Mad Men: Let's change the conversation

The commentary on Mad Men is often more fruitful for analysis than the show itself.

Notice for example, how Hanna Rosin saw the exact same show that I reported seeing yesterday:

The broader theme (and it’s a little Phyllis Schlafly for my tastes) is that free love isn’t really free. If you dive into the late 1960s sex scene, then you either come out with a huge hangover (like Joan’s friend Kate) or you’re a total lascivious buffoon (like Megan’s swinger bosses). In the meantime, Don’s brand of adultery is so old-timey it’s biblical, freighted with crucifixes and prayer and long meaningful looks. In fact Don is the peeping Tom of the episode, spying on Peggy, spying on Megan, a spectator to the action going on around him but not really able to participate.

The difference between us is moral. I like the moral point here and she doesn't. Aesthetically speaking, however, we are on the same page.

Two preliminary points, the first of which is going to seem a little pedantic: there are no crucifixes in the Bible. (To be even more pedantic, Sylvia is wearing a cross not a crucifix.) There were, in fact, no crucifixes anywhere until at least the tenth century. It's not Biblical but medieval. And that is tremendously important. The theme here is renunciation. Don says, "I want to stop doing this." (But not yet as Augustine would finish it.)

The second point is the notion of freedom inherent in Rosin's view. She doesn't just want people, especially women, to be free to make their own choices in sexual matters, she wants them to be able to make these choices and have good consequences follow from them. She and I agree that Megan's swinging boss come off looking like idiots. The difference is that Rosin seems to think that is some sort of manipulative twist by the show's producers; she thinks there is a possible dramatization that would be equally, if not more credible, in which these characters come across as fun-loving, well-adjusted people.

The problem, as anyone who ever had the bad luck to interact with them can tell you, is that swingers are lascivious buffoons. This isn't some sort of distortion of reality. It's dramatically credible because that is what people who drain sex of all the things that make it human are like.

The medieval sex that Don engages in is not without its moral pitfalls of course and he certainly isn't without moral failings but it's miles more interesting than anything the swinging sixties had to offer. And it is that because it is human.

Choose your character and then become him or her

The other thing that strikes me as interesting about Rosin's commentary is the narrative arc she wants to see. The show tends to tell the same stories over and over again only with slight variations so you don't actually get anything that looks like the sort of narrative arc you'd get in a novel. Notice, for example, that we already had this Don goes to an exotic land seeking peace in Season 2 and in Season 4. He even walks into the ocean seeking to be made clean at the end of Season 2. That's the way it tends to be in television when the show drags on for season after season and then suddenly stops.

And before you condemn that, ask yourself what is more like real life: the arc with a sense of an ending you find in a novel or the repetition with variations you find in television?

Anyway, what is the narrative arc that Hanna Rosin looks for amongst all this debris? Not surprisingly, it concerns a woman trying to change her life. The woman is Megan:

It struck me that by acting, Peggy allows herself to feel a little less, which is precisely what Megan does in her love scene. That play within a play unfolded beautifully. The first shot showed Megan dressed up in her maid’s uniform lounging on a couch, and because we’d never seen her on set, it wasn’t clear if this was “Zou Bisou Bisou,” Downstairs edition, or what exactly was going on. Then pretty soon Megan (as the maid) was on her back on the bed, with “Rafe” all over her. Her acting dilemma is a real one for the era. I recently  saw the movie Hitchcock, which is about the making of Psycho. It takes place a few years earlier than this episode, but one of its main themes is Hitchcock’s rage about his leading ladies always betraying him because their husbands insisted they quit, or lay off on the love scenes, or button up their shirts. That doesn’t excuse Don’s despicable behavior, of course. But it does create the interesting dynamic that Megan, the youngest of all the adults and the best placed to let loose in the late ‘60s, is practically the only character on this show whose moral compass seems to point true north.

I quote this lengthy bit because I want you to see how much Rosin is on Megan's side.  And why not?

That acknowledged, I think Rosin is missing some serious problems with Megan's moral compass. For Rosin misses the point completely here. The drama is indeed telling us to recall scenes from last year but not the ones that made Rosin feel good.

I apologize for the horrible image quality but Apple won't let you take screen captures in iTunes anymore. You can see enough, however, to catch that the connection the shwo makes is not with the Zou Bisou Bisou moment at the opening of last season but with the fantasy she ad Megan shoots at the end:

I'm pretty sure that is the same sound stage that they shot last years final episode on. It's vertainly the same set up: girl with unrealistic dreams in a bedroom with a fairytale bed.

And do you remember how Megan got there? Not by earning it but by asking her husband to get her the job and, not incidentally, betraying a friend in the process. And then the camera pans back to reveal Don watching just as he watched the set up for the shoot of the shoe commercial. 

The similarity doesn't end there. In last year's finale, a woman walks up and asks Don a question and that signals pretty clearly that he is now bored with Megan. Her childish routine has reduced her in his eyes. This year, a woman Don hates, a woman who represents the kind of sexuality he hates, walks up and whispers, "You like watch, do you?" It may be that, more than anything else that puts him off.

Don likes to do sexual things in the dark by subterfuge and seduction and not by mutual consent that has been carefully negotiated in the light of day. That shouldn't be a surprise, my bet is that Hanna Rosin much prefers the same thing no matter what she might say or even think differently.  In any case, I'm pretty sure Don got some pleasure out of watching in the dark until that damn woman came along and ruined it with her pandering.

Either way, Megan has lost something by trading a business partnership with her husband to pursue fantasy dreams. And that matters because ... continued tomorrow.

Manly Thor's Day Special: Ballerina

I'm still on that last episode of Mad Men. Looking around the web, I think I'm the only person who thought it was brilliant. Some others thought it good, some thought it terrible and most thought it underwhelming.

Well, the last is to be expected. That's the Mad Men motif: a big penultimate show full of drama followed by a quiet, philosophical wind up. The only exception so far has been Season 3.

