Mad Men: Collaborators

Well, that was awkward. And that, of course, was the point. It's a modernist story-telling technqiue, very popular with The Beats among others. You deliberately create awkwardness.

Of course, it's commonplace nowadays, every situation comedy and soap opera trades on it. The show used a sort of subtle awkwardness. You kept waiting for the moment when someone would blunder into the truth and the fireworks would start. In the end, the only particular firecrackers to actually explode were Pete's. he was the one who had the most interest in keeping up appearances, so he had the most to lose.

But he doesn't lose in a big, soap-opera like bang. Instead, he loses, in classic Pete fashion, with a pathetic whimper.

There was also retroactive context all over the place. That's another soap opera technique. It consists of taking some known event from the past and completely changing its meaning by giving us some new details that wrench it out of the context it has been comfortably sitting in and drops it into a new context. For example, last season, Trudy proposed that Pete should get an apartment in the city after he lied to her and claimed he had gotten facial injuries as a result of a car crash. In fact, he got them when a neighbour punched him in the face after finding that he'd had sex with his wife. Well, in this episode, it is the neighbour's wife who gets punched in the face after she tells her husband that she'd had an affair with Pete. But that's not all that gets changed. When Trudy finds out the truth, she tells Pete that she agreed to let him have an apartment in the city on the condition he be discreet about his affairs. That sense was completely absent in the past.

The other big bit of retroactive context was Uncle Mack. Up until now, we have known him only as the man that was good to little Dick after his father dies and he and his step mother go to live with him. Today we learn, with quite a jolt that Uncle Mack's rooming house was, in fact, a whorehouse and that he is a pimp ("rooster" is the term he uses to explain it to little Dick). What's more that his stepmother went to the place in the full expectation that she would become one of Uncle Max's stable. We watch, along with Dick, as he stares through a keyhole and sees Mack breaking in the new talent.

That is another complete reversal of meaning as we have seen the step mother only as a woman of strict Christian morality until now. Until now, we've thought of Dick as being born to a prostitute who dies in labour and then raised by a strict Christian. We now learn he was born to one prostitute and then raised by another. And the show goes to great lengths to make us understand that there is a connection between this and Don's womanizing.

Does that sound familiar? It will if you are a François Truffault fan.

The French connections

There were French cultural references all over this show.

Can I take a brief break to note how utterly shallow most of the commentary  on this show is? If you go around reading "recaps" of episode one, you'll notice that a lot of people made a big thing of Don quoting from the Inferno in episode one. What's wrong with that? Well, here is the line Don quotes:

Nel mezzo del cammin
di nostra vita,
mi ritrovai per
una selva oscura...

"Half way through life's journey, I found myself in a dark wood".  That's my rough "translation"; translation being a bit of an overstatement as these are very familiar lines so I can hardly claim to have figured anything out about it. They are familiar lines because they are, I'm going to raise my voice and pound on the table here, THEY ARE THE FIRST EFFING LINES IN THE PIECE! The point being that there is not a scrap of evidence that Don, Matt Weiner or anyone else, real or fictional, associated with the show has actually read the Inferno. So if you read a recap that made a big thing of that reference last week, the person who wrote that recap is a fraud.

This episode, on the other hand, is full of references to bits of French history. There is the title, "Collaborators", which suggests France during the occupation. At the other bookend, there is the outro with with der Bingle singing "Just a Gigolo", which, for those of you who only know Diamond Dave's rip off of Louis Prima's version, is a song about a French World War 1 veretan reduced to being a gigolo.

In the middle, we have the wholesale rip off of subtle homage to François Truffault's L'homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women) wherein the hero's compulsive womanizing is explained by his having been the neglected child of a prostitute now desperately seeking connection but unable to have a satisfying love connection with a woman because this past has damaged him.

The story arc

Somewhere in the past, I quoted an interview in which Matt Weiner said he threw everything he had at the first season because he didn't know there would be a second one. That came up at lunch when the Lemon Girl said, "How much do you think Mad Men is like Dawson's Creek?"

