Conversations About Mad Men

In an episode full of revelations, the main secret driving the the show’s central character gets kept under wraps - for everyone besides Faye, a new member of the Draper/Whitman inner circle. But let’s review everything we learned about the rest of the characters: Lane is involved with a “negro”! Joan is preggers with Roger’s baby! Joan gets a secret abortion! Roger loses 69% of SCDP’s revenue! Lane’s a victim of domestic violence!

This episode worked so well because it played on the central theme of the show: secrets and lies. And now that we’re four seasons in, the audience is getting a huge payoff for paying attention all these years. We see the resentment Pete harbors toward Don, as Pete has known the Dick Whitman secret since 1960 and now it’s coming back to ruin his business relationship. (Only the irony there is Don actually helped fix Pete’s big secret - the Peggy baby situation - all those years ago.) We see the marked difference between Betty’s reaction to learning Don’s secret and Faye’s reaction. Where Betty turned cold toward Don after learning the truth, Faye drew nearer to him. Faye’s actually Don’s type, of course. Instead of being a trophy wife who can cook and sew and such, Faye is that independent, headstrong woman who Don’s always actually been drawn to. (e.g. Rachel Menken, crazy Miss Farrell, Bobbie Barrett, Midge)

So one of my questions as we leave this episode is, if Don gets away with it again and gets to keep his fake identity, isn’t he still running? He really breaks down here and admits he’s sick of running, but Pete helping him keep things under wraps means he’s going to continue this lie… should the whole house of cards come tumbling down in order to save his sanity?

Finally, the change theme of the season’s really coming into full focus, as Roger loses the company’s golden egg (and, I think, the only real account he’s in charge of). As we’ve talked about in previous posts, his and the rest of the “old guard’s” influence is waning, if not dying a la Blankenship and that client he tried to reach by phone in this episode.

So we head an episode closer to the season finale with SCDP teetering on the edge, and Trudy about to pop out a tot. Methinks this season won’t end with as much caper-style fun and triumph as last season.

Watch out for old British dudes with canes,

Elise

While I didn’t love this episode,  the young versus old, male versus female conflicts we’ve been observing all season come into full focus. And as Walton mentioned, the season-long “the education of Peggy Olson” continues…

I was especially struck by what Walton observed in his “wounded knee” post regarding the gradual disappearance of people like Bert and Roger this season. Just last week he wrote:

It is significant that Roger and Cooper have been absent, invisible. They are part of the fading, receding mode. 

And in this episode, good ol’ Ida Blankenship (who we were all getting sick of anyway) ACTUALLY ‘RECEDES’ in death. How prescient of our gimpy co-blogger to basically predict this. And my god, watching the secretaries put the blanket over her in the background of that  meeting - what a great use of the glass conference room.

But this episode was really about the girls. Photographer Joyce describes at the end of the episode the idea of a woman being a container for a man. But finally,  now that we’re in 1965 and in the midst of great social change, women get a chance to turn their backs on being someone else’s container. But with great difficulty or sacrifice. Faye can’t deal with children well because she chose work over family (signaling that she believes it’s a linear choice); Peggy compares her professional struggle with the plight of blacks, and she’s not wrong.

Ever the traditionalists, Ida spent her life answering phones for other people and dies in that position. Joan was the “container” to Roger’s “vegetable soup,” holding him and warming him all these years, but what did she get out of it in her real life? He married another secretary while she got stuck with an absent failure of a doctor who will  probably die in Southeast Asia.

Sally’s story is sadder than ever; her situation has basically set her up to be someone who either hates men or seeking the attention of men for the rest of her life. Sure is tough being a girl.

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

-Besides that rum-topped french toast, Don didn’t have a drink all episode, did he?

-Is anyone actually going to publish Roger’s book?

-Let’s say the mugging didn’t happen. Would Joan have hooked up with Roger? I wish we knew how their affair ended. It seemed she basically let Jane have him, but would he have left  his wife for Joan as he did Jane? I realize I’ve fallen into a  hypothetical abyss here…

To devoted caretakers everywhere,

Elise

I haven’t been writing for a few weeks while nursing my right knee after an injury and surgery.  But I’ve been following Mad Men closely, thinking about what the show’s writers and actors are trying to illustrate.

Mad Men is now in the process of describing the set of cultural changes that revolutionized American life.  