I'm going to arrogantly suggest that the reason people haven't appreciated it fully is because there was so much to digest in the show. I know that I find more in it every time I rewatch this episode. To take just one example, think of the word "ballerina". Lots of people have quoted a remark that Megan's mother Marie makes but I think they then fail to grasp the full significance of it.

First, the remark. Finding Megan moping in bed about her lack of success in her acting career, Marie tells her that the problem is that she is running after a phantom. Megan childishly whines that she is supposed be encouraging. That is when Marie gives her both barrels of twelve gauge realism:

Not every little girl gets to do what they want. The world could not support that many ballerinas.

Megan doesn't take that well. She makes a snide comment and her mother calls her an ungrateful little bitch.

An aside: Am I the only one to care that Marie is absolutely right on this one? And this is about more than just this one episode of the show. I find it very troubling that no one else latches on to this because it makes me wonder about our attitudes towards women in this post-feminist era. As a man, do you want a woman like Megan or a woman like Peggy? Both are variations on Margaret meaning a pearl, perhaps even a pearl of great value.

That goes right to the heart of not only this season's Mad Men but to the very nature of sin. Is sin in the devil who tempts us or is it in our desires.


But let's get back to "ballerina". Marie, after all, could have said that the world can only support so  many princesses but she chose, or, rather, the scriptwriters chose for her, "ballerina". We've had two notable ballerina appearances in the show before. We've had a character who has shared the name of a ballerina: Suzanne Farrell.  We've also had Peggy whom Freddy Rumsen calls "Ballerina".

So here is the question again: Do you thing Megan is Peggy's equal? Peggy didn't go looking to be a copywriter but she worked at it when she was given the chance. Megan didn't value the dream given to her but instead reverted to her childhood, and childish, dream of being an actress.

As I've said before, I don't think there is anything wrong with the image of the ballerina and the princess and I don't think there is anything wrong with little girls seizing on these archetypes. The problem comes when people feel entitled to it. And we tend to do that don't we? We look at some impossible dream and we know we can't earn it but we also think it will be magically handed to us.

To shift sexes for a moment, that is surely what was wrong with Lane Pryce's dreams. His wife thinks Don filled him with ambition he ought not to have but Lane didn't have ambitions, he had silly little fantasies as revealed by his still having the photograph of the sexy young woman that he found in a  wallet in an earlier episode. This is that crazy dream that most of us men have that some absolute goddess will come along and just give herself to us; not because we have won her love but just 'cause you know. Just 'cause we live in a narcissistic age and we're all prone to those sorts of dreams.

By the way, the "666" is beginning to make some sense now. Needful things: it's all about our desires and how they make us sin. Remember how Lane comes into Joan's office and she asks him what he thinks of her two possible vacation choices and he says neither seemed appropriate for celebrating the death and Resurrection of our Lord? And then he immediately makes a sexual suggestion that angers Joan. And then he, like Judas, hangs himself.

In the last episode, Joan wonders of Lane would not have committed suicide if she had given him sex. But why would that make any difference?

Mad Men: That ending

I wish I could post a video of just that ending. I buy the episodes through iTunes and I can go back and rewatch the really good bits and the ending of this season's finale is worth watching and rewatching.

We start on in black and white. We're watching Megan's "screen test". The camera pulls back and we watch Don watching. There is no sound at first so the sense of unreality created by the film is heightened. Then the music starts with a vague sort of French impressionist feel about it. At first it might be Satie, then it might be Debussy and then it sounds just like classic Hollywood.

What's Don thinking? We see him smile so his thoughts are affectionate but they are paternal. This is a change. I've rained some criticism on John Swansburg so let me give him full credit for spotting this first. His relationship with Megan has changed. She is no longer his equal but just another child with childish dreams she is seeking to satisfy.

Keep that thought in mind.

The next shot is the five partners walking out into the now available space one floor above. Except it isn't really. It's just the set where their current offices are emptied out. Our sense of unreality is heightened. There is a lovely joke on this in Pete saying he will have the same view as Don now. Literally the same. This must have been better for the actors because they, of course, are merely looking at a  blue screen where the "view" out the windows will later be dropped in.

And they all line up. The instant cliché has been to say they line up like super heroes. That's true enough but there is a prior source. They all line like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday and the gang about to fight the gunfight at the OK coral. This is a profoundly unrealistic shot created by Hollywood.

And then we are in a fantasy set, only we don't know it's a set yet. And Megan, dressed up like a child's dream, comes out to Don and says, "I can't believe this is happening." Then she says, "You know I love you," and kisses him. But she only loves him because he can make her dreams come true. Megan has come way down this episode. She has become a child just like Betty.

This is reflected in her clothing. (And who do we blame? It was her choices that got her here.)

And then Don turns and walks off the set. Again, the scene is so cinematic. The hero walks away at the end of his triumph. Because that is what heroes do. Like the lover in a sexual fantasy, he walks away and doesn't stay around to clutter things up. Shane would always be a source of tension so he has to leave and the mystery lover would kinda clash with the husband. And so does Don here. He has to leave because that is what heroes do.

And then the music kicks in. We don't know that it's a James Bond theme yet. We only know that it's very cinematic and it perfectly matches the lone hero walking away. And he walks and walks and the camera tracks him. It's like he is walking through the universe.

And then the best part. This is sooo perfect. If you can go rewatch it, do it now.

The camera stops tracking Don and he goes by us into the dark and then walks out of the dark right into a bar. He walks out of the last scene going from left to right and he walks into the next one from left to right. There are no establishing shots in between. It's like one continuous act before our eyes. He just walks out of one set and into another set.

Because that is what heroes do. They walk out of one adventure this week into a brand new one next week.

The music has been continuous and now the vocal starts. We know the tune of course. It is one of the pieces of common currency of our era but we haven't pinned it quite yet until the vocal starts and when it does, we are in a Bond movie.