Let me explain that question before I answer it. Dawson's Creek, like a lot of TV shows had a concept that set out the first season: a guy and a girl are best friends and he, a perpetual child, misses the implications of their having grown up and doesn't realize he loves her until after his best friend steals her away. Okay, but once you've done that, where do you go for the second season? and the third? and ...?

And Mad Men is a lot like that. It keeps circling back to the big concept from the first season. This sort of television often gets compared to novel reading because it uses similar story-telling techniques. But that is only true to a point. The difference is that novels tend to know where they are going. Even a novel that goes nowhere, the most famous example being Tristram Shandy, goes nowhere by design. The author has a plan, a story arc, in mind when he or she starts out. This sort of television doesn't because the writers never know whether this season will be the last one. And so the story circles and circles around the big concept.

(That's the real significance of the Dante reference in episode one of this season: it's an excuse to go back to the beginning. It's as if the producers were saying, "Okay, we've entertained you with a lot of filler to stretch what is really a one season show but now we are going to start the same story all over again only it's now a few years past the original start.")

We need a story arc for each season, of course. But that arc can't drive the original concept off stage. It can't up stage it either. Thus, the odd sort of limbo the story is in and the odd way it has of returning to the various wars US has fought and how those wars serve as cultural and moral markers for the generations who fought them.

That's entertainment

The fascinating thing is how much more entertaining the show gets whenever it goes back to these fundamentals. When Roger, Don, Peggy and Joan dominate the plot, as they did at the best moments of this episode, it gets to be much more fun. There was a magnificent scene where Don and Sylvia end up in the restaurant and she is being difficult and Don solves the problem by dominating her sexually. The female audience at home were all squirming in their seats, and not from embarrassment, for that scene.

The show shines when those for characters—each of which is a throwback to an another era—get to be themselves for a while.

A Little Heavy Culture: Sonnerie de Ste Geneviève du Mont

For my money, this is the most erotic piece of music ever written.




PS: Sonnerie means the ringing of the bells and Sainte-Genevieve is a church in Paris. The bells are very nicely suggested by the Viola de Gamba in the opening.

That's your setting. It's morning in Paris and it's a cool day. You are in a hotel room in one of those little three-star Paris hotels and your bed almost fills the tiny room. There are two floor-to-ceiling casement windows in your room and one of these is open because it was so hot when you got into bed last night. The curtains are opaque and they shut out all the light except for what escapes around them. You are not alone but you have been the only one awake. You've been listening to the street sounds hoping your partner will awake and now the bells start.

Your partner rolls over at the sounds of the bells starting but then just lays there, not-quite-awake. You have been waiting for them to wake up a long time and your desire is so intense you can barely hold it back. But you do hold it back because you have to gently ease and urge them into a little morning lovemaking.

Or, if you prefer, turn it around and imagine you are the one just barely awake and your partner desperately wants you.

And ...

Take your time. Imagine the feel of the crisp sheets. Think of what it feels like to lie under warm covers in a cool room. Imagine the smell of the Café au lait the hotel staff have brought up. Think of the relentless pounding of the distant bells.

A few more thoughts about marriage

Just marriage this time and not same-sex marriage as last time.

A woman named Julia Shaw, about whom I know nothing, wrote an article about getting married young last week. A fierce rebuttal followed and, because the rebuttal came from Amanda Marcotte, the rebuttal was stupid. Fortunately, some more thoughtful people also chimed in.

Before I go on, I should say that I know a few couples who married young and the women, but not necessarily the men, all report that they received a hostile response from other women for having married young.

For that, and other reasons, I suspect that the trend towards getting married older is being driven by women. Not that they have had to drive very hard for men typically have not wanted to get married early. The natural trajectory most men imagine for their lives is a few years adventure followed by "settling down". Young men I meet today still talk in these terms. You might say that later marriage is what men have always tended to want and it has lately become what women want as well. (And a cynic might wonder who is really being served by this social change.)

But women have never seen marriage as settling down. It's always been a goal to shoot for. You can see this if you go to Pinterest: young women still sit around dreaming about their wedding. Men don't. The difference is that they now see marriage as something that follows a few years of getting settled in a career and a maybe a "starter relationship" that is serious but not marriage.

