Mad Men: One Last Look - 3rd in a Series

Parenting advice from Betty Draper Francis 

Click here for parts 1 and 2 in the series titled A Wrap Up and Personal Farewell to Mad Men

To conclude this admittedly overlong goodbye to Mad Men, I'd like to hit on a couple of loose ends concerning two key characters I've neglected so far.

When I was preparing my pre-finale post which never got finished, let alone posted, Betty Draper Francis' (January Jones) fate was the first thing I started writing about. So I was embarrassed when I got to the end of two lengthy posts and nary gave her a mention. Keeping in mind my basic premise that the characters in the show didn't so much change over the course of the series as much as they came to terms with who they are, setting out to be the best versions of themselves they can be, pursuing dreams in accord with their talents, abilities and deepest wants, we can rightly ask, "where does this leave Betty?"

Just when she seems to be hitting her stride, enjoying domestic stability, returning to school to study psychology with hopes of making a career out of it, Betty is diagnosed with lung cancer. For all the smoking going on the show, you'd think she'd have to get on line for that diagnosis. But no, she is the sacrificial lamb on this one.

By now it's not so original to observe that Betty is accustomed to being obedient to the men around her. She very much appears to be a passive player in her own life. Don manipulated her, and even Henry, as sensitive and loving as he is, doesn't like it when she starts giving her own opinion when it's inconvenient for him. Her life is spent in reference to others. This is a great source of frustration for her, but she never quite knows how to break herself out of this rut. It's often pointed out that Don remained unchanged through the turbulent 60's, remaining essentially a man of the Eisenhower administration. But Betty, as well, is very much a woman of the '50's.

At the same time she sees her friend Francine (Anne Dudek) get an office job outside the home and is inwardly jealous, while outwardly she tries subtly to give her friend a guilt trip over not being satisfied with marriage and family. She is vain, obsessed with her looks and the superficial appearance of things in general. She does lament the roads not taken, like when she hosts a child music prodigy ready to throw it away. Betty tries to convince her to not give up her dream of being a professional violinist, as she had abandoned a modeling career to get married, thus conforming herself to the social expectations of the day. Now, at the end she finds her bliss in the dreams of being a therapist (I'm sure a cleaver twist considering Betty's own adventures on the psychologist's couch which dominated the first season).

Once the cancer diagnosis comes Henry's first response is to seek the best doctors offering the most aggressive treatments. But Betty lived through the death of her mother. She knows how this will end, and adding six months of suffering that will not lead to a cure will be unbearable for her and the one's she loves. So she chooses to let the cancer, which has already metastasized, run it's course. We can debate the wisdom of this choice, but for the first time in her life the choice is hers. Still ever vain, she leaves meticulous instructions to Sally as to the dress she is to wear and how her hair is to be made once she is laid in the casket. But she also does something we rarely see; her giving heartfelt affirmation to her daughter.

Of all the actors on the show, January Jones gets the most hits from the critics. Jones is undeniably beautiful, and she and Jon Hamm look like they belong on top of the wedding cake together (which I think someone may have observed already). But her acting chops are often called into question. I don't now, but any actress who agrees to play such an unlikable character, and really is truly despicable at times, and then gets you to cry for her (which I did), can't be that awful. And that's what I think it is: some people can't separate the character from the person playing the role, which is the critic's problem, not the actress'.

Then we have Sally Draper (Kieran Shipka). An observation made by more than one critic is that the show, after being about Don, is really also about Sally, and the things she will be talking about with her analyst as an adult. She ages from 6 to 16 on the show, and we see her mature, literally and figuratively. I have questioned whether depicting certain aspects of her transitioning from childhood to  adolescence in such a graphic way was necessary; could the same points have been made in a less intrusive way? In the same way some questioned how Linda Blair being in The Exorcist may or may not have effected her human development, I have the same questions about Ms Shipka. I get that editing is involved with the scenes, but Sally does witness a lot of unsavory things over the years. I only hope she's not going to need therapy for herself and Sally.

I guess Sally's was the most unsatisfying ending. She is 16, so I hardly expected a full story arch for her, or that we would flash forward ten years to see what the mid-twenties Sally would look like. But we leave her, back home from boarding school, assuming the domestic duties as Betty slowly fades away. Of all the clips in that montage of the various players going their way into a bright if uncertain future, her's was the dissonant counterpoint. Does she and her brothers go live with her uncle as Betty wants, stay with Henry as she wants, or will Don swoop in after the funeral to try and assume custody, which no one wants? She did get to see the Beatles at Shea in '65, but is missing out on Spain the first in a line of disappointments to follow in life, or will she rebound? There are no hints.

But what we do know is that Sally sees through her parent's many faults and has learned to despise the defects while loving them. She also loves her brothers, and feels protective of them. In this crisis she isn't just thinking of her own security, but is thinking for all of them. On many levels she grew up too quickly, like her father, though under different circumstances. Even though Don had overcome poverty, and was careful not to discipline his children as he had been harshly reared, his inability to come to grips with his past effected them, and Sally in particular. She witnesses the infidelities first hand, she gets burned by Don's lies, and learns to lie herself because it's less embarrassing then having to explain the truth. In many ways she's a typical idealistic teen who demands authenticity, despising the phony adult world of manners and pretense. In some ways she is more mature than her parents, telling her father to think straight about he situation, assessing his abilities as a father compared to the task at hand. She does sacrifice what she wants to come home and care for her mother in her last months. If we can count these as hints, then we can say that Sally will probably turn out to be alright. Though I would still keep the number of a good shrink handy.

And so I come to the end of my journey with Don Draper and company. I could see writing more, but I'll give it a rest, at least for a while. Maybe I'll revisit our friends when the Season 7B DVD and streaming becomes available.

A Wrap Up and Personal Farewell to Mad Men, Part 2

Taking up where I left off last time, Mad Men's last episode finds Don Draper on the road, feeling disconnected, displaced and still running from his past life. He lands at a Northern California crypto New Age style retreat. He goes, dragged by Stephanie, his "niece," in the hopes it will let him open up and come to grips with what is eating at his soul. 

I once described Don's journey as a descent down a corkscrew, and in a way the series finale proves the point. But not only does he go down the slide, he goes up it as well, only to slide right back again.   He's disappeared before, gone on benders, fallen into deep existential despair, contemplated running away for good, and, at the very least, implicitly considered suicide. He experiences all these things in the last ten minutes of the show, reaching his lowest point when he's found slumped down at a pay phone, paralyzed with grief, by a hippy. But, like Stan Rizzo put it, he always comes back, he's a survivor, and, I would add, is usually better, professionally at least, than before, which our ending seems to indicate will happen yet again.

Don always returns refreshed and ready to do corporate battle, but still labors under the same assumptions. He still believes that just moving forward, forgetting the past, even to the point of total personal reinvention is the answer to life's dilemmas. When Peggy secretly has Pete's baby (one of the more bazar story lines from early on), he tells her to get back to work and live as if it didn't happen. When Lane Pryce gets caught tampering with company funds, Don gives him the chance to resign gracefully so as to avoid being fired. Don lets him know that the toughest part is over: all he has to do now is start over with a clean slate. When Stephanie faces a similar dilemma to Peggy's, he tells her to just keep on moving forward; the farther you get away from the event the easier it gets to forget.

While Peggy does move on and become a successful copywriter, she is still haunted by the decision to give up the baby. She has a series of relationships that fail in part because she wants a life partner, but also wants her job; a balancing act difficult for a woman in any age, but especially in the 1960's. Lane, as a proud Briton, knows that there is no such thing as reinvention where he comes from. He's from an upperclass, prominent family, so going the Mayor of Casterbridge route isn't an option. Besides, he tried living a double life in America and the long arm of British manners stretched across the pond by way of his domineering father to stop him. To return to England under these circumstances isn't an option, so he hangs himself. Stephanie knows that Don has been on a treadmill his whole adult life and basically tells him to stop believing his own line of bull.

