Mad Men – The Grown-Ups

I’m very glad that Mad Men tackled the Kennedy assassination an episode before the season finale (as was suggested in a comment on my blog post last week). Obviously, the event provided an impetus for the imminent collapse of the Draper marriage, which has always been at the core of Mad Men’s thematic content. The assassination also created the shift we always expected that it would – from the slowly disintegrating gleaming surfaces of the early part of the decade, we finally reach a point when disintegration rapidly accelerates and all of the collective inner turmoil leaps into full view. It was a necessary step in the show’s storyline, and it would have been unreasonable to downplay the assassination or its reception. Still, the whole event created the upheaval we expected it would create, and so I’m glad we still have the last episode for a conclusion that will hopefully be less predictable.

A meditation on watching the television

I think the challenge of the episode was to depict the event’s magnitude without losing sight of the characters and the effect it has on their development, and “The Grown-Ups” did so with moderate, uneven success. In order to recreate some of the disoriented, rudderless sensation the characters were experiencing, one of the episode’s strategies was to jump quickly between scenes and locations, leaping from the initial moment of realization at Sterling Cooper, to Don’s reaction, to Duck Philips and Peggy, to Betty and back to Sterling Cooper. Although that jerky, jarring viewing experience was effective, its downside was that it allowed some of the character development to get lost inside the almost montage-like transitions. Without question, the scenes that made last week’s episode so remarkable were the long, focused, quiet, painfully still moments between Don and Betty, and the need to embody an entire country’s response to national tragedy made it impossible to include any similarly intense, motionless scenes this week. As a result, characters made emotional jumps in time with the physical and temporal gaps in the episode. Betty switches from confused housewife to determined adulterer, Don moves from shaky-but-functioning man of the house to pleading husband, Margaret from weeping, immature child to calm bride, and Roger from henpecked patriarch to misunderstood sensitive guy without any explanation other than “Kennedy’s dead.” I understand the reasoning, but “The Grown-Ups” sacrificed individual emotional intensity for depictions of collective mood.

It didn’t help that Margaret’s wedding forced the plot to follow the same “how are a large group of people responding” concept – the wedding did allow Betty and Henry Francis to reconnect, but the primary impression was that everyone wanted to be somewhere else, myself included. The New York Times City blog published an interesting piece today about New York marriages that actually took place on the same day as Margaret Sterling’s in 1963, and their anecdotal evidence indicates that those who decided to attend weddings were relieved to have a reason to think about something other than Kennedy. That certainly was not the case at the Sterling-Hargrove wedding, and it’s a shame. This season has been so good at balancing overpowering emotional experience with wry, ironic sensibility, and the wedding missed its opportunity to offer a different tonal register.

All that being said, there were several moments in “The Grown-Ups” that I found powerfully effective, among them, Carla’s heartfelt response to the assassination, Betty’s refusal to let Don join her on her drive, and every interaction between the Drapers and their children. It was heartbreaking to watch Don and Betty struggle to interpret the grown-up tragedy for Sally and Bobby. And oddly, my favorite scenes from last night’s episode were those involving Pete and Trudy Campbell, who I often find annoying. Theirs was the one emotional journey I felt was fully explicated within the episode, starting with the news of Pete’s demotion all the way through Trudy’s complete shift in worldview. The Campbells have always been crucial figures on the show; they are young, privileged members of society whose ambitions are to achieve the same (but bigger) success as their parents. As usual, Pete is completely tone deaf, and on watching Lyndon Johnson, remarks sadly that now they have “more of the same,” and before Kennedy’s death it “felt for a second like everything was about to change.” Trudy, far cannier than her husband, suddenly realizes the immense change that has already occurred, and she shifts tactics, encouraging Pete to gather his clients and leave Sterling Cooper. Like Betty, Trudy realizes that as sad as the end of Camelot may be, change and mobility are possible in ways they were not before. Except unlike Betty in “The Grown-Ups,” we get to watch that realization happen on Trudy’s face.

Change is now possible. Next week, season finale!

P.S. Does this ad for AquaNet remind you of anything? Yeah, Peggy’s probably going to need to rewrite this one.