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Welcome
Welcome to Kritik, a public forum on theory, culture, and politics hosted by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1981, the Unit for Criticism has been at the forefront of U.S. debates in critical theory and cultural studies.
With this blog, we hope to take these activities into a new public realm. While some of the posts and debate hosted here will refer to “local” events, this blog is intended to engage discussion beyond the University of Illinois community.
[Faith Wilson Stein, a graduate student in Comparative Literature, is the author of the next in our multi-authored series of posts on the fourth season of Mad Men, which anticipated the March 2013 release of MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s by Duke University Press.]
"GET RID OF IT"
Written by Faith Wilson Stein (Comparative Literature)
The tenth episode of Mad Men’s fourth season, “Hands and Knees,” has, as in previous years, depicted various characters’ relationships (the filial in particular) coming to a reckoning. In Season One’s “Long Weekend,” Roger’s heart attack brings him back to his wife and daughter, while it drives Don to seek comfort with Rachel, with whom he shares some of the seedier details of his background, telling her, “You know everything about me.” Meanwhile, Betty, unaware of her husband’s affair with the department store heiress, is chafing at the presence of a new girlfriend in her father’s life. Season Two’s “The Inheritance” brings Betty and Don to her father’s house, their marriage seemingly set to end, only for the pain and stress of Gene’s post-stroke condition to prompt an assignation that results in pregnancy and a temporary forestalling of divorce. In last year’s “The Color Blue,” the secretive plan to sell Sterling Cooper to another agency is revealed, while one of the show’s central points of narrative tension—the prospect of Betty’s discovering Don’s false identity—comes to a head.
This week’s episode revisited several of these markers—Roger’s heart problems; a serious threat to Sterling Cooper’s existence; an unintended and inconvenient pregnancy; and, of course, Don’s possible exposure as a fraud and deserter. In hurtling forward with various plotlines, the episode made up for the narrative pauses taken in “The Suitcase” (Season 4, Episode 7) and “The Summer Man” (Season 4, Episode 8), mood pieces that featured more overtly artistic gestures–such as the appearance of a spectral Anna and Don’s voiceover—than the show had previously indulged. At the same time, the near total absence of actual “ad talk” (as well as Peggy) would seem to stress interpersonal thematics over the more philosophical consideration of advertising’s harnessing of creativity in order to invent and stoke desire. Still, several instances of parallelism throughout the episode underscore that, as always, the viewer is being sold something: the show itself as a product, yes, but also, (as Don once told Peggy, and as last week’s post on wordplay also noticed), “You, feeling something. That’s what sells.”
The opening exchange between Roger and Joan—she practical as ever while he indulges in his own personal salesmanship (whether “the tenderloin of your distress” is a greeting she finds charming is anyone’s guess)—establishes the episode’s central theme: the power of fatherhood, from the literal to the symbolic, and the need to grapple with it. We see Don winning back Sally’s affection with tickets to the Beatles concert at Shea Stadium. (One hopes that despite her precocity, at 10 years old she has not yet developed a sense of irony, acute or otherwise). This explicit reference to the “British Invasion” is overdue for a show so richly packed with cultural history, and it is cheekily followed by an English incursion on a much smaller scale, as Lane, still holding the gifts with which he’d hoped to charm his own child, is surprised by his imperious father.
In this three-part beginning, the issue of Roger’s paternity (pun regrettably intended) is a problem to be eliminated; Don’s shoddiness as a father is at once ameliorated and confirmed with his bribery; and Lane is denied the chance to act like a doting father and is instead put in the position of humbled son. (Note as well how the revelation that Roger “inherited” the Lucky Strike account, and his rolodex of dead clients, further attests to his shortcomings as a procurer of accounts in his own right.)
The transition to the meeting with North American Aviation and the encounter it entails with the Department of Defense sets up the episode’s figurative filial tensions. Pete, abandoned by Don in California back in Season 2, has nurtured the account “from cocktail napkins to four million dollars”; and yet, when the threat is raised of Don’s leaving the agency (indeed, leaving the life of “Don Draper” entirely), Pete, like Joan, has to “get rid of it.” (The added irony, of course, is that Pete is himself an expectant father as a very pregnant Trudy can't but remind him.) While Don has previously acted as a withholding father figure to Pete, the looming threat of government sanction (not to mention Lee Garner Jr.’s sudden removal of SCDP’s Lucky Strike lifeline) is a form of paternalistic punishment far more frightening than mere interpersonal resentments.