This is not to say that Don is unchanged over the course of the series. The Don Draper of the pilot is a  nihilistic hedonist living a complete lie, with little or no remorse. He softens somewhat as the seasons move on, but he remains, as his used and discarded secretary Allison proclaims, not a good person. But the Don of more recent vintage does try to make his marriage to Megan work, even after it's clearly not going to. He goes to Joan's apartment to tell her not to debase herself so the company could land the Jaguar account. He mentors Peggy and even tries a hand at fathering his children. He has many flaws still, and numerous failures, but with the big exception of his affair with Sylvia Rosen, his sins are often misguided attempts at setting things right. I'm thinking of his keeping his work situation a secret from Megan, not to hide an affair like she thinks but to give him time to get the job back and act like nothing happened (true to his philosophy of life). Or antagonizing the Jaguar dealer to settle a professional and personal score. For all his progress, any change in his inner life is small, but ironically significant.

Drama is about conflict and change. Mad Men had plenty of conflict, but many questioned if the characters, especially Don, had changed any by the end. I would say that the answer is both yes and no. In the series finale each major character gets their jumping off point to the next phase of their lives. Joan starts her own commercial production company, which costs her romance. Peggy ends up staying at McCann, like her head hunter told her to, but finally finds love with Stan (someone who really understands her). Pete gets back with Trudy and jets off to Wichita for job at Learjet and a second chance marriage. Roger marries Marie Calvet, Megan's mother, presumably cashing out at McCann and living in Montreal. Ted Chaough simply fades into the wood work at the new agency, happy to be just another piece of the furniture. In way, it's not that any of them changed, but that they came to know who they were and what they really wanted. Rather than fighting it, they went with it.

Of course Joan wants love, but she's also come to understand that she's always had a passion for the office. She has talents, experience and business acumen, and wants to take her shot at building something while she has the chance. With Stan's help, Peggy understands that she loves her job but really does want more than just a career. She may not be able to have it all, but she can have what she really wants and needs. Pete is tired of living his father's mistakes simply because he's expected to. Whether he and Trudy will make it work is anyone's guess, but they know that they're better together than apart. Roger wants to experience life, but  knows the Dionysian dream of the hippies is a dead end. So he finds an age appropriate partner who's still nuts enough to make life interesting and drops out in style. And Ted, well, he was burnt out being in the lead, and now gets to put it on autopilot, enjoying the perks of the biz while not having to carry so much of the load.

And so what about Don? He has the cathartic moment hearing the voice of his fellow office drone speaking the words of alienation and lovelessness he holds in his own heart at the group session in the commune. The next morning, as he greets the sun, it's more than implied that he's thinking up a new Coke ad campaign during morning meditation, as opposed to finding inner peace and detachment. So Don hasn't changed then; he's the same grasping capitalist swine he always was? Maybe. The real question is, has Don come to accept who he really is: an ad man who loves his job, who's had a difficult life but really did make something out of himself? He's not a great father, but has made progress in that area. Now that Betty is dying can he make further strides? Or will he continue on these spirals up and down the corkscrew slide of self loathing and self destruction? Will he continue to lie to himself, believing that just moving ahead, acting like the past hasn't happened is the answer, when it's cause him and the people around him so much pain?

The world may never come to know the answer to these questions, but it's great debating them.

As for me, there is so much more I could say, and maybe I will (I see I mentioned nothing about Betty or Sally). Maybe next week, though. Then I'll put on my personal feelings to go along with the analysis.

A Wrap Up and Personal Farewell to Mad Men, Part 1

While my love of cinema has never abated, my enthusiasm for its less artistically ambitious stepchild Television has waned considerably since my misspent youth as a TV junkie. Outside of sporting events I don't watch much of it anymore. So that I became so enthralled with the now concluded series Mad Men is a surprise to me. This is the only show that I've seen every episode of, and since watching it in "real time" in 2012, I've never missed a Sunday night telecast: a level of personal commitment to a show unprecedented in my 48 years on this earth.

My indoctrination came in late 2011 while the show was on its long, controversial hiatus. I binge watched the first four seasons on Netflix pretty much on a whim. I'd heard about the show, but it being off the air for over a year at that point, it fell off my radar. I started seeing articles about the show's return and became intrigued by the 1960's setting, how Matthew Weiner and his crew were obsessive about detail, and decided to take a look. The sixties was the era I was born into, and have always had a fascination with. From that point, I never looked back.

I did have to do some soul searching though. In many respects Mad Men was a soap opera: one with fantastic writing and production values, but a soap opera nonetheless. So why did I like it so much? What it came down to was that it was one of the few programs on TV dealing with ideas. It was a soap opera at times, but the characters were well drawn. Weiner tried to make sure that even minor characters had a back story so that they weren't just serving someone else' motivation. It did give you a view into the advertising industry of there 60's, but it wasn't a procedural drama or antiquarian exercise. In many ways the campaigns they were working on were unimportant. The important things were the big issues: sexism, racism (which some critics feel they did't handle enough), changing sexual mores and religious values, and the evils of capitalistic consumerism. But it also hit deeply personal issues of self identity, guilt, isolation, alienation and the meaning of life in general. So, for me, the historic details are what drew me in, the melodrama that made me feel a tad guilty, and the overall depth of characters and themes that kept me and drew me in.

So what about the the finale, and the last half season?

I'll hit the second point first, just so I can get the criticism out of the way. I do believe that splitting up the last season into two parts hurt the overall flow of the story. I'm not up on the economics of it all, and my understanding is that this was primarily a money issue for the network, AMC, but the whole thing would have been better served by two full seasons or just one, unified season seven. Last year the show was on it's typical roll, and then it felt like it had an artificially quick wrap up. Mad Men was always a slow moving ship. The themes and story lines unfolded little by little, almost imperceptibly. Many times we'd be getting down to the last five or ten minutes of an episode and I wouldn't be sure what the story was about or where it was heading. Most network TV is predictable; you can drop in at almost any point and figure out what's going on. Not with Mad Men; you had to watch from beginning to end to get it. And increasingly, as the seasons progressed,a viewer needed to have seen it from the first episode to understand what was happening in a given moment. Each show may have had a self contained story, but the subtext was vital, and not being in the know would leave you as stranded as Don at a rural bus stop with just the cloths on his back and a Sears bag of dirty laundry.

For Season 7.5 the issue was time, and tying off old strings while keeping things fresh by introducing some new ones. Looking back I can see what Weiner was up to in the second half, but his meandering ways were at odds with the urgency of the ticking clock counting down to the final scene. Many fans were disconcerted about the introduction of the Diana Baur character (Elizabeth Reaser) as a new love interest for Don. With only a few episodes left we wanted to see more of Joan, Peggy or Pete. There are only so many more opportunities to savor a Roger Sterling zinger. Even another Bert Cooper hallucination would be welcomed. All many of us were asking was, "who is this woman and why should I care?" And, "can we get back to Mrs. Rosen, please."

In spite of the hemming and hawing, and as much as I hate to admit it, it fit: Diana represented many things. My guess is that, because of her physical resemblance, she was the ghost of both Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff) and Sylvia Rosen (Linda Cardinale), two of Don's lost, idealized loves. She also is a female version of Don: a person with a past she is running from, riddled by guilt and remorse. Unlike Don she's not trying to forget or reinvent herself, at least not in the same way. Don grew up in rural poverty, living out his adolescence in and around a brothel. He swindles and cons his way into a middle class, and later upper class existence. All the while hiding behind a stolen identity, trying desperately to blot out any remembrance of Dick Whitman. Based on Don's visit to Diana's former Wisconsin home, she is escaping a comfortable middle class life. She goes downward, living in squalid SRO's and working in roach infested greasy spoons. She even engages in prostitution, albeit inadvertently, mistaking an extravagant tip from Roger for solicitation by Don. She is descending into hell, or at least purgatory, running away from the comfortable life she knew, but never allowing herself to forget why she's there.

