So I've been digging around the Internet to see if other people's memories of fern bars match my own. For the most part, they seem to. Allowing, that is, for the watering down that must have happened between the first such places in San Francisco and the version that showed up in the mill town in Quebec where I grew up.
I also expected to find much snide criticism and I did. But it was worth it for this one guy who thought he was being terribly superior by referring to the Tiffany-style lamps that were found in Fern bars as "fake Tiffany lamps". The implication being that he has the authentic thing straight from Louis Tiffany sitting in his parlour right in front of him; no doubt sitting on his Duncan Phyfe table.
If you don't actually know what you're talking about, always adopt a cynical tone it will make the most foolish nonsense seem authoritative.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Fern bars (3)
One of the popular novels in the '50s was a book called AUNTIE MAME by Patrick Dennis. It was about a guy growing up in the '20s and '30s. There's a wonderful chapter where he talks about how he and his friends are in college and they all worship Fred Astaire just like people would later worship Elvis Presley. They want to dress like him, talk like him, light cigarettes like him. They all walk around in this absolutely hilarious, unknowing parody of sophistication and adulthood. That's exactly what people in the '40s and particularly the '50s were not doing. They were not in any way imitating or acting out adulthood. They weren't like little girls putting on their mother's dresses, high heels and lipstick. The rebelliousness that was everywhere perceived and what has today become a cliche wasn't about politics. It wasn't about changing society or addressing injustices.
The rebelliousness was the insistence of young people of all kinds on autonomy, on being able to act as they wished for no particular reason and engage in play or delinquent activities that weren't going to lead into adulthood or jobs or family or responsibility.
Greil Marcus from a 1997 interview
And, much as Marcus pretends otherwise, the 1960s rebellion was mostly an elite thing that played out in a small number of elite universities of industrialized nations.
It was in the 1970s that our society was finally wealthy enough that the entire middle class could take part. Some of us didn't want to. And thus the appeal of fern bars. They may have been a poor example of adulthood but they were an example and, in the town where I grew up, they seemed to be the only part of the culture where people went who looked forward to growing up. They were a place where some people, people who didn't feel like they fit in with the whole youth rebellion thing, chose to, as Marcus puts it above, "walk around in this absolutely hilarious, unknowing parody of sophistication and adulthood."
They didn't create this sense themselves. Like any cultural moment of any significance at any time anywhere, the bars put together elements that were already lying around just waiting for someone to put them together in the right way. My mother in those days wanted to have a wing chair and a Tiffany-style lamp for her house. And she did have all those things because she could afford to. I suspect, although I don't know, that a lot of people who went to fern bars could not afford such things.
But they aspired to them.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
It's not hard to figure out why some Muslims have troubles with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. What is hard to figure out why so may liberal intellectuals are falling over themselves in the rush to dismiss her. The latest to the party is Pankaj Mishra in the New Yorker.
Hirsi Ali is a difficult figure to dismiss because she brings boatloads of personal experience with the subject she writes about. In the normal course of events, this would buy her nothing but credibility with liberal intellectuals. She is the sort of authentic voice that liberal intellectuals are always telling us we need to be listening to. Why does she have to be rushed off stage as quickly possibly then?
I think we can see the explanation is Mishra's essay. Notice, for example, how he criticizes Voltaire below. He does this because Hirsi Ali cites Voltaire in support of her position.
It's an attitude that recurs again and again in Enlightenment and modernist attitudes. Both GB Shaw and HG Wells advocated genocide for the Slavs. For many intellectuals peoples that clung to their traditional ways of life were a barrier on the road to enlightenment and if they weren't going to get with the program they had to be eliminated.
The post-romantic attitude is a little more nuanced but leads to the same conclusion. Now the devout minorities are tolerated and even loved, provided they stay "over there" somewhere. "Over there" can be quite close. They can live in the city and even have a chair at the university provided they recognize that there are clear lines of demarcation between them and the rest of the culture.
Hirsi Ali is a difficult figure to dismiss because she brings boatloads of personal experience with the subject she writes about. In the normal course of events, this would buy her nothing but credibility with liberal intellectuals. She is the sort of authentic voice that liberal intellectuals are always telling us we need to be listening to. Why does she have to be rushed off stage as quickly possibly then?
