Megan!

The virtues of Mad Men
Do you believe in love?
Update: I think I mustn't have been as clear as I intended below.I meant to say that it is tempting to think that, "Faye Miller is playing a part and Megan appears to actually be the part" below. But I meant only that it is tempting to think and not that that is the case. Having just rewatched the episodes in question to prepare this post, it is pretty obvious that Megan is playing a role every bit as much as Faye. More on this later this morning.

It seems to me that what it boils down to with Megan is whether you believe in love. Do you think that love is merely an epiphenomenon  of biological adaptation? Do you think that it exists just because people who formed bonds during mating were more likely to have children who survived them long enough to also reproduce and therefore we have love as an adaptive trait and nothing more? Or do you think it is a divinely created good to give our lives purpose and direction?

If you believe the second (relevant disclosure: I do), then you will want to see this marriage play out in a certain way. It doesn't necessarily have to work. A failure can still be meaningful and beautiful but it cannot be simply absurd. The story can't end with Don and Megan going through the same old motions in a coffee shop and then a man comes through the door and the screen goes black the way The Sopranos ended.

Matt Weiner has put himself in a tough situation here.  Perhaps it is a tough situation he wants to be in, I hope it is.

One of the big questions reading anything is whether you can trust the creator. If you read 800 pages of a novel only to have the narrator commit suicide on the last page you may just feel cheated.

But then again you may not. If the novel is all satire characterized by black humour from page one on, such an ending would not be a cheat. The young Evelyn Waugh could have written such a novel. In a sense he did write such a novel and called it A Handful of Dust. It doesn't end with a suicide but it certainly ends in a giant nothing. There is no hope, no future, nothing to believe in.

Some people watch Mad Men that way. Every episode is an occasion to exercise their cynical superiority to the characters. Maybe that is the kind of narrative they like but I can't help feel that part of it is also defensive. Unwilling or unable to commit themselves to any faith, any hope or any love, they project an absurdist plot line onto everything so they can never be disappointed.

This year, Matt Weiner threw one love possibility after another at us all season long. Do you remember the nurse? I didn't. She was outside Don's apartment nailing up Christmas decorations and it seemed like something might happen between them for about fifteen minutes. I had forgotten all about her until I went back looking for all the scenes with Megan in them for this write up about her.

A beautiful girl
Rewatching things, I thought this bit of dialogue from the end of the Beautiful Girls was significant. Joyce says to Peggy:

Men are this vegetable soup and you can’t put them on a plate or eat them off the counter. So women are the pot. They pick up. They hold them. They contain them.

Peggys says, "I don't believe that," and Joyce replies that it has been her experience.*

In the end, that is certainly part of what Megan does for Don. And she obviously really wants him. Rewatching the scene where Sally comes, unbidden, to the office and then runs down the hall crying, I was struck by how much Don's approval meant to Megan at the end. 

I was also struck by the parallel between Sally's running out of the office like that and Allison's doing likewise just a few episodes earlier.

Part of the reason that Megan wins Don is that she promises not to be like that.

The other key moment was during the focus group to test the marketing concept for Pond's cream. Faye Miller and Megan are interacting and they get a momentary confirmation of the thesis. Faye Miller, lying every inch of the way about who she is and what her purposes are, gets Megan to talk about exactly the sort of feminine ritual they were hoping for. And Peggy, watching, says, S"he's amazing!" Peggy, of course, means Faye Miller. Don, who implicitly agrees, seemed to mean Faye as well. It turns out not. He thought Megan was amazing. And so did we all except we don't want to believe in that sort of beauty do we?

But what is that beauty? And there is one possibility: Faye Miller is playing a part and Megan appears to actually be the part. That is the autheniticity issue again.

Except Megan is not simply being something. She isn't any more authentic than Don. She is much more like him than Faye really. At the end, for example, we realize that Megan was, as Don's secretary, fully aware of the relationship between Faye and Don. She knew she had a rival to out manœuver! No one here is innocent. What is it that Megan has that Faye doesn't? I suspect this is part of the answer.

Season 5 will either be great or it will be a massive disappointment. Weiner has set things up for himself such that there can be no third possibility.





* An aside, notice how easily we accept the notion that Joyce's lesbianism is a moral choice that she'd made? If this had been a conversation between two men ending with one man implying that he was gay by choice, the show would have engendered so much criticism they would have had to take it off the air.