Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.8
"Leaving the Whorehouse"
Guest Writer: Todd McGowan

Monday, May 20, 2013

posted under by Unit for Criticism
[The seventh in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 6 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]

"Leaving the Whorehouse"

Written by: Todd McGowan (University of Vermont)


It is difficult to claim that someone who leaves his children unattended in a large city and cheats indiscriminately on his spouse is an ethical figure, but this is precisely the wager of Mad Men. This wager comes to the fore in this week’s episode, “The Crash,” which depicts the fragile construction of Don’s personal life and the aura that sustains his work life crashing down around him. Don Draper is an appealing character not due to his physical appearance, his sense of mystery, or his ability as an advertiser. The source of his appeal lies in the relationship that he has to trauma. The series makes clear that our ethical being emerges through an engagement with trauma, and with “The Crash,” Mad Men develops this conception of ethics even further than it hitherto has.

An advertising agency does not seem like the site where we would find ethical acts. Rather than act ethically, advertisers willingly prostitute themselves to sell whatever product their clients want them to sell, no matter how destructive that product might be. Mad Men emphasized this dimension of advertising in its first few years by highlighting the dependence of the agency Sterling Cooper on revenue from cigarette advertising. But there is another sense in which an advertising agency is the perfect site for the deployment of an ethical subjectivity. The advertiser, even more than everyone else in society, must constantly confront the emptiness of the Other’s desire and try to find a way to speak to that desire. Even if the series uses the backdrop of advertising as a metaphor for the world of unrestrained capitalism, it shows the possibility for the ethical act within this world. Of course, capitalism can make use of this act for its self-reproduction, but the act itself retains its ethical status. And despite his affairs, his mistreatment of coworkers, and his many other flaws, Don is the ethical center of the series. With “The Crash,” we see for the first time why this is so.

In earlier episodes, Don’s ethical status becomes apparent through his capacity to act against his own self-interest and abandon the assurances of his symbolic identity. He can, for instance, publicly highlight the dangers of cigarettes after establishing his name as the advertiser for Lucky Strike. This act requires an engagement with the trauma of abandoning the security of his reputation, and this public betrayal of Lucky Strike in Season 4 (“Blowing Smoke”) does have lasting repercussions for Don’s career. He acts as he does, however, because he recognizes that there is no ground for his identity, that one’s symbolic identity provides no ultimate foundation upon which one might act. But the series shows a stark contrast between Don’s life in advertising and his private life, where he uses a series of lovers to avoid the trauma that he confronts in the advertising world. He uses these lovers to avoid the ethical self-destruction that he welcomes at work.

This dynamic undergoes a radical change with the introduction of Sylvia and with the development of their relationship in “The Crash.” Unlike Don’s previous lovers, Sylvia embodies for him his fundamental exclusion: his relationship with her repeats the exclusion that defined him as a young boy. No matter how closely Don approaches Sylvia, he remains at a distance from her, and she refuses to allow him to broach that distance. The series highlights Sylvia’s importance formally at the very beginning of this episode.

The second scene of the episode shows Don eavesdropping outside Sylvia’s apartment, and it is soon clear how traumatic their relationship is for him. Though the series typically respects the rules of continuity editing, this scene begins with a direct violation of the 180 degree rule. We see Don in profile from the right side, and the show cuts directly to a profile shot from the left, so that Don seems turn around instantaneously, facing one direction and then facing the other. This disruption for the spectator suggests the traumatic disruption of Don’s subjectivity in his encounter with Sylvia. Rather than bolstering his sense of his identity in the way that Betty or Megan did, Sylvia returns Don to the trauma of his emergence as a desiring subject and forces him to exist within this trauma. This is why the episode that begins with Don traumatized outside Sylvia’s door returns him to his childhood and to his first sexual experience.

“The Crash” is the first episode of Mad Men to show Don’s introduction to sex. This introduction occurs thanks to a prostitute, Aimée, who works at the brothel where he is being raised. Aimée comes to the aid of the young Don when he is sick with a cough and cold and, as he recovers, she seduces him and provides him with his first sexual experience, in spite of his reluctance. As she lies down next to him on the bed, she asks, “Do you want to know what all the fuss is about?” Though he responds in the negative, Aimée continues and tells him that she’ll “do everything.” After she says this, the scene concludes with a close-up of the young Don’s face as he grimaces before it cuts to an image of Don in the present day in the archives of the agency where he has discovered an ad that he believes holds the key not just to the Chevy campaign but to the very problem of existence.

In this shot following his sexual initiation, Don stands holding an advertisement that he did for oatmeal that shows a mother standing over her son with the caption, “Because You Know What He Needs.” As the prior scene makes evident, Don never had a mother who understood what he needed. In contrast to life at a brothel and to Aimée who traumatically seduces Don, the advertisement promises a mother who will nurture the child and protect it from trauma while speaking perfectly to the child’s desires. Don immediately sees this ad as not just the answer to his own trauma but also the key to advertising as such.

After returning to his office, Don calls Peggy and Michael Ginsberg in order to announce his discovery to them. In the midst of describing his idea, he proclaims, “If this strategy is successful, it’s way bigger than a car. It’s everything.” Though Ginsberg plays along with Don in awe of his reputation, Peggy soon recognizes that this is a massive delusion and that, rather than producing ideas for a Chevy campaign, Don has spent the weekend in a drug-induced haze in which he created nothing but gibberish. He fails because he imagines a mystical union with a non-existent mother who would save him from the trauma that continues to mark his existence.

The absence of this mother is apparent in the seemingly unrelated interaction of Don’s daughter Sally with an intruder in Don and Megan’s apartment. The show emphasizes that this is a black woman not just visually but also when multiple characters describe her as a “Negro” and when Don’s son Bobby wonders aloud if he is himself a “Negro.” Many critics (including my colleague here at the University of Vermont, Sarah Nilsen and some of the contributors to Mad Men, Mad World) have taken the show to task for its depictions of race and racism. Despite taking place during a time of integration, the show remains relatively white, and the black characters often serve not as independent figures but as mere indices of the attitudes that the white characters take up toward the question of race. The death of Martin Luther King, for instance, inspires white characters to seek out black characters in order to display their anti-racism, but it also enables the otherwise unattractive Pete Campbell to express genuine concern in the face of this event. If prior episodes incidentally provided fodder for critics more through omission than commission, “The Crash” seems to go out of its way to employ a racist stereotype in the figure of Grandma Ida, a thief who presents herself to Don’s children as the woman who raised their father.

