Because it’s so important to teach our children about emotional manipulation and the advertising industry. Also because Sesame Street is pretty awesome these days.
In many ways, last night’s Mad Men was a return to the issues and themes of the first two seasons. Unlike the more recent episodes where the outside world has begun to intrude into the atmosphere, the primary focus of “Seven Twenty Three” was looking inward.* Politics inside Sterling Cooper clashed with Don’s complicated selfhood, Peggy’s fumbling attempts at sexual and professional development led her into bed with someone from her work environment, and Betty once again found herself prone on a couch. (Remember the first season, when Betty used to be in therapy, and would lie down and talk out her feelings while an unsympathetic psychiatrist diagnosed her with mother issues?) Happily, the episode did much more than rehash previous content – if anything, “Seven Twenty Three” gave us a culmination of one of the central concerns of the first two seasons. Don gives up his professional freedom in favor of long-term stability, and in doing so, as Alan Sepinwall points out, essentially kills Dick Whitman in favor of Don Draper.
Wake up Dick Whitman, wake up Don Draper
The episode was also different from many of the previous installments in that it was far more overtly formal (by which I mean, in a lit. crit.-y way, that it had a noticeable and purposeful form). “Seven Twenty Three” worked with a method of storytelling Mad Men has rarely experimented with, a classic procedural technique. We see our main characters engaged in some startling activity or located in an unexpected place, and then we flash back to an earlier point in time to discover how they get there. CSI does it constantly, Alias used to do it practically every other week, and it even happens occasionally on shows like Grey’s Anatomy or House. The tool creates a built-in sense of expectation and suspense, but its rigid form can also backfire and allow the audience to easily predict the rest of the episode. The “twenty-four hours earlier” technique can also force a frequently unstructured show like Mad Men into a somewhat unnatural but nevertheless appealing symmetry.
Solar eclipse
First, Mad Men instantly classed up the form by denying the audience the standard “twenty-four hours earlier” title card and instead creating the jump in time with a nice visual leap from Don rubbing his bruised neck to Don nattily fixing his tie the previous morning. Next, the episode highlighted and, I think, justified the inorganic symmetry of the convention by centering the mirror images (opening and closing with the same moment in time) around an unusual, unnatural event, a solar eclipse. The unexpected specialness of a full eclipse makes the inverted storytelling feel appropriate, or at least less out of place. It also gave the episode a still moment in time, where Don and Betty could pause and be anchored to the same event, which made the whole experience more contemplative and less like the typical headlong rush toward the opening scene.
Daddy Whitman
The best thing about the flash back storytelling is that Mad Men created enough meaning around its use that the form and content were matched. We watch Don wake up with his face destroyed in a motel room, fully regressed to his Dick Whitman identity. Then we watch Don wake up the morning before as Don Draper, complete with pressed suit and polished shoes. Over the course of the day, the conflict with Conrad Hilton and Don’s need to actually sign a contract as Don Draper bring his identity anxiety to the forefront until he reaches a point where he loses control entirely. Dick’s father appears in a vision to scold him for producing nothing of substance, and then he allows himself to be snookered by two fresh-faced con artists. The return of the Dick Whitman wake up then gives us a conclusion to the process – he may have woken up as his previous self, but he immediately heads to the office to seal Dick Whitman’s coffin and walk out, permanently, as Don Draper.
For me, the episode worked. It was thoughtful, taut, eventful and self-aware. But this was your one cliché episode opportunity, Mad Men. You used it well, but that means you probably shouldn’t do it again.
*This is not to say that there weren’t occasional blips of historical reference – Henry Francis’ political ambitions could become quite pointed after November. More importantly, Pete’s excitement about an aviation contract and the impending need for jets to fight in Vietnam continues to nudge Sterling Cooper toward a wartime marketplace.
Well, that was pretty awesome.
As long as I seem to be writing this paper on Mad Men and its historical moment one week at a time, I might as well continue. This episode actually seemed to have quite a bit less to do with cultural or political context, as the events inside Sterling Cooper were without question sufficient to distract from anything going on in the world outside. Who has time to watch the evening news when a young upstart has shown up to demote everyone and you’re being relocated to India and your loser sexually abusive husband can’t even stay on his career path?
Happy 4th of July!
