Mad Men: Moving on from here

One of the signs of just how shallow our culture has become is the way all commentary on Mad Men dries up in the 24 hours after the season finale every year. At precisely the moment when we are actually in a position to analyze the show in a meaningful way, the news cycle demands that we move on.

So I thought I'd take a different approach to this year's wrap up: instead of looking back, I'm going to look forward. Here is the project I'm working on, imagine that, instead of watching next season, I decided to write a piece of fan fiction instead. If I were doing that, what would I have to build on?

The answer to that is both obvious and evasive. The obvious part is that our hero has an old-fashioned kind of masculine virtue to draw on.  He was trying to be a certain kind of man.

Now our culture both demeans and honours such a man. The demeaning part is the assumption that Don is living a fake life and needs to allow himself to be the man he really is. To continue to be Don Draper, we are assured, is to risk massive breakdown and failure. Keeping it all boxed in like that is, we are told, a recipe for failure.

Before going on, notice that that explanation is old-fashioned and wrong. It's based on nineteenth century pneumatic physics that was used as a metaphor for nineteenth century psychology by Freud. It treats our emotional self as if it were a steam-powered machine needing safety valves to let off the pressure before it builds up and explodes. And that is important to note because that 19th century psychology was wrong. Men (and women, for that matter) who "hold things in" don't explode and lose control. The better you get at controlling your emotions, the less likely you are to have some sort of giant character meltdown. It's the man who is constantly venting and complaining who has no self control and blows up.

As an aside, where this season's show went deeply wrong was in the huge shift from good storytelling to Freudian bullshit that happened right from the beginning of the season but especially in episode 3 "The Collaborators". Basing your fiction on discredited pseudo-science like Freud is to guarantee failure, so that is the first thing to thrown overboard.

There are some other things that we cannot disregard because they are facts of Don Draper's life. So as to avoid confusion, I'll assign them to a new character whom I will refer to by his initials JAC.* Let's start with some limitations:

• JAC didn't have a strong father to provide him with a good example of manliness
• He grew up in a feminized environment driven by social policing and dubious sexual morals
• He has a drinking problem.
• He has a a lot of romantic baggage that he brings along from the past.
• The replacement he found for his first failed relationship is another weak and ineffectual woman who never grew out of her princess stage. 
• He has burned some bridges by admitting publicly that he has a shameful past.

I'll analyze those one at a time beginning tomorrow.


* Short for Jules Aimé Costigan. I share a lot common with Dick Whitman. I was not an orphan who grew up in a whorehouse but my Grandmother was. My religious background is Catholic not protestant but, again, there is a fair amount of similarity. I also shared Dick's desire to become a newer, more manly man. That said, JAC is a fictional character.

Mad Men: In care of ...

"This is where I grew up."

There was a lot of promise in that line.  No, it wasn't a great episode like of old but it had its moments and that was the best of the bunch. And did you notice that they changed Don's hat. The brim on his fedora has narrowed just like Frank's did at the end of the 1960s. In fact, that look he gives Sally at the end is pure Sinatra.

Which makes it all the more painful that we had to listen to Joni Mitchell drag us through her second-rate Annie Ross imitation in that lame-ass song about Clouds right afterwards. Of course, to a lot of the people who watch this show, Joni Mitchel is a classic along with Sgt Pepper and a lot of other pretentious crap.

But before going on, I'm going to take a victory lap because you can read a lot of high-priced commentary out there but I got it better than anyone. No, we don't knowwith absolute certainty that Don and Megan are finished yet although it sure looks like it. Barring next season starting with Don stepping out of the shower and Megan telling him she dreamed it all, we have lots of reason to be hopeful. No matter what happens, we can be certain it's not going to be like before.

Can Don make it on his own? Well, we know he cam, he did it before. Besides, he doesn't really need to because he's rich.

And it could be so awful. We got a lot of Freudian crap this year and we could get an awful lot more of it next year. And I don't think we should be in any hurry to forgive them for putting us through this stuff. But there is a hope here and it is that they went with the Don Draper mythology in the end.

I don't mean mythology in the sense of being untrue. Quite the opposite in this case. He is telling the truth. No, the point is, as I have been saying over and over again every year (and especially this year), he is the centre of this show. Take him away and it's worse than boring. Take him away and it's stupid and pointless ... and boring as hell. His story, the story of how a modern, hopeful America grew out of the depression and then was lost in the late 1960s to all the Woodstock bullshit is the story people need to learn right now.

They'll never be allowed to tell it completely honestly just yet but this has promise.

Mad Men season six final episode: predictions

My main predictions are that no one dies and Don and Megan split up.

The reason is that she has become a child and that bores him. Don needs a woman who challenges him and not a woman who needs him to launch her fantasy-princess career, as she had become by the end of last season.

Caveat: I'll cheerfully admit that I identify with Don Draper (and Bob Benson for that matter) and that tends to colour how I see things. Like most people, my prediction is also my hope. To my mind, Megan ceased to be worthy of the man by the end of last season and that is what i see driving his discontent so that is how I would write it. I hate the whole Freudian aspect that Matt Weiner has put such heavy emphasis on this year and suspect that is what has ruined the show.

Still, I can't give up hope. Dump Megan! You can do it Don.

The Quality of Mercy metacommentary

This week it's Seth Stevenson's chance to be slow coming up with the commentary at Slate. This year's batch are a major letdown compared to the crew who did it last year. They are dour, unhappy and decidedly preachy. And they are lazy about getting their work done.

Typical of the shoddy work journalists do. On the other hand, last year's crew were pretty good.

Anyway, let's start with Paul Ford.

Kenny wanting off of Chevy means that Pete sees a way onto the account. He wants to schmooze in Detroit, but is informed that he’ll be working with Bob Benson, whom Pete is convinced made a pass at him.

Pete is "convinced" that Bob made a pass at him?  I think he's pretty sure don't you? I mean everybody watching now thinks that Bob Benson is gay and how the hell would we know that unless he actually had made a pass at Pete?

The other thing we know is that Paul Ford could be Miss Utah if he was just a little bit smarter.

He is gentle on his co-conspirators, however.

Hanna, you pointed out that Bob makes a perfect Nick Carraway, but here his story is exactly Jay Gatsby’s—signing up to see the world on Dan Cody’s yacht, and transforming himself from Gatz to Gatsby by pluck and criminality. 

In other words, Hanna, you got that one completely wrong because you were too busy projecting your  smug moral views on the show to pay attention to what was going on. I mean, how much effort does it take to see a movie that is being heavily promoted everywhere you turn as the thing that explains life. Is Hanna going to start seeing everything next week in terms of Superman?

But Paul then makes it too easy for Hanna to turn around and gently make him look like an idiot by saying the following:

There’s been a lot of this sort of Bob/Pete detente this season. (Anyone have any thoughts as to the title, “The Quality of Mercy”? Is it about Pete and Bob? Is Pete the Shylock of Mad Men?) Don and Ted agreed to collaborate; Don and Sally found some sort of compromise through a closed door. If you can’t love one another you can agree not to hurt one another. 

Do tell me, if you can think of a reason, how Pete could be Shylock? Did he make a deal and is now insisting on driving it through no matter what the cost? Did he ... never mind we all know that Paul Ford wasn't really paying attention the day his Shakespeare prof went over this one.

Hanna, on the other hand, was paying attention, to both the play and the to the politically correct moral lesson she was supposed to draw from it in order to get a good mark.

It comes of course from Portia’s speech in Merchant of Venice in which she tries to convince Shylock that he should not in fact extract his due pound of flesh from her friend Antonio, that the more noble, and, in fact, the more powerful thing to do would be to have mercy. It is a beautiful compassionate Christian speech that can move you in the moment—but it’s also utterly cynical. Portia is playing Shylock for a fool; she and the whole wealthy, spoiled Venetian society that is the 16th-century version of Madison Avenue has treated Shylock with nothing but contempt and made it clear that he is beneath their Christian values. Plus Portia is about to use some clever legal maneuvering to cheat Shylock out of his rightful pound of flesh anyway. Mercy in this case is a power play; it is entirely situational and does not arise naturally from a pure heart. 