Viewers of the show are aware immediately that Ida is neither Don’s mother nor the woman who raised Don. And as her interaction with Sally goes on, it becomes clear even to the uninformed that she is trying to rob the apartment rather than visit Don. But she nonetheless plays an important structural role in the episode. She is a motherly figure—she immediately wants to cook for Sally—and claims to occupy the position of Don’s nurturer at the same time as Don is imagining the existence of such a figure. The fact that she is lying tells us that this nurturer doesn’t exist, that though some of us, unlike Don, may have mothers, none of us has a nurturer who knows what we need. Instead of the nurturer, we must confront and embrace the stranger who appears in this position.

Though she is lying, the woman posing as Don’s mother and robbing him is in another sense telling the truth insofar as Don shares her exclusion. She is the mother that he didn’t have. Her blackness is not merely contingent or a signifier of the show’s underlying racism. If Don didn’t have a black mother, that is only because such a narrative line would provide an easy answer for his exclusion. This sequence, which parallels Don’s own flashbacks to his upbringing, reveals that no one has the mother who offers what is needed. Both Don and Peggy share this absence.

Throughout the series, the link between Don and Peggy (discussed last week by Sean O’ Sullivan) provides one of the touchstones to which we continually return. On one level, their connection stems from their skill as advertisers, and it is clear that they have a mutual respect for this skill. But it is much more their ethical being that separates them from other characters on the show, and “The Crash” highlights this through their shared engagement with trauma.

After trying to seduce Peggy, Stan reveals to her that his cousin has just died in Vietnam. She tells him, “I’ve had loss in my life. You have to let yourself feel it. You can’t dampen it with drugs and sex. It won’t get you through.” Though Stan is unconvinced, this statement makes clear the basic point of connection between Peggy and Don, especially as we see Don in this episode. He works through a continuing confrontation with the trauma of loss and exclusion, and every ad that he creates emerges out of this confrontation.

The episode ends with Don once again acting against his self-interest by abandoning work on the Chevy advertising campaign. Just two episodes ago, abandoned the agency’s most important client, Jaguar, when he refused to allow Herb Rennet, their connection at Jaguar, to involve someone from his dealership in the development of the advertising. In “The Crash,” after an unproductive weekend of nonstop work, Don decides that the agency resembles the milieu in which he grew up. He announces to new partners Ted Chaough and Jim Cutler that he will now only oversee creative work on Chevy rather than producing any. The final word of the episode, which Don speaks as he’s walking back to his office, is “whorehouse.”

With this word, Don makes the connection that many do between advertising and prostitution, but this is especially poignant for him since he grew up in a brothel. By dismissing the agency as a whorehouse and refusing to continue to work as a prostitute, Don displays once again the possibility for the ethical act that exists within the most ethically compromising spaces. One should not judge this act on the activity that follows it. If Don goes back to writing copy for Chevy in the next episode, here he nonetheless breaks for a moment from his enslavement to the Other’s demand and confronts the absence of anyone who knows “what he needs.” This break and this confrontation are the basis for every ethical act.

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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.7
"The Pause That Refreshes"
Guest Writer: Sean O'Sullivan

Monday, May 13, 2013

posted under by Unit for Criticism

[The sixth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 6 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]

"The Pause That Refreshes"

Written by: Sean O'Sullivan (Ohio State University)

We have reached the doldrums. By this I do not mean some unexpected state of plot lethargy or ennui, since “Man with a Plan,” the seventh episode of Season 6, is full of hustle and bustle, and since 1968 is one of the least drowsy years in American history. Rather, I mean something structural, constitutional. I mean the seventh episode of what I have called the “sonnet season”*—that is, the 13-episode uninterrupted narrative unit inaugurated by The Sopranos in 1999, which has served as the template for much of the most prominent television of the 21st century.

The sonnet season has transformed not just how television is made but how television is discussed. It is a season that is more compact, more distinct than the typical network sprawl of 20-plus installments (or 39, in the case of a 1960s show like the fictional Grin and Barrett conceived in Mad Men’s second season). But it is a season that has more space for development and alteration than the six or eight hours of the British televisual tradition, where the beginning and the end are in such proximate conversation as to allow no room for a real middle.

In the middle of such a season, at the juncture of the seventh episode, we are potentially neither here nor there; far enough from the beginning to feel launched, far enough from the end to feel the tidal pull of conclusion. We are—to cite the Oxford English Dictionary’s most targeted definition of “doldrums”—-in “the region of calms and light baffling winds near the equator, where the trade winds meet and neutralize each other.” The terms and directions of the season have been put in motion, but we do not yet understand, or need to understand, the eventual place where we will land. Or, to use Ted Chaough’s description of air travel: it is where we are once we have leveled off, having navigated the clouds of turbulent ascent. It’s our chance to take in the wonder of God’s televisual majesty.

A seventh episode can emphasize its position as showstopper. See, for example, “The Suitcase,” everyone's favorite melodramatic two-hander. The midpoint of Mad Men’s fourth season operated explicitly as a break, a chance both to deploy a significant plot change—-the death of the original Mrs. Draper—-and to focus as intimately as the series ever has into the emotional particulars of the show's central relationship—-Don and Peggy. “The Suitcase” to some degree exists independently of its season's trade winds. Watching it, we may have sensed that everything had changed, suddenly—for Don and Peggy, for the show, for us. And yet in many ways nothing changed in the subsequent weeks, an illusory epiphany of the kind that featured so prominently in Mad Men’s ancestor series, The Sopranos. That simultaneous position of significant weight and significant weightlessness may perhaps be the privilege of an episode at the center of things.

We get a version of that intimacy here in the Don and Sylvia story, in a room that they temporarily agree to seal off from the rest of the world. But their story has always been an opaque one for us, since their middle was our beginning, our introduction to her in the Season 6 premiere, “The Doorway” (covered in this series by Bruce Robbins) an instance of in medias res. With the exception of Midge Daniels at the very beginning of the series, we had been there at the start of every one of Don’s extramarital dalliances. His relationship with Sylvia, like the sixth season more generally, has made the relative position of beginning and middle harder to map out.

