It should be interesting.
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I couldn't help noticing the parallels to "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" also. In both episodes tobacco is key but in profoundly different ways. In Episode 1 the goal of S-C was to successfully counter all the bad press that tobacco was getting and thus maintain the financial stake of both the tobacco industry and
ReplyDeleteS-C. In "Blowing Smoke" Draper uses the bad press to breathe life into a dying SCDP under the guise of altruism. But this validates an earlier post where you speculated that Draper would try to capitalize on the cultural changes, e.g, anti-war protests, to use them to his advantage. The attitudes about smoking certainly underwent a sea-change during that period which ran concurrently with the other social changes that were occurring. I think Draper's statement will ultimately be successful--cutting edge--but it might take time.
I agree with you about Midge and the drug culture. That was the dark side of what happened in the '60s, and its affects were--and in many cases still are--felt by too many people. One can argue about who flooded the cities with drugs and made them so readily available, but the acceptance of using drugs as being "cool" and "harmless" obviously created a demand for them and a problem of such magnitude that is still difficult for society to get a handle on, not to mention the incredible costs--in $$$, human lives, and lost potential--involved.
And you're absolutely right, the polarization we see today between red and blue is nothing compared to what was going on in the '60s. And back then it wasn't even the social issues--abortion, gay rights/same-sex marriage, or religion that divided people, those weren't even issues during the '60s. I agree with your comments about Progressives--both Republicans then and Democrats now, and I think the presence of Conrad Hilton in past seasons is a foreshadowing of this. He represented the waning of the Eastern moderate/progressive influence in the Republican Party, and the emergence of the "wild-west" wing of the party, monied but without elite educations, and self-made. Going back to your comments about Progressives, why couldn't the vision of these university-educated people create a better life for everyone? David Halberstam posed essentially the same question many years ago in "The Best and The Brightest" referring to JFK's "brain trust" of the Harvard-educated intelligentsia he surrounded himself with (most of whom continued in the Johnson Administration) regarding the failure of Viet-Nam. I don't know the answer to that question. The next obvious question is, if the most intelligent and well-educated people can't solve society's problems, then who can? Who is better equipped to deal with them? I don't know the answer to that either.
I think the last episode--"Tommorowland"--must be some kind of a reference to Disneyland or the nascient Disney World about to be constructed in Florida.
Thinking about the question I posed at the end of my last post, Charles Murray had one answer for it in one of his books that came out probably 10 yrs ago. He envisioned a future where all of the "policy wonks" came from elite institutions and universalized their experience. As a result, they would have little understanding of what "ordinary" people were like and how they lived, so the domestic policies they would come up with as solutions to social problems would be unsuccessful. I remember at the time thinking that we're already there, this isn't the future.
ReplyDeleteI also thought about Vincent Kartheiser's comment about people wanting to know what went wrong. I don't think there's an easy explanation for that, it was a combination of factors. Some of these factors were political, but others were cultural or social, and they all converged at a particular period in time.
Which brings me back to your comments about Progressives. LBJ as Vice-President was--if anything--the anti-Progressive compared to JFK and his inner circle, as well as Nelson Rockefeller and the Eastern Republican establishment. They all regarded him as crude, and he saw them as elitist snobs. That LBJ was able to push through a Progressive agenda was only due to the fact that he had such considerable clout with the Congress, not only among Democrats (except for the South which never forgave him) but also among the Progressive Republicans. But I guess my point is that maybe the Progressive agenda--whether by Republicans or Democrats--never lived up to what the authors of it had hoped because the opposing faction has always been bent on blocking or sabotaging it--sometimes very successfully--while offering no substantive alternative of their own, except to maintain the status quo.
You've analyzed me pretty well here.
ReplyDeleteMy feeling is that the progressive agenda was originally dreamed up by good people with the best of intentions and that it has not worked so far. There have been enough failures now that I think we should give up on it. But I could be wrong and the wonderful thing about a democracy is that I only get one vote like everyone else.
As to LBJ, I would only add that he was an original new dealer. In the early 1960s, the progressive option was considered kind of quaint and old-fashioned. Progressivism is back in style now but for most of recent history it was an old option.
Nowadays, we think of JFK as an inspirational figure but the man himself was very pragmatic. Most hip people of the era wanted to be pragmatic rather than ideological.
The point here being that the categories have shifted considerably. On the surface, for example, Obama's inspirational rhetoric might seem to make him line up with JFK but the two men have virtually nothing in common in terms of the content of their beliefs. LBJ, OTOH, had quite a lot in common with Obama.
"...the wonderful thing about a democracy is that I only get one vote like everyone else."
ReplyDeleteAt least in theory, I see less and less tangible evidence of that today. Part of what went wrong is that you get as many votes as money can buy.
I agree with you, LBJ was definitely an original New Dealer. And it was from that Progressive tradition that he was able to push through his agenda. He also claimed that it was actually JFK's agenda had he lived especially in the area of Civil Rights. I don't doubt that JFK would have introduced Civil Rights legislation, he was quoted as having said that and his actions in response to Gov. Wallace at the U. of Alabama indicate that. But the irony is that without Johnson and the sway he held with Congress, JFK could never have succeeded in getting it passed. I agree that LBJ had a lot in common with Barack Obama, except that LBJ had the ability to "persuade" Congress to go along with him, which Obama does not. LBJ was able to do that because he had been in Congress for 20 plus years and he knew how to "appeal" to every member.
I'm not old enough to know if "progressive" was considered quaint and old-fashioned in the early '60s. However, I suspect that it was more something that people in the mainstream took for granted. That would also explain why ideology was less important than pragmatism at that time, the ideologies were less clearly defined than they are today, and there wasn't as huge a gap between being "Progressive" and "non-progressive" whatever that would have been. The only area where there was a huge ideological divide in the early '60s was about Civil Rights for Negroes. To be "Progressive" meant to be in favor of Civil Rights, to be against that was un-Progressive. Barry Goldwater proudly voted against the Civil Rights legislation of 1964. While I agree with you that JFK was pragmatic, both he and his brother the Attorney-General did take bold and unpopular (to some) stands when circumstances warranted, e.g., with Gov. Wallace at the U. of Alabama. He even appeared on prime-time television to argue and defend his actions to the American people. This of course, cost him the support of even some Democrats in the South. Part of the reason for his trip to Dallas on that day in November of '63 was to mend fences. So while he was pragmatic he was willing to sacrifice pragmatism and political expediency in favor of standing up for a moral principle, there came a point where he drew a line in the sand.
Perhaps the progressive agenda was dreamed up by good people with the best of intentions. But it didn't happen in a vacuum, it was a reaction to problems that required solutions. And how do you measure whether or not the progressive agenda or elements of it worked or did not work? Its fashionable on talk radio and Fox News to say the Progressive Agenda was a failure. But progressive Civil Rights legislation worked, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid worked and will continue to work for millions of people who would otherwise have been consigned to "poorhouses" as my grandmother used to call them. While the right-wing has succeeded simply by dint of constant repetition in turning Progressive into a dirty word, they offer no reasonable alternative other than to do nothing or "let market forces rule." Yeah, right.
Jules, are you familiar with "The Values of Everything" by George Monbiot? I just became aware of it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/10/11/the-values-of-everything/
ReplyDeleteI've heard about the psychological studies he references. I also think he's right about the role of advertisers--the Mad Men--in all of this.