COOL MEDIUM

Greg and Sean,

Last week, Sean spoke of Anna’s death as an “important milestone” in the Dick-to-Don devolvement. And though Anna’s ghost remains absent from Season Six, it lingers by way of Don’s relationships with other women: Don longs for the emotional openness that Anna allowed him, but also struggles with intimacy in the face of performance. Anna, his wife-on-paper, represents both his truest self and the beginning of his life’s performance as Donald Draper, ad man. It’s no wonder, then, that “The Crash” helps itself to the same vulnerabilities that the Anna plot line develops; Don has come to a point where intimacy and performativity seem one and the same (“You exist for my pleasure.”). Identities (his and others’) are lost in the shuffle.

Grandma Ida makes for a compelling (albeit easy) play on Don’s Life in Fakery. Sally, always in nightgowns, struggles to recall the details of her father’s life, but she’s at a loss; Ida’s con artistry takes advantage of Don’s, well, con artistry. “Your daddy still handsome?” Ida asks Sally. Yes. This is the one thing that Sally knows for sure. A floor down, Sylvia sweeps up Don’s post-swagger cigarette butts. Or, rather, trans-swagger: it’s changed courses and objectives (“The timbre of my voice is as important as the content.”).

It’s in this line that we find the episode’s hardy-har farce. “The Crash” puts SCDPCGC on literal speed for sake of literal simulated brilliance. If we hadn’t yet seen Don’s yammering maw for the hole that it is, then we’re sure not to miss it now. This is, again, an easy play. But I tend toward Mad Men’s dippings into the absurd, even the ones that lean on convenient devices (read: acid). But shrinking cigarettes are a far cry from bum shots of Energy Serum, and this time, the whole office is whack. I’m into it—don’t get me wrong. But it makes me uncomfortable in the way that Jim Cutler’s voyeurism makes me uncomfortable. Which is to say, I’m creeped out, but also entertained.

Don’s flashbacks are another matter. Regardless of backdrop, nothing bores me more than a kid who can’t act (see: Moonrise Kingdom*). Moreover, flashbacks are prefab devices. We assume their significance on existence alone. And it’s not as if Don’s oedipal tendencies need a soup session as thematic backing. So given my indifference, I’m most intrigued by Don’s flashback triggers. Why, for instance, does Don think of Amy when he spots Peggy comforting Ted? Does he sense their professional/sexual ambiguity or does the Energy Serum heighten his already-mounting inclination toward those who comfort? Yes and yes!

Further: Is Frank Gleason’s daughter the Tiresias to Don’s raving Oedipus? Why not! Her “does someone love me?” line and heart check-up do the work that we’ve already done. Other thematic pop-ups follow suit (“You’re like my brother,” Peggy says to Stan before they kiss; “My mother, no, my first girlfriend,” says Ken when asked about his otherworldly tap dancing skills; “Your mama don’t know how to take care of nobody,” coos Amy to a young and passive Dick Whitman), and extend past the latently sexual and into the generally ambiguous (Sally takes on a maternal role, Bobby asks, “are we Negroes?,” and Don—naturally—becomes a babbling dummy with a pull string, though this role is less ambiguous than most). Greg—does all this rapid-fire excite or tire you? Or is it like speed i.e. does both?

All of these sideshow antics make me wonder: where is Bob Benson? Why is his character not put to use? Why does he not scuttle down the stairs in bystander enthusiasm? Why does he not join the office footrace, completely and utterly sober? Why does he not throw a pen above Stan’s head and hit the apple’s dead center?

One miscellaneous observation of minor worth:

Speaking of impalement arts, I’m reminded of Elisabeth Moss in Top of the Lake when, in Episode Two, her character purposefully hits a man in the chest with a dart. I watched this episode right after I watched “The Crash” and thus had to merge scenes:

Your face looks like a bag of walnuts,

Erinrose

*Do I say this to ruffle feathers? Who’s to know.

Hello friends,

As Greg has mentioned,“Man with a Plan” often frames Don and Ted as mirror images. On one hand we have Don, an enigma who swings between giddy assholishness and emotional deadness. On the other hand we have Ted, a warm, humorous man often shown at moments of relative emotional weakness—kissing Peggy because he’s “grateful,” reacting with shock and sadness as he learns that his friend and business partner Frank Gleason is dying, admitting to Frank that he finds Don’s opacity and eloquence mysterious. Don is a “cold fish” and Ted seems like a pretty nice guy, as much as he would hate to hear me say it.

The contrast expresses itself in their different styles of getting things done. Ted plans a meeting at one o’clock and shows up at one o’clock. While he and the creatives have “a rap session about margarine in general,” Don is in a hotel room with Sylvia projecting a version of himself (“Super-Draper,” as Greg aptly put it) that is somehow more masculine and inscrutable than I previously thought possible for him. Ted gets things done by showing up on time and putting in the effort. Don gets things done by presenting the particular version of himself  most advantageous for him in the situation at hand. Just look at the way they each play for status within the newly vague hierarchy of their joined agency—Ted demonstrates a hard-earned skill when he flies his plane to upstate NY to impress a client; Don ingratiates himself to his rival by offering him an “olive branch” and then takes him down a notch by displaying him to the office at his drunkest.