For Don, the possibility of needing to relinquish the responsibilities of “Don Draper”—the claims of paternity in both literal and figurative senses—is perhaps his most basic fear and desire. Having abandoned “Dick Whitman” and all his ties and obligations, Don is at once the inheritor of the real Lieutenant Draper’s legacy as well as the ultimate self-made man: the “father” of his own identity.
But the professional life Don has built for himself once again threatens the persona it has bolstered and vice versa. The Department of Defense agents who question Betty are investigating possible Communist links, and yet, while Don is no socialist, their line of inquiry cuts to the very heart of her fractured relationship with her ex-husband, crystallizing his character and the central questions of the show. Is Don Draper a man of “integrity”? Is he “loyal”? Harking back to this season’s opening line (“Who is Don Draper?”), the G-men ask Betty if there is any reason to suspect that her former husband “isn’t who he says he is.” Is there any answer that Betty could have given to those questions that wouldn’t, on one level or another, be untrue?
In Season One, Roger’s cardiac distress precipitated Don’s seeking confession and comfort with a woman; this time, however, the transition requires the viewer to connect the dots as the scenes shift. For the second time this season, Don is ill in front of a woman, left vulnerable and exposed. But whereas Don’s revelations to Peggy were limited, his confession to Faye divulges more of his true history, linking physical purging to a disgorging of his sins. Nonetheless, the intimacy it would seem to create between him and Faye feels tenuous. By contrast, the other couples in the episode give the impression of greater stability, perhaps precisely because they do not share their secrets. Trudy, to whom Pete does not tell the story of Don’s identity, assures him, “Everything’s good here.” The line recalls Betty’s statement to Henry at the end of “The Summer Man”: “We have everything.” Although Betty doesn’t tell Henry the full truth regarding the Department of Defense’s questions about Don, she appears content with Henry in the promise, however false, that there are no secrets between them.
Lane’s father, in an act of horrifying violence, brings his son to the “hands and knees” evoked in the title of the episode, commanding his child—who has fallen in love with a woman of color—to “put [his] home in order.” Despite the brutality of the moment, the truth of his admonishment rings clear: “Either here or there. You will not live in between.” Here or there, New York or London, Don or Dick, abased honesty or contented secrets. While Roger’s health might attest to the disadvantages of keeping damning information to oneself, the eventual exposure of everything is apparently no less messy and leaves one prostrate on the floor--seemingly destined to return to a previous state of reserved lies.
The episode nears its conclusion with Faye standing in Don’s open office doorway, uttering innocuous professionalisms to cover over the intimacies they had been sharing moments prior (even while their office romance is another secret Pete has discovered). Faye’s faked exit parallels Joan’s behavior with Roger in the opening scene and suggests that the brutal underside of their relationships – the need to abort what one has conceived and to vomit up the fundamental lie at the center of one’s life – bubble up beneath the faked detachment necessary to maintain the professional status quo.
Finally, through the open office door, we see Megan and, then, we see Don seeing Megan. Looking up from the Beatles tickets he had anxiously checked on throughout the episode, he stares at her, wearing a wholly inscrutable look. Is he in awe of her youth and ingenuousness, unencumbered by the knowledge of who he truly is? Is that then a source of lust? Would she tell him that everything is good here? Or if he told, would she promise that (as Anna told him in the third episode of this season), she knows everything about him, and still loves him? Does a relationship founded on truth hold the same appeal to Don that it once did, or does he desire guilelessness and the patched together resolution of a clerical error that appears to have been fixed?
We close with the Beatles’ “Do You Want to Know a Secret” (a song they did not actually play at Shea Stadium), but it is an instrumental version. The episode is bookended with this legendary band, for whom young girls screamed as though instantly forgetting the mistakes of the men in their lives. Yet we do not hear the actual words entreating us to listen, asking if we want to know a secret.
The weight of knowing, the responsibility of taking ownership over those secrets, is perhaps too much to bear. Maybe we should get rid of it.