So let's get back to Amanda Marcotte. The easiest pick of a lot of low-lying fruit in her piece was this sentence:

If he's good enough to marry, he'll still be around when you're ready to make that leap.

It's with the "he" singular that Marcotte slips into the narcissism for which she is famous, although hardly unique. And she got slagged, deservedly, for that. Yeah sure, I'll just hang around six years until you're ready to get married. That is assuming you ever will be or that you don't pick someone different when the time comes.

But even if we try to save Marcotte by rewording her imbecilic argument more intelligently there are huge problems. Suppose she had said this:

There will still be lots of good men around when you're ready to make that leap.

Others have already pointed out that life will indeed be different in a few years. I thought Ann Althouse put it best: "You're free to absorb the risk that the right man at the wrong time will be in the wrong place when it's the right time." But that doesn't go far enough. Because the other consequence of getting married older is that you will change over time. Marrying a twenty-seven year old is a very different proposition from marrying a twenty-three year old and marrying a thirty-five year old is a different proposition altogether. To paraphrase Althtouse: You're also free to absorb the risk that if you're the right woman for Mr. Right at the wrong time for you, you might be in the wrong woman for  Mr. Right when it's the right time for you.

Zing!

Amity Shlaes nails the triviality of Lean In:

Which brings us to the largest obstacle to today’s Iron Ladies: the emphasis on corporate or government process. As Sandberg laboriously notes, Harvard Business School, which already famously focused on teamwork and consensus, has lately emphasized teamwork even more. It’s hard to imagine Thatcher (“Defeat? I do not recognize the word”) thriving at HBS. 

The result of the collaborative culture is that corporations or government institutions focus intensely on internal culture and pour their energy into achieving minuscule policy changes relating to workplace efficiency, gender or race. The great victory with which future Thatcher biographers are likely to open their accounts is her winning back the Falkland Islands from the Argentine junta. The great victory with which Sandberg opens her book was getting Google Inc. (GOOG) to establish reserved parking for pregnant women. 

Ouch.

 PS: A similar, but longer, diagnosis here.

Shame is not enough

Shame is a good thing. It helps hold us in check. There is a story up today about a former politician who was arrested for driving around waving his erection at women driving other cars. At one point he apparently got it up to 90 miles an hour with said erection poking out the window. No, I don't know how he did it either but, and this is the important thing, that is where we'd all end up if you had no shame.

By the way, if you go to the original story, you'll notice it says the guy was exposing his "genitals". That's another interesting aspect of shame, that it leads people to say "genitals" when they mean "erection". Shame tends to lead us to not do things that will make people laugh at us to be sure but it also tends to make us squeamish about things we all know and understand but would rather not admit we know and understand. That is why newspaper editors go to great lengths to mask the primary motive of some guy driving around to expose himself. What primary motive? If you read case studies of exhibitionist behaviour, you will quickly learn that the vast majority of male exhibitionists don't just strive to show themselves to others, they aim to get an erection from the arousal that comes from exposing themselves.

And we all co-operate in keeping these secrets. Why? If I asked you directly, you'd most likely say, "Because I don't want to know!" Yeah sure. But suppose I left you alone in a room with video of some celebrity's shameful behaviour and then I came back in quietly twenty minutes later to catch you watching. What would you say then? You've never pried into or been curious about someone else's shameful secret? Ah, but you say, "Sure, I'm intrigued but I resist." Okay, but the first time around you said you didn't want to know and that is different. It was also a lie.

(We do the same thing with women by the way. Exhibitionism from women is far more acceptable in our society than from men but we still go to great lengths to conceal the sexual motive women have for this. We tell ourselves it is from peer pressure or a need to be popular or the bad influence of Hollywood, we tell ourselves just about anything rather than admit that women and girls get a sexual charge from doing this.)

You may say, but I would never get a thrill out of exposing myself that way. No, of course not, but when you have sex, does it matter that your lover  is there to experience you having sex? That's a big part of the experience isn't it? Yeah, something has gone a bit crazy if you are driving around exposing yourself but doing it with another human being is big part of the thing. That's part of the shame: we don't do these things ourselves but we understand perfectly well how they got where they are. 