1) downtown hipster culture versus midtown, WASP male culture.

At the end of 4.4 there are a set of beautiful shots, edited so that Peggy and Pete spy each other through the glass doors.  Peggy’s on her way to hang with the young editors at Life magazine while Pete, in his blue conservative suit, mingles with a bunch of white-haired white dudes on his way to three martini lunch.  

It is significant that Roger and Cooper have been absent, invisible.  They are part of the fading, receding mode.  

2) WASP male culture becomes introspective

Though he made fun of Roger’s tapes (4.7), Don Draper is now a memoirist, writing to get it down and keep it straight.  Swimming, like a John Cheever character, to clean his body and clear his mind.  Swearing of booze for coffee.  Trying to be a man in full.  

The use of silence and the widening, retracting shot as a way of displaying Don’s internal study and his discomfort with whiskey-soaked business chatter in office meeting scene (4:8), puts one in mind of boozy intellectuals in mid-century American high literature:  Cheever, Updike, and Bellow.  Those writers, like Don in his diary, captured a moment simultaneously rising and fading.  Of course, when you document the dying thing, it never really ends.  Consider all the inches given over to covering Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom”: a novel is about a white, upper-middle class family struggling with booze, dreams unrealized, conservatism, business, sex, and trying to get right to live right.

3) Women as professionals and leaders

All season Joan and Peggy have been working through a minefield of social and professional changes.  Many women are still negotiating ieds in the work place.  It has been very hard for me to watch the cocksuckers in creative speak condescendingly to Peggy and Joan.  Watching Joey leave was pretty easy.  

“Fuck you, Joey!”

But the elevator scene (4.8) with Joan offering a sharp disquisition on the politics of women in the workplace was powerful and intense.  Not only is Joan physically intimidating, she has a mind of crisp calculation.  Peggy has the same stunned look on her face that Don does when specific truth sinks in.

Thus far the entire season could be called “The Education of Peggy Olsen”: from episode to episode she gets wiser and bolder, while stumbling still in order to prove she has more to learn.

—Walton

It’s quite a predicament for women at SCDP - and women in the workplace everywhere, isn’t it? You’re either just a sexy secretary or you’re an overzealous climber bitch. (Monica vs. Hillary, anyone?) As Joey the freelance art director becomes more and more misogynistic toward Joan, (because apparently his mother was the same way), Peggy steps into to save the day and show Joey the door.

Peggy thinks she’s done something magnanimous for Joan. But Joan knows better. Now Joan’s the damsel in distress, saved by a “humorless” chick with a dick. While we’re forty years forward and situations have gotten better for women, I can’t say I don’t understand the perception predicament Joan describes in the elevator.

And this episode really explored the show’s ladies, didn’t it? Bethany’s back, and willing to meet Don’s, uh, draper. She needs a more from him, and says it. “We really are from different generations,” Don replies. But now that we’re hearing his internal thoughts for the first time, a la Carrie Bradshaw, we know he doesn’t think much more of her than he did Betty Draper. She’s beautiful, charming, but not on his level.

The women on his level were traditionally Don’s mistresses - they tend to be the aggressive, modern, independent ladies who could take him or leave him. Midge, the hippie from season one, Rachel Menken, who headed her own stores, Bobby Barrett, who was responsible for the entire Jimmy Barrett machine, Miss Farrell, the enlightened teacher who worried how DON was doing after he ditched her in the car … and now, Faye. The ad doctor of persuasion is actually getting to hear Don’s actual thoughts and worries - he discusses Gene’s upcoming 2nd birthday with her, that he’s out of sorts, etc. etc. Where he keeps the dancer at arm’s length (and later muses that he already “knows her” - is that a reference to how similar she is to Betty?), he seems to let down the mask when he’s with Faye. What a contrast.

Speaking of contrast, I’m not sure how I feel about actually hearing Don’s internal monologue. The show opened with narration and immediately I thought of Sex and the City and wondered if we’d get a “I couldn’t help but wonder” moment. I’ve long believed the beauty of this show is the subtlety in the story and the acting WITHOUT getting into the characters’ heads and actually hearing what they think. While it’s helpful to know Don is now making a bucket list (yay Mount Kilimanjaro) and wants to “gain a modicum of control over” the way he feels, we could have figured that out without the exposition. (Okay, maybe not the mountain climbing part.)

