Mad Men, Season Seven, Episode Ten, "The Forecast"
While the first two episodes of this half season drew us backward: into an exploration of Don's losses, into a focus on the relationships to which he can never return, this episode looks forward. It invites us to consider--with Don and others--what might occur after our time with them is finished. What's next? What's "the forecast" for their lives?
In the guise of preparing the "Gettysburg Address" speech on SCP for a McCann retreat that Roger will attend, Don wanders from colleague to colleague to suss out ideas on where the company is headed. But, it's soon clear that this is merely cover for his quest for a direction to and the meaning of his own life. His apartment "reeks with failure," according to his realtor, and while he protests that "a lot of wonderful things happened here," we know--and I expect he does too--that that's untrue. So, as President Lincoln sought to make meaning out of the deaths of tens of thousands of people on the fields of Gettysburg, Don Draper (on a much smaller scale) takes Roger's inflated metaphor for his talk and tries to engage others in discussions on the meaning of life. When Ted responds to Don that he hopes for perhaps a tire account, or bigger yet, a pharmaceutical company, "That's your dream?" Don wonders. "Bigger accounts?"
He pulls Peggy closer to where he wants to go, using her performance review to get her finally to say that she wants to create "something of lasting value." "In advertising?" he laughs. She just gets aggravated with him, though, retorting, "This is supposed to be about my job, not the meaning of life." When he responds, "So you think those things are unrelated?" we can glimpse what he wants, but she storms out of his office, thinking he's being critical of her aspirations, but I see him as trying to figure out his own.
When he's musing on the speech into his tape recorder, he says, "Four score and seven years ago. We know where we've been and where we are. Let's assume that it's good. But it's gonna get better. It's supposed to get better." How can Don Draper--who's so seriously mucked up his life and relationships--create something of lasting value that will make his life get better? For all of his faults, he does have a sense of how it should go. Though he should never have told Mathis the story about his comment to Lee Garner, Jr.--and Mathis shouldn't have been dumb enough to re-use it--Don does tell the younger man the truth when he says that he needs to fix his own mistakes and deal with his own problems. Is that what Don is finally--or again--trying to do? Mathis tells Don that he has no character; "you're just handsome." That's often true, but Don strikes me as giving it a sober effort in this episode.
He also has not been a good father in so many ways, but is right when he tells Sally that she is like him and Betty. For better and worse, we all are created out of the forge of our families, our childhood highs and traumas, our cultures, our time periods. Don knows that he is like his parents in many ways, that killing off Dick Whitman and adopting a new identity did not shed him of the dead young prostitute mother, the cruel father, the fundamentalist stepmother, the whore-house setting, or the grinding poverty. But, his advice to his angry daughter--who dreams "to get on a bus, get away from you and Mom, and hopefully be a different person than you two"--offers a kind of hope, both to her and to him: "You may not want to listen to this, but you ARE like your mother and me. You're gonna find that out. You're a very beautiful girl. It's up to you to be more than that." And, it's up to Don to be more than just the handsome, but characterless, man Mathis accuses him of being. When he stands outside his sold apartment door, is he on the threshold of something new? Or will he again step back into the old? Or find some balance between the two?
--And--more briefly: is Joan also poised on the cusp of something new with the new Roger? It all moved very quickly, but there's not a lot of time left in the show. Will she have really found love before it's all over?
--And Glen Bishop. Yikes! I wasn't expecting him to be the means of bringing the later part of the war home, and don't know why we needed to have this minor character make an appearance in the show's wrapping-up stage, but, since Weiner apparently feels his reappearance is necessary, I'll try to make some sense of it beyond just saying "Eeew, creepy! Leave Betty alone!"
While I get a kid having a crush on an attractive adult neighbor (I had one of those when I was young too), Glen's means of expressing it has always creeped me out. Betty handled it better this time than when he cut some of her hair off as a souvenir when he was little, but did he really expect her to give herself to him as his going-off-to-war present? Not believable. So, I'm going to assume something beyond a literal interpretation is suggested by the whole scene. Does Betty have some sort of mystical meaning to Glen? Is she the beautiful Helen over whom war becomes worth being fought? Or a courtly love figure? The beautiful married woman sung of from afar by the medieval bard? But, what happens when the warrior actually talks to his idol on the pedestal? When she doesn't accept that role, the facade of the noble warrior starts to fall away: "But you understand why I'm doing it," he wants to believe, but instead Betty--one of the few characters left who does support the war--says, "Do you want me to say that I like it?" "I know you do," he presses on, "because I'm brave and I want to protect this country and everyone in it." Yet he and Betty both know that's a slogan. When she looks skeptical, he confesses that he's really going because he flunked out of college. His myth of the beautiful woman to fight for "was going to be the good thing that came out of it." He leaves on another lie--or at least a promise that cannot be kept--when Betty tells him, "You're going to make it. I'm positive." It's a kindness to send him off with, but her actions later with Bobby's toy gun show that she is now disturbed by and questioning the enterprise. It's an odd way to get at the way Vietnam was still a force in American life in late 1970, but it's either that or just "Eeew, Glen, stop."
Either way, the episode ends with questions about what's next for a number of the characters. And only a few more episodes to suggest where they might be headed.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Monday, April 13, 2015
Back to the Beginning
Mad Men, Season Seven, Episode Nine, "New Business"
In the car as they head to the golf course to meet clients, Pete talks to Don about the challenges of being a high-profile businessman post-divorce. He admits that his failed marriage was his fault and worries, "What if you never get back to the beginning again?" Don doesn't answer him, but his actions demonstrate the paradox of his life (perhaps of any life): while he knows he can't get back to the beginning--in terms of starting again; there are no do-overs--at the same time, his loveless beginning will always be a part of him and will forever drive him: to continually seek the love that was withheld from him in his childhood and to muck up his relationships when he thinks he has found it.
In the evening's first scene, we see him in the Francis kitchen, making milk shakes for his sons and himself. They all seem to be having fun, but when Betty and Henry return, Don takes his leave, with a kiss to the top of Gene's head, without drinking his shake. At the door, he turns back to look with sadness at the family he failed to make work. There's another man at the center of it now, and Don is the outsider. There's no way he can go back to the beginning with Betty and their children.
We next see him alone in his dark apartment, on the phone with his soon-to-be second ex-wife. The pained look from the Francis home returns as he hangs up the phone. With no apparent emotion, he later writes Megan a check for a million dollars to give her "the life you deserve" and to end their fighting. This is another failed relationship that he knows he cannot go back to the beginning to fix.
Yet, he holds fast to the quest for a meaningful relationship, pursuing Diana--a woman whom he thinks is simpler, with her Avon shampoo and a ranch house in Racine, Wisconsin--to the new restaurant at which she waits tables. She at first acquiesces to his request for time together, but Don soon discovers the extent to which she--like he--has been emotionally damaged by loss and feels herself unworthy of giving and receiving love anymore. He initially relates well to her, expressing his sympathy for the death of her daughter and taking time off work to comfort her in the room his children inhabit only every other weekend. But when he later visits her rented room, the "dump," so like the place he chose after his and Betty's break-up, he realizes that she too thinks she doesn't "deserve any better." After she discloses that she left a second daughter back in Wisconsin, Don realizes the extent to which she has allowed her child's death to wall off her core self: "I told you about my heart," she says. "I don't want to feel anything else. When I was with you, I forgot about her. I don't ever want to do that." Don places the guidebook he'd bought her on the bed before he walks out, but I can't see Diana being guided out of her hell of deep sorrow anytime soon. Does Don's leaving signify his respect for her feelings? A recognition that she's right, and it's not wise for her to be in a relationship at that point? His awareness that since she is incapable of being a mother to her own surviving child that he's not going to get from her the mothering he often looks for in a lover? Whatever his leave-taking means, all it leads Don to is an apartment that is now not just empty of other people, but also of every stick of furniture. Our last glimpse of him drives home just how very alone and isolated Don Draper is.
While Don is continuing last week's focus on loss that began with the death of Rachel, other characters provide fodder for continued reflection on the culture of commodification that these advertising industry workers create. The photographer, Pema, opines that "All art is selling something," when she decides to place her photographs at the service of an ad campaign. The episode takes this further, though, when it demonstrates that all relationships are about selling something. Everything is a transaction: in ordering all of the Draper furniture onto a moving van, Megan's mother asserts, "I took what you deserved." She then offers Roger sex in exchange for the few hundred dollars she needs for the extra work of the movers. "Please, take advantage of me," she moans to Roger--who is ever-accommodating in that regard. Don exchanges a million dollars for an end to fighting and divorce negotiations. Harry expects sex from Megan in exchange for his advice about an agent, and she has the idea planted in her head that perhaps the reason she is not offered leading roles is because she is not following directors to the casting couch. (As scummy as Harry is, he might not be wrong about that.) Stan has a hard time at work; now he not only has a female boss, but he is told he has to contend with a female photographer. "It's hard to keep my balls at this job," he says while leaving Peggy's office. Once he's able to put his balls into play again, though, asserting his manhood with Pema in a bit of darkroom sex, he's willing to exchange this for his approval of her work. He's on familiar footing. The woman who was threatening has now--he thinks--been placed under his control. He exudes enthusiasm for her being placed on a number of accounts. Peggy, however, is in charge of this transaction, and she's not having it. Completely disconcerted by Pema's advance to her, she refuses to consider her for another job. And Stan, disconcerted by the idea that he might not have put Pema under his control, refuses to believe Peggy.