As different as the two are, I can’t ignore the resemblance between Ted, that eager-to-please puppy dog, and Don’s alter ego, Dick Whitman. The scene of Ted sitting by Frank Gleason’s hospital bed, for instance, was full with the sort of empathy and simple humanity we haven’t seen on Mad Men since a wide-eyed and smiling Dick used to visit Anna Draper in California or Don wept upon learning she had died.

And it is fitting to consider Anna Draper, because doing so brings into sharp relief the difference between the two people that this man is capable of being: Dick the warm human being and Don the charming, but hollow, impostor. I see Anna’s death as an important milestone in his sad transformation from Dick into Don. If you’ll remember “The Suitcase,” the episode in which Anna died, Don’s sudden show of emotion was brought on not only by the loss of a person he actually loved, but also by the loss of the person that really knew him as he genuinely was, i.e., knew him as Dickie before he took up the act of being Don. When Peggy finds him crying—

Don: “Somebody very important to me died.”

Peggy: “Who?”

Don: “The only person in the world who really knew me.”

To wit, we might consider the absence of Anna in seasons 5 and 6 (and the absence of Peggy—the only other person who really knows him—from the beginning of season 6) as part of the reason that the man abandons what is left of Dick and loses himself in being Don Draper. The state of pure, empty swagger gets so bad that he is capable of saying to Silvia, “You exist, in this room, for my pleasure.”

But as you mentioned, Greg, the swagger becomes pathetic the very moment that it stops working. And I think that this moment is very important because it is the first time in a long while that we see this man as Dick, as a human being compelled by fear, boredom, neediness, lust, loneliness. He even begs—“Please?” And I see the following scenes where he interacts with Megan—she talks about going to Hawaii again and the sound slowly cuts out; she cries watching the news reports of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and he sits on the bedside, looking at nothing—as crisis moments for him. He is bored with Megan and his dalliance with Sylvia ended in him falling for her rather than vice versa. His Don Draper act has failed to secure him a romantic relationship with levels of intimacy anywhere close to the love he had reached with Anna when he was, simply, Dickie.

I would be remiss, of course, if I did not talk about Bob Benson, this week’s big question mark. Who is he and what does he want? You asked, Greg, what I thought Bob’s arrival at Joan’s apartment bearing gifts says about him. I think we are seeing many Bobs at once—a mixture of warmth and a canny ability to offer people exactly what they want and need so that they will give him what he wants and needs. We saw the same mixture of Bobs in the hospital, I think, when he calmed Joan and smooth-talked the nurse into fast-tracking Joan’s treatment. And, if all this kindness from Bob is just a plan to save his career, so what? He hasn’t hurt anyone, he has only found the one partner at the firm who appreciates a bit of warmth, he has only put his EQ to use. If this is what it’s like for Joan to be used by Bob Benson, she is getting off much lighter than she did with Pete. 

This is not to say I’m sure what to make of Bob’s offer to pay for Pete’s sex at the “party house up on Lex”, though. The real defining Bob moment, I think, will come when he is in a position to fuck someone over for personal gain. Until then, all we can do is wonder.

Misc. and Sundry:

- Bert Cooper has, somehow, managed to one-up his request for “spirits of elderflower” by spectacularly mispronouncing “aspirin.”

- The sign on the door of Peggy’s new office, “coffee chief,” perfectly encapsulates the differences between the two agencies. She is back in the boy’s club.

- In an episode full of redundancies—Pete’s mom confuses the Kennedys, Don/Dawn (“the white one or the black one?”), Peggy/Margie, Don/Ted, Roger/Cutler (“Roger Sterling with bad breath”)—one stood out above the rest. I appreciated watching Roger fire that blowhard Burt Peterson for the second time. The act suggests that Burt was a one-man redundancy.

- The episode takes place in June, 1968, and Sylvia is worried about her son, who is in France. Are we to assume that he was participating in a demonstration during May, that famous period of civil unrest? Is he a budding revolutionary? Someone get him in contact with Megan’s dad.

I hope you can still look up to me,

Sean

“Every good deed is not a part of a plan,” Joan’s mother tells us near the end of “Man With a Plan.” We finish the episode not knowing whether to believe her—after all, she hasn’t visited her daughter’s office lately. Most interactions at SCDP (or whatever it’s called these days), already a place of false faces, have the interpretive latitude of Bert Cooper’s Rothko following the merger with Ted Chaough’s firm. When can a gesture be understood on its own terms? After layoffs have ended, most likely, and only after Don and Ted have finished their scuffle over status.