Don becomes obsessed with her. He sees a kindred spirit: a wounded soul like his own running from the past. But she has no interest escaping her final judgement. When she moves, leaving no forwarding address, he goes off to look for her (his reasons for bouncing from McCann-Erickson to go on yet another extended, unauthorized road trip are manifold, though). He gets to Wisconsin assuming not one, but two more false identities in the course of a few minutes, to try and get information as to Diana's whereabouts. But the ex-husband sees through it, knows he's a fake, sternly sending him on his way.

Now his journey is not so much about finding a particular woman as it is about, once again, trying to find out who he really is and where he belongs. He passes through a small plains town and sees a glimpse of what things might have been like if he had lived life as Dick Whitman; idyllic at first, but then he's run out of town when he's falsely accused of stealing by the same folks that seemed so amenable before. After giving his car away to the young grifter who set him up, he finds his way to Utah, helping out a couple gear heads getting their hot rod ready for a competition. They're appreciative, but a little suspicious of a stranger with no car who knows more about motors then they do. When he finds out that his first wife, Betty, has terminal lung cancer his immediate response is to want to go "home" and take custody of the children. But neither Betty nor their daughter Sally thinks this is a good idea, and tell him to stay away. He visits California next, dropping in on Stephanie, the real Don Draper's niece, who, after greeting him warmly, also looks with suspicion on his unexpected arrival.

This theme of Don's displacement was prominent through out the season. Two brief visits to Betty's new home and family situation makes it clear that he is the odd man out, not only in Betty's life but in his children's lives as well. When he visits the now deceased Rachel Menken's apartment where relatives and neighbors are sitting shiva, her sister is none too happy to see in the flesh a man she had only heard about. She asks a question that would be echoed either literally or in subtext throughout these seven episodes, "what are you doing here?" He more and more feels as if he has no home, and isn't wanted. He's not even at home in his own apartment, since second wife Megan surreptitiously took all the furniture on her way out of their marriage. The one place that wants him, McCann-Erickson, Don wants no part of. He's a trophy for this giant firm, one stag's head mounted on the wall among many others. So he bounces, mid presentation, to take to the road, ostensibly to find Diana, but really, once again, to try and find himself and where he belongs.

I'll never get all my thoughts on Don out, let alone touch on the other cast of characters and their fates, in one post. So I'll end it here, and save it for next time.

"Mad Men" Finale Quick Take

I had been preparing a post for last week as a sort of lead in to the big Mad Men finale last night, but pastoral concerns kept me from engaging in my favorite leisure time activity, writing. So just a quick take on last night's Mad Men wrap up. A more detailed reflection to follow.

Matthew Weiner has said that he always knew what the last shot of Don Draper would be, though he wasn't always sure how he was going to get there. Well, our man in creative, sitting lotus position on a Northern California cliff overlooking the Pacific, facing east to meet the sunrise, eyes closed with a Mona Lisa grin, letting out a heart felt "Ommmmm," was quite a sight. So, Mr. Materialistic Consumerism is embracing Eastern Mysticism and letting go of his attachment to the material world so as to find inner peace and enlightenment? Not so much. As the coda more than implies, he's thinking up an ad campaign for Coca Cola.

And not just any ad campaign. Probably the most iconic, true to it's period, exploitative of it's period and successful ad campaign in the history of advertising.

Many commentators have said that the great theme of Mad Men revolves around the issue of whether people can truly change. One can make an argument that all the main characters here do experience some change in their seven season journey (ten years in the show's story line). But, while Don didn't die as many had predicted, and he does seem to be happy, he really is the same as he was when the show started: running from his past, and believing that running from one's past is the answer to life's problems, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. And most of all, he is the job. Even in the midst of this last half season where he seems to be stripping off the fake self to get back to who he really is, it proves to be a failed project. He may have changed names, stealing a dead man's identity, it was always a paper identity. Don Draper is Dick Whitman; a hustler looking for an angle. Don Draper does find peace by embracing who he really is, but who he is is the same person he always was: a high priced snake oil salesman who's never satisfied until he gets 100 percent.

As for the parting shot and coda: brilliant. It's ironic, and brings things to a close while still leaving room for our imagination to wonder where things go from here: for Don, certainly, but for the others as well. More on Don, and the rest, soon.

Mad Men Season 7.2: Could it be a Sign?

Don Draper standing in the shadow of love lost, and the life not lived

The second installment of Mad Men's farewell season has begun, leaving the exact time and date of our reentry a bit vague. I originally assumed we were still in the summer of 1969, but a presidential speech playing in the background indicates we've moved ahead to the spring of '70.  Other tip offs that time has elapsed are some misadvised mustaches, longer sideburns and slightly wilder hair for the men. Otherwise things have flowed logically from last years midseason finale. SC&P has been acquired by McCann, and both Pete and Ted are back from California. While on the surface the larger parent company seems to be letting their new acquisition alone as promised, the corporate overlords manage to settle some old scores, as we shall see. Don, on his way to divorce number 2, is back to his old womanizing ways. At the same time he tells stories of his youth growing up poor in a bordello with panache and a sense of comic nostalgia that belies his obsessive secretiveness from years past. Yes, Don seems, if not reborn, reinvigorated and comfortable in his own skin now that he's fully back after his half a year exile from the company.

But, as you might guess, all is not well bellow the surface. After Don has a dream about an old flame from Season 1, Rachel Katz, nee Menken, he decides to reach out to her to help solve a problem with a client, only to find out that she died suddenly the week before. She had been on his mind even before this, as evidenced by his previous fascination with a vaguely similar looking brunet waitress at a greasy spoon.

At the same time Ken Cosgrove is forced out of the company by an executive at McCann as payback for past slights, both professional and personal. Only the night before his wife tried to talk him into quitting to pursue the writing career he's always wanted. Her father is retiring from his job at Dow, and she feels that Ken shouldn't wait so long to leave a job he hates to go after the life he really wants. When he speaks to Don after the sacking, he tells him that he's not really mad or distressed, but sees the confluence of his father-in-law's retirement, his wife's advise and being fired, all within 24 hours, as a sign that he needs to go out and live the life not lived.

Don begins to see his looking for Rachel in a random waitress' eyes, his dream about her and her untimely death as a sign as well. There is no doubt that he has often thought of her over the years. A few season's back they ran into each other in a restaurant, and the brief scene effectively conveyed the messages that she had found a personal happiness that was still eluding him, and that she was the one he could have found his own happiness with. He goes to her apartment where her family and friends are sitting shiva to pay his respects. But her sister, who knows of their romantic past, is suspicious as to Don's motives. When Don tells her that he just wanted to know what was going on in her life, she tells him that her dead sister "lived the life she wanted to live."

Don is left on the outside looking in as he stands alone in the vestibule as the traditional prayers of mourning begin to be chanted in Hebrew. He isn't allowed to actively participate in the mourning rituals because he's not Jewish. But there is a sense that he's separated from Rachel by more than religion, or even death. She rejected Don's cynical world view and followed a more traditional path of marriage and family, while still being active in the running of the family department store. She knew what she wanted and who she was, staying true to that until the end.  Don mourns the passing of possibly the one woman in the show's 10 year story line he actually loved, as well wondering if his hopes of true happiness died with her.