[D. Fairchild Ruggles, Professor of Landscape Architecture, is the author of the below Open Letter, written in response to a Board of Trustees meeting she attended Thursday. Professor Ruggles has asked the readership of Kritik to post comments and for those who would like to join her in signing the Open Letter to email her: dfr1@illinois.edu or email the Board of Trustees: UIBOT@ullinois.edu]
But the key point in such a vote should not be Ayers’ hot-headed dedication in his co-authored 1974 book, nor the political context of the Vietnam conflict and the American civil rights movement that prompted the dedication. Emeritus status is not given on the grounds of statements and events that took place 36 years ago, but rather Ayers’ 23 years of service as a professor. If years of great public service could be cancelled out by a terrible deed with irreversible consequences, Senator Ted Kennedy might not lie in Arlington Cemetery today.
The emeritus title is not a lifetime achievement award but a confirmation of a productive career as a professor and scholar. More to the point, it is not awarded on a whim or as a gift. Kennedy’s condemnation, while entirely understandable in the heart, was a personal response to a student activist’s statements about Kennedy’s father. The personal and professional conflict of interest between grieving son and university trustee is clear, and either Kennedy should have recused himself from the vote and refrained from comments that could have influenced the members of the Board which he chairs, or someone else at that Board meeting should have put forward such a motion.
Scandals at the University of Illinois? Ethics violations? It’s a way of life.
D. Fairchild Ruggles Professor University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign September 25, 2010
[The next in our multi-authored series of posts on the fourth season of Mad Men, posted prior to the publication of MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s by Duke University Press, is by Konstantine Klioutchkine, Associate Professor of German and Russian at Pomona College, and Sanja Lacan, PhD Candidate in Slavic Studies at UCLA]
"ON FEELING, FILLING, AND FLYING"
Written by Konstantine Klioutchkine (German and Russian, Pomona College) and Sanja Lacan (Slavic Studies, UCLA)
“Fillmore Auto Parts: For the Mechanic in Every Man!” is the advertising slogan Dr. Faye Miller conjures up for three Fillmore executives in a meeting at the center of this season’s ninth episode, devoted, as its title suggests, to “Beautiful Girls.” Mad Men frequently structures its episodes around the language of advertising pitches, one of the most memorable of which is the well-known Kodak Carousel presentation at the end of Season 1 which Michael Berube discussed two weeks ago. Indeed, wordplay, including the kind found in many advertising campaigns, organizes the fabric of meaning in the show.
The wordplay in “Fillmore” evokes Don’s advice to Peggy from the Season 2 premier ("For Those Who Think Young") that she feel more in order to produce effective advertising—and also, perhaps, to produce an effective self. “You are the product,” he tells her, “you feeling something—that’s what sells.” Up to the current episode, the show’s fourth season has been purveying more feelings than fillings, a trajectory palpable in the portrayal of Don’s gradual descent into alcoholic despair until his rebirth in last week's episode ("The Summer Man"), as a person who, as Don says self-consciously, “sounds like a little girl, writing down what happened today” in a diary. “The Beautiful Girls” departs from this trend with an encouragement to turn from feeling to filling, from emotion to sex, from emasculation to the rediscovery of the mechanic in every man.
Fittingly, the episode’s opening scene of Don on the phone quickly cuts to a sex scene between Don and Faye, punctuated by a play on the transparent sexual implication of Don’s actual first name, Dick. As the characters are having sex they dislodge a lamp, prompting a suggestive question as to what might have broken: the lamp or Don’s phallus. The upshot of this wordplay is the celebration of Don’s post-swimming virility. But the return of Don’s manhood means more than mere sexual prowess: it is also related to the return of his ability to destroy human life. As far back as the award-winning pilot, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Don’s bohemian lover Midge describes him as a person capable of “leading sheep to slaughter.” In the current episode, Don’s potential for violence emerges in Ken Cosgrove’s jest that “Don Draper” be identified as the cause of death of his secretary, Miss Blankenship, in the coroner’s report.
Following the exchange about the (un)broken object, the dialogue between Don and Faye seems to take its cue from Tristram Shandy as they wonder about the time. Unlike in Lawrence Sterne’s famous 1759 work, in which Tristram’s conception is interrupted when his mother asks his father if he has remembered to wind the clock, no reproductive clock is being wound up here (at least none that we know of). Instead, the clock reminds the characters of the need to return to work. Ultimately, attitudes toward reproduction vis-à-vis the production of labor become an especially poignant matter in the episode which builds this motif in part out of sexual wordplay.
Another important scene concerned with filling involves Roger Sterling and Joan Harris walking down a lonely street after dinner. They fall victim to a hold-up and turn over an array of vaginal symbols--rings and a purse prominent among them--to the gun-brandishing assailant. After the latter leaves without taking a shot, Joan encourages Roger to make use of his own firing power, and they have sex in the street.