“The Suitcase” was the fruit of an intimacy gleaned slowly, week after week; its story was, to a large degree, the story of two people shedding their guardedness, their roles, and enacting some possible version of their true selves. By contrast, Don and Sylvia indulge in elaborate make-believe, in artifice rather than exposure. In this way, “Man with a Plan” is almost the obverse of “The Suitcase”; if the final word of the earlier episode was “open”—a gesture toward doorways that also inaugurated this season—the corresponding threshold, or more precisely elevator, would appear here to be “closed.” Don wants to linger in the middle, in the suspension of space marked by room 503 of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. Sylvia, a narrative traditionalist, finally insists on going home, in that most ancient of narrative drives, a journey that may take her toward episode 13 of this season, or somewhere completely outside our orbit.

Not every seventh episode can, or should, be “The Suitcase.” In some ways, the series’ first seventh may represent the most archetypal illustration of the possibilities of the middle. You may or may not recall “Red in the Face,” from Mad Men’s inaugural campaign. Sandwiched between the series-defining “Babylon” and the back story explosion of “The Hobo Code,” “Red in the Face” is a sardonic sketch of marital and workplace tension, featuring Pete's saga of the Chip ‘n’ Dip and Don making Roger walk up 22 flights after an oyster-swollen lunch, in revenge for flirting with Betty. It ends with a barf and a smirk, and it is less tethered to the large serial movements of the season than the preceding or succeeding episodes. If “The Suitcase” is the seventh episode as deep burrowing, “Red in the Face” is the seventh episode as lateral move; it is the kind of episode we get if we think of the 13-episode season less as a novel and more as a collection of short stories, in the manner of Winesburg, Ohio (a copy of which sits in Dick Whitman’s tent in Korea). It is Mad Men as anthology show, as an array of simultaneous options in a narrative universe, rather than a necessarily sequential logic of cause and effect.

There is too much going on in “Man with a Plan” to be as light on its feet as Season 1’s “Red in the Face.” But we do get a compressed version of the earlier episode’s investment in alpha men as sex and alcohol performers. The improvised flirtation that Roger directs toward Betty in the Draper kitchen coagulates here into the domination ritual that Don concocts for Sylvia. More directly similar is Don’s attempt to dominate Ted by out-drinking him. Don’s most prominent man-with-a-plan gambit in season one was that well-designed revenge in “Red in the Face”: bribing the elevator operator (an occupation that Don must assume for himself at the start of this week’s episode) to pretend that the lift is out of service. Here, all he needs is a bottle of Canadian Club and a new business partner who doesn’t want to get left behind. Unlike that earlier episode, Don emerges from these games as vanquished, or at least chastised, rather than merrily triumphant. “Move forward,” Peggy admonishes him, anticipating Sylvia’s demand that they leave the doldrums.

One thing that both episodes clearly share is a moment of throwing up. Indeed, prominent scenes of vomiting—-or preparation for the same—-occur in no fewer than four of Mad Men’s seventh episodes. This may be coincidental; but I choose to think of the phenomenon as a self-conscious recognition that seventh episodes may be necessary emetics, places to purge before we binge on the second half of the season.** In this instance we get Joan’s dry heaves, whose primary purpose appears to be to bring Bob Benson from recurrent, inscrutable background to something like front and center. I have thought of him throughout this season as something like the man in the macintosh in Ulysses-—the most minor of characters, who pops up here and there with no ostensible purpose or consequence, beyond the purpose of inscribing minorness as an interest of the narrative. Unless we are being aggressively misled, the prognosis for Joan’s ovarian cyst certainly seems better than the one for Frank Gleason’s pancreatic cancer. Why is this minor excursion here at all? This seems a deliberate design to move the storyline of Bob Benson—-prominently wearing a macintosh here—-from the edge to the center, mirroring to some degree the collision of peripheral and dominant characters in the chaotic hallways of the still-unnamed agency that Don and Ted created in Detroit.

There is no escaping the clash of beginning, middle, and end throughout the episode. It’s the first day of school, Ted tells Peggy, and we catch Bert Cooper in the middle of an announcement about the merger, but with no ending scripted yet. (Not to worry; they’ve got a lot of writers out there.) “Were in the middle of a merger,” Pete exclaims to his brother, even as his mother appears to be nearing her end. It’s worth recalling that the seventh episode of the third season, “Seven Twenty Three,” also marked a new business arrangement; at the behest of Conrad Hilton, Don Draper finally signed a contract with Sterling Cooper. We all remember how well that turned out. So the middle-as-beginning inversion is hardly a new one—as forecast by the very beginning of the season, where we found ourselves in a dark wood, in the middle of our life’s journey. The Inferno proved foundational for the season in more ways than one: Dante’s invented verse of terza rima is the most serial of poetic schemes, since each three-line segment explicitly triggers its successor. The aba bcb cdc ded structure, where the middle rhyme in one triad always becomes the beginning and end rhymes of the next triad, inscribes an interdependence of origin, center, and conclusion. (The rich relationships between epic and serial are the least examined branches in narrative genealogy.)

Perhaps my favorite scene in “Man with a Plan” has less to do, ostensibly, with matters of form; but it’s certainly about issues of limitations, and about the sense of closure that we think we can sniff in a seventh episode. It’s the hospital conversation between Ted Chaough and Frank Gleason—-the second of three hospitals in the episode, following Joan’s encounter with Nurse Finnegan (more James Joyce?) and preceding Bobby Kennedy’s transportation to the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles. This scene may be Mad Men at its best. Here’s one character who until recently has existed more or less in the zone of caricature, as the prankster and provocateur rather than the complicated nemesis; and another character whose existence did not even register until last week, a character whose beginning for us is an end for him. We dip into a relationship that has clearly evolved for decades; these are characters that have existed, in their own drama, outside the selective focalization of Sterling Cooper and its successors. Mixed with the soapiness of introducing a character on what appears to be his deathbed, we also get a prominent maneuver of the realist tradition—-the sudden immersion in a world that exists independently of us, of what we think we need to know. We get banter between two men that is the froth of many days, weeks, years of association, the reminder of what was and the speculation about what might be. There may be a whiff of Tony Soprano’s vigil for the cancer-stricken Jackie Aprile, in the early days of that series, when a sidekick in a crime family suddenly had to become a protagonist. Ted Chaough may not have been a sidekick within the world of CGC, but he has certainly been a sidekick in the world of Mad Men. As Alex Woloch has argued, major characters in realist fiction always exist dynamically with minor characters, creating space for themselves at the expense of others who threaten to take their place. For Ted to become important to the narrative with which we’re familiar, Gleason’s minorness must be recorded, and then his character jettisoned. There are only so many chairs to go around.



