Final Thoughts on Mad Men, Season Five

(Note: This post was originally published on a now-defunct platform on June 18, 2012 and is being saved here so all the Mad Men recaps are in one place).

 

As the ultimate English Major’s show, Mad Men is full of symbolism, metaphors, ambiguous dialogue, character growth, nuance, references to other works of art, and all the other features of great literature that English majors like to sift, weigh, and interpret. It’s not really a show you can watch with your brain turned off, and its ratings have been correspondingly un-huge. But it’s a show you can watch again and again and get more out of it each time.

Over its first five seasons the literary qualities of Man Men seem to have deepened, and now, after every episode the bloggers go wild on the Internet trying to analyze what it all means.  This isn’t easy because each episode is packed with multiple story lines that are open to detailed and varied interpretations. In the end, Mad Men is not one show, it’s many shows.

I didn’t study English in college but I was an American Studies major, which is almost as bad.  Consequently I can’t conclude a season like this without feeling compelled to take one last whack at what it has all meant, looking at the various “shows” that exist under the overall rubric of “Mad Men.”

The American Show: First and most obviously, Mad Men is a quintessentially American Show, with the characters pursuing the happiness that was promised to all of us in the Declaration of Independence. Whatever they’ve got, they want more.  Don Draper, like Gatsby before him and like Ben Franklin before HIM, reinvented himself in search of the American Dream – wealth, status, power.  This drive for self-improvement affects everyone, and not just the men. Peggy might be female but she is an American first, throwing off the chains of her outer borough birth to make a better life for herself.

And of course there’s Lane, the Brit who doesn’t particularly like his prospects in British society and embraces the freedom and mobility of America.  In the U.S., no one knows that he’s not really an English gentleman, or that his father was just an army officer, or that he was considered a prat and a puppet by the upper class managers of Putnam Powell and Low, the British ad agency that bought the old Sterling Cooper. After he commits suicide his very English wife blasts Don: “You had no right to fill a man like that with ambition.” As an Englishman he should have settled for the cards he was dealt, she implies, but like millions of immigrants before him, he was seduced by the opportunity and freedom of the new world.  Unfortunately, he’s not truly American like Don, who advises him to “start over” without realizing that’s not something a Brit can do when he is sent back to England.

The Modernist Show: Why are the characters on Mad Men so unhappy?  They seem to have everything they need but remain dissatisfied. Pete Campbell is the worst – all that whining about not getting the recognition he deserves and claiming he has a “permanent wound.”  That wound is called Modernity and it’s closely related to the American theme (see above) since America is the most modern country.  Post-war America was the first time in world history that a majority of the population had its basic material needs met and how did it respond?  By complaining. By spawning Baby Boomers. As Don tells the napalm makers at Dow, happiness is a moment before you need more happiness. Our souls have a big hole that we need to fill over and over.

Season Five was one long examination of the ennui of modern America. The Beatles got a lot of attention this season, but the season really should have been dedicated to two Rolling Stones songs:  “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”  Peggy wants more recognition. Betty wants a more exciting marriage. Megan’s not happy with a successful advertising career.  On second thought, maybe the song for this season should be Peggy Lee’s downer masterpiece, “Is That All There Is?”

The A.V. Club pointed to Abraham Maslow’s Pyramid of Happiness (see below) to explain the seeming contradiction of unhappiness in a land of plenty. Back in 1943 Maslow posited that there’s a hierarchy of needs ranging from basic subsistence to enlightenment and inner peace. At the base of the pyramid are survival needs like food, water and sleep. The next level is basic safety (a job, a family, health) followed by love and belonging (friendship, family and sexual intimacy).  Most of the characters on the show have achieved these first three stages but they are stuck on the next two: esteem, which includes confidence, achievement, and respect of others; and self-actualization, which includes morality, problem-solving and acceptance. Don alone seems to have achieved the esteem level, and although he’s done much better with morality, he’s still struggling with acceptance. (The only time anyone achieved enlightenment this season was when Roger took his LSD trip – and that “wore off.”)

What these characters really need is a spiritual grounding. Modernity is a rejection of the old world, where faith and community prevailed, and nothing has taken their place to heal Pete’s wound.  Yet religion is almost invisible in the Mad Men world – an ahistorical anomaly. When I was growing up in the Sixties, everyone I knew went to church, but on Mad Men the only mention of religion is Peggy’s conflict with her Catholic upbringing (and why is Peggy, a proud Swede, Catholic? She should be Lutheran.)

In the Sixties, the Drapers would have been Episcopalians and Sally and Bobby would have gone to Sunday School. Not so in the purely secular world of Mad Men.  I wonder if Matt Weiner has deliberately downplayed the religion angle or if he just doesn’t know about it.  In any event, it’s hard to see how these characters will ever get to true acceptance and enlightenment without some spiritual resolution.  Much of the Sixties was about rejecting organized religion in favor of substitutes like Paul Kinsey’s Hare Krishnas, Roger’s LSD, EST, and the back-to-the-earth movement.  So far, nothing is working for them.

The Anti-Corporate Show: Mad Men has always had a love/hate relationship with corporate America.  Intentionally or not, it glamorized this world and even made it enticing.  The competing for accounts, the creative work, the office hi-jinks, the office camaraderie – it always seemed a little fun. Not this season. What was so sad about the show where Joan prostituted herself wasn’t just the personal tragedy but the implication that everything associated with the business was prostitution.

And what is that business? It’s convincing people to feel good about buying things they don’t really need. Providing a temporary salve on their day-to-day misery. What could be more superficial than that?  In the end, the agency is little better than a pimp for corporate America.

This past season the love/hate relationship between the show and the corporate life has evolved into a straight-out “hate” relationship.  The office is a place where bad things happen. It’s the place where executives kill themselves, beat each other up, sell their souls and make themselves miserable. When Glen asks Sally how New York is she replies “It’s dirty,” and Megan needs to close the windows on Thanksgiving because the air itself is so filthy. Will we get two more seasons of this?  That would be kind of depressing.

The Sixties Show: Much of the initial enthusiasm from Season One grew out of nostalgia for the more glamorous life of the early 1960s. The clothes, the décor, the three martini lunches. For those of us who were alive in the Sixties, there was always a shock of recognition at the way a kitchen looked, or a winter coat or a couch. Of course Mad Men went deeper than design; it also examined the social mores of the early Sixties.  And one thing I never liked about the first few seasons seasons was all the tut-tutting and moral superiority by today’s writers looking back at the way we lived 45 years ago, especially as it pertained to male/female relationships.  None of the women I knew from the Sixties, starting with my mother or the mothers of my friends, were as helpless or brittle as the women on Mad Men and I didn’t appreciate the little lectures on their behalf.

Because Mad Men has made a fetish of historical accuracy, with many episodes tied to historical events, it’s been fun watching the years unfold and catching all the historical clues. The Sixties were a period of enormous turmoil and the changes in fashion and décor this season signaled equally momentous changes in society.  We got a whiff of that in the very first episode at Don’s birthday party, when all of a sudden everyone is wearing mid-Sixties outfits – loud sports jackets and bright party dresses – and the Drapers are living in a modern apartment with a sunken living room, white carpet and contemporary furnishings (look at the background when Megan’s singing Zou Bisou Bisou.)

What’s interesting about the season is that the first ten episodes occur at very specific times – there are many hints about what week, and sometimes even what day it is. There are the Chicago nurses’ murder, the Texas Tower sniper, the mystery smog of Thanksgiving 1966, Pearl Harbor Day. (There are even tiny details, like Michael Ginsberg’s father commenting on the death of the baseball player Pete Fox, which a quick Wikipedia search tells us occurred on July 5, 1966).  But then the last three episodes, which are the most earth-shaking shows of the year, revert to the timeless look of the early seasons, presumably to avoid having the design distracting us from the very serious issues at hand.

Season Five – which goes from Memorial Day 1966 through Easter 1967 – shows us the early stages of the 1960’s crack up. There’s a generational shift, with old-timers like Don and Roger not understanding the emerging culture. There’s an alarming rise in violence, with murder and riots outside and fistfights inside. And there’s music, with those over age 30 not comprehending the way music is speaking for the new generation.

But in in this season, America has not gone yet completely haywire, and it will be interesting to see what the date is when Season Six resumes.  Normally after a Mad Men hiatus, six to nine months will have passed, but it’s hard to imagine they will jump over the summer of 1967, with its notorious race riots, the flowering of Hippie culture in San Francisco (aka “Summer of Love”) and the growing anti-war protests.

Mad Men has not yet begun to show how the youth movement would begin to tear the country apart, either.  Anyone who thinks we have a divided culture now should reflect on the late Sixties, when half the country actively loathed the very sight of the other half, even within families. Especially within families. The long hair, beards, jeans and acid-tinged music were a direct rebuke to the guys with crew cuts, suits, corporate jobs and clean suburban families – in other words, everything that Mad Men represents.  In the beginning of Season Five, it looked like Don, Roger and the old guard would surrender before their younger more energetic colleagues but by the end of the season they had regain their mojo – in the office at least.  I wonder if they will be able to withstand an even stronger assault in Season Six.

And who will speak for “youth” next year?  The younger characters – Peggy, Megan, Ginsburg – are all too old to be baby boomers.  Will poor Creepy Glen get the job of growing his hair out and raging against the system?  He’s the only character on the show who’s the right age. And as someone who’s been mistreated by life (with divorced parents and a history of being bullied by the lacrosse team) he’s ripe for disenchantment.  Bold prediction: There’s a very good chance that he gets kicked out of Hotchkiss for smoking pot.

One last word on the Sixties. Except for the first episode, the issue of civil rights was conspicuously missing this year after having been subtly woven into the first four seasons.  It’s not like the show decided to abandon social movements – it has never stopped yapping about women’s rights.  But nothing except for the Vietnam War engaged the nation like race did during this time and to have it absent from the discussion is a pretty big miss.  There was the one fascinating scene where Peggy took Dawn home and blabbered about how women and blacks both face prejudice, but then the whole issue fell off the table.  It’s not Mad Men’s job to squeeze every social issue onto the show, but considering how important race was in the 1960s, it’s a surprising omission.

The Don Draper Show: Mad Men is a show about many things (see above) but it is also the journey of one man. What was so inspiring to me this year was Don’s attempt to become a better man.  He didn’t cheat on Megan, tried to do the right thing with Lane, tried to head off Joan’s prostitution, and served as a good father. He drank less. He loved his wife enough to give her the freedom to succeed, even though he knows he might lose her.