While this episode jumped around a great deal, I found most interesting the situations of the three women with whom Don has to contend as he faces his existential position with regard to Pete's question on beginnings. Betty may actually be in a position of beginning again. After last half season's struggle with judging Francine for going back to work after not finding her family to be enough, and her fights with Henry over her right to her opinions, Betty has declared her intention to go back to school. Don is dismissive, but she seems not to care about his opinion. I hope the show gets back to her to explore this more fully; I find the offer of nothing more than an enticing glimpse into her possible future frustrating, but it's an intriguing development.
Megan is unsure which story to tell herself about her divorce. When her sister refers to it as her "failure," she fights back, arguing that the States are in the 20th century. She is a modern woman following her own path and career. When with Don, she sounds like Roger's version of Jane that he whined about to Don earlier: "I wasn't going to give you the satisfaction of knowing you ruined my life" and "I gave up everything for you." Is she letting her mother's and sister's judgment get to her here? Is she feeling hopeless, after her lunch with Harry, about the career that she never gave up for Don? For all of his serious flaws as a husband, Don did provide the financial support that allowed her to quit office work and pursue acting full-time. She's right that Don is a liar, but is she lying to herself about what's happening too? She seems truly stuck between having no desirable beginning to head back to (her family-of-origin is a mess; her marriage is a deceased mess) and the recognition that the career she does desire might have too high of an entrance transaction fee.
Finally, there's Diana. A character I wish we'd have more time to get to know. There's no going back to the beginning for her either. With her grief for her dead child strangling her ability to be a mother to the child she has left, she outcasts herself to a shabby, unhappy room in a big, unhappy city, having managed--perhaps--to find, and then reject, the briefest of respites in the arms of a man who also feels unloved and unlovable.
An interesting, but most unhappy, episode.
In the car as they head to the golf course to meet clients, Pete talks to Don about the challenges of being a high-profile businessman post-divorce. He admits that his failed marriage was his fault and worries, "What if you never get back to the beginning again?" Don doesn't answer him, but his actions demonstrate the paradox of his life (perhaps of any life): while he knows he can't get back to the beginning--in terms of starting again; there are no do-overs--at the same time, his loveless beginning will always be a part of him and will forever drive him: to continually seek the love that was withheld from him in his childhood and to muck up his relationships when he thinks he has found it.
In the evening's first scene, we see him in the Francis kitchen, making milk shakes for his sons and himself. They all seem to be having fun, but when Betty and Henry return, Don takes his leave, with a kiss to the top of Gene's head, without drinking his shake. At the door, he turns back to look with sadness at the family he failed to make work. There's another man at the center of it now, and Don is the outsider. There's no way he can go back to the beginning with Betty and their children.
We next see him alone in his dark apartment, on the phone with his soon-to-be second ex-wife. The pained look from the Francis home returns as he hangs up the phone. With no apparent emotion, he later writes Megan a check for a million dollars to give her "the life you deserve" and to end their fighting. This is another failed relationship that he knows he cannot go back to the beginning to fix.
Yet, he holds fast to the quest for a meaningful relationship, pursuing Diana--a woman whom he thinks is simpler, with her Avon shampoo and a ranch house in Racine, Wisconsin--to the new restaurant at which she waits tables. She at first acquiesces to his request for time together, but Don soon discovers the extent to which she--like he--has been emotionally damaged by loss and feels herself unworthy of giving and receiving love anymore. He initially relates well to her, expressing his sympathy for the death of her daughter and taking time off work to comfort her in the room his children inhabit only every other weekend. But when he later visits her rented room, the "dump," so like the place he chose after his and Betty's break-up, he realizes that she too thinks she doesn't "deserve any better." After she discloses that she left a second daughter back in Wisconsin, Don realizes the extent to which she has allowed her child's death to wall off her core self: "I told you about my heart," she says. "I don't want to feel anything else. When I was with you, I forgot about her. I don't ever want to do that." Don places the guidebook he'd bought her on the bed before he walks out, but I can't see Diana being guided out of her hell of deep sorrow anytime soon. Does Don's leaving signify his respect for her feelings? A recognition that she's right, and it's not wise for her to be in a relationship at that point? His awareness that since she is incapable of being a mother to her own surviving child that he's not going to get from her the mothering he often looks for in a lover? Whatever his leave-taking means, all it leads Don to is an apartment that is now not just empty of other people, but also of every stick of furniture. Our last glimpse of him drives home just how very alone and isolated Don Draper is.
While Don is continuing last week's focus on loss that began with the death of Rachel, other characters provide fodder for continued reflection on the culture of commodification that these advertising industry workers create. The photographer, Pema, opines that "All art is selling something," when she decides to place her photographs at the service of an ad campaign. The episode takes this further, though, when it demonstrates that all relationships are about selling something. Everything is a transaction: in ordering all of the Draper furniture onto a moving van, Megan's mother asserts, "I took what you deserved." She then offers Roger sex in exchange for the few hundred dollars she needs for the extra work of the movers. "Please, take advantage of me," she moans to Roger--who is ever-accommodating in that regard. Don exchanges a million dollars for an end to fighting and divorce negotiations. Harry expects sex from Megan in exchange for his advice about an agent, and she has the idea planted in her head that perhaps the reason she is not offered leading roles is because she is not following directors to the casting couch. (As scummy as Harry is, he might not be wrong about that.) Stan has a hard time at work; now he not only has a female boss, but he is told he has to contend with a female photographer. "It's hard to keep my balls at this job," he says while leaving Peggy's office. Once he's able to put his balls into play again, though, asserting his manhood with Pema in a bit of darkroom sex, he's willing to exchange this for his approval of her work. He's on familiar footing. The woman who was threatening has now--he thinks--been placed under his control. He exudes enthusiasm for her being placed on a number of accounts. Peggy, however, is in charge of this transaction, and she's not having it. Completely disconcerted by Pema's advance to her, she refuses to consider her for another job. And Stan, disconcerted by the idea that he might not have put Pema under his control, refuses to believe Peggy.
While this episode jumped around a great deal, I found most interesting the situations of the three women with whom Don has to contend as he faces his existential position with regard to Pete's question on beginnings. Betty may actually be in a position of beginning again. After last half season's struggle with judging Francine for going back to work after not finding her family to be enough, and her fights with Henry over her right to her opinions, Betty has declared her intention to go back to school. Don is dismissive, but she seems not to care about his opinion. I hope the show gets back to her to explore this more fully; I find the offer of nothing more than an enticing glimpse into her possible future frustrating, but it's an intriguing development.
Megan is unsure which story to tell herself about her divorce. When her sister refers to it as her "failure," she fights back, arguing that the States are in the 20th century. She is a modern woman following her own path and career. When with Don, she sounds like Roger's version of Jane that he whined about to Don earlier: "I wasn't going to give you the satisfaction of knowing you ruined my life" and "I gave up everything for you." Is she letting her mother's and sister's judgment get to her here? Is she feeling hopeless, after her lunch with Harry, about the career that she never gave up for Don? For all of his serious flaws as a husband, Don did provide the financial support that allowed her to quit office work and pursue acting full-time. She's right that Don is a liar, but is she lying to herself about what's happening too? She seems truly stuck between having no desirable beginning to head back to (her family-of-origin is a mess; her marriage is a deceased mess) and the recognition that the career she does desire might have too high of an entrance transaction fee.
Finally, there's Diana. A character I wish we'd have more time to get to know. There's no going back to the beginning for her either. With her grief for her dead child strangling her ability to be a mother to the child she has left, she outcasts herself to a shabby, unhappy room in a big, unhappy city, having managed--perhaps--to find, and then reject, the briefest of respites in the arms of a man who also feels unloved and unlovable.
An interesting, but most unhappy, episode.
Monday, April 6, 2015
"Is That All There Is?"
"Mad Men," Season Seven, Episode Eight, "Severance"
This episode is fraught with tensions. As it begins, a sexy woman, dressed in not much more than a fur coat and high-heeled shoes, walks into a room with Don Draper's gaze on her. He stands near a window, smoking and flicking the ash of his cigarette into a paper coffee cup in his left hand. He rather seductively tells her what to do: "You're not supposed to talk. Just tell me how you feel. . . . Look at yourself [in the mirror]. Do you like what you see?" She complies with his continued demands, putting her leg up on a chair as a woman's voice-over draws us into a story: her father saved her from their burning home when she was a child. Watching the fire from the street, she wonders, "Is that all there is to a fire?" The camera pulls back to reveal a group of men on a couch taking notes, and my question is answered. This is an audition for a commercial, not the foreplay to Don's latest dalliance.
The opening scene rather brilliantly encapsulates the questions and issues to be dramatized: What is real and what is fantasy? Can Don Draper and other characters ever direct what occurs in their lives or are they always subject to the whims of fate--that director across the room? Can one--particularly the women--escape the objectifying gaze of those of a higher social status? Can there be meaningful human connections forged in the world of modern advertising, which is always about commodification and acquisition? Will these characters ever be satisfied (look in the mirror and like what they see)? And then there's the reference to fire, repeated several times: the child saved by her father. We then learn from Joan that "department stores are being blown up by radicals every day." Fire is used as a form of protest against capitalist excesses. Later, Joan herself tells Peggy that she wants to "burn this place down" after the women have been subjected to sexist disrespect by the team of McCann men with whom they'd been meeting. The fantasy of fire is used to express anger and hurt over unjust treatment.