Extending this theme of shooting at women, the post-mugging coitus links with an earlier conversation between Peggy and her potential love interest, the politically-minded bohemian Abe. In response to Peggy’s comparison of her own struggles to those of African Americans, Abe points out that “they’re not shooting women to keep them from voting.” Peggy perceives Abe's insistence that she adopt his radical political views as a figurative shooting down of women. Sensitive to Abe’s penchant for aggressive proselytizing, Peggy’s lesbian friend Joyce extends the episode’s sexual banter by saying that Abe “pulled a boner.”
This comment leads to an exchange between Joyce and Peggy which amplifies the episode's sexually-charged wordplay. Joyce discusses male and female roles by constructing the metaphors of a masculine “vegetable soup” as a filler that requires a feminine “pot” to “heat ‘em up and hold ‘em.” Peggy, however, is not ready to agree. Before leaving, Joyce highlights Peggy’s symbolic masculinity by calling her “Peg.” This shortened version of the name Margaret evokes the idiom of “a square peg in a round hole,” reminding us that Peggy’s achievements and problems alike are inseparable from her resistance to stereotypical female roles.
How does this focus on sexual wordplay relate to the titular theme of the episode, “The Beautiful Girls”? The answer might lie in another set of wordplay that organizes the theme of women around images of birds. While working on a crossword puzzle, Bert Cooper asks his former secretary Miss Blankenship for help finding a three-letter word for a flightless bird. By naming the extinct emu, she both predicts her own demise and introduces avian wordplay into the episode, with the near homonym of emu and emo. Miss Blankenship might insist that she knows more about crossword puzzles than her ex-flame and ex-boss Bert Cooper, but she is no flightless bird. In Episode 7 (“The Suitcase”) Roger describes her as “a queen of perversions,” and in the current episode Bert compares her to an astronaut who ascended from her birth in a late-nineteenth-century barn, to her death on the 37th floor of a modern skyscraper.
The episode’s central figure of flight is Don’s daughter Sally, who flees her mother in order to play a Lolita-cum-wife to her father. But Sally’s flight also finds its limit when she falls to the floor before being forcibly returned to the care of her mother. This particular flight, couched as it is in various forms of intensely emotional behavior, may seem rather contrived, at least insofar as Sally models herself on the amateur detective Nancy Drew, whose book she reads while waiting in Don’s office. The ambivalence and uncertain agency expressed by Sally’s behavior may prove central to understanding the show’s depiction of the female condition. Limited by various social, economic, and cultural forces, many of them, nonetheless, prove highly capable of gaining some power over their circumstances.
Two contrasting instances of wordplay clarify the logic of the bird theme, which became prominent in the first season, in Don’s repeated address to his wife Betty as “Birdie” and then in the 9th episode (“Shoot”) in which she took a BB gun at her neighbor’s doves to unleash her pent-up aggression at this symbol of her own lost freedom. Miss Blankenship complains that Faye always “breezes by,” singling her out as especially free: will she remain so now that she has succumbed to Don’s charms?
By contrast, the three-letter word for a flightless bird materializes at the end of the episode in the image of two figurative hens in Don’s office: his ex-wife Betty and his daughter Sally (their flower-patterned dresses distinguishing them from the more formally-dressed professional women). Their status as flightless is emphasized by the visual opposition in the scene in which Betty and Sally stand on one side of the reception area while the childless working women (supposedly freer? or flightier?) observe them from the other.
By way of bringing together these two sets of wordplay, we suggest that the show puts a special emphasis on investigating the human condition of its characters through its symbolization of their attitudes to sexual practices. In this episode, the death of “the queen of perversions,” provides a signal to renew sexual endeavor, both corporeal and symbolic: Joan and Roger’s public sex, Faye and Don's sex, the forms of masturbation and oral sex which previous Season 4 episodes have depicted, and—per the episode’s preview—Peggy’s “receiving a romantic gift that could compromise her career.”
Although the theme of sexuality in “The Beautiful Girls” is organized around the male-centered slogan for Fillmore Auto Parts, the question about what forms sexuality should take is posed primarily to women, who are portrayed as erotically more creative and adventurous than men. Joyce might be right in her insistence that women are about to give up being pots in order to become vegetable soup in their own right.