Will he continue to grow or will he relapse?  The last scene of the season – when he is being hit on in the bar – is ambiguous at best.  My own guess is that the narrative arc of the Don Draper story is that of a man who fell victim to his own weaknesses over several years and hit rock bottom during “The Suitcase” episode of last season, then took control of his life and found some kind of meaning.  There are still two seasons to go, so there will undoubtedly be steps forward and back but I hope the show doesn’t descend into cynicism. Don deserves better and so do we, his loyal fans.

I’d like to close with a list of my top ten favorite scenes:

10. Don fixing the faucet at the Campbell’s. During an otherwise excruciating dinner party, the kitchen faucet bursts open, spraying water on the wives. While Pete, who had previously tried to fix this very faucet, goes in search of a toolbox, Don strips down to his tee shirt and masterfully engineers a repair. For poor Pete, this is one of many humiliations this season.

9. Don and Harry at The Rolling Stones concert. Harry is the personification of gooberiness, first not knowing the difference between The Trade Winds and The Stones, and then scarfing down a full bag of hamburgers.  Good comic relief. I have no recollection of the Trade Winds but here is their biggest hit

8. Michael Ginsberg and his father. After telling Peggy that he can work around the clock because he has no family, we discover that Michael actually has a father that he needs to support. This is a father who loves his son so much that he gazes at him when he’s asleep. The scene takes on added poignancy when we learn that Michael was born in a concentration camp. More Michael next year, please.

7. Ken Cosgrove’s short story.  Having been admonished by Roger to stop writing SciFi fiction in his spare time, Ken adopts the pen name Dave Algonquin and starts a Cheeveresque story about Pete’s suburban miseries.  The narrator’s voiceover plays while we see a montage of scenes demonstrating Pete’s discontent.  There’s at least one person at SCDP who is not miserable, and it’s Ken, who not coincidentally doesn’t tie his whole self-worth to the office.

6. Glen and Sally at the Museum of Natural History.  An obvious homage to “Catcher in the Rye,” this scene is a sweet depiction of kids in transition from children to adults. In Sally’s case this is literally the very last minute she can consider herself a little girl.

5. Roger’s LSD trip – the best evocation ever of what it must like to drop acid.

4. Betty spraying whipped cream in her mouth after visiting the Draper apartment. All I can say is that Henry deserves this after stealing away another man’s wife.

3. Don putting The Beatles “Revolver” on the stereo and hearing “Tomorrow Never Knows” pour out  What a jolt that provided! It was a shattering reminder of what lay ahead in the Sixties.

2. Joan and Don at the bar, flirting and reminiscing about old times.  Although there was enough sexual combustion to power a small city, there was also glamour and friendship and wistfulness.

1. The last five minutes of the final episode, starting with Don screening Megan’s reel, and moving through the iconic shot of the partners standing alone on the vacant floor looking out at the city and finishing with Don leaving Megan on the soundstage to the strains of “You Only Live Twice,” entering a bar and being asked that profound question, “Are you alone?”

Actually, I do feel a little alone now that the season is over.  Did I miss any other great scenes?

Mad Men: Are You Alone?

(Note: This recap of S5 E13 — “The Phantom” — was originally published on a now-defunct platform on June 11, 2012 and is being saved here so all the Mad Men recaps are in one place).

I’m not sure why I never realized this before, but the 1960’s character that Don Draper most resembles is James Bond.  Dark and handsome, hard-drinking, has a certain way with the ladies, super-great at his job, an icon for his generation.  The Draper/Bond seems painfully obvious now, but it wasn’t until last night’s season finale ended with the theme song of “You Only Live Twice”:

And if that’s not enough to make the case, consider that we also saw Peggy and Don running into each other at a showing of “Casino Royale.”

Do you think two James Bond references in one episode of Mad Men is a coincidence?  There are no coincidences in Matt Weiner’s world.

Of course there is one big difference between James Bond and Don Draper: one enjoys life and the other is tormented by it.   For James Bond, all that killing, cheap sex and shaken-not-stirred Martini drinking is a lark, but Don Draper has a deep interior life – as deep as that open elevator shaft into which he almost fell.

And he’s not the only one. No one on “Mad Men is happy, and in case you didn’t notice, the episode hammered that point home again and again.  Perhaps the most shocking thing about last night was how obvious everything was – and how boring.  I kept looking at my watch wondering when the good stuff was about to start and wishing everyone would just buck up.  Of course any episode where Pete Campbell gets beaten up is a good one (I mean seriously, could they make this guy any douchier?) But it wasn’t until the last five minutes that it all fell into place.  Those last five minutes – beginning when Don looked at Megan’s reel, through the preview of the new offices, through the shooting of the commercial and the fantastic shot of Don walking into the empty sound stage with Nancy Sinatra singing “You Only Live Twice,” and the montage of the main characters trying to find happiness – were fantastic. One of the all-time great sequences.

Unfortunately the previous 55 minutes were kind of a dud. First, Megan’s meltdown and Beth’s advances to Pete came out of left field and seem contrived.  Megan’s been looking for an acting job for what? Six months? And already she’s so discouraged she is drinking herself to sleep.  Maybe she’s more fragile than we think or maybe spending a week with Mama has put her over the edge, but this is not the vibrant, confident successful girl we saw at the just two episodes ago.

Then there’s Beth, who is clinically depressed – a real malady, not the existential angst that Pete is experiencing. If you are about to get electroshock treatment and know you’re going to lose your memory what better time to hook up with Pete? But it seems so arbitrary that she would suddenly show interest in him.   She says she thought they had the same problem, but he keeps spouting adolescent gibberish (“We’re only unhappy that we’re apart”) and referring to mental illness as weakness so it’s probably a mercy that she can’t remember anything about that tryst in the Hotel Pennsylvania.

As if these irksome plot lines weren’t enough, we are treated to an extended and over-obvious metaphor about Don’s sore tooth.  He tells Megan the pain will go away – it always does. Gee, I wonder what that could stand for?  And was anyone the least bit surprised that when the dentist gave Don post-extraction gas, he had a dream visit from his dead brother Adam (who had also hung himself in season one). He utters possibly the worst line in the history of Mad Men: “It’s not your tooth that’s rotten.”  Thanks for clarifying that, Adam.

Pete’s confession to the memoryless Beth after the electroshock treatment was almost as obvious, although somewhat more touching.  He tells her he pursued their affair because he “needed to let off some steam, needed adventure, needed to feel handsome again. Needed to feel that he did know something – that all this aging is worth something. That he knew something that all these young people didn’t know yet.”  He also confesses to her that his life with his family is “just some temporary bandage on a permanent wound.”  We soften toward him a little, but that doesn’t last. After all, it’s one thing to punch the odious Howard on the train, but something completely different to insult the train conductor.

The name of this episode is “The Phantom.” The phantom could be Lane’s lingering presence (no one wants to move into his office). It could be Adam, who’s much on Don’s mind after Lane’s suicide.  But Megan’s mother is the one who actually utters the word when she tells her that pursuing an acting career is “chasing a phantom. “ She seems to be suggesting that looking for fulfillment is a fool’s game and that happiness itself is a phantom.

So it’s no surprise that the final line of the season is a woman at the bar asking Don, “Are you alone?” Yep, Don’s alone.  And so is everyone else.  This is what the season has been leading up to. We are all alone in an unfriendly world.  We can grab for happiness and sometime find it temporarily but soon that feeling wears off and we are back again looking for more.

I never thought the lyrics to “You Only Live Twice” were particularly profound, but in this concluding scene and in these circumstances, they almost seem worthy of Sylvia Plath herself:

You Only Live Twice or so it seems,
One life for yourself and one for your dreams.
You drift through the years and life seems tame,
Till one dream appears and love is its name.

And love is a stranger who’ll beckon you on,
Don’t think of the danger or the stranger is gone.

This dream is for you, so pay the price.
Make one dream come true, you only live twice.

Some other thoughts:

·         I’m sure I was hardly the only person who, seeing the warning about partial nudity, was surprised to see THAT.

·         Poor Don, he keeps trying to do the right thing, but keeps getting slapped around for it. And going to see the Widow Pryce with the $50,000 check was absolutely the right thing to do – better than dropping it in the mail.  Her complaint is very profound, though: “You had no right to fill a man like that with ambition.” In a way, it goes to the heart of the series. Should Lane have lived out his days as the toady of the British company that had assigned him to Sterling Cooper, or should he have raised his expectations?  Rebecca Pryce has hated America as much as Lane loved it because you could become someone new, but once Lane had tasted freedom he wanted more of it.  He came to a tragic end, and according to the way most Americans think (but not Rebecca), it’s better to try and fail then never to try at all. (Note that both Megan’s mother and Lane’s wife – each a foreigner – reject the idea of striving for a better life and counsel acceptance instead.)

·         Speaking of Megan’s mother, yikes. Not exactly nurturing. She seems to welcome Megan’s failure: “Not every girl gets to do what they want. The world could not support that many ballerinas.” And while Megan’s socialist father had advised her to reject the opulence of the Draper world and seek the life of a struggling acting career, Marie counsels the exact opposite – to be satisfied as a rich housewife.

·         If Peggy ever does land that Virginia Slims account she will never come back to work for Don because she’ll be far too successful.  The launch of Virginia Slims was one of the most acclaimed product launches of all time, making it acceptable for women to get lung cancer as frequently as men.

·         It’s an obvious irony that the Topaz client is complaining that SCDP doesn’t have a female creative person any longer.  There’s a strong implication that Peggy was so intuitively in touch with the female brain that they never needed to commission research into what women think.  Now they do.

·         By the way, that Topaz pitch?  “Always Less Expensive – Never Cheap”?  It actually is horrible. Why use the word “Cheap”?  That’s like Nixon saying he wasn’t a crook. Another implausibility of the episode is that Ginsburg would have lost his touch so fast.

·         Kudos to Megan for stealing her friend’s idea to try out for the Beauty and the Beast shoe commercial. If Pete had tried that, we would have thought he was sleazy, but something about Megan’s friend rubs me the wrong way (“I’d ask who I need to sleep with, but I don’t think you’d like that”) and I’m happy that Megan double-crossed her.

·         Not to take Pete’s side AT ALL, but it must be very tiring to be married to Trudy.  She’s always pushing him around, finding new ways to spend money.  She completely disregarded his desire to remain in the city and now wants to build a pool?  Pete’s too weak for her – she should have aimed higher.

So the lingering question remains where it’s been all season – will Megan and Don make it?  It doesn’t look good now, since she’s pulling away from him in a way that she doesn’t recognize but he does.  I’m hoping they will find a way to accommodate and fill each other’s needs. The decline and fall of another Draper marriage seems a pretty obvious way to go – what would be more interesting is to show how they pull together and find happiness with each other.  This season was all about ennui.  It’s getting boring.  Roger’s got his LSD, Peggy’s got her airplane ride to Richmond, Megan’s got her big break.  I don’t expect Don to join an ashram but I do hope that over the next two years Matt Weiner finds a way to bring him out of this emotional tailspin.