The implication is clear that for all the new found peace he's found with his past, as well has his professional resurgence, Don is still not living the life he wants. And he's not the only one. In spite of the financial windfall she got from the McCann buyout, as well as her increased responsibilities at the firm, Joan still can't get any respect. Peggy also seems comfortable at the office, but there is an aching for someone to share her life with. When love seems to fall into her lap, she's apprehensive. As she tells her prospective beau who playfully calls her old fashioned for not wanting to give in on the first date, she's tried "new fashioned" and didn't necessarily find it better.  Life couldn't be better for our anti-heroes, but there is still this lingering feeling that there is something more out there.

The episode is bookended by Miss Peggy Lee singing Is That All There Is, her 1969 hit that's style nonetheless hearkens back to the show's early 1960's origin. And while some might call the song selection a bit on the nose, it's relative obscurity coupled with Lee's knowing, world weary delivery makes it inspired. We are coming to the end of an era, as AMC's painfully on the nose promotional campaign reminds us, and everyone still seems to be taking one step forward and two steps back on the road to happiness. While the signs are not clear yet, I don't think we're looking at a total Don Draper crash and burn, but he still seems a long way from finding the peace he's been looking for.

"Mad Med" Season 7.1: So Far

Mad Men's new co-star, the IBM 360

The series run of Mad Men, which will come to an end next year, can be divided into two parts. Or at least, that's the way I see it. In Seasons One through Four episodes did carry plot lines across installments, but there didn't seem to be any great plan at work. There were twists and turns, but I'm not sure that producer and writer Matthew Weiner was thinking too far ahead. Even individual episodes didn't seem to have clearly unifying themes to then. He may have had an idea where he wanted the season to go, but I'm not sure he had an endgame for the series in mind. What was happening was that week by week we were learning more about the show's main figure, Don Draper / Dick Whitman. Yes, there was a great deal of office intrigue, and sex and boozing, and corporate reshuffles, but if I were to sum up, these were mainly four seasons of developing and unfolding the enigma that is Don Draper.

After the contract dispute that delayed production of Season Five, Weiner knew that he had two to three seasons left, and returned to work with a greater sense of purpose. Episodes were constructed in a more symmetrical way, with plots and subplots coordinated to accent particular themes. In spite of this the episodes are not completely self contained units. This story is leading in a direction, and it's upon a second look that the foreshadowing becomes clear. The show always had a literary air to it, but now it was being constructed in a literary way. It wasn't clear to me until now, but since at least Season Five, the story has been constructed to lead to a particular end. What that is is yet to be seen, but we are at a point in the show that unless you've seen at least the last three seasons I'm not sure a new viewer will understand what's going on.

I would not want to predict the ultimate payoff Mr. Weiner has in mind, but there are themes that can be identified that can give us clues. There is no doubt that a main theme dominating the entire almost six and half season run of Mad Men is change and people's capacity to adapt to shifting social norms. With the show taking place in the 1960's, and following the decade in a semi-real time fashion, we can follow this theme right from the pilot episode when Don struggles to find the right angle for Lucky Strike cigarettes that will satisfy new government restrictions on tobacco advertising. I would say that in season seven another theme has emerged that melds somewhat with that of change. It's one that may not be completely new to the show, but which is being put forward with greater force than before. Is it me, or are there a lot of people suffering from paranoia in and around SC&P? As far as I can see, all this fearful mistrust begins with a computer.

If a working knowledge of Rosemary's Baby, and it's wider cultural significance to the sixties, was helpful for making sense of last season's goings on, then 2001: A Space Odyssey is this season's touch stone. While there is still a lingering Sharon Tate - Charles Manson vibe hovering over Season 7, the references to the Stanley Kubrick classic came hot and heavy the last couple of weeks. I have to admit that I missed all the references to 2001 made in Episode 4, but once I saw the connections explained on various sites I felt like a bit of a dolt for having those easy fly balls sail over my head. In fairness, many sites that I perused made no mention of the paranoia in space fable either, so maybe I shouldn't feel too bad about it. My only excuse is that I saw 2001 many years ago, and it simply didn't make a lasting impact on my imagination. On the other hand I am familiar with Rosemary's Baby, and it's connection to the Manson Family murders so I saw those clues much more clearly.

It was impossible to miss the 2001 allusion this week, since they essentially re-staged one of the movie's most famous scenes, in a quite clever and comic way. Michael Ginsberg, always a bit neurotic, and even more edgy since a new room size IBM 360 computer was installed in the office, spies Jim Cutler and Lou Avery conspiring inside the glass room that houses the contraption, a la the HAL 9000 eves dropping on the two astronauts. Only instead of being able to read lips like the fictional super computer, Michael fills in the blanks with his increasingly deranged imagination. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Michael wasn't only anxious over being replaced by a machine, but he's struggling with his own sexual identity as well.

Paranoia is not not restricted to poor Michael (I was sad to see him wheeled out of the office, strapped to a gurney, knowing he may never return. He was one of my favorite minor characters). Lou and Cutler plot secretly. Lou, himself, is nervy about Don's return to the office. Peggy sees the hand of her would be lover Ted Chaough behind every flower arraignment. Megan is convinced that Don is cheating, even though, for once, he isn't.  She essentially kicks his pregnant "niece" out of the house because she suspects that he's the daddy. Some of this mistrust is understandable, some is truly paranoia. But as the times do indeed change, no one knows where they stand and if they can trust that the ground won't fall out from under them.

The only person who doesn't seem to be looking over his shoulder is Don Draper; the person who has the most business being nervous. He's the Army deserting, identity stealing, serial philanderer who's probably on more than one jealous husband's hit list. Lets not forget that he's been let back to work after a forced leave under duress, with harsh conditions and partners salivating at the opportunity to get rid of him for good. Yet he, as always, is cool as a cucumber. Frustrated, sure, but he's the one plotting to get ahead, not to simply hold his place.

Like I wrote, there have been hints of paranoia spread throughout the show's run. I think specifically of Season Five when Sally is fed the sorted details of the Richard Speck murders by her babysitting step grandmother. At first she tries to hide the newspaper from the child, but eventually shares the gruesome details with the overwrought drama of a camp counselor telling ghost stories before lights out. When Betty and Henry come home after their long weekend, they find grandma sleeping on the couch with a knife and Sally sleeping under her feet (imitating the lone survivor of Speck's rampage who had hidden under a bed). Both are haunted by the idea of random murder at the hands of a demented intruder.

So we see this year these two themes; the specter of change and the psychological unease that it brings. Life is nothing more than a series of changes, but the 60's saw them come at lightning speed. And yes, there is a dark side to the era that often gets white washed by the romance of flower children and cool music. I hope that there are no Manson style murders thrust directly into the Mad Men story line, but I'm glad for the paranoia. I read this approach criticized as a reactionary questioning of the glorious social progress made during that era. I think that's ridiculous. If the 1960's era Baby Boomers are going to take credit for Civil Rights, ending the Vietnam War, Woodstock, the ushering in of an era of self awareness and the sexual revolution then it also has to own the Manson Murders, and their glorification by the underground press at the time, Altamont, drug abuse, dislocated lives and broken families; in other words they need to wrestle with the dark side of the dream.

Charles Manson: Still looming large from the foreshadows 

Mad Men Seaon Seven: Week One

 
I don't plan on doing a week by week recap of the new Mad Men season, but I did want to get a few scattered thoughts down about last night's season premiere. I'm not going to go into the background of each character I mention, so I will admit that if you're not interested in Mad Men you might not be interested in reading on.