But what Mad Men may have neglected in the way of subtle cultural hints, it traded for full-blown historical allegory. This episode was potently American in a way the show has often played with but seldom taken on with full force. What could be more suggestive of an old world/new world divide than rehashing a question of leadership between Britain and America? As represented by St. John, Lane Pryce and the doomed Guy McFerland, Britain means class, sophistication and privilege, and Betty glows at the possibility of living in London with a pram and a real nanny. Britain is also unmistakably the old way of life, stuffy and staid, and thanks to its British overlords, Sterling Cooper seems to be sinking further into the past while Don Draper courts new American royalty in the form of Conrad Hilton. How appropriate that the British invade on the 4th of July, forcing the Sterling Cooper secretaries to ironically reverse the significance of the holiday with tiny British flags on their desks. Watch the episode again, and just keep an eye out for how many times there’s a tiny British flag in the foreground. Even the uncharacteristic (and thus, impressively shocking) bloodiness was carefully woven back into the allegorical fabric, with Roger commenting that the office looked like Iwo Jima and young copywriters musing about Vietnam. And then to have a John Deere tractor, symbol of hardworking American agriculture, literally mow over poor Guy McFerland, the young, posh, well-educated Briton’s Briton?
An episode like this could have been completely absurd. The allegory, so markedly drawn, could have been unsubtle, thoughtless and simplistic. Instead, “Guy Walks Into an Advertising
And really, what's funnier than a guy squeegee-ing blood off the window?
Agency” was saved from obvious metaphor and transformed into an absolutely gorgeous piece of television by the funny, tragic, sick, uncertain, contemplative mess that surrounded it. Roger Sterling learns he’s not even part of the old guard, he’s actually been written out of the company flowcharts, and he does not find the discovery reassuring. Pete Campbell, so desperate to be respected and viewed as an older authority figure, slides down the ladder a bit and ends the episode with the same thwarted ambition he’s always felt. What most saved the allegory from over-determined silliness, though, was the persistent sick humor of the aftermath. Guy loses his foot, jokes Roger, “right when he got it in the door.” Of course, he can never be an accounts man now because the doctors say he’ll never golf again. And finally, the underlying joke of the whole episode, its title – “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency,” but he does not walk out. The sick humor keeps us laughing uneasily, probing our reactions and preventing us from tying it all up in a neat little bow.
The last word about this episode should belong to Joan. It is a testament to Christina Hendricks’ portrayal of her as well as the amazing writing of this show that in an episode where a guy’s foot gets mangled by a tractor and blood literally spews across the office, the real tragedy and humanity of the night came from Joan Holloway Harris on her last day at work. I was horrified and moved when she actually wept in the office, I was impressed but not surprised when she ably administered a tourniquet on Guy’s bleeding leg, and I was both thrilled and saddened by the final moment of mutual appreciation between Joan and Don. I don’t know what will happen to Joan, now that she’s left Sterling Cooper and is stuck with her awful, incompetent, sexually abusive husband. The best hope for Sterling Cooper is that she’ll be coming back soon, because a day on which Guy McFerland walks into an advertising agency and Joan Holloway walks out does not spell a happy tomorrow.
“Every job has its ups and downs,” said the elevator operator.
For an episode chock full of developments, it’s a testament to my overpowering love of silly wordplay that the first thing I remembered this morning as I reconsidered last night’s Mad Men was this quote from Hollis, the man who works in the elevator. Silliness aside, The Fog gave us a number of telling moments and suggestive possibilities for the show’s future, but for me was much more about the smaller throwaway lines and brief glances.
Medgar Evers in the waiting room and at the kitchen table
As my focus has been largely on this season’s increasingly insistent relationship with its historical period, the most obvious of those throwaways is the embedded account of Medgar Evers’ assassination. First Sally’s teacher mentions she has been asking questions about it in class (and assumes this is related to coping with her grandfather’s death), then footage of the memorials plays in the background while Don sits in the hospital waiting room, and finally the reference culminates in Betty’s drug-induced hallucinations. Explaining to her mother that she’s having a baby, Ruthie tells Betty to shut her mouth, and then gestures to the bloodied black man sitting at the kitchen table. “See what happens to people who speak up? Be happy with what you have.” Evers, who died mere hours after Kennedy’s civil rights speech from the previous episode, organized boycotts and spoke in favor of integration, and then became a figurehead for the civil rights movement after he was assassinated in 1963. Ruthie’s comment that Evers should signal the importance of being “happy with what you have” is one of the show’s great motifs. From the surface, Betty should be happy with her picture-perfect life (a picture taken just a few episodes ago at the end of the school May Day performance), but the emotional hollowness underneath and the historical pressures from outside both telegraph the increasing impossibility of simply being happy. The mismatch between Ruth’s words and Evers’ bowed head make it clear that being “happy with what you have” will not be the way of the future.