I think we can see the explanation is Mishra's essay. Notice, for example, how he criticizes Voltaire below. He does this because Hirsi Ali cites Voltaire in support of her position.
In another respect, however, the invocation of Voltaire is more apt than Hirsi Ali seems to realize. Voltaire despised the faith and identity of Europe’s religious minority: the Jews, who, he declared, “are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts,” who had “surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism,” and who “deserve to be punished.” Voltaire’s denunciations remind us that the Enlightenment was a much more complex and multifaceted phenomenon than the dawn of reason and freedom that Hirsi Ali evokes.There is something right here. Voltaire and the Enlightenment did show a deeply disturbing intolerance for devout Jews. Mishra might have noted, however, that the intolerance was far less marked towards Jews who had abandoned Judaism. He says above that Voltaire's attitudes "remind us that the Enlightenment was a much more complex and multifaceted phenomenon" than we might realize. He has this exactly backwards. What Voltaire's attitude toward devout Jews showed was a narrow single-mindedness on his part. Voltaire had a vision of how human beings ought to be and hated everything that opposed his ideal of enlightened humanity. People who hewed to ways of life he didn't like didn't have the right to exist.
It's an attitude that recurs again and again in Enlightenment and modernist attitudes. Both GB Shaw and HG Wells advocated genocide for the Slavs. For many intellectuals peoples that clung to their traditional ways of life were a barrier on the road to enlightenment and if they weren't going to get with the program they had to be eliminated.
It's a little like ballroom dancing. When modern liberal intellectuals take up Ballroom dancing we accept that a certain style of dress goes with it and that we talk of men leading and women following on the dance floor but the second we leave the class all this stuff gets left behind "where it belongs".
With this more romantic attitude towards devout minorities also comes a tendency to infantilize them. Mishra explains, and explains away, the repressive attitudes towards women that Hisri Ali finds in Islam by saying these are a product of a confrontation with the west.
Whitechapel has much in its past—oppression, bigotry, poverty, radicalism—that would have helped Hirsi Ali understand not only the neighborhood’s newest inhabitants but also her own family. But “Nomad” reveals that her life experiences have yet to ripen into a sense of history. The sad truth is that the problems she blames on Islam—fear of sexuality, oppression of women, militant millenarianism—are to be found wherever traditionalist peoples confront the transition to an individualistic urban culture of modernity.It's not that there isn't some truth to this. There is. But the reasonable answer to that is "So what?" Or even "So #%&*ing what?" Likewise every human being feels natural a defensiveness that some times makes us want to irrationally yell at people sometimes but if you see me doing that, you tell me to stop it and you are right.
That is where the west sits with regard to Islam. Many Islamic cultures display attitudes towards woman and Jews that are simply unacceptable. And it is not reasonable to point at the west or the state of Israel as the cause of these attitudes. The west's attitude here should be like a broken record. No matter what explanations are offered, the answer is "Stop it! Stop it right now!
Fern bars (2)
Some Fern bar history
One of the many downsides of being self indulgent is that you forget to give other people background. Here I have been talking about Fern bars and I haven't said what they are. I mentioned old blue laws in previous post, for example, and that may have been confusing because Fern bars dated from decades after the blue laws were passed.
Fern bars sprung up in the early 1970s. In some ways they were typical of the era and in other ways they were a reaction against it. Before they arrived, there were two, maybe three, kinds of bar culture. There was the cocktail lounge that was created in response to prohibition. And there was the working class pub which had become the rock and roll bar. In some places, there were still Tiki bars too. [Update: There was also gay discos which would soon have a big influence but were unknown to most of us in the early 1970s.]
I'll start with decor because they were very much a backlash against 1970s design. the 1970s was characterized by two styles. One style was very modern design. Furniture, lamps and carpets came in shapes and colours and fabrics that had never been seen before. There was a lot of artificial colours like orange and greens like you don't find in nature.
