Mad Men: Waterloo

When it was over, I said, "Well, that was shameless."

And the Lemon Girl said, "In a good way or a bad way?"

Very much in a good way.

They faked us out. They certainly faked me out. I could see nothing but darkness. And I'm just thrilled for having been fooled.

I have nothing but stray bullets this week

• One of the things about the 1960s, if you were a kid like me, Matt Weiner or James Lileks is that the experience we lived doesn't match the PBS documentary, the Time retrospective or what you would get if you took one of those easy-credit courses on the culture of the 1960s at college. We lived a different life that revolved around school, girls, the usual challenges of adolescence, syndicated TV shows that we watched after school, moon landings and fast food chains. That is the 1960s we see on Mad Men, especially last night.
• I love Don's visions and have missed them now that he doesn't have flashbacks anymore. Bert's song and dance number was perfect.
• Did you notice, by the way, that Weiner did with the whole show what Don does with the Carousel pitch? The show connected with us on an emotional level using the pain of nostalgia. Perfect!
• There is something about Harry. Everyone acted in their own interest last night. There was a moment just before takeoff, when Peggy makes the sign of the cross. Harry beside her, thinks she is worried about their safety. Peggy is actually worried about the astronauts but not, as we might guess, for their sake. What worries her is that they'll have to postpone the campaign if the moon mission fails. If the roles were reversed, we'd see it as more reason to hate Harry.
• The pilot of the plane talks just like Neil Armstrong. He uses that same flat delivery. We know why, of course, because we've all read The Right Stuff.
• It never but never occurred to me to think of Bert as the Napoleon character until the shot of Roger removing his name tag. At the same time, even though it never occurred to me, it made perfect sense in retrospect. That's good story telling. I love being taken for a ride like that.
• I'll also admit that I like it when the people I like, and the moral views I endorse, are vindicated by my favourite show. I was thrilled to see Roger take charge. Roger is my favourite character for the very simple reason that he and I have a lot in common.
• On that subject, might I point out how good a man Don Draper is? They, meaning people who do recaps,  just hate him all over the Internet but he is a good man. By that I mean three things:

1. He's is good.
2. He is good at being a man
3. He reminds us that a man is a good thing.

• Final note for now: I'll also claim complete vindication on Peggy's religiosity. It's not just the sign of the cross on the plain but the complete Burger Chef pitch. It's a religious view of life she pushes in her pitches and her campaigns.
• The most uncool thing of all, when it comes to Mad Men, is to keep talking about it a week after the season is ended. I, of course, will do that either later this week or next week.

Mad Men: Give me night or give me Blucher

Well, tonight's the night.

They've been ridiculously obvious with the hints they've been dropping. Don has a defeat coming. Then he has seven episodes to either fail or succeed next year. Plus, the episode is called Waterloo* and Don is trying a comeback from a period in exile. (I don't have the patience to do it but it would be interesting to date the beginning of Don's return from exile and count forward 100 days.)

I read an interview somewhere where Matt Weiner seemed to suggest that some thing Don has forgotten from the first season comes back to haunt him. I hope that was just a feint to confuse us. I don't see anyway they can do that convincingly at this point. That goes quadruple for his desertion in Korea. Dropping that on us tonight would be to break the rules the show has established for itself.

Which rules, by the way, are straight out Robert McKee. There is no show in TV history that follows McKee's rules more religiously than Mad Men. Every single scene features a value reversal. People start off confident and end up uncertain, or the reverse. Or they start off timid and end up brave, start satisfied and end frustrated, start with a sense of belonging and end up isolated, start with sense of failure and end with a sense of achievement and so on through the list of values. Every scene follows this sort of arc and so does every episode. There is never an episode of Mad Men that is nothing but exposition; the exposition is always slipped into other scenes driven by value reversals. Even if nothing substantial in terms of actual action takes place, and it often doesn't, the value reversal does.

People who love action plots—which could mean anything from a superhero movie to Breaking Bad—are critical Mad Men. I heard a podcast in which Jonah Goldberg complained the show is "existential". That's nonsense. There is never an existential moment for Don Draper or Roger or Joan or Pete or Peggy. Lane had existential moments. That's why he could commit suicide. He had an existential crisis. The principles do not. No matter what happens, they can go on. Their very sense of being is never at risk. To kill one of them off at this point would be deeply unsatisfying; it would feel like a cheat.