Well, Portia is playing Shylock for a fool but that's an easy thing for her to do for Shylock is a fool.  Yes, Shylock and other Jews were horribly treated in Venice and, yes, they couldn't catch a fair deal from Venetian society which considered Jews (even the ones who tried to convert) as beneath their Christian values. And, yes, Portia is motivated to save Antonio in no small part because she wants to marry him and live the rich, comfortable life she feels she is entitled to. And, yes, Antonio's greed has led him to enter a stupid contract that puts his life at risk. But that doesn't change the basic fact that Shylock has conspired to use the law of contract to kill Antonio. Shylock knows full well that Antonio will die when he removes his pound of flesh.

Thus her speech and it's a good one:

The quality of mercy is not strained.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes

The point here is that mercy costs you nothing. You gain from giving it as well as the person to whom you grant mercy. The point is not, as these people seem so fond of doing, that you draw parallels between the characters of Mad Men or whatever classic happens to pass under your nose this week. Everything you need to know is that quote itself. (Which doesn't mean you have to take it as Gospel. You don't have to go very far in life to find people who will accept your mercy and then turn around and stab you in the back. There are some of them in Shakespeare even.)

Of course, if you did want to be purely utilitarian about it, you might well draw a very cynical lesson about how you can exploit people to your advantage from that. And it's worth recalling what Bert Cooper says to Don by way of encouraging him to show a little mercy to Pete in season one right after Pete's attempt to expose Don backfires.

Don, fire him if you want. But I'd keep an eye on him. One never knows how loyalty is born. 

Bert, of course, understands full well that it is in Don that loyalty is being birthed at this moment and he will later use the demands of that loyalty to his advantage. Pete was like Shylock in the first season and he isn't anymore.Thus, the quality of mercy for mercy is not charity.

Tom and Lorenzo, as usual, do much better at understanding the episode and I won't do much more than refer you to their site so you can read it all. They do, however, begin by talking about what a great episode it was and I'm not at all sure about that. In previous seasons, Matt Weiner have dished out at least or six episodes of this quality every season. This year, they have given us one good and one acceptable episode and a lot of trash. And next week is the big finale.

The big question is why the show has gotten to be this lame. I think it's because they have so brutally undercut Roger and Don who were the heart and soul, respectively, of the show. You can hate them if you want, and I know lots of people do, but there was no denying the efficiency of these men. They were good, very good, at getting things done. That has changed with no good reason.

Imagine a fairytale in which a castle is guarded by two mean and very big ogres. Along comes a skinny little prince who wants to get in. He can't because the two ogres are bigger and stronger than he is. It's a fairytale so we know the little prince will succeed but don't know how. Here's the thing, there isn't a four-year-old child in the land who would be satisfied by a story that would solve the problem by having the big mean ogres suddenly turn into a couple of ineffectual losers with no explanation.

The point is this: even if you think of guys like Roger and Don as dinosaurs who had to be cleared out of the way in order for the new world to be born, you still have to take them seriously as guys whom the clearing away of would be serious, hard work and the show is cheating on that point.

Mad Men: The Quality of Mercy

That was a pretty good episode. It wasn't good enough to justify all the painful "setting up" we've had to put up with this season but it was good.

For starters I'll take a victory lap on Rosemary's Baby. While everyone else was running around fantasizing about Sharon Tate, I directed you to Mia Farrow.

It was a bit heavy-handed to have Ted put Don in the place of the baby. And then the episode ends with Peggy calling Don a monster, thereby echoing what Bert Cooper said back in Season 4, and then a shot of Don curled up like a baby on his office couch. Then, and I think this is important, it fades out with the Monkees singing "The Porpoise Song". Why would that be important? Because the Monkees are the fake Beatles and "The Porpoise Song" was a fake psychedelic song written by a couple of old Tin Pan Alley hands. Just as they could make up a girls name and write a convincing love song about her, Gerry Goffin and Carole King could crank out a fake John Lennon druggie song on command (and, not incidentally, do it better than him).

The point is not to carefully study Rosemary's Baby or, God forbid such a thing, the lyrics of "The Porpoise Song" but to recognize that the creators have used these bits of popular culture from the time to launch the premise. (Although I am tempted to go back to the Season 4 launch epiosde and check for clues). Rosemary's Baby perfectly reflected the mood of a public that saw the culture going out of control in 1968, a point nicely reflected by Megan's comment that the movie was "so realistic". Of course it wasn't but it did reflect how people felt.

I like the new twist on the Bob Benson plotline. I think it's meant to tie in with Sally's experience at Miss Porter's school. That is handled accurately, by the way. Private schools gained cachet when The Preppy Handbook was published in 1980 but back in the late 1960s and 1970s, private schools was where parents sent kids they couldn't control or to get them out of the house during messy marital problems or, as often was the case, both. Anyway, I think the point that Weiner* is quietly making is that the elite of that era no longer deserved to be the elite and thus the possibility of people like Don Draper and Bob Benson rising.

Finally, until tomorrow, poor Pete saves Bob, not of mercy but of fear of "people like him" for people like Don and Bob have an antichrist like feel to a genuine insider like Pete.

Off to read the other commentary now.


*Although I could have done without the hunting accident that is clearly meant to make us think of Dick Cheney. Weiner seems to be obsessed with hating Republicans.

Favors metacommentary: Two out of three ain't bad

Okay, I'm going to have to admit that Hana Rosin is a lot sharper than I gave her credit for. My only excuse is that I was fixated on her particular blind spots but the problem with that is that we all have blind spots. Anyway, she really hit a lot of good points this week.

Let's start here:

Seth, I think you omitted one other important reason why Don does the favor for young Mitchell Rosen: his man-crush on Arnold. Given the way Don fixates on Arnold, I often wonder whether he’s sleeping with Sylvia just to become enmeshed with the good surgeon. 

The psychological insight at work here is called mimesis.  In it we form crushes on people not because we desire them but because we desire to be like them. The most obvious example of this is a child for the parent. Mimesis creates a sort of instant tension because the one experiencing it will see the person they imitate both as an object for imitation ("I want to be like you") and rivalry ("I want to replace you").

If that is really what is at work here, and I hope it is because it would give this season some real meat and purpose, then Don is not attracted to Sylvia in her own light but because he wants to be like Arnold Rosen who is married to Sylvia. This, by the way, is a very male thing. If a man you admire is suddenly attracted to a woman you would not normally find beautiful, you can be sure that you too will suddenly find things about her that are beautiful, not because her beauty wasn't always there but because you hadn't really tried looking for it.

In the eyes of some critics, mimesis explains everything about art and culture. That's overstating it but it is a powerful, and usually neglected force in human life.

I'll carry on with the rest of the paragraph I cite above:

Similarly, at their drunken confessional dinner, Peggy accuses Pete of being in love with Ted. Of course, that’s where the episode stopped being subtle. I can’t tell you how irritated I was at the Benson knee press. It’s always such a letdown when a mystery is solved and the answer is … He’s gay, even if Internet rumors have long abounded. How much more satisfying if the answer had been … nothing, as you wished for last week, Paul, and Benson had remained his thoroughly inscrutable shiny self for the whole of the season. Although I suppose we should have guessed it, since the vibe between Bob and Joan was more Elton John and Marilyn Monroe than Don and Sylvia.

Yesss!!!!! (Not incidentally, how much more satisfactory the drama will be if the root causes of Don Draper turn out to be ... nothing.)

As I was saying last time, the really irritating thing about Bob Benson's sexuality is how it's wrapped up in a nice guy motive and it isn't really, you know, sexual. This was the problem with the sexual roles women used to be offered: whore or the female equivalent of Bob Benson as gay man. I think Rosin would have been able to make her point more forcefully if Benson had been a woman for then the fundamental injustice of it all would have jumped out: all the other male characters on the show are allowed to have raw sexual desire and this guy has to be this neatly dressed, super-polite and thoughtful eunuch who just wants love. That is the way wives and mothers used to be portrayed and it is one of the great victories in a show such as Mad Men that female characters are show to be driven by irrational sexual passions just as men have always been. Why not gay men too?