The other style you saw a lot of in the early 1970s was earth-mother simplicity. Here everything was very much in colours you'd find in nature. A lot of browns and natural fabrics. Spider plants in macrame plant holders abounded. If anything was dyed it was dyed using old-fashioned techniques, tie-dying or Batik. All stains and paint was removed from wood furniture so that the supposed beauty of the natural grain would show through. This was even done with woods that don't have any noticeable grain such as pine.
The Fern bar (I have no idea why I keep capitalizing this) was a rejection of both those styles. They were decorated more like some little old lady's living room.
Walk into a fern bar and the first thing you would see would be a lot of old-style furniture. There would be wing chairs and Tiffany-style lamps. The chairs were arranged around low tables and on these low tables there would almost inevitably be a backgammon board. Backgammon was very big in Fern bars.
Actual ferns weren't a necessary feature. The most important thing was that there were no spider plants. The fern was often there because it was an excuse to put it on a Victorian-style plant stand that was, again, not unlike what you might find in the living room of a upper-middle class widow in the 1970s.
Fern bars were quiet. All the fabric on the furniture and the floors absorbed sound. There was a dance floor but it was usually isolated, partially walled off and music was kept at a low volume until after 10 o'clock at night. The dance floors were also quite small with no where near enough space to hold even a quarter of the people present. The assumption was that people came to sit and talk.
What did people drink in these places? Mostly rum- and Vodka-based drinks with various citrus fruits to soften and maybe even to disguise the presence of the alcohol. Screwdrivers, Mai Tais, Cuba Libres and, above all, Pina Coladas were served. The Harvey Wallbanger was often talked about but rarely actually ordered. Women would often drink white wine and often only one or two glasses over the evening.
At the beginning there was very little attempt at being any kind of connoisseur. People would just ask for the drink and not typically specify what brand or variety. Thus, a glass of white wine would be ordered "I'd like a glass of white wine" and no one particularly cared whether it was Chardonnay, Riesling or Pinot Gris. In practice, it was usually Kressman. Towards the end, people had started to rediscover the Martini and Grand Marnier also became popular.
Never make fun of society dear, only people who can't get into it do that
Fern bars had a mixed reputation that recalls Oscar Wilde's quip I have used as the heading above. Fern bars had dress codes. Jeans were absolutely forbidden.
That may not seem like a big thing nowadays but it was a big barrier at the time. In those days, most people wore jeans anytime they weren't at work. Having a no-jeans policy was turn away most people from the get-go. People had gotten used to thinking they could just drive downtown and wander in and out of any club just to see what it was like. To wander into a place only to be greeted by some doorman who said, sorry we have a dress code rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
But more than that, Fern bars didn't advertise their presence. In order to know which one to go to, you had to already be one of the people who knew which one to go to. When a Fern bar got too well known all sorts of people would come to see it. Everyone usually included a lot of single men looking to meet sexual partners. Anytime this happened, the people who really liked Fern bars would decamp and find a new place. And the sort of new place that would appeal to them had to be a place that wasn't advertised.
Okay, that sounds snobbish and it was but there was a certain logic to it. A decade ago now, the Serpentine One and I were in a club that recreated the atmosphere of New York's 21. Every detail of the decor was perfect but the customers weren't. As the Serpentine One astutely noted, "It's easier to recreate the room than it is to find people who know how to behave in it."
Getting laid
Sex had a lot to do with it. People went to Fern bars looking for sexual partners. Now, before you sneer, it's important to remember that that is also why people went to every other type of club in the 1970s. As I've said before, it felt like there were no consequences. There were only two sexual diseases, both of which were rare and even if you got them they were curable.
People didn't hook up in those days. Hooking up is what you did with friends. People went and met strangers in bars and went home with them. But even then it was nice to know that there was a place where you could go and meet the right kind of stranger—a stranger who had the same cultural background, manners and moral values that you did.
And while you wanted sex, you didn't want to go to a place full of desperate people looking for sex. These bars appealed to people who liked to socialize with members of the opposite sex. To meet and talk and if something happens, something happens.
I'll be blunt here, the bars appealed to people who knew they could get sex if they wanted it. They were more interested in the right kind of partner than just getting some. That is why the worst thing that could happen to a Fern bar was for it to get known as the sort of place to go meet people.