And a woman approaches him and asks him to light her cigarette. This is a perfect opening for a  film noir. And she asks him if he is alone. again, there has been an instant cliché about this: that the answer is that "everyone is alone". True enough but it's not at all inappropriate or unusual for Don to be alone. He is the hero and he is always the hero and the hero is always alone at the start and end of each adventure. This is the start of something new.

The only unfortunate thing is that they didn't have  the courage to end it right there. I mean to end everything right there; not just the season but the series.

Mad Men quickie

There was so much in this episode that I keep coming back to it. I haven't seen anyone else comment on this yet so I will. When Don accidentally meets Peggy at the theatre to watch Casino Royale, she makes it clear that she learned this trick of going to the movie to clear the brain from him. That's not all she has learned.

Appropriately, it's the mirror image of the original:

Mad Men: The Phantom

They could end it right there. In fact, it's hard to see why they bother going on. Well, expect that ratings are way up and there is apparently a deal for two more seasons.

You caught the clever joke of course. They never name the brand because it hasn't got a name yet. Virginia Slims would be introduced in 1968:

You've come a long way, baby

To get where you've got to today

You've got your own cigarette now, baby

You've come a long, long way

You've come a long way baby. Except they haven't At the end of it all, Don walks into a bar and orders an old fashioned which, of course, is where we see him in the opening scene of the pilot. Peggy is literally trying to get a  cigarette of her own for her new employer. And then she checks into her motel room in Virginia (we know it's "motel" because she is on the ground floor) and she looks out the window and sees two dogs having sex.

Here is the problem, the show itself uses women in ways that are just as unenlightened. I'm not sure that is a problem for the show or for us. You decide.

Consider this bit of dialogue from last night's show:

Megan: I need you right now.
Don: Megan.
Megan: Please. It's the only thing I'm good for.
Don: What the hell happened today?
Megan: This is what you want isn't it? For me to be waiting for you. So you won't give me a chance.
Don: That's not true.
Megan: I know, I know. Because it's either that or I'm terrible.

Okay, nascent feminist theme perhaps? I don't know but stop and consider what the visuals tell us as opposed to the words. For as soon as that dialogue ends, Megan rolls over and we see this:

I know, I know, how very crass of me. But Megan's words from 1967 tell us that she is worried that her only value as a woman is sexual and then the camera immediately tells us that the creators and audience think her only value is sexual.

But Don gives her a  chance. Or appears to. He leaves the ad that is about to be filmed with Megan and walks out of a set and the camera pulls back so we can see that there is no fourth wall. And then he walks right into another set. Luckily this is not some stupid post-modernist wink but a lovely existential moment ebcause the very next scene he walks into is a bar.

Where he orders an old fashioned.

I love the show. That's why I write so much about it. But is this going anywhere? Or does it all end with some bit of cheap cynicism about how people can't change.

There were all sorts of fourth wall moments this season by the way.  Did you catch the shot where the partners all walk into the floor above to look at the empty office. That, of course, is nothing but the empty set of the existing office. Here is a gem. Here is the moment in episode "5G" from season one when Adam comes to Don for help and Don refuses:

Okay, here is the scene from "The Christmas Waltz" this season when Paul asks Harry for help and Harry gives him help:

Yes, it's the same booth. (Click on each image if you need to see it larger.)

And now consider this dialogue from "5G" in season one. Midge has called Don at the office and he nips over for a quickie. It's a sort of feminist moment" the woman makes the booty call. Sort of. Anyway, after the sex is over he following dialogue ensues:

Midge: That was it. That was what I called for. You can go.
Don: You can't call me at work.
Midge: You're scared I might get lonely all the time. Start having conversations with you and ring you all the time and say, 'When are you going to come over?'
Don: This is working right now.
Midge: And it worked today. Look, I'm sorry your life is in a million pieces. Be easier for you to have one less.

There is heavy dramatic irony there because Adam is about to take one piece out by committing suicide. Just as Lane takes apiece out this season and, lo and behold, Adam starts appearing in Don's dreams.

Now consider Marie's advice to Don this season:

"I know, it's hard to watch. But this is what happens when you have the artistic temperament but you are not an artist. Take my advice, Nurse her through this defeat and you shall have the life you desire."

Which is exactly what Midge offered Don and that Megan fears is all she has to offer.  Only Don ignores Marie's advice and tries to make Megan's dreams come true. Don spends a lot of time making women's dreams come true, which is perhaps not surprising  given that most of the show's writers are women.

Back to season one. Rachel has just expained to Don why there has to be an Israel even if she doesn't go there. She says it is more of an idea than a place.

Don: Utopia.
Rachel: Maybe, They taught us at Barnard about that word. Utopia. The Greeks had two meanings for it eu-topos, meaning the good place and u-topos, meaning the place that cannot be. 

That's pretty much where we are stuck again isn't it? (as I've said before, one of the show's weaknesses is when characters start to talk like writers. This isn't the only time we see a character start unrealistically going off about Greek definitions.)

What would it take to redeem this? What would it take to raise the show above some trite bit of cleverness wherein people can't change?

Here is my thesis. The usual criticism of the dream merchants: as Midge's new boyfriend Roy says in Season one, "You make the lie. You invent want". But suppose we are like Megan, desperate to believe the problem is with Don rather than face that the problem is with us in the first place ('cause it's either that or we're terrible).

Well, what if we are terrible and our desires keep getting us to the same nowhere? If that is true then Don is just a MacGuffin. And we keep trading one false religion for another, episode after episode.

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.

Mad Men: Fees and Commissions

"If you needed it so badly, why didn't you just ask?"

I'll say right up front that I think Don's behaviour towards Lane was exemplary. And I thought Lane was unmanly and weaselly in response. I'd guess that how you feel about this episode will boil down to how you feel about that interaction.

I don't mean who you feel about this episode as an artistic creation but how you react to the moral aspects of it. Of course, that moral response will have something to do with how you might react to it as art.

Okay, but here is the hard argument against it. Don says he can't trust Lane but any severe Don critic—of whom there are legions—will say, "How can you trust a man who isn't who he says he is?"

