Mad Men – Wee Small House
Much of Mad Men’s punch has always relied on the juxtaposition of our contemporary perspective with the unflinching portrayal of urban corporate America in the 1960s. We watch Betty down a gimlet and take a puff on her cigarette while she’s nine months pregnant, and we love the frisson of transgression it gives us. Many of the best of those moments go unspoken – one of my favorites from season two happens after Don buys his new Cadillac and he takes Betty and the kids out for a picnic. They lounge on a blanket after lunch, music playing from the open car door, and when they’re done, Betty blithely shakes the trash onto the pristine green grass, folds up the blanket, and walks away. The scene is all the better for its winking silence.
The subtext of “Wee Small House” operates on the same principle, but does so in a far more explicit way. While Don struggles with Conrad Hilton’s demanding requirements and Betty continues to entertain and reject Henry Francis, Sal Romano finally falls victim to the homophobia we’ve all feared since season one. Lee Gardner Jr. comes on to him, Sal exercises his perfect right to work in unmolested peace, and Don’s irritability finally expresses itself by lashing out at someone else’s inability to keep secrets. Thanks to Connie, Don has had to quash his wayward ways (at least professionally), and resents the continuing existence of others’ hidden lives. We saw it recently in Don’s impatience with Peggy’s ambition, and now Don’s previously secret knowledge of Sal’s sexual preference causes him to strike out against Sal.
This is the type of plot that usually goes without commentary on Mad Men. We see, understand, and are saddened by the social context that permits and even encourages homophobia. But for whatever reason, “Wee Small House” goes farther. Underneath Sal’s disgrace, we see Don listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech early in the morning with his daughter’s teacher, we hear clips from the memorial service for the four girls who died in a church in Birmingham, the neighborhood women discussing the march on Washington, and perhaps most importantly, we see more from the Drapers’ “girl” than we’ve ever seen in the past. While we’re upset when Don fires Sal, the real emotional response to injustice comes out of these scenes, watching Carla and her employers while we hear Martin Luther King Jr. in the background. We feel the weight of cultural memory as Carla listens to “[her] station” on the radio, and we’re certainly not allowed to watch without anger as Betty shakes her head and wonders if civil rights are just “not supposed to happen right now.”
"Do you know how bad it must be, for the negroes to descend on Washington like that, just to be heard?"
The parallel is not subtle, and Betty’s comment about civil rights ensures we catch the drift. The 1960s were the time for civil rights, but it won’t be Sal’s time for decades to come. It’s the first time I can recall Mad Men not only capitalizing on our shock about the past, but also using that shock to rebound with explicit commentary on the current day. With Prop 8 and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, it is still an open question for some people about whether gay rights are not supposed to happen right now. Watching Carla stand quietly in the kitchen and listen to the funeral service on the radio, Matthew Weiner’s contemporary answer sounds clearly from his historical fiction.