As I hinted yesterday, I think a gay Pete makes much more sense. He acts like a man denying something about himself to himself would do. I knew a gay guy just like him in the 1980s who similarly overcompensated to the point of getting married and having children.

There were some who saw Bob Benson as a Don-like character and that makes sense if we think of the episode wherein the history of Don's relationship with Roger is revealed and how Don ingratiated himself with Roger. But the problem with that is that it's too narrow. To paraphrase Cary Grant: the force driving Mad Men is that everyone wants to be Don Draper, including Don Draper (a point I will return to).

Okay, now I want to trouble you with a thought that may make you uncomfortable. Here is what Rosin has to say about Don encouraging Sally to become a party to his lies:

As for what Don said, it was surely bad parenting—Sally knows what she saw—but there is something profound about asking a child to collude with you in an obvious lie. (Marjorie Williams addressed this question in her beautiful essay about Santa Claus and dying of cancer.) Contrast Don’s decision to lie with Pete’s to bully his way into what he sees as the truth about his mother and Manolo. Pete refuses to see that “it’s complicated,” as Don tells Sally, so he winds up in a cruel place where he robs his mother of her only comfort, fires Manolo, and sneers at Bob Benson. Sometimes we need our lies—something an ad man understands better than anyone.

That's a good, and very, very profound, point. I know, I know, this particular secret seems and odious one but we need our secrets and having secrets requires lying. For it is complicated especially when we bond especially close to someone. That is obviously going to be true of sexual relationships but also of child-parent ones. Think of the difference between the adult who is still capable of loving their father or mother and the one who hates him or her. The secret to loving her is not to be blind to your parents' sins but to be aware of them and grasp that it is complicated and, therefore, to collude with their lies to some extent. It is the adult or teen who really hates their mother or father who wants to drag every last ugly sin out into the daylight.

Hold that thought, and consider this brilliant insight that gets two thirds of the way home:

Lately I’ve begun to think of the show as operating on two very different planes. One is full of fairytale conflict and Jungian archetypes and Biblical-level dramas. This is the plane on which Don and most of the characters from earlier seasons are trapped. The plot twist that led Sally into her worst Freudian nightmare was straight out of a 17th century play: a purloined letter. (In classic French farce characters are always eavesdropping behind doors and screens.) Meanwhile the original spirit of the show—rooted in a particular moment in American history and moving along with the decade—resides with the newer characters.

That's so true. The worst episodes this season have been the ones that explore the supposedly deep psychological roots of Don's behaviour.  (I'll leave aside the biblical issues for a moment.)

Meanwhile, however, there is the "original spirit of the show". Rosin gets this wrong and does so in a way that is typical of her and her generation. But go back to the first season and you will clearly see that the original spirit of the show is indeed a particular moment in history that has been lost. The show is driven by nostalgia for a particular kind of manliness and, although to a lesser extent and less lovingly, for a certain sort of womanliness.

And here we get to the point that separates people. As I said above, even Don Draper isn't Don Draper but he wants to be. There is an entrenched line of criticism that says that is his great moral failure and that he should embrace authenticity instead. But Don Draper is not an unusual creation. A whole generation of men and women left behind their rural and ethnic roots to become something like him. Think just of actors and singers:

Archie Leach became Cary Grant
Doris Kapplehoff became Doris Day
Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis
Ann-Margret Olsson became simply Ann Margret
Anita Belle Colton became Anita O'Day
Dino Paul Crocetti became Dean Martin
Norma Jean Mortenson became Marilyn Monroe
Allen Stuart Konisberg became Woody Allen

I won't go on but I could. Nowadays performers still change their names but most do so to seem more exotic than their given names would suggest. Al those people above changed their names so as to seem less exotic and to conform to a sort of ideal of all-American virtue. And it wasn't just a new name they sought but a new personality to go with that image. Don Draper too didn't want to be a dick anymore.

Final thought for now: in the opening season, Weiner dropped some heavy biblical hints about Don Draper as a sort of Moses character. Now, if we step back to Rosin again. For her, the most important thing about the show is its portrayal of a moment of historical "progress".

Meanwhile the original spirit of the show—rooted in a particular moment in American history and moving along with the decade—resides with the newer characters.

She cares about where the thing is going. But no one would have watched a show that featured only those newer characters and their progress.  The entire appeal of the show for five seasons was in Don, Roger and Joan. At the same time, we all knew they had to get swept off the stage at some point. And thus the nostalgia: something was gained but something was lost when characters like them disappeared from American life. And one way to handle that dramatically would be to have Don Draper be a sort of Moses character who leads us to the promised land but cannot enter into it because of his own sins.

Unlike Rosin, I miss characters like Don and Roger and think a lot of our current cultural problems would be solved if men were encouraged to adopt characters like theirs again. And I'd have put Bob Benson in with them until he became the rather sad character he became last Sunday night. The central lesson of the show, as I've said many times before, is that who and what you are trying to become is more important than being or trying to be the person you "really are".

Mad Men: Favors

The clichés came down so fast this episode that I wanted to put on a raincoat.

You can't entirely fault the episode as a single episode. Everything in it made sense and the story arc was logical. The characters all acted in credible ways. They just didn't act in ways that matched the show they were supposed to be in.

The set up wasn't quite credible. As Raymond Chandler put it once, it is perfectly believable that that all these things might happen to various people at various times. What issn't believable is that they could all happen to such a small group of people all of whom are connected to one another within such a narrow time frame.

But, then again, that's what had to happen if they were going to make the story fit the 1960s mythology. Every businessman at the GM meeting spoke exactly the way they would have had they been cartoon characters, straight out of Doonesbury, rather than real human beings and ..., perhaps the less aid the better.

I said last week that I think the show is using the Dawson's Creek playbook this year and last night's episode had it all. It was certainly there on the surface. The show is doing just what Dawson's Creek did in taking the 90210 teen soap conventions and using them in a more serious way. There were the too cute moments with Pete's mother and then Bob Benson's gay come on to Pete and, most of all, the heavy dramatic irony of Ted seeing the connection between Pete and Peggy and getting jealous.

But there was also the dramatic arc issues. Here's the problem. Shows like this are conceived like novels with a clear dramatic arc that takes characters from their inception to a self- realization and then a conclusion. That's the scheme that Jane Austen set out and pretty much every serious English novel has done since. There is a lot of other Jane-ish touches as well, such as the difficulties faced by families where the father is absent or distant, but I'll leave them aside for now. The problem I want to highlight is that the creators of a television series never know when it is going to end,

A novel is driving towards an end so everything goes to that purpose. A TV show has to keep entertaining people for a middle stretch of indeterminate length. In Dawson's Creek, the arc went as follows:

1. a boy and a girl grow up together, puberty changes their relationship, 
2. he has a bit of a Peter Pan syndrome and wants to keep living in a world where this sexual tension doesn't exist, 
3. his best friend does see the girl in a sexual way and they fall in love, 
4. our hero gets enough distance on the episode to muse about childhood and puberty and the lessons learned and feel grateful for it all which, we realize at the end, was the reason he has been telling us this story as the show is really about storytelling.

Okay, but all that could be covered off in one season or two at most and the show ran for six. As a consequence, you get a lot of episodes in the middle that are pure filler. And then, at the end, it has to get yoked back to the story arc again.The thing that the writers at Dawson's Creek realized is that you had to state the theme early and then keep pulling it back every once in a  while just so viewers could remember what the show is really about. For six years we wondered, Dawson or Pacey? Doing that was incredibly silly but it was at least honest.

Mad Men didn't do that. We got the set up of Don's character but we never got an honest treatment of what was at stake for Don. Perhaps because none was possible. All we knew was that there was this guy who had assumed a false identity and was, sometimes perilously, living it out. The relationship with Rachel showed an odd neediness on Don's part but it wasn't explored at any length.