I think a man is what he does. Keep doing it, and you become it. As the old line has it, fake it 'til you make it. In that regard, we are all like Don. We're born with an identity and at some point we crave a new one and set out to become that.

"Fake it until you make it", is still very good advice.

Think of the moment back in Season One when Don faces exposure by Pete. He wants to run away, as we all would in a moment like that, but, as I noted at the time, while Don talks about running away it is Rachel who actually does.  But even running away is better than trying weasel your way out like Lane does. Is that an old-fashioned morality? Is it an old-fashioned sense of what it is to be a man? You bet. That's why it's good.

I thought the opening was intentionally old fashioned. First the barbershop and then the restaurant. These were both interiors that already would have felt like they were fading into the past in 1967. And they, especially the barbershop, were very male interiors.

And we see two very different ways of being male. Don is driven by rivalry. Jed Covington's mention of Pete Campbell sparks him. And his calling the firm "little" also drives Don. The partners' meeting furthers that feeling.

Along with that, we get a lot of the old Roger-Don chemistry in this episode.

We might wonder, those of us who love Don, whether the show's creators aren't teasing us a bit here. If you love that lost world, and a lot of us do, you can't help feeling the sense of profound loss as the late 1960s slip into place. For me, and people who think like me, the period from 1967 to sometime in the late 1970s is a cultural tragedy. All season long we've felt it creeping up on us. And here was this last nostalgic look at it. When Roger says to Don that he missed the guy he sees again, we all felt that with him. (Well, those of us who are true believers did.)

Poor Lane. And yet there is nothing more selfish than a  suicide. And it's not just the act. His entire life up to that moment was like unto  it. The man  never could ask for what he really needed. The most pathetic moment was when he went to Joan and he might have talked to her, told her what had happened. Instead, he made a stupid sexual comment.

And it was avoidable all along. He didn't have to do it.

How fitting, then, that his final message was, as Roger aptly puts it, just boilerplate.

Glen Bishop seems less creepy now and just geeky.

O yeah, there was a girl-woman story going on too. It didn't do anything for me. Perhaps your mileage varied on that one.

Final thoughts
I thought Don evoking his Korea experience in answering the napalm question had a hint of doom about it. This too must have been something he used to do. Remember how he had his Purple Heart in his desk in Season One? Remember how Pete used to make reverence to Don the military hero. There must have been a time when that was more a part of his personality and it coming up again suggests a return to the beginning.

(By the way, Don's answer on napalm is the right answer.)

Anyway, as I said before, I have a feeling that the next episode of Mad Men will be the last one. I think AMC would be foolish to renew again as the show is not growing and they could make better money out of something new.

Besides, the important thing about this series was that it enabled us to focus on an important era that is too often ignored because the baby boomers have had too tight a stranglehold on our culture. Their market power has forced us to sit through too many evocations of the later 1960s.

AT this point, I find I don't care how it ends up. Part of me worries that Weiner and Co. have some completely trite ending wherein Don falls hard. More likely they have a non-ending as happened with The Sopranos. Maybe they have no ending at all and they are planning to try for another season. I don't care, I've gotten what I wanted out of the show.

Mad Men: A temporary delay

I'm off to bury my friend Henrietta this morning so there won't be a Mad Men post until later some time.

Liminality anyone?

Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates, I found my way to a post over at Vulture called "Why No One Should Be Shocked By Joan's Big Move on Mad Men" that tries to explain why Joan agrees to sleep with a client for personal gain. You can read the whole thing but you won't do any better that Coates at finding the money graphs.

A lot of the discussion around this episode focuses on would Joan really do this, and hey, she's in a desperate situation because she has to care for her child as a single parent. Yes, it's true that Joan is a single parent, and it's true that that's a difficult situation. Except Joan hasn't brought that up. She hasn't talked about her fears about raising Kevin alone and hasn't seemed all that stressed about money (or alimony?), to the point that she declines Roger's attempts to pay off-the-books child support.

She didn't sleep with scuzzy car guy just because she was desperate for the stability. She slept with him because she's in a liminal phase.

Liminalty is the scary in-between times in our lives, the weird time when we're not who we used to be but we're not quite who we're going to be. Joan's in a classic — classic! — liminal phase right now. She's not the office vixen anymore, but she hasn't really transitioned to doting mother. And to top it all off, she's in the middle of a particularly traumatic divorce. Joan doesn't know who she is anymore; her entire identity is jeopardized.

She doesn't know who she is anymore?  As opposed to everyone else? I wouldn't dwell on it except that this sort of rationalization gets used a lot.

I've been hard on Simcha Fisher in the past but she was brilliant in her response to the same rationalization used by a woman who divorced her husband "to find herself" a while ago:

I hate to break it to her, but the minute she made that decision to leave him to find herself, the search was over:  this elusive self had been found.  In fact, I can sum up her self for her in one short sentence:  She is the kind of person who is willing to abandon her husband in order to find herself.  That’s who she is. A virtuous man acts virtuously, and a monstrously selfish woman spends her life trying to find her monstrous self.

And she is an active participant in creating her own life:  according to her own narrative, she spent her entire married life actively pursuing her own happiness.  That is the life she created.  The only unfinished business here is clearing up the mystery of why she thought such a life would make her.

"Joan doesn't know who she is anymore"? Of course she knows, she's a whore. That's what you become when you have sex for pay.

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: The Other Woman

"I'm talking about business at a very high level."

I loved that line. Pete says it to Joan when making his pitch that she should have sex with a client to help secure a sale.

Let's start with the bad

This was an exceptionally entertaining episode. Every second was gripping. But hollow. It was morally hollow. Maybe that's okay. Maybe it's because some otherwise good people acted in a morally hollow way. We'll see how they redeem it next two episodes. But for now it feels empty.