More than once throughout this episode, the camera frames Don and Ted as reflections of each other. The two men are not equals in any uncomplicated way—their approaches diverge wildly, and only one of them uses Gilligan’s Island as a brainstorming tool—but Ted is a credible competitor, and by some measures, hipper than Don. (Only one of them says “groovy” and “free associate.”) Once under the same ceiling, the new coworkers test each other with a series of gestures that have both overt and ulterior meanings.

Don’s offer of whiskey is the olive branch as pissing contest; Don first uses alcohol to challenge Ted’s manhood, then lets a drunk Ted embarrass himself in front of other staffers in order to regain some lost credibility. Later, in the sky, Ted feigns deference to a cringing Don: “You’re going to talk to Henry Lamont. You’re the one that knows him.” Don’s reply: “No matter what I say, you’re the guy who flew us up here in his own plane.”

Meanwhile, Bob Benson has “no place to go,” as he admits in a clinic waiting room. This plays like a moment of naked vulnerability, and perhaps it is—perhaps we have the privilege of watching Joan meet the real Benson. Then again, Bob shows a striking canniness only moments later, approaching a waiting room nurse with what seems like the particular weakness of the polite person, then manipulating her into taking Joan for immediate examination. (This once again proves that while everyone on Mad Men is a jackass some of the time, no one is a jackass all of the time, i.e. Crane’s Law.)

Bob shows savvy and self-awareness even before that, of course. He skirts Joan out of the office under the notice of everyone else, half-joking beforehand that he’ll “bother [her] all the way out.” So what do you make, Sean, of Bob’s appearance at Joan’s apartment, football in hand? Are we seeing a calculating Bob Benson, a guileless Bob Benson, or evidence that Bob can be many things at once?

Back to laws and jackasses: another lesson Mad Men can teach us is that swagger looks pathetic the moment it stops working. Don’s position as a domineering sexual hypnotist is only as real as Sylvia Rosen allows it to be. When she breaks off their affair, we see the character he’s been performing in their hotel room—a sort of super-Draper—is part of an effort to control not only her but also (some combination of) fear, boredom, neediness…basically every hazard of the human experience. Although Don is skilled at manipulating both people and circumstance, he often has luck on his side, as Erinrose noted last week. I was worried after this season’s first couple episodes that season six would allow Don to be flawed in only the sexiest of ways, but sometimes even he plays the fool.

Misc.:

- The camera lingers in Harry Crane’s office long enough to catch him burping. Obviously.

- “I thought you said ‘come in.’” For all we know, Bob Benson’s game playing begins right there. You glorious weirdo.

- I don’t doubt Matthew Weiner’s attention to detail, but was the Madison Avenue of the 1960s really such a Democratic stronghold?

- John Slattery directed “Man With a Plan,” and between this episode and last season’s “Signal 30,” the guy has proven himself to be one of Mad Men’s most reliable behind-the-camera talents.

- Great bit of writing-people-who-resemble-real-human-beings: Peggy confronts Don about his treatment of Ted, cutting right through Don’s BS, but also makes the situation about her. Convinced, rightfully, of her value, she can’t grasp the scope of this battle of egos.

Greg

Sean and Greg,

In retrospect, I’m not surprised that “For Immediate Release” occurs over the course of a Mother’s Day week. The episode’s plot movements are male-driven, sure, but its underpinnings are—without question—female. Mother’s Day! A celebration of women who nurture others, who foster something bigger than themselves! So in “For Immediate Release,” the holiday’s irony lies in the steps that our female characters take toward a greater good, how little they benefit from their efforts, how much their male counterparts benefit instead, and how little the men take note of the women’s instrumentality. The reading isn’t deep, but it’s worth noting for sake of better understanding where the season is headed.

“For Immediate Release” opens with three establishing scenes: 1) SCDP’s banker discusses the company’s public option and admires Joan’s “spotless papers.” “It’s a marvel. Everyone wants you, don’t they,” Pete says to Joan after the banker leaves. 2) Roger and flight attendant Daisy wake up together and Daisy admits that she’s already put on her makeup and gotten back into bed. “Is that what you do?” Roger remarks. 3) Pete attempts to have sex with Trudy who softly rejects him. Trudy has “taken note of his efforts” to make things right and flows around the room in a fuchsia sleeping gown.

All three women appear a bit otherworldly in these moments. How do they do it? What’s their secret? But there is little glamor or mystique in their toil. SCDP’s success with Jaguar is, in large part, due to Joan’s “dealing with” Herb Rennet, an act that Joan lives with daily. (Don then throws it all away.) Daisy winks at sleaze balls, makes quiet phone calls, and loses baggage so that Roger can land a deal. And Trudy cares for a baby by herself in the wake of a marriage founded on a Vicks partnership gone south. These women are ultimately instrumental in shaping SCDP’s success, but their efforts go unnoticed and/or under-appreciated. Instead—as Sean pointed out—Don and Ted rub elbows in a dark bar, SCDP and CGC men shake hands in the Chevy lobby, and Herb and Don redden each other’s faces over (uneaten?!) dessert.