Meanwhile, another Don Draper and another Roger Sterling managed to sneak in between the lines. The best moments in the entire history of the show were those moments between Don and Roger that first season. Without really meaning to, the show's creators gave us a story about a man's world from a-not-so distant past that was compelling and interesting, much more interesting than the domestic dramas that ran parallel to it. That set of the original Sterling Cooper offices was magnificent, to be sure, but one of the reasons so many people loved it was that you knew you were in for a treat any time the camera panned across those desks. The same was true of most of the flashbacks. Some were deeply flawed, but you knew you were going to get a story about manliness.

To put it bluntly, the filler turned out to be better and more meaningful drama than the intended story arc. a Better artist than Matt Weiner would have realized this and gone with it. For a brief moment with the magnificent Bond-ish ending to last season it looked like he might.

The problem with Mad Men this year is that the story arc everything is being yoked to a story arc that doesn't match the opening. It's all has a sort of wimpy, PC quality. For example, notice how we went from gay Bob Benson to gay Pete. That's classic Dawson's strategy. Handle the sexual issues with great gestures of being open and honest but don't connect them to any of sex's wet and sticky flavour. So Bob makes his pitch to Pete in terms of love and tenderness as opposed to, hey Pete, how do you feel about raw sex with another man? It's as if gay men spent their entire lives feeling vaguely different without knowing what it was that made them feel different. That, as opposed, to getting erections when they looked at other men, which, while honest, would actually force the audience to acknowledge that gay love means means gay sex: you know, two men actually doing things with one another's erect penises.

I know, you'd rather not think about that. But is that honest? I mean, you're so terribly hip and cool and so much more open than those uptight evangelicals. But, if that is really true, then why can't you handle a story in which gay men actually do what gay men do? Which is to penetrate one another in various ways. There was no explicit sex between Don and Sylvia but the show is at least honest enough to acknowledge that Don penetrates her.

As a consequence, we get this deeply dishonest account of the gay love. Try to imagine, for example, how Bob Benson would come off as a heterosexual who just tried to get with a girl by being really nice to her all the time. That he never once told her what his purpose was but that he just hoped that, as Bob ultimately explains it,

Is it really so impossible to imagine ... couldn't it be that, if someone took care of you, very good care of you, if this person would do anything for you, if your well-being was his only thought, is it impossible that you might begin to feel something for him?

Recognize that? It's the nice-guy strategy for picking up girls or, in this case, another boy. You run around being a nice guy—just 'cause, you know—and hope that this magically turns into love. You hate that nice guy. Remember? Women certainly hate him. And he always loses in any half-way credible drama. He loses because there is always another guy who pays attention to a woman but not "just 'cause". This other makes it clear that he is paying attention to a woman because he wants her sexually. And that guy had a name for the first five seasons and his name was Don Draper.

How did he suddenly turn into this pathetic, needy loser? The whole Sylvia thing has a deus ex machina quality wherein it pulls Don into a character that just doesn't fit with the guy we have been watching all these years.

It's like the pathetic, nice guy dweeb got to be a TV producer and now he is going to get his revenge on the guy who actually had sex with the girl his nice-guy strategy failed with by making the more successful guy into some pathetic loser after all. And, in that sense, it fails to live up Dawson's Creek. The Dawson who told us that story was honest enough to admit that Joey chose Pacey over him for reasons that made perfect sense seen from a mature viewpoint. For five seasons, Don Draper was a complex, flawed but manly man whom people watched because he was more interesting than the dweeby losers that television and movies feed us these days. Now, he seems to be morphing into an unconvincing Alan Alda type. Don is no longer interesting and the show is no longer interesting.

BTW: Did you notice the guilty quality in Megan's voice when Sally's friend, a character so boring and predictable she doesn't deserve a name, asked her if she was calling her agent? If that turns out to be an affair, I may vomit all over the screen.

Mad Men: the ratings

I was wondering if anyone else was noticing haw bad this season was. Turns out lots of people are. The show lost one million viewers over the first three episodes. As of this week, it has not won them back.

Meanwhile, you have to wonder how many people there are who, like me, hate this season but are holding on in the hopes this gets better.

Mad Men: Tale of Two Cities Metacommentary

I have to dash off to the doctor's this morning so I'll just give you a bit to nibble on. This is from Tom and Lorenzo:

We wondered a couple episodes back, when the two characters were reunited, if Peggy was going to have a problem with Joan’s ascent to partner and how she got it. Turns out, she kinda does – and that’s perfectly in character for Peggy and perfectly understandable given her own story. We know Joan and understand her the way the viewers outside a story can understand a character, but to Peggy – and to everyone else in the story  – Joan is someone who slept her way into a partnership, and that’s not something most people – then or now – could call an admirable act. Peggy would naturally have an especially tough time handling it, given her own history with Joan – and all of that came beautifully roaring to the surface in their argument.

These guys are among the better analysts of the show but I think they really miss it here. Peggy's remark that she never slept with Don comes in response to Joan's claim that Peggy let Don carry her to "the deep end of the pool". It's not driven by resentment of how Joan got to be partner but by resentment at all the aspersions others have made about how Peggy got to be a writer. (Added: Joan, of course, understands it as a dig at her because she is just as wrapped up in her defensiveness as Peggy is in hers.)

That's the brilliance of it. Neither woman is taken seriously for her talents. And thus they dig at one another. As I've said before, one of the things the show gets no credit for is how realistic it is about how women really do behave.

Speaking of which, this sentence from T&J is a little bit mealy-mouthed:

Joan is someone who slept her way into a partnership, and that’s not something most people – then or now – could call an admirable act

It's true enough that most people would not call it an admirable act  but that is because it isn't an admirable act. Joan sinned against herself mostly but also against all women in the office when she did what she did and she should be called on it. This is a recurring theme here but one of the things our culture does vis a vis women over and over again is to not hold them responsible in sexual matters. It's high time we did.

Okay, have criticized them for a few paragraphs, T&J also blunder into the truth:

But here, have a theme anyway:

“They don’t know our name because we don’t know our name.”

Jim Cutler’s admonition about the tenuousness of the newly merged agency is as good a choice for a theme as any other in this largely themeless episode.

Actually, it's better than that. Think of the Dickens novel that gives the episode its title here (as I get to below, the writing in this episode and the use of the novel is right out of the Dawson's Creek playbook). Sydney Carton is the not very good man who is a doppelganger for Charles Darnay.  It is precisely because no one knows Carton's name that he can make the great sacrifice at the end of the novel. Not having a clear name gives you a certain freedom. A point that is underlined by Don deciding that "Don" is not his real name at the party in LA.

Ultimately, the solution for the name of the firm is for a whole lot of people to remove their name from the masthead! You surrender your identity for a greater cause. It is a far, far better thing that I do et ecetera.

Now we can go back to Joan and Peggy and understand what really happens. These are both strong women but strong, pre-feminist women. What happens in the hallway is driven not by Peggy's resentment at how Joan rose to partner (no one knows that Joan has real skills better than Peggy) but by Peggy's realization of how much she shares in common with Joan. So she helps her out.

Final thought, the theme and the way it was handled had a very Dawson's Creek feeling about it. In fact, this entire season has been very reminiscent of Dawson's Creek both in the way it is written and in the slightly too cute way it handles serious issues sometimes. I'll probably have more to say about that as we go ahead.

PS: Well, that's a bit more than a bit to nibble on but I don't have the time to edit it down. While I'm at it, if you read the bit about Don above and thought, "but it's not his real name, I say, "Who cares?!!!!"

Mad Men Quickie: No, Megan isn't Sharon Tate

Update: This post was intended to be more tongue in cheek than serious. I suspect that Mia Farrow inspired the creation of Megan but I don't think it changes our way of understanding the show if it is true. This post is a protest against the over-analytic approach to characters on the show that we've seen this and every other season. Repeat after me: Don Draper isn't Jay Gatsby, Bob Benson isn't Nick Carraway, Megan isn't Sharon Tate, the Chevy account isn't a symbolic stand in for Vietnam, the real truth is neither Freudian nor Jungian. Just watch the show people! (Or, given how crappy it has been this season, don't watch the show.)

