Welcome to the Village. Who's the New Number 2?

Patrick McGoohan, Number 6 (L) with the most famous of the Number 2's, Leo McKern

Sometime in the late '70's or early '80's PBS rebroadcast the British TV series The Prisoner. The 17 episodes originally ran in the fall of 1967 to February of '68, and gained a cult following on both sides of the Pond (it was broadcast in the States for the first time on CBS later on in '68). Even in my tweens I was curious about both late sixties pop culture and anything representing itself as being even remotely "artsy" or "deep," so I eagerly tuned in to see what the legendary series was about. Alas, at the time I possessed a curiosity beyond my actual ability to comprehend such material, so I tuned in but am not sure I made it through the first installment. It was surreal beyond my capacity to "just go with it." Which is too bad. Recently I've caught a few episodes on You Tube, and the first episode (The Arrival) is still pretty much as incomprehensible as I remembered it, but not so much so that it didn't set a context that makes each progressive episode more understandable, and a bit frightening.

Patrick McGoohan, who co-created the show, as well as writing some episodes, stars as a secret agent who resigns abruptly from what we presume to be a British spy agency (who is on what side of the Cold War era divide is never made clear). That very same day he is abducted and brought to an island containing an idyllic village, complete with public parks, a cafe, a general store, a gymnasium, and even a village government. He's assigned a cozy town house with all the comforts of home. But make no mistake; this is a prison, and he is being held captive. Anyone who tries to escape is pursued and smothered by an ominous white orb called Rover, which either subdues or kills the inmate, depending on the situation. And like all prisoners he has a number which replaces his name. For the run of the program McGoohan's character is known only as Number 6.

The Village contains other numbered prisoners of course, but also official observers and overlords, and it's not always clear who is an inmate and who is a guard. We only know that the warden, for lack of a better term, is Number 2, and he reports to the never seen Number 1 (whose identity is the great reveal of the finale). The Number 2 rotates frequently, and there is at least 1 new Number 2 each show, though two actors have multiple appearances in the role. Their job, along with the general oversight of the Village, is to get Number 6 to tell why he resigned so abruptly. He is a sensitive and valuable intelligence asset, so they don't want to use brute force to get him to talk, but they rather employ psychological manipulation to get at the truth.  I have about five installments to go, and because of research I know how it ends, though not how they get there, which will keep me watching.

The Prisoner was conceived of quite deliberately as an allegory, with Number 6 representing the individual struggling to resist a society that demands conformity and submission to group think. It's like Orwell's 1984, but instead of a hard oppression, the residence of the Village live in middle class comfort. They are free to while away the hours playing chess or loitering about the beach. There are group recreational activities, and even carnivals. But all the time they are being watched. The other inmates, like Number 6, are former agents whom the wardens are trying to extract information from, or are confined there after similar resignations because they know too much. As long as the prisoners comply peacefully and supply information, they can go on living their peaceful if meaningless existence. If they don't they are subjected to sophisticated psychological experiments, drugging, and aberrant conditioning (similar to what is seen in A Clockwork Orange). For those who refuse to follow the rules and show violent tendencies extreme measures like frontal lobotomies are performed. As I mentioned, Number 6 is spared the worst of it all because he is seen as being so valuable, to point that his handlers hope that he can be put back into regular society to resume his duties as a spy.

As an allegory all the characters are types, and we never get to know who they really are on any deep psychological level, not even Number 6. McGoohan envisioned seven episodes, but the production company wouldn't back it unless he committed to a full season. They compromised at 17 shows, and you can tell that some installments are rather pointed social commentary, while others are more straight forward action adventure, though still of a decidedly surreal nature. This leads me to believe that the former type episodes are what were intended, while the latter are a kind of filler (though again, of a very high quality).

