Required reading for anyone who doubts that we live in a narcissitic age

"Being Amanda Berry" is the current headline on the piece Emily Bazelon has written in response to the astounding events in Cleveland. The article itself is even more irritating than the headline.

I think it's the third headline to appear on the piece since yesterday. Headlines can be incendiary items and often make a reasonable article look bad. In this case, we see the opposite phenomenon. The headlines keep getting changed in an attempt to make the monstrous self involvement of the piece underneath seem reasonable.

After three paragraphs rehearsing the facts of this and similar cases, Bazelon gets down to the real issue: Emily Bazelon and how the story makes her feel. From there she goes into how the movie The Silence of the Lambs made her feel. (I'm not making this up.)

I could easily imagine myself as that naive, trusting girl. The movie terrified me so much that I turned down a summer job I’d wanted as a caretaker on a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Suddenly I couldn’t handle the idea of being alone and exposed.

Does Bazelon think she is the only one who sometimes fantasizes about bad things happening to her? Or is the problem rather that she thinks she should be served up with narratives that make her life meaningful?  I ask that because the very next line in her piece is this:

This is the opposite of empowering

That's true, it isn't empowering. Was it supposed to be? Are women owed empowerment? There are other stories that are empowering for women. Isn't it inevitable, given the existence of evil in the world, that there will be stories that are the opposite of empowerment? Think how ridiculous a man would sound if he claimed that some type of news story wasn't empowering for him.

Most of all, note the corrupting power of journalism. Notice how very often journalists convince themselves that the story is really about them. It's rarely as extreme as this case but it happens all the time.

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.)

Mad Men: For Immediate Release (the shortest recap ever)

Over at Slate, Seth Stevenson writes:

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. We’ve got a whopper of a new account to pursue. A merger that might spice up the office with new personalities—including Harry Hamlin!

You see, they agree with me. They rain hate on Don all the time, claim he is over and done with and that they're eager for the moment he's finally gone but they're bored when the show does what they want it to and love it when Don and his big, swinging swagger is back.

What did I think? I thought, it's only rock and roll but we like it. That's an inside joke only hard core stones fans will get. After the boys cranked out that little ditty, it was greeted by general praise. But Mick Taylor said he thought the song was a failure. He said the problem was that they were too busy trying to make a classic Rolling Stones record. That's the problem with this episode. It's too busy trying to be a classic Mad Men episode. And that's a problem because they are looking backwards and trying to repeat themselves.

I hope they sharpen up soon, but so far, this season is ... well, it's like the song, which is to say,  like the Rolling Stones in 1974, it's still a hell of a lot better than anything else but it suggests that the glory days is over.

Mad Men: the mix up and the delay

Update: the nice man with the Texan accent at Apple Support solved the problem.

As you may have heard, this week's episode of Mad Men (ironically entitled "For Immediate Release") was accidentally (we hope) leaked on iTunes. By the time I got up this morning, it wasn't available at all on iTunes, which means that I haven't seen it.

That's going to be tough on my stats as about five times as many people come here to read my Mad Men commentary than my regular readership. Oh well, these tings happen.

To add insult to injury, someone reading an old post, put up what has to be the stupidest comment in the history of the blog,

Another image: follow-up

Note: This post has been edited and then reposted because I changed my mind about a few things.

It's often noted that you get a very different sense from looking at one side of a person's face versus the other. I was just about the close the blog for the weekend, when I noticed that an overlapping image had accidentally cropped the face of the woman in the ad I was commenting on earlier. The effect was quite jarring.

Although the combined image is of a woman who clearly is thinking of making a big change in her life and wants to be somewhere else, the right side of her face alone is more resentful but in a wistful and passive way:

The expression on left side, on the other hand, is much more aggressive but also very erotic.

The difference is quite jarring. It's hard to see how they could both be part of the same face.

Yet they are the same face.

From a male point of view, the the whole face is more threatening than either side. However challenging the woman of the left side , there are possibilities there. However distant the woman on the right side, she's passive not passionate. Combine that aggressive eroticism with the sense that mentally she has already moved on and left you behind that the right side gives you, however, and there is lots to be threatened by. The combined face says, "You should see me when you're not around ...":

Another image: What is it selling?

I commented on a campaign of a local shopping mall called the Rideau Centre a while ago. They have a new ad up this week. The theme is similar but, as a piece of advertising, this is a huge improvement over the last effort.

These days people talk about ads that are "edgy" all the time but that ad really is edgy. They are using an unhappy couple to sell stuff!!! It's not hard to guess who it's aimed at. Just ask yourself who you'd most want to be or to know; this man or this woman? And that is really important. Money spent on an ad campaign designed to attract men to a shopping centre is money wasted.

Let's spell it out. Advertisements work when they feed your needs. This ad will speak to every woman who feels a need to change her life. She wants to change this conversation but, even more than that, she wants to change the story she is living.

What's limiting her? The answer is her boyfriend or husband. But it can't be her husband in an ad like this. That would be a little too edgy. As was the case last time, the ring finger is visible to reassure us that they are not married (and, trust me, this is a detail most women never miss in a picture like this).

There is a little ambiguity because the ring finger is right at the edge of the picture, but it's there so you can check.

To finish the narrative, we have a woman who wants change in her life, we have the limiting boyfriend looking diminished, small and resentful, and, most importantly of all, we have the woman thinking of change. And by getting the women who sees this to associate the need for change with the Rideau Centre, the advertisement succeeds. It makes going shopping a little like cheating on your boyfriend and that makes it more of adventure. And that is edgy: shopping as an act of sexual betrayal!

Edgy ads aren't to everyone's taste, of course, but if edgy is what you want, this is about as good as it gets. Congratulations to who whoever put this one together.

Compare it with the previous ad from a  few weeks ago and the difference is quite striking.

[Added: The Lemon Girl, just home now, points out that they probably have used the same two models in the two ads.]

If this ad were for a film noir with a femme fatale, it would draw men like flies. Well, if you made the man look even vaguely heterosexual it would. It's a frantically erotic ad because she is talking on the phone. That makes you wonder who she is talking to. And the obvious answer to that is her lover.

Now look at the ad at the top of the post. The man is resentful and angry. They've had a fight. The woman is thinking. What is she thinking of? Change.

The big difference between the two ads is who it's aimed at. The one immediately above, as I note when I first commented on it, is an ad for men. We see the man in the ad enjoying the erotic power the woman has and enjoying feeling helpless in the face of it. It would be a great ad for an erotic thriller. In the ad at the top of this post, we see a woman feeling the need to break out. There is an erotic potential in it too. She could have an affair after all. But a woman in her situation would use the affair as a way to break free. The sex might be great when she got to it but that wouldn't be why she sought it. She'd seek the affair as a way to change her life. In the meantime, she can go shopping and, who knows, that may be enough.

The irony here, by the way, is that the ad with the clear sexual content is much less threatening if you're a man. It's an edgy male sexual fantasy to be sure but it's your edgy sexual fantasy. (Assuming this particular fantasy appeals to you; if it doesn't it's just a weird ad.) The ad at the top of the page is very threatening to a man. I could explain this myself but I'll leave it to Lyle Lovett instead:




Have a great weekend everybody.