The final scene of the episode, however, suggests that women’s options remain ambivalent and confusing. Joyce, Faye, and Joan do not get to determine which of the several elevator doors will open first and each fails to guess the one that will. They are momentarily confused before filling what becomes available. In the closing scene, Peggy arrives to the lobby in time to join Faye and Joan in the already open elevator car. She comes closest to making her own choice, but her choice is to join the two confused older women.
In this way she remains a square peg in a round hole, as the smile on her face contrasts with the visible distress of her colleagues. Ultimately, it appears that filling--as much fun, verbal and otherwise, as it might be--may be as fully disorienting as feeling. What will that portend for the option of flying?
[On Monday, September 13, the Unit for Criticism held the first of its Fall 2010 Author’s Roundtables, hosting Kathleen Woodward who discussed her book, Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Emotions (Duke 2009). Below guest writer Michael Simeone provides an overview of the event. (A second post below includes the work of all three respondents] Written by Michael Simeone (English)
One of the most gratifying aspects of Woodward’s recent work is its inclusive mode of argumentation. During the September 13, 2010 presentation and following discussion, there was a current that went through the room as audience members and respondents alike began connecting their own experiences and observations with Woodward’s overall framework of emotions, subjectivity, and statistics. Woodward mentioned repeatedly that the tone of her book was not so much an assertive argument meant to displace an existing perspective, but rather one that would be associational, inviting, and agglomerative. It seems to have worked.
But one connection between Woodward’s work and the present tense tended to repeat: the conventions of scholarly publishing. Academic writing has become increasingly emotionless and de-personalized, she argued, consonant with the impoverishment of human emotional interiority in the face of neo-liberal capitalism. For Woodward, there are no emotions in articles, no sense of personal stakes in books, making up a pervasive aesthetic of “professional cool.”
Once published by university presses, books and articles go back into university libraries, where they remain guarded from the non-academic public. Accessing an article on JSTOR or checking a book out from the main stacks requires a University ID number. That number costs a considerable sum. Even walking into a library resembles walking into airport security; checking items in lockers, scanning identification cards, and passing through a gate of scanners. The end result is a depersonalized discourse accessible to a dismal fraction of the population, which itself may not even enjoy or even prefer the continued banishment of the personal from academic writing.
All of this makes for a discouraging kind of reversed alchemy, where passion and enthusiasm turn into boredom. Scholars who so frequently enjoy what they read, or are so fascinated they commit years of their lives to its study, produce writing that is demanding to produce, gray, and joyless. Woodward’s work suggests that the drain of affect from academic writing is related to the statistical panic of the future of the humanities, brought about by dismal figures that reference anything from short-term job prospects to long-term departmental budgets. Emptying out emotion from academic writing as a response to statistical panic helps produce a binary relationship between reason and affect, a way to combat the empirical persuasion of statistics with the cool power of academic sterility.
But where to go from here, if here is in fact no longer a place where there is less and less human livelihood?
Woodward mentioned alternative forms of publication such as Vectors and NINES, as possible ways to think outside of current configurations of publication. And while there was little time for her to elaborate, I want to suggest that these forms of publication, forms where authors submit, design, curate, annotate, and publish content online by themselves or through collaboration, not only help to make scholarship more accessible, they also help to reconnect authors with the enthusiasm that motivates their scholarly interest in the first place. Statistical panic in academic writing is a version of the same kind of Cartesian thought about information that motivates (and has motivated) much of U.S. thought about information: information is immaterial, pure, and incorruptible; bodies are immediate, messy, and full of inconvenient or unpleasant emotions.
Sterile academic writing, in light of Woodward’s juxtaposition of statistical panic and scholarship, is a version of digital transcendence, the scholar’s version of Neo disappearing gaining immortality as pure data in the networks of the Matrix.
Perhaps, then, it is possible to work backwards. Maybe scholars who produce digital scholarship emerge from anonymity as the personal force that organizes and presents an online exhibit, multimedia article, or annotated collection. Instead of sliding away from view as the cold voice of reason, they are visible as the human force of inclusion, design, and significance. Thus, before they revolutionize the kind of work we do, new forms of publication and scholarship may first revolutionize the way we feel about that work.