Another thing I noticed was that Number 6 plays off of many different leading ladies during the course of the series, but never becomes romantically involved with any of them, even when such an occurrence would be logical or otherwise expected based on the established conventions of TV. There is one exception, and this is done through a conceit that has the Prisoner's mind transferred into another man's body, so that McGoohan himself never does the kissing. I found out, as I suspected, that McGoohan, being a practicing Catholic, refused to do any "love" scenes in his films and TV shows (he also refused to use guns). It didn't matter that it was "just acting"; passionately kissing and cavorting with a woman not his wife on screen was a nonstarter; one that often had him at loggerheads with producers and directors. It's the reason he turned down both the James Bond franchise and The Saint TV show. For him it was very simple; men such as Bond and Simon Templar, who had a new paramour every night and held human life as cheap, are not heroes or roll models, and he wasn't going to have his daughters see him playing such characters. He was also ferociously devoted to his wife, who he reputedly wrote love letters to constantly (so he can't be accused of not being romantic).

Lest the reader thinks I'm setting up McGoohan for canonization, he was a decidedly flawed man. He struggled with drink, and could fly off into terrible rages. His female co-stars especially found him difficult to work with. But he was a man of principle who chose a quietly distinguished career over international superstardom, and doesn't appear to have regretted it. He passed away, after 57 years of marriage, in 2009 at the age of 80.

So what's so frightening about The Prisoner? I've spent a lot of time on the set up, I'll get the dark, but resonant message of the series next time.

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.

A.D.: The Bible Continues // Mini-Review

I did catch the first installment of the new Roma Downey-Mark Burnett produced Biblical TV production, A.D.: The Bible Continues. The massive success of 2013's The Bible (broadcast in the U.S. on The History Channel) and last year's Son of God, the theatrical release culled from the original miniseries, has won the wife and husband production team a slot on NBC. I want to watch a few weeks more before giving a full blown analysts, but my first impressions are positive, with some of the same apprehensions I had with the original production.

On the positive side, the production values are better than we saw with The Bible (obviously high ratings and solid box office breeds bigger subsequent budgets). While still not up to feature film standards, they do try to tell the story artfully. The story itself is told in a straight forward, un-ironic way: while characters may express doubts, the presentation itself accepts that Jesus is who he says he is. While the Jewish authorities are clearly on the wrong side of history, they are not completely villainized. They are presented as men walking a tight rope between being true to their faith and avoiding giving the Roman occupiers an excuse to crack down. In other words they are treated like human beings and not mustache twirling criminals.

On the negative side the first episode (of 12) drops us right into the middle of Good Friday without any real context of how we got there. The producers' goal is to make a series in the style of Game of Thrones, that will draw a broad audience, including the un-evangelized, and continue with 12 new episodes a year for seasons to come. I certainly hope they get their wish, but I'm afraid that the viewer really does need to have some knowledge of the Biblical sources to really understand what's going on. As Christians we sometimes take for granted that people are familiar with Jesus' story and why he died on the cross. But the truth is that people who grew up in other religious traditions or, as is increasingly the case, no faith tradition at all, will probably be left scratching their head a bit.

I'll be back in a few weeks with some more, again, I want to see more. Episode 1 leaves us with an empty tomb cliff hanger, I'm guessing designed to draw back people who may not know how things go from here. Again, I think their aim is true, but only a few more weeks of tracking the ratings (which by all accounts were solid for Sunday's premiere), to see if they hit the target.

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.

Quick Reviews: "This is the End", "Man of Steel", "The Lone Ranger" and "Ken Burns: Prohibition"

I've seen a bunch of movies this summer, but have chosen not to review them up to now.  Consider this a catch up on some of the more recent films out right now.
 

This is the End

"R" rated comedies are not usually high on my list of must sees, but I took a chance on this one.  I rarely walk into the theater knowing nothing about the movie being screened, but there wasn't anything else out that week, so I figured I'd take the chance.

Bad move.

