Mad Men: Going meta-meta on The Forecast

Four years ago now, Megan McCardle noticed something about internet journalism that still strikes me as very important. Netflix had just made what was, for them, a rare but serious misstep. They recovered but the criticism levelled at the company and its CEO was savage at the time. McCardle noted something bizarre about the criticism:

I don't want to pick on Ms. Martin, particularly, because I've read some version of this lament about Netflix about a thousand times. And indeed, I completely agree that the Qwikster disaster was nothing short of debacletacular.

But how do we get from "that was a bad idea" to "Reed Hastings doesn't understand what business he's in?" When internet commentators see odd behavior that they don't understand, why do they assume that the most parsimonious explanation is that management must be a bunch of drooling morons?

I mean, Reed Hastings did manage to build this rather large and successful business that killed off one of the most successful retail operations of its day. It's possible that he just sort of did this by accident. But is this really the most likely explanation? That he didn't understand the first thing about how people watched movies, or how to run a business?

Don Draper is a fictional character but any reasonable assessment of him should follow similar rules. He has been very successful, he has come up with brilliant campaigns, women find him very attractive (including lots of women at home too so it isn't just because it's in the script) and he often proves to be the only adult in the room. (This includes the assessment made by the shows writers; if he suddenly turns into a complete loser for the final four shows they will have betrayed their viewers.) Yes, he has faults and very real ones but how do we get from man to serious flaws to the following:

1. ... it’s that Dick Whitman simply can’t keep up the Don Draper facade anymore. The Dick-ishness is seeping through. Don Draper created dreams; Dick Whitman shits on them. Don Draper was a legendary Manhattan sex god; Dick Whitman hits on teenage girls. Don Draper had everything – and deserved it; Dick Whitman has nothing – and it’s all his fault. It truly feels like we’re at the end of Don’s story and he knows it. It’s why, when faced with the kind of assignment the average high-schooler could complete in a weekend (2500 words on the future), he’s completely stumped. Don Draper has no future.
2. Don’s hypocrisy really shone through when he tried to lecture Sally after his somewhat pathetic performance at the Chinese restaurant. Talk about regression—here’s a man who’s struggling to keep his life afloat and is falling for anonymous diner waitresses because they remind him of an old flame. But put him at the table with a bunch of 17-year-olds, and his tarnished charm finally gets a chance to shine again. Sally’s right about him “oozing,” but what she doesn’t realize is that he can’t help himself—she’s 17, so she’s not in the right place to empathize with her father, but this is a man whose real estate agent thinks he’s pathetic.

That's Tom & Lorenzo and The Atlantic respectively. The big problem here is that Don doesn't hit on a seventeen-year-old girl; she hits on him. And while Sally's unhappiness is understandable, more on this later, she's wrong. Don handles that situation about as well as an adult male could. (BTW: there is a nice bit of esoteric writing in this section when the 17-year-old in question mentions that Senator Dodd is going to given them a tour of the Senate. Anyone want to take a guess at how he and his buddy Teddy would respond to that sort of flirting?)

What's stunning about these assessments of Don is how dismissive they are. There are so many fans of the show who, while they clearly like watching Don Draper, dismiss everything he does as if it was just so much "privilege". 

Not unrelated, here is a snippet from a Slate piece on "Americana".

As a category, Americana has its problems—it’s a very white scene that claims to represent a lineage deeply rooted in African-American sounds (since country, too, was born in blues), and its adherents often cling too rigidly to notions of virtue and authenticity.

There's so much wrong in that I don't know where to begin. Yes, country music is (partly) rooted in the blues. It's also partly rooted in parlour music, Irish, Scottish and English folk music and opera. The blues, meanwhile, while unquestionably African-American, also owes a huge amount to music that was Arabic or European. The problem the writer has here is not with authenticity but with what is, for her, the wrong kind of authenticity. She makes me think of this pathetic display:

My name is such a vanilla, white-girl American name,' said Ashley Holmes of Indianapolis who changed her name online 'to show how little meaning "Hussein" really has.

The McCardle article I opened by quoting asks the rather bluntly how the critics of Netflix can be so much smarter than its founder and yet not be millionaires themselves. What's hiding here is self-hatred and all this raining on Don Draper is really an attempt at virtue signalling.

Mothers and other women

The key to understanding Sally's being so upset at Don is that she has already been through this with her mother and that scene was more genuinely disturbing. (Matt Weiner's mother must hate this show although I have to say I understand where he's coming from; I see a lot of my mother in Betty.) Anyway, if Sally is half as smart as her many fans doing recaps say she is, then the events of last episode must have given her some inkling that the main reason that Glen has been friends with her all these years is so he could keep the channel for future contact with Betty open. And the reason she has to have some inkling is that Betty all but diagrammed it out for her: "Sooo, you two have stayed in touch."