*Kritik will soon be providing access to this piece on the Unit for Criticism's webpage.

** For those scoring at home, those four episodes are “Red in the Face,” “The Gold Violin,” “The Suitcase,” and “Man with a Plan.” And Sally Draper certainly felt like throwing up when she saw what she saw at the codfish ball.

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The Eighties in Theory and Practice: Gabriel Solis’s Opening Remarks

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

posted under , , , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[On May 2-3, 2013 the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory hosted “The Eighties in Theory and Practice,” a conference. Gabriel Solis (Musicology) opened the second day of the conference. His remarks are below.]

Welcome, and it’s my pleasure to introduce the second day of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory spring conference, “The 1980s in Theory and Practice.” Let me welcome back those of you who were here yesterday, and welcome in those who weren’t.

I think of my brief remarks here as a kind of mid way check in, a bit of, as Johanna Burton put it yesterday, “taking the temperature of the room,” and hopefully providing a bit of further context for today’s further discussion. I’ll try not to go on at too much length, as we have a nicely paced series of talks to look forward to for the rest of the day today.

So, a little context. When we thought about this event in the first place, it was an attempt to conceptualize a broadly intermedia, interdisciplinary cultural history of the 1980s, with three main themes. Those were:

Spacialities: Geopolitics
Temporalities: Diachronic contexts, synchronic text
Technocultures


We have touched on all three threads, but it seems to me that of the three threads, technology has gone the directions I, at least, least expected. When we workshopped the conference proposal we imagined having a discussion of early digital technology and the emergent web--think War Games. But instead we have had a very interesting discussion, thanks to Chris Castiglia and Roger Hallas, of video, a technology that predates the 1980s, but which seems definitive of its cultural productions. Though we didn’t talk about it, the proliferation (and miniaturaization) of amateur video technology—hand-held VHS cameras and dubbing playback machines—in the 1980s ties all of our threads together. It is a fact of technoculture, and one that was surely part of the neoliberal pleasure of conspicuous consumption (whoever dies with the most toys wins, after all); and it is central to the creation of texts in the moment, the massive amateur documentation of events that seemed perhaps at the time to contribute to the postmodern sense of the flattening out of temporal experience, the twin senses that time was moving faster than ever and that its linearity was fundamentally disrupted (and that in retrospect gives us the remarkable archive from which we have crafted a sense of the 80s in historical, teleological time; but it was also connected to our geopolitical thread. As the American media anxiously noted at the time, miniaturized, personal video technology, like most consumer electronics of the time, was a product of late modern globalized capital, and part and parcel of “turning Japanese,” as the song said.

Video was also a critical part of the turn to the visual that we saw so powerfully in yesterday’s talks, and that was briefly mentioned, but about which I am inclined to go meta for a moment here. The turn to the visual was not just felt in the world of high culture—the art world, as it were—but in the world of popular culture perhaps even more. While graphic design and photography had been a consistent part of post-war (and in a smaller way early 20th century) popular music, and while bands had exploited film to build audiences and enhance the narrative shapes of their music going back to the 1920s, video was THE growth medium of popular music in the 1980s. I’m not sure that video killed the radio star, as Wooley and the Camera Club (and later the Buggles) had it, but it certainly altered the landscape.

In terms of diachronic temporalities, yesterday gave us a good deal to think about, as we try to periodize and figure out when we actually mean when we talk about the “long 80s” (or even a 10-year 80s, if we follow Howard Singerman and date them from 1977 to 1987). I’m quite taken with the early start date, because in addition to the reasons in politics and art that Howard gave us, it also allows me to think of post-punk, including Elvis Costello’s first three albums (My Aim Is True, 1977, This Year’s Model, 1978, and Armed Forces, 1979), early synth pop recordings (including “Video Killed the Radio Star,” which was recorded in 1979, though its video was the first broadcast on MTV in 1981), and so on all as part of our period. And because, looking to the South Bronx, as Howard encouraged us to do, it also takes in more or less the entire history of recorded hip hop, beginning with DJ Disco Wiz’s mix tapes in 1977 and the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. And because it encompasses more or less the entire history of hardcore in the U.S.—we don’t need the early start date to capture the San Francisco scene’s Dead Kennedys, whose debut, In God We trust, Inc. wasn’t released until 1981, but it does allow us to claim Black Flag in Los Angeles, whose first shows were in 1977 (under the name Panic), and the Bad Brains in Washington, D.C., who, admittedly started as a jazz fusion group under the name Mind Power in 1977, but who were playing hardcore shortly thereafter. The danger, I’m afraid, with pop music as a scholarly object, is that argument is all too easily substituted by lists, so I’ll stop there. Or almost—I also note that it allows us to claim Lauren’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” which was initially released as a single in 1979.

That said, I do want to suggest that at least one artist at the time gave us a reason to think of 1980 itself as a fundamental turning point in American life. Gil Scott-Heron, responding to the first Reagan presidential election in the song “B-Movie”—the year from Shogun to Raygun—called on us to recognize the grotesqueries of postmodernity ascendant. Scott-Heron's meditation on the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Presidency speaks specifically to the substitution of story in place of history.

I’m really not sure where our 1980s end. Nancy Condee’s paper suggested to me, at least, that we might see it ending with the dissolution of the Soviet Union throughout 1991; or perhaps that we might think it is still with us, as we see the extended continuation of a Russian contiguous empire in the post-soviet era. 1991 is, of course, also the year of Desert Storm, which Baudrillard saw as the ultimate expression of the postmodern simulacrum, but which probably didn’t feel like that to people on the ground. This, I think picks up on Johanna Burton’s point about feeling uncomfortable with the turn to “fictionality,” even as she is—and we are—taken with its aesthetic and theoretical possibilities. The narratives that characterize the kinds of laterality she describes (and that Roger and Chris saw in another medium) can reveal different truths than history does; but they can also obscure and obfuscate in ways that are suspect. In whatever affective register, however, the Gulf War certainly seems like a fulcrum point, an end and a beginning, to me.