Rejecting the 1960s
Without really knowing what they were doing, Fern bars were one of the first steps away from the 1960s and towards the Reagan era. And here is where some people really objected. Fern bars appealed most of all to people who rejected the culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Not in any terribly overt or political way. Back in those days everyone, and I mean everyone, saw themselves as a liberal politically.
A writer back at the time, I forget who and I'm not going to look up the reference, called it "the new normal". After a decade in which people affected to be part of different groups—hippies, working class, flower children, Jesus freaks—a lot of college-educated people started wanting to be normal.
Only no one knew where to turn to find normal. Your parents weren't normal. They had joined the spirit of the times just like everyone else. Your grandmother's house looked normal and the kind of manners and talk you found there was appealing. But your grandmother lived there and you couldn't count on meeting the sort of young men and women you wanted to meet at your grandmother's place.
So the solution was a bar decorated like your grandmother's living room. If your grandmother was of a certain class.
You might say that the Fern bar was the first step to democratizing the idea of class. Anyone could join provided they learned how to dress and behave the right way. And provided they could afford the bar tab and the bar tab was noticeably higher than it was in other clubs.
One of the many downsides of being self indulgent is that you forget to give other people background. Here I have been talking about Fern bars and I haven't said what they are. I mentioned old blue laws in previous post, for example, and that may have been confusing because Fern bars dated from decades after the blue laws were passed.
Fern bars sprung up in the early 1970s. In some ways they were typical of the era and in other ways they were a reaction against it. Before they arrived, there were two, maybe three, kinds of bar culture. There was the cocktail lounge that was created in response to prohibition. And there was the working class pub which had become the rock and roll bar. In some places, there were still Tiki bars too. [Update: There was also gay discos which would soon have a big influence but were unknown to most of us in the early 1970s.]
I'll start with decor because they were very much a backlash against 1970s design. the 1970s was characterized by two styles. One style was very modern design. Furniture, lamps and carpets came in shapes and colours and fabrics that had never been seen before. There was a lot of artificial colours like orange and greens like you don't find in nature.
The other style you saw a lot of in the early 1970s was earth-mother simplicity. Here everything was very much in colours you'd find in nature. A lot of browns and natural fabrics. Spider plants in macrame plant holders abounded. If anything was dyed it was dyed using old-fashioned techniques, tie-dying or Batik. All stains and paint was removed from wood furniture so that the supposed beauty of the natural grain would show through. This was even done with woods that don't have any noticeable grain such as pine.
The Fern bar (I have no idea why I keep capitalizing this) was a rejection of both those styles. They were decorated more like some little old lady's living room.
Walk into a fern bar and the first thing you would see would be a lot of old-style furniture. There would be wing chairs and Tiffany-style lamps. The chairs were arranged around low tables and on these low tables there would almost inevitably be a backgammon board. Backgammon was very big in Fern bars.
Actual ferns weren't a necessary feature. The most important thing was that there were no spider plants. The fern was often there because it was an excuse to put it on a Victorian-style plant stand that was, again, not unlike what you might find in the living room of a upper-middle class widow in the 1970s.
Fern bars were quiet. All the fabric on the furniture and the floors absorbed sound. There was a dance floor but it was usually isolated, partially walled off and music was kept at a low volume until after 10 o'clock at night. The dance floors were also quite small with no where near enough space to hold even a quarter of the people present. The assumption was that people came to sit and talk.
What did people drink in these places? Mostly rum- and Vodka-based drinks with various citrus fruits to soften and maybe even to disguise the presence of the alcohol. Screwdrivers, Mai Tais, Cuba Libres and, above all, Pina Coladas were served. The Harvey Wallbanger was often talked about but rarely actually ordered. Women would often drink white wine and often only one or two glasses over the evening.
At the beginning there was very little attempt at being any kind of connoisseur. People would just ask for the drink and not typically specify what brand or variety. Thus, a glass of white wine would be ordered "I'd like a glass of white wine" and no one particularly cared whether it was Chardonnay, Riesling or Pinot Gris. In practice, it was usually Kressman. Towards the end, people had started to rediscover the Martini and Grand Marnier also became popular.