Which is probably true for you too! That's the way life is. If someone were to ask you to recount your life story up to the present moment, you'd tell a story with an arc leading to your present happiness or unhappiness. Tomorrow morning you will get up, however, and face an episode with no overarching story arc.

But heres the thing, Matt Weiner needs such an arc for Don Draper and he needs it tonight. He needs a crisis that will ties us back not only to the exile in Elba Don spent at the beginning of the season, but all the way back to season one. I don't know that he can do it.

And absolutely everything hangs on it. If tonight's episode fails, there is no coming back.


* Corrected, earlier version said "Napoleon".

Mad Men, The Strategy addendum

1. Three photos from three seasons

That's when Adam comes to Don/Dick in season one looking for a family connection and Don refuses him.

That's season five. Paul is in Hare Krishna and he approaches Harry to get help promoting a script he has written on speculation for Star Trek. Harry talks about family.

That's last episode and, again, the context is a discussion of family.

The composition in all three is so similar that it cannot be accidental.

2. There is something about Harry

Why is this man hated so much? And before you say that he lies and cheats on his wife you may want to ask yourself which characters that is not true of on Mad Men. Harry's chief failing seems to be no worse than anybody else while lacking in cool.

3. Waterloo

That's the title of next episode.

That is, as someone says somewhere else, ominous sounding. That is, if we take Don as being Napoleon trying to make his big comeback after escaping Elba.

Mad Men: The Strategy

Was this the episode where Mad Men turned into Cheers? Here is the germ of Peggy's new strategy for Burger Chef. She and Don have been having a discussion about their failures to start a family and about how the family has, supposedly changed. Peggy blurts this out.

What if there was a place that you could go where there was no TV? And you could break bread. Anywhere you were sitting with was family. 

That's a test. If you are part of the cultural elite then you probably missed it. I'll get back to it.

The basic plot line was pretty simple: We have a bunch of people who, for various reasons, have closed the door on traditional family or who have had it closed for them. Pete is getting divorced. Don is divorced. Bob Benson is gay. And, you may want to sit down and swallow your coffee for this one, Joan and Peggy are getting old. (Hey, don't blame me, the show set it up that way.) They're all looking for something to replace that family and so they all settle down in a bar in Boston.

Not really but they may as well have. It's wrong, of course, to credit Cheers with this. It's the plot dynamic of all sorts of TV. Think of The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Friends: someone (usually a woman) has failed to get married for whatever reason and they find a substitute family with work or with friends or in some bar somewhere. This sort of group dynamic is a speciality of television but you find it in some movies, think of The Big Chill or any of Whit Stillman's films.

The dynamic tends to work a lot like family. You have difficult brothers and sisters (Pete and Peggy), creative ones (Peggy and Don), kids who resent that they're not the favourite (Pete and Don), matronly motherly types (Joan) and fatherly types (Roger, Bert and sometimes Don). You also have bullying types, scheming types and a whole raft of others in supporting roles too but there is always a core to the group.

And it occurs to me to wonder if the real theme of Mad Men all along hasn't been leaving family behind. I leave that vague because it could be that the theme is "leaving your family behind" in the sense of growing up and becoming an adult or it could be "leaving the family behind" in the sense of abandoning traditional family structures for some sort of new arrangement.

Reality check: people who go to the same bar every day in real life are losers and people who go to fast food restaurants all the time are obese and people who get their sense of purpose and meaning in life from work are pathetic. Which is to say, it's much easier to make something that feels like a replacement for the family you've left behind work in drama than it is real life.

The thing is, you leave your family and you feel a hole where family used to be. And this is perverse because you feel that hole even if your family life was nothing to regret having left behind. Even if you remember your childhood fondly, you make it play a bigger role in retrospect than it ever  did in real life.

Back to the skill testing question at the topic: the answer is that Peggy is a Catholic! The place you can go to where there is no TV and you can break bread and everywhere you sit is family is weekly mass. Don't believe me? The episode ends with Pete, Don and Peggy together on Sunday.

We're being offered a kind of religious solution. I say "kind of" because it isn't clear that anything really happens. Don and Peggy get up and dance to Sinatra's most embarrassing song.  Sinatra himself hated it but he was a consummate pro who didn't make himself the centre of everything and he sang it because the audience wanted it. That's ironic.