I digress on this because I want to tease something important out. When you claim that you don't want to know shameful secrets that you, in fact, do want to know, that is shame at work. There are websites that mock celebrities for their behaviour and dress. Have you ever been to one of them? Are you ashamed of what you have done? Of course you are. But what do you want to do about it? Well, nothing because ... well, because nobody is being hurt (consequentalism) or because there is no law against it (deontology).

If your reaction is to say, "I'm never going to TMZ or Go Fug Yourself again!" let me assure you that you are wasting your time. You can't stop playing the shame game. It's part of being human. You can play it at more exalted levels if that makes you feel good. You can read Jane Austen or Shakespeare, for example. They both use shame as a dramatic technique over and over again. Willoughby is shamed and then he comes crawling to Elinor and tells her all about it and we feel good for justice has been restored through shame. (Exam question: Why does it matter so much that Willoughby actually confess his shame at his own behaviour instead of just feeling it? 20 marks. This isn't a exam for English literature but for Virtue Ethics 101.)

One problem, of course, is that we all do things that would shame us if others knew. You may feel perfectly comfortable having your spouse see you reach orgasm but you'd probably not want your mother to know too much about it. Your mother loves you and all and she wants you to be happy in an abstract sense but there is stuff you'd rather not have to explain to her. And even less so to your neighbours. (Oddly enough, you might not have problems fantasizing about some random stranger whom you'll never have to see again seeing something by "accident". )

That's not a problem because there is nothing wrong with having sex and orgasms or having fantasies to help you reach orgasm. There is a lot good about it. But it is and should be an intimate act. If you and your spouse like to dress up in medieval costume as part of your sex play, go to it but close the curtains first. And shame helps here.

The other problem, and this is the really big problem, is that shame is a self-oriented emotion. It leads us to protect our honour or, if we can't do that, at least minimize dishonour. It doesn't lead us to care much about others as others. Think back to age five when you were caught doing something and you immediately responded by claiming others had done likewise. Why did you do that? That Joey did it first doesn't absolve you of one ounce of guilt. But it does reduce your shame.

Every mother in the history of the world misses the point of this exercise and promptly says, "If little Joey jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?" That's because your mother cared about guilt more than shame. You had done something wrong and she wants you to apologize and, much more importantly, not do it again in the future. She was disappointed in you and wanted you to try harder to please her by being a better girl or boy. Because she is focused on this, she thinks that you invoke Joey as the reason why you did it. Your real goal was to reduce your shame by cutting all the other poppies in the room down to your level.

And if you had been able to lie with a reasonable chance of getting away with it, you would have tried that instead.

As it is, your mother played right into your hands by treating your excuse as a reason and you meekly agreed that you wouldn't do what Joey did in the future. And it felt good to meekly do that because you'd dodged the bullet because you knew full well that Joey doing it or not doing it had nothing at all with your doing it. You knew it was wrong and you were damn glad to have the excuse of Joey doing it first. (assuming he did and it is just as likely that you made the whole Joey thing up.) And if you ever got a chance of doing it again without getting caught, you were going to jump at it.

But, we are tempted to say, our mothers won in the long run. Why do we say that? Well, because we learned how to behave. And the proof of that is what? That you don't do anything shameful anymore? You might be tempted to say (I'm certainly tempted), "But I'm better than I used to be and that should count for something".

Okay, but to whom and why? And we still have to figure out why we got better.

It seems like the answer should be something like this. Even though you fully intended to keep doing the fun thing in the future if you could get away with it, you now realized that there were consequences to getting caught. Now all you need is a little prudence, that is the realization that the risks of getting caught outweigh the gains that come from occasionally getting away with it, and you're home.

It's odd though that we don't often make that argument when teaching children, or even adults, how to behave morally. And it has limitations. Would you do the bad thing if the chances of your getting away with it looked really good? The answer to that will be yes in some cases and no in others. "Depends on what the thing is,"  you will say. If it is glancing at the breasts of a woman you know when she bends down to get something out of her purse, you might do it (relevant disclosure: I definitely would) if it is having an affair with the same woman even though she is married, I would hope you wouldn't do it. But everyone should see that one act is in a different moral class than the other. At the very least, you should see that if we keep moving the needle down the scale it will reach a point where no shame-based rationalization would be acceptable; even if you could talk yourself into having affair on the grounds that you won't get caught, you wouldn't use the same argument to rationalize rape. If you have to think about that, something has gone deeply wrong in your moral development.