Here is what I think the problem is. I think a bunch of people in the entertainment industry foolishly assumed that advertising works just like their business. Last night's big plot twist is something people in the entertainment industry would do quite regularly. (It's pretty clear that Katherine Hepburn, for example, used sex to assure that she could star in a movie version of The Philadelphia Story.) It might happen in advertising but not so easily.  It's not that such things couldn't happen. It's the routine quality of them. The way four partners sat down and discussed and outrageous proposal and approved it.

I loved Pete's line because it was so extreme, so incredibly over the top. It struck me as the sort of thing he would say. It didn't seem right that Roger would go along with this.

Let me put it another way, when Pete puts the proposition it seemed right because Pete is this odd, damaged, shriveled little part of a man trying to pass himself off as an entire human being. I don't have any illusions about Roger, his moral standards are often outrageous, but he is still every inch a man not a little homunculus like Pete.

I'm sure that everyone noticed that as Peggy walks away, Joan looks over and sees. And, hey, here we are back at the beginning with the two of them in their standard roles. Thanks to Don, Peggy didn't become Mimi Alford but Joan is Judith Campbell Exner. (UPDATE: It just occurred to me that the "other woman" in this episode is not a man's other woman but a woman's other woman.)

Okay, the good

The whole thing with Peggy leaving was perfect. I loved the way Don kisses her hand at the end, the hand he wouldn't let her offer him in the first episode.

That's important because it wasn't Don who first saw Peggy's creative ability. It was Freddy Rumsen who saw that. Don was the guy who told Peggy she didn't have to offer herself sexually to make it. And Peggy was more than ready to do it. He told her, as he tries to tell Joan this episode, that she is too good for that. He saw in her what others, including Peggy herself, didn't see.

Can I take you back to a moment everyone forgets? The very first episode, in the bar, Don sees the humanity in Sam, the black man working as a busboy in the bar. Later we find out that he is leading a  double life. Everyone remembers that on their way to condemning him as "a bastard and drunk". But the first thing we see from him is a kind of manly virtue you don't see so much anymore.

Peggy's clinching argument is when she tells Don that he would do the same thing in her shoes. That was her way of saying that she, unlike Lane, wasn't negotiating. That was virtue.

By the way, I called it folks. The tension between Don and Megan is obviously influenced by the Sinatra-Farrow one. It ended in divorce in 1968 by the way.

Final though for now. I suddenly thought,

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...again

That album would be released just the year after the Christmas that the partners will not be getting bonuses for. I thought of it because it popped into my head that Weiner was heavily influenced by the contract negotiations for this year. He knows this could be the last year so he wants to end this season in a  way that will stand as a worthy whole should he never get to make another episode.

Only two more episodes folks!

And I always sleep with my guns when you're gone.

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.

Mad Men: Christmas Waltz

That was a treat.

It's only the second really good episode this year. On the other hand, it was the best show this year so far.

Do you know why it was so good? Because Harry really cares. He feels uncomfortable, lustful, confused and lost but he really cares. And so do we ... about Lane. You can feel this horrible disaster coming but you care for the man. Well, we do. There are other sites where they will cackle with glee.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, this show is at its very bets when it does intimate little miniatures. The moment with Don and Joan in the old-fashioned bar was perfect. I loved the way Don evoked Sinatra because that is the way real people did it.

No, they don't solve anything. Not for Joan anyway. It's hard to see what, if any, future she has. She is starting to get a sort of Judith Campbell Exner vibe about her.

Nor Lane.

I know, it breaks my heart to type that. But the world is passing her by and it's about to crush him.

Did you notice, by the way, that no one has anyone they can really talk to about their problems. Don and Joan could talk because they are characters. I mean that in two senses. They, as I said way back at the beginning of season one, operate like Minstrel show characters. They represent stock parts. They can be good or bad at what they do but they always have to stay in character or else, as Pete notices, everything falls apart.

Every era, every culture has such characters but they really mattered in the late 1960s. You can rebel against them, as the students in Quebec are doing right now, but your worst nightmare is that they might join the rebellion. If the government leaders suddenly showed up on the barricades beside the students screaming "smash the state" there would be this awful empty feeling.

Characters also have "character" in the sense of moral character. They have to inhabit their parts with a certain integrity or else we'd stop believing in them. And we have to believe in them, even the people who hate them. There is this wonderful existential thrill that goes with contemplating them. If they suddenly stopped being who they are, we'd be lost.

This is particularly relevant to the 1960s because so many people did drop out of their expected characters.

A much mocked event in 1967, which is now right around the corner, was the 25th Amendment. It's the one that establishes who gets to be president if sitting president dies, resigns or becomes incapacitated. I remember listening to drunken adults at my parent's parties joke about where in the list of who becomes president they were. "If the postmaster general succeeds and dies, then they have to turn to me." A lot of people thought the whole thing was just silly. But it matters and not just in political terms. These people are keystones for whole ways of life.

Mia Farrow
 I keep thinking of Mia Farrow. She was such a perfect 1960s icon. And she is someone who dropped out of her expected character over and over again. She becomes  a star in Peyton Place, then she marries Sinatra, then she is connected to Roman Polanski through Rosemary's Baby, then off with the Beatles to see the Mahafraudster and it keep on right through the Woody Allen years and the celebrity charity stuff. She manages to touch every single trend that seemed significant at the time only it turned out to morally empty.

And that seems to be Megan. I know, I know, "But you hated Betty too!" And I did but she just isn't right. Not in terms of the part. She's almost too perfect for the part. But people like Megan never establish a real moral character. They just flit from scene to scene.

I think they'll keep her though for a while. She serves a function in that they can use her as a way to connect Don to all the weird New York stuff that went on at the the end of the1960s. Ultimately, though, I think Don will dump her.

(Unless, of course, you believe in that great fantasy invented in the 1970s and still popular today of "reinventing yourself". I don't and I don't think Matt Weiner does either.)

A big historical event?
What this show mapped out for last fall? Here we are watching the Christmas show in May.

Anyway, the question I have now is will the show tie itself to some big historical event? They did that for the first three seasons. Last year, however, everything turned around Don's letter about "quitting tobacco". Okay, there was a real historical even that inspired that but it was not a really big event.