This makes a fine point to turn to the last of our three topics, spaciality and geopolitics. Yesterday’s talks focused on the myth of neoliberalism that has come to feel like the truth of neoliberalism: that the 1980s are characterized by the consolidation of the global phase of late capitalism, and in particular its celebration of the atomized, desocialized, disculturated individual. I want to suggest that while as cultural studies scholars we have had some references to the “end of history” at this conference, in the theoretical tradition I was trained in—anthropology’s social theory—the 1980s are better seen as characterized by the death of “culture.” The edited volumes Writing Culture (James Clifford and George Marcus, 1986) and Recapturing Anthropology (Richard Fox, 1991) showed a profound crisis in the discipline, as we came to grips with the fact that our communities of study could no longer be understood through the fiction of abject difference and should no longer be forced to occupy the “savage slot,” as Michel-Rolf Trouillot called it. While I am in full agreement with the work of those two groups of scholars, I note that those communities of study have been less excited about our discovery of their connections to the larger world (they already knew about them and quite probably wondered why we never asked), and have been far less willing to give up the idea of coherent communal identities.

In this, I see a useful and interesting pushback against the logic of neoliberalism. If I may, I will take just a minute to describe how Indigenous artists and musicians in Australia have insisted on cultural integrity in ways that have been very, very hard for the nation state to come to terms with, as a part of the story of the 1980s. Unlike the U.S., U.K., and Germany, the 1980s were a period of labor ascendant. Under the leadership of Robert Hawke, the labor party, among other things, worked directly with Indigenous communities, funding a series of initiatives, and making gestures in the direction of recognition and inclusion for Indigenous people in the national polity. Encouraged by this thaw, and working in dialogue with liberation movements from Africa, the U.S., and Asia, the period saw enormous growth in the Indigenous sovereignty movement in the country. 1989 marks a point of culmination that can be seen in art and politics. In the small Aboriginal community of Barunga, in the interior of the Northern Territory, a good day’s drive from Darwin, but not a third of the way to Alice Springs, leaders from the northern, coastal Yolngu peoples and the Central Desert Walpiri and Pintupi peoples came together to draft what has come to be known as the Barunga statement. The statement has a central text calling for the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, enclosed by representations of the Tjukurrpa and Rom (often called “dreamings,” but better translated as “law”). The presentation to Hawke marks a high point in some ways—a moment where the collective sovereign rights of a colonized people looked possible. Indigenous art was selling for huge prices in the international art world (as Howard Morphy and Fred Myers have documented), and Native Title was becoming law through the Wik and Mabo cases.

The ugly end to the story is perhaps the end to our 80s. Hawke was voted out; there is STILL no treaty; and while Indigenous artists, dancers, and musicians have become a staple of Australian “culture”—for locals as well as tourists—sovereignty is too disruptive for the neoliberal state to come to terms with. The government sends tanks into the streets in Aboriginal villages on the pretext of protecting women and children from the specter of half-animal Aboriginal men, in spite of the fact that the government fails to make a significant investment in programs that will actually address real, systemic, and devastating problems with domestic violence. The band Yothu Yindi’s expression of disillusionment, “Treaty,” from 1991 can be added then, as another part of our diachronic bookends.

I hope this provides some context for our further conversations today, and a way of thinking about the 1980s as a period.

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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.6
"Get Your Wargasm On"
Guest Writer: Nicholas D. Mirzoeff

Monday, May 6, 2013

posted under by Unit for Criticism
[The fifth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 6 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]

"Get Your Wargasm On"

Written by: Nicholas D. Mirzoeff (New York University)

Last week my friend and colleague Dana Polan accomplished the astonishing feat of blogging Mad Men in the advert breaks. Watching him do this made me aware of the tension between a show about advertising and the advertising shown during that show. Mad Men’s drama is always doubled: between the present and the past it represents, the story the characters are involved in and the one known to viewers, and its aspirations to drama in a highly commercial environment.

At the end of the last episode, “The Flood,” an odd coincidence highlighted how fragile that balance can be. Right after the incomprehensible-as-ever “scenes from next week,” AMC cut to a title for its follow-up show Rectify, which happened to be “presented by Jaguar.” The once-British Jaguar that was sold by Ford to India’s Tata Motors in 2008 to increase its chances of survival in the financial crisis. The same Jaguar that boosted SCDP after Joan did her trade of sex-for-partnership last season. Which was valued by Pete Campbell for her at the beginning of this episode (the sixth in Season 6, “For Immediate Release”) at about $1 million: the size of her partnership if SCDP goes public as planned.


The coincidence reminds us of what we always know but try to forget—that the show about advertising exists to sell. In the new TV economy, it has to sell itself as much as it sells advertising. But sell it must.

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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.5
"A Tense Experiment"
Guest Writer: Dana Polan

Monday, April 29, 2013

posted under by Unit for Criticism
[The fourth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 6 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]

"A Tense Experiment"

Written by: Dana Polan (New York University)

I keep thinking about some of the narrative curiosities of this season's two-part opener for Mad Men: an initial shot (a man seeming to pump at the body of someone off-screen while a woman screams) that only makes sense as we move later into the narrative (he, it transpires, was Arnold, a doctor who luckily came into the lobby with his wife Sylvia just after the doorman had collapsed in Don and Megan's presence and who was able to perform successful C.P.R.), but then final moments that make us realize that what we were seeing earlier has now, again, to be rethought in light of very consequential new information (it turns out that Don's been having an affair with Sylvia—although we're never sure when that started).

The Sixth Sense (1999)
In the pause/rewind world of TIVO and dvd, the season opener of Mad Men joins with other popular works of narrative visual fiction that might at first mislead us but that we can now go back over (and are encouraged by the works themselves to go back over) through technology-enhanced methods of close analysis (freeze that frame!) that let us check both on how we were tricked and on whether all the mysteries that we fell for were flawlessly set up: think of films like The Sixth Sense (does anyone other than the boy interact with Bruce Willis?) or Fight Club (is no one ever around when Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are in the frame together?) or Shutter Island (are the flashbacks really localized in Leonardo di Caprio's mind alone?).

In like fashion, at the end of "The Doorway," we might wonder if Don and Sylvia ever exchanged meaningful glances that we missed the first time around, if there were any hints here or there of what we would later realize had already been going on some time earlier.

Such works as these set up a tension then between the present-tense in which we watch them and a future that can challenge what we've been (already) seeing and turn it into a past-tense that we then have to rethink. We watch Don, Megan, the doctor and his wife a first time around but then later realize that whatever we thought we were watching needs revision.

