We are better than half way through Season Six of Mad Men. What can me say so far?
Don Draper 3.0
As was hinted at in the last scene of the last episode from last season, Season 6 has seen Don return to his philandering ways. The "Old Don" is back then, right? Well, sorta kinda, but not exactly. He actually expresses feelings of guilt over his renewed infidelity in this season's episode one, even though the subsequent episodes show the more amoral side of our "hero" that we're used to. But when Sylvia, the married woman he is cheating on his wife with, breaks it off out of her own feelings of guilt and shame we see Don's eyes change from steely and cocksure to helpless and heart broken. For his two marriages and the countless affairs he's engaged in over the years, Don Draper is in love, maybe for the first time in his life, and the fact that he can't control his beloved or his own emotions is killing him. When he returns home after the break up it is early morning and the news has just broken on the East Coast of Robert Kennedy's assassination. His wife Megan is crying in front of the TV, and Don sits emotionally drained on the other side of the bed. Once again the show does a masterful job juxtaposing historical events with the fictional crisis of the characters (more on that later).
So Don has changed, but on some level also remains stubbornly static. As others have pointed out, last season ended on the doorstep of the Summer of Love and this one dawned on the threshold of 1968. Having passed through that cultural blender and out the other side fashions and hair styles have changed; ties are getting wider, sideburns longer, dresses more colorful. The one constant is Don, whose grey suits and close trimmed and slicked back hair haven't changed since we met him in 1960. His resistance to change isn't confined to his choice of neck tie. He still drinks too much, and though he's not quite the dirty stomp around he once was, in his world fidelity remains optional. The sexual revolution is going on, but he still maintains a strange mix of chivalrous misogyny. While not the bigot Roger Sterling is (he accepts a black secretary no one else wants, and is generally respectful to the African Americans he deals with), he's content to let the status quo of institutional racism remain out of complacency if nothing else. He professes to be against the war in Vietnam, but suggests an ad campaign for Dow defending the use of napalm. It's 1968, the world is blowing up, but Don is walking through the rubble willfully ignorant of all the change going on around him.
Don's one time rival, now partner, Ted Chaough represents the more modern, sensitive man; keen to the ways of business, not above playing the game a bit loose and fast, but you get the feeling that while he's out to win he's not bent on destroying people in the process. He drinks, but not too much. Ted tries to draw ideas out of his creative people using brain storming techniques as opposed to browbeating them like Don. In most things he uses the carrot, not the stick. Is it a coincidence that he's the only major character who practices a religion (Lutheranism)? But now that he has been drawn into the SCDP universe will Don rub off on him, as Peggy Olson fears, or the other way around?
Which ever way it goes, Don has to face eventually that things are are changing. In this week's episode, Man with a Plan, Don and Sylvia engage in some very strange sex as power and manipulation game that seemed to be taken straight out of The Last Tango in Paris or 9 1/2 Weeks. Though Sylvia was on the submissive end she seemed to actually enjoy it. In spite of this by the episode's conclusion she ends the affair, and no amount of alpha male posturing will change her mind. Yes, the game was fun, but the world is bigger then the hotel room where they pretend that what they are doing is at once real, but inconsequential to their lives outside. Their relationship is complicated, and both are close to their cheated on counterpart. For Don, the king of compartmentalization, this type of thing is second nature. For Sylvia it is too much to endure. So he goes, confused and distraught, for a lost love but also because the tricks he could always rely on in the past don't work anymore.
MLK and RFK
There is a spit opinion out there as to Mad Men's incorporation of historical events into the show's storyline. Some see it as the weakest part of the show, I'm one of those who feels that they do a good job with it. Most episodes don't pivot around big news events of the Sixties, but when it does it works pretty well because the event itself isn't the thing; it's meant to speak somehow to what's going on with characters themselves. The JFK assassination worked well as the back drop to the final disintegration of Don and Betty's marriage. The Martin Luther King killing highlighted the difficulty Don has dealing with his feelings,as well as showing the political and social cracks beginning to emerge on the ground among the people of SCDP.