When Don tells Sally she is a beautiful girl and that it's up to her to be more than that, she has to know what this says of her mother.

Speaking of mothers, I mentioned how unsatisfying and unrealistic Joan's romance was and lots of people caught that (although no one mentioned how creepy it was for the guy to stalk Joan by flying to New York). Hanna Roisin spotted something I did not. Speaking of the Peggy and Joan subplots this episode she writes,

Sometime I feel like Matt Weiner lets the men work out their conflicts delicately while the women sound like anecdotes out of the Center for Work and Family. Joan faced the classic baby versus boyfriend dilemma. Only it didn’t really feel like much of a dilemma, because we never got to experience the maternal bond.

That's absolutely right. And it leads me to revisit something I said a long time ago about the show. I can't find the post where I said it but I once replied to a critic who said that the female characters were, as Roisin argues above, straight out of a textbook. I said that one of the great things about teh show was that the women were not like that. I still stand by that because it used to be true. As time goes on, though, the series plays more and more by the feminist handbook and all the women are either victims or role models.

Final thought, that Hanna Roisin piece is called, "Sally is the best character on Mad Men." I don't think Roisin really believes that for a second. Much of the commentary, and I cheerfully admit my own falls into this category, is really a way of voting for what you hope will be the case. Hanna Roisin votes for a future in which characters like Sally succeed. I vote for a future in which the forgotten virtues of characters like Roger and Don are rediscovered by men of later generations. It's funny to be arguing for either outcome as we already know that both came true.

Meta Meta: Virtue at last

I have heaped a fair amount of abuse on the recap crowd at Slate, particularly on Patrick Radden Keefe, but yesterday he came very close to the truth.

He did it with the help of two of the shows writers, who did a guest spot with the Slate crew. André and Marie Jacquemetton wrote a rather elusive little piece in which they answered questions without being very clear about which questions they were answering. One of their answers, which Radden Keefe, picked up on was this:

Matthew Weiner and the writers were very interested this season in the success of the business and how that becomes every man for himself. Playing out the voracious hunger that goes along with ambition, achievement, and getting what you want over the season arc and how that would manifest, particularly in characters like Ken Cosgrove, Lane, and even Don, who despite their sometimes questionable choices generally uphold a certain standard of morality and/or dignity. In this episode, the firm’s success in the light of Don’s “tainted” win of jaguar has left him ravenous for more success. (emphasis added)

I'll come back to that in a minute but first I want to go to what Radden Keefe takes from it.

But what about this notion of dignity, as distinct from morality?

How does dignity fit with morality? Is it morality or is it something outside or even opposed to morality?

Ever since beginning I have been saying that you need to think in terms of virtues if you want to get this show. That's a tough thing for us to do because we have been trained to think of morality in terms of rules and duty—the technical term is deontology—rather than virtues. Confronted by Donald Draper, rule and duty ethics can only condemn. Don literally does not do his duty as a soldier and he spends the whole of his life pretending to be someone he is not.

What is dignity? It's a virtue pure and simple. Dignity is not dependent on following the rules or doing your duty. Dignity is something that you can embody successfully or fail to embody. Other people can, although not always successfully, take away your dignity but no one can give you dignity. Even God will only co-operate with (or not co-operate and frustrate) you in your efforts to have dignity. (In strict terms, God could presumably give us dignity if he chose because he can do whatever he wants, but everything we experience tells us that he does not choose.)

As Radden Keefe goes on to say, dignity also seems to have some relationship with pride. And yet dignity is generally taken to be an admirable thing and pride often isn't. You might say that dignity is something we project whereas pride is something we have "inside". It is possible to do things out of pride that rob us of all dignity. Pete Campbell has lots of pride but rarely or never seems to project dignity. Don Draper, on the other hand, often seems moved by a kind of self-loathing and yet usually manages to project dignity.

We had a good example of that in this last episode and it is one that the Jacquemettons don't quite seem to get. They write:

In this episode, the firm’s success in the light of Don’s “tainted” win of jaguar [sic] has left him ravenous for more success.

But why the scare quotes? The win of Jaguar is tainted because Joan had sex with one of the big players to help secure it. This is part of Don's sense of virtue right from the beginning. In season one (The Wheel) he says,

Bringing in business is the key to your salary, your status and your self worth.

Pete promptly goes out and brings in the Clearasil account by taking advantage of a connection with his father and law. Don regards that as tainted. Pete gets two of three, he has salary and status but he doesn't have self worth.

Of course we have a hard time accepting the idea of dignity in work particularly work in advertising.  If there is one thing that makes us different from the immediate postwar era it's that we don't believe in that anymore.