Sandro Botticelli's illustration for Dante's Inferno (1481)
Of course, subsequent episodes in a serial narrative such as this could encourage even further revisions of what we think we know, what we think we've learned. But just as any one episode's ending can make us go back over what we've been seeing for the last hour or so (the season opener was two-hours long), another fixity of meaning comes when we move away from an ended episode and begin to think, after the fact, upon its trajectory. In this respect, even when they seem to be produced at the speed of light (kudos to my predecessors, Bruce, Lilya, and Rob, for getting such pithy and rich commentaries done so quickly!), the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory series of blogs on Mad Men still, necessarily, assumes a future stance, a critical distance put into play after an episode has terminated and from which it can be retrospectively analyzed. In the act of commentary, we benefit from hindsight, the time of reflection. But Mad Men's season opener reminds us that while there's retrospective meaning-making, there's also the meaning making we engage in while the work unfolds: it's not always a meaning-making that we get right. But, clearly, straying from the journey in that way (like Dante's own straying, quoted by Don from a copy of the Inferno given him by Sylvia, from the road he was on in the middle of his life) is key to how the work works in such a case and how it deliberately works on us.

Hence, then, an experiment in tense: I am not writing this blog after my assigned episode ends but while it unfolds (ok, to be honest, I'm doing it during the commercial breaks so there is still a degree of belatedness from the episode segments proper to commercials that follow on each segment). I want to write about what I know--or what I think I know --as the episode progresses and reflect on how that ongoing process of knowing went (that last, judgmental part will be written after). To be sure, I have some background from previous episodes to go on (but how helpful is that going to be in a series that often jumps to new situations and constantly revises acquired knowledge?), and I have a title for the episode to go on ("The Flood?" but, really, how useful is that?). I will watch and form hypotheses in the present, and then write them up on the fly as close as I can to the present-tense viewing. Here goes.

"It sounds very old world," declares one of the characters (Michael, a young Jewish copywriter) in "The Flood," referring to a blind date his father has set up for him even as he (the reluctant dater) boldly speaks to the woman he is out for the evening with in a way that signals his desire to move beyond the strictures and structures of the past into new territory (here, new sexual territory).

There's a lot of reference to pasts (for example, all the accounts the ad agencies, both Don's and Peggy's, used to have) but there's also a lot of suggestion that new worlds are being put into place (the episode opens, of course, with Peggy looking at a new apartment as her real estate agent tries to come to grips with new relations between the men and women she is arranging home or apartment ownership for). And, indeed, from its first segment on, "The Flood" seems in a way that at first develops gradually and then comes with the veritable force of a gunshot to be about conflicts of tense--the tensions between a pastness that still weighs the characters down and a fateful futurity that they are not fully equipped to deal with in all its ramifications.

Historicity always has been hovering in the background of Mad Men--particularly so in this season where we hear references to real-world events (the war in Viet Nam, for instance) as muted reports that come from televisions somewhere offscreen (and sometimes are talked over by characters in the foreground). But with "The Flood," with the death of Martin Luther King, history floods in, and every character has to come to grips in whatever way with absolutely new conditions. We watch as characters fumble and one by one reveal their best or their worst. Think, for instance, of those supposedly empathetic hugs by whites with African Americans--hugs that are more than awkward (especially since they are supposed to be about denying racism but need to turn each African American woman into a symbol or direct token of her race).

Or think of those endless machinations by this or that character to benefit from the tragedy in absolutely self-aggrandizing ways: for instance, Henry dreaming (with Betty) of a new political career or Peggy hoping (or being convinced by her real estate agent to hope) that new urban unrest will bring down the price of the apartment she wishes to buy. Mad Men is not merely a show that is watched in the present tense, like any other series, but it is also particularly and pointedly one in which the characters live in a present that often about self-interest and moment-to-moment improvisation to secure that self interest. This is not always a series about the larger picture or the longer view or the higher moral ground. (Ironically, though, we find that the characters we might have expected the worst from in such cases defeating our expectations: who might have imagined that Pete Campbell, for whatever reasons, would be the one to condemn profiteering from King's death?)

As we watch Mad Men in the present, across its seasons, we can have the sense that everything is being worked out at the moment, both by the characters--who often have to improvise to get by in the moment (often the great improviser, Don stumbles at this when early in "The Flood," he is taken aback by Sylvia's departure with Arnold for a weekend away and, losing his cool, flubs his lines)--and by the show itself which comes to us in bits and pieces that seem to hold out larger, significant resonances even as they slip away from us. At the same time, it's tempting to feel that there is a larger design to these fragments and to imagine there's a greater plan to the series: as we watch, we try to tap into the narrative design of the show and piece it all together (the "Next on Mad Men" previews are particularly adept at this fleeting promise of something more: there are seductive glimpses of a sense that flits away even as we cling to this or that fragment for deeper significance).

But if the characters are now confronting the momentous nature of a history they often have ignored (and sometimes continue to ignore, as when Betty tries to get her children to stop watching the breaking news on television), there is little suggestion that the characters of Mad Men necessarily will themselves evolve in consequential fashion. "The heavens are telling us to change" announces one character (Randall, an insurance executive who's come to Don's firm seemingly to throw business its way), but he's presented as a veritable nut case whose interpretation of the calamities of the moment are laughable to both characters in the show (Stan can't resist the stoner's chortle at the absurdity of it all) and to we spectators. Mad Men is a series that cannot acknowledge intentional agency in the service of consequential change as anything more than foolish (as Megan tells Don, he doesn't, in contrast to her sanctimoniously radical father, need Karl Marx because he's got booze: dreams of revolutionary upheaval and escapist inebriation all amount to the same thing).

Maybe, one might hope, there could indeed be meaningful change: towards the end of "The Flood," Don seems to have an epiphany that is precisely about the ways in which improvised, feigned performances of sentiment can turn into the real thing: seeing his son Bobby talk at the movies of sadness to a black janitor makes Don realize the pretending at fatherhood he's been acting at can turn into actual, even profound paternal feeling. But it as likely that none of this conversion to heartfelt sentiment will hold: not merely do characters in the show, Don especially, frequently forget their epiphanies and backslide into the very behavioral patterns they had promised to go beyond, but forgetfulness is also endemic to Mad Men itself as serial television, caught as it is between a progressive building up of knowledge and a scene to scene, episode to episode fragmentation that works for the moment but has no lasting power.