See you later. I have postcards to write.

Mad Men: This Is A Very Dirty Business

(Note: This recap of S5 E11 — “The Other Woman” — was originally published on a now-defunct platform on May 29, 2012 and is being saved here so all the Mad Men recaps are in one place).

Ten years from now, when people ask what Mad Men was all about, we’ll be able to point to last night’s episode “The Other Woman,” as the defining statement of the series. It was an instant classic, with all the major implicit themes made explicit.  Set at no particular time – no season and no year – with no time stamps to make it seem like a period piece, the show itself is literally timeless.

And to really raise the stakes, the show is stuffed with classical references, both ancient and modern. Joan is compared to Cleopatra and Helen of Troy.  Joan’s mother’s “friend” is name Apollo. Pete referred to his commute as an “epic poem” (i.e., The Odyssey, which would make him the wily Odysseus – as if!!! – and Trudy the faithful Penelope). But that’s not all.  Don’s pitch, intercut with Joan’s assignation, harkens to the juxtaposition of murders in the famous baptism scene in “The Godfather,” while Don’s throwing money at Peggy recalls the moment in “La Traviata” when the young protagonist humiliates the courtesan Violetta by hurling his gambling earnings at her feet.

“The Other Woman” intertwines ambition, sex, desire, cravenness and betrayal, while explicitly articulating the major theme of the season, which is, as Ginsburg says, “In one way or another, what he has isn’t enough.”  Everyone on Mad Men is dissatisfied and wants more.  Peggy and Pete – who have been two sides of the same coin from the first episode of the series – are the most obvious examples, but as depicted in this series a desire for more (more love, more praise, more things) turns out to be the universal human condition.  As Peggy says to Don when he refuses to celebrate the Jaguar win – as she similarly said to Megan in the same spot under the same circumstances (with Heinz) – “You really have no idea when things are good, do you?” Look in the mirror, Pegs.

I’ve been sad watching Mad Men before, but never sadder than last night.  Anna Draper’s death, or Don and Betty breaking the news of their divorce to the kids were wrenching, but at least they provided a catharsis.  But Joan’s soul-deadening decision to prostitute herself with the active connivance of the male partners (excluding, of course, Don) stripped away the glamorous façade that the show has built over five seasons. It was a far more devastating critique of corporate life – or life in general – than that pathetic play (“American Hurrah”) that Megan and Don went to see last week.

And what was so brilliant about “The Other Woman” was the way a proposition that seemed so preposterous at the beginning of the show – the idea that Joan would have sex with that Jaguar pig Herb – slowly develops its own logic and eventually becomes inevitable, although no less tragic.  And yet why does it seem tragic? Certainly Joan has used her sexual allures to manipulate men before – she’s even boasted about it – so what’s the big deal with one more time?  It’s that there is no artifice about it.  It’s a straight-up cash transaction.  There’s no dinner, no repartee, no pretense that they care for each other even a little.  It’s straightforward prostitution – she’s even home from the hotel before Don gets out of work.

Matt Weiner explodes all the Mad Men myths.  Don’s Jaguar pitch brilliantly recalls the justly famous “Carousel” spiel from season one.  “When deep beauty is encountered, it creates deep emotion,” he tells the Jaguar team.  “It creates desire, because it is by its very nature unattainable.  We are told that function is all that matters. But we have a natural longing for this other thing.”    Beauty creates desire – a story as old as Helen of Troy. But underneath that desire is tawdriness and corruption and the people who sell desire are no better than pimps.

And what was so sad about “The Other Woman” was that Don tried so hard to stop it from happening, going to Joan’s apartment in an attempt to head it off. He leaves thinking that he’s talked Joan out of prostituting herself, not knowing, as we learn later in a tremendous flashback, that the deed is already done.  I speculated last week that the story arc of Season Five might be Don’s moral growth and this seems to be the case in this episode.  Rather than countenancing sleaze, he stands on principle.  He’s seen too much of prostitution,  but even a Draper conscience can’t prevent his colleagues from pimping out Joan (and don’t forget, by the way, the agency lost the Jaguar account the first time around because the marketing guy got gum stuck in his pubis when the SCDP team took him to a whorehouse.)

It’s a sign of what a great episode this was that the second plot – Peggy quitting – which would have been an earthquake in a normal show, seems like an afterthought.  The scene of Don throwing money in her face, so she can go to Paris if that’s what she cares about so much, is one of the most shocking scenes ever – almost as shocking as the lawnmower in the office scene.  And yet, I can understand Don’s frustration.  Peggy is never satisfied and always looking for more praise, more credit and more plumb assignments.  This must become tiresome, especially after you’ve learned that your partners are whore-mongers.

And Peggy’s departure has a flavor of prostitution to it too.  Everyone has a price – with Joan it’s a five percent stake in the company and for Peggy it’s a $19,000 salary.  As the odious Ted Chaugh says when he tries to recruit her, “You know you want to go.  You know how much you’ll do it for. And you didn’t make me wait.” Sounds like a john to me.

Peggy tries to rationalize her departure when she tells Don she’s leaving but ends up stabbing him in the heart when she says “I’m so sorry but you know this is what you would do.” She’s saying he has a price too, not knowing that this is exactly what he’s trying to get away from.  (And not knowing that in a previous season he actually had turned down the opportunity to move to a bigger and most prestigious agency.)  “Don’t be a stranger,” she tells him – that hoary old cliché that people say when they leave, but in this case we see that he really is a stranger to her already.

Some other random thoughts:

·         The acting in this episode was fantastic.  If Christina Hendricks doesn’t win an Emmy for this it will be a travesty.  But Jon Hamm was amazing again, portraying a wide range of emotions, including that sad sad moment when he kisses Peggy’s hand.  Awards are stupid and who cares? But it’s a travesty that he has never won an Emmy.

·         Why did Joan do it?  First, because she was lied to, with Pete implying that all the partners, including Roger and Don, had gone along with the deal, which must have demoralized her.  But I also think she decided to use her main asset, her beauty, to gain a little respect and power.  How shocked she was to learn that the partners had discussed the offer behind her back; by becoming a full voting partner, she finally gets into the boardroom where the decisions are made.

·         Last week’s scene in the bar with Joan and Don, which lit up the Internet like a Christmas tree, has added resonance after “The Other Woman.”  Joan thought that her drinking buddy, who had shown so much sensitivity and compassion (and respect), had betrayed her, but in the end he was looking out for her.  “You’re a good one, aren’t you?” she says when she finds out. (And I’m not ashamed to admit I cried at this moment when I watched the episode a second time.)

·         Don’s pitch is astonishing and deserves to be quoted just because of the beauty of the prose, but also because of what it says about desire and beauty: He says a ten-year-old boy saw him driving the Jag: “He saw something he’d want the rest of his life.  He’d just seen that unattainable thing speed by, just out of reach.  Because they do, don’t they?  Beautiful things.” He says you can flip through Playboy or Esquire and know you can never possess those “shiny curves.” But that you “can buy a Jaguar. This car, this thing.  What price would we pay?  What behavior would we forgive if they weren’t so pretty, if they weren’t temperamental? If they weren’t beyond our reach or a little out of our control?  Would we love them like we do?” This is Homeric.

·         The Chevalier Blanc ad is just another version of unattainable desire, in case we don’t get the point the first hundred times.  The commercial is a take-off on the opening sequence of “A Hard Day’s Night” in which screaming female fans are chasing a rock and roll star.  And what would they do if they caught him?  Everyone, including teenage girls, want to possess things that literally cannot be possessed.

·         The Megan sequence will get short shrift in all the recaps because the Joan and Peggy subplots were so powerful, but it could eventually become equally consequential.  Don finally realizes the bargain he made when he set Megan free to seek an acting career. He never understood that a successful Broadway play requires out-of-town rehearsals in Boston (and probably New Haven too.) Initially he explodes, but later seems to soften, and when he pleads “don’t run away like that,” I think he means don’t run away like she did in the Howard Johnson’s episode and when she stormed out of the apartment after their fight over Boston.  Not don’t run away to a career.

·         Was it me, or did everyone else think that when Megan went on her audition they were going to ask her to take her clothes off?  They treat her like an object, just like the boys treated Joan, but at least they let her stay fully dressed.

·         Finally we learn why Lane has money problems – because he didn’t make a good deal for himself when he joined the firm.  He took a percent of the company rather than a good salary, and now has a cash flow problem.  This doesn’t excuse the terrible plot line under which he has embezzled funds to pay his tax bill, but at least it begins to provide some explanation.

·         Lane’s poignant line “Every time someone’s asked me what I wanted, I’ve never told them the truth,” can apply to many Mad Men characters, although in this episode, we finally see Joan and Peggy being explicit in their requests.  And of course Megan has been straightforward in her desires since she showed up.

·         There was only one legitimately funny line in the episode.  When Pete first propositions Joan and she rejects it, he oleaginously explains, “This was an act of desperation.  I hope I haven’t offended you.  That’s all that matters to me.” Hah, right. Not one honest word passes his lips this episode except when he admits he doesn’t like living in the suburbs because “there’s no good night noises anywhere.”

Someday someone will write a great Ph.D thesis on the elevator sequences in Mad Men.  People are either having deep conversations in the elevator or doing something important while they wait for the elevator.  This episode, one of the best ever, ends with Peggy waiting for the elevator door to open before she leaves the office for the last time.  Will someone run out to stop her?  Nope. Instead, we hear the Kinks blasting “You Really Got Me,” and for the last ten seconds of the show we feel exhilarated that Peggy is headed off to an exciting adventure – maybe even an epic poem of her own.

One last word.  Next week is the penultimate episode of the season.  That means it is the “next to last” episode.  Don’t fall in the trap of thinking that “penultimate” means “final,” as I’ve heard some podcasts assert.

 

Commissions and Fees

(Note: This recap of S5 E12 — “Commissions and Fees” — was originally published on a now-defunct platform on June 4, 2012 and is being saved here so all the Mad Men recaps are in one place).

“Why does everything turn out crappy? Everything you want to do. Everything you think that’s going to make you happy, just turns to crap.”

Matt Weiner puts these words in the mouth of his own son, who plays Sally Draper’s friend Glen Bishop, after an idyllic outing in the city goes sour.  This has been a prevailing theme in Mad Men all year – the thing that you think will make you happy doesn’t. Joan’s marriage, Roger’s marriage, Pete’s marriage, Betty’s marriage, Sally’s “date” with Roger. Getting the Heinz account, getting the Jaguar account – none of it leads to real satisfaction because materialism can’t satisfy.

And to hammer the theme home, we have Don telling the Dow folks: “You’re happy because you’re successful – for now.  But what is happiness?  A moment before you need more happiness.” He makes the pursuit of happiness seem like a drug, an addiction.