We tend to believe in reinvention, or at least we say we do. We talk about David Bowie and Madonna and now Lady Gaga as reinventing themselves. The problem with that is that they don't. The keep redoing it because no one reinvention is ever good enough. Think of what Don says to Lane when Lane says he feels lightheaded,

That's relief. I've started over a lot Lane. This is the worst part.

Don doesn't reinvent himself, he starts over. There is something very American about that. It's something we have lost.

I'll leave it there.

Meta-meta: Who deserves contempt?

Patrick Radden-Keefe at Slate writes:

How appropriate that it is Ginsberg who diagnoses the pathologies gripping the firm. Ginsberg is an old soul himself, who is both fascinated and repulsed by the sex-and-violence decadence of his era. What inspired his breakthrough on Jaguar? It was Megan’s actor friend, performing an impromptu audition for the campaign by crawling, panties bared, across the conference table—another nod at the conventions of striptease.  “I could be in a bikini,” she brainstorms lustily, “and you could paint my body with spots.” Knockoff the grabass, indeed.

As his horny colleagues gather round the spectacle, Ginsberg does not mask his contempt for them, or for the intended audience of the campaign. 

Okay, but consider this. Here is what the guys in the boardroom are seeing:

And here is what we the home audience are seeing:

Ginsburg says, "I kept imagining the asshole who is going to want this car." Radden-Keefe says "he does not mask his contempt for the "intended audience". Fine, but what about the intended audience for, as the Internet creeps like to put it, the upskirt shot above? How "appropriate" is it for us, the assholes who want to watch this show, to feel superior?

Consider this dialogue between Pete and Joan about the Jaguar representative who wants to have sex with her in exchange for his good word.

Joan: Which one is he?
Pete: He's not bad.
Joan: He's doing this.

To which the obvious response should be, "So are you, honey." Pete wouldn't, couldn't say that but I'd feel a lot better about the episode if I thought the irony here was intended. I'm not convinced that the show's creators get it; Radden-Keefe sure doesn't.

As I said in my first commentary on the episode, I think there is something morally hollow about it. And it is characteristic of the entertainment industry to imagine it is "diagnosing" pathologies that are actually typical of shows like this.

Meta-meta: One of them cannot be right

Matt Zoller Seitz and Allan Sepinwall sat down to watch what was ostensibly the same episode of Mad Men last night. Here is what Seitz saw:

"The Other Woman" focuses on its three lead female characters (sorry, Betty!) at critical junctures, moments when they can retreat or advance. Astonishingly, and at great personal cost, they all advance, and exit stronger than they entered. 

And Sepinwall:

It's an hour about women being viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold, or simply owned, spelled out bluntly, horrifically and yet beautifully by Don delivering Ginsberg's "At last: something beautiful you can truly own" tagline just after we've seen Joan slipping uncomfortably out of the Jaguar exec's bed.

Hmmm.

Sepinwall has the more interesting take on the show by a long shot. Seitz, however, is an interesting example of a post-feminist quandary. The primary issue is that nothing can ever be a woman's fault in a post-feminist world. So if a woman sells her body then it has to be either because some evil pimp of a guy manœuvered her into it or because she has made a wonderfully brave self-affirming decision to control her own body and her future. Although I say either, Seitz seems to want to be able to condemn Pete for being a pimp and praise Joan for taking control.

Either way, his position is a morally ludicrous but not uncommon one: pimps bad, whores good. Unless, of course, a black hip hop artist raps about being a pimp and says degrading things about women, in which case the morality doesn't quite reverse but it all becomes "understandable".

Even Sepinwall, however, seems unwilling to criticize Joan directly. Over at Slate, Julia Turner is willing to go a little ways in that direction. Her remarks are worth reading at some length:

Joan, meanwhile, has finagled a place at the partner’s table, by way of a sordid assignation with Herb from the Jaguar dealers’ association. The incident smeared muck onto everyone who came in contact with it, including Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, and various sultans of Araby. It made Pete look bad, for pushing the idea. (How Pete-ishly slimy was his initial insinuating approach?) It made Bert look bad, for ineffectually saying “Let her know she can still say no,” and washing his hands of the matter. It made Lane look bad, for pretending to be Joan’s friend—urging her to ask for a 5 percent partnership, rather than cash—when in fact he was serving only himself, hoping to conceal his financial skullduggery a few weeks longer. It made Roger look horrible: “I’m not going to stand in the way, but I’m not paying for it,” he said, marking nothing but his first refusal to pay for something all season. And, finally—and not to get all judgmental about it—it made Joan look bad.

Why not get "all judgmental" about it?  She has no trouble getting all judgmental about Pete. Is there some doubt about making "judgments" selling your dignity and your body for personal gain? Or to put  it in an old-fashioned way, about being a whore? Well, yes, there is in the era of the sex-trade worker of Babylon.