The 1969 Peggy Lee song bookmarks this episode--an atypical way for the show to use its weekly song. Raising the question "Is that all there is" to fire, to love--to life, essentially--the music expresses Don's existential anxiety over the losses he faces and the tension between them and the excesses he engages in to avoid them. Though we don't hear the chorus to the song, it hangs in the air, heavy with relevance:
Is that all there is, is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing.
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is.
In a March 29, 2015 interview published in The New York Times, Matthew Weiner discussed his perception of how his show "mines" the secret shame that all people feel, and that leads to a sense of isolation: "We're all alone. And we all have a fake identity." While I observed in blog posts on the first half of this season that characters like Don, Peggy, and Pete were making moves to bridge that isolation and forge more meaningful relationships with others (Don with Sally, Peggy's Burger Chef campaign on a new kind of family that included Don and Pete), in their post-sale of the firm to McCann, they once again are essentially fragmented and alone, seeming to revel in the luxuries the new money can buy, but not finding real connection. We barely see Don and Peggy together. Peggy and Joan are working more closely as a team, but instead of allies in the face of the dismissal and sexist comments they receive from men in the field, they once again have an elevator spat as Peggy opines that Joan should dress differently if she doesn't want to be told she should be a brassiere model, and Joan retorts, "I don't expect you to understand." Peggy makes the first of the show's references to the fact that non-partners in SCP resent the millions the partners made in the sale of the firm when she spits back, "You know what. You're filthy rich. You don't have to do anything you don't want to!" But, Joan is doing what she wants to do. She just would also like to dress in her style while doing it, and be respected for her brains and ability. Instead, she and Peggy--intelligent, creative ad people--are objectified by the gaze of the three males across the table from them as much as the fur models are.
Peggy is attempting to create a social life for herself when she accepts Mathis' offer of a date with his brother-in-law. She and Stevie hit it off, laughing and drinking through a long dinner that ends with Peggy proposing a trip to Paris. That falls through when she can't find her passport and the next morning, she wakes up hungover and questioning whether they could have a relationship that will go anywhere.
Don starts out the episode seeming on top of his world, if in a superficial way. He's back on the team, leading the audition for the fur ad. He has a date with a model and a mustached Roger sitting between two young models. They've been someplace fancy, but are ending the evening at a diner, where Don is comfortable enough to tell stories about his step-mother, uncle, and their impoverished past. Roger tells the women, "He loves to tell stories about how poor he was, but he's not anymore." The implication is that Don really is moving forward. When he gets home and calls his answering service, he has messages from three women among whom he can choose to spend the night with. But, he doesn't seem happy. With his arm around a young, beautiful, well-dressed model in the diner's booth, he is more drawn to the hard-working waitress with the John Dos Passos novel sticking out of her apron. When he arrives home and turns on the light to reveal the empty apartment, he looks sad. Megan is gone. There is no hint at all of his children in this episode. We could be back at the series premiere in which we don't find out until the very end that this man with a lover in Greenwich Village has a wife and children in the suburbs. The stewardess on lay-over whom he calls to spend the night seems there just to dispel the isolation; she allows him to don a mask so that he doesn't have to deal with the question, "Is that all there is?" As in Peggy Lee's song, he is just dancing so he doesn't have to stand still. The news of Rachel's death, though, forces him to slow down.
Don has a special sensitivity for seeing the shades of dead people as they're on their way out of this life. Anna Draper appeared to him in "The Suitcase" (Season 4.7), saying nothing, but smiling beneficently at him as he wakes from a drunken nap on Peggy's lap. At the end of the last episode of Season 7, Part 1, he sees the recently deceased Bert Cooper engage in a song and dance routine, exhorting him to realize that "the best things in life are free." He seems in this episode to be trying on the lifestyle of the millionaire he's become, but also to recognize that it doesn't offer the best things in life. So, when Rachel Menken Katz enters the room, clad in a fur coat, for an audition, he is thrown off guard. It can't really be her, can it? Her message to him is that he's missed his flight. All he can think to say to her is the ad slogan-sounding "You're not just smooth. You're Wilkinson smooth." What the hell does that mean? A day or so later when he receives the news that Rachel had died the week before, Don is thrown into a search for what it all means. He visits the Dos Passos reading waitress and receives some quick sex in the alley. For him, it seems to be one of those attempts to hold fast to one's physical nature when forced to face the gaping hole of mortality--especially the mortality of someone younger than oneself. For the waitress, it is what she expected she'd have to pay out for the glib $100 tip Roger left her to make up for having been rude. "You got your $100 worth," she tells Don. "You can go." But, he doesn't want to go. He wants to talk to someone with substance. To someone who reminds him somehow of Rachel.
He makes an awkward visit to the Katz home while the family is sitting shiva. Rachel's sister makes it clear that he is unwelcome: "I'm not sure what you're looking for here." Don just wants some knowledge. He wants to know what happened, what her life was. "She lived the life she wanted to live," the sister tells him. "She had everything." "Good," Don replies, his face full of pain. Whether or not Rachel actually did find full satisfaction in the life she had, Don is shown the disparity between having the life one desires and living the one he has made for himself when he confides that he is about to be divorced for the second time. He's alive, but a failure at relating: to his wives, to this lover who is now dead. Rachel is dead, but leaves behind a husband, children, sister, and others who grieve her passing. He returns yet again to the diner, to the woman whose social status is closer to the one in which he was raised. He again wants answers; he is again looking for meaning--"Is that all there is?" The waitress can only tell him, "When someone dies you want to make sense of it, but you can't." Then she leaves him to sit alone at the counter, again in isolation, listening to Peggy Lee sing, "And then one day she went away and I thought I'd die, but I didn't and when I didn't, I said to myself, 'Is that all there is to love?'" Another thought-provoking question to add to the one that begins the episode. This time it is Don who is the object of our gaze, and it seems clear that he does not like what he sees when he looks into the mirror within. A haunting beginning to these last few episodes.....
This episode is fraught with tensions. As it begins, a sexy woman, dressed in not much more than a fur coat and high-heeled shoes, walks into a room with Don Draper's gaze on her. He stands near a window, smoking and flicking the ash of his cigarette into a paper coffee cup in his left hand. He rather seductively tells her what to do: "You're not supposed to talk. Just tell me how you feel. . . . Look at yourself [in the mirror]. Do you like what you see?" She complies with his continued demands, putting her leg up on a chair as a woman's voice-over draws us into a story: her father saved her from their burning home when she was a child. Watching the fire from the street, she wonders, "Is that all there is to a fire?" The camera pulls back to reveal a group of men on a couch taking notes, and my question is answered. This is an audition for a commercial, not the foreplay to Don's latest dalliance.
The opening scene rather brilliantly encapsulates the questions and issues to be dramatized: What is real and what is fantasy? Can Don Draper and other characters ever direct what occurs in their lives or are they always subject to the whims of fate--that director across the room? Can one--particularly the women--escape the objectifying gaze of those of a higher social status? Can there be meaningful human connections forged in the world of modern advertising, which is always about commodification and acquisition? Will these characters ever be satisfied (look in the mirror and like what they see)? And then there's the reference to fire, repeated several times: the child saved by her father. We then learn from Joan that "department stores are being blown up by radicals every day." Fire is used as a form of protest against capitalist excesses. Later, Joan herself tells Peggy that she wants to "burn this place down" after the women have been subjected to sexist disrespect by the team of McCann men with whom they'd been meeting. The fantasy of fire is used to express anger and hurt over unjust treatment.
The 1969 Peggy Lee song bookmarks this episode--an atypical way for the show to use its weekly song. Raising the question "Is that all there is" to fire, to love--to life, essentially--the music expresses Don's existential anxiety over the losses he faces and the tension between them and the excesses he engages in to avoid them. Though we don't hear the chorus to the song, it hangs in the air, heavy with relevance:
Is that all there is, is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing.
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is.
In a March 29, 2015 interview published in The New York Times, Matthew Weiner discussed his perception of how his show "mines" the secret shame that all people feel, and that leads to a sense of isolation: "We're all alone. And we all have a fake identity." While I observed in blog posts on the first half of this season that characters like Don, Peggy, and Pete were making moves to bridge that isolation and forge more meaningful relationships with others (Don with Sally, Peggy's Burger Chef campaign on a new kind of family that included Don and Pete), in their post-sale of the firm to McCann, they once again are essentially fragmented and alone, seeming to revel in the luxuries the new money can buy, but not finding real connection. We barely see Don and Peggy together. Peggy and Joan are working more closely as a team, but instead of allies in the face of the dismissal and sexist comments they receive from men in the field, they once again have an elevator spat as Peggy opines that Joan should dress differently if she doesn't want to be told she should be a brassiere model, and Joan retorts, "I don't expect you to understand." Peggy makes the first of the show's references to the fact that non-partners in SCP resent the millions the partners made in the sale of the firm when she spits back, "You know what. You're filthy rich. You don't have to do anything you don't want to!" But, Joan is doing what she wants to do. She just would also like to dress in her style while doing it, and be respected for her brains and ability. Instead, she and Peggy--intelligent, creative ad people--are objectified by the gaze of the three males across the table from them as much as the fur models are.