Planet of the Apes (1968)
It seems appropriate then that when Don decides to take son Bobby to the movies (even though what the boy's been watching at home is not the news, so worrisome to Betty, but McHale’s Navy), they end up seeing a time-travel narrative, Planet of the Apes (and then, in another complication of temporalities, decide to see it once again). In the moment of 1968, Planet is another narrative of future revision of past knowledge: at the finale, we, along with Chuck Heston, end up having to revise everything we thought about the world we had been living through (oh my god [or 'Jesus!' as Bobby says], we were on planet earth all along!; oh my god, Don's been having an affair with that doctor's wife all along!). As it unfolds, "The Flood" (and all of Mad Men perhaps) gives us definitive events that rewrite our times but it does so in uncertain ways.
April 4, 1968
Yes, we might know what happens in a real world on April 4th, 1968 and that then continued beyond that consequential date, but we don't still know how that will impact the narratives of this television show (is that Mad Men's own self-interestedness?: that it makes the assassination of Martin Luther King a question about the resolution of stories in its own fictional universe?).

One constant debate about Mad Men has had to do with the seeming ways in which it sets up perhaps a gap between the limited perspective of its characters, rooted in their moment of the late 1950s into the 1960s (didn't they know, for instance, that all that cigarette smoking was bad for one's health!), and our superior knowledge from the enlightened 2000s. But the unfolding presentness of Mad Men as we watch it moment to moment closes that gap and makes us into improvisers, too--searching for a sense of an ending that is not yet here and that we're not yet sure will ever come.

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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.4
"Out in the Open"
Guest Writer: Robert A. Rushing

Monday, April 22, 2013

posted under by Unit for Criticism

[The third in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 6 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]

"Out in the Open"

Written by: Robert A. Rushing (Italian/Comparative Literature)



Joe Namath card from 1968
A great deal happens—perhaps too much—in the fourth episode of Mad Men’s sixth season, “To Have and to Hold” (the title is that of Megan’s soap opera, and a reference to marriage vows in general). The Vietnam War continues to emerge into the explicit content of the show (“they should stop dropping napalm on children”), rather than remaining in the marginal radio and TV news that viewers can’t help but notice, but which the characters in the show ignore. Harry Crane’s plan to distract the people from napalm by giving them bread and circuses (“Joe Namath in a straw hat!”) seems woefully behind the times (and doomed to fail besides). For several years, viewers have waited to see if we would ever “follow Carla home” —that is, explore the lives of the show’s African American characters, rather than having them also remain as marginal background that Don and others pay no attention to—and indeed, last night’s episode follows Dawn, if not home, then to an African American diner and into a glimpse of her personal life. And late 1960s counter-culture, perhaps most prominently the sexual revolution (bisexual swinging! casual hookups! a near-threesome in the back seat of a taxi!), begins to take a commanding role in the lives of the characters on the show—and even in the style of the show itself. 

“To Have and to Hold” opens with a three-shot: Don, Pete and Timmy from Heinz ketchup, discussing the possibility of an “exploratory mission” to see if SCDP can capture the lucrative and prestigious condiment account, in addition to (or in place of) the Heinz baked beans account they already have. They agree to give it a shot, and Timmy stands up to leave, noting that he has a rendezvous with a lady in a few minutes. In a rapid, much-practiced and rather repulsive gesture, Timmy licks his wedding ring and then slides it off into his pocket, pointedly noting that he doesn’t “need much of an excuse to come to Manhattan.” Don smiles his forced business smile in response, and a minute later, Pete offers his own rather sad apartment to Don, should the need arise to “spend the night in the city.” Don, as is so often the case when dealing with Pete, marvels at Pete’s tactlessness and foolishness. “I live here,” Don he reminds him.
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Author's Roundtable: Stefan Helgesson, “The Writing of Colonial Time”
Response by Dara Goldman

posted under , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[On April 8, 2013 the Unit of Criticism and Interpretive Theory in collaboration with INSPIRE and the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, and Society held an Author’s Roundtable hosting Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University) to discuss a chapter of his current book project on temporality and postcolonialism, with responses from Dara Goldman (Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, Latino/Latina Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Director of Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies), Ken Salo (Urban and Regional Planning), and Matthew Nelson (Comparative & World Literature). Below is the second of the two blogs on the event and features Goldman’s response.]

Written by Dara Goldman (Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, Latino/Latina Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Director of Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies)

Helgesson engages in a critical and highly productive analysis of the question of time—and narrative time in particular—in postcolonial studies and the humanities more broadly. As he asserts, the scholarly debate in postcolonial studies around these questions has tended to assert the difference of non-Western temporalities and assess this difference as either fundamentally positive or negative. In order to elucidate and begin to move beyond this binary, Helgesson turns to the analysis of literary texts. He cogently argues that literature has the capacity to encode, decode, and intervene in the articulation of temporal difference. Rather than simply recreate hegemonic modes, denounce their hegemony, or celebrate their alterity, these texts can offer a rich landscape of paradoxes, contradictions, displacements, dilatios, erasures and violences that emerge when a set of rhetorical temporal modes is mapped onto a lived historical experience of time and space.

I would like to offer a few comments or suggestions as to how this discussion might be developed or explored further. In particular, the specific examples Helgesson examines tend to emphasize or highlight the ability of literature to complicate questions of temporal difference. In their particular construction and deployment of their respective chronotopes, the narratives he analyzes interrogate questions of simultaneity and notions of progress. I would like to introduce two examples that I believe encode, instead, the very failure of the recuperative historical project and explore what they might add to the discussion of how literature and narrative might advance our thinking about temporal differences.


In his articulation of this temporal hermeneutics, Helgesson has given us a rich set of theoretical bibliography to work with—and I suspect that my colleagues may offer some additional tools—so I will refrain from expanding the corpus to extensively. I would like to mention, however, that work on temporality in gender and sexuality studies has made some highly compelling interventions about the underlying assumptions and interpellations that are often embedded in conceptualizations and representations of time. (See the work of Patricia Parker, Patricia Murphy, Jack Halberstam, and Lee Edelman.)

I also wanted to mention the role of positivism in Latin America. Nineteenth-century Latin American writers and intellectuals engaged with positivism, almost to the point of a fetishistic obsession. Both as a Latin American writer and through his military training, Euclides da Cunha would have had extensive contact with these discussions, and this contact undoubtedly influenced his thinking about time, temporal trajectories and their sociocultural implications.

Turning now to more recent work, there is an extensive (all too extensive, perhaps) critical and theoretical bibliography that deals with the writing of time and temporality in Latin America (Carlos Alonso, Néstor García Canclini, Roberto González Echevarria, Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Julio Ramos, Silviano Santiago—just to name the ones that came to my mind most frequently as I read) The inclusion on any/all of these would undoubtedly enhance and deepen the theoretical argument.