Never make fun of society dear, only people who can't get into it do that
Fern bars had a mixed reputation that recalls Oscar Wilde's quip I have used as the heading above. Fern bars had dress codes. Jeans were absolutely forbidden.
That may not seem like a big thing nowadays but it was a big barrier at the time. In those days, most people wore jeans anytime they weren't at work. Having a no-jeans policy was turn away most people from the get-go. People had gotten used to thinking they could just drive downtown and wander in and out of any club just to see what it was like. To wander into a place only to be greeted by some doorman who said, sorry we have a dress code rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
But more than that, Fern bars didn't advertise their presence. In order to know which one to go to, you had to already be one of the people who knew which one to go to. When a Fern bar got too well known all sorts of people would come to see it. Everyone usually included a lot of single men looking to meet sexual partners. Anytime this happened, the people who really liked Fern bars would decamp and find a new place. And the sort of new place that would appeal to them had to be a place that wasn't advertised.
Okay, that sounds snobbish and it was but there was a certain logic to it. A decade ago now, the Serpentine One and I were in a club that recreated the atmosphere of New York's 21. Every detail of the decor was perfect but the customers weren't. As the Serpentine One astutely noted, "It's easier to recreate the room than it is to find people who know how to behave in it."
Getting laid
Sex had a lot to do with it. People went to Fern bars looking for sexual partners. Now, before you sneer, it's important to remember that that is also why people went to every other type of club in the 1970s. As I've said before, it felt like there were no consequences. There were only two sexual diseases, both of which were rare and even if you got them they were curable.
People didn't hook up in those days. Hooking up is what you did with friends. People went and met strangers in bars and went home with them. But even then it was nice to know that there was a place where you could go and meet the right kind of stranger—a stranger who had the same cultural background, manners and moral values that you did.
And while you wanted sex, you didn't want to go to a place full of desperate people looking for sex. These bars appealed to people who liked to socialize with members of the opposite sex. To meet and talk and if something happens, something happens.
I'll be blunt here, the bars appealed to people who knew they could get sex if they wanted it. They were more interested in the right kind of partner than just getting some. That is why the worst thing that could happen to a Fern bar was for it to get known as the sort of place to go meet people.
Rejecting the 1960s
Without really knowing what they were doing, Fern bars were one of the first steps away from the 1960s and towards the Reagan era. And here is where some people really objected. Fern bars appealed most of all to people who rejected the culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Not in any terribly overt or political way. Back in those days everyone, and I mean everyone, saw themselves as a liberal politically.
A writer back at the time, I forget who and I'm not going to look up the reference, called it "the new normal". After a decade in which people affected to be part of different groups—hippies, working class, flower children, Jesus freaks—a lot of college-educated people started wanting to be normal.
Only no one knew where to turn to find normal. Your parents weren't normal. They had joined the spirit of the times just like everyone else. Your grandmother's house looked normal and the kind of manners and talk you found there was appealing. But your grandmother lived there and you couldn't count on meeting the sort of young men and women you wanted to meet at your grandmother's place.
So the solution was a bar decorated like your grandmother's living room. If your grandmother was of a certain class.
You might say that the Fern bar was the first step to democratizing the idea of class. Anyone could join provided they learned how to dress and behave the right way. And provided they could afford the bar tab and the bar tab was noticeably higher than it was in other clubs.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Posting will be light
As I mentioned Tuesday, I'm starting work on a book so I'll be posting less. Probably only once or twice a day for a little while.
Goodbye to a legend
The virtues of mad men
Six Months Leave
I'm sorry but no one like Don Draper in 1962 would have opened the door of their hotel room wearing just boxer shorts.
That aside, there is a nice parallel between the dead Marilyn Monroe that Don reads about in his newspaper in the hotel where he is staying and the bedraggled Betty who gets out of bed in her nightie. Ever so slowly we are starting to say goodbye to the culture that the show has gloried in up until now.
One key moment in this episode occurs when Betty turns on the radio long enough to hear the announcer quote Marylin saying that it is unfair to criticize stars and that stars are what is right with the movie business. Now that is telling if you've been reading the on-line commentary and blogs about this show. Critics and pundits defend Betty (no one loves her). They see her as a victim and a vindication of the Friedan thesis.