But shame isn't what makes the difference when you do this. If anything, the act of voyeurism carries more shame than sexual infidelity. In our society we laugh at the man who is cuckolded more than the one who cheated on him. Heck, not just in our society. Having an affair come to light might cause some people to get angry at you but you won't be the one feeling shame.

Shame and honour are essential to any morality but they aren't enough.

The Confessions: How much of a platonist is Augustine?

(Conclusion of Book One)

The more I read of this thing, the more dismayed I get with myself for having read so shallowly thirty years ago.

Rereading it now, I can see that again and again, I simply assumed I knew where Augustine was going instead of paying attention to what was really going on. Augustine, for example, says that plays that had him weeping for fictional characters led him astray. When I first read this, I read it as simply saying what Plato says in The Republic, that these texts are poor for teaching. I think now that Augustine's point is more subtle and more positive. It's easy to miss this because he goes on and on about his failings in being so enthralled in all this drama when he should have been studying more practical stuff.

At the end, however, there is a flip where Augustine suddenly talks about how, despite all his failings, God's grace was with him and helped him do things he never could have done of his own accord.

Where Plato sees a epistemological problem, Augustine always and everywhere sees sin first and epistemology second. It isn't just the texts he loved but also the teachers who taught him who were sinners. I think Augustine would say that no matter how far astray you go, God's grace is reaching out to you and is there to lead you home.

The second big thing that I missed all those years ago was idolatry. Under the influence of popular culture, I tended to assume the danger of idols and superstitions was the idols and superstitions themselves. I see now that to do that is to treat these things as if they had real powers. Even thought I knew that idols were empty, I thought that superstition itself could get a hold of you to such an extent that the idols you were superstitious about may as well have power.

I have come to see in the ensuing years that the real problem with idols is that they and our thoughts about them are nothing at all. The primary danger they pose is that you will simply waste your time worshiping or being fearful of what is just clay. Any real power or psychological effect is a distant second by comparison to this waste of time and opportunity.

It matters a whole lot to Augustine that the fictional character whose words he declaimed was Juno as opposed to mere a fictional character created for the purposes of entertaining. And it also matters to him that even when he declaimed the words he knew that Juno had never actually spoken them. The whole exercise was, thus, a waste of time and effort.

The biggest shift between my earlier and present readings is one of tone. I now see that this section of the Confessions is full of hope. When I first read it, I projected a vision of the "dark ages" wherein people saw this world as a vale of tears to be endured solely for the purpose of getting to a better life in the next world. I see now that Augustine saw this world as full of God's grace. Those years he spent weeping tears for Juno were years he might have spent better but, given human sinfulness, it is unlikely that he would have done. Wonderfully, however, he sees that even though he did not do better, God's grace was still with him. It's a wonderful life after all—let's wonder at it.

Mad Men: romanticizing modernism

Well, we always knew Mad Men might go bad, we just didn't know how. I think we may now have some idea how it's all could to go to ruin.

It looks like maybe Matthew Weiner has been listening to the critics. They all wanted to have Don see that his life was a fraud and begin to look for authenticity. The critics want to do this because they look at modernism in a romantic way. Modernism isn't their thing. It died long ago. But things like Ikea and shows like Mad Men brought it back. As nostalgia that, as nostalgia tends to be, is actually for experiences that the person feeling nostalgia didn't actually experience themselves.

The thing about this sort of romantic perspective is that the person experiencing it wants to use the past for self validation. They want to see the past as leading to them and justifying them or at least explaining why they can't be any better than they are. This has been part of the critical view of the show from the beginning; as we saw in the first season hope that the show would "explain why the sixties had to happen". This view admits that, sure, the guys in the early 1960s seem more interesting and more manly than today's men but insists that their lives really a hollow sham. We may be less interesting today but we're more real.

