Mad Men – The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

From its first season, Mad Men has occasionally done this type of plotline. Beginning with Rachel Mencken and the Israeli tourism board, and then continuing through Pete’s support of a black-focused campaign for Admiral televisions, we’ve gotten a few glimpses into a 1960s perspective on otherness. “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” extends this into an encounter with Japanese culture, and as with the previous experiences, the methods and the results are much the same. Don and company do some research (Don read Exodus before his meeting with Israeli tourism just as he reads The Chrysanthemum and the Sword to prepare for meetings with Honda), and at the end of the day, whatever everyone’s personal inclinations may be, more tolerance means more business.

But it’s clear that this experience with Honda is much more strained than the earlier incidents, and the pressure is coming from a few different angles. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce needs the business more than Don-Draper-era Sterling Cooper ever needed any individual account, so the corporate stakes are far higher, and as Roger Sterling made painfully obvious, the emotional stakes are similarly raised. Roger’s questions about the world are the same as our questions watching Mad Men – how much of this world has changed? Are we still the same people as these characters, or are the differences just superficial? And the analogy works for our perpetual questions about Mad Men’s historical specificity as well. Roger is furious that no one remembers Dr. Lyle Evans, while Matt Weiner engages in a weekly game of “name that 1960s reference.” (This week: Sally watches The Man from UNCLE, Benihana was founded in 1964, and the internet seems to be scrambling this morning to identify Dr. Lyle Evans).

It’s a carefully orchestrated episode of television that can begin with an uncomfortable cultural reaction that we now view as painfully old-fashioned (“your new yellow buddies”) and then shift to a topic that we still feel a hefty dose of awkwardness about, although it may not be quite at the level of Betty’s mortified 1960s reaction. “Look!” it seems to say. “We may feel superior and dissimilar to these crazy Japanese-hating pre-hippies, but you felt pretty uneasy yourself, didn’t you?” Even among a group of academics at Dickens Universe, the subject that created the most debate and emotional response was the concept of Oliver Twist as a sexualized child, an object of pedophilic lust, or a child in danger of falling outside of heterosexual relationships. This episode took an enduring cultural queasiness about the sexualized child and connected it back to The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a text all about guilt and shame-based cultural values. Don managed to successfully negotiate the unfamiliar waters by demonstrating his personal sense of honor (a quality on display for the Honda executives if not for many other characters on the show), but Betty’s mortification felt like the episode’s dominating mode.

If nothing else, this incident with Sally means that she’ll be getting some therapy which she almost certainly needs, although Betty probably should be the one going four days a week. It did feel appropriate that after Betty’s disastrous therapy experience in season one, she is far more comfortable and open in a session with a children’s therapist. Of course she is. I think at this point, even Bobby is more adult than Betty, who responds to her daughter’s self-applied haircut by slapping her across the face and calling her a Mongoloid. I’m glad that at least for now, Henry Francis is willing to be the father figure Betty obviously desires, although it’s unclear how long he would be satisfied by a wife who has no more control over her emotions than her ten-year-old daughter.

Three cheers for Peggy, right now the least embarrassed of the bunch, as she tools around the empty sound stage on the Honda motorcycle. May we all have many similarly shameless moments.