Meanwhile the women are off “powdering their noses.” “My plan is to pack [the dinner] with spouses to limit the explosion,” says Roger earlier. This is a regular office tactic and the women are used to it. Take Herb’s wife, for instance. She is certainly a fluff ball, but she’s also just reciting her lines. “See you soon!” she calls as the others leave the table in a hurry. Upon exiting, the “tall and tan and yummy and lovely” Megan turns heads, but when Don and Megan return home, Don wants her not because she dresses seductively (as Marie recommends), but because Don is high on his own brazenness.

He’s so high, in fact, that he delivers an elevator sermon to newly jobless Arnold: “I don’t cut people open. I don’t believe in fate. Make your own opportunities.” Are you fucking kidding me with this garbage? Don doesn’t care that he’s “swinging from vine to vine,” even after publicly upsetting Joan. In fact, he’s happiest just after she storms out. He grins from ear to ear while Roger feeds him the new Chevy details. We rarely see Don this happy, and—if I’m going to be perfectly honest—I think it’s sort of repulsive. Where is flat faced, mortality-obsessed Don? I almost miss him.

Instead, Ted is the one preoccupied with death. Frank Gleason’s cancer diagnosis hits Ted hard, and he kisses Peggy in a moment of… something (or Emerson’s Something, am I right?). It’s certainly not straight romance because seconds after Ted apologizes (“I’m just grateful”), he turns his back, deep in thought (probably about Frank). Peggy, on the other hand, finds meaning in the moment, but must head home to her new apartment on the side of Manhattan that Abe prefers. Later, Peggy returns to Ted’s office in excitement and finds Don—her strangled past incarnate—sitting coolly on the couch. Peggy, like these other women, has put so much effort into making things right for herself, but perhaps it’s all for naught.

Quickly:

-I really enjoyed the physical comedy in this episode. Pete falls down on his bum mid-diatribe, office members peek around the corner to witness the fight in the conference room and then scatter when Don turns around, Bob Benson wordlessly offers two coffees through office window glass. It’s all great, and even better when it happens just before, after, or amidst serious dialog.

-Marie’s French accent has always been bad, but it is atrocious in this episode. Perhaps my distaste for her accent is exacerbated by my distaste for her entire character and presence. I will gladly forget… her… name.

-What if Bob Benson is the one who pooped on Peggy’s stairs?

-Or, better yet—what if it’s Don?

You had to write that down?

Erinrose

Erinrose, Greg,

While watching this week’s episode, I was reminded of the season three closer, “Shut The Door. Have a Seat,” in which the prime movers at Sterling Cooper make a bold escape from their own company as it lies on the chopping block, taking their clientele with them and resurfacing as a new agency, in modernized digs, and with a few extra names on the door.

“For Immediate Release” followed a similar plot arc. SCDP appears to be screwed—Don’s petulance has lost him the Jaguar account; Pete has accidentally ruined his relationship with Vick’s Chemical (and Trudy, and his father-in-law); and the agency is beginning to understand that Roger Sterling could shmooze Chevrolet forever and it wouldn’t matter to General Motors, who would be happy to take their creative and hand it over to a bigger agency. And then Don makes a brash decision at the 11th hour—what if, he suggests, SCDP and CGC were to band together? Cut to a brightly lit showroom where four well dressed men stand. A CGC partner quips (“I want to make this clear—unless this works, I’m against it”), Roger Sterling quips (“That’s what I said”). The four men walk past a few cars that look like spaceships while some spritely music plays. The boys are at it again.

This episode may be reminiscent of season three, but things are different this time around—Mad Men is less congratulatory of Don’s antics. We see now that if Don had been able to hold his tongue with Jaguar, he would not have needed the Chevy account so badly in the first place. That is, we see now that Don’s tendency to make big, bold moves is what gets him into undesirable situations in the first place. And then gets him back out again. And so on. One imagines this happening over and over throughout Don’s life—from wife to wife, from car account to car account. “Don’t act like you had a plan,” Pete says, “you’re Tarzan, swinging from vine to vine.” Now that the show has stopped glamorizing Don’s boldness, there is little left to redeem him but a silver tongue. I wouldn’t quite say they are flattening his character, though, just pulling apart the myth that they built around him.

The character of Pete Campbell seems to be undergoing a similar operation. For whatever else was wrong with Pete (read: almost everything), he always displayed a racial consciousness that seemed sophisticated for his time and environment. This week, however, he threw a hissy fit that was just straight-up racist, describing the woman his father-in-law visited at the “party house” as the “biggest, blackest prostitute you’ve ever seen.” This moment shows that Pete’s progressive attitudes tend to fail him when they are not convenient to his career (remember when he pitched an ad campaign in Ebony?), and as a result it also recasts his earlier moments of racial sensitivity in a less flattering light. I can hardly watch his argument about MLK, for instance, without seeing self-regard as the true motivation for his disgust. He seemed more concerned by the ways in which MLK mirrors his own predicament—they are both men suddenly and irrevocably removed from their families—than he was by Harry’s overt racism. Pete, like Don, is losing redeeming qualities. At least he appears to be capable of having his heart broken.