And there is a difference between your strategy for dealing with life and what actually happens. At this point, the penultimate show of the first half of the last season, we have a strategy.

Stray Bullets

• Speaking of strategies, one of Matt Weiner's favourites is to handle the big, issues in the second last shot in order that the finale can be a dramatic joy ride. So far, he is running true to form.
• Megan is packing her stuff and not just her summer clothes. When Don suggests that he can bring some of it for her when next he comes out she says, "I want to see you somewhere where there is nothing else going on." Is she having an affair? With Amy?
• Flashing back on Megan 1: Four years ago I said, "... it is tempting to think that, "Faye Miller is playing a part and Megan appears to actually be the part". But I meant only that it is tempting to think and not that that is the case. Having just rewatched the episodes in question to prepare this post, it is pretty obvious that Megan is playing a role every bit as much as Faye." Which raises the obvious question: Is Megan Bob Benson in reverse?
• Flashing back on Megan 2: In season 4, episode 4, there were some weird dynamics between Megan and Joyce.
• They played two nice tricks on us this episode. The first was when the phone rang in the middle of the night and we thought it must be Don's phone only it was Bob's. Then we get virtually teh same scene only it's Peggy waking up in the middle of the night to work on something. Finally, we get Don waking up in the morning.
• The other great trick was the false ending. Don and Peggy get up to dance to the Sinatra tune, the camera zooms out and the music shifts from a sound on the set to a sound from our speakers and we think it's over because the big pop song of the day always comes at the end. But there is four and half minutes left.
• I used to think that the recap over at Slate was childish but, more charitably, I now think it's childlike. 
• It's hard to place the time on this one but "My Way" hit the charts in June of 1969. June is the most popular month for weddings. 
• The Lemon Girl and I were at a wedding last week. A young man at our table confessed that he has based his personality on Don Draper (I lean more to Roger Sterling myself). A number of the people at the table said they were disappointed with the show. I made the suggestion that I have often made here, that the 1960s were a cultural tragedy and that was why. The young man smiled and said, "That is what is so great about it: the culture is degrading and the show is going with it." I wish I'd said that. I'm going to try to cultivate his attitude.
• Donald Barthleme: "Writing is a process of dealing with not knowing". This is a very meta show. Often the characters say something that appears to be about life but is actually about the challenges of writing. "Living with the not knowing," sounds like a profound existential statement when Don says it but but it's really the writers putting their own writing challenges into the mouth of one of the characters.

Victoria Day weekend

From the big meal we served in honour of the Queen Empress.

That's Duck à la Water Scott. It's pretty simple recipe: the duck is roasted at high heat, apples are cored and cooked bonne femme style and then served on a large crouton fried in butter and then spread with  paste made from the ducks liver. Final touch, the apples are filled with a sauce made of Dundee marmalade and whisky. Absolutely straight-forward and simple but you can imagine Victoria and Albert having a meal like this at Balmoral after hunting.

My only regret is not digging out the good china and silver. I have no idea why I didn't—too focused in cooking I guess.

Friday roundup: Buick Rviera plus added stuff

Only one item this week. Since posting this yesterday, I've thought of some some more stuff I wanted to add:

1. Mad Men ratings are down!

So why is it? One theory is pure aesthetics: the show's always been emotionally ugly, but in its new time period it's got the exterior to match. The first season took place in 1960, and the sheer glamour was so compelling that it brought about a revival on modern high streets: hello tailored suits, skinny ties, pencil skirts and so on. But now the 1970s are looming large over Don & co, and if there's one thing that era isn't known for, it's beautiful clothes. Banana Republic probably isn't planning a clothing line based around plaid sport coats and paisley ties. 

Shockingly enough, it turns out that style matters. A whole lot.

2. Manly virtue 

So Mad Men has ceased to be aspirational, which is surely deliberate on the part of Matthew Weiner and his team.

Yes, it is deliberate. The creators of the show, along with the critics, want to make Don, and everything he represents, a failure. The problem is that Don Draper and everything he represents is what attracted viewers to the show. "Aspirational" is right; we wish we could be like that again.