Peggy is attempting to create a social life for herself when she accepts Mathis' offer of a date with his brother-in-law. She and Stevie hit it off, laughing and drinking through a long dinner that ends with Peggy proposing a trip to Paris. That falls through when she can't find her passport and the next morning, she wakes up hungover and questioning whether they could have a relationship that will go anywhere.
Don starts out the episode seeming on top of his world, if in a superficial way. He's back on the team, leading the audition for the fur ad. He has a date with a model and a mustached Roger sitting between two young models. They've been someplace fancy, but are ending the evening at a diner, where Don is comfortable enough to tell stories about his step-mother, uncle, and their impoverished past. Roger tells the women, "He loves to tell stories about how poor he was, but he's not anymore." The implication is that Don really is moving forward. When he gets home and calls his answering service, he has messages from three women among whom he can choose to spend the night with. But, he doesn't seem happy. With his arm around a young, beautiful, well-dressed model in the diner's booth, he is more drawn to the hard-working waitress with the John Dos Passos novel sticking out of her apron. When he arrives home and turns on the light to reveal the empty apartment, he looks sad. Megan is gone. There is no hint at all of his children in this episode. We could be back at the series premiere in which we don't find out until the very end that this man with a lover in Greenwich Village has a wife and children in the suburbs. The stewardess on lay-over whom he calls to spend the night seems there just to dispel the isolation; she allows him to don a mask so that he doesn't have to deal with the question, "Is that all there is?" As in Peggy Lee's song, he is just dancing so he doesn't have to stand still. The news of Rachel's death, though, forces him to slow down.
Don has a special sensitivity for seeing the shades of dead people as they're on their way out of this life. Anna Draper appeared to him in "The Suitcase" (Season 4.7), saying nothing, but smiling beneficently at him as he wakes from a drunken nap on Peggy's lap. At the end of the last episode of Season 7, Part 1, he sees the recently deceased Bert Cooper engage in a song and dance routine, exhorting him to realize that "the best things in life are free." He seems in this episode to be trying on the lifestyle of the millionaire he's become, but also to recognize that it doesn't offer the best things in life. So, when Rachel Menken Katz enters the room, clad in a fur coat, for an audition, he is thrown off guard. It can't really be her, can it? Her message to him is that he's missed his flight. All he can think to say to her is the ad slogan-sounding "You're not just smooth. You're Wilkinson smooth." What the hell does that mean? A day or so later when he receives the news that Rachel had died the week before, Don is thrown into a search for what it all means. He visits the Dos Passos reading waitress and receives some quick sex in the alley. For him, it seems to be one of those attempts to hold fast to one's physical nature when forced to face the gaping hole of mortality--especially the mortality of someone younger than oneself. For the waitress, it is what she expected she'd have to pay out for the glib $100 tip Roger left her to make up for having been rude. "You got your $100 worth," she tells Don. "You can go." But, he doesn't want to go. He wants to talk to someone with substance. To someone who reminds him somehow of Rachel.
He makes an awkward visit to the Katz home while the family is sitting shiva. Rachel's sister makes it clear that he is unwelcome: "I'm not sure what you're looking for here." Don just wants some knowledge. He wants to know what happened, what her life was. "She lived the life she wanted to live," the sister tells him. "She had everything." "Good," Don replies, his face full of pain. Whether or not Rachel actually did find full satisfaction in the life she had, Don is shown the disparity between having the life one desires and living the one he has made for himself when he confides that he is about to be divorced for the second time. He's alive, but a failure at relating: to his wives, to this lover who is now dead. Rachel is dead, but leaves behind a husband, children, sister, and others who grieve her passing. He returns yet again to the diner, to the woman whose social status is closer to the one in which he was raised. He again wants answers; he is again looking for meaning--"Is that all there is?" The waitress can only tell him, "When someone dies you want to make sense of it, but you can't." Then she leaves him to sit alone at the counter, again in isolation, listening to Peggy Lee sing, "And then one day she went away and I thought I'd die, but I didn't and when I didn't, I said to myself, 'Is that all there is to love?'" Another thought-provoking question to add to the one that begins the episode. This time it is Don who is the object of our gaze, and it seems clear that he does not like what he sees when he looks into the mirror within. A haunting beginning to these last few episodes.....
Monday, May 26, 2014
"The Best Things in Life Are Free"
Mad Men, Season Seven, Episode Seven, "Waterloo"
This was an irony-rich episode. When the shade of Bert Cooper serenades Don--who had just voted for a $65 million deal making SC&P a subsidiary of McCann and all the partners millionaires--with a Broadway version of "The Best Things in Life Are Free," complete with a dancing chorus of secretaries, it was more than just a fun send-off for Robert Morse, back to his musical roots and whatever version of an afterlife the writers believe appropriate for someone like Cooper. It offered commentary on several of the events and themes of not just this episode, but of this half-season, and posed some interesting, complicating questions.
After watching the awe-inspiring moon walk with his Black "help," who's all dressed-up in a TV character maid costume complete with white frilly apron, the not-yet-ready-for-a-Black-woman-in-the-reception-area founding partner sings "The moon belongs to everyone" (though they did stick an American flag in it; but then Neil Armstrong did say that it was a "giant step for mankind," not just Americans; so--a moment of "national pride" as Roger says to the gathered employees after the buy-out vote? a universal moment of connection, as Peggy tells the Burger Chef reps? Americans appropriating what belongs to everyone on behalf of everyone? a hugely expensive act of hubris, as the Francis' young house guest asserts and gets Sally to consider? some combination of the above?) At least in its depiction of characters raptly watching the event, the show seems to come down on the side of it being--like the Kennedy assassination--a defining American moment that brought disparate groups together in unusual community and family: Roger--who has spent the last few years drifting from family model to family model, through LSD-induced quests for meaning, landing most recently in the position of a city hotel suite commune dweller who criticizes his rural commune-dwelling daughter of being a bad parent--is sitting in a living room with his first wife, their abandoned son-in-law, and their space helmet clad grandson on his lap; Betty, Henry, and Betty's and Don's children are with another family (that of Betty's college friend who's visiting); and Don is in a hotel room with Peggy, Pete, and Harry Crane, sharing a seat on one of the beds with Peggy, whom he leans into as they both watch with wonder on their faces. Harry--master of TV advertising--nearly cries. Afterward, Don reaches out to his children via phone and chastises Sally for being cynical about the whole event. But, Sally is just trying on different viewpoints. She tries Sean's with her father, but after he calls her on it, she goes outside to the younger visiting son who prefers watching the sky through a telescope. He wants to avoid the mediated views of the families and of the news casters. Yet even viewing through a telescope provides a frame for what one sees. And this ties in to one of the series' themes that I'll get back to.
To Don Draper, whose second marriage has just finally, and not surprisingly, been pronounced dead, Cooper sings "And love can come to everyone." This season has raised some intriguing possibilities around the question of Don and love. The compulsive womanizer has turned down the advances of a few women whom the old Don would have taken to bed: the airplane profferer of sleeping pills and forgetfulness, the woman in the restaurant when Don was with some other advertisers, and--in this episode--his new secretary. The only other woman besides his wife whom he's had sex with this season is the one his wife brought to him for the three-way and Don didn't seem much into that. No, in this season, in this time after Dick Whitman was allowed to come out in front of his partners, his clients, and his children, Don/Dick has gone after the love he's never felt in more meaningful places than the beds of strangers and employees. And, he's found it: in the Valentine's Day drive and shared burgers with his daughter, in the platonic arms of a dance with his work daughter and soul mate Peggy, and over burgers and fries with his work family Peggy and Pete, after he and Peggy crafted an ad campaign for Burger Chef that urges viewers not just to buy fast-food sandwiches from their would-be client, but to buy the idea that families should gather around a table for food, fellowship, and connection and leave their TVs behind (one of the greater ironies for this firm that's just offered its TV guy a partnership).
These two points of focus on the moonwalk and on the Burger Chef campaign are intimately connected and indicative of the over-arching tension of Season Seven, Part One between those who are in advertising as a means to fuel and play out their creative energies and those who are in it for the business. Don tells Roger, "I just want to do my work. I don't want to deal with business anymore." And, as he tries to sell Ted on the deal with McCann, he shares with him how much, after his suspension, he missed his work. So much that he would "do anything to get back in. And I did..." He wrote tags and coupons, things he hadn't done since his early days. He believes that Ted also would love his work again if he too could do it without the stress of partners' meetings and worrying about business. Yet there is a tension in the creative people's vision of advertising, a tension that Peggy realizes after the moonwalk and before the pitch to the burger people: "I have to talk to people who've just touched the face of god about hamburgers." Their creative efforts are not spent on art for art's sake or art just for self-expression. It's spent on selling stuff in an increasingly consumerist culture. Yet it's a consumer culture that is also fraught with tension, a tension that Peggy again gets. She knows that Americans are not only hungry for fast food burgers, but are also hungry for human connection in a chaotic world: "We can have the connection we're hungry for. There may be chaos at home, but there's family supper at Burger Chef," she sells to the almost weepy-eyed Indiana businessmen. This is in stark contrast to Jim Cutler's vision for the firm as a business that can pinpoint media buys "with surgical accuracy." And hence, this final (for now) showdown between those in it for the technical precision and the money--Jim and Joan most notably--and those in it for the creativity and connection. Pete Campbell is straddling the line between the sides, sitting on the couch next to Joan at the final meeting, crowing over the millions he'll make and spitting out that Ted is being "selfish" as he thinks through his vote AND cheering on the return of "the Don Draper Show," "back from its unscheduled interruption."