If Weiner succumbs to temptation to give those critics what they want, and it sure looks like he is about to, he will ruin everything good about the show. The people who love the show, love Don. The "fakeness" of his life doesn't bother us. We want him to get away with transforming himself into something new.

There were two three good things-three reasons for hope. The first was the way Megan's character developed from the ad scene at the end of last season. She has become a trivial woman you cannot, and Don does not, take seriously. She is to Don what Mia Farrow was to Sinatra. That Don would cheat on a beautiful young woman with an amazing body with an older, but more substantial, woman was completely believable. The second was the Tom Wolfesque trick of having the summer of love be followed by winter. (Mind you it would have been better yet to go to the autumn because that would have been more ambiguous.)

What really jumped out at me was the cultural tragedy that is the late 1960s and early 1970s and how it, like cold weather, is creeping in and killing off the incredible cultural growth that followed the war. You can see it in the shots of the village to be sure but you can see it even more clearly in what are supposed to be comfort. The new fashions, the fabrics, the haircuts—it's all so irredeemably awful. Just the shots of Don and Roger and even Ken and Peter against that cultural disaster was powerful. That's how cultural degradation drags down everyone.

And that brings the third good thing. There is a beautiful moment when an ad campaign pushes the word "love". Don delivers a beautiful and devastating critique of everything that was wrong with the summer of love and how it trivialized the word. It was  solid kick in the teeth to John Lennon and Paul McCartney and it was as good as anything we have ever seen on the show.

Unfortunately, the scene had an evil twin of a horribly melodramatic scene with Roger breaking down in tears over a  shoe shine kit. An utterly unbelievable scene because Roger gets the shoe shine kit because the family of the man who used to shine his shoes sends it over because the man has died and Roger was the only one who still used his services. Yeah, that could happen.

Monroe Stahr sets out what is going here in Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon:

Broaca, on the surface, was an engineer—large and without nerves, quietly resolute, popular. He was an ignoramus and Stahr often caught him making the same scenes over and over—one scene about a rich young girl occurred in all his pictures with the same action, the same business. A bunch of large dogs. entered the room and jumped around the girl. Later the girl went to a stable and slapped a horse on the rump. The explanation was probably not Freudian; more likely that at a drab moment in youth he had looked through a fence and seen a beautiful girl with dogs and horses. As a trademark for glamor it was stamped on his brain forever. 

And thus it is with the shoe shine kit. Weiner used it before with Don Draper. Somewhere deep in his brain, Matt Weiner has linked shoe shine kits with men struggling to hold themselves together. When his brain is on cruise control, when it's not really working but only pretending to work, out the image comes. It doesn't do any real dramatic work for anyone else. For Weiner himself it doesn't have to work. Like the girl on the horse for Broaca, he associates it with something so the connection is instantly made the second it shows up.

There is, of course, a way to do it right. To do that, Weiner would have had to use the image in a recurring way, slowly building it up until it meant something for all of us and not just for him. he would show us a man turning to care for his shoes every time he couldn't get others things to work. He doesn't do that because he doesn't think he has to.

Unfortunately that was only one example of  lazy writing and the episode was full of lazy, sloppy writing. The trick of having people suddenly being able to bond with complete strangers when they can't do it with those closest to them. The trick of using big life events such as weddings and funerals to make it seem like dramatic changes the "drama" itself fails to deliver.

The worst example of this was a scene where Betty turns to one of her daughter's friends and suddenly becomes the in control adult she can't manage to be with anyone she has an actual connection to. It's like Glen all over again. And yet it's played like progress. Why is it that Betty can only really bond with children? And did it bother anyone else that she calls out her husband for looking at a teenager by making jokes about raping the girl and then goes downstiars and dispenses motherly advice to the girl? That was really, really creepy.

Oh well, it can only get better from here on in. I hope so anyway. That is what happened last season. Of course, one of these times it won't.

The episode ends with Elvis singing the Hawaiian Wedding Song and it says a lot that that cheesy bit of tacky fluff felt like a cultural high point compared to what we saw going on in the late 1960s.  Perhaps that was the point? We can only hope so.