As has been the trend the last couple of years, the end of the previous season gives hints to what's going to happen in the future, with the new season beginning with a bit of a reset. Last summer saw a more open and honest Don Draper, whose marriage to Megan was over, ready to come to grips with his past and choose an actual identity. Last night saw Don and Megan still together, though "bi-coastal" and still strained. He's still in New York on paid leave from SC&P, though Megan doesn't know this little detail, what with her move to L.A. to pursue an acting career. Don is also clandestinely pitching copy to his firm by way of Freddy Rumson, still working as a freelancer. So much for the open and honest Don Draper/Dick Whitman.

Some honesty does come through by way of an encounter with a mysterious woman (played by Neve Campbell) on the red eye back east. Don finds himself next to a young widow who is obviously interested, but instead of going in for the "kill" he backs off, admitting that he's pretty much a dirty stomp around whose made a mess of yet another marriage and his wife knows it.  Don has these moments of truth every so often, but they never stopped him for being, well, Don. But he does pull back on the throttle, maybe because he wants to stay focused on getting back in the ad game, maybe because he does want to salvage his marriage, probably a little bit of both.

Along with Don, most of the old cast of characters are dealing with changes that they sought, or at least brought on themselves, and are suffering because of them. Ken Cosgrove wanted out of the pressures of Detroit and GM, but feels overwhelmed in his new position at the New York office. Ted Chaough wanted a clean break from New York to get away from the temptations of Peggy Olson, but the move to L.A. has been rough. Roger Sterling is moving deeper into a hedonistic lifestyle that seems to be leaving him with more of a constant hangover instead of the intended perpetual high.

Since they went with a standard 47 minute premiere instead of the double episode kickoffs of seasons 5 and six, many characters are left out or just mentioned in passing, but the only one who seems happy is the perpetually sour and grasping Pete Campbell. His move to the West Coast was an unwelcomed demotion remember, but he's tan, rested and content. He waxes poetic about a trip to client Tropicana's orange groves and the wonders of nature, and he means it; very un-Pete like. Maybe the lesson is that the blessings in life sometimes come when we let go and let things happen instead of trying to run after things we think will make us happy.

I admit that I do catch up on the post broadcast on-line commentary, and some of it is very good. I especially recommend the Orange Couch on You Tube. I don't always agree with their analysis, and they are pretty much coming from a left leaning politically correct sensibility, but they are good at picking up the overall themes and subtle undertones that come through by way of the 1960's pop culture references producer Matthew Weiner throws in. Last season the big buzz revolved around a series of Sharon Tate, Rosemary's Baby references that were meant to bring to mind the Manson Family murders. They came to nothing, but I was surprised that only one commentator I read this morning noticed that Megan is living in the "Hills" near the "Canyon:" where the murders took place. No one noticed Peggy Olson conspicuously flashing a Folger's coffee can around, making sure the label faced the camera. Abigail Folger, heiress to the coffee fortune, was murdered in the same rampage that took Sharon Tate's life in August of 1969 (we begin season 7 in January of that year). Ordinarily I would agree that sometimes a coffee can is just a coffee can, but Wiener and company are obsessive about such minute touches, and have made conspiracy theorist of all us hard core viewers. We'll see if this is a real hint of future events or just a tease.

I'll be back with more in a few weeks after we get a couple of episodes under our belts.

Mad Men Season Six: Put it in the Books

I'm not sure that I have much to say about the just concluded season of Mad Men, since I wrote a pretty extensive post two weeks ago.  I guess pleasantly surprised would be the best way to describe my reaction to the last two episodes.  Last year ended with a bang, by way of Lane Pryce's suicide in the penultimate installment, with the final episode serving as a kind of epilogue meant to tie up loose ends from the season and give us hints as to the future.  I'm glad they didn't follow that same strategy this time out. Here the entire season seemed to be building to this big crescendo that didn't happen, though the conclusion was far from uneventful.  The whole Rosemary's Baby motif ended up being for atmospherics, not foreshadowing.  Megan wasn't murdered.  Bob Benson wasn't whatever it was people were imagining him to be; everything from a corporate spy to Don Draper's long lost son (some out on the Web even suspected he was a time traveling Don).  And Don didn't die.

Or, did he?

The one constant in a sea of shifting relationships, alliances and corporate configurations over the past six seasons of the show is that Don Draper doesn't change.  He might be tempted to run away, change local or even business, but he will always be the same secretive, controlling fraud hiding behind a made up persona.   He has only lifted the veil over his past in small ways to different people over the years, like when he told Peggy that he grew up on a farm, or Conrad Hilton that he was born in Illinois and grew up in rural Pennsylvania.  But in the final episode of Season Six Don Draper for the first time publicly acknowledges his true identity as Dick Whitman, if not by name then by story.

As I wrote previously, Don was very much a mess as this season came to a close.  Like two seasons ago he was drinking way too much and was beginning to show physical and behavioral signs of alcoholism.   In the past he was the top creative dog at the agency (know known as SC&P), so if he blew off a partners meeting or disappeared for a few days, or weeks, people put up with it because they knew that the work would get done and done well.  Now, in 1968, we see that Don is not the creative force he once was, and now that he has real competition from Ted Chaough, people are less inclined to put up with his erratic behavior.

They say an alcoholic doesn't begin to turn his or her life around until they hit rock bottom.  For Don that was spending the night in jail after hitting a preacher trying to evangelize in a bar.  But as usual, Mad Men doesn't take a simple view on things, including religion.  Yes, this particular preacher probably deserved the belt for implying that Martin Luther King and the Kennedy's met their tragic ends because they weren't true believers (another stereotypical caricature of a hypocritical religious person).  But when he flashes back to his teen years working in the brothel, and the preacher who was kicked out for trying to convert the prostitutes, the words that stuck with the adult Don Draper / Dick Whitman was when the minister said, "The only unpardonable sin is to believe that God can not forgive you."

So he goes home after his night in the drunk tank and dumps the booze down the sink.  He plans to move to a proposed branch office in California, convincing Megan that they can make a fresh start there.  Then he hits a conundrum.  Ted, who is also trying to save his marriage, pleads with Don to trade places.  He appeals to his conscience, which may seem like his least vulnerable spot, by telling him that he knows that there's a good man inside of him.

Something does click in Don's mind.  At a pitch to Hershey's Chocolate he begins with his usual smooth delivery, speaking of his own, mythical, childhood experience of getting a Hershey Bar as a reward from his father.  A total lie, of course, but it's working as always.  Then inexplicably, after it appears the deal is done, he starts up again, this time telling the truth about himself and his orphaned youth, serving as a pick pocket in a bordello, getting the candy as a reward if he stole more than a dollar from a given john.  The candy to him was his only link to normalcy and goodness, and he tells the representatives that  they don't need a man like him to explain to a child what a Hershey Bar means, they know already.  For the first time I felt true pity for the man, because for the first time he was really owning who he is and what he's made of his life.

I'm not sure if he was trying to make it up to Ted for being bad to him, especially when he embarrassed him at the St. Joseph's Baby Aspirin pitch, but this act of self sabotage showed the first act of total unselfishness Don has ever done.  It also sealed his fate.  Though he eventually yielded to Ted's request, California wasn't going to happen for him now anyway.  The other partners essentially dump him, under the guise of a leave of absence.  Megan, rightfully angry that she had quite her job to relocate to the Coast, now in career limbo, walks out, presumably for good.  Don had shifted careers before in his life, and even identities, but always stayed the same self serving con man.  Now he is stripped of everything, not to escape into some sort of alternate reality, but to confront himself as he truly is.  That little "meltdown" was the first step in that process, and was as much an act of redemption for himself as it was a favor to Ted.

The end was perfect.  Don brings his three children to the house in Pennsylvania where he spent those painful years.  The house is now completely rundown, surrounded by housing projects and factories.  The quintessential suburban kids, they're nervous at stopping in such a bad neighborhood.  After he explains that this was where he grew up, his daughter Sally, who he's been estranged from since she discovered his infidelities, gives him a knowing look, as if to say, it's still not right what you did and what kind of father you've been in general, but think I get it now.  

