Mad Men – Waldorf Stories
It was a fortuitously timed episode of Mad Men last night, as both the show and Don Draper won major awards, and we got a hefty dose of award ceremony spectacle on both counts. For the third year in a row, Mad Men won the Emmy for Best Drama, and Don Draper won a Clio for his revolutionary Glo-Coat ad. One hopes that Matthew Weiner didn’t model Don’s behavior on his own typical post-ceremony celebrations, because wow, it does not look fun to black out for a day and a half only to wake up next to a waitress named Doris who is calling you by your long-abandoned birth name. Meanwhile, Don has pitched someone else’s terrible catchphrase to the Life Cereal people, he’s forgotten to pick up his children, and it takes Peggy Olson’s increasingly amazing self-confidence to pull him back to reality.
The combination of Don’s Clio win and the Emmys is a mirror that comes from outside the episode itself – it’s hard to believe this episode could have been scheduled without some realization that it would coincide with the biggest annual television awards show, but you could watch this episode a year from now and not feel the reverberation of that echo. Even so, the idea of doubling continues to bounce around inside the episode itself, tinting the ad pitches, the flashbacks, and the verbal tics alike. Those flashbacks, a welcome return to a device I initially found annoying, make some obvious parallels between Don’s early career and the disastrous introduction to young Danny Siegel. Both men are desperate, brazen, full to the brim with dubious ideas, and ultimately benefit from the overindulgence of their superiors (although Don unequivocally steals Danny’s idea for the Life Cereal pitch, while it’s unclear whether Roger actually offered Don a job or Don just showed up in the lobby and invited himself in. Welcome aboard!). To tie down that juxtaposition even further, we get flashback Roger’s hijacked cliché, “My mother always said, be careful what you wish for, ‘cause you’ll get it. And then people get jealous and try and take it away from you,” followed by a young Don’s reply, “I don’t think that’s how that goes,” as a direct response to the episode’s opening scene. “Aspiration’s as good as perspiration,” intones a smug Danny Siegel. “That’s not how it goes,” answers Don. There’s more where that comes from, of course. Even before Don steals Danny’s stupid “cure for the common…” idea, his own pitch for Life Cereal is a drunken hackjob of his brilliant Kodak Carousel pitch from the season one finale. And just to put a little visual bullet point on all that doubling, that ad Don created for the fur company features young Betty, before her marriage to Don “saves” her from her modeling career.
The episode’s primary obsession is credit and recognition – getting it, deserving it, being denied it, working for it, failing to be appreciative to those who helped you get it. It’s a part of every plot line, even that little conference room scene when Pete Campbell makes clear that Ken will have to report to him, and Ken gives him that look of begrudging respect. In addition to all of the multiple opportunities for “find the theme” bingo (no one appreciates Peggy’s Glo-Coat contributions! Don hasn’t thanked Roger for discovering him! Just what does that obnoxious new art director think he’s earned, anyway?), the idea is supported more subtly by the episode’s on-the-nose mirroring and the repeated return to cliché.
Underneath the fairly simple impulse to give awards to those who earn them is the more complicated problem of where an idea comes from. While she may be furious with Don’s pitiful lapses in control, Peggy’s chiding speech is also surprisingly generous about the problem he’s created for himself. “I know I’ve gotten stuff stuck in my brain before, and you don’t know where it’s coming from.” All of the episode’s doubling is a manifestation of this anxiety; it illustrates the problem of originality and copying. Which comes first, Danny’s response to Don’s appropriated cliché, or Don’s identical response to Roger’s? Danny’s scene comes first in the episode, but Roger’s drunken cliché happens years previously. Is it copying if Don cribs that little nostalgia shtick from his own pitch? At what point is a cliché something you’ve re-appropriated as your own, and when is it still just something floating around in public consciousness? This one, at least, has the beginnings of an answer – wherever that point of re-invention may be, Danny certainly hasn’t reached it with “cure for the common chair.” “It’s an idiom…Did you know that?”
For once, it feels like Mad Men’s cultural references to the modern moment have more juice than the perpetual 1960s references, and rather than be relegated to the background, “Waldorf Stories” makes it feel as though those coinciding references to the Emmys are front and center. Who deserves the credit for a television show? How do we award originality, and where do we imagine those ideas for story and character come from? As Pete notes, Gray’s built its reputation on awards for five years. I wonder what this Clio will mean for SCDP, and, in the same breath, what three consecutive Emmys means for Mad Men.