By the way, the guys at Slate have yet to respond to Turner as of 2:20. I'm not sure whether that is because they are too busy licking the polish off of Lena Dunham's shoes or whether he moral quandaries posed by last night's episode are too daunting.

Turner is also of mixed feelings about Peggy's departure. My sister had the same reaction and Sepinwall also wouldn't want her to just go. All argue that it is Peggy's character is what they will miss. I wonder. Or is it the Peggy-Don connection they will miss?

Mad Men: What is Lakshmi up to?

Some more Meta-Meta commentary. Over at the Vulture site, Matt Zoller Seitz loved the episode except for one scene:

I loved the coffee shop scene so much that it made me almost (but not quite) forgive the scene between Lakshmi and Harry in Harry's office, which is hands-down the dumbest and most incoherent scene in season five of Mad Men, and the one that most lends credence to the notion that this is ultimately a male-centered show that understands many of its female characters in an academic rather than intuitive way. Lakshmi was there to …

And he goes on to make the point that  Lakshmi's actions don't make much sense on the surface.

Well, how much sense do we expect from someone who is into Kozmic Krishna Konsciousness?

And Lakshmi is named for a Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity so we should be cued to see contradictions in her character. (This, incidentally, is a bit of a theme this episode with Don and Megan and Roger and Joan also having disputes over wealth versus "spirituality" in which the woman is in a very ambiguous position.)

Seitz assumes that her purpose was, as she seems to say at one point, was to use sex to keep Harry from saving Paul. But, if that is her purpose, her actions, as Seitz points out, don't make sense. Seitz also notes that they don't make sense to Harry either. So what is she doing?

I thought the receptionist had a useful clue, when she calls to tell Harry Lakshmi is there, she says, "She's got a whole story." That rang a bell with me. Back in the 1980s, I'd meet these young "downtown" women who were lost and confused on the one hand and hard as nails pragmatists on the other. They'd feed you a "whole story" but they also tended to know exactly what everything cost.

They were runaways who lived downtown and got by by hook or by crook. That was how they got that way. There are still thousands of girls like that about.

Lakshmi strikes me as charter member of that club. Notice that she comes on to Harry in a very sexual manner right from the get-go. She is used to using her sexuality to get what she wants. And Paul tells us that when he gives Harry, and us, her background.

I don't think we should discount the possibility that she was hoping to recruit Harry to the Krishna movement in this way. It's probably how she got Paul into it, as Harry surmises.

My final thought here is that Seitz has it exactly backwards in saying that the "show that understands many of its female characters in an academic rather than intuitive way". One of the most refreshing things about Mad Men is that it understands its female characters in an intuitive manner rather than an academic one. There is zero feminist theory at work here. These women behave like women tend to do. Sometimes their actions make sense and sometimes they don't.

I shouldn't have to stop and make this qualification, but the same is true of men. But depictions of men have always been like that—no one expects fiction about men to correspond to some academic theory.

Thus we have the wonderful portrayal of Joan and Lakshmi who both define themselves in terms of their sexual power and will do things that, otherwise, make no sense to display that power to themselves and others. For a woman who thinks this way, and there are a few, the validation comes not from the fact that the guy wants sex with her but from the sense that those guys she does give sex to are so impressed by the experience with her that they keep coming back for more.

On a related note, at the bottom of his piece Seitz wonders at the lack of Dawn since her earlier integration into the show. The fascinating thing here is that the producers handle black characters exactly the way Seitz, falsely, accuses them of handling women: that is academically rather than instinctively. And that is why the black characters who do appear are always so boring.

Mad Men: Commenting on the commentary

Not just meta but meta-meta.

What do they teach kids these days?

In discussing this week's episode, Patrick Radden Keefe writes:

It seems that her Majesty’s Tax Man has come calling, and Lane has turned for assistance not to H&R Block, as you or I might, but to a suave but insistent British gentleman who puts on a tuxedo to make a transatlantic call.

It used to be that people with double-barreled names kept up a double-barreled front to go with. Not anymore apparently. Here is that "tuxedo":

Now, it might actually be a tuxedo but I doubt it very much. First hint, that is a patterned bow tie. Second hint, his shirt has plastic buttons and not studs. He's just a well-dressed solicitor wearing a bow tie with a suit that was cut to flash a little cuff.

UPDATE: We can see this quite clearly when the same character appears wearing a different colour jacket that shows up better:

Does this matter? I mean, does it matter a lot as it obviously does matter? Well, that will be a subject of some discussion over the week. I have promised to go on a lighter note for summer and this is the beginning. I'm going to be looking at the recap community a bit this week.

To answer my own question, yes it does matter. If you are going to be a cultural critic, you should be possessed of some culture and my point this week will be that these people aren't. They are Google and Wiki fiends but they don't have much cultural depth and that is why most Mad Men recaps are so pathetic.