Bob Benson. It seems that all we can do now is observe him, as we are given so little to speculate on. My excitement about his character has slowly morphed into dread at the realization that all does is trail Pete around. Remember when he came to Pete’s office in the middle of the night to ask if he could buy Pete a sandwich? This week he one-upped himself in a big, big way by following Pete to the brothel and offering to pay for his celebratory sex. Bob appeared a few times later in the episode, as well—holding his two cups of coffee outside of Ken’s office as Pete goes on his racist rant, on the stairs as Pete yells at Don for ruining the Jaguar account, and peeping through the glass walls of the conference room as Roger breaks the news about the new Chevy pitch. To be fair to Bob, he’s not the only one we’ve seen spying on the partners in their glass room, but he’s certainly the creepiest.

Misc:

- What was all that talk of Mother’s Day? I’m trained to believe that every detail is significant, but this one confounds me.

-I spit out my drink when I saw Ted Chaough reading “Something” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. This scene was is almost too over the top.

-I can’t help but imagine Peggy, our recovering Catholic, feeling like she brought her misfortune on herself by fantasizing about Ted.

Do you want my flowers? I’m quite done with them.

Sean

Greg and Sean,

We’d be remiss, I think, in neglecting to recall Season Three’s episode “The Grown Ups” as it plays foil to Mad Men’s latest national tragedy. The characters crowd around their television sets after Kennedy’s assassination and again after MLK’s. In “The Grown Ups,” Roger’s daughter’s wedding, as you might remember, is both a goof and a gain; very few people show up, but Margaret finally concedes to happiness and Roger gives a rather touching speech. (Money well spent!) Meanwhile several people sneak back to the kitchen to watch the news of Kennedy’s death. The bit is, in essence: privileged white people attend perfunctory events in the midst of tragedy.

Weiner revisits this conceit in Season Six. This time, ad agencies gather for an awards banquet and the news hits as a microscopic Paul Newman gives his speech. Everyone is so far away from Paul Newman! And so far removed from real progressivism! Lots of squinting ensues. The crowd is confused and upset, but the program continues after a ten minute break. “What else are we going to do?” asks Don, and the question is a legitimate one.

But an important distinction between “The Grown Ups” and “The Flood” is that the former depicts a white ensemble that mourns the loss of a celebrated president (“The whole country’s drinking!”), while the latter depicts a white ensemble that responds to a tragedy not entirely their own. So why are we privy to Mad Men’s white principals’ responses alone? The answer, as Greg said, isn’t entirely clear, but I don’t think that Weiner’s approach completely misses the mark. In fact, I think that the episode feels smart insofar as it makes use of the close-third. We, the audience, are made witness to the tribulations of white characters exclusively and thus experience a unique discomfort: the discomfort that the privileged feel during times of inexplicable turmoil.

Even characters with the best intentions misstep as they navigate this event: Abe is practically giddy as he readies himself to “go to Harlem in a tuxedo” on assignment; Joan side-hugs Dawn in an attempt to express her condolences; Peggy, as she discusses her bid on an apartment mid-race riots, wonders, “Do I want to live up there?;” and Pete and Harry duke it out like buffoons in the middle of their half-abandoned office floor. “Let me put this in terms you’ll understand,” spits Pete. “That man had a wife and four children.”

Of course our characters turn to [the idea of] family, a subject that feels most immediately relevant to MLK’s assassination. In its wake they ask themselves, Who and where are the people I love? and How am I acting toward these people? Pete is concerned about the safety of a family he’s neglected and wants to be with them now. (“This cannot be made good; it’s shameful” thus refers to more than just MLK’s death.) Similarly, Ginsberg’s father insists that “now’s the time when a man and a woman need to be together the most. In the flood, the animals went two by two.” And then there’s Don.

Greg, I am similarly confounded by the Planet of the Apes scene. The father-son time seems right in spite of the forced post-apocalyptic film choice (“You idiots! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!”). I liked that Don, in a moment of [self-]indulgence, lets Bobby see the movie again, but Bobby’s interaction with the usher is underdeveloped. Ultimately it’s a Don Moment couched in a Race Moment, and that move feels a little cheap to me. Later, when Megan and Don talk about parenthood, Don speaks of paternal love as a feeling that, up until recently, he’d been “pretending to have.” Nothing in the episode disturbed me more than this moment. I am hopeful that Weiner makes a more convincing push to humanize a quickly flattening/pseudo-sociopathic Don.

In short:

-My favorite scene in “The Flood” is, hands down, when Pete orders Chinese and tries to speak to the Asian delivery man who speaks no English. It so succinctly encapsulates the entire episode and ends with Kartheiser half-lit in his bachelor kitchen. “Jesus!” as Bobby would say.

-“I’ve never had sex, not even once” is the best way to admit to one’s own virginity. I am hopeful that Ginsberg’s nascent love thread will continue because, well, duh.