The 'New Sites' of Feeling: Response 1 Written by Ericka Beckman (Spanish/Comparative Literature)
In the second part of her book Statistical Panic, Kathleen Woodward draws from Raymond Williams’ notion of “structures of feeling” to explore some of the new feelings /intensities that cut across contemporary U.S. culture. An alternate definition she offers is that of “familiar feelings in new sites” (135), including, to wit, feeling for non-human cyborgs, bureaucratic rage, and statistical panic. In the case of bureaucratic rage (the evocative term is Woodward’s), the individual directs an emotional response towards the impersonal institution: the credit bureau, the insurance company. Statistical panic is a coinage used to refer to the uncertainty of the individual with the aggregate, an individual who when looking at the statistic (one in x number of women will develop breast cancer before the age of 45) is forced to manage her own risk.
And indeed the concept of risk becomes crucial to the generation and expression of bureaucratic rage and statistical panic. Drawing from work by Ian Hacking, and Zygmut Bauman, among others, Woodward identifies the concept of risk society as a social body in which private individuals are forced to constantly assess and manage risks to their physical health, financial future, emotional well-being, etc. For Woodward, statistics—the realm of probability—is an aspect of risk society that deserves attention as a site of proliferating affects, which, when studied can lead to better understandings of social experience and of institutions in our cultural moment. In studying the emergence of new feelings, Woodward places special emphasis on narratives of illness. There are compelling reasons why Woodward focuses on illness narratives, memoirs in particular: first, because of the potency of the emotions generated by mortality: loss and grief; and, in a related vein, because late capitalism (or neoliberalism) has fomented unsustainable modes of caring for others. We live in a society health care not a right, but a commodity that the market should make available to those who can afford it. Second, Woodward argues that illness memoirs “serve the important cultural function of transcending the divisive identity politics of the past twenty-five years that have fragmented the body politic. For if there is one thing that is certain it is that the experience of illness crosses differences” (175). We are all held in the thrall of bureaucratic rage at insurance companies, at the FDA for not approving life-saving drugs, etc.
Yet I would stress, that precisely because we all inhabit a privatized and segmented risk society, some are more likely to die than others (those with no health insurance, for example, or those who suffer from conditions for which bracelets are not worn, or charity runs not organized). The structure of feeling may cross differences of age, class, race, gender but the experience within that structure of feeling is more likely to correspond with the visible segmentations inscribed within the social body of capitalism.
Statistical bewilderment: affects of financial crisis Thinking with Woodward, the question I want to entertain for a moment is what happens if we turn our attention away from the medical establishment and disease, to turn to the financial sector, which, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, are likely to be generating new intensities and feelings. Among these we might identify: statistical bewilderment. If statistical panic refers to the uncertainty of individual faced with the solid certainty of the statistic (someone will die of Huntington’s, I just hope it’s not me), statistical bewilderment would mark the uncertainty of the individual before failure to predict what just months before the crisis had been unimaginable: the near collapse of the banking sector; the failure of risk managers to foresee the consequences of overextension; and, of course the failure to fathom the devastation wrought in the immediate aftermath of financial crisis: massive job loss, defaults on mortgages, evictions. These experiences will not be spread evenly among population, but will nonetheless provide ground for emergent affective dispositions and emotions.
An affect experienced in the midst of statistical bewilderment might be the “cool” disposition of “cynicism,” recently discussed by Slavoj Zizek as as a falsely post-ideological form of skepticism, by which I affirm my disagreement with what is going on, but accept it nonetheless under the assumption that it cannot be changed. The logic goes like this: “Wall Street bankers do not deserve such huge bonuses, but we must pay them so that they don’t wreck what is left of the financial edifice. It’s unfair, but that is just how it goes.” This feeling as non-feeling, I think, has a calming effect, in that it wills a return to “normalcy” by disavowing the uncertainty and instability that has just been revealed. (ideolgies have affects).
A second feeling generated by financial crisis is of course anger—directed at the banks, at CEOs, at politicians. On the surface, this seems like a more productive response to bewilderment. For only anger might lead us understand the nature of the calamity (in the Marxist terms if prefer—how tiny class of capitalists is able to ruin the whole credit system while enriching themselves). But the unsettling fact is that the most vociferously angry response to financial disaster and devastation has come from the populist right, one that sees a murkily conceived “state socialism”—and not the system of private accumulation—as causing the lamentable financial state we are in today.