The other brilliantly played small glance in this episode comes in the scene where Peggy asks Don for equal pay. After being prepped by the “previously, on Mad Men clips” and the lunch with Pete and Duck, we are completely ready to see Peggy finger the blue baby boy’s footies and feel the flooding memory of her traumatic first year at Sterling Cooper. It is no coincidence that the thematic content of the scene is a direct parallel to Betty’s hallucination – where Ruth scolds Betty to settle for her unhappy marriage, Peggy goggles at Don’s amazing life. “You have everything,” she breathes, “and so much of it.” He has the income, the social stature, the suave snappy suits, and most painfully, the baby she could never have raised on her own. Don’s life is what Peggy strives to attain.
Except, whether you want it to or not, “every job has its ups and downs.” For Peggy, although she longs to achieve the seemingly perfect life of Don Draper, Duck Philips is right to point out that this is Peggy’s time, and Don’s job may well be on its way down. While she may want what the old guard has, Peggy is as much on the right side of history as Betty is on the wrong, and her freedom to pursue her own career gives her the opportunity to speak up rather than being happy with what she has.
As for Hollis the elevator operator, soon it will be his time as well. And when that time comes, Pete Campbell will be right there to sell him a TV.
On the whole, I found this episode much more tightly and carefully drawn than the last, with a more coherent overall effect of “variations on a theme” rather than the few incongruously startling scenes of last week. That theme, of course, dealt with the way parents raise their children, and the frustrating difficulty of cross-generational communication. The Drapers, Peggy Olson, and the jai-alai enthusiast Horace “Ho-ho” Cook Jr. all provided opportunities to say, in a variety of tones and emotions, “My children are not what I would have wanted them to be” and “My parents cannot comprehend my experience of the world.” As familiar and well-worn thematic territory as it is, Mad Men manages to maintain a sense of anticipation and the unexpected by perpetually shifting the roles of parent and child, so that Betty begs her father to remember that she is his “little girl,” even as her advanced pregnancy acts as a constant visual reminder of her own children.
One primary effect of this episode structure, where each new character provides insight and further depth to the central issue at hand, is that the audience’s focus is diffused across several plotlines rather than focusing on one character. Mad Men has always done this to some extent, and the device is made easier because each supporting character has a fully developed background and is ready to step in at any moment and carry some of the thematic weight. In the past, the heavy lifting of each organizing device rested on Don Draper. Much of the plot has dealt with locating a kernel of truth underneath the sales pitch, both in Don Draper’s identity and in the central premise of an advertising agency, and because of that, Don has always remained firmly at the core of the show. He has always been what Mad Men sells to us each week in the opening credits – a perfectly coiffed silhouette, the thing our eye always returns to, and an outline whose inner features we cannot fully see.
Except now, as season three begins to take shape, Mad Men is more than ever about its time period. We have more constant reminders of the exact date (this episode took place on June 11, 1963), we get more discussion of political events and the way the world is changing, and the thematic content of each episode mirrors the sentiments of an era rather than a single inscrutable man. If you’re going to be dealing with the coming social upheaval of the sixties, what better theme to deal with than the gap between parents and children? And in the midst of Grandpa Gene, Peggy’s cruel mother, and the somewhat silly jai-alai plot, Don’s childhood flashback is reduced to a silent examination of a photograph and muted against sharper emotions.
Don Draper's in the foreground, but Grandpa Gene's in focus
I’m not at all upset that Don Draper has become less of the central focus of Mad Men – I love it as an ensemble piece rather than the continued exploration of one man, and it makes sense that we could only find his mysterious past interesting for so long. Mostly, I’m impressed with what a smart technique this is to build an audience for an obscure television show: hook them on one (extremely attractive, complicated, subtle) character, and then as the audience grows and the world of your show becomes more familiar, you can afford to expand your scope. It’s something The Sopranos was really good at, and something The Wire never did, but might have made it a little easier to build a following while it was on the air.