There is a lot of talk floating around about a tie-in between Megan's character and Sharon Tate. As Tom and Lorenzo note, the model's for characters rarely draw directly from how they are dresses.

Besides, as I've said many times before, the obvious actual character model for Megan is Mia Farrow.

The evidence for this is painfully obvious if your paying attention:

• Mia Farrow played in the television version of Peyton Place.
• In a TV movie version in which Farrow does not appear, the character associated with her has an illegitimate child named Megan!
• An older man representing the style of a passing era (Frank Sinatra) surprised everyone by impulsively marrying Farrow.
• Then, in 1968, Farrow stars in Rosemary's Baby, a movie in which she spends a lot of time alone in a spooky New York apartment building because her husband leaves her alone. 
• Her husband has odd connections with another couple in the buidling.
• There is a meeting in which Farrow's character meets another woman in the laundry room!
• There is a "666" on the side of a building visible from the lobby of the office in the Time-Life building and a scene from Rosemary's Baby was shot in the Time-Life building.

I mean, how much more obvious can it get?

And Don and Roger get more and more like Frank and Dino with every passing episode.

Finally, if you were paying attention last night it was pretty obvious that Danny Siegel was the Roman Polanski type. (Apropos of nothing, a favourite joke of mine from the 1970s: Roman Polanski is a five-foot Pole you wouldn't want to touch anyone with. And you wouldn't, I mean yechhhh!)

Special added bonus: Here is some actual footage of the Mad Men recap team at Slate meeting to discuss this season's episodes:

Mad Men: A Tale of Two Cities

It is one of the great ironies of this series that the closer it gets to the end, the more it relies on clichés, Was there one scene in that episode that couldn't have been in a horrible Bud Cort movie with a Cat Stevens sound track from the early 1970s? The wild party, the drugs, the people doing odd things that make no sense only they do, the claim that this new irrationality represented the way things were going to be from now on.

And did you notice that only one person, the guy at Carnation, was going to maybe vote Nixon? And he was only in it as a set up for the Reagan supporter who was going to come in and crap on him? All of which should bother us because Nixon is going to win the election in just a few months time. I know it doesn't fit in with the cliché that all the good creative people want to believe about 1968 but there was a huge bunch of people who weren't part of this rather elite little fantasy that was floating around in 1968. They all watched it on TV and decided that, no thanks, they didn't want to be part of all this.

And did you notice the other strange absence from the episode? George Wallace? That's weird because he's usually a giant figure in the tale.

But the biggest problem with the episode was this: I didn't enjoy it. I endured it. Most of the episodes lately have been like that. When the show was set in the early 1960s, it spent a lot of time confounding our expectations, showing us that people back then weren't the cardboard cut outs we imagined them to be. Every single character who appeared at that wild LA Party in last night's episode was a cut out.

And, sorry, but having the straight guy suddenly decide to try drugs is about as clichéed an ending as they could possible have dished out.

Hanna Rosin comes through

It took a whole day for her to get it up but I have to admit that Hanna Rosin really delivers with her comment today. Read the whole thing: it's the best commentary you'll read anywhere other than right here.

I would only quibble with one thing: her take on Ted.

And Ted, the creepy little tease, tells Peggy he’s just another cliché, in love with his protégée, and the next day pretends that confession never happened, merely because he’s decided that being in love with her might get in the way of his productivity. The scene in his office is chilling. He doesn’t explain himself to Peggy, or brood, or show any signs of longing. He just bullies an alternate reality into being. “Ready to get to work? It’s Monday morning, Peggy, it’s a brand new work week,” he shouts, opening his office door as if he’s starring in an ad about a nifty new typewriter. “Round up the team.”

What Rosin misses is that Ted is married. Yes, he has behaved badly, yes he has teased Peggy, yes he shouldn't have kissed her and he should not have confessed to thinking about her that way. But, when it comes time to make things right, Ted's obligations to his spouse dwarf anything he owes Peggy.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say Ted gives a clinic on just how you should break up a budding romance with someone other than your spouse. You owe everything to the person you made vows to and next to nothing to this other person and that should be painfully obvious to them.

In a way, Ted is merely telling Peggy exactly what Don told her at the beginning of the episode: there is a right and wrong and sometimes you have to stand up for the right no matter who gets hurt. Don meant this in a purely aesthetic way but it applies to ethics as well.

The Better Half metacommentary

Looking around the comments this week, I think the most telling thing is the silence. Over at slate, the comments have been slower and slower getting up. The blame for this rests on one person alone and that is Hanna Rosin. The other two get their stuff up on time but she is slow and has been getting slower and slower.

She's married to the editor of Slate by the way. I'm sure that has nothing at all to do with why she gets away with such shoddy work.

I held back on one thing yesterday because I wanted to see what others did or didn't make of it. It was Don's comment:

Why is sex the definition of being close to someone?

 To which Betty replies,

“I don’t know, but it is for me. It is for most people.”

This is hugely problematic in terms of the internal consistency of the drama.  For starters, it's a lie coming from Betty. She is saying it to someone she is having sex with but has no intention of being close to. In fact, throughout this episode Betty's interest in sex is narcissistic—she cares only to the extent that it makes her feel good about herself.

The second problem is that it's hard to figure out what Don means by the comment. Is he complaining or genuinely wondering? It appears to be the first but that makes no sense at all not in terms of the episode but of the entire show from season one.

Having bashed Hanna a bit at the start, let me say that I do understand some of her attitude. The show has been so boring this year, it's hard to care enough to bash anything about. I put off watching yesterday because I actually dreaded starting for fear of how awful it might be.  I was relieved not because itw as any good but because it at least wasn't as bad as I anticipated.

 Tom and Lorenzo start their recap with three quotes:

“She’s blonde, classy. You need to make these women different.”

“You’re the same person at times.”

“They’re two halves of the same person and they want the same thing but they’re trying to get it in different ways.”

I assume T&L are gay and that is why they can cite these things and then miss the obvious import of them. They immediately go into cheapo psychoanalysis about every person being two people and thereby miss the really important thing which is right on the surface: The blonde, classy one is Betty. Talk to any woman who is in love with a guy who was formerly married to or in a long relationship with another woman and you'll get it by the barge load. For the second woman in a guy's life, the first is a constant presence in the relationship.

She needs to differentiate herself from the previous woman. The most common mistake, by the way, is to try and be something other than sexual for him. I don't know why but the second women in a man's life almost  always assume that the first woman was really hot sexually and that they cannot live up to that. In my experience, the exact reverse tends to be the case.

But the show doesn't get that either does it? The show has Megan s a mass of contradictions. She doesn't even begin to understand herself. How is it, for example, that the mature, sensible and calm woman she was at the beginning turns into the shallow, fairytale princess we see now?

And here is a little liberal silliness masquerading as something else.

Once again, Peggy shows how little she understands current events: “They were brought here by slave ships!” “Well I was brought here by you!” Not that we didn’t side with her in this argument. It’s the height of liberal white guilt silliness to not want to help the cops find the person who stabbed you just because you feel they got a bad deal from society. On the other hand, Peggy seems to always go to the “I have it hard too” well every time someone brings up civil rights or racial issues.

Actually, Abe is the one shows little or no understanding of current events. They were not brought here in slave ships. Their ancestors were brought here in slave ships just as my ancestors were starved to death in Ireland and then fled in the hold of an empty lumber ship. In both cases it has remarkably little to do with what is going on right now.

T&L can at least see that it is liberal silliness to not help the police find the vile bastards who just stabbed you. What they can't see is that this is not what would happen in real life. Liberals mugged by reality act exactly according to script and that is by temporarily rejecting their ideals in favour of the current self interest just as Peggy does. Abe's reactions aren't silly, they are insane. The only possible explanation is that he is such an immature child that he doesn't get it, which is certainly consistent with what we have seen from him so far. The problem, however, is that I'm not sure his own creators are any smarter.

Finally, something from the comments yesterday:

You're right when you say that Men's magazine's wouldn't write article's about Manson's style, and that's the point. They aren't writing articles about Draper the Man, they're writing about Draper's style. Similarly, people don't watch the show because they admire Draper, they admire Draper's style. Certainly very shallow, but that's our world. 