-Let’s reflect on this line: “There is a tear and in that tear are all the tears in the world. All the animals, crying.” Randall’s delivery (impeccable) is trumped only by Stan’s muffled laughter (infectious).

-Weight gain, hair change, what next? Were we to revisit our collective Speculative Lens, I might venture to say that Betty will continue down her road of physical transformation and become completely unrecognizable by the end of Season Six.

-Don’s current affair with Lindsay Weir, I mean Sylvia, is the biggest Snoozefest this side of Yawnsville, but I blame the script and not the delivery.

Go get back in your cage,

Erinrose

Last week, Sean asked whether Mad Men was letting down viewers with its treatment of Dawn, and by extension the topic of race relations. To put it mildly, that question is still relevant following this week’s episode, “The Flood.”

In theory, I believe that fiction does not owe us anything. In practice, I’m still a little baffled that Matthew Weiner and co. chose to show the effects of MLK’s assassination on African Americans only in the context of Mad Men’s white principals and their reactions. (In a season that gave us Don reading Dante’s Inferno five minutes in, the answer can’t be that focusing on Dawn would be too on the nose.)

I didn’t always find early criticisms of Mad Men and race compelling; it seemed cruelly appropriate that people like Roger Sterling would be insulated from racial conflict, even from extended interactions with people of color. I still think that in earlier seasons, the introduction of racial tension (or a race-related awakening) might have played like a contrivance. Not every TV show can be everything to everybody, etc. With “The Flood,” though, I wonder what the excuse is.

As Don and Bobby wait for their second screening of Planet of the Apes to start, Bobby asks a black usher if he has seen the film, then says, “Everybody likes to go to the movies when they’re sad.” Don later intimates to Megan that the gesture provoked an unexpected swell of love for Bobby—he’s moved by his son’s simple kindness of intent. (This being Don Draper, I’m reluctant to all it an outright breakthrough.) However, Bobby’s words are as close as we get to an indication of how this usher might actually feel—the man’s effectively a narrative stepping stone.

Read More

Hello friends and colleagues!

It feels good to be posting again. We can only hope that our exchanges have the same conviviality of Peggy and Stan’s pre-ketchup late-night phone chats.

Sean, you mention Don’s drunken interrogation of the doorman, and this sudden morbidity puzzled me throughout the season six opener. The presence of death also distinguished season five, perhaps Mad Men’s best to date. Even before the undignified departure of Lane Pryce, death loomed over each episode—I recall more than one blogger wondering whether we’d once again see the gun Pete keeps in his office. So what are we to make of Matthew Weiner and co. leading with more of the same? I can believe that Don thinks about death all the time—in a very literal way, death enabled Dick Whitman to become Don Draper. But Don’s encounter with the G.I. in Hawaii was not a compelling inciting incident. Doesn’t stuff like this happen every time Don goes on vacation?

Mad Men is projected to run seven seasons, one longer than any other standout from the Golden Age of Television. (Unless you count Sopranos seasons 6.1 and 6.2 as distinct seasons, but David Chase and HBO didn’t, so.) Perhaps Weiner, the viewers, and everyone else need this many seasons to cover the 1960s at a comfortable pace. But after the first episodes of season six, I wonder how often Mad Men will retread the same thematic ground before it concludes.

Speaking of treading ground: I’ll admit that I was under the spell of “The Doorway” at times, especially when it gave us visuals as powerful as Don’s doctor friend taking his skis out into the Manhattan streets. And if Don’s taking of a new mistress also felt a little overfamiliar, let me ask you guys: by taking Don back down this path, have Weiner and his writers passed judgment on Don (or at least rendered a diagnosis) like never before? The start of season six tells us, persuasively, that Don is a slave to Pursuit. He needs the excitement of a chase, even at the expense of a good marriage.

As Doctor Faye Miller explained at the end of season four, Don Draper only likes the beginning of things. But now that Mad Men has reminded us that there’s a void in Don, that he’s an incurable hound, where do we go from here?

While we’re at it, let’s talk about another marriage in crisis. People are routinely surprised when I tell them Pete Campbell might be my favorite Mad Men character. This has less to do with his marginal likability than with the function he serves opposite Don. Pete is another searcher, another depressive. And with Pete Campbell, the show can follow a deglamorized version of life as a perpetual yearner. Mad Men has accelerated the timetable on Vincent Kartheiser’s receding hairline and given Pete a bachelor pad that’s the most Lynchian thing we’ve seen in six seasons. (And yes, I remember that Don once strangled Madchen Amick in a dream.) There is no romance to the misdeeds of Pete Campbell—we would see fewer Mad Men-themed cocktail parties if he were the show’s lead.

When Pete’s latest act of infidelity has repercussions for his home life, Trudy sends him packing. Viewers saw a flash of Trudy’s assertiveness in season five’s “Signal 30” (a great Pete Campbell episode); she managed to talk Don Draper into a dinner at the Campbells’s despite his evasions. So perhaps this turn isn’t entirely out of character. Even so, the development played as very sudden to me, and for that matter heavily ‘written’—a Mad Men rarity. Do you agree?