Of course for most of the Mad Men characters, the ennui of not being always high on happiness is nothing compared to the despair that Lane feels when his embezzlement is discovered and he loses his job.  That is REAL unhappiness.  Lane has loved America, helped build an agency, been emotionally supported by a loving wife and it all comes crashing down.  In a five-year series full of sad incidents, this one is potentially the saddest of all – and I say this knowing full well that just last week I declared Joan’s selling herself for a piece of the company the saddest incident of all.

Don’s getting better at reading people but he still misfires more often than not.  Last week he couldn’t see what his outbursts were doing to Peggy and this week he misreads Lane’s predicament.  As someone who has lied and worried about being caught he mis-attributes Lane’s dizziness to relief.  You’ll start over, he tells Lane, and it will be better.  But it won’t be.  Lane will lose his visa and be forced back to England in disgrace.  England is not the kind of place you can start over at his age.  And worse is losing the respect of his wife and son – you can almost understand why death would be preferable than that.

Don should understand, but despite being a prevaricator himself, he can’t abide people lying to him.  Recall that he didn’t protect Sal when Lucky Strike’s Lee Garner Jr. demanded he be fired, because he lied to Don about being gay (even though Don had seen him have sex in that hotel room in Baltimore.)  And from Don’s perspective, he really is doing Lane a favor – he doesn’t tell the other partners about the embezzlement, he covers the $7,500 in stolen funds and he gives him a face-saving out by letting him resign.  Someone other than Lane might have bucked up and started over – look how many times Duck Phillips has started over – but Don misreads his man.

A suicide has been widely anticipated this year – ever since AMC launched its ad campaign showing the falling man.  Early in the season it looked like Pete Campbell, with his rifle, window office and growing despair (“Don, I’ve got nothing,”) might be the candidate, but as soon as Lane forged Don’s signature on that check, we all knew he was a dead man walking.  I’m a little disappointed that the obvious outcome turned out to be the actual resolution, and that Matt Weiner didn’t have a surprise twist in store, yet the story line has a beauty in its classic demonstration of how one step leads to another until there’s no other resolution that the one we see.

I have not loved the Lane embezzlement story, which seemed a little far-fetched until now, but we finally learn what’s driving it.  Lane had to sell assets to invest in the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce several years ago and never paid the required capital gains tax.  When Don asks why he just didn’t come to the other partners with his problem, he says “Why suffer the humiliation for a thirteen day loan?”  The humiliation?  Of course. The guy has been posing as something he’s not from the beginning.  He’s not really an English gentleman; he’s just a middle-class impostor from a mediocre school who has worked his way up. With no real money, he  made a bad deal when they started the firm, probably because he didn’t want to admit to the other partners who he really was.  So when forced to pony up the money for his taxes, he cheated a little and then the cheat loomed larger and larger as time went on.

Lane’s fall finally rouses Don out of the torpor he’s been in all season.  Rather than settling for the mediocrity of their second-class accounts (even Jaguar is nothing compared to Chevy), Don decides to shoot for the moon.  Unlike Lane, who never came clean until it was too late, he finally admits to Roger that Ed Baxter, who’s out on the lam for killing Laura Palmer, (oops, I hope that wasn’t a spoiler for a twenty-year-old TV series) told him none of the big companies would hire him because of his stab-in-the-back-to-tobacco letter. Roger quickly arranges a meeting with Baxter so Don can confront him and bowl him over with his “happiness” speech that promises a more aggressive approach.  He’s terrific in this meeting. The old Don.  So good that he even convinced me that Napalm was a patriotic product.

There’s a third plot in the episode – Sally and Glen – that is sweet and touching.  They are both confronting their emerging sexuality, with Glenn and his wispy mustache and Sally with her first period.  Glenn confides that he’s being bullied at school – and what a surprise — it’s the lacrosse guys! Nothing ever changes. So it’s a little heartbreaking that Sally ditches him at the museum when she’s so embarrassed by that first period.  Again, it has an air of inevitability – she couldn’t re-emerge from the bathroom like nothing happened – but how scared he must have felt when she disappeared.  He probably had the same fear that Don experienced when Megan disappeared from the Howard Johnson’s.

And after all the sadness and despair, how wonderful that the episode ends with an act of kindness. Don takes Glen back to Hotchkiss – a two hour drive – with no recriminations and judgment.  “What do you want to do,” he asks him? (In the elevator – again! Don’t forget the upcoming Ph.D thesis on elevator conversations in Mad Men). In the final scene we see Don letting Glen drive his car back to school.  Yes, this is what a teenage boy would want to do – drive a nice car with a surrogate father.

Some other thoughts:

·         Did Don have to fire Lane?  Probably.  Theoretically he could have let him stay on with a warning, but executives don’t think that way. Once someone has cooked the books one time, you just can’t trust him again.  At my former place of employment – in the supposedly enlightened 2000’s – a former colleague was summarily fired for taking her staff out for a Christmas lunch and then claiming on her expense report that the lunch had been with someone else.  The bosses couldn’t trust her again after that, you see.

·         Every time Betty does something that seems redeeming, like her kindness to Sally, she makes up for it by doing something nasty.  She could not get on the phone fast enough to brag to Megan (Don’s “child bride”) that Sally ran home to Rye, rather than going back to Don’s apartment. “I think she just needed her mother,” she says, sticking the needle in.  Also, I’m not in a position to judge the content of that conversation, but several women on Twitter said that their own mothers used the same euphemisms to explain what had occurred (“She became a women today.  She started.”) Yuck. At least Sally is straightforward enough to say the word “period.”

·         The scene of Sally and Glen in the Museum of Natural Museum reminded me immediately of Catcher in the Rye.  Like Glen, Holden Caulfield (who was on the lam from a fancy boarding school), seems to see the diorama room as a place where nothing changes – every time you go back, you might have changed, but the museum itself is the same as it was in a more innocent time.  It’s also the place where Holden finds a disturbing obscenity written on the wall. Echoing Glen’s lament that everything turns out crappy, Holden says, “You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful because there isn’t any. You might THINK there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody will sneak up and write ‘fuck you’ right under your nose.”  And if you think I’m stretching a point, recall that the kid playing Glen is named Marten Holden Weiner.

·         When go-go-booted Sally greets Glen at the door of the apartment for their morning tryst, she looks like a ‘tween Lynne Redgrave from “Georgey Girl,” which, like “Alfie” and “Blow Up” is rejected by Megan’s friend for featuring “abortions and foreigners.”

·         I think Don and Megan will make it as a married couple.  They are each prone to hissy fits but they are at least honest with each other.  He confides in her that he had to fire Lane, something I can’t imagine him telling Betty about. Having someone to confide in will end up being even more important to them than the sexual chemistry.

·         Joan is no longer taking notes at the partner’s meeting because she’s a partner now. Welcome Scarlet.

·         Lane’s terrible hanging recalls the suicide of Don’s half-brother in Season One. And in that case too Don was responsible for rejecting him when he needed help.  Don has always been able to compartmentalize but he’s going to need a full cabinet now.

·         “What happened to your enlightenment?” Don asks Roger after a particularly ferocious quip.   “I don’t know.  It wore off.” Yeah, there’s no lasting happiness in LSD either.

·         Good for Ken Cosgrove. I hope that next season is all about him smacking Pete around.  He has never used his father-in-law’s position to advance himself (unlike Pete, who literally blackmailed his own father-in-law to get an account). He rejects the offer of partner if the Dow account comes in (“I’ve seen what’s involved,” which leads to a look of shame on Roger’s face.) All he asks is that Pete be kept off the account, which will thrill both Roger and Don, who have come to despise Pete.

·         The name of this week’s episode is “Commissions and Fees,” ostensibly a reference to Jaguar’s proposal that they pay SCDP a fee plus mark-up instead of the traditional 15% commission on media sold.   Can Roger be so dense as to not be able to understand this? It’s an interesting inside reference because ad campaigns continue to be sold that way – I didn’t know this was under discussion back then.  In any event, the real significance of the title is that Lane engaged in an act of commission and he needed to pay the fee (or the penalty.) Or the Pryce/Price.

The final song is “Butchie’s Tune” by the Loving Spoonful:.

As noted, this final scene is a moment of grace and redemption for Don, who is looking out for a scared kid.  The lyrics, though, speak to Lane’s predicament.

Please don´t you cry when the time to part has come
It´s not for what you´ve said or anything that you´ve done
I gotta go anywhere anytime
And I’m leavin´, gone today, on my way
I´m goin´ home

Lane has gone home. But what about the rest of the characters?  Are they headed home?  Only if they find joy in small intentional moments of kindness.

Oh, and wipe that blood off your mouth.

 

Mad Men: Christmas Waltz

(Note: This recap of S5 E10 — “Christmas Waltz” — was originally published on a now-defunct platform on May 21, 2012 and is being saved here so all the Mad Men recaps are in one place).

 

Is it possible that Don Draper is becoming a better person?  We have become accustomed to his moral degeneration and worrying when it will kick in again this season, but maybe it won’t.  Maybe he is actually growing as a human being.

So far this season he has resisted temptation and been supportive to his wife, and now he seems to be getting his Mojo back at work.  Last week he recovered his competitive juices when he saw the great creative work that Ginsburg was turning out and this week he gave a rousing St. Crispin’s Day speech in which he tells the troops that their holidays are ruined because they have to work on the Jaguar pitch – and they cheer like soldiers headed off to their deaths.  (Compare Don’s speech to the actual St. Crispin’s Day speech below:)

As if that speech wasn’t enough, last Sunday’s “Christmas Waltz” gave us a second classic Draper scene – when he consoles Joan at the bar after she’s been served divorce papers.  With Doris Day singing the title song, he bucks her up, flirts with her, gives her advice, shows respect and provides necessary comfort.  The scene harkens back to the early days of Mad Men. It still has that fifties sensibility of men in suits drinking in the afternoon with dreamy music in the background. But it’s only a respite. Both of them know that the days when they were the hot objects of desire are over.  “Wasn’t it fun,” she asks ruefully, knowing that she has a baby that will now scare other men away.  And yet, as tinged with nostalgia s this scene is, both Don and Joan have never looked better.  He is incredibly handsome and charming and she is gorgeous in the dim light and soft focus.

Given how lovely that moment was, it’s jarring – almost shocking – that the next scene is Don speeding away in his new Jaguar, shifting faster and faster with a determined look on his face (and who among us doesn’t have a feeling of dread any time someone gets behind the wheel of a car on this show?)  And all mellowness is gone by the time he gets home to a furious Megan, who was worried that she was left at home, sitting at the dinner table alone, as poor Betty was left so many times in the past. But Megan won’t put up with it – against the wall she flings the plate of spaghetti (two episodes ago, the symbol of family happiness) and yells at him to sit down and eat with her.  The old Don would not have submitted so meekly.