One way or another all the major characters end this season with clean slates.  Pete, whose marriage is over and whose mother joined his father in a watery grave, is also going to California to start over.  Peggy, knowing that Ted will not leave his marriage for her, is last seen giving Don's office chair a tryout.  Roger is starting over with Joan, but on different, platonic terms, so he can be close to the son that only he and Joan know that they have.   Mad Men seasons have always left off with a dose of uncertainty, but never like this.  What 1969-70 has in store is wide open.  Will Don be let back in to SC&P after his leave of indeterminate length is over, or will he branch out on his own?  Will Peggy get Don's chair for real, and a partnership (as I've predicted in the past)?  Will the show be switching focus to Los Angeles, or really be bi-coastal, as Don proposed for Megan and himself?  Is Bob Benson gay or just an opportunist (which is my opinion), and so his designs of Joan are more than just business related?

All these questions are interesting, but to me everything comes down to Don Draper, who is now dead as many predicted that he would be, just not literally.  The only question is whether or not he'll go back to using his birth name at some point.  The years of running from his past are over, and next season will be a time of self discovery for the man whose solution to every problem was denying the truth to others, but mostly to himself.    
 
It would probably be too much to ask for the writers to include God in Don's transformation.  They have shown a fairness to religion in the past, by way of Fr. Gill, and Ted's religiosity, which I have to believe effected his decision to stay with his wife.  Don's violent reaction to the preacher was not so much that he was a preacher, but that he was judgmental fool.  I get the feeling Don wants to believe, but has seen too much bad to cross that line.  But as the aforementioned Ted observed, there is a good man inside there, and I do believe someone open to believing again, or maybe for the first time.

I guess that I had more to say than I originally thought.  Until Spring 2014, that will do it for Mad Men.  Though you never know, I might have some other musings on the show before then.

Swinging Round the Corkscrew: "Mad Men" Season Six Down the Stretch

We are heading, sadly, into the last two episodes of Mad Men for this season.  Much of the discussion out on the web concerning the goings on at Sterling Cooper and Partners (the agency's new post-merger name) has been over the hidden motives and objectives of the strangely "straight" Bob Benson (James Wolk) and, more recently, if Megan Draper (Jessica Paré) will be going the way of Sharon Tate.  While these are interesting twists, what has kept my attention, not just this season but over all six, is the moral train wreck that is Dick Whitman's altar ego Don Draper (Jon Hamm).  In him we have the perfect example of the fact that sin makes us unhappy.  Like many of us though Don has become so attached to his vices, like Gollum to the ring, that he can't break way and make the changes necessary to truly be free and happy.  Year after year he just keeps on making the same mistakes, expecting different results, the very definition of insanity.  The way things have gone down hill for him this season it makes me wonder, as others have, if he'll be around for the seventh and final season in 2014.  While I really don't think that they will kill off the main Mad Man before the series finale next year, I can't argue that things don't look bleak for the ad exec we love to hate, or at least pity.

Matt Weiner (pronounced wine-er), the show's creator and chief writer, has said that he knows how he plans to end the story next season, down to the final shot.  This doesn't mean that he has every episode or plot twist worked out, but there is a trajectory, and what I've noticed this season is that he is already tying themes together from seasons past.  We are not dealing with repetition, but with very deliberate attempts to show how things in life come full circle, and can leave you just where you started even with all our good efforts.

Earlier in this season Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) tries to fire a secretary for falsifying a time card and finds herself undercut by Harry Crane (Rich Sommer), much like she was in a similar situation by Roger Sterling (John Slattery) in season 2.  The difference is that then Roger was a partner and Joan was the office manager.  Now Joan is a partner being successfully bucked by an underling.  Part of this has to do with Harry's resentment that she's risen past him in the company, and what she did to get there.  All Joan knows is that she has a new rank earned through hard work, no matter what any one may think, but she is still treated like an over glorified secretary.  A few episodes later she tries to validate her position to the others by clandestinely wooing new business, even though Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) was given the assignment.  Pete was guilty of a similar breach of protocol in season one and was almost fired for it.  Rather than remembering his own actions he blows up at her in front of the other partners, essentially trying to get her ousted, for breaking a "fundamental rule" of advertising, the very reason he was almost gone years before.  In both cases history is repeating, and not for the better.  In Pete's case though, he seems to forget that he was once the one breaking the rules and being pardoned for it (Oh, hypocrisy: of all the vices on this show, the one it seems everyone shares). 

If there's been a season long throw back it's Don's downward spiral, reminiscent of a his near breakdown in season four.  Back then his decline was manifested by a slow physical deterioration.  He had a hacking cough that wouldn't go away and was beginning to black out, sometimes waking up with unexpected company.  The years of boozing, smoking and womanizing were taking their toll.  Newly divorced, there were now no stops on his already self destructive habits.  His personal problems were spilling over into his professional life, and things were generally getting out of control.  Then he met Megan, they married and most of season five was spent in relative stability, if not exactly marital bliss.  He was faithful to his wife, and as happy as this very unhappy man had ever been.

Season six began with Don backsliding.  Again we can see echoes of the past.  The series' very first episode presents Don as a devil may care ladies man about town, with a touch of existential nihilism thrown in, ending with a surprise reveal: the man we were led to believe was an eligible, if roguish, bachelor was actually a married father, complete with the big house in Westchester.  This season we go the first episode thinking Don has stayed on the straight and narrow (in spite of last year's season ending foreshadowing), to find in the final scene that he's having an affair with his best friend's wife, who happens to live one floor below the Draper's apartment.

Can you say "self destructive?"  I knew you could.

Most of the commentators out there focus on the therapeutic aspects of Don's problems; he's a sex addict, or he's a control freak, or all his self destructive behavior stems from his highly dysfunctional childhood (which we've gotten clued into over the years by periodic flash backs).  All this is true.  But in our postmodern world no one wants to talk sin.  That Don is caught in a web of sin doesn't negate the other therapeutic reasons for his predicament, or that the reasons he turned to these self destructive behaviors can't be seen as serious impediments to his freedom.  But because we have found ourselves in a cycle of addiction does not mean that we are condemned to stay there.  There is a way out, if we have the courage to surrender.

This season has high lighted a tension within Don: He needs to be in control but is constantly losing it.  He seems to be losing his creative touch at work and, since the merger with their main rival, control in the office as well.  The bloom is off his marriage since Megan gained greater independence by way of her acting career.  The implication is that she no longer needs him in the same way as before, thus another loss of control.  As all this is happening he tries to tighten his grip on the one aspect of his life he thinks he does have control over by his manipulative games with his married mistress Sylvia Rosen (Linda Cardellini).  Even she eventually breaks away from his grasp.  Don is all about control, and losing it makes him look to other options, like possibly abandoning his present identity and starting over, like he did when he deserted the army by assuming a dead man's identity.

The big speculation out there is that this season might see the ultimate in Don shedding his current persona.  There have been overtones of death since the first episode when Don presented an ad campaign for a Hawaiian hotel that made people think of James Mason drowning himself in the Pacific at the end of A Star is Born as opposed to taking a leisurely dip in the ocean (we won't even get into him reading Dante's Inferno on the beach).  Don has some serious issues that he needs to deal with, holes in his soul that need to be filled.  With all the loss of control and continuing dissatisfaction with his life, maybe checking out permanently is the answer?  But he's told in a hallucination (near death experience?) by a soldier he had met who was killed in Vietnam, still missing an arm in the afterlife, "Dying doesn't make you whole."