I will leave those as a mere suggestion, however, and devote the rest of my time to comments that might be of greater interest and productivity for our collective discussion of narrative time. I would like to touch upon two literary examples that I hope, along with the readings offered by Helgesson, will help to think about the role of narrative in engagements with postcolonial temporalities and of the temporal hermeneutics his work proposes.

The first of these examples is The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier. In this 1953 novel, Carpentier charts the trajectory of a disillusioned composer who is charged with a mission to track the lost origins of music, a journey that leads him to travel to South America, into the jungle, and eventually to take up residence in an indigenous community he finds in the Northern Amazon. Lest you should have any doubt as to the relevance of this work to our discussion, the Amazon.com entry for the English translation summarizes the novel as follows: “A composer, fleeing an empty existence in New York City, takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization-the upper reaches of a great South American river. The Lost Steps describes his search, his adventures, and the remarkable decision he makes in a village that seems to be truly outside history.”

This protagonist’s experiences involve a concatenation of adventures with precarious modes of transportation and unreliable infrastructure (the eruption of a local revolt and the loss of power at the hotel leads to an invasion of the building by all manner of insects and snakes) and a serial progression through various sexual partners who prove strangely elusive at the end of which he finds himself in the remote indigenous village that is—indeed—able to reveal the secret/lost origins of music. The newly inspired composer attempts to record his findings and produce a musical piece that showcases this newfound historical understanding, but he is frustrated by the lack of paper or writing implements and must attempt to record his notations on local leaves, animal skins, and other available materials. When the rains finally subside, he leaves the jungle to procure additional supplies. As he attempts to return to the village to complete his tasks, however, he finds he is unable to locate the path along the river that will take him to the village. He finally realizes (with the help of the local individual steering the boat) that the water level of the river has now risen significantly, and the markings on the trees he had been using to navigate are now completely submerged and invisible.

The Conradian “horror” of the epistemological impasse in this case stems from the moment of anagnorisis, the realization that any attempt to “discover” and “recover” the lost secrets of one’s past in this location is doomed to failure: in the end, this place requires an understanding and relationship with the cyclical temporalities of nature that he does not possess. More importantly, perhaps, the local residents have no investment or interest in the temporal reconstructions that casts them in a Fabianesque narrative of non-coevalness in which the remote village must play the role of a living diorama that conveniently performs a historical past that can be witnesses, accessed, and mined for its lost treasures in the present. Carpentier presents this story as a melancholic tale of insuperable loss and tragic hubris; in doing so, however, he also ultimately underscores how the particular landscape and subjects of the South American jungle compellingly resist being neatly inserted into the “northern visitor’s” history.

The other example I would like to present is not one from my own purported regional area of expertise, but one that can be compellingly read—against the grain—in terms of how narrative encodes issues, encounters, and disencounters of postcolonial temporality: the film Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011). (The film is based on a novel published in 2004 that I have not read, so my comments refer to the film adaptation only.) The film offers the rather charming tale of a group of British retirees who travel to Jaipur, India in order to ameliorate the effects of personal/financial failures at home and gain access to a fresh start and a higher standard of living than they could afford in England.

View of Jaipur, India.
Of course, the conditions they encounter do not meet their expectations (is not “what they were sold”). It turns out that the proprietor, Sonny Kapoor (played by Dev Patel) has launched his new business venture—the “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”—in an attempt to save his dead father’s beloved hotel from sale and probable destruction. Despite set-backs, disappointments and cultural conflicts, desires—amorous and financial—are ultimately fulfilled in the film. One retiree eventually abandons the enterprise (and her husband) to return to recently restored financial security back home. The rest settle in to life in Jaipur and become a resource that helps India negotiate its insertion into the global economy as a major competitor. One resident secures work as a “cultural consultant” at a local call center, helping the workers learn how to better engage in appropriate small talk and banter in order to gain the interest of their target consumers. Another resident agrees to take over as financial manager at the hotel in order to rescue Sonny from his apparently erstwhile disastrous mismanagement of the hotel’s books. Of course, the epitome of a good transcultural, capitalist love story, financial success is “coupled” with greater cross-cultural understanding and the resolution or rectification of past romantic/familial mis-steps: the mis-matched couple of retirees separates, freeing the husband to initiate a relationship with the more compatible fellow resident of the hotel, and Kapoor finally stands up to his mother, winning the opportunity to continue running the hotel and marry the woman he loves.

Perhaps most tellingly, Graham Dashwood is a gay man who had been plagued by the memory of how his first homosexual encounter led to the shaming and financial ruin of his lover and his family: when he lived in India years earlier as a young man, he had become involved with the son of the family who worked in domestic service for his family. When the relationship was discovered, the family was promptly dismissed and ejected from the household. Dashwood is able to locate his long-lost first love, and he finds that the man is happily married (to a woman who seems to know about and understand the affair), has had a good life, and remembers Graham fondly. Shortly after this reunion, which demonstrates that his desire to atone for past mistakes was apparently unnecessary, Dashwood peacefully slumps over and dies in a chair in the hotel’s main courtyard.

In this way, on several registers the film depicts (celebrates even) a naïve desire in which imperial/colonial subjects seek to recover and rewrite their own history through a return to the (former) site of conquest, colonization, and empire building. As with a “Generation of '98” writer in Spain, they seem to be earnestly and desperately seeking answers to the question of “where did it all go so wrong” and “how can we (re)set it right?”

I would like to suggest that both of these examples illustrate how narrative can encode the aporia Helgesson examines in highly suggestive and productively destabilizing ways; on the level of plot, the literary archive of temporal inscriptions may often point towards facile and/or reductionists ways of resolving, suturing, or “filling in” those aporias. Nonetheless, Helgesson’s argument compellingly point toward how this archive can be mined in the service of a postcolonial rethinking of transcultural time in/across/beyond the so-called Global South. The work of writers such as Euclides da Cunha, Olive Schreiner, and Thomas Mofolo offer complex negotiations of temporality that both reflect and challenge established understandings of progress, failure, nostalgia, and utopia. At the same time, works such as the ones I have presented here can be juxtaposed with Helgesson’s examples in order to illustrate how narratives can seek to resolve and reduce—as well as to exacerbate—the complexities of temporal differences.

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