Everyone else dislikes her. Visit the discussion groups and you'll see that no other character is so widely abused and disdained as Betty. No matter our sex, race or religion, we are united in our dislike of Betty Draper. The writers know this and they were already plotting her demise when they wrote this episode.
There was a scene last episode when she appeared without make up and that carries through this episode (I suspect she is actually made up to look like she's not made up but the effects is what we see not the reality). And here we get some nice retroactive context. A couple of shows ago, we thought of Joan as the Marilyn type, now we see it is Betty who represents the false image of womanhood that has to go.
In any case, we see de-glamourized Betty actually doing housework. But not actually raising her children. She's not much good at that. She is better at relating to objects than people.
Grown ups
The distinction that will become so important in Season 3 between the people who are grown ups and the ones who act like children starts to be drawn here. One thing you have to say about Weiner, is that he is always laying the groundwork for future developments. "Grown up" doesn't mean morally perfect here. And we should remember that the 1960s was increasingly, as the season opener reminds us, the era of youth.
In this episode, a couple of icons disappear. There is Marylin. Marylin is one of those people, foreshadowing JFK here, whose achievements objectively considered are not nearly as impressive as the mythology around them would have us think. Both are all about image rather than actual achievement. And historically speaking, the show is about to enter an era where image trumped substance.
How do you play this to someone in their 20s or early 30s? Remember that, for them, people who morn dead icons are like those pathetic idiots who went around wailing after the death of Princess Diana. For them, the grown ups are the people who get on with life and don't engage in self-indulgent hysterics. How do you sell them on the virtues of a decade that made self-indulgent wallowing in the death of a minor president into a cult religion?
Surprisingly, Weiner plays a nice game of bait and switch. He teases us with Marilyn but instead gives us Freddy Rumsen, about as unglamorous an icon you could imagine. And instead of mythologizing Freddy, he gently moves him off stage paying due to him and his era. I won't say anything about it here because the show itself handles it so well. Buy the episode and watch the scenes where Don and Roger take Freddy out for a final night on the town. It's as rich and beautiful a performance as this show is capable of, absolutely full of humanity like a Louis Armstrong trumpet solo.
There is also another retrospective twist here. When JFK is shot in the penultimate show of Season three, the characters will again divide into grown ups and children, Joan will be one of the grown ups then. Here she is still a child. I'm pretty sure that is not the way the writers had originally planned it. I think she was meant to be the one who got phased out. But everyone loves Joan and no one loves Betty, so plans were changed.
And there is a minor joy. Jimmy Barrett is, as I noted before, a decidedly Seinfeldian character and there is a lovely moment when Don punches him in the face. Rogers says he doesn't know why Don did it but a lot of people will tank him. And we do. The only way it could have been betterw as if they had cast Jerry Seinfeld himself in the part.
He could have been a legend
The other key moment is when Peggy chews out Pete for ratting on Freddy. She says he could have been a legend. And perhaps he could have.
Marylin did become a legend in a way that is all too typical of the 1960s. In the same way that Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix later would . The joke in the 1980s was to say that dying was the best career move they ever made. Except, of course, that they died. Freddy get's to live.
And also except of course that they were all pathetic washed up addicts when they died. The legend hides that.
Leaving the past behind
Weiner has said that the first season was a complete idea. He put everything into it because he had no idea if there would be a second season. Now that he has one, he has to expand his scope to include the sweep of history. It's not enough to present costume drama now. he has to show us why the very attractive culture he showed us in Season one withered away.
That carries immense risks for the show's writers. Most importantly because the people who actually watch the show love the culture and style of this era. And an era that had lots of style is about to be replaced by an era that had none.
Equally troubling is the values. I'm not sure the writers grasp this one fully. The critics and pundits come from a generation that still saw the 1960s as a time of great liberation. They are looking for a show that will justify the 1960s. That will, as someone else put it, show why the 1960s had to happen. And that is going to be a lot harder than it sounds.