The premise and set up were actually intriguing.  The main actors, among Hollywood's Young Turk comedians and thespians, all play themselves, or at least play parodies of their public image.  They're self absorbed, stoner elitists living in their insulated pleasure domed ivory towers.  Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel go to a party at John Franco's new house, along with a host of other young stars like Emma Watson, Michael Cera and Rhianna, all engaging in the excesses associated with show business types on their time off, when, you guessed it, the Rapture/Apocalypse happens.  Actually, so far so good.  But then, after a completely over the top sequence in which most of Hollywood's young stars are not simply "left behind," but gruesomely swallowed into the fires of Hell (again, I'm not into gore, but the movie still had me) the film settles into what seemed like an interminable middle section where six survivors try to figure out what happened and how they are going to survive.  It never goes anywhere interesting, and begins to feel claustrophobic and self referential, like, as some other critics have observed, this was some big inside joke that only they a few other peeps in the biz are in on (in fairness, this was not the majority opinion; This is the End was very well received by critics).

I would chalk this up as a missed opportunity, because the beginning, as I said, sets things up nicely, and the end, which goes inexplicably feel good in some ways (though still a bit bloody), wasn't that bad.  But the entire middle was a muddle of hit and mainly miss gags that left me bored. There was an opportunity to comment of religion, race relations, the objectification of women and the various anxieties effecting twenty and thirty-something men, but it never really does, or does so in the most superficial ways imaginable.

I've read and seen reviews (after I saw this mess) trying to explain the deeper meaning that Rogen and Seth Goldberg (writers and first time directors) were trying to say about male friendships and fame versus reality, but I didn't see it.  I admit that this is at least in part a generational issue (I'm just too old for this kind of stuff), but I think that it's more than that.  Yes, there is gore (this is meant as a "horror-comedy"), plenty of profanity and humor of the sexual and scatological variety, but who cares?  Just because you repeat a "dirty" word or phrase a bunch of times doesn't make it funny.  You may not have always agreed with Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor or George Carlin (I certainly didn't), but the profanity that they used wasn't the point.  It was meant to get your attention so you would hear what they were really trying to say.  And no matter where you landed on the issues being explored, you couldn't deny that they were very funny men.  I know that this was meant as a bit of self parody and all, but maybe these guys really don't have as much to say as they think.  Maybe they are a bit more self absorbed than they want to admit.

Man of Steel

Now that Batman was been revamped for the screen it's time for the Superman legend to get it's day in the multiplexes.  The bottom line: this wasn't a terrible movie, but it simply wasn't all that compelling, either.  And all the Christ symbolism was laid on mighty thick.  I thought telling the story in a non linear style was good, and how they brought Clark Kent / Superman and Lois Lane together was inventive (though they sort of conflated the Lois and Jimmy Olson characters together, which seemed odd).  Superman is unbreakable, but not un-bendable, and he does have to exert great effort to accomplish some of his more spectacular feats, which was refreshing. Again, I didn't hate it, I just wasn't sure how necessary it was.

I'm having a hard time thinking of things to say about Man of Steel (I saw it about two weeks ago) not so much because of the time laps but because it was such a vanilla experience.  Fr. Barron gave an interesting commentary on it, so I'll leave him to say the rest.

The Lone Ranger

Back when I was a kid there was an attempt to bring the Lone Ranger legend to screen by way of a big budget spectacle, and it flopped epically.  From the reviews and box office receipts of this latest attempt, from the same people who brought us the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, this concept must be cursed to failure.  

In spite of the title, this time out the "Faithful Indian Guide" Tonto is actually the main character of the story (actor Johnny Depp gets top billing to drive the point home).  Borrowing heavily from the 1970 Dustin Hoffman film Little Big Man, the story is told in flashback by Tonto as an old man in 1933 San Francisco.   There are other thefts from that earlier film, including one of its most famous lines, but in the end it's irrelevant.  They could have taken the best ideas from every western of the last seventy years and it wouldn't have saved this thing.