STRAY OBSERVATIONS

-Henry Francis, God bless him. He looked like such a sad, lonely creature mowing that lawn. And he really is stuck with a child. I loved his line “Hate’s a strong word. I hate Nazis.”

-No Roger again!?! Arrrgh.

-Francine’s reminder to Betty is an important one. Who is Betty but a woman who has defined her life through men? And then she acts out with the men she’s with? I can’t decide if it’s bad acting or bad writing that’s making this woman so one-dimensional and irritating. Shouldn’t I feel bad for her a little - I swear I have before in earlier seasons.

Anyway, I’m anxious to hear what y’all think about the new use of narration and the issues about sexism that came up for the girls. And whatever else.

Use kindness and gentleness where force fails,

Elise

“So, Bert has no testicles?”

Friends, it is with a heavy heart I write this post knowing we’re now more than halfway through the season. These episodes keep building on each other so well; I expect we’ll be watching episodes 11 and 12 with our mouths agape.

Episode 7, aptly titled “Suitcase,” returns our main characters to the suitcase motif from the end of season two. (Remember the end of that season, when Don left his bags at the California hotel to go off with the Eurotrash, and his suitcase wound up on Betty’s doorstep?)

And what a fitting motif it is. As the SCDP team comes up with ways to describe a Samsonite’s toughness, we find the principals - Don and Peggy - struggling to keep their emotional baggage inside. It’s a test of toughness not only for their clients product, but for these way-too-similar characters, whose mental suitcases are constantly being tossed off the Empire state building.

“You’re not going to start giving me morality lessons, are you?”

Most of this episode was devoid of anyone but Don and Peggy, and the exploration of their relationship together was a huge payoff to viewers, if you ask me. We never really knew what Don knew about Peggy’s baby situation (clearly he still doesn’t know the father), or that her family thought Don was at fault, or that Don was the only person to visit, and how Peggy feels about dealing with it. Don shares with Peggy that he watched his father get killed by a horse when he was only 11; Peggy (in keeping with the reflexivity of their characters) reveals she too watched her father die in front of her when she was also a child. They both avoid what’s in their suitcases by giving everything they have to their work. I wonder, in fact, whether their personality types are somehow well-suited for advertising because of the way their brains can imagine another reality… or something… ? Anyway, Peggy said a lot come morning, when Don found out for certain that his beloved Anna died. “She was the only one who really knew me,” Don said, of Anna. “That’s not true,” Peggy replied. She may not know Dick Whitman, but she knows Don as well as anyone can.

Speaking of reflexivity, that Don versus Duck drunken wrestling scene was about as far away from that Cassius Clay boxing match as we could have gotten, I reckon.

STRAY OBSERVATIONS

-Good riddens, Mark. You were a loser. And Peggy’s right, who invites a girl’s family (that she hates) to her romantic birthday dinner?

-Loved that random pink paper crown the boys probably made for Peggy for her birthday. It seems like they have a nice motley crew going, even with that annoying Danny kid around.

-Really not missing Betty. This season is so much better with her absence.

Re: Tim’s question. I think the answer is, Duck wouldn’t bother to wipe his ass. Matt and I loved the Duck wanting to take a shit in their office scene so much that we kept rewinding the DVR to the moment he squats down and lets out a little fart. Did y’all notice that?

Ida was a hellcat,

Elise

1. I loved the interaction between Don and Peggy. Don saved Peggy and Peggy is saving Don (again). But I wonder if Don ever would have opened up to Peggy in the first place if he hadn’t saved her to begin with. He knows he can trust her, but would that be the case if she never got pregnant? 

2. Roger said that he didn’t like hanging out with the AA guys because they start out telling funny stories and then end up crying. Don’s night in a nutshell.

3. There’s a famous commercial from the 70s (I think) with a gorilla in a cage throwing around and jumping on a suitcase. The company? American Tourister — the rival brand mentioned in the episode. Fun fact: The same company that owns Samsonite bought American Tourister in the 90s.

4. I know we all think Don is a dick, but he is 100 percent right about Peggy’s credit re: Glo-Coat. She works for him. That is how these things go.

5. When Duck was going to take a shit on the Roger’s chair (thinking it was Don’s), how did he plan to wipe his ass? Just a logistical question.

-Tim