But most people who watch his show are ten to twenty years younger than the critics and pundits. They grew up sneering at oldsters sitting in front of PBS documentaries about the summer of love or the nine-millionth Peter, Paul and Mary Special. To them, the 1960s is just history. It's got nothing to do with them. They, correctly, admire the style and flash of the early 1960s are not going to be conned into believing that protest songs, long hair, Nehru jackets and jeans were a step up.
Season 2 blogging begins here.
The next episode blog will be here .
(Season one begins here if you are interested.)
Six Months Leave
I'm sorry but no one like Don Draper in 1962 would have opened the door of their hotel room wearing just boxer shorts.
That aside, there is a nice parallel between the dead Marilyn Monroe that Don reads about in his newspaper in the hotel where he is staying and the bedraggled Betty who gets out of bed in her nightie. Ever so slowly we are starting to say goodbye to the culture that the show has gloried in up until now.
One key moment in this episode occurs when Betty turns on the radio long enough to hear the announcer quote Marylin saying that it is unfair to criticize stars and that stars are what is right with the movie business. Now that is telling if you've been reading the on-line commentary and blogs about this show. Critics and pundits defend Betty (no one loves her). They see her as a victim and a vindication of the Friedan thesis.
Everyone else dislikes her. Visit the discussion groups and you'll see that no other character is so widely abused and disdained as Betty. No matter our sex, race or religion, we are united in our dislike of Betty Draper. The writers know this and they were already plotting her demise when they wrote this episode.
There was a scene last episode when she appeared without make up and that carries through this episode (I suspect she is actually made up to look like she's not made up but the effects is what we see not the reality). And here we get some nice retroactive context. A couple of shows ago, we thought of Joan as the Marilyn type, now we see it is Betty who represents the false image of womanhood that has to go.
In any case, we see de-glamourized Betty actually doing housework. But not actually raising her children. She's not much good at that. She is better at relating to objects than people.
Grown ups
The distinction that will become so important in Season 3 between the people who are grown ups and the ones who act like children starts to be drawn here. One thing you have to say about Weiner, is that he is always laying the groundwork for future developments. "Grown up" doesn't mean morally perfect here. And we should remember that the 1960s was increasingly, as the season opener reminds us, the era of youth.
In this episode, a couple of icons disappear. There is Marylin. Marylin is one of those people, foreshadowing JFK here, whose achievements objectively considered are not nearly as impressive as the mythology around them would have us think. Both are all about image rather than actual achievement. And historically speaking, the show is about to enter an era where image trumped substance.
How do you play this to someone in their 20s or early 30s? Remember that, for them, people who morn dead icons are like those pathetic idiots who went around wailing after the death of Princess Diana. For them, the grown ups are the people who get on with life and don't engage in self-indulgent hysterics. How do you sell them on the virtues of a decade that made self-indulgent wallowing in the death of a minor president into a cult religion?
Surprisingly, Weiner plays a nice game of bait and switch. He teases us with Marilyn but instead gives us Freddy Rumsen, about as unglamorous an icon you could imagine. And instead of mythologizing Freddy, he gently moves him off stage paying due to him and his era. I won't say anything about it here because the show itself handles it so well. Buy the episode and watch the scenes where Don and Roger take Freddy out for a final night on the town. It's as rich and beautiful a performance as this show is capable of, absolutely full of humanity like a Louis Armstrong trumpet solo.
There is also another retrospective twist here. When JFK is shot in the penultimate show of Season three, the characters will again divide into grown ups and children, Joan will be one of the grown ups then. Here she is still a child. I'm pretty sure that is not the way the writers had originally planned it. I think she was meant to be the one who got phased out. But everyone loves Joan and no one loves Betty, so plans were changed.
And there is a minor joy. Jimmy Barrett is, as I noted before, a decidedly Seinfeldian character and there is a lovely moment when Don punches him in the face. Rogers says he doesn't know why Don did it but a lot of people will tank him. And we do. The only way it could have been betterw as if they had cast Jerry Seinfeld himself in the part.
He could have been a legend
The other key moment is when Peggy chews out Pete for ratting on Freddy. She says he could have been a legend. And perhaps he could have.
Marylin did become a legend in a way that is all too typical of the 1960s. In the same way that Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix later would . The joke in the 1980s was to say that dying was the best career move they ever made. Except, of course, that they died. Freddy get's to live.