Our world comes to us not directly, but mediated through frames--those created through stories ("every great ad is a story"), through computerized data sheets (though data always need to be interpreted), through songs, and through TV shows like "Mad Men." What will Don do with the song and the ironies that Bert Cooper shows him through it? At the end, after watching Bert with a sometimes puzzled, sometimes pained expression, he leans against a desk--thinking? And there, we'll have to leave him. Until next year.
This was an irony-rich episode. When the shade of Bert Cooper serenades Don--who had just voted for a $65 million deal making SC&P a subsidiary of McCann and all the partners millionaires--with a Broadway version of "The Best Things in Life Are Free," complete with a dancing chorus of secretaries, it was more than just a fun send-off for Robert Morse, back to his musical roots and whatever version of an afterlife the writers believe appropriate for someone like Cooper. It offered commentary on several of the events and themes of not just this episode, but of this half-season, and posed some interesting, complicating questions.
After watching the awe-inspiring moon walk with his Black "help," who's all dressed-up in a TV character maid costume complete with white frilly apron, the not-yet-ready-for-a-Black-woman-in-the-reception-area founding partner sings "The moon belongs to everyone" (though they did stick an American flag in it; but then Neil Armstrong did say that it was a "giant step for mankind," not just Americans; so--a moment of "national pride" as Roger says to the gathered employees after the buy-out vote? a universal moment of connection, as Peggy tells the Burger Chef reps? Americans appropriating what belongs to everyone on behalf of everyone? a hugely expensive act of hubris, as the Francis' young house guest asserts and gets Sally to consider? some combination of the above?) At least in its depiction of characters raptly watching the event, the show seems to come down on the side of it being--like the Kennedy assassination--a defining American moment that brought disparate groups together in unusual community and family: Roger--who has spent the last few years drifting from family model to family model, through LSD-induced quests for meaning, landing most recently in the position of a city hotel suite commune dweller who criticizes his rural commune-dwelling daughter of being a bad parent--is sitting in a living room with his first wife, their abandoned son-in-law, and their space helmet clad grandson on his lap; Betty, Henry, and Betty's and Don's children are with another family (that of Betty's college friend who's visiting); and Don is in a hotel room with Peggy, Pete, and Harry Crane, sharing a seat on one of the beds with Peggy, whom he leans into as they both watch with wonder on their faces. Harry--master of TV advertising--nearly cries. Afterward, Don reaches out to his children via phone and chastises Sally for being cynical about the whole event. But, Sally is just trying on different viewpoints. She tries Sean's with her father, but after he calls her on it, she goes outside to the younger visiting son who prefers watching the sky through a telescope. He wants to avoid the mediated views of the families and of the news casters. Yet even viewing through a telescope provides a frame for what one sees. And this ties in to one of the series' themes that I'll get back to.
To Don Draper, whose second marriage has just finally, and not surprisingly, been pronounced dead, Cooper sings "And love can come to everyone." This season has raised some intriguing possibilities around the question of Don and love. The compulsive womanizer has turned down the advances of a few women whom the old Don would have taken to bed: the airplane profferer of sleeping pills and forgetfulness, the woman in the restaurant when Don was with some other advertisers, and--in this episode--his new secretary. The only other woman besides his wife whom he's had sex with this season is the one his wife brought to him for the three-way and Don didn't seem much into that. No, in this season, in this time after Dick Whitman was allowed to come out in front of his partners, his clients, and his children, Don/Dick has gone after the love he's never felt in more meaningful places than the beds of strangers and employees. And, he's found it: in the Valentine's Day drive and shared burgers with his daughter, in the platonic arms of a dance with his work daughter and soul mate Peggy, and over burgers and fries with his work family Peggy and Pete, after he and Peggy crafted an ad campaign for Burger Chef that urges viewers not just to buy fast-food sandwiches from their would-be client, but to buy the idea that families should gather around a table for food, fellowship, and connection and leave their TVs behind (one of the greater ironies for this firm that's just offered its TV guy a partnership).
These two points of focus on the moonwalk and on the Burger Chef campaign are intimately connected and indicative of the over-arching tension of Season Seven, Part One between those who are in advertising as a means to fuel and play out their creative energies and those who are in it for the business. Don tells Roger, "I just want to do my work. I don't want to deal with business anymore." And, as he tries to sell Ted on the deal with McCann, he shares with him how much, after his suspension, he missed his work. So much that he would "do anything to get back in. And I did..." He wrote tags and coupons, things he hadn't done since his early days. He believes that Ted also would love his work again if he too could do it without the stress of partners' meetings and worrying about business. Yet there is a tension in the creative people's vision of advertising, a tension that Peggy realizes after the moonwalk and before the pitch to the burger people: "I have to talk to people who've just touched the face of god about hamburgers." Their creative efforts are not spent on art for art's sake or art just for self-expression. It's spent on selling stuff in an increasingly consumerist culture. Yet it's a consumer culture that is also fraught with tension, a tension that Peggy again gets. She knows that Americans are not only hungry for fast food burgers, but are also hungry for human connection in a chaotic world: "We can have the connection we're hungry for. There may be chaos at home, but there's family supper at Burger Chef," she sells to the almost weepy-eyed Indiana businessmen. This is in stark contrast to Jim Cutler's vision for the firm as a business that can pinpoint media buys "with surgical accuracy." And hence, this final (for now) showdown between those in it for the technical precision and the money--Jim and Joan most notably--and those in it for the creativity and connection. Pete Campbell is straddling the line between the sides, sitting on the couch next to Joan at the final meeting, crowing over the millions he'll make and spitting out that Ted is being "selfish" as he thinks through his vote AND cheering on the return of "the Don Draper Show," "back from its unscheduled interruption."
Our world comes to us not directly, but mediated through frames--those created through stories ("every great ad is a story"), through computerized data sheets (though data always need to be interpreted), through songs, and through TV shows like "Mad Men." What will Don do with the song and the ironies that Bert Cooper shows him through it? At the end, after watching Bert with a sometimes puzzled, sometimes pained expression, he leans against a desk--thinking? And there, we'll have to leave him. Until next year.
Monday, May 19, 2014
"My Way"
Mad Men, Season Seven, Episode Six, "The Strategy" (or "The Suitcase," Part Two?)
The "strategy" of the title is, on the surface, a reference to that which those characters on the Burger Chef team are trying to figure out: how to approach the would-be client to secure the account. But beyond that, it's what Don and Peggy are trying to accomplish: how can they establish a strategy to work well together again after Don's betrayal of Peggy and Ted the year before and their new turned-on-its-head working relationship of Don reporting to her and then Pete's insistence that Don pitch the campaign to the burger people? But even more deeply, it reflects that which a number of these characters need if they are to negotiate the world of changing family dynamics and women's roles: Pete and Trudy aren't sure how to relate to each other as they're divorcing (though Pete seems to think it should be the same way they had it set up when they were living together--Trudy is always there and chaste, while Pete gets to sleep around); Tammy doesn't seem even to be sure who her father is after his long absence. Peggy, having recently turned thirty while spending time in field research to determine why mothers turn to Burger Chef to feed their families, has looked into too many station wagons in Ohio and Pennsylvania and wonders what she's "done wrong." In the meantime, she can't get Stan to come in to work on the weekend because he has a lover with whom he has plans and she's feeling the lack of someone in her life. Don smiles fondly at Megan on his balcony and claims to be happy she's there, but later looks unsure as he watches her clean out a closet. The long-distance marriage doesn't seem to be working for them as much as they try to pretend. And, most sad of all, Bob Benson needs a strategy to appear the "certain kind of executive" that Buick requires, e.g. not gay; family structure and possibilities of roles for people to play hadn't expanded THAT much yet in 1969, though the Stonewall riots were just around the corner later that month in Manhattan.
The most interesting thing about this episode to me, though, is how it leads us back three seasons and four years of Mad Men time to "The Suitcase," the seventh episode of Season Four--one of the most poignant and beautifully written and acted hours of "Mad Men" they've produced. As it turns out, it was exactly at the center of this series: three and a half seasons had already aired and three and a half seasons were to come. But more, it was also central to the show conceptually. This has always been a show that is at its best when focusing on people's work lives and the office. "The Suitcase" brought Don's and Peggy's complicated personal lives into the workplace. It's a perfect episode to re-turn our thoughts to as they again struggle at work to make sense of the personal, and try to figure out what it means that they both lack meaningful connections with family. In "The Suitcase," Don and Peggy spend a night working together, honestly discussing their lives and regrets--including Peggy's baby--and Peggy helps Don through a difficult crisis, the death of Anna Draper. That night of Anna's death was on Peggy's birthday. This time around--a couple of weeks after Peggy's 30th birthday--Don has it a bit more together and he helps Peggy through an existential crisis--wondering if she will ever know what it's like to be a mom, while she also struggles to assert her authority at work. In both episodes, we see the process of them creating an ad campaign. Alone, they're not doing so well. Together, they come up with something inspired. When I wrote about "The Suitcase" at the time, I commented on how much I enjoyed seeing how their minds work. In this one, a frustrated Peggy, not sure if she can trust Don, says, "You really want to help me? Show me how you think!" And he does, and she smiles, and their connection is re-forged. At the end of both evenings, Don and Peggy share an intimate moment: in "The Suitcase," Don falls asleep on the office couch with his head in Peggy's lap. It is while he sleeps that the shade of Anna passes through, bestowing a last smiling glance on him. In this episode, they dance to Frank Sinatra's "My Way" as it plays on the radio. Peggy rests her head on Don's chest and he looks--what?--almost afraid, uncertain, confused, but then kisses the top of her head. From the time each woke up that morning and chose what to wear, they were apparently meant to have this moment of working out their differences and honoring the kindred spirit in the other because they were color-coordinated, the orange in Don's tie matching well Peggy's shirt. While Joan can't accept Bob's proposal and re-vision of marriage that he offers ("We could comfort each other through an uncertain world"), Don smiles on Peggy's redefinition of family: "What if there was a place you could go where there's no TV, you could break bread, and anyone near you is family?" With his one failed and second failing marriage, he too needs a new way to conceive of family. And who better than Peggy to suggest it, the one with whom he has so much in common? They both live for their work--with all the negatives and the positives that way of being brings to their lives, to their families and to themselves (it was in "The Suitcase" that Peggy said to Don, "I know what I'm supposed to want. It never seems as important as what's in that office.") Why not finally expand the view of family to include their work companions?