I don't know what but something big should start looming as of next episode. Some opportunity to change the conversation.

By the way, on the subject or reinventing yourself, here is what Pete said in response to Don's tobacco ad:

"Don't you realize the clients are all going to think that you could turn on them at any minute?"

And here is the way Ed Baxter breaks it to Don at the end of the Codfish Ball

"He loves your work, they all do. But they don't like you. This crowd, they'll bury your desk in rewards, but they'll never work with you. Not after that letter. I mean, who would they trust you."

Is there a way out?

Mad Men second thoughts

The callow youth* over at Slate are a favourite spot for me after writing my own thoughts about a Mad Men episode. They are reliably trite and shallow. And they sure do like piling it on the characters they hate.

Anyway, this time Patrick Radden Keefe and Julia Turner have it in for Don. Keefe says he's lost his respect for Don. And Don does smack down Ginsberg but good this episode. The problem is that Ginsberg richly deserves it. He describes Don to Roger as a tall guy with a  short temper and then is obnoxious towards Don and belittles his ideas. That's asking for it: pure hubris and it got what hubris always gets.

Turner, however, goes on to a limited defense of Betty that also deserves some comment.

But I do want to take a moment to defend Betty in this episode—or at least to marvel at a scene that perhaps demonstrated some growth. There was remarkable tenderness over that overdone steak in the Francis kitchen. And though Betty does, perhaps, wonder if she’s “bet on the wrong horse” with Henry, she also offers an uncommonly supportive little speech ...

But here is the thing, that "supportive little speech" is not unusual for Betty or someone like her are all.

This is a setback. You’re always thinking about other people, and then you’re angry because no one’s thinking about you. But I am. It’s so easy to blame our problems on others, but really we’re in charge of ourselves. And I’m here to help you, as you’re here to help me. We’ll figure out what’s next.

First, note that it is a lie. Betty doesn't think of Henry. She is a selfish and self-centred jerk.  No, this is exactly the speech that passive-aggressive exploiter like Betty would trot out in a situation like this. Her own interest is what drives her: Henry has to perform because she needs to feel competitive with Don. If you asked someone who hadn't yet seen this episode for an example of a person that Henry is always thinking of but who never thinks of him, Betty is the first example they'd come up with. If Betty had really changed and really cared, she would have started with an apology.


* Update, just in case it isn't obvious, all these insults are a joke of sorts—I am using the same sort of summary condemnation of Keefe and Turner that they use in describing characters on the show.

Mad Men: Dark Shadows

If you like your irony to be about as obvious as a slap in the face with a greasy fish and your moralizing trite and obvious, then Percy Bysshe Shelley is the poet for you.

And that is why Ginsberg quoting from Ozymandias is a problem. Anyone who knew the line well enough to trot it out on command would already know it is ironic. If you follow Stan's advice and go read the rest of the poem you'll discover that you don't need to read the rest of it because the irony is already obvious before you get to the line that Ginsberg quotes.

And the episode is called "Dark Shadows".

And it's got Betty in it.

"But you hate Betty!" Maybe, but I don't hate her nearly as much as the screenwriters do. There is a moment in this episode where Megan teaches Sally how to cry. She tells her to keep her eyes wide open and think of something that makes her sad. Well that's how the scriptwriters crank out Betty's parts, they keep their eyes wide open and think of some woman who treated them badly.

I love Roger though. Did anyone else look at this sketch

and think of Roger? It's a perfect Roger line in that nothing ever changes with Roger but he is always promising to change everything. You can just imagine Roger in the garden with Eve telling her that eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil will change everything. Except we don't have to imagine because it happens to poor Jane who ends up learning that knowledge of good and evil means looking at your new apartment and tasting the ashes in your mouth.

I love Roger. By the way, notice that Roger tends to charm people by telling them the truth and not by lying to them. When Roger asks Ginsberg to help him come up with an idea to pitch the Manischewitz people, Ginsberg cynically assumes that Roger will present them as his own ideas but when he is with the potential client, Roger cheerfully owns up that that he had the creative people come up with some ideas so "I could show you what we are capable of". The devil is a team player.

Rivalries
This episode was reminiscent of "The Summer Man", although not nearly so brilliant as that episode because it was rivalries that drove everything. Don goes into the office where Ginsberg and Peggy work and sees the subversive stuff Ginsberg has drawn up and that inspires him to try and match the guy.

By the way, the folder labelled "Shit I gotta do" is a false note. That is what someone would do in 2012.

But back to the moment. We've had a whole lot of set up beginning with Roger explaining to Bert how fishing is a competitive sport, not man versus fish but man versus man. And then we get a whole lot of male posturing. And then Joan shows Don a lot of work going into a portfolio and complements him for putting together "a lot of voices" in the creative department.

Okay, next Don goes into the office on a holiday and then he stands up and for a full 15 seconds we get a seemingly pointless shot in his office of him standing, lighting a cigarette and stretching in his office. Except that for the entire shot we can see Don's semi-erection which is clearly visible through his pants. Don't believe me? It starts at 5:15 on the iTunes version of the episode. It's not an accident. It's right in the centre of the shot.

Then Don walks down the hall and goes and spies on Ginsberg and then he goes back to his desk to prove he still has it.

And there is a rivalry between Betty and Sally that Sally, thanks for small mercies, wins.

I won't list them all.

As Woody Allen once parodied Hemingway: It was a good episode but not a great episode.

Final thought, the writers themselves are better of far better use of irony than Shelley. There is a lovely moment when Henry is having his midnight snack and talking to Betty and says,

"I bet on the wrong horse Betty."

He literally means in picking Lindsay to work for. But we immediately think of Betty. But the fascinating thing is that she doesn't see that. She is so wrapped up in her own petty rivalry with Don and Megan that she doesn't see it.

Now it's off to see what other people thought.