Sean’s right to note that the denseness of a typical Mad Men episode creates its own challenges for the Tumblrer—Peggy Olson’s new status quo deserves a post to itself. (For the curious: it has had some elsewhere.) Not to mention a more-brash-than-ever Harry Crane, who challenges the “secret” part of Joan’s office open secret. So before I finish, let me at least answer the question about Dawn.

Is her storyline a disappointment so far? Is something a disappointment if it feels like a disappointment? Matthew Weiner is from the David Chase school of showrunning, which means, among other things, that he hands out screentime to ancillary characters piecemeal, often keeping them in the background for episodes at a time. But for those eager to see Mad Men aggressively confront race, Dawn’s absence from an episode is more conspicuous than that of a Ken Cosgrove. I’m not sure Weiner and co. are bungling Dawn’s larger arc—I’d even argue they make every scene with her count—but sometimes it feels as though they are anyway. Did her détente with Joan resonate with the two of you? Will you be disappointed if it isn’t developed further? (Does Dawn know Joan slept with a Jaguar rep?)

Misc.:

- Don has never looked older than he does in “To Have and To Hold,” asking, ‘What does a love scene consist of?’ (And never mind Pete’s likability, Don’s an emotional tyrant by episode’s end. For someone who excels at projecting empathy, he doesn’t even bother with Megan anymore.)

- New addition Bob Benson. LOVE THIS GUY. I get excited every time he’s onscreen—I agree it’s only a matter of time before some season-three-lawnmower-level weirdness happens in his orbit.

- ‘Who can tell at that place?’ ‘Everybody’s scared there.’ - If Dawn were in more episodes, she’d already have replaced Peggy as our Official Audience Surrogate

- Stan’s beard overpowers nearly every shot it’s in.

Greg

Greg, Erinrose! Welcome back!

I hope you’re as thrilled as I am to discuss this current season of Mad Men and leave Nashville behind. Though the country-music soap opera was the most highly rated new drama of the year, it tested my belief that all culture, no matter how superficially constructed, can sustain serious and extended analysis. The pop-fizz carelessness of its storytelling and the sparing deployment of character details proved to be too much for us to handle. Nashville as we eventually imagined it—a meaningful world of speculative-technology fictions and pop-culture cross pollination—may have been a weird and wonderful thing, but it was a world we had to build for ourselves. This was a valuable task if not a sustainable one.

In trading beans for ketchup, I think we might have replaced our problem with its inverse. Mad Men’s episodes not only accommodate deep reading in a way that Nashville never did, they invite it. Though the possible readings of Mad Men are not very broad (it is not exactly radical in most formal respects), the show is impressively deep—its narrative is carefully constructed and flush with enough detail that it could be obsessed over indefinitely. This is obvious from a simple glance at the field we are now entering—whereas before we contributed our analyses to a conversation that didn’t even exist before we showed up, we now arrive late (fashionably, I hope!) to a conversation already crowded and buzzing. While writing about Nashville, we might have asked, “What more is worth saying?” While writing about Mad Men, we might ask, “What is worth saying that hasn’t already been said?” I’m confident we’re up to the task. Let’s jump in.

Rather than regale you both with a plot synopsis of a show you’ve already been watching, I’ll touch on some events quickly so we can get up to speed with a few of the season’s major themes and memorable moments. So far death casts a long shadow—in the first episode alone Jonesy the doorman passes away for a brief spell, Don reads Inferno, Roger’s mother and shoe-shine guy die, PFC Dinkins talks about his survival chances at war, and Don pitches an ad about his own suicide. Though this season opener is a little obvious about this theme of mortality, it felt contemplative rather than artless, and there was at least one moment I found striking: Don, after having relieved the contents of his stomach into an umbrella holder at the wake for Roger’s mother, is brought back to his apartment by Pete Campbell and Ken Cosgrove. Waiting for the elevator in the lobby, Don starts to prod Jonesy very insistently—

Don: “No, I want to know. I want to know. What’d you see when you died?”

Jonesy: “I dunno, doc said I wasn’t really dead.”

Don: “I saw it! You were dead! He died right there. What did you see?”

Jonesy: “I don’t like to think about it.”

Don: “Well you must have seen something.”

Jonesy: “I guess there was a light.”

Don: “Was it like hot tropical sunshine?”

Jonesy: “I don’t know.”

Don: “Did you hear the ocean?”

This is one of the few moments this season that the otherwise catatonic Don has shown any enthusiasm, as frantic as that enthusiasm may have been. Here Don seems fixated on death, not as an escape from the indignities of life the way Lane Pryce did, but rather as some great last frontier, as an object of curiosity in a world that has become rote, as a jumping off point.