I never want to lose you, Don Draper. But I’m happy to see you blend into the background a little.
I hardly even know where to start with last night’s Mad Men. The episode outdid itself with the number of scenes begging to be close read, ranging in blatant absurdity from Roger’s blackface number and Pete and Trudy’s Charleston to the countless unspoken moments of subtle eye contact and enigmatic dialogue. (Among the latter group I’d list Joan’s accordion performance and Peggy’s conversation with her secretary Olive high on the list of scenes that practically have a space for annotation written into the script.)
But my struggle with how to actually attack this episode stems from another direction entirely. Mad Men is begging to be analyzed, and the response to that invitation has suddenly begun to feel a little overwhelming. The usual suspects like Alan Sepinwall and Maureen Ryan of course have extensive commentary, and there are posts on Jezebel, the NYTimes Artsbeat blog, TIME and already three posts about it on slate.com. I didn’t fully appreciate just how appealing Mad Men is as a subject until I saw today that ABC News’ Senior White House Correspondent, Jake Tapper, has started writing weekly Mad Men blog posts. Apparently, we love to write about Mad Men.
The screenshot everyone will use from this episode
It’s not hard to see why, especially with an episode like last night’s. There was something for everybody’s own Mad Men hobbyhorse. If you’re into gender studies, Peggy and Joan had plenty of material for you, with Peggy blazing new territory and Joan suddenly realizing her traditional ambitions have limited her opportunities. If you’re more into social history, it’s hard to beat the Kentucky Derby party as a snapshot of life at the brink of change. For the political scientists (I’m looking at you, Jake Tapper), we get Roger complaining about the Roosevelt marriage and the likelihood of Goldwater as a presidential candidate, and for the lit. geeks (I’m looking at…me), we get Sally reading Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Paul Kinsey reciting from Eliot’s The Hollow Men. And anyone into civil rights and the history of race in American must look at that blackface scene and feel like they’ve been handed a Christmas present.
Enter my mixed feelings. I am thrilled everyone is writing about Mad Men. Whoohoo, thoughtful dialogue about a great show! Plus, there’ve been some seriously impressive discoveries about the episode I never
Decline and Fall
would have found, particularly the revelation that Don Draper was almost certainly talking with Conrad Hilton (socialite and hotelier) in the abandoned country club bar. On the other hand… really, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? (The same could be said for The Hollow Men, but it was so obviously meant as a joke on Paul’s self-dramatization that it gets a pass). That text has been used a metatextual symbol for social catastrophe since the nineteenth century. The ‘X marks the spot, uncover-the-hidden message!’ cues in this episode were a little broader and more distracting than usual. It felt like the show’s desire to be legible and accessible in its references made the experience of watching less like an all-engrossing hour of television and more like a Find the Analysis puzzle book for grown-ups.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved the episode. Who am I kidding, if there were an entire television show called Find the Analysis: A Visual Puzzle Book for Grown-Ups, I’d watch every week. But I’m pretty sure I’d pay more attention to the answers than the actual show. A day after “My Old Kentucky Home,” I find myself thinking more about the coverage than the episode.
A brief post on yesterday’s Mad Men while waiting at the Newark Airport:
Certainly, the most memorable and alarming moments from the episode last night were courtesy of the Ann-Margret clips from Bye Bye, Birdie, which was released in 1963. Seen as part of that whole wacky movie, the scenes with the buxom young lady singing “Bye Bye, Birdie” and lunging seductively at the camera aren’t all that shocking. I mean, it’s a movie with Dick van Dyke and a scene in a secret Shriner’s meeting, so everything feels equally aggressive and shrill. Within the context of Matthew Weiner’s restrained, subtly crafted visual aesthetic, though, those clips from Bye Bye, Birdie are jarring beyond belief. The disconnect becomes even more apparent as Peggy sings “Bye Bye, Birdie” to herself in the mirror, and that intense juxtaposition highlights the real tension of the episode. The first episode of this season was about masculinities, featuring images of Don as Don Draper and Dick Whitman, thrilling male love between Sal and the bellboy, the sparring between Pete and Ken. This second episode, “Love Among the Ruins,” was about femininities, and the distinct gap between Peggy’s reality and the fantasy she sells in advertising. As a part of that scheme, we also saw the conflicts in Roger’s daughter’s wedding planning, hints of Joan’s expectations for impending motherhood, and Betty’s struggle with her role as an adult daughter. It might be telling that the episode’s title, “Love Among the Ruins,” is also the title of a poem from Robert Browning’s 1855 collection, Men and Women.