There is a large portion of America that doesn’t feel about America the way we did in 1960, and I think we want to know why we don’t,” said Mr. Kartheiser, 29. “We want to know what went wrong.”

3. Story arc

I wrote this four years ago:

Story arc is not Matt Weiner's forte. As we saw in The Sopranos, his stories don't go anywhere. Although it is often said that these new series are novelistic, his really work more like the writings of Ovid (a comparison that is far more flattering than this stuff deserves). What I mean is that Weiner's forte is not showing change but rather showing the same things happening over and over again.

I think that holds up pretty well. And catch what Weiner himself says about his episodic approach to writing in his very revealing Paris Review interview:

They were uncomfortable with a movie like The Godfather or a story like theOdyssey, where the only thing holding the events together is the characters. Now, there’s this monster, this obstacle, but there’s no real progression—the hero just keeps trying to get home. Sure, Michael Corleone starts off as a young war hero and ends up as the godfather, but the wedding takes up the first half hour of the movie. People liked to talk about “act breaks” and “rising action” leading to a climax, but what about Apocalypse Now? Someone’s on a journey, and sure, we’re heading toward a climax, but there are so many digressions. To me, those digressions are the story.

All of which is fine but there is usually more than just characters holding together an episodic structure. There is a particular worldview at work. When we read good or great episodic writing—Dubliners,  Lives of Girls and Women, Anne of Green Gables, The Odyssey—the thing that makes this writing good or great is the moral worldview at work.
If the question is, "What is it that is making Mad Men ultimately unsatisfying?" the answer is going to be that world view.

4. Nooooooooooo! Not John Cheever!

Yes, John Chevver. If anything at all explains the long-term problems that plague this once-great show, it's this:

And then, with John Cheever, I recognized myself in the voice of the narrator. His voice sounds like the voice in my head—or what I wish it sounded like.

Cheever's entire career was based on his "exposing" the sordid details hidden in the lives of people like Don Draper. That might sound good if you didn't know anything about Cheever himself.

5. How long do you think it will take us to be a in a place like this again?

I wrote the following four years ago, right after the brilliant ending to an otherwise-disappointing season three. I think it holds up pretty well.

My title for this post is the question that Roger asks Don as they stand in the office of Sterling Cooper for the very last time. My answer; not until the early 1980s. I don't mean for them but the whole culture and what I mean by that is in the following paragraphs. It is also my explanation of why I am almost certain that Season 4 is going to be a major disappointment.
The infamous line about Mad Men is that it will explain why the sixties had to happen. Implicit in that very statement is an admission of failure. No one says they need to explain why good thing had to happen. Good eras are their own justification and we thank God they happened at all. No, the second someone says they are going to explain why something had to happen they are already apologizing for it. It's like a divorce or an abortion, no one thinks these things are good; the most they can do is try to justify why they "had to happen".
I doubt very much that Mad Men will pull this trick off; it's hard to see how any TV show could but if they were even going to try that wonderful set had to go. More than one critic has bemoaned its loss but that style—American High Modernism—was a style of optimism and hope and the period we are about to enter from the mid sixties until the crashing failure of the Carter Administration is an era when style and optimism almost died in America. It's still on life support even now.
And it almost died at all levels. The establishment culture of the 1960s was awful and so was the anti-establishment culture. To have showed the cultural events of the 1960s against that background would have been a cruel indictment. And that bodes ill for this show for at least half the enjoyment was being able to see that wonderful style brought back to life. God preserve us from the thought of Nehru jackets, sideburns, bell bottoms, long hair on men, waterbeds and lava lamps ruining this wonderful show.

6. Back to our originally programmed Buick Riviera

This is the early 1970s model. That sales were disappointing is an indictment of the culture of the era and not the car. Even with the front bumper missing, this Riviera looks better than anything on the road today.

Best of all, a boat tail!

Bill Maher's rant

Here it is. I think almost everything he says is right.



The one thing he gets wrong is his assumption that Kathleen Parker is in the business of speaking her mind. She isn't. (BTW: Her answer to Maher is about as good an example of deliberately missing the point as you'll ever see. ) Kathleen Parker is in the business of editing her thoughts. That's what she does. She thinks it's a good thing if everyone has to edit their thoughts because that gives her an advantage because it means everyone has to operate on the playing field where she excels.