I don't mean to pick on this particular commenter. He is only saying what almost everybody else says about Don Draper. I suspect that, in the end, Matt Weiner intends to make a similar judgment against the man. But I would like you to notice the odd contradiction in that. This is a show about style. That's what it has been from the get-go. The whole attraction of the show and the man, which is to say the same thing twice, is style. For it to end with a message that style is shallow pursuit of empty trappings would be like watching a porn film that ends by trying to prove that it's real message all along has been that sex is empty and celibacy is where real joy lies.

It's not that you can't believe that style is the shallow pursuit of empty trappings. It's a respectable position and you're welcome to try and make it if you want. The problem is this: no one who really believed that would have spent the last six seasons watching Mad Men.

Mad Men: The Better half

I thought the key quote of the episode was something Megan said:

I keep trying to make things like they used to be but I don't know how.

Anyone who has ever been in a marriage (or other long-term sexual relationship) will understand that sentiment. There was an odd kind of magic when you didn't know one another quite so well as you do now. Part of this was the sexual mystique that a partial stranger has and the sense that every knew encounter could teach you something new about you and them. And part of it had to do with  the fact that you both used to try harder. Now both know how to shut down the other with little passive-aggressive tricks any time they start something that requires a reciprocal effort from you. And you use those passive aggressive tricks not because you no longer fear losing them but because you no longer want to try as hard as you used to.

What do I mean? Well, lets look at Don and Betty in this episode. It will be interesting to see how the other commentary runs because you could use some dime-store Freudian analysis to diminish either  either to a nothing. Don cannot connect sex with intimacy. Betty on the other hand, needs attention from men other than the one she is married to to get her batteries charged (and Henry has a latent cuckold fantasy in that he gets his charged by seeing her pursued by other men). My prediction is that most of the other armchair analysis of the show will consist of people picking the person they least like and crap on them from great height for their shallowness. But all three are equally shallow—or all three are equally deep if you prefer that option.

And so to are Megan, Pete, Joan, Roger and Peggy. They are all have mixed feelings for the man that used to be. The women are looking for it in their partners and the men are looking for it in themselves but neither knows how to make that happen any more the way they live now.

Here is a bit of grand theory of Mad Men. Don Draper is an heroic ideal of manhood. I know, but he's a "fraud who is living a lie"  and all the other bullshit that sensitive modern guys aren't supposed to be opposed to but, and this is the important thing, all men and all women find him more interesting that modern sensitive men. Fake or not, Don actually has an identity that is the sum total of what he does. He is what he does. And he is mysterious because his identity (his primary identity) is the sort of secret alter ego that all the wimpy little hipsters who watch the show dream of having. (Yes, I appreciate that that might be applied to me as well.)

But every man alive knows that Don Draper isn't just mythology no matter what they taught him at college. We know this because we all knew men like him. In my case, it was my godfather who rose from a family of dirt poor famine Irish to considerable success in business. Along the way he ditched his "authentic" poor Irish wore identity and killer suits with fedoras, drove luxury cars with leather seats, was a member of an exclusive salmon-fishing club with rights to some of the best salmon water in North America and ... well, it's hard to tell how much else because the man was a bit of an enigma.

That male past was real and it was compelling ane, let's be blunt, erotic in a way that current men are not.

And this episode seemed to me to be about that. Everyone seemed torn between examples of that old masculine ideal and some newer, less exotic but supposedly more dependable type.

Having trashed the show a lot this year, I thought they did one thing very well this episode. That is they started to use nostalgia within the show itself. When we all started watching this, Mad Men was about our nostalgia. Critics claimed it was a past that never existed but we know that's beside the point: any past, real or fictional will no longer exist precisely because it is past. But the show has been on the air long enough now that the characters' nostalgia for their own past is becoming a factor. Thus we have Megan wanting to make things like they used to be.

The point of any nostalgia worth the name is not the accuracy with which it portrays the past that it is nostalgic about. What matters is the sense of loss that we feel right now. That's what it has to get right.

A final brilliant touch was the visit to Bobby's camp. That knotty pine paneling, the dining hall, the picture windows with the lake in the distance, even the country gas station where Don and Betty run into one another on the way. All these things touch some chord with anyone who ever went to camp.

Perhaps more importantly, they also touch a chord with anyone who didn't go to camp but who once visited or even just saw pictures of some classic old camp and wished that had been part of their past.

I have one major problem though.  As I've said many times before, the show moves too quickly to actual sex. In real life, Betty and Don most likely would not end up in that cabin together. All the same sexual tensions would exist between them but it's rarely that easy to end up having sex with someone. It hardly ever happens in fact. Most people might have an experience where sex happens that easily maybe once in a lifetime.

In real life when two people who used to be lovers get together, they go through the same sort of exchange Don and Betty have here without any actual sex. It would have been better drama and more honest drama if they had talked and talked with all sorts of sexual tension and then one morning Don had woken up and gone to talk with Betty over breakfast again only to find Henry sitting with her.

And that would have opened other moral possibilities as well for we all have these sorts of sexually charged encounters that go nowhere in real life and they are useful things to us. In the show they can't be precisely because the show treats actual sex too lightly.

PS: I thought the episode did a nice bit of teasing it's critics. That portrayal of Abe this season was like saying "this is what you really look like to other people" to the people who write at Slate or The AV Club.

The Crash metacommentary

Hanna Rosin shows the depth of her cultural understanding:

In one of the brainstorming sessions, Peggy throws out the Vietnam-era idea that “the child is the father of the man.”

Actually, it's classic Romantic era thinking; to be specific it's Wordsworth from 1802.

 My heart leaps up when I behold
       A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
 So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
      Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
       I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

That's only 166 years off. It was a line much quoted during the Vietnam era of course because it is one of those lines that feels terribly deep when you're on drugs.

A lot of the people defending this indefensible episode are arguing that it was like a drug experience. And that is true enough but, while it is true that some of the people in the episode took drugs, the audience did not. Drugs alter your brain and make it malfunction so that reality appears to change but they don't actually alter reality. It makes sense that the people in the scene should not be able to make sense of reality, but their drugs shouldn't change what we see.

The sharpest observation this week comes, not surprisingly, from Tom and Lorenzo:

If you’ve ever listened to the Matthew Weiner commentary tracks on the show’s DVDs, you’ll quickly find out that Don Draper is (unsurprisingly) a Matthew Weiner stand-in, and that the show often uses the advertising world to make points about marrying creativity to mass media and corporate concerns. In other words, advertising is being used as a stand-in for television production. Weiner & Co. are using their own experiences in their careers to make observations about the careers of the people in the show.

I've never listened to the commentary on the DVDs myself (I was surprised to learn that they still make DVDs) but I'm perfectly willing to believe that is how Matt Weiner thinks about the show.  As I've said before, like Hollywood doing period drama, Matt Weiner tends to get the costumes right and the people who wear them wrong because he makes the people into projections of the current culture and not products of their own.

When people study the late 1960s at university, which is where journalists like Hanna Rosin (who was -2 in 1968) and Matt Weiner (who was +3) get there notions about the era, a very narrow focus prevails. As Tom and Lorenzo note, we get to hear the smooth sounds of Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66 doing "Going Out of my Head" during this episode. That song was a couple of years old at the time but there was a string of smooth, easy listening tunes that were hits in the summer of 1968: Mrs. Robinson, This Guy's in Love With You, Grazin' in the Grass, People Got to be Free. That tells you a lot about how most people were experiencing the world.

I wish I could find it now, but years ago there was a show called The Wonder Years in which the older brother of one of the main characters dies in Vietnam. At the time, somebody did a calculation to determine how likely that was. How likely it was that someone on any random street in suburbia would have a brother die in Vietnam. The answer was not very likely at all. Even the most basic math confirms this. Although 1968 was a very bad year for the war with 16,592 deaths, that translates into only .008% of the population at the time. For most people, the war was a TV war and not a happened in their lives war.