If this episode had only been about Jaguar and Don’s personal growth, this might have been one of the great episodes, but it was actually the weakest of the season because the other two subplots could have derived from a soap opera.  The worst subplot is Lane’s petty embezzlement from the firm. Having been off the show for several episodes – perhaps playing Professor Moriarity again, but possibly Ulysses S. Grant in the new “Lincoln” movie – Lane rematerializes with an unexplained financial squeeze. He owes back taxes in the U.K., but rather than asking his partners for a loan he decides to steal it from them, going so far as to forger Don’s signature on a check.  All the skulking around in the dark and lies about profits and Christmas bonuses is, unfortunately, not very interesting since we don’t know the cause of the financial problem in the first place.

The second subplot is more interesting but scarcely more believable.  In fact, the phrase “jump the shark” was used several times on Twitter to describe this story line.  Any long time viewer would have been excited to learn that “Mr. Kinsey” has been calling Harry Crane for a meeting, but what a shock to find him as a Hare Krishna follower.  We have been hit over the head this season with the idea that the Sixties are heavily upon us, but whereas the earlier LSD sequence seemed fresh, unusual and interesting because it involved a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals experimenting in an upscale apartment, the appearance of the Krishna’s seems far-fetched.

Yes, the Krishna movement was founding in New York in 1966 but what are the chances that Paul Kinsey would have been an early disciple or that Harry Crane would have even heard of them?  The whole thing seemed a stretch.  That’s not to say there weren’t some great individual scenes within the subplot.  For example, it’s hilarious that Harry, who is the least self-aware character on the show, manages to have a vision the first time he chants with the group. And he’s also perceptive enough to know that Kinsey’s connection to the Krishnas is based on his attraction to a pretty co-follower. In the end Kinsey admits as much – that he’s not getting anything spiritually from the group and is only staying for the love of that woman (Mother Lackshmi, aka “Janet.”)

But what’s really improbable about the Krishna subplot is that Lackshmi would come to Harry’s office to seduce him.  Whenever someone comes to Pete’s office to seduce him it invariably turns out to be a fantasy. But not so with Harry?  Apparently not. It wasn’t just the seduction itself that seemed so improbable, it was the speed with which she dropped the façade as soon as it was over. Did she really think she was going to manipulate Harry with such unbridled contempt?  As Harry pointed out, she gave away her only bargaining chip for free. (The funniest Tweet of the night noted that they did it “dogma style.”)

Still, as improbable as this whole sequence turns out to be, it did allow Harry Crane to show Draper-like personal growth.  Once he learns that Kinsey’s only worth to the Krishna’s is as their best recruiter, he helps him break free and head to L.A. He does not do what everyone else recommended, which is to tell Kinsey the truth of how bad his screenplay is.  Instead, he lies to give him encouragement and the strength to escape.  Also wise advice on California: “This failure, this life. It will all seem like it happened to someone else [once you get out there].” California has always been a place where the Man Men can become different people and it wouldn’t surprise me if Paul Kinsey re-emerges in the next two seasons as a successful Hollywood writer.

Some other thoughts on this show.

·         Paul Kinsey sounds an awful lot like Pete. Nothing brings him satisfaction.  “Everyone else looks so happy. As soon as I got there, I tried to figure out who Prabhupada likes best. He doesn’t like me. No one likes me. Sometimes I don’t think Krishna likes me.”

·         Speaking of Pete, his groveling for approval and a pat on the head would be pathetic if it wasn’t so funny.  When the partners are somewhat unimpressed that he has landed them a shot at the Jaguar account (along with four other agencies) he petulantly announces, “No one has given me the reaction I desire for this blessed event.” And when he announces the news in the office meeting, no one applauds until Don’s speech.

·         Ali Kahn (usually spelled “Aly Khan,”) was a rich Pakastani playboy, the son of the Aga Khan, and the third husband of Rita Hayworth. When Don says that Joan got so many flowers he thought they were from Ali Khan, he is making a dated joke, since he died in 1961. Still, it’s wonderful gesture for him to send Joan flowers in the guy’s name.

·         Don has every right to be peeved at bring dragged to see that experimental play, which the playbill helpfully informs is called American Hurrah. For more info on this play see here. If my wife brought me to something like this I’d be annoyed too.

·         Joan’s meltdown in the reception area after being served the divorce papers was epic.  And yet that receptionist, who seems to spend her day reading the Daily News, manages not to lose her job.  In the old days Joan would have fired her on the spot and kicked her out before she could have even collected her coat. Instead, the receptionist whines back, “you’re not allowed to do that.” Which might actually be true by 1966. Maybe the HR-ing of the workplace had progressed that much by then.

·         Don’s line “Prepare to swim the English Channel and then drown in Champagne” is potentially an omen about Lane’s demise.  Or maybe just another red herring.

·         It didn’t really seem credible to me that Don would write out a check for $6,000 to buy a Jaguar XKE, especially when he admits to Joan later that it doesn’t really do anything for him. If he can throw around that kind of dough, why is Lane so hard up for cash?

·         The series takes place on the 25^th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Is this enough to make Roger start drinking before work?  Also not very credible.  Although he did have one brilliant observation: that the attack was an act of genius, but the Japanese didn’t plan for success. After they won, “they didn’t know what to do with it.” Which is the case with much of life.

·         I think that was Zooey Deschanel singing Christmas Waltz at the end of the show, but I have to say I prefer the Doris Day version, and not just for retro reasons.

·         There are only three episodes left this season and I still have no idea where we are headed. Things don’t always deteriorate on this show. Don’t forget the end of season three where the boys pulled off the coup that got them out of Sterling Cooper into their new agency.  That was thrilling and upbeat. And last year ended in a wedding proposal.

·         Funniest line: “You’re the worst girlfriend.” “And you’re the best friend?” But both statements turned out to be true.

Good advice from Joan.  If you’re dressed for fishing, you’ll have more success if you’re quiet.

Mad Men: I’m Pea Green With Envy

(Note: This recap of S5 E8 — “Dark Shadows” — was originally published on a now-defunct platform on May 14, 2012 and is being saved here so all the Mad Men recaps are in one place).

Happy Mother’s Day ladies!  Sunday’s Mad Men was Matt Weiner’s gift to Moms everywhere.  Regardless of your own maternal shortcomings, you can console yourselves that at least you’re not as bad as Betty Draper Francis.

Really, what can be worse than using your own daughter to drive a wedge between your former husband and his new wife?  Telling Sally about Don’s first wife, Anna, and then advising her to ask Megan, secretly hoping that Don had kept it a secret from Megan, just as he had kept it hidden from her.  She expected this to cause an explosion in the Megan/Don relationship.  Which is almost what happened.

What Betty didn’t count on was that Megan is the “girl who can do everything,” as Peggy astutely noted last week.  As the only adult in Manhattan, she was able to calm Don’s fury and prevented him from calling and blasting Betty, which was his initial inclination.  Instead, Megan continued to help Don travel down the road to becoming a better person and if anything, strengthened Don and Sally’s relationship at Betty’s expense.  Upon returning home, Sally then extracted an exquisite measure of revenge by oh-so-innocently informing Betty that Don had told her all about Anna, adding, “Daddy showed me pictures and they spoke very fondly of her.” Betty knows full well who they are NOT speaking fondly of.

That was a great scene, but the show overall was the least excellent and least demanding of the episodes this season.  The portentous title of the show, “Dark Shadows,” forecast the presence of evil and darkness, but it had the feel of a soap opera, which is only appropriate since the title comes from the vampire-based soap opera (see below) that debuted in 1966. (And what a coincidence – and I do believe it was a coincidence – that the Johnny Depp movie version of that show opened last weekend.)

You can make the case that evil actually is afoot in “Dark Shadows,” (the Mad Men episode, not the soap opera).  The episode shows how envy – one of the seven deadly sins – distorts our personalities and makes us do things we know are wrong.  We see Betty trying to move to her good side in the Weight Watchers’ meetings, but she is still overcome by jealousy and competition.  In the first meeting she admits to “feeling a lot of things I wish I hadn’t,” a rare expression of emotional maturity, but after the second weigh-in, she is sour and unhappy that the pound-a-week-losing Judy Schechter has lost more weight that she has.

The theme of competition is pretty heavy-handed in “Dark Shadows.”  In the very first line of the show Roger explains to Bert that fishing is competition – not because it’s man versus fish as Bert assumes, but because “it’s man vs. man. The weighing and measuring.”  Then in the final line of dialogue, when Betty has to reveal what she’s grateful for at Thanksgiving, she says, really, really pathetically, “I’m thankful that I have everything I want. And that no one has anything better.”

In between those two lines we have numerous examples of competition and jealously.  Don and Peggy are both competing with Michael Ginsberg. Don actually stays at work on a Sunday night to come up with a creative idea that is better than Michael’s and then presents only his own idea to the client.  Betty is competitive and jealous of Megan, with her lithe figure and glamorous apartment. As noted, Betty is also competitive with the other women at Weight Watchers.  Roger is competitive with Bernie Rosenberg, the client’s son who is hitting on his estranged wife at dinner. He’s so competitive that he aggressively seeks to have sex with her at her new apartment. Pete is competitive with all the other agencies and is yanked that SCDP don’t appear in a NYT magazine article on ad agencies (an actual piece by Victor Navasky that appeared on November 20, 1966.)

The only one who is not competitive is Megan.  Her friend is jealous of her modern apartment and rich husband, but Megan herself seems supportive of her attempts to land the part on the aforementioned Dark Shadows series.  She does admit, when the friend is giving her grief about her fortunate situation, “What do you want me to say, that I’d kill for an audition in this piece of crap?  I would. Are you happy?” Admitting to that kind of jealousy seems a healthier and more honest way of dealing with it than lobbing the cutting but passive-aggressive remarks that the other characters make.

It surprises me that there are many viewers who don’t like Megan.  She’s been on screen more time this year than anyone else, except for Don himself.  Until this year, the second-most important plot-line on Mad Men has been Peggy’s story, which exemplifies woman’s struggle for equality.  But the Megan story has gained traction this year – she exemplifies not just woman but the new generation who reject the compromises and cynicism of the previous generations.  She’s only a few years younger than Peggy but Peggy is from a different era.  It’s no surprise that her last line of dialogue – in response to Don’s suggestion that they open the window to cool off the apartment is to note “The air is toxic. I don’t want it in here.”   A perhaps too-obvious metaphor for the rotten world that the older generation has built.