And also except of course that they were all pathetic washed up addicts when they died. The legend hides that.
Leaving the past behind
Weiner has said that the first season was a complete idea. He put everything into it because he had no idea if there would be a second season. Now that he has one, he has to expand his scope to include the sweep of history. It's not enough to present costume drama now. he has to show us why the very attractive culture he showed us in Season one withered away.
That carries immense risks for the show's writers. Most importantly because the people who actually watch the show love the culture and style of this era. And an era that had lots of style is about to be replaced by an era that had none.
Equally troubling is the values. I'm not sure the writers grasp this one fully. The critics and pundits come from a generation that still saw the 1960s as a time of great liberation. They are looking for a show that will justify the 1960s. That will, as someone else put it, show why the 1960s had to happen. And that is going to be a lot harder than it sounds.
But most people who watch his show are ten to twenty years younger than the critics and pundits. They grew up sneering at oldsters sitting in front of PBS documentaries about the summer of love or the nine-millionth Peter, Paul and Mary Special. To them, the 1960s is just history. It's got nothing to do with them. They, correctly, admire the style and flash of the early 1960s are not going to be conned into believing that protest songs, long hair, Nehru jackets and jeans were a step up.
Season 2 blogging begins here.
The next episode blog will be here .
(Season one begins here if you are interested.)
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Secret subtext in Austen?
There was a post a few days ago that drew a comment from Arnie Perlstein who has devoted a lot of time and effort to uncovering a secret subtext in Jane Austen. He has a blog on the subject if it interests you. I've only skimmed it so far but it looks interesting enough to me.
What do I think?
I am quite certain there is all sorts of subtext in Austen. In fact, I think you'd have to be crazy to think otherwise. Look at the playfulness of Northanger Abbey and you see a writer who was probably constitutionally incapable of resisting the temptation to litter her writing with all sorts of sly allusions and in jokes for her family and friends. (Fanny Price's name, for example, could well be a rather rude pun as some writers have suggested.)
BUT and this is a huge but, there is a giant difference between having subtextual elements and having a consistent secret subtext and I don't think there is a such a subtext running through Austen.
The most obvious reason, to my mind, for thinking so, is that the novels are so good. A novel or poem with a single subtext running through it is a dual purpose thing. It's like one of those cars that is also function as a boat. What you get is a pretty crappy car and a pretty crappy boat. It works but not nearly so well as a car that is just a car or a boat that is just a boat.
The first hint that a work may have a single subtext running through it is that it creaks a bit when you try and read it as straight text and that is most emphatically not true of the Austen novels. Austen wrote these books to be read as texts.
That will no doubt be a disappoint for some people but really, read the text. As readers we can convince ourselves that we are being terribly clever rooting out bits of subtext but for writers, the ability to put everything right on the surface is often more impressive. There are very few writers as good at it as Austen and there are no other novelists as good.
What do I think?
I am quite certain there is all sorts of subtext in Austen. In fact, I think you'd have to be crazy to think otherwise. Look at the playfulness of Northanger Abbey and you see a writer who was probably constitutionally incapable of resisting the temptation to litter her writing with all sorts of sly allusions and in jokes for her family and friends. (Fanny Price's name, for example, could well be a rather rude pun as some writers have suggested.)
BUT and this is a huge but, there is a giant difference between having subtextual elements and having a consistent secret subtext and I don't think there is a such a subtext running through Austen.
The most obvious reason, to my mind, for thinking so, is that the novels are so good. A novel or poem with a single subtext running through it is a dual purpose thing. It's like one of those cars that is also function as a boat. What you get is a pretty crappy car and a pretty crappy boat. It works but not nearly so well as a car that is just a car or a boat that is just a boat.
The first hint that a work may have a single subtext running through it is that it creaks a bit when you try and read it as straight text and that is most emphatically not true of the Austen novels. Austen wrote these books to be read as texts.
That will no doubt be a disappoint for some people but really, read the text. As readers we can convince ourselves that we are being terribly clever rooting out bits of subtext but for writers, the ability to put everything right on the surface is often more impressive. There are very few writers as good at it as Austen and there are no other novelists as good.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)