Mad Men has also been pressing hard on another of its central themes: the gap between lives as we imagine them and as they are. We see this clearly in Joan’s friend, who praises Joan for making partner at a big Madison Avenue advertising firm without needing the support of a husband. The irony, of course, is that this friend doesn’t know that Joan won her partnership not by transcending the expectations made of her gender, but by taking advantage of them. That is, Joan didn’t succeed in spite of a stifling workplace gender bias, but by exploiting it. It’s a victory, sure, but a functional, possibly hollow one. And Joan, the only person who really has a right to judge whether or not this victory counts a step forward, doesn’t seem satisfied. 

The theme of this gap between imagination and reality extends to the show’s depiction of its characters’ successes, which are as hollow as ever—Ken gets the Dow account and it makes him miserable, Peggy becomes the new Don at a different company and finds the art of management confounding, and Pete gets his Don-Draper lovepad only to have it cost him his wife. And Bob, who desperately wants in on all this success but doesn’t see how it causes everyone’s misery, flatters Pete Campbell with a bunch of talk about how Pete makes success in the advertising world look good. Pete, uncharacteristically aware, replies: “It’s all about what it looks like.”

If this season of Mad Men has remained conscious of the stories we tell ourselves, it is equally conscious of the ways that technological development gives us new raw material for fashioning those stories. In noticing that episode 3, “The Collaborators,” is bursting at the seams with war talk, I couldn’t help but think of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, in which she identifies the new familiarity with war afforded by the television. “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country,” she wrote, “is a quintessential modern experience […] Wars are now living rooms sights and sounds.” The most interesting thing to me about these recent episodes of Mad Men is that they demonstrate the intrusion of war into the living room, into the everyday background ambience of the home, and show the language of war bubbling up into everyday life. As Evan Kindley at Dear TV has put it (suggesting more than I could hit on here), “The theater of war is the whorehouse is the boardroom.” We are produced by the culture we produce.

And, most humorously, the show has proven to be equally conscious about the stories it tells, even being so cheeky as to include a soap opera named To Have and to Hold within its own soap opera. It’s all a bit on the nose for a show about storytelling, a bit Paul Auster-y, but at least there isn’t another character named Don or Dawn who works in advertising.

At the risk of going on for too long, I’ll spare you the list of gifs I’d like made from this episode (Joan and her whiskey!).

Misc:

Would you watch an entire hour of Mad Men’s brilliantly useless “next week on” montages? I would. I have a pet theory that all these snatches of dialog are selected at random.

I would keep an eye on Bob, if I were you. Since he has shown up in all of this season’s episodes, I’d wager the corporate climber is going to be important to this story.

What do you make of Dawn’s storyline? It felt like a throwaway to me, which was horribly disappointing.

Are you on dope?

Sean

Erinrose, Sean,

Are you as surprised as I am? “You Win Again” was a marvel of construction compared to Nashville’s previous two episodes and an enjoyable hour of television by any measure. Hayden Panettiere continues to defy our expectations; she once again has all the best scenes. I squirmed during Juliette’s dressing down of her mom following Jolene’s fit of slider grabbing, and like Erinrose, I was touched by their eventual reconciliation. Jolene recoils like an abused dog as her daughter first approaches her, then finds that Juliette still cares for her after all. Juliette, after seeing attention directed at Rayna at every turn—even when Juliette intervenes at Deacon’s house—finds the validation she needs in her mother. This is compelling stuff, elegantly done.

On the other side of Nashville, we learn that Liam has been maneuvering behind Rayna’s back in hopes of scoring a finder’s fee from Countless records, which means he apparently is a different character than the show has set him up to be for the last several episodes. We also learn that the head of Edgehill Records is somehow privy to this information, which catalyzes the end of Liam’s partnership with Rayna. Sometimes, obviously, Nashville is dumb. But some shows, you just have to say the serenity prayer before clicking Hulu’s play arrow and let the dumb pass by you. This scene was idiotic, but we could always be watching something else, and it leads us to one of the show’s most interesting questions: How do you solve a problem like Rayna James?

With the exception of her manager, Rayna doesn’t seem capable of having a mature, functional relationship with any adult males. (“Another man in my life lyin’ to me.”) Most of the men of Nashville are total wrecks, granted. But although the show has by and large depicted Rayna as a port in a storm, I’m inclined to wonder how much of life’s hurricanes are her fault. Sean, Erinrose, do you agree with me here? Is there a divide between how Nashville presents Rayna—the tone or spirit of this presentation, let’s say—and what the facts of her life suggest?

Misc.:

- Some genuinely funny lines throughout this episode: “Co- means two.” “Co- actually means with.” - “It was out of tune.” - “Why do we have to do everything at the crack of butt?”

- Gunnar and Scarlett’s song near the beginning of the episode has weirdly loaded lyrics. Choice? Natural selection? What are you two trying to tell us exactly?

- Did either of you assume, at the start of Avery’s nighttime driving scene, that he was headed for a crash? Wishful thinking?

You told me to speak from the heart, OK?

Greg