The emotions of bad others; or, the emotions of others we don’t like This brings me to a second point of engagement with Statistical Panic. If I understand Woodward’s project correctly, it is through engagement with the emotions that we can reach understandings of the self, but also of institutions: the risk society, the bureaucracy, etc. For the most part, Woodward reads novels and memoirs in which emotional responses are credited with having an “epistemological edge”: Virigina Woolf’s anger in A Room of One’s Own allows her—and us—to understand how patriarchy works; likewise, Alice Wexler’s memoir about being at risk for developing Huntington’s disease productively redefines the notion of risk not in terms of fifty-fifty odds of dying or surviving, but rather to inhabit a “third space,” “one that is neither certainty nor complete uncertainty.” (208). Woodward invites us to identify with and “feel” with most of the writers she chooses, and to gain insight from their observations.
A moment ago I asked how shifting focus from medical narratives to financial narratives might alter the structures of feeling we see emerging; I now want to ask after cases in which when bona-fide emotional responses seem not to provide epistemological edge with respect to social experience, but instead foment mystification and distortion. It may be true that a subject like Glenn Beck, in conjunction with Fox News, produces sensation rather than emotion. But we cannot doubt that this sensation is experienced by receptive audiences as real emotion: negative emotions like anger, sadness, depression; or positive ones like solidarity and empowerment. These emotions are real/genuine, and yet they spring from faulty premises. The premises are faulty in that, from my perspective, the anger that hails from a lost sense of racial entitlement is morally and politically unacceptable, but also because they rely upon a proud rejection of sustained analysis (conflation of Keynesian economics with Stalinism, etc). In the face of such distortion and mystification, how are we to avoid the importance of these emotions to the people who are guided by them? Can we assume that no insight comes from these emotions, even if we find their starting premises and assumptions faulty, or even reprehensible?
“Statistical Joy?” Response 2 Written by Jane Desmond (Anthropology/GWS/ International Forum for US Studies)
In this passionately felt and elegantly written book, there are many key strands, or, as Woodward calls them “elastic rubrics” of cultural hypotheses (p.135). She offers this as a text to think with rather than a proclamation of rigid arguments achieved. And this evening, given our shared readings, I want to think with her about just two of them: aging and statistics.
Like all of us here, I am “aging”—the term we give to a bodily persistence of being over time. I am, understandably, and predictably, not as young as I once was. Neither, I suspect, are you. This passage of time and our own persistence in it is, if we are lucky, inevitable. But I am very struck by the historicity of these experiences, as Woodward notes when she carefully delineates the realm of her study as post-1950s, and mostly but not exclusively anchored in U.S. and Western European texts and circumstances. She reminds us that emotions and our experiences of them are historically evoked and culturally made meaningful. And that they explicitly or implicitly shape the life experience—the ways of knowing, being, doing, and feeling, and making publics—of everyone in particular communities of shared belief.
Woodward connects both aging and statistics in our own time and place with notions of a vulnerable body, and proposes the concept of a postmodern “society of the statistic” to go along with Baudrillard’s “society of the spectacle.” Our ceaseless bombardment by probabilities and ratios in realms as disparate as sports and medicine, Woodward argues, can give rise to a pervasive statistical panic—a fear of the future based on an analysis of probability attached to a vulnerable body.
Just a few weeks ago, I had a moment of statistical panic myself—echoing that that Woodward recounts in her introduction—when perusing our local newspaper here, the Champaign, Illinois, News-Gazette. I can look back now and see that its power lay in its melding of aging and risk. Skimming a page, my eye caught on the sharp shard of a title in the business section “Seniors face matrix of misery,” those double “m’s” driving home the point. According to the writer, Scott Burns, “solvent seniors,” (with those hissing double “s”es) that is, those in the broad middle class who had been prudently saving for decades, now faced, due to the collapse of the stock markets, a brutal truth: they may outlive their money. (This truth does not even begin to address the plight of the poor, just the projections of the middle class.) As Woodward noted about these scare articles, it occurred to her at one point that the smart move would be to die now and beat the odds of living too long.
Seniors were not me, of course, they were my mother’s generation, but I had a hunch that, if I played my cards right, and stayed on the good side of the statistics of disease, death by car crash, and avoided accidents in the home while changing light bulbs, I might someday in the not so very inconceivably distant future, pass over that line from the unmarked “adult” category to that of “senior,” finally accruing discounts on the early bird dinner specials, and a membership in the AARP—even here I find myself slipping into the distancing technique of irony—holding at bay the persistence of time—for, I realized, not only do I not want to outlive my money, I do not want to outlive my life.