After laying out the contemporary boundaries of these gendered roles, Don also gives us the key to how this season will proceed, by selling the Madison Square Garden on a message of change and progress. Peggy may be looking in the mirror and pretending to be Ann-Margret, but her own behavior and the power she wields in walking out of that nice young man’s apartment, suggests her own readiness for changed paradigms.
Did it strike anyone else that the premiere of this season was funnier than usual? The show has always banked on humor, often reserved for the audience’s delicious chuckle at the period (think of the pilot episode, with Joan unveiling Peggy’s typewriter and assuring her it’s been designed so women can use it). In the past seasons, though, that humor has always been accompanied by either a cringing realization of the underlying injustice, or a subtle shiver at the deeper darkness. When has Mad Men’s funny bleakness been more disturbing then last season’s completely bizarre Utz potato chips commercials? In comparison with that incredibly grim sense of humor, this episode was downright slapstick. read more…
You guys… Mad Men came back. Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll put this entry after the jump. read more…
On the whole, last spring’s scheduling announcements were much less painful than I was expecting. Chuck and Dollhouse were both teetering on the edge of extinction before they were yanked back into the land of the living (for now), so other than those shows that were blatantly DOA (I’m looking at you, Kings), there really weren’t that many heartbreaks.
Part of my sensation of pleasant surprise came from the renewal of a show called Better Off Ted, an ABC sitcom I initially dismissed as unfunny and then gradually grew to love. Better Off Ted is a wacky, occasionally pointed send-up of corporate culture, set in the sterile headquarters of a massive, ethically ambiguous company called Veridian Dynamics. The main character, the eponymous Ted, is a well-dressed, well-liked, well-meaning guy trying to balance the demands of his heartless boss and his hapless underlings. The humor revolves around the absurdities of bureaucracy, with a healthy dose of silly lab projects. Not every joke hits, and Ted’s on-again-off-again thing with his colleague Linda gets pretty tiresome. (Linda is cute, but not that bright, and her role as the conscience of Veridian Dynamics drags down the fun of the satire).
But Phil and Lem, the nerdy heads of Ted’s research division, were what won me over from my initial doubts. Phil and Lem are where Better Off Ted indulges in its silliest and most disturbing jabs at corporate science, as they struggle to weaponize pumpkins, use themselves as jetpack test subjects, cure baldness (that one goes pretty badly, actually), and keep Ted happy. The absurd projects are hilarious, but the relationship between Phil and Lem is what makes it really work; their bond is a study of that relationship that all too often goes unexamined on television today – the love between lab partners. Phil helps Lem try to get dates, they participate together in a secret Medieval Fight Club in the basement, and Lem goes off the deep end when Phil agrees to be cryogenically frozen as an experiment. They’re partners, they’re friends, and although there is a little hitch when Lem discovers Phil didn’t attend MIT as he had claimed, they ultimately support each other.
Phil and Lem; some problems with an unbreakable dinner plate
Ted as Don Draper
As the whole television world is now acutely aware, Mad Men is returning for its third season this Sunday night, and it’s not inappropriate to think about Better Off Ted in that exalted TV company. The tone, the content, the scope and ambition of Better Off Ted is, of course, completely different than something as subtle and finely tuned as Mad Men, but there are a few hints of influence that are worth thinking about. Women’s clothing and role in the workplace may have changed since the days of Sterling Cooper, but Ted is a veritable Don Draper doppelganger, complete with suit, slicked hair and sharp tie. He is Don without the dark side, and strolls around the uncannily similar office space with the same sense of mastery. To put it in SAT analogy terms, Better Off Ted is to Mad Men what Scrubs was to the best of ER – it takes the intense atmosphere, the psychological portraits, and the complex workplace relationships and punctures them, finding humor and satire inside the oh-so-serious setting. This week, the last two episodes of this season of Better Off Ted aired. I’m sad it’s gone, but I’m glad it’ll be coming back.
(And next week, Mad Men!)