And so it is that at the end, we see Peggy with Don and Pete (the two people outside her circle of mother and sisters who know about the baby she had and gave up for adoption), breaking bread (or French fries to be more accurate) at the place where "every table is the family table." Leave aside for the time being that as the camera pulls back from their table to show us other families at Burger Chef and the bright, rather garish red and white building, we're also seeing the way the creativity of people like Peggy and Don helped persuade us Americans to become the 'fast food nation.' It's a complicated, ever-changing world and strategies pursued to resolve one problem can often lead to others. As Don tells Peggy, it's part of their job that they can never know which is the right approach. Don seems to be getting to a place where he's more okay with ambiguity.
The "strategy" of the title is, on the surface, a reference to that which those characters on the Burger Chef team are trying to figure out: how to approach the would-be client to secure the account. But beyond that, it's what Don and Peggy are trying to accomplish: how can they establish a strategy to work well together again after Don's betrayal of Peggy and Ted the year before and their new turned-on-its-head working relationship of Don reporting to her and then Pete's insistence that Don pitch the campaign to the burger people? But even more deeply, it reflects that which a number of these characters need if they are to negotiate the world of changing family dynamics and women's roles: Pete and Trudy aren't sure how to relate to each other as they're divorcing (though Pete seems to think it should be the same way they had it set up when they were living together--Trudy is always there and chaste, while Pete gets to sleep around); Tammy doesn't seem even to be sure who her father is after his long absence. Peggy, having recently turned thirty while spending time in field research to determine why mothers turn to Burger Chef to feed their families, has looked into too many station wagons in Ohio and Pennsylvania and wonders what she's "done wrong." In the meantime, she can't get Stan to come in to work on the weekend because he has a lover with whom he has plans and she's feeling the lack of someone in her life. Don smiles fondly at Megan on his balcony and claims to be happy she's there, but later looks unsure as he watches her clean out a closet. The long-distance marriage doesn't seem to be working for them as much as they try to pretend. And, most sad of all, Bob Benson needs a strategy to appear the "certain kind of executive" that Buick requires, e.g. not gay; family structure and possibilities of roles for people to play hadn't expanded THAT much yet in 1969, though the Stonewall riots were just around the corner later that month in Manhattan.
The most interesting thing about this episode to me, though, is how it leads us back three seasons and four years of Mad Men time to "The Suitcase," the seventh episode of Season Four--one of the most poignant and beautifully written and acted hours of "Mad Men" they've produced. As it turns out, it was exactly at the center of this series: three and a half seasons had already aired and three and a half seasons were to come. But more, it was also central to the show conceptually. This has always been a show that is at its best when focusing on people's work lives and the office. "The Suitcase" brought Don's and Peggy's complicated personal lives into the workplace. It's a perfect episode to re-turn our thoughts to as they again struggle at work to make sense of the personal, and try to figure out what it means that they both lack meaningful connections with family. In "The Suitcase," Don and Peggy spend a night working together, honestly discussing their lives and regrets--including Peggy's baby--and Peggy helps Don through a difficult crisis, the death of Anna Draper. That night of Anna's death was on Peggy's birthday. This time around--a couple of weeks after Peggy's 30th birthday--Don has it a bit more together and he helps Peggy through an existential crisis--wondering if she will ever know what it's like to be a mom, while she also struggles to assert her authority at work. In both episodes, we see the process of them creating an ad campaign. Alone, they're not doing so well. Together, they come up with something inspired. When I wrote about "The Suitcase" at the time, I commented on how much I enjoyed seeing how their minds work. In this one, a frustrated Peggy, not sure if she can trust Don, says, "You really want to help me? Show me how you think!" And he does, and she smiles, and their connection is re-forged. At the end of both evenings, Don and Peggy share an intimate moment: in "The Suitcase," Don falls asleep on the office couch with his head in Peggy's lap. It is while he sleeps that the shade of Anna passes through, bestowing a last smiling glance on him. In this episode, they dance to Frank Sinatra's "My Way" as it plays on the radio. Peggy rests her head on Don's chest and he looks--what?--almost afraid, uncertain, confused, but then kisses the top of her head. From the time each woke up that morning and chose what to wear, they were apparently meant to have this moment of working out their differences and honoring the kindred spirit in the other because they were color-coordinated, the orange in Don's tie matching well Peggy's shirt. While Joan can't accept Bob's proposal and re-vision of marriage that he offers ("We could comfort each other through an uncertain world"), Don smiles on Peggy's redefinition of family: "What if there was a place you could go where there's no TV, you could break bread, and anyone near you is family?" With his one failed and second failing marriage, he too needs a new way to conceive of family. And who better than Peggy to suggest it, the one with whom he has so much in common? They both live for their work--with all the negatives and the positives that way of being brings to their lives, to their families and to themselves (it was in "The Suitcase" that Peggy said to Don, "I know what I'm supposed to want. It never seems as important as what's in that office.") Why not finally expand the view of family to include their work companions?
And so it is that at the end, we see Peggy with Don and Pete (the two people outside her circle of mother and sisters who know about the baby she had and gave up for adoption), breaking bread (or French fries to be more accurate) at the place where "every table is the family table." Leave aside for the time being that as the camera pulls back from their table to show us other families at Burger Chef and the bright, rather garish red and white building, we're also seeing the way the creativity of people like Peggy and Don helped persuade us Americans to become the 'fast food nation.' It's a complicated, ever-changing world and strategies pursued to resolve one problem can often lead to others. As Don tells Peggy, it's part of their job that they can never know which is the right approach. Don seems to be getting to a place where he's more okay with ambiguity.
Monday, May 12, 2014
"Walk the Line"
Mad Men, Season Seven, Episode Five, "The Runaways"
As Waylon Jennings sings at the end of the episode, a number of characters feel like somebody's "been stepping on my toes and I'm getting pretty tired of it." Lou is fed up with his crew at the office whom he sees as a "bunch of flag-burning snots," who have "a thing to learn about patriotism and loyalty," as well as about taste in comic strips; Betty finally realizes--HELLO!--that a traditional 1960s marriage isn't supposed to include the wife thinking--even in Italian; Henry's put out by his wife's expression of her unpopular opinion on the war because it might cost him votes (who knew there were that many Westchester County residents opposed to the war, even in 1969?); Megan--I'm assuming--worries that Don has sent a woman pregnant with his child to her home for care and money; Sally KNOWS that her mother is out to stomp all over her toes and isn't shy about speaking out, while her poor little brother (weren't those two just a few years apart when the show started? now he seems to be about five or six years younger) fears having to go through another divorce. From the opening shot of Stan laughing at Lou's comic strip about Scout, who can "take anything but an order," this episode is about authority: those who desperately try to hold on to the bit they have left and those who want to defy the authorities weighing down upon them. Some are fiercely trying--like Waylon--to walk a line, but by the end of "The Runaways," Don looks like the only one who's succeeded (for now, at least), while the tragic Ginsberg has plunged headlong over it.
It's unusual to witness Betty as the character voicing the insight that grounds an episode, but this time she is. After Henry diagnoses "wildness in kids" as a "national disease" and their neighbor Mike opines that things aren't just bad in Vietnam, they're "falling apart here too," Betty says, "Well, I don't know that those things are unrelated. I mean first the kids start off protesting and the next thing you know every authority is up for grabs." While I disagree with Betty--I think most of the student protests in the '60s were a good thing--she is spot on that challenges to authority in the political realm are connected to those in the personal realm. Once people see it as okay to talk back, they'll do so whether it's to their parents, their teachers, the President, or the CEO of Dow Chemical. And not all of their protests will be important and meaningful; sometimes they'll just get angry, or aggressive, or bratty and throw some rocks at street lights in the affluent suburbs without leaving a note explaining why, if they know why. Was that just meaningless vandalism or--as the guests at the Francis' party seem to think--a big 'fuck you' to the pristine order the Westchester adults try desperately to impose upon the chaos of 1969?