A little light culture: Revisiting Lady Lazarus

One of the things that I do to keep myself sane is to remind myself every once in a while that any political party that really represented my interests would be lucky to get one percent of the vote. When elections roll around, I don't go looking for anyone to represent me but rather pick the candidate who seems the least of the evils available that year.

A similar lesson should apply when it comes to culture. I love Mad Men and so do lots of other people but three percent of the television audience would be a huge audience for the show. Most people don't watch and they don't care. AMC, the network that produces the show, seriously considered not renewing it this year. They aren't losing money on it but they could probably make more from some other alternative. It could be cancelled anytime. For all we know AMC executives may have already decided that this is the last year.

But even if the show were as big as the Beatles it wouldn't matter that much. Cultural events rarely amount to anything political. A revolution that could be televised wouldn't be revolutionary.

Which brings me to NPR's Ann Powers who is rather miffed at the fact that Don Draper didn't like the Beatles tune he listened to. And the sentence she starts off with his telling:

Don Draper sure has a lot of power for a fictional character.

Meaning what? I suspect that it means that for Powers we're in a culture war and she is terrified Don is on the other side. She worries that he has a huge influence on how some young people are going to understand the sixties and how we understand the sixties is going to have a huge effect on the culture wars. Powers is worried that all the cool kids watching the show are going to think less of the Beatles and psychedelia because Don Draper pulled the needle up and walked away unimpressed. She may even be right.

Relevant disclosure: I sure hope so. Reading her piece on the subject gave me new hope that the series is going somewhere worthwhile this year after all. The only thing for sure is that the show is going to disappoint someone. It will either disappoint Ann Powers and people like her or it will disappoint me and people like me. We'll see. The fortunate thing is that it doesn't matter. Nothing really important hangs on the outcome. I'm not sure, though, that Ann Powers sees it that way. I suspect that rather a lot hangs on it for her.

But let's take a  deep breath and consider a few important facts. Let's start with Mad Men itself.
Never in the entire history of the show has it managed to attract more than one percent of North Americans. Walk down the street and remind yourself that most people you pass not only don't watch the show, the vast majority have never seen a single episode.

Now consider the Beatles. They had a much larger impact than Mad Men but most people alive in 1966 did not buy Beatles records. They were aware of the Beatles because they got a lot of news coverage and radio airplay and there was very little choice in music in those days. For most people that year the Beatles meant the two sided single with "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yellow Submarine".

Very few people bought Reviolver and even fewer sat around listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the ones who did were oddballs and geeks.

But that shouldn't stop us. I mean, come on kids, Hey, hey they're the the Beatles! Lets listen to it backwards maybe it will make more sense! Or maybe not. Here is the couplet that we hear just before Don pulls the plug:

Love is all and love is everyone
It is knowing, it is knowing

Oooh deep. Well no, it's fatuous tripe, sophomoric and shallow right to its core. And sophomoric on acid doesn't make it any better. I know, it's not nice to point this out but it's true.

Let's back back to a few facts.

• Two years after te release of Revolver  Nixon was elected president. He won an even bigger majority the next time. Watergate deflated that for a while but Carter was a one termer and he was followed by Reagan.
• The late 1960s would provoke a huge normalcy backlash. In 1971, The Waltons would debut on TV and it would be one of the most popular shows on television for the next decade. A few years later it would be followed by the movie American Graffiti and the TV series Happy Days. Not only would these shows reach a huge audience, they would reach that audience with a sustained narrative. 
• The Beatles, OTOH, reached people with a lot of songs that could be easily separated from narratives people didn't like. With that in mind, which of the following sets of Beatles songs do you think reached the greatest number of people at the time and since?

1. "Tomorrow Never Knows", "She said, She said", "The Walrus", "Strawberry Fields", and "Come Together".
2. "Yesterday", "Eleanor Rigby", "When I'm 64", "Hey Jude", and "Something".

• For years and years after 1966, Madison Avenue went on making millions of dollars selling cigarettes, Jello, Canadian Club, Oldsmobile 98s, Kraft Dinner, Revlon, Swanson TV Dinners. No matter how important they are to you, all of those products had a bigger cultural impact than the Beatles.

And that is why Don Draper makes the right choice to pull the needle up and go to bed. No matter what they taught you in the Pop Culture course you took at university because you needed an easy A, the Beatles did not, as Ann Powers seems to think, transform, "pop marketing as much as music".

Manly Thor's Day Special: Under a court of law it wouldn't look like an accident

But it's not.

Does Vincent Kartheiser flub these lines? Logically, it would make more sense if he'd said, "Under a court of law it would look like an accident. But it's not." Maybe it doesn't matter. You know what he means. Women are allowed to say and do things that sound and look like invitations to you to get involved with them without committing themselves.

Oh yeah, this is all from an episode of Mad Men by the way. You don't have to have seen the episode to get the point though.

And I know, as everyone who did see the episode will say, it's Pete. But we have to care about these characters even though they are fictional characters. Obviously we don't treat them the same as real people. We don't get up and call 9-1-1 when a fictional character falls off a bridge but we should feel bad. Pete for all his failings is supposed to be a human being and we deprive ourselves of a proper enjoyment and understanding of fiction if we forget to respond to characters as human beings deserving our love and concern.

And have you never had the thoughts that Pete has here? These are thoughts we are all trained to keep to ourselves but all men have them. Maybe it was years ago so we don't remember or maybe we just don't have the courage to vent the angry thoughts that Pete does:

Work it over in their minds, turn it off and on when they feel like it. We're just there, waiting at attention.

Maybe you've never been there but I don't mind admitting that I have. I know from many years experience that you shouldn't express such feelings out loud. Best case scenario, people will laugh at you. Worst case scenario, you'll be branded as an unenlightened pig.

But women will do that to you. And it's not about sex or, to be more precise, it's not only about sex.

Let's go back to the dialogue (with the error I noted at the top noted):

Pete: Why do they give you a glimmer of hope in the midst of rejection. A little thread to hang on to. A misplaced word. Suggestion of the future.