Final thought, Sally has breasts! Nice legs too! I know, older men like me aren't supposed to notice these things. And yet the episode was simply dripping with teen sex. And that too was an aspect of 1968. Juts a few months in the the future from this week's episode, the Rolling Stones would record a song that celebrated the joys of sex with a fifteen year old girl! Think about that for a while. Think about how different that mentality is from our time.



A lot of the moralizing commentary on this episode focuses on the fact that a woman who robs the Draper apartment is played by a black actress. Worse, a mugger in an earlier episode also was black. This might be racist! I wonder why? Does anyone think that black muggers and burglars in Manhattan in 1968 were unheard of? I distinctly remember there being other criminals portrayed in the who who were white. (The couple who roll Don in the motel room, for example.) Meanwhile, another of the things that happened last week was that a teenage girl just back from her father's funeral was sexually exploited by a man much older than her and another man, her father's colleague, watched the sex happen. I guess that's just fine right?

Mad Men: The Crash

In the teaser, Matt Weiner says, "We've seen him with all these of mistresses; we're sort of maybe wondering why he is so attached to her." Well, yeah, we're wondering and do you know why we're wondering? We're wondering because you have given us absolutely nothing in the way of motive or cause for why he may be wondering this way. Nothing at all. This episode made zero sense from beginning to end. It was a complete waste of our time.

There have been bad episodes before but this is the first time I was just waiting for it to be over.

The central conceit this year is stolen straight from François Truffaut's L'Homme qui aimait les femmes. Don's obsession with women is explained in terms of his childhood. Only it isn't actually explained at all. All they do is gesture a bit as if we're all supposed to accept this as obvious. His entire life is explained in terms of his search for something to fill the emptiness. It didn't work in the film and doesn't work on television either. And it doesn't work because it's bad psychology. Our minds just don't work that way.

This used to be the best show on television, it has now sunk to something that even the worst daytime soaps wouldn't do.

Mad Men: What actually happened?

Updated 2015/05/17: Some light editing for clarity.

The question above is one of my favourite critical techniques when approaching a story. You can spend so much time wrapped up in the subtext that you fail to notice the text. It's important to forget about interpreting events sometimes and just figure out what actually happened.

Ted goes to see his now ex partner in the hospital (soon to be simply "ex period") and talks about how he can't make Don out. His partner quotes Sun Tzu at him:

 If I wait patiently by the river, the body of my enemy will float by.

and then:

Give him the early rounds, he'll tire himself out. Go home, shower, walk back in there like you own half the place.

But that isn't what actually happens. Instead, Don gives Ted the next round by telling him that no one at Mohawk will listen to anyone but Ted now that he has flown his own plane up. Is he really as upset as he looks or is he acting? Ted has no way of knowing and neither do we. Which is the same point I made yesterday about what happens with Sylvia. (I was flattered to see that show up, uncredited of course, in the comments at other sites.)

The most important thing Ted says this episode is:

You don't want to take in the wonder of God's majesty?

Remember in episode one when Peggy is facing a crisis and Ted isn't returning any of her calls? It's because he is on a religious retreat. Ted is a religious man! That's unusual on Mad Men.

The other thing that is really jumping out at me this season (besides how awful it is) is how much this year is a mirror image of the first few seasons. The second last episode of season one was the defeat of Nixon. This year we're building up to his victory. The second-last episode of Season two ended with Don walking into the western ocean seeking redemption. This season began with him in Hawaii dreaming of redemption. The second-last episode of Season three featured the JFK assassination followed by a massive reorganization at the office spurred by an inspiration of Don's. This season featured two political assassinations and massive reorganization at the office spurred by an inspiration of Don's building up to the mid point. Finally, we get the odd replay of the conflict over Peggy between Don and another man that we saw in Season four, only Ted stands in for Duck this time.

It's almost as if we are building everything back to the starting point again. Only it's not the starting point anymore. There is a loss of innocence.

Not much commentary on the commentary this week. The writers at Slate were reliably shallow though. They were gleeful in their speculations that Ted would replace Don, that Don is yesterday's man. But do tell me, why do you think people watch this show with such earnest devotion today. It would seem that Don was actually tomorrow's man, or even the eternal man. On the other hand,

... and again my thoughts drifted to Don, a man falling swiftly out of step with the times. As you note, Hanna, Don still gets drunk at the office, still shaves off the sideburns every other man grows out, and still hearkens back to the earnest simplicity of the Depression when Ted speaks the language of dippy, high-concept sitcoms. 

Ted also says "groovy" and talks abut "rap sessions". Does Seth Stevenson  think that represents the future? The thing we're supposed to have looking at a show set in recent history is the advantage of hindsight. Too many of the people commenting on this show seem to have forgotten that history didn't work out the way earnest liberals thought it would. The summer of love is over and it's the winter of discontent. There is still Woodstock to look forward to in 1969 but there is also Altamount. And looking back from 2013, what seems like the more important cultural event: the depression or Gilligan's Island? Take your time.

The more important issue is that women hate sensitive guys with trendy facial hair. It was interesting that when Peggy asked Joan how her little boy was, Joan asked back, "How's yours?" With the possible exception of Ken Cosgrove, the new generation doesn't seem very promising and that is right because they weren't. The 1970s sensitive guy was a cultural and moral disaster.


PS: Burt Peterson was let go the first time in "Out of Town" the opening episode of Season three. Roger actually misses the meeting, walking in after the news has been broken. Burt handles it very badly. There is actually a valuable life lesson here: no matter how gracious or ungracious the people who let you go are, listen to what they have to say, say little in return and make sure that whatever you say or do is gracious. Firing him the second time has to have been the easiest thing Roger has ever had to do.

PPS: I note that while Peggy praised Dawn for being a good secretary who didn't divulge any of Don's secrets we didn't actually see Dawn. There were several scenes where Dawn plainly wasn't there and others had to do her job for her. What's up? (Perhaps they were too cheap to pay Teyonah Parris's salary?)

Mad Men: Man with a plan

First thought

I kept thinking of the stupidest rock lyric in the history:

I shouted out, "Who Killed the Kennedys?"
When after all it was you and me.

Actually, JFK was killed by a communist and Bobby Kennedy's death was an act of terrorism commited by, who else, a pro-Palestinian sympathizer named Sirhan Sirhan.

But the liberal mythology is that the Kennedys somehow died for America's sins. I mention this so you can see how the show plays into that. You have people living their sinful lives and then, suddenly, Kennedy is dead. You didn't hear a word about Israel and the 1967 war, or the growing terrorism problem. You just see these people in America behaving in dark, dark ways and suddenly the guy's dead and you connect the two things even though they had nothing whatsoever to do with one another.

Second thought

What was Don's plan vis a vis Sylvia? Do you think it was to set her up in that hotel as his sex slave?

The show starts with him overhearing a big fight between Sylvia and Arnie. Dr. Arnie is going to Minnesota, presumably to make a pitch to the Mayo Clinic (which, if successful, will make him a colleague of my uncle who was a senior guy there at the time). Sylvia doesn't want Arnie to go. Why not? She doesn't have a job. Maybe she just loves New York. Not in 1968 she doesn't. On the other hand, she calls Don and tells him she needs him.

You can hate me for this if you want but I know what I'd feel in his place. Dread is what I'd feel. Here he has this perfectly good deal with a wife and a lover who is safely married to someone else and now she is going to be single and wanting who knows what. His first emotion is a need for containment. He he doesn't want her hoping for more from him. He can't dump her because who knows what she will do. She might run to Megan with the whole story. So he puts her in the role of sex slave.

As I say, you can hate me for this if you want, but he has nothing to lose. She'll either say "no" right away, in which case the problem is diffused. Or she'll say "yes" first, in which case he has a sex slave for a while. Special bonus: no matter whether she says "no" immediately or if she takes a while to come to her senses, it will feel like her decision to end the thing and that will sharply reduce the risk of bitter recriminations later.

It's pretty manipulative to be sure but it isn't stupid.

Third thought

The jousting between Don and Ted is different. Each is capable of standing up for himself. Ultimately, someone has to lose and someone else has to win.