With that scenario in the background, Betty is primed to see Sally's appearance at the house with black eyes and bandaged nose as an intentional affront to Betty's arduous preparations to marry Sally off to a suitable man who would never condescend to accept a trophy wife with a less-than-perfect nose. No "Come here, sweetheart. Does it hurt?" or even, "Seriously, you're fifteen and you're playing sword fights with golf clubs? But, I hope you're not in pain." No--all Betty can offer to her battered, self-confessed 'idiot' daughter is "That's your face, young lady!"
But, even as she's chastising her daughter for not following the traditional feminine script, and getting an earful from the non-conformist Sally, Betty is also starting to realize--finally--that there is something wrong with that script. Even someone as thick and as limited by self-imposed blinders as Betty is can't fail to be insulted when her husband, in multiple arguments over a couple of days, says things like "From now on, keep your conversation to how much you hate getting toast crumbs in the butter and leave the thinking to me." Betty's having a bit of a crisis. The woman who's always tried hard to walk the line between doing what society and her mother have told her she's supposed to do and what she might be interested in doing is talking back: "I'm tired of everyone telling me to shut up! I'm not stupid. . . . Guess what? I think all by myself!" She tells Henry that she doesn't know what she's going to do. I'm not going to hold out much hope that maybe this time she will do something outside the box; I've been disappointed before, but....
And in the meantime....While Don's first wife is expressing very conservative views about Vietnam, but also staging her own rebellion in the personal sphere, his second wife is nursing her sexual jealousy of Don--which is not unjustified in general, but is in the instance of Stephanie--when the pregnant niece of Anna Draper shows up at her house, and then jumping to the other extreme when she initiates the three-way with Don and her friend. What's up there? Okay she was, as Don pointed out, stoned, but I don't think it was just the drugs talking. Was this her way of trying to contain what she sees as Don's inability to be sexually faithful? If I can't have a faithful husband, I'm going to control the terms on which he has sex with someone else? It's going to be when I can participate too? Or is this Megan just trying to fit into what she thinks everyone hip is supposed to be doing? We first see her dancing provocatively with the young man at the party, but she's keeping an eye on Don while doing so. She then orders Don to "Kiss her. I know you want to." The next morning, she's trying to be cool about making coffee in the apartment where both Don and her friend are, but as soon as Don leaves, she starts to cry into her hands. She's not been real successful at walking the line between what she's "supposed" to do and what she wants to do.
Then, there's poor Ginsberg. He's exhibited scary signs of mental instability before. In the past, he told Peggy that Martians spoke to him. This time, he believes it's the computer that has a plan to "turn us all homo." "Am I Cassandra?" he asks, referring to the ancient Greek character cursed by Apollo with the gift of prophecy and the fate of never being believed. Since the computer first arrived at SC&P, he's seen it ominously. And he's right that it represents some of the partners' desire to stifle the creative team, replacing them with a completely rational, mechanized business model. And, his fears about computers replacing humans in some spheres and about technology's effects on human creativity have proven to be somewhat warranted. But, I don't want to reduce Ginsberg's psychotic break to a metaphor of the tragic components of the conflict between computers and humans. The young man who spent the first five years of his life in a Nazi concentration camp has oppression and control from horrible outside forces impressed into his very being. I couldn't help but think of HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey" as Ginsberg developed his ideas about the office computer. Did he see that movie when it came out in 1968, relating too heavily to the fictional story of a computer that manipulates and then kills people before being brought down itself? Whatever the genesis of this iteration of his mental illness and breakdown, the image of him being rolled out on the gurney, yelling "Get out while you can!" as the tearful Peggy and somber other women watch is one of the saddest and most serious of the show. While Don may or may not have successfully walked the multiple lines drawn out in that meeting with Cutler, Lou, and the tobacco men (the image of him whistling for a cab at the end suggests he at least THINKS he did), this episode was dark and portends the season (or at least this half of it) ending more on an Altamont note than a Woodstock one.
As Waylon Jennings sings at the end of the episode, a number of characters feel like somebody's "been stepping on my toes and I'm getting pretty tired of it." Lou is fed up with his crew at the office whom he sees as a "bunch of flag-burning snots," who have "a thing to learn about patriotism and loyalty," as well as about taste in comic strips; Betty finally realizes--HELLO!--that a traditional 1960s marriage isn't supposed to include the wife thinking--even in Italian; Henry's put out by his wife's expression of her unpopular opinion on the war because it might cost him votes (who knew there were that many Westchester County residents opposed to the war, even in 1969?); Megan--I'm assuming--worries that Don has sent a woman pregnant with his child to her home for care and money; Sally KNOWS that her mother is out to stomp all over her toes and isn't shy about speaking out, while her poor little brother (weren't those two just a few years apart when the show started? now he seems to be about five or six years younger) fears having to go through another divorce. From the opening shot of Stan laughing at Lou's comic strip about Scout, who can "take anything but an order," this episode is about authority: those who desperately try to hold on to the bit they have left and those who want to defy the authorities weighing down upon them. Some are fiercely trying--like Waylon--to walk a line, but by the end of "The Runaways," Don looks like the only one who's succeeded (for now, at least), while the tragic Ginsberg has plunged headlong over it.
It's unusual to witness Betty as the character voicing the insight that grounds an episode, but this time she is. After Henry diagnoses "wildness in kids" as a "national disease" and their neighbor Mike opines that things aren't just bad in Vietnam, they're "falling apart here too," Betty says, "Well, I don't know that those things are unrelated. I mean first the kids start off protesting and the next thing you know every authority is up for grabs." While I disagree with Betty--I think most of the student protests in the '60s were a good thing--she is spot on that challenges to authority in the political realm are connected to those in the personal realm. Once people see it as okay to talk back, they'll do so whether it's to their parents, their teachers, the President, or the CEO of Dow Chemical. And not all of their protests will be important and meaningful; sometimes they'll just get angry, or aggressive, or bratty and throw some rocks at street lights in the affluent suburbs without leaving a note explaining why, if they know why. Was that just meaningless vandalism or--as the guests at the Francis' party seem to think--a big 'fuck you' to the pristine order the Westchester adults try desperately to impose upon the chaos of 1969?
With that scenario in the background, Betty is primed to see Sally's appearance at the house with black eyes and bandaged nose as an intentional affront to Betty's arduous preparations to marry Sally off to a suitable man who would never condescend to accept a trophy wife with a less-than-perfect nose. No "Come here, sweetheart. Does it hurt?" or even, "Seriously, you're fifteen and you're playing sword fights with golf clubs? But, I hope you're not in pain." No--all Betty can offer to her battered, self-confessed 'idiot' daughter is "That's your face, young lady!"
But, even as she's chastising her daughter for not following the traditional feminine script, and getting an earful from the non-conformist Sally, Betty is also starting to realize--finally--that there is something wrong with that script. Even someone as thick and as limited by self-imposed blinders as Betty is can't fail to be insulted when her husband, in multiple arguments over a couple of days, says things like "From now on, keep your conversation to how much you hate getting toast crumbs in the butter and leave the thinking to me." Betty's having a bit of a crisis. The woman who's always tried hard to walk the line between doing what society and her mother have told her she's supposed to do and what she might be interested in doing is talking back: "I'm tired of everyone telling me to shut up! I'm not stupid. . . . Guess what? I think all by myself!" She tells Henry that she doesn't know what she's going to do. I'm not going to hold out much hope that maybe this time she will do something outside the box; I've been disappointed before, but....
And in the meantime....While Don's first wife is expressing very conservative views about Vietnam, but also staging her own rebellion in the personal sphere, his second wife is nursing her sexual jealousy of Don--which is not unjustified in general, but is in the instance of Stephanie--when the pregnant niece of Anna Draper shows up at her house, and then jumping to the other extreme when she initiates the three-way with Don and her friend. What's up there? Okay she was, as Don pointed out, stoned, but I don't think it was just the drugs talking. Was this her way of trying to contain what she sees as Don's inability to be sexually faithful? If I can't have a faithful husband, I'm going to control the terms on which he has sex with someone else? It's going to be when I can participate too? Or is this Megan just trying to fit into what she thinks everyone hip is supposed to be doing? We first see her dancing provocatively with the young man at the party, but she's keeping an eye on Don while doing so. She then orders Don to "Kiss her. I know you want to." The next morning, she's trying to be cool about making coffee in the apartment where both Don and her friend are, but as soon as Don leaves, she starts to cry into her hands. She's not been real successful at walking the line between what she's "supposed" to do and what she wants to do.
Then, there's poor Ginsberg. He's exhibited scary signs of mental instability before. In the past, he told Peggy that Martians spoke to him. This time, he believes it's the computer that has a plan to "turn us all homo." "Am I Cassandra?" he asks, referring to the ancient Greek character cursed by Apollo with the gift of prophecy and the fate of never being believed. Since the computer first arrived at SC&P, he's seen it ominously. And he's right that it represents some of the partners' desire to stifle the creative team, replacing them with a completely rational, mechanized business model. And, his fears about computers replacing humans in some spheres and about technology's effects on human creativity have proven to be somewhat warranted. But, I don't want to reduce Ginsberg's psychotic break to a metaphor of the tragic components of the conflict between computers and humans. The young man who spent the first five years of his life in a Nazi concentration camp has oppression and control from horrible outside forces impressed into his very being. I couldn't help but think of HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey" as Ginsberg developed his ideas about the office computer. Did he see that movie when it came out in 1968, relating too heavily to the fictional story of a computer that manipulates and then kills people before being brought down itself? Whatever the genesis of this iteration of his mental illness and breakdown, the image of him being rolled out on the gurney, yelling "Get out while you can!" as the tearful Peggy and somber other women watch is one of the saddest and most serious of the show. While Don may or may not have successfully walked the multiple lines drawn out in that meeting with Cutler, Lou, and the tobacco men (the image of him whistling for a cab at the end suggests he at least THINKS he did), this episode was dark and portends the season (or at least this half of it) ending more on an Altamont note than a Woodstock one.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Carousel
Mad Men, Season Seven, Episode Four, "The Monolith"
Jim Crane--with hard hat planted on head--can cheer on about how "this agency is entering the future" because construction is about to begin on 'the monolith' of a computer in a space that used to belong to the creative team, but the main story lines of this episode feature characters riding The Hollies' "Carousel," going "round and round and round and round and round and round." This includes Don and, even more so, Margaret Sterling and her parents.