What makes you whole is coming to terms with the demons, both psychological and literal, that are haunting you, acknowledging personal responsibility for your sinful behavior and surrendering to God, with the understanding that control apart from God is an illusion.  Don is constantly running, seeking escape in drinking and sex, but remaining unsatisfied because when he wakes up the next morning hung over and alone he's back where started, the same person with the same problems, even if he's taken another man's name.  In life if we don't take the steps to break the cycle of sin then we just keep hurling down a corkscrew shaped slide, repeating the same turns but into deeper and deeper levels of depravity and self destruction until we hit the ground in a dead stop.

Addiction is real, but is not a life sentence.  I know people who have been in Alcoholics Anonymous, sober for decades, that will also say that sobriety doesn't come to everyone on the first try.  It's surrender to what they call a "Higher Power," but also depending on sponsors, friends, family, as well as coming to grips with why drinking has become problematic that will bring ultimate liberation.  There may be set backs along the way, but they can be overcome if these safeguards are in place. Again, being honest with ourselves and allowing ourselves to confront the underlying issues of our lives is also important.  As people who suffer from compulsive eating disorders will say, The problem isn't what you're eating, it's what's eating you.  In the case of Don, he has issues with intimacy, he's a father who had no solid role model himself.  He never knew his mother, and any mother figure in his life was either cruel or took advantage of him somehow.  Does he need a therapist?  You bet ya.  But he also needs God, and to surrender to His loving mercy if he is going to get past the hurts, the addictions and the self destruction.  If not he'll be just spinning around that corkscrew until he lands face down in the dirt.

This is incomplete, but I've written way too much already.  Another major theme running through the show is what is the nature of happiness.  In my season ending analysis of Mad Men season 6, I'll hit this topic, as well as tidy up this one. 

Mad Men Season 6 So Far

 

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.

Mad Men Season Six

I'll be writing a more complete reflection on the new season of Mad Men once a few episodes are in the can and some sort of narrative theme has been established.  But a few quick observations on last night's season premiere.


1. (CORRECTION:  In the original post I identified the setting of the season premiere as the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve 1968.  I was critical of what I thought was the choice to skip the entire year, one of the most turbulent in American history.  The episode itself keeps the date somewhat  ambiguous.  I based my dating on a New York Post preview that cited a news paper headline Don reads while he's at the beach to reach the December, 1968-January '69 time frame.  It seems after investigations made by the various bloggers out there, putting the clues together as only those intrepid guys and gals with even more time on their hands than I do can, that I'm a year off, and we have not missed out on all the fun and frolic of that volcanic year of 1968 [and looking a the episode again on demand makes me want to kick myself for missing the Green Bay - Oakland Super Bowl reference, that as a sports fan should have been the dead give away].  

First, I'm embarrassed at the flub.  Secondly, I'm glad that I was wrong.  Third, in light of the earlier start date, it seems really quick for so many of the "straights" at SCDP to have gone all groovy with the hair and cloths.  These trends take time to bubble up in the culture, and while it's certainly not completely out of place, with this revised timeline the changes seem more radical than at first blush.  

I read one article that argues that all the obsession over such details is silly, and I'm not going to dispute the fact that as a bit of a history nut I probably pay too much attention to such things.  But I do think the context matters, even if you can enjoy the show without it.  Most historical dramas use the past as a way to comment on the present.  A film like M*A*S*H was really talking about what was going on in Vietnam at the time and bore no resemblance to the Korean Conflict.  A Man for All Seasons, while taking it's setting in Tudor England much more seriously, was exploring very twentieth century notions of conscience.  I would argue Mad Men does the same in reference to our consumeristic society.  But unlike M*A*S*H it does take it's historical setting seriously to the point of making it almost another character.  I disagree with critics who say the show works well the least when the stories interact directly with the events of the time.  I find Matthew Weiner and his writers are actually pretty subtle in that department and the detail only adds to he experience.  As I observed about Season Five I felt there were times the story could have taken place at anytime, which loses some of the magic.  I will admit that there is a balance to be struck between letting the story unfold naturally and forcing it to follow historical events in a contrived way.  I think Mad Men does it, and here's to hoping they continue)

2. The Old Don Draper is Back, Sort Of.  When last we saw our anti-hero he was sitting at a bar being hit on by proxy; one sweet young thing making a pitch on behalf of another.  Don had been faithful to his second wife up to this point, but the look in his eyes said the streak was about to end.  While we go the full length of the season opening two parter without a hint of infidelity, the closing scene brings us the ugly truth.  Not only is Don cheating, but he's doing it with the wife of a close friend; a neighbor, even.

I did read one blogger who was surprised he was cheating again. I wasn't (I can't see how you could read the season 5 finale any other way than that this was the road he was taking). Who he is cheating with did catch me by surprise.  Don hasn't had many (any?) real friends out side of Anna Draper, his "widow."  Now he seems to have a real respect for Dr. Rosen that is contradicted by this most wretched betrayal.

But there is a difference.  Don seems guilty, something he never did before.  The season one or two Don saw life as now and death is the big sleep in which there are no dreams and from which no one wakes.  So take what you can when you can and make sure you have a clean path to the door if a jealous husband shows up.  Now he's reading Dante and wondering about hell.  When asked by his illicit love what his New Year's resolution is he replies, "to stop doing this."  The old Don may have said these words, but with a twinkle in his eye and an inch of irony covering the words as he demonstrated the very thing he was going to give up.  Now he is a man conflicted; still in love with his wife but struggling to put on the new man. 

3. Betty Francis is Wacked.  I came in last night after the first commercial break, so when I saw Betty get all up in Henry's grill about his response to a teenage violinist I didn't have the context for her putting him on the spot until I caught the first twenty minutes on the replay.  It still didn't make any sense.  And maybe it wasn't supposed to.  Otherwise she tries to mentor the young musician, essentially trying to help her not make the same mistakes she made as an aspiring model.  She goes looking for her after she runs away and winds up on the set of Midnight Cowboy (not literally, of course) with a bunch of hippie squatters in an abandoned New York building.  Can you say, awkward?  To be honest I didn't really get who the house guest was and why they were responsible for her.  Even after she runs away Betty seems to be the only once concerned about a 15 year old wandering in the City.  What this character's journey is supposed to be, I'm not sure.  But it seems Weiner and his crew are setting her up for a wild ride.

4. A Pleasant Surprise. Usually when a character leaves SCDP they are off the show as well.  That was a fear when Peggy Olson jumped to a rival agency.  Not only was she in the show last night, she got a considerable amount of story time.  Here's hoping the trend continues.  

Scattered Thoughts on The "Mad Men" Finale

For those who have been coming to the site and wondering if I'm in Canada or been kidnapped or both, my lack of original output of late is based solely on too much work and not enough time to think of things to write about, let alone to actually write about it (I know, a spit infinitive; don't have a cow).  I'll get to more substantial matters soon, but for now just a few scattered thoughts on the Mad Men finale

Indeed, this past Sunday did see the end of Season Five of Mad Men.  The penultimate episode (really the previous two) were so filled with shock and awe that it was hard to see how they could top it.  And the decision was to not even try.  Episode Thirteen seemed like an epilogue of sorts to a season that had a strong beginning, a bit of an unfocused middle and then a powerful, if not completely profound, ending.

What I walked away with from this week's installment was that things have come full circle.  Don Draper, the James Bond of advertising, has actually remained faithful to his second wife, if I've got my chronology right from the end of last season, for the better part of two years (last season ended sometime in the fall of 1965, picked up again Memorial Day 1966 and leaves off now in late March '67).  That the streak will continue was left ambiguously in doubt in the final scene Sunday.  But when Draper, by himself at a bar, ordering an Old Fashioned (his favorite drink we haven't seen him with in awhile), Nancy Sinatra's contribution to the 007 canon playing in the background, is approached for a light by a blond who asks if he's alone, well lets just say the look on his face tells us the Old Don Draper is back, and all that that implies.