By the way, there really was a “killer smog” on November 24, 1966 that killed 400 people. Hats off again to the Mad Men research department:

Some other observations:

·         Many Mad Men episodes are rooted firmly in specific moments in history and deal with broad sociological themes. Not with “Dark Shadows.”  The themes explored in this show could have occurred on many other television series set in any historical era.  The only thing that tied it to the mid-sixties was Weight Watchers, which was formed in 1963. Those meetings, in which the plump ladies are advised that “we should fill ourselves with our children, our homes, our husbands, our happiness,” could not have occurred like that just a few years later, when The Feminine Mystique had penetrated more deeply into the culture.

·         Speaking of Weight Watchers, from 1978 to 1999 it was owned by Heinz! It was probably not in the baked beans division, though.

·         Megan, I don’t think Sally Draper needs any acting lessons.  The girl is a natural at putting on an act to get what she wants or to manipulate her parents. You are playing with fire if you give her any more tips.

·         Henry Francis is unhappy because he “backed the wrong horse” in leaving Nelson Rockefeller’s team to join the John Lindsay administration. In the 1966 election there was a major backlash against Lyndon Johnson (one that paralleled the 2010 backlash against Barack Obama) in which Rockefeller, George Romney and Ronald Reagan all won gubernatorial elections by huge margins.  Henry thinks that Rocky will run for president, but Betty is more astute for once in noting that Rocky’s divorce makes him an unpalatable presidential candidate.  In fact, Rocky initially supported Romney as the candidate from the moderate wing of the GOP but jumped into the race in February 1968 after Romney faltered in New Hampshire. Although he finished second at the GOP convention, there was no chance that he would be nominated.  Of course if backing the right horse is what’s important to Henry, he should be making inquiries right about now with Richard Nixon.

·         In Michael Ginsburg’s “Sno Ball” portfolio there are several references to pigs.  This refers to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which the protagonist is named Snowball.  Here’s a relevant quotation from the book, which might actually interest Betty Draper Francis: “The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master.”

·         How many ways can Roger Sterling make anti-Semitic jokes?  When told that he needs to meet the heads of the Manischewitz wine company and to bring his “Semitic wife” because they are obviously Jewish, he asks “How Jewish are they? Fiddler on the Roof – audience or cast?” Then in explaining the business opportunity to Michael Ginsberg, he manages to make three anti-Semitic remarks in one paragraph: “They make wine for Jews and now they’re making it for normal people. You know, for people like me. They’re open to everything. It has to be cheap – surprise – but impactful. Bring me a couple of your best ideas by sundown Friday. [pause] I have done a little research.”

Finally, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, when are they going to start dealing with race relations in a major way?  This was a bigger topic in previous years that in this season.  They obviously hired Dawn, the black secretary, to make a point, but I just can’t believe that the whole civil rights saga, the most important issue of the sixties other than the Vietnam war, will continue to fly under the radar.

Don’t forget. It’s every man for himself.  On Mad Men it sure is.

Mad Men: Tomorrow Never Knows

(Note: The Recap of S5 E7 — “Lady Lazarus” — was origibnally published on a now-defunct platform on May 7, 2012, and is being saved her so all the Man Men recaps are in the same place.)

Congratulations to Matt Weiner for one of the great head fakes in Mad Man history.  The title of last night’s episode “Lady Lazarus” is also the name of a notoriously depressive Sylvia Plath Holocaust poem. If you want to slit your wrists, here is a reading from Plath herself:

This would make even Ingmar Bergman want to take a Zoloft. (Sample lines: “Dying/Is an art, like everything else/ I do it exceptionally well.” Sheesh.)

Sylvia Plath? The Holocaust?  That could mean either a subplot about concentration camp-born Michael Ginsburg or the suicide that’s been hinted at since the “falling man” promotional ads started appearing earlier this year.

And indeed, the episode initially seems like it’s going the former route.  In the very first scene Pete tells his commuting buddy that his life insurance policy even covers suicide after two years.  Further, this scene is set up like the Hitchcock movie “Strangers on the Train” (where two train travelers discuss killing each other’s spouses and one actually does.) Almost immediately there’s another Hitchcock reference to “The Birds,” further suggesting a creepy Hitchcockian sensibility.

And then we meet Beth, the wife of the man on the train, a classic unhappy Sixties housewife, who despite being “well-provided for” is miserable because she knows her husband is cheating on her (shades of Betty Draper!)  Beth is absorbed by the recent photos of the earth from outer space, which show our home planet as “tiny and unprotected, surrounded by darkness.”

And then finally, there’s this little speech from Pete, who continues to be morose as a suburban husband, and is particularly unhappy that Beth, who succumbed once to his advances, will not progress toward a full-blown affair. Talking to the always-clueless Harry Crane he says: “Why do they give you a glimmer of hope in the midst of rejection? A thread to hang onto. A misplaced word, a suggestion of the future. Under a court of law it would look like an accident but it’s not.” Yikes, that’s some heavy existential stuff if you consider that “they” can be the whole human race and not just “women that Pete wants to have sex with.”

But, presto-chango, Lady Lazarus is not about suicide after all.  Yes, it’s about a dead woman being reborn but that woman is not Sylvia Plath but Megan Draper.  Feeling increasingly deadened in her job as an successful copywriter, she slips the chains to pursue her real dream, which as we have learned, is to be an actress.

And here’s where we have to work backward from the last scene in the episode.  In a show about the Sixties, it was inevitable that Mad Men and the Beatles would intersect in a major way.  It is hard to overstate the crucial role the Beatles played in the development of the Sixties sensibility.  They started as a conventional boys band, then popularized long hair, stirred up teens like no one before or since (except for maybe Elvis), expressed the alienation at the root of the Sixties rebellion before anyone else put a finger on it and ended up symbolizing everything that was counter-cultural. In song after song, album after album for six years they dominated the cultural landscape.

The Beatles played an important role in a previous Mad men episode. Back in Episode 10 of Season Four — “Hands and Knees” — Don takes Sally Draper to the Beatles appearance at Shea Stadium. This is a the episode where Lane gets caned by his dear papa and everyone seems to be hiding something. So it was perfectly spot-on that the closing credits featured an instrumental version of the Beatles song, “Do You Want to know a Secret.”

Matt Weiner explained later that they used an instrumental version of the song because the licensing fees for actual Beatles version were prohibitively expensive.  So what a huge surprise when Megan gives Don the “Revolver” album in the final scene, suggests that he play a particular track if he wants to understand what’s going on in society, and we hear the actual song Tomorrow Never Knows.

This is both a shocking and thrilling selection.  Even today, almost 50 years later, the song never fails to amaze. Here it is, in all its psychedelic majesty.

This song, in this episode, shows how deeply into the Sixties the show has come.  On the surface things still seem normal – husbands still commute to the city from the suburbs and people pursue careers, but deep down there is a tidal wave of dissatisfaction and disillusionment heading our way.

John Lennon wrote “Tomorrow Never Knows” after reading  The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, which in turn was adapted from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Following the instructions laid out in the book, Lennon took LSD and was never quite the same.  (You will remember of course, that at the party where Roger and Jane started their own LSD trip, the other guests were discussing the Tibetan Book of the Dead.) Lennon lyrics make it clear that there’s a path to transcendence that does not involving making commercials for baked beans:

Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream,
It is not dying, it is not dying

Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void,
It is shining, it is shining.

Megan bless her, has the clarity of vision to know you can should not spend your life doing a job you do not love and she has the courage to make the change. Her co-workers do not understand this, and even Don doesn’t get it at first.  In a rueful conversation Roger remarks, “I didn’t get to do what I wanted to do. My father told me.” Don replies, “I was raised in the Thirties – my dream was indoor plumbing.” But, he adds, “Why shouldn’t she do what she wants? I don’t want her to end up like Betty – or her mother.”

And here’s the new Don Draper – he has become the perfect husband. Supportive, understanding, sensitive (and well-off.) And how heart-breaking it is that at the moment he has become possibly the happiest he’s become in his life, the one thing that makes him happiest – working with his wife – vanishes.  No wonder when he looks into the elevator shaft all he sees is a void.

Megan, at least, gets to pursue her dream, but will that lead to happiness?  We’ll see.  Don has made the excellent point that “sometimes we don’t get to chose where our talents lie,” and it may turn out that Megan true calling is in advertising after all, where she has a real talent. But I think Peggy’s right.  She’s one of those girls who can do it all.  She’s a great character and an inspiration to us all.  Let’s hope she doesn’t find that professional success doesn’t break up her marriage.  That would be the expected thing, but Matt Weiner usually does not do the expected thing.

Some other observations:

·         This episode takes place on and around October 17, 1966. We know this because the news broadcasts are full of reports of LBJ’s trip to Asia, which began on that date.

·         Joan increasingly seems like a dinosaur, stuck in the Fifties. Her aphorisms about sexual politics are drawn from an age when women had to entrap and manipulate men. Last week she was sure that Abe was going to propose to Peggy, failing to foresee the possibility of cohabitation. This week she dismisses Megan as a typical second wife, following a “playbook.” She snarks, “She’s going to be a failing actress with a rich husband. Did you know that he met Betty Draper when she was a model on a photo shoot? That’s the kind of girl Don marries.” Joan can possibly be forgiven for not knowing exactly how talented an actress Megan is, having missed the birthday party where she performed “Zou Bijou Bijou.” Nor has she seen her acting in client pitches.

·         What is the Beatles-like song that the Cool Whip people want to put behind the commercial and why does Michael Ginsberg react so viscerally to it?  It’s supposed to be 30 years old.  Is it a Nazi song? Many mysteries with Michael.

·         Last week Julia Ormond appeared as Megan’s mother. Last night former Gilmore Girl Alexis Bliedel, showed up as Beth, the unhappy housewife. Gilmore Girls is a show I never watched but Twitter went crazy when she showed up as a suburban housewife.  I wonder if she’ll be back and finally take those pills/slit her wrists/put her head in the oven. She tells Pete, “I’ve had men paying attention to me since before it was appropriate and they don’t care what I say. They just watch my lips move.” She doesn’t sound like she’s long for this world.

·         What a hilarious joke Roger pulled on Pete, convincing him to take those skis by appealing to his vanity and telling him the client specifically wanted him to have them. Pete looked completely ridiculous carrying the skis around the office and transporting them home, as Roger undoubtedly knew he would. Revenge is best served cold, indeed.

·         As mentioned, Beth is wigged out by how vulnerable the earth looks from outer space.  Here Are the photos to which she was referring:  http://bit.ly/r32xVo

·         I want to be head of desserts.

·         Wise words from Megan: “It’s so simple when it’s someone else’s life, isn’t it.”

By the way, I think we will find out that the Beatles let Lionsgate use Tomorrow Never Knows for a reduced rate or maybe even for free.  I have no inside knowledge on this.  Just guesssing.

Mad Man: Who’s Born Free?

(Note: This recap of S5 E6 — “Far Away Places” — was originally published on a now-defunct platform on May 1, 2012 and is being saved here so all the Mad Men recaps are in one place).

I always wondered if Matt Weiner is on drugs when he writes his Mad Men scripts and now I’m pretty sure that he is.  Sunday’s show “Far Away Places” has the most vivid acid trip in TV history – and he did it entirely without special effects.  Only someone who frequently hallucinates could have thought this up.

The show itself feels like a hallucination, like some tripped out French “New Wave” movie playing with time and space, but the structure of the episode could not have been simpler.  The episode features three separate stories that take place at the same time over the same 24 hours.  Nothing new there, but we are so accustomed to TV’s convention of interwoven and parallel story lines in which you get multiple cuts among the various stories that when they play our serially it seems mind-blowing.  As the episode progressed, it felt like an increasingly complex puzzle but it was only at the conclusion that you realized it had actually been three mini plays one after another: 15 minutes of Peggy, 15 minutes of Roger and 15 minutes of Don.  Seriously, what could be less complicated?

Even more amazing is the LSD trip that Roger and Jane take.  It seems so freaking weird, but it’s really a matter of dialogue, camera angles and the occasional musical sound effect.  Usually these experiences are portrayed with distorted lenses, animation or CGI pop-ups, but here is a perfect example where Weiner’s budgetary limitations do him a tremendous favor – simpler is better because it’s more believable.

The title of the episode is “Far Away Places,” which refers to the LSD trip, Don and Megan’s ill-fated trip to the Plattsburgh Howard Johnsons and (presumably) Michael Ginsberg’s birth monologue. It’s hard to know what was more hallucinatory – the actual LSD trip or Ginsberg’s story about coming from Mars but in reality being born in a concentration camp and later found in a Swedish orphanage at age 5.  You don’t need to be on drugs to have a loose grip on reality.  “Are there more like you?” Peggy asks? I don’t know, I’ve never found any, he responds.

Speaking of Far Away Places, how trippy is that Howard Johnsons?  The colors are so vivid and bizarre – and such a shock of memory.  Yes, I spent a lot of time in Howard Johnsons restaurants in the Sixties and it never dawned on me that they were so freakish.

But for pure Sixties out-there-ness consider the movie that Peggy goes to see after she blows the Heinz pitch.  Born Free is about a couple who adopt a lion cub (just like Ginsberg was adopted!!).  I actually used to have the ‘45 record of the theme song, as performed by Andy Williams.  Some of the lyrics include:

Live free and beauty surrounds you
The world still astounds you
Each time you look at a star

Stay free, where no walls divide you
You’re free as the roaring tide
So there’s no need to hide

Does this or does this echo an acid trip? (Here’s the trailer to the movie.)

In any event, to the main point of the show. This was a depiction of three relationships under stress: 1) Peggy and Abe, because Peggy cares too much about her job; 2) Don and Megan because Don doesn’t care enough about his job; and 3) Roger and Jane because Roger doesn’t care one way or another about anything.

The Peggy and Don conflicts are hard to watch because they are so real.  The fight that Don and Megan have is a remarkable depiction of how frighteningly fast a resentment can escalate into a full-blown crisis. Megan wants to be taken seriously at work but Don is looking for a playmate; when he yanks her away from her colleagues on the day of the Heinz pitch, he is tacitly diminishing her worth to the team.  He’s still on his honeymoon and just wants to recreate the joy of their Disneyland vacation; he’s genuinely so excited for her to taste orange sherbet. Again, here’s the shock of recognition – how many of our own arguments have escalated like this because we can’t articulate, even to ourselves, what is bothering us or what we desire until it’s too late.  And as much as I sympathize with Megan, has there ever been a more devastating and cruel taunt thrown in a spouse’s face than “Why don’t you call YOUR mother?”

As for being born motherless, this is another thing that Don and Michael have in common. Except that Ginsberg has a loving dad, which is one of the best things this season.  It’s wonderful finally to see someone getting unreserved guilt-free love from a parent.  To have someone who will stare at you while you sleep is no little thing.

Some random observations:

·         Megan has abandonment issues. Presumably we will find out later what those are.

·         Nice to see Burt Cooper reasserting his authority at SCDP. Until now, everyone in authority at the firm has been coasting – will they now start working again?

·         I loved it that the LSD session was conducted in an upper-intelligentsia East Side environment and not by a bunch of hippies.  Apparently LSD was not outlawed until 1968 so taking it under the supervision of a doctor was probably legal.

·         I also loved how the Beach Boys was playing in the background during the LSD trip.  Why the reel-to-reel tape, though, and not the record?  (Assuming the music is from Pet Sounds” although I don’t actually own that LP myself.)

·         The word “displacement,” which had an important meaning in World War II, was used in two very different contexts. When Ginsberg says he’s from Mars, he reassures Peggy, “Don’t worry, there’s no plot to take over Earth.  We’re just displaced.”  Later Roger tells Jane he’s moving to a hotel because he doesn’t want to displace her.  Both Ginsberg and Jane are Jewish, but so different they can’t be seriously considered the same ethnicity.

·         When will Mad Men tackle civil rights?  The first scene in the entire season was a civil rights protest, but except for the occasional awkward scene with Dawn, the entire subject of race has been unexplored.  This is certainly a conscious decision by Matt Weiner, but the more he delays dealing with it, the more I dread an explosion.

·         Funniest line: When Jane realizes that her marriage is over, “It’s going to be very expensive.”

Boy I would love some fried clams right now.

Made Men: Signal 30 or I Thought We Were Friends

(Note: This recap of S5 E5 — “Signal 30” — was originally published on a now-defunct platform on April 17, 2012 and is being saved here so all the Mad Men recaps are in one place).

An episode that begins with screeching tires and a crash and ends with “Ode to Joy” covers a lot of ground.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Mad Men is its unpredictability.  Starting with the misleading promos that offer snippets of upcoming scenes taken out of context, you can never tell where Mad Men is headed. There are zigs and zags within the episodes, even within the scenes themselves, which makes the series one surprise after another.

When I saw that last Sunday’s show was titled Signal 30, I was filled with dread.  Signal 30 is a notoriously gruesome driving school safety movie designed to scare students into good behavior by graphically showing the aftermath of traffic accidents.

Coming on the heels of last week’s gothic marriage of sex and violence I could only imagine some horrible end for some character (particularly Megan, who is standing between Don and his natural state of unhappiness.)

Nope, this was just another Matt Weiner head fake; Signal 30 turned out to be one of the funniest episodes of the series, with one surprising scene after another.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that after four straight episodes of sometimes heavy-handed exposition showing how the sixties have changed everything, we are right back to the culture of season one.  The female characters all have subsidiary roles as the mad men themselves duke it out with each other (literally.) The boozing and carousing are back. Don is back – confident and good looking again, no longer seemingly like a relic of the old days. Heck, even Sterling and Cooper seem to have regained a little of their Mojo, offering sage business advice and one-liners galore.

And of course bad Pete is back.  He was a swine in season one and seemed slowly to be maturing, but it’s clear that he hasn’t grown up at all.  If anything, he’s gone backwards, hitting on a jail-bait cutie in his drivers’ ed class (what an idiot – as if he didn’t learn his lesson from impregnating Peggy and then humiliating himself with his neighbor’s au pair).

Now that Dr. Greg Harris is back in Vietnam Pete Campbell seems to have emerged as the designated villain of the series.  And he was born for humiliation.  Impatient, grasping, always wanting more, and completely lacking in self-awareness, he’s both a figure of contempt and pathos.  “I have nothing Don,” he whines  after getting beat up by Lane (in one of the great scenes in Mad Men history.) Right, Pete, nothing except a successful career, a beautiful wife, a sweet baby daughter, a house in the suburbs and a great pedigree.

But Pete has become one of those guys who can’t get no satisfaction.  Nothing’s enough. Having grown up with wealth and privilege, he needs to earn his way through life because his father frittered away the family fortune.  He wants to be creative but can’t get the respect he craves. And he seems bored with the life he’s worked hard to build.  Ah, the ennui.  The disenchantment of the modern man.  I’ll give him some slack, conceding that it’s tough to grow up with expectations that fall considerably short in adulthood, but that doesn’t change the fact that Pete has become, if you will forgive the expression in a family blog, a dick.

That’s what makes his myriad humiliations such a treat.  Let’s categorize them, just for fun:

·         He is unmanned by a much older Lane Pryce in bout of fisticuffs, right there in the office in front of an agog trio of Don, Roger and Bert.

·         His slightly perverted advances towards the queen of his drivers ed class are rebuffed because she favors a fellow student named Handsome, who is such a lug-head he would rather go to Vietnam that accept a track scholarship to Holy Cross.

·         His attempt to fix the drip in the kitchen faucet blows up during the dinner party and Don, to great applause (and references to Superman) has to come to the rescue, fixing the faucet while Pete is still fumbling to find a wrench.   (Not being very mechanical myself, I have to sympathize with Pete, but I’d like to think that I would know at least to shut off the water before running to find a tool box.)

·         He is made to feel cheap and dirty by Don’s exemplary behavior at the brothel when they take a client out for a good time. Don, of course, says nothing judgmental – Pete intuits that Don is looking down on him for partaking of the pleasures that Don has passed on, and there’s nothing Pete wants more than Don’s approval. (And how funny is it that when the client tells the group that he wants “to have a little fun,” Peter suggests, “We could grab a drink at the Carlyle. That’s a good place to get into trouble.”)

·         His erstwhile rival, Ken Cosgrove, with a less successful career and a plainer wife, seems so much happier; he turns out to be a successful author of science fiction stories, recalling for us that when Ken published a story in The Atlantic Monthly in Season One, Pete failed to get any takers for his own fiction and was reduced to seeing it published in Boys Life! (And what he doesn’t know is that Ken is setting him up for eternal humiliation by writing an eloquent Cheeverseque short story based on Pete’s suburban unhappiness.)

Pete’s dissatisfaction is the mirror opposite of Don’s state of mind.  We now have happy Don. Having literally strangled his own destructive urges last week, he is now so blissful that when he gets drunk the first thing that pops into his mind is “Let’s make a baby.”  Megan says that’s impossible, but we don’t know whether that’s literally or metaphorically impossible.

Don’s happiness stems from his marriage, which admittedly, as Pete points out, is still in its honeymoon stage.  Don has always been attracted to strong women (despite marrying Betty) and Megan has surprisingly turned out to be a match for him.   She stands up to him, but in a flirty, not bitchy, way. She picks out his clothes, gets him to cut back on his drinking and tells him that if he wants to get out going to Pete’s dinner party he has to call his wife himself. She knows his secrets and still loves him. The word “uxorious” (Definition: fondly doting or submissive to a wife’s desires) comes to mind.  In response to Pete’s snide remarks about his failed first marriage he says “If I’d met her first, I would have known not to throw it away.”

Even though it’s impossible to anticipate Matt Weiner, I still can’t stop myself, and it seems that Don will continue to have his swagger, confidence and fidelity as long as he remains happy with Megan. Remember that so much of his destructive behavior was driven by his unhappiness with Betty (in a telling early episode, Don gets passed-out drunk at his son’s birthday party after seeing the loving relationship between a neighboring couple.) That’s why I fear for Megan, and had my heart in my throat as she drove home from the Campbell’s party.  If she makes Don too happy, the might lose its focus, so an early death – perhaps from a Signal 30-type car crash – would be a way out of this conundrum.

Some other random thoughts:

·         All the episodes this season have been firmly rooted in a specific historical date. This one starts on July 30, 1966, the date the Brits won the World Cup.  The next day, just a couple of weeks after the Richard Speck nurse massacre, an ex-Marine climbed to the stop of a tower at the University of Texas and began taking target practice on the students below, eventually killing 16 and wounding 32. I remember both the nurse and Texas Tower murders vividly. Mad Men integrated the Speck murders into last week’s story but the Texas events are mostly an afterthought, except for the remark that the Drivers Ed girl makes: “Everything seems so random all of a sudden. Time seems to be speeding up.” Indeed.

·         And how creepy is it that Ken’s wife calls the Texas murderer Charles Widmore, only to have Don correct it: “Whitman.” You wonder if Matt Weiner had planned this moment from five years ago when he gave Don the birth name of Dick Whitman.”

·         Is it really likely that the wife of the Jaguar prospective client would have found out that he’d spent the evening at a brothel because he had “chewing gum on his pubis”? You’d think that would the kind of thing you’d notice no matter how many martinis you had, but if you challenge the credibility of something like this, Matt Weiner always seems to find a newspaper clip, memoir or interview to show something like this happened.

·         There was a huge discussion on Twitter about the sports jackets that Don, Pete and Ken wore to the Campbells. I have seen similar jackets in my own family photos, although not thankfully on me. This is the kind of shock of recognition that Mad Men creates almost every episode.

·         The interaction between Joan and Lane after the fight demonstrated once again why everyone loves Joan. Lane is so overcome by Joan’s kindness (“If they tried to make you feel different from them you are And that’s a good way to be”) that he kisses her.  Wordlessly she gets up and walks to the closed door. Will she lock it so they can continue, or will she walk out in a huff?  In another surprise, she simply opens it to remove the element of privacy and walks back to the couch and says “Everyone is this office has wanted to do that.”  You bet. “To Pete Campbell.” Oh.

·         Ken’s story about the robot who removes a bolt from a bridge, thereby causing its collapse, is almost existential in its insight into modern man (represented in this episode by Pete).  The guests at the Campbells are dumbfounded when he outlines the story and they probably don’t get his explanation either: “He’s a robot. People tell him what to do. He doesn’t have the power to make decisions. He can only decide whether that bolt is on or off.” I can’t wait to read his new story under his new pen name “Dave Algonquin,” a perhaps overly obvious reference to the Algonquin Table writers of the 20’s and 30’s.

·         Love the Lobster bibs they were wearing at the dinner with the Jaguar guy.

·         Since when do Ken and Peggy have a pact?

·         Bert is an astute political analyst: “Believe me, Nixon’s lying in wait,” and later “You don’t stop a war before an election.”

·         After Pete gets beat up by Lane, Don tells him, “you’ll be fine,” which is essentially what he told Betty when she had her cancer scare.

·         Funniest line: “Reschedule the meeting,” after Pete and Lane have beaten and battered each other’s faces  to a pulp.

·         Second funniest line. Peggy to Ken about one of his short stories. “I read the one in Galaxy about the girl who lays eggs.  Wow.”

Wow indeed.

 

Made Men: Mystery Date

(Note: This recap of S5 E4 — “Mystery Date” — was originally published on a now-defunct platform on April 9, 2012 and is being saved here so all the Mad Men recaps are in one place).

If the stated purpose of Mad Men is to illustrate how people react to change – not only age-related changes but also cultural changes – then the April 8 episode “Mystery Date” did a better, more subtle job than the first three episodes of the season.  Last night no one moaned about being old (or asked “when will it get normal again?”) and there were no cheap reminders of cultural shifts like the wild sixties outfits that the guests wore to Don’s birthday party.

Yet there is no doubt that the Mad Men of July 1966 is culturally far removed from the Mad Men of 1960, when the series opened.  The backdrop to the episode is the gruesome Richard Speck murders in Chicago, where Speck tied up and murdered eight nurses – a troubling reminder (along with references to the urban riots in Watts and Chicago) that the country is beginning to go haywire.

There’s also a growing sense that the alcohol-lubricated hijinks that seemed like so much fun in 1960 are no longer so appealing.  There have been no wild office parties with conga lines and lawn mowers, the office drinking seems way down, and Megan even tells Don to stop smoking, at least while he’s got the flu. Some of this is age-related (Ken Cosgrove, Pete Campbell and Harry Crane are all married now – and Don doesn’t have the same stamina that he did when he was 34) but the main reason is that all that smoking, drinking and catting around seems vaguely passé to the younger and newer characters.

Of course not all the cultural changes are necessarily bad.  In 1960, Joan probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to dump her unworthy husband, but by 1966, there’s a growing sense that women should be able to exert more control over their lives.  And in 1960, Sterling Cooper wouldn’t have had a black secretary or bragged about having a Jewish copywriter.

As usual, there is far too much going on in Mad Men to comment or analyze every relevant development.  Here are a few random observations:

Dream On – This is the second episode in a row in which a dream sequence has revealed the anxieties of a main character. Last week it was Betty, fearful that she would die of cancer, foreseeing her bereaved family after her funeral; this week it was Don hallucinating that he strangled an ex-lover who had developed a bad case of Fatal Attraction Syndrome.  Dear Matt Weiner, please knock off the dream sequences, especially ones that are not explicitly labeled as such.  I was one of those who believed that Don really had (already!!) cheated on Megan and it wasn’t until he strangled her and pushed her under the bed that I began to think this might be the fever talking.  Truth is: dream sequences have seemed like a cheap way out ever since Pam Ewing dreamed an entire season of Dallas.

The Valley of the Dolls – For whatever reason, “Sally Draper” was trending on Twitter throughout the show; Twitter has an extreme fascination about what happens to her; it already thinks she’s going to have an eating disorder. Now they think she’s going to end up like Judy Garland.  Her scenes with Grandma Francis, Henry’s “obese” mother, were terrific.  Myself, I only vaguely remember the board game “Mystery Date,” which gave a name to this episode, and I certainly don’t remember that weird commercial (which looked a little bit like Michael Ginsberg’s hosiery pitch sounded).  I love how Grandma Francis turns out to be a major pusher – first she tries to get Betty to take diet pills and then she gives Sally a Seconal to get her to sleep. The scene were Betty and Henry come home and find the old bat asleep with the carving knife while Sally’s passed out under the couch was terrific in its understated creepiness.

The girl in this ad for the Mystery Date game even looks like Sally

Bye-Bye Greg – If there’s a more reviled character on Mad Men than Dr. Greg Harris, I’d like to know who it is.  Of course we all hate him for forcing himself on her that time in the office and we feel tremendous satisfaction when she finally tells him, “You’re not a good man, you never were, even before we were married—and you know what I’m talking about.”  We ALL know what she’s talking about.  Still Joannie’s on a bit of a high horse about him making unilateral decisions considering that little Kevin is going to grow up with a shock of white hair and a fondness for Martinis. Greg is an interesting character that we don’t see a lot of on TV – he’s fundamentally weak and hasn’t quite lived up to his own expectations. No wonder he wants to go back to Vietnam, where he feels needed and competent.  Oh well, good riddance, I guess. As interesting as he is, we don’t want anyone around who talks to Joan like this: “I have my orders and you have yours.”

Peggy Sue – What a great roller coaster ride Peggy had this week. Her $400 shakedown of Roger was one of her greatest moments, but then her good deed in letting the African American secretary Dawn sleep at her apartment was as cringe-worthy as anything she’s ever done. For a second I thought she was going to make a lesbian pass, but thankfully she appeared more interested in mentoring her, implying that copywriting is the most important thing a woman can ever aspire to, before then conceding she doesn’t know if she has the strength to carry on. Peggy also tried to compare her struggles as a woman to the barriers that African Americans have to overcome.  She tried this last year too (just as Hillary Clinton’s supporters tried vis-a-vis Barak Obama). I don’t think Dawn was impressed. But the most awkward moment occurred when she wanted to remove her cash-laden pocketbook from the coffee table but didn’t want to give the impression that she didn’t trust Dawn not to steal Roger’s bribe money.  That situation could have come straight out of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Roger Dodger – I was marginally sympathetic to Roger up until now but it is increasingly clear that he is a major empty suit and screw-up.  The WHOLE POINT of hiring Michael Ginsburg was to have “someone with a penis” work on the Mohawk account, yet he completely neglected to give him the assignment and was forced to beg Peggy to work on it because everyone else had gone home for the weekend.  Just wait Roger, if you pull this 40 years in the future you’ll be able to blackberry someone on a Friday afternoon to ruin their weekend.

Here are some predictions:

·         It will transpire that Michael Ginsburg’s mother was killed violently. He didn’t react well to the gallows humor over the Richard Speck murders.

·         I think we’ll see more of Dawn. Hope so, because she’s been extremely one-dimensional up till now – nice, quiet, minding her own business. She’s been like Carla, the show’s only other black character. Clearly the opening sequence of the season, with the Black protesters on Madison Avenue, signaled a major emphasis on the civil rights movement – and at some point, the show is going to have to deliver, presumably with a major story on Dawn.

·         I’m predicting that Don will not cheat on Megan, but only because Megan will not survive the season.  This is too much happiness for Don and I think she will actually get the cancer that Betty avoided.

·         I’m predicting we’ll see more of Bobby Draper.  The little boy playing him now is the fourth Bobby Draper so far, but already this season baby Gene has had more lines than him.  What is the point of casting a new kid as Bobby if he’s going to spend the whole time at bed-wetting camp?

·         Roger will either learn not to carry around a lot of cash or he will go broke bribing his way through the office. He got Harry to switch offices with Pete for $1100, so I guess he made off relatively cheaply with Peggy.

This was a very good episode, but I am not sure I can continue to watch these shows live.  My heart is always pounding when the show ends at 11:00 p.m. and it takes me forever to fall asleep. Maybe I should get Grandma Francis to give me the other half of Sally’s Seconal.