Don was trying to live up to the stipulations the partners gave for his return: showing up to work every day, staying in his office, not drinking, but being made to work for Peggy on a campaign with no strategy is too much for him. Throwing his typewriter at the wall and storming out on a Friday, he comes back on Monday without his homework done and sits at his desk playing Solitaire. Lou told Cutler that he thought Don would "implode," but it's not until his confrontation with Bert that he almost does. Bert confirms for Don that the partners see him with no purpose to the firm. "We've been doing fine," he says. When Don asks why he's there, Bert throws back at him "Why are you here?" "Because I started this agency!" Bert's "along with a dead man whose office you now inhabit" sends Don into Roger's office to steal a bottle of liquor and drink himself silly back on his own couch. In his conversation with Lloyd, the computer man, Don snarkily asks him about how many people he's replaced that day, but Don is getting replaced not by a computer, but by other people. He's been put out to pasture in the office where people go to die. Fortunately for Don, though, he has his own AA sponsor without ever going through the 12 step program. After calling Freddy Rumsfeld about a Mets game, Freddy comes to rescue him and take him home to pass out. The next morning, with a cup of strong coffee, Freddy dishes it to Don straight and--because he's been there and Don knows it--Don listens. "Do the work, Don," Freddy presses and the next thing we see is a cleaned-up Don entering his office, pulling the cover off the typewriter and tapping out Peggy's twenty-five tags, which he tells her she'll have by noon. The Hollies' song in the background reminded me of another low point in Don's life--but not a low point in his career. He'd just pitched the brilliant Carousel campaign to Kodak. While his career was soaring then, he created the ad out of a false nostalgia for a family past that didn't really exist. This time, Don's career is in shambles and he's riding the carousel right around to his early days as a fledgling copywriter, but he's more honest. We'll see where this carousel ride takes him.
Meantime, there's Margaret Sterling and her parents, going round and round and round in the never-ending dysfunctional family blame game carousel. As funny as Roger is--and he was given some really good lines tonight (the computer's "going to do lots of magical things, like make Harry Crane seem important")--it cannot have been easy being his daughter. Margaret blames him for having his secretary order birthday presents for her when she was a child and blames her mother for regularly locking herself in the bathroom with a bottle of gin, but uses those reasonable complaints as justification for abandoning her own son. I have a lot of sympathy for the need to find oneself and for women who are "tired of accepting society's definitions of who [they] are." I've been there. But Margaret still seems like the same spoiled child who railed against Roger for not giving Brooks money to start a business. This time she's just railing against him for not accepting her choice to live in a filthy commune, but it still all seems designed to punish him for his bad parenting rather than figure out her own path--or maybe I'm just too biased against privileged spoiled rich kids. It's hard to say if Roger is just being a hypocrite, given his current situation living in a tawdry hotel room commune of his own, or if he really has figured out there's something wrong with the way both he and Margaret are trying to find meaning. He admits to her that he's not as open-minded as he'd thought and that while he can understand the temptation, she can't do this because she's a mother. Is that just sexism or has her message about his and Mona's parenting started to sink in? By the end of his time with her, the mud has been literally as well as figuratively slung and he leaves far from the dapper figure he cut when they pulled in.
A couple of final thoughts:
--interesting talk about the symbolism of the computer between Don and Lloyd. Lloyd says that the computer is frightening but it's made by people. "People aren't frightening?" Don tosses back. Don here is the older generation, wanting to focus on people and their experiences. The IBM 360, Lloyd tells Don, "can count more stars in a day than we can count in a lifetime." But, a man lying on his back counting stars isn't thinking of numbers, Don retorts. No, "he probably thought about going to the moon" (Lloyd's response) is just one foreshadowing of the upcoming moon walk in this episode (Margaret and Roger talked about astronauts and the moon too). Science that can send humans to the moon versus the science of human communication and advertising that Lloyd goes into Don's office to ask him about. The dance goes on between these generations and fields.
--it also continues to go on between the genders in the office. I loved Joan's response to Peggy's complaint about them giving her Don on her team so that one of them will fail:
"If it makes you feel better, Peggy, I don't think they thought about it at all."
Jim Crane--with hard hat planted on head--can cheer on about how "this agency is entering the future" because construction is about to begin on 'the monolith' of a computer in a space that used to belong to the creative team, but the main story lines of this episode feature characters riding The Hollies' "Carousel," going "round and round and round and round and round and round." This includes Don and, even more so, Margaret Sterling and her parents.
Don was trying to live up to the stipulations the partners gave for his return: showing up to work every day, staying in his office, not drinking, but being made to work for Peggy on a campaign with no strategy is too much for him. Throwing his typewriter at the wall and storming out on a Friday, he comes back on Monday without his homework done and sits at his desk playing Solitaire. Lou told Cutler that he thought Don would "implode," but it's not until his confrontation with Bert that he almost does. Bert confirms for Don that the partners see him with no purpose to the firm. "We've been doing fine," he says. When Don asks why he's there, Bert throws back at him "Why are you here?" "Because I started this agency!" Bert's "along with a dead man whose office you now inhabit" sends Don into Roger's office to steal a bottle of liquor and drink himself silly back on his own couch. In his conversation with Lloyd, the computer man, Don snarkily asks him about how many people he's replaced that day, but Don is getting replaced not by a computer, but by other people. He's been put out to pasture in the office where people go to die. Fortunately for Don, though, he has his own AA sponsor without ever going through the 12 step program. After calling Freddy Rumsfeld about a Mets game, Freddy comes to rescue him and take him home to pass out. The next morning, with a cup of strong coffee, Freddy dishes it to Don straight and--because he's been there and Don knows it--Don listens. "Do the work, Don," Freddy presses and the next thing we see is a cleaned-up Don entering his office, pulling the cover off the typewriter and tapping out Peggy's twenty-five tags, which he tells her she'll have by noon. The Hollies' song in the background reminded me of another low point in Don's life--but not a low point in his career. He'd just pitched the brilliant Carousel campaign to Kodak. While his career was soaring then, he created the ad out of a false nostalgia for a family past that didn't really exist. This time, Don's career is in shambles and he's riding the carousel right around to his early days as a fledgling copywriter, but he's more honest. We'll see where this carousel ride takes him.
Meantime, there's Margaret Sterling and her parents, going round and round and round in the never-ending dysfunctional family blame game carousel. As funny as Roger is--and he was given some really good lines tonight (the computer's "going to do lots of magical things, like make Harry Crane seem important")--it cannot have been easy being his daughter. Margaret blames him for having his secretary order birthday presents for her when she was a child and blames her mother for regularly locking herself in the bathroom with a bottle of gin, but uses those reasonable complaints as justification for abandoning her own son. I have a lot of sympathy for the need to find oneself and for women who are "tired of accepting society's definitions of who [they] are." I've been there. But Margaret still seems like the same spoiled child who railed against Roger for not giving Brooks money to start a business. This time she's just railing against him for not accepting her choice to live in a filthy commune, but it still all seems designed to punish him for his bad parenting rather than figure out her own path--or maybe I'm just too biased against privileged spoiled rich kids. It's hard to say if Roger is just being a hypocrite, given his current situation living in a tawdry hotel room commune of his own, or if he really has figured out there's something wrong with the way both he and Margaret are trying to find meaning. He admits to her that he's not as open-minded as he'd thought and that while he can understand the temptation, she can't do this because she's a mother. Is that just sexism or has her message about his and Mona's parenting started to sink in? By the end of his time with her, the mud has been literally as well as figuratively slung and he leaves far from the dapper figure he cut when they pulled in.
A couple of final thoughts:
--interesting talk about the symbolism of the computer between Don and Lloyd. Lloyd says that the computer is frightening but it's made by people. "People aren't frightening?" Don tosses back. Don here is the older generation, wanting to focus on people and their experiences. The IBM 360, Lloyd tells Don, "can count more stars in a day than we can count in a lifetime." But, a man lying on his back counting stars isn't thinking of numbers, Don retorts. No, "he probably thought about going to the moon" (Lloyd's response) is just one foreshadowing of the upcoming moon walk in this episode (Margaret and Roger talked about astronauts and the moon too). Science that can send humans to the moon versus the science of human communication and advertising that Lloyd goes into Don's office to ask him about. The dance goes on between these generations and fields.
--it also continues to go on between the genders in the office. I loved Joan's response to Peggy's complaint about them giving her Don on her team so that one of them will fail:
"If it makes you feel better, Peggy, I don't think they thought about it at all."
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