The notion of “outliving our lives” is telling, and hopefully a productive and provocative one. “Outliving” immediately invokes a sense of loss: loss of dignity, loss of youth, loss of autonomy, loss of loved ones, loss of self recognition, loss of recognition by others, loss of options. We could imagine a different calculus—one based on accrual over time—of friends, of experiences, of skills, of money—but statistical panic feeds on fear of loss. Woodward carefully excavates these fears and their aftermath—grief.
But there is another question we can ask, flipping things around: What other cultural work does this saturation by statistics possibly do? Is there is such a phenomenon as “statistical inoculation,” or “statistical hubris?” If one out of seven women in this country will get cancer, 6 out of 7 won’t. Perhaps there are realms in life where we calculate our odds and come out smiling...perhaps the statistics are weighted toward cohorts not our own: for example, if your odds of X,Y or Z are higher if you smoke, lower if you don’t, better if you are not obese, more probable if you are of, say, African American background, but less likely if you are Latina? and so on, and on.
Do we make continual small calculations, parcing ever more finely our inclusion or exclusion in multiple categories of risk?
Like a pack of sheep tightly meshed together in the face of an attack by wolves, we hope that we will be on the inside of the pack, protected from harm by the insulating presence of so many others, those at higher risk, exposed to the sharp teeth of marauding wolves or in this case, of disease. Do people experience a sense of protection, of ease, of lack of fear based on the idea of “statistical inoculation?”
Part of our statistical panic is the sense that so many of the losses we fear cannot be protected against by whatever social power we may have, or by justice, or by our beliefs, or even by our actions. In most cases, there is little we can do to “make sure” we do not lose ourselves and lose our minds, despite all the Dr. Oz or Oprah advice about doing crossword puzzles and eating our vegetables to prevent Alzheimer’s.
While there are sometimes clear differences in our odds based on social privilege, or poverty, or other unjust differentials, there is also the fact that loss in general is a democratic infection, reaching each of us in turn, but reaching us somewhat differently. So we might ask further who has what kinds of statistical panic? And what roles does it play in their/our lives and the lives of their/our particular communities? How is statistical panic endured or experienced differentially?
Finally there is the opposite of statistical panic—statistical joy!—the joy associated with “beating the odds.” This is what winning the lottery is all about. Or, in our academic profession, this might refer to the accomplishment of actually getting a job in a market saturated by Ph.D.s. We could call this the emotional high of “hitting the jackpot!”—where the sweetness of success, or of a positive outcome, is so heightened by our awareness of its unlikely probability that we experience a frisson of joy tied to the palimpsest of dread.
So, while we may experience statistical panic, we may also actively engage the inoculatory or jackpot effects of statistical living—of calculating our effects, and affects, against a cascading wall of prediction and fears for the future—of statistical panic, statistical relief, and statistical joy.
In all of these we remain embedded in the notion of a world supposedly graspable by a calculus of probability, hoping against hope that we have a chance of escaping death, of winning the jackpot, of being the sheep safe at the inner circle of the pack, of being the one thrust into the winner’s spotlight, of—against all odds—being safe, even flourishing, in an unpredictable future. Statistics raise the flag of danger and the relief of escape, the hubris of “not me” in a world of “why not you?” Kathleen Woodward spurs us to think about these ways of projecting fear, determining actions, narrating lives, encountering loss, and imagining the future, and of considering what may be the grounds for hope and change.
Perspectives on Statistical Panic: Response 3 Written by Elizabeth Massa Hoiem (English)
Statistical Panic examines the dynamic landscape of emotional experience in 20th-century American culture, using narratives to demonstrate how personal emotions are culturally inflected and social emotions are subjectively embodied. Focusing on autobiography and emotional pairs—such as the oscillating boredom and rage that constitute statistical panic—Kathleen Woodward confesses her debt to Freud, while historicizing the relationship between narrative and emotions. Whereas the goal of psychoanalysis in the early 20th century was to discover emotions hidden within us and use narration to release them, feminist activists in the later 20th century formed communities around personal narratives of collectively experienced anger. In postmodern cultures, plagued by emotional poverty and overstimulation, the task is to recover emotions. Narrating emotional experiences helps mediate intensities and revive shared physiological emotions like grief—it is a modern talking-cure that revitalizes our emotional life.
I find myself intrigued by Prof. Woodward’s methodology, which creates nested layers of self-reflection. Statistical Panic analyzes memoirs as supporting evidence, examines how we analyze self-reflