Mad Men – Out of Town

You guys… Mad Men came back. Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll put this entry after the jump.

I’ll point you first to this review by Alan Sepinwall, which includes this really lovely reading of the “London Fog” motif of the episode:

Yes, “Mad Men” is back, and “Out of Town” was an incredibly satisfying way for the show to return from the long hiatus. Heck, even if the rest of the episode had been a drag, it would have been worth it for the running gag about London Fog itself, which served as a metaphor for the whole show. Pryce explains that there is no London fog – that what we think of as fog was actually dust from the coal mines. In other words, what we think of as something mysterious and romantic from the past was actually something far seedier than its reputation suggests – just as “Mad Men” is constantly showing us the hidden emotional cost beneath the glamorous behavior of men like Don and women like Joan.

And yet “Mad Men” rarely makes us feel too guilty for asking us to revel in the surface when we want. As Bert Cooper, bless his Ayn Rand-loving heart, puts it, “I don’t care what they say: London Fog is a great name.”

It is, as Sepinwall suggests, an important reminder of the show’s central premise, the project of reconstituting our collective memory of the era so that it includes both the sleek, well-manicured façade and the rapidly disintegrating scaffolding underneath. Of course, the London Fog campaign gives Don the opportunity to warn Salvatore about maintaining his personal cover story (“limit your exposure”), but it also gives Don a chance to utter one of those classic Don Draperisms that remind us why he does what he does.

Time and again, at the moments when Mad Men seeks to comment on itself or its historical moment, it turns to the ever-handy built in commentary machine that is Don Draper’s advertising genius. To sum up the emotional emptiness of the early 1960s, Don comes up with “it’s toasted” in the show’s pilot, and then retroactively invests that emptiness with near saccharine nostalgia with the carousel at the end of the first season. At the beginning of this third season, we’re reminded that Don may be able to create a soothing fantasy land if he chooses (Betty’s beachside lawn chair), but that he also sees the longer, less edenic truth of history. The current head of London Fog looks at his son and wonders if the business will thrive, worrying that the market has already been saturated (heh) with raincoats. Don’s reply? “There will be fat years, and there will be lean years, but it is going to rain.”

This, coupled with the truth behind the real London pea-soupers, is the concise but complete spectrum of historical commentary in Mad Men. So much critical attention on Mad Men has been directed towards its period, particularly when writer/director Matthew Weiner provides such juicy anecdotes about historically accurate cigarette butts in the Sterling Cooper ashtrays. One of the biggest questions about this premiere episode was when it would be set, given the significant jump in time between season one and season two, and so although TV critics had seen this third season premiere long in advance, they were under strict gag orders about spoilers, and specifically about leaking the episode’s approximate date. Don’s line “it is going to rain” means that rain is inevitable, but also universal – it always has rained, and it always will. From that perspective, it sounds almost like a gentle chiding, a subtle reminder that while time period may be the driving motivator, it’s a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. The project at hand is to uncover the unpleasant realities of 1960s glamour, but every historical moment has its idealizations and less comfortable truths, and we can’t be allowed to gawp at the position of women from the comfortable distance of several decades without extending that examination beyond 1963. The episode makes that clear in how readily Don’s past bleeds into his home life, while at the same time, the intense sense of transgression Salvatore experiences in a male sexual encounter winks forward to current political debates.

That said, it’s pleasant to think about all the change 1963 will bring with it. Martin Luther King, Jr. will give the “I Have a Dream” speech in August, President Kennedy will be assassinated on November 22^nd, and on December 26^th, The Beatles “I Want to Hold Your Hand” will be released in the US. Don’s right – it is going to rain, and the weather may change sooner than anyone’s expecting.