In the spirit of the aforementioned This is the End, they started with a good idea but this time, instead of going no where with it, director Gore Verbinski moves things along briskly, though the wrong direction.  The angle here is that The Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer) is an amiable dunce.  He's an earnest lawyer going west to bring law and order but is totally clueless.  He and Tonto form a reluctant partnership, which Tonto is constantly trying to wiggle out of after saving Kemosabe's skin time and time again.  The movie is full of humorous moments, which is great, but these are juxtaposed by truly gruesome scenarios. For me the two things just didn't mix.  I think if they had stuck with the Lone Ranger as well meaning dimwit motif, made this a smaller movie; more like a straight satire, it could have worked.  But, without a doubt, they want to make a series out of this, so that was never going to happen.  We get hearts getting torn out (and eaten), decapitations and terrorized children.  It's PG-13, so there is no gore to speak of, and the most extreme violence happens off screen, but it still makes for a very heavy experience that weighs down the whimsical movie trying to get out.    

Ken Burns: Prohibition

Ken Burns has reached a point in his career where I think that he is blissfully incapable of making a bad documentary.  2011's Prohibition, directed with Lynn Novick, is not ground breaking like The Civil War or Baseball, but it doesn't need to be.  His style is familiar, true, but he has a way penetrating a story and making distant history and the people who made it seem contemporary, giving us an empathy with the players, not just a knowledge of dates and events.  We come to understand better why things happened the way they did, not simply that they did.

In the case of Prohibition he uses the first of its three parts to trace the history of alcohol use and of the temperance movement in the United States, going back to colonial times.  While the clear conclusion of the series is that Prohibition was a great mistake, we understand that the problems of alcoholism and how drinking habits had evolved in the States over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries lead to real problems and legitimate concerns among the public.  Those in the temperance movement were not simply moralistic busy bodies, but were often victims of the ravages of alcoholism and saw the need to do something about it.

Where things go off the rails, for Burns, is when the temperance movement very early on changes from a movement seeking people's voluntary abstinence from strong drink to one pushing for the total ban on its manufacture and sale.  In the end the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that made the manufacture and sale of alcohol a crime, and the Volstead Act that detailed it's enforcement, were simply unenforceable.  Rather than alleviating the problems of alcoholism and crime both were exacerbated.

A theme that is repeated again and again throughout the series by the various interviewees as to why prohibition failed is that "you can't regulate morality."  There is something true to this, but something incredibly false as well.  All laws are somehow a reflection of the moral code of the people, if not of God.  It's not a question of if we regulate morality, but rather how we regulate it.  As was pointed out in the movie, it was harder to get a drink after the repeal of the 18th Amendment than it was during prohibition.  Milton Friedman (not featured in the film) once told the story that he went to a former speakeasy with a friend the day the law changed in 1933 for a drink and were informed that they couldn't serve alcohol because they hadn't been issued a liquor license yet.  With regulation, as opposed to an outright ban, governments can control and manipulate better the actions of the people.  And we should not kid ourselves, moral persuasion is a tool used by authorities to get their point across.

Smoking, for instance, has dramatically decreased in the last fifty years, yes because we know more about the heath risks involved, but also because of the heavy taxes levied on tobacco products.  There are also laws restricting where a person may smoke, with some municipalities mulling laws prohibiting smoking even in private residences.  The government has also used public service campaigns that present smoking as wrong.  Scientific and medical evidence may be used to make the case, but these are not cold appeals to logic, but very deliberate framing of the issue in moral terms.  A message is being sent; smokers are outside, literally and figuratively, the mainstream of social behavior and the practice must be stopped.

I have no love for cigarettes, and don't smoke, myself.  I'm all for ending smoking.  I'm just pointing out that by framing the issue in moral terms, conditioning the behavior and attitudes of the people and slowly regulating the industry out of existence, the government has been more successful in it's attempts to end smoking than it would have by an all out ban.  That is the real lesson of Prohibition.

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.