From Don's perspective, the big problem is that Peggy is on Ted's side. (and we see this mirrored by Bob Benson who cleverly uses Joan to protect his job.) In that regard, I thought the most significant shot in the show was Don lying on his back in bed with all that chest hair visible. He's an old-fashioned man. Ted and Bob look like the sort of guys who sing effeminate tenor instead of manly baritone and who would consider having their hair waxed off. It's an increasingly feminized world and guys like Don are less at home in it.

In any case, notice how it is Don who tells Ted that he has won these second skirmish when he tells him that he has pulled a coup by being the guy who flew up to see Mohawk in his own plane. Again, he looks weak from the outside but it feels like he has managed to get exactly what he wants.

Final thought

I don't see much future for the Draper marriage. In this show assassinations serve to separate grown ups from children and Megan is definitely one of the children. Again, I know how I'd feel if I'd heard all those brave plans the night before only to walk in and see Megan weeping in front of the TV like that. I wouldn't be seeing a woman who can share my life but a child who needs taking care of.

Okay, I hear you say, can't she be upset at the shock of it? Sure, but the problem is that she already cast herself in the role of spoiled princess last season. Her reaction to Bobby Kennedy's death reinforces that.

I can see Don serving her the divorce papers on the set of her show the way Sinatra did to Mia Farrow.

Other than that, I didn't like the episode much. Doing these commentaries used to be a pleasure but it has felt more and more like a task I dread as this season has gone on. I don't know how much longer I'll keep it up.

Mad Men metacommentary: Oh Hanna

Hanna Rosin never disappoints:

This episode, being all about cars, was structured loosely like a road movie, in which the characters get to shift the frame by changing locations. “Throw the map out the window, hit the road Jack,” Ted tells Don in a classic road movie scenario: In a strange bar in a strange town, the two buddies figure out the so-crazy-it-just-might-work solution to their problems. But road movies are traditionally for dudes. The women have to stay behind, tend the hearth, and take their mothers out to lunch because as they keep reminding the men it’s Mother’s Day. (That’s why in Thelma & Louise the two girlfriends get punished for breaking the rules with DEATH.)

Those poor women, they get shafted every time.  This isn't just a miserably bad interpretation of last night's show, it also gets Thelma & Louise wrong. Watch that ending again. Whatever it is, that isn't punishment.

Hanna isn't alone in seeing nothing but women getting the rough end,  again, sigh, in this episode. Margaret Lyons saw things similarly. I wonder if it's difficult maintaining that level of cynical bitterness all the time. Well, no, of course it isn't. The thing about being an unhappy bitch all the time is that it's painfully easy to do so.

There is not much more to say on that point except perhaps to contrast what Margaret and  Hanna saw with what some others saw:

Watching “For Immediate Release” is like riding a rickety old wooden roller coaster that thrills you with its seemingly unsafe twists and turns and leaves you feeling sore for a couple of days. That’s a compliment, by the way.

And

Ah, there’s the Mad Men we’ve been missing.

And

When Mad Men is slow, it's really slow. Then when it gets moving but good, it's like Ocean's Eleven, with the jazzy score and the jaunty angles and the wisecracking.

And

And

I liked the overall energy, the jazzy vibe of the episode. I think we all enjoy Mad Men more when Don is on his game and crushing life.  

Turn up the testosterone, and everyone loves the show and everyone loves Don. Except they don't like to admit it because that would be to admit that the pre-boomer men were more manly and more interesting and generally more admirable than boomer and post-boomer men have been. It's not the fact of the matter that troubles them—everyone knows that men have changed for the worst—they just don't like admitting it.

Even poor Hanna gets wet when Don takes charge, as he did just a few weeks ago:

My favorite scene was the one between Don and Sylvia at the restaurant, because it reminded us that Don’s power comes from his ability to see through other people’s codes. Left alone with her lover at a restaurant, without sex to distract her, Sylvia’s Catholic guilt starts to press in. But Don calls her on it right away. “You want to feel shitty right until the point when I take your dress off. Because I am going to do that. If you want to skip dinner, fine, but don’t pretend.” Now that’s a line that can raise the temperature.

This is what Hanna wants: a world in which men are praised for being masterful about sex (but only when they correctly read a woman's mind) and hated for their efforts to be masterful anywhere else (particularly when they succeed and women fail).

The history that isn't

I commented in the last post about the alternative history so beloved of progressives. Here's a related thought to leave you with: Did you ever notice how little impact the big events of boomer mythology have on characters of the show? Martin Luther King was assassinated last episode and nobody even mentioned it this time. The JFK assassination was a big couple of episodes but can you point at one single thing about the show that suggests that it had any long-term impact on the characters or the culture they live in? Neither can I.

Now, we might say, "That's because it's a show and it simply forgets to connect all the dots." Perhaps, but notice how easily we all accept it when the show does these things. That history is something you study in books, especially when you take courses on late 20th century history or pop culture at university but it doesn't match up very well with what you experience when you look outside the textbooks. The big events but life goes on.

That should trouble us a whole lot. It suggests that the show has blundered into a truth worth taking a deep look at.

Mad Men: A longer, slower release

High finance and low sex

For starters, partners don't call in underwriters without consulting the other partners. It just doesn't happen. For seconds, the underwriter's accountants don't do the math in front of you (there is a team of them, not one guy, and they take all your papers, and there are huge piles of them, into a room you provide and spend days going over them). Finally they never but never complement the person who keeps the books as a "chef" as analogies between accounting and cooking are very much verboten.

I know, I know, if I want realistic accounts of how business works, I came to the wrong place if I have come to television or movies.

But did you notice that Trudy, who has been the opposite of sexy so far this year, is suddenly making efforts to look very good now that she is denying Pete sex? That was very believable.

And just in case we think that was an accident, Marie later tells Megan that the problem is that she is dressing like to much a wife and not enough like a woman who wants to be wanted. Pete, meanwhile, responds to Trudy by foolishly telling her that he is about to become big. Why didn't dictate this directly to her lawyer and cut out the middleman?

And we have Roger using sex to get leads on clients and getting a big one that way.

Finally, we have Peggy who is losing interest in Abe because he isn't much good at actually making things happen and is attracted to Ted who can. They have a lovely mismatch when she fails to realize that he needs to be told he is strong and he, grateful that she inadvertently does tell him this, kisses her.

And it all ends with Peggy realizing, with a jolt, that Don is a better seducer than she is and that he got to Ted before she had a chance. It ends with Peggy off typing the press release, under instructions to make the new entity sound like the sort of company she'd like to work for. Always a bridesmaid ...

I can't wait to read Hanna Rosin on this episode. I will disappointed if the feminist clichés don't flow freely.

Romance

Perhaps because it is an unrealistic show, it is telling when it reaches points that even it cannot fudge.  (Historical drama of the Hollywood type always gets the costumes right and the behaviours of the people who wear them wrong.) And one of the big things that even an unrealistic show like this has to get right is the romantic account of the 1960s favoured by progressives. This is a view that history is on the side of progressivism and if things went other than what they had hoped, then it was because history made a wrong turn. Thus Abe sets out the view that either Clean Gene or Bobby Kennedy will become president and the war will end.

It's all dramatic irony because we know that none of these things will happen. Even when the war ended it didn't end and we are still living with the consequences of it now. But in the progressive view these things should have happened because this is the way history was supposed to have gone. This romantic view then is not a dead dream to mourn but the actual path that they will always try to drag history back to. This alternative root remains, for progressives, more real than what actually did happen. That Nixon actually got elected is, to them, an accident that deflected history from the place it was really supposed to go.

I could go on at some length about this but the short version is that I don't think it's an accident that Abe is looking more and more like Meathead from All in the Family with every passing episode of Mad Men.

(It's a very nice touch that Peggy imagines Ted reading Something by Ralph Waldo Emerson when she fantasizes about him. It's a realistic touch because she wouldn't have actually read anything by Emerson and neither would Abe have. Prep school boys read Emerson: Roger, Bert and Pete would all be able to converse on the subject quite intelligently. As would, of course, Ted. But not Peggy.)