Under a  court of law it wouldn't look like an accident. But it's not.

Harry: So we're not talking about Megan and we're not talking about Trudy?

Pete: Why do they decide what's going to happen?

Harry: They just do.

There is a lot more wisdom in Harry's response than we might give him credit for. That is the answer. Women just are the gatekeepers when it comes to love and sex. And the irony is that that is the result of the sexual revolution and feminism. In a society where women are repressed, their latitude for sexual expression is extremely limited by their being veiled or cloistered and some man, either her father or husband, is "supposed" to control her sexuality. In order to free women to say yes they also had to gain more power to say no.

Let's have a look at another of Pete's questions again:

Why do they give you a glimmer of hope in the midst of rejection. A little thread to hang on to. A misplaced word. Suggestion of the future.

The two choices aren't "yes" and "no" but "yes" and "maybe". Why? Part of it may be a cynical exploitation of power. Part of it may be the fear of having to acknowledge to herself that she is cutting you off after leading you on. Part of it may be the fear that you'll show up outside her room  screaming and shouting in the middle of the night or that you may kill yourself or something.

Most likely, though, she does it because that is the way she likes it. She was attracted enough to you to flirt with you and even if she decides, for whatever reasons, not to allow anything else to happen she doesn't want to close the door and lock it.  It suits her vanity to think it might be possible even though she won't. She is still denying herself but she is the one doing the denying and there is a certain power that goes with that. (That's why "negging" her and walking away instead of giving her a chance to reject you often works as a seduction technique. It leaves her feeling powerless and a lot of women will go to surprising lengths to regain that power.)

In the case of Pete, the internal logic of the show works against the interaction with Beth ever being convincing. On Mad Men people end up having sex too quickly. In real life, the relationship between Beth and Pete would have been more protracted. They would have known one another longer before anything happened. And a lot less would have happened. They might have just kissed and then stopped and then things would have built up until they had sex. And then Beth would have thought, "I can't do this," and pulled out.

As Gaius noted in the comments, the moment when Beth makes the heart on the fogged window in the carpark next to Pete was the most unbelievable moment in the episode. I agree but I think that is largely because they left out all the emotional stage-setting that would have had to take place around that affair. For the show, love is sex but for most of the rest of us, sex is a kind of love. But if they had taken the time to build up the story a bit, then the heart would have made perfect sense.

There is a woman I was in love with many years ago whom I occasionally run into. We're both married now but every time we talk she says or does something that suggests that, for her, the door is still open. I wouldn't pursue her in any case but even if I did I would be crazy to take those hints as assurance of her acceptance. For whatever reason of her own, she won't close that door and she can't help letting it show when she is with me.

She feels entitled to do this and society backs her up. If I let any similar hints drop in her direction, it would be tantamount to asking her for sex and it would seem that way in a court of law. This is not just a metaphor. We never can be sure her acts are intentional enough to condemn her. We'd unhesitatingly condemn the man who did the same thing.

And that, as Harry says, is just the way it is.

And the unspoken assumption behind this is that men will always be there waiting, as Pete says, "at attention". And yes, that does mean everything it seems to mean.

Mad Men: The Lady Lazarus

That was an immensely unsatisfying show. It wasn't crap. There were some great moments in this show but it just added up to a huge mess signifying nothing. In that sense winding up with one the Beatles bits of audio gimmickry passing itself off as a song was appropriate.

I think the worst of Mad Men comes when it starts feeling too much like the lives of people in the entertainment industry. This, of course, is one of the prime traits of modernism, where the writing becomes about the artist grasping their moment in history rather than an artist being someone who writes about others. This episode we quite literally had Don trying to find his place in history. (I take it as a promising sign that he cut "Tomorrow Never Knows" off to go to bed.

Someone needs to tell the writers that this is supposed to be about other people's lives and not thinly disguised versions of their own aspirations. And note that Weiner wrote this episode. It's getting to be sadly predictable that when he gets the writing credit the episode will be unsatisfying.

Everywhere I saw false notes. The fact that Peter ends up in bed with Beth so quickly for example. All the plot needed was the recognition that they both wanted one another. It would, in fact, have been more convincing if they'd bonded emotionally and then come this close into exploding into sex. And then she'd pull back.

This has always been a problem with the show. Not that so many people have so much sex but that they have it too easily. Although it's worse when they try and drag it out as they did with Suzanne Farrell. The irony here is that the shows producers don't have the art to pull it off.

By the way, do you think Pete can pull off the same impregnate in one go trick with Beth that he managed with Peggy?

Beth's telling Peter to "Fantasize about it," also rang false. Not that people didn't fantasize about tings but they didn't talk about it that way yet. My Secret Garden wouldn't be published for another six years.

At first it seemed promising that Megan had a secret life especially the way they let us go through half the show without anymore of a hint about what it was than the name "Jack Shapiro". Then it turned out that her dream was to be an actress, gag, and then some dialogue between Don and Megan about her dream that was already a cliché when 42 Street was made. Don't believe me? Then go watch the movie—it parodies this sort of crap.

Aside from that we learned that Peter reads Pynchon in hardcover. I'm thinking this is a hint that Peter has more depth than Ken, who writes mere fantasy fiction. Or maybe that is wishful thinking on my part. The one good thing we've seen so far this year has been Pete acquiring depth and character and doing so convincingly.

The show is at it's best on miniatures, there was too much trying to connect with the big picture of history this episode. The writers all need to get themselves a copy of Joan Didion's The White Album and read it.

Final thought, too much cleverness. Like the way they played what I assume was the Cilla Black version of "September in the Rain" when looking for a song that sounded sort of Beatlesy. If you don't get that reference, look her up.

I know I'm not alone on this: For a lot of us fans the show's glory was it's style and that style was attractive because we were bloody tired of having the same stupid tales of the style-less 1960s shoved down our throats all our lives. That the show had to cover this era was inevitable but it didn't have to give us just  another wow sixties aren't drugs cool, story.