But why the backsliding?  One constant in this show is that everyone is either not who they say they are or is willing to compromise their morals to get what they want.  The one exception seemed to be Megan, Don's second wife.  She always came off as the one transparent person amid a sea of phonies, neurotics and social climbers (I guess you'd have to include Peggy with her as well, though even she has a few skeletons).  She even quit the agency rather than continue to work at a job she hated, though was very good at, to pursue her life long dream of an acting career.  But the pursuit has been fruitless, and she finds herself wallowing in self doubt and pity.  Is her mother right, that she possesses an artist's temperament but isn't really an artist?  Is she not getting call backs because she's simply not that good?  She wants this badly, and so double crosses a friend and pressures Don into recommending her for a commercial the agency is working on.  He relents, after trying to convince her that this is not the way she wants to break into the business. The final sequence sees him move from the darkness of the sound stage, where the commercial is being shot, into the dimly lit bar where his old demons await.  Don stayed faithful because Megan represented something different, something pure and honest.  They've certainly had their share of fights and conflicts, but he didn't stray because I think he saw the relationship as something worth preserving.  With Megan he always knew where he stood.  This wasn't the cold, emotionally distant Betty, who could turn from loving wife to claw bearing tiger in a spit second.  She wasn't like the rest of them at SCDP, who would grovel, back stab, and even prostitute themselves to get ahead.  Now, by manipulating the situation the way she did, Megan has proven to be no better than the rest, and with that goes what little idealism the "new" Don Draper was ever able to muster.

All is not dark.  After two years of financial instability Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce (now minus the Pryce) is booming, ready to lease more space in the Time-Life building (makes you feel worse for poor Lane checking himself out like he did-Oh the irony).  The newly liberated Peggy Olson seems to be getting along well at the new job, though I think we can see cracks in that situation forming as well.   Can I go on a limb and predict that we might see the Olson surname added to the list of partners eventually? 

While the critics have been generally positive in their response to this season, there has been grumbling that the story telling has been too straight forward, the subplots overly coordinated thematically and the themes themselves too easy to pick out when compared to the relatively enigmatic proceedings of earlier seasons.  I'm not so sure I agree, or at least I haven't found the more structured, symmetrical style a problem.  What was troubling to me is that the season began with producer and writer Matthew Weiner continuing his brilliant job of keeping the personal stories synced with what was going on in the world at that time.   It was done very subtly, but effectively nonetheless.  The times were changing, and while some was positive, there were also darker currents at work and the dread was palpable.  By the second half of the season I'm not sure that the mid-sixties setting really mattered that much to the story, except that people were drinking in the office and smoking at the bar.  An African American character was introduced into the office, but she quickly blended into the scenery.  We have a character in Vietnam, but except for some news reports we hear in the background and a few isolated references to protestors and napalm here and there, things could have been happening in 1977, '87 or even 2007.  Mad Men has always veered between keen social comment and personality study and soap opera melodrama.  Unfortunately this season ended on the soap opera side of the ledger.  Though I enjoyed the ride, I hope 1968 is a better year.

Mad Men Revisited

Last year I discovered the popular AMC drama Mad Men via Netflix, and became hooked immediately; hooked but a bit conflicted, all the same.  The hook was the 1960's setting, which feeds into my fascination with that decade, and the strong production values that obsessively recreates the look and mood of the times.  The first two seasons had me enthralled, though when I scratched the surface I wasn't sure there was much there there, especially in seasons 3 and 4.  But I'm finding that as this long delayed fifth season is unfolding the show is living up to the claims of artistic merit that were only a pretensions in the past.

We are now in 1966, a tipping point of sorts.  The fashions are becoming more bold and colorful, mainly for the women, the decor more modern, and we are beginning to see the change in social mores brought on by the civil rights movement and burgeoning sexual revolution.  Alcohol, the drug of choice up to now, shares more time with marijuana, a minor player in the past, and one character has even experimented with LSD (and not a character you might expect).  In typical Mad Men style these changes are introduced gradually.  We saw the early rustlings of the emerging counter culture as early as the first season, set in 1960, by way of Don Draper's affair with a bohemian artist in the Village.  Don't get me wrong, it's not like we're seeing hippies everywhere here in season five, (I don't think they've shown one yet); the makers of the program are careful to show that cultural shifts, even the radical ones of the '60's, take time to permeate the society.  But unlike ABC's attempted copy cat drama Pan Am, which glorified the times that were a changing, Mad Men approaches these things with a far more ambiguous air.  There is a darkness amid the change that's palpable.

With the new season we continue to follow the misadventures of the fore mentioned Don Draper, ad man extraordinaire, who's now remarried.  Struggling to put his philandering past behind him, he has remained faithful to this point, not counting a "was it real or was it a hallucination" conceit from this season's third episode (and no, this did not involve acid).  The world is changing, to be sure, but Don and the rest of the cast only seem half aware of it.  To paraphrase the words of Bob Dylan, they know something is happening, but they don't know what it is.  There are race riots in Detroit and Los Angeles, but the headlines are dominated by the Richard Speck murders in Chicago.  Vietnam is escalating, but again it doesn't seem to be on people's radar, and only in so far as it effects one character personally.  In spite of the veneer of normalcy Don, in particular, knows that something isn't quite right.  He's worried, especially about the younger generation and their future.  He encounters a teen age girl back stage at a Rolling Stones concert (he's there in a vain attempt to talk them into doing a Heinz Baked Beans advertisement).  He questions her as to why she likes The Stones, probing her answers to find the right marketing angle.  She stops him by saying that he sounds like a psychologist.   He seems genuinely stunned that a teenager would even know what one was, let alone what one would sound like.  I don't think the season one Don would have been on the make in that situation (he's a philanderer, not a creep) but I'm not sure he would have shown a father's concern for the girl either, inquiring if her parents know where she is.  He's not so much shocked by her sort of adolescent world weariness as worried and disappointed by it.

This sort of discontent runs through season five's story lines.  In this past Sunday's episode Peggy Olson, the secretary turned copy writer, has agreed to move in with her boyfriend Abe; a bold move in 1966.  She invites her strict Catholic mother for dinner to tell her, and is met with disapproval, as one might expect.  But this isn't treated as simply a clash of generations; the Victorian past colliding with the Swinging Sixties.  This isn't even about Abe being Jewish.  Peggy's mother warns her that this arraignment has no future; she's doing this to avoid being alone, but alone she will be once Abe finds a woman he's willing to give a ring to.   She's settling, and in her heart she knows it.

And that's the strength of this season, and especially this past episode; you can see scenarios being constructed that lead to predictable ends, but once we hit the pay off a subtle twist is applied that raises it above the level of a cliche.  There is a rather inevitable, and obscene, encounter between Roger Sterling, one of the firm's partners, and Don's mother-in-law (I called it, though not the particulars, at least twenty minutes before).  In earlier seasons it would have been played strictly for shock value, but instead it's used as a metaphor for lost innocence.  The sins of the characters are not glorified, even if they aren't exactly condemned, and all the freedom in the air isn't necessarily translating into happiness.  In the background are the children learning way to soon that the city can be a dirty place.

This season was delayed because of a contract dispute between producer Matthew Weiner and the network, but I believe at least two more seasons are lined up, that will bring our heroes (a term I use very loosely) straight into the jaws of the social revolution to come. I hope the jaundiced eye they are presently employing continues.  I don't expect a "conservative" take on the sixties, but the typically romantic portrayal of that era would be disappointing, and unworthy of the show and how it's developed.