Monday, November 15, 2010

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.

5 comments:

  1. You say a lot here. I'll start with the last first. It is interesting isn't it that lesbians often speak of "choosing" the lifestyle. I took a Feminist Ethics class in grad school, and one of the lectures was about this. The instructor--a guest lecturer actually--said that the lesbian is saying she won't be available, won't be part of the barter system--sex in exchange for economic security--of the partriarchal system. I remember being very confused by this at the time. I don't know that this is true of all lesbians, at least not at the conscious level. But you are right that if that had been a man saying those words, well Weiner just would never have done that.

    You say that Faye is playing a part while Megan is the part. I agree with that because I often feel that way myself in my work with people. People in her and I guess any helping profession--including clergy--watch and critique people living their lives. But in that capacity, we are playing a part, its not who we really are because the boundaries imposed on the professional relationship don't allow us to reveal who we really are to the people we treat or minister too, not that I would want to anyway.

    Is love--I assume you mean eros not agape--a divinely created good designed to give our lives meaning and purpose? I'd like to believe that, and I did very fervently when I was young and naive. As I've gotten older I've come to realize that there are other--and maybe less painful--ways of giving our lives meaning and purpose. Nonetheless, I think in Mad Men, what we used to call infatuation is often confused with love. Maybe that's deliberate on Weiner's part or maybe he's just been in Hollywood so long that he can't tell the difference. The headlines in the rags on the stand at the supermarket announce Jennifer and Brad, Brad and Angelina, they profess undying love and have these incredible weddings, then 6 mos later its over.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I see I didn't express myself as clearly as I thought and have posted an update to try and clarify above.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I took me a while, but I think I understand what you're trying to say, tying in your comments about Megan with the nun's pastry and your earlier post about sensuality. Let me have a stab at it so see if I'm getting it right. First of all I agree with what I think you're tryig to say. We do sanitize sex, but more so than life in general. It seems to me that its to make it more palatable for women or some peoples' notions about women. I don't know whether its residua of the Victorian era or something more. But I think it has to do with the devaluing of sexuality as something base and crude, and beneath the "higher" intellectual or spiritual pursuits. When sex is acknowledged as something "beautiful" (never as
    %$&*'ng hot) it is only within very narrow parameters, i.e., valid heterosexual marriage, both bride and groom virgins, it then becomes elevated to a mystical union of souls for all of eternity, with NO nasty smells. Someone wrote a book which was sent to me quite a long time ago--maybe 10-12 yrs ago--called "The Feminization of the Church." As I recall, the author (whose name escapes me) argued that over the course of centuries the Church became more and more feminized, and that the Church's view of sexuality became more feminine than masculine. Its been a long time since I read the book and I no longer have it, but as I recall I think one of the reasons he cites for this is the preponderance of homosexuals among the Church hierarchy and priesthood in general. But the point of the book was to explain why more men don't go to Church.

    In this light I understand what you're saying ahout Faye and Megan. Faye is all intellect, because that's how professional women with Ph.Ds are supposed to be according to the early Feminists, while Megan is very feminine, very sensual, and non-apologetic about it. She's the type of woman that the early feminists derided, that's what the conversation between Joan and Peggy after Don announced his engagement was really all about.

    I didn't comment on your earlier post about sensuality because I essentially agreed with most or all of it. A really sensual woman doesn't need chocolate, or bubble bath, or perfume to prove it, that's just another way of sanitizing it. Real sensuality comes from within, and the truly sensual woman can exudes it with a look, a gesture, or enjoying a stretch. Consider the Italian acress Anna Magnani (maybe before your time). She wasn't considered beautiful by even 1950 standards, never wore makeup, a little overweight, yet she was incredibly sensual and sexual, and frequently described as "earthy." You would never think of her shaving her armpits or her pubic hair, or wearing Chanel No.5, that would have ruined everything about her. The natural smells emanating from all of her bodily orifices would be far more intoxicating and arousing, and I can fantasize about her taking as much pleasure in them as her sexual partner would.

    So, is this the gist of what you're saying?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ok, I just read your addendum or preface to the first post about Megan. I guess it all depends on how one defines "playing a part." We all play "parts" I think in our day to day lives, based on what we think we're supposed to do or be. How we arrive at the ideas about that can come from different sources. Maybe Faye doesn't like children or to cook because she thinks those are beneath women of her high intellect and academic achievement, she thinks that's what society expects of women like her, or thats how she was socialized in graduate school. Or maybe she's really just a selfish bitch! I think the part that Megan plays is more genuine because she didn't have the same external influences--other than growing up in a traditional family in Canada--that Faye had. Maybe I'm naive, but while marrying Don might have been a fantasy of hers, I don't believe that Megan set out to maneuver her way around the relationship between Don and Faye, in part because I don't think she really thought she could compete with Faye. I think that her reaction to Sally in the hallway was completely spontaneous. And she didn't engineer the circumstances that led to Don asking her to go to California, that was all Betty's blunder with Carla. But when Don presented her with the opprtunity on the trip to CA, of course she grabbed it. If she was trying to maneuver, he just made it a lot easier for her.

    ReplyDelete
  5. That's the thing, if Megan really felt she had to out maneuver Faye--and felt she was capable of it--she certainly didn't have to work very hard at it. Not as hard as Joan Holloway did putting out for Roger for years, and she still didn't get what she wanted. All Megan had to be was, you better sit down for this, her true authentic self! There's no evidence that she has been anything but that--no skeletons in her closet, no furtive hang up phone calls--or that she behaved the way she did simply to ingratiate herself to Don. I think Don noticed her "that way" long before she noticed him "that way." She is who she is, which happens to be very appealing compared to the other women in Don's life.

    ReplyDelete