This past Sunday the Robert Kennedy assassination was placed at the tail end of the show. Some commentators were surprised that this important event was treated like a "throwaway." I disagree strongly. This was no throwaway, but a superb way of summing up what's been going on. I would go as far as to say the entire sequence, which segued into the closing credits, was a brilliant mix of style and substance.
As I wrote in my Season 6 preview, you can only have so many of these "very special episodes" where we witness the reactions of the characters to these monumental events. It's not the producers' fault that MLK and RFK, two American icons, were murdered two months apart from each other. They could have done two episodes in three weeks with characters walking around stunned and weeping, asking "what's the world coming to." Instead we have the world falling apart and Don Draper totally disconnected emotionally from it, in part because he can't seem to make sense out of his own personal situation. He has lost control of his love life, and at work he is quickly losing his status as the smartest guy in the room, though it's debatable how aware of that he is. Up to now he has always been the most powerful, charismatic and intelligent man at SCDP. Since even before this latest merger there have been questions about that, beginning at least with his ill advised Hawaiian tourism pitch that made people think of suicide instead of a leisurely swim in the ocean. The center isn't holding, both inside and out, and Don is confused and oblivious at the same time.
As for style, the sequence begins with a sleeping Pete Campbell being awoken by his increasingly senile mother who is staying with him at his bachelor pad against his wishes. She tells him that, "they just shot that Kennedy boy," to which the aggravated Peter responds with a huffy reminder that that happened "years ago." We cut to Megan and Don, she crying on the bed, eyes fixed on the TV news coverage of the killing, he fixing his cuffs as he walks into their bedroom. She is emotional, he is stoic. We know why she is upset, but as he takes his place on the bed, away from Megan, we are left to wonder what exactly Don is thinking; is he aware of the assassination? We have to assume that he is, but if so does he even care? Is he thinking of Sylvia? Is he pondering his lost power? Is he wondering if the the world he knew, both in terms of his personal life and the bigger social picture, is ever going to get back to normal? Meanwhile the monotone of the TV reporter is all we hear as Friend and Lovers' Reach Out in the Darkness, that very optimistically hippie anthem, comes up in the background and shares the sonic space with the tragic report, much like Simon and Garfunkel did with their rendition of Silent Night from that same era. The screen goes black and the credits come up as the sound montage continues (Darn AMC for cutting in with promos way before the credits end).
A "throwaway"? Not by a long shot. In probably less than three minutes we get an insight into how people then may have found out about the shooting and reacted to it, while both moving the story ahead and summing it up at the same time, and we only had to hear about the world going to hell in a hand basket once (from Pete's mother). We got irony, pathos, a touch of farce and a heavy dose of psychodrama without having to go through the entire "tragedy of the week" routine yet again. Bravo.
Who is Bob Benson?
Bob Benson is a newbie in the Mad Med universe, and is, at this point, even more mysterious than Don Draper. He is also very anti-Draper in that he is cheerful, quick to help, perky as all get up (if you can call a man perky), and did we say cheerful? The mystery is why is he around and what does he want? The general consensus is that he will either turn out to be the biggest back stabber in history or else is part of some bigger plot to overthrow Don, even though at this point their paths have not crossed in any significant way. In fact up to this week Bob has sort of just been there, popping up now and again in random, seemingly meaningless situations, piquing our curiosity about who he is and what he's all about.
The plot thickened a bit this week when he helped Joan get to the hospital when she was stricken by some mystery illness, and then got her bumped to the top of the emergency room triage list by bluffing the nurse in his cheerfully slick way. Joan later returns the favor by making sure his name is not included in a post merger list of firings.
Some in the blogosphire think he's a corporate spy of some sort. I'll go out on a limb and guess that he could be a reporter or writer doing his own piece of gonzo journalism research for a book or article. Just a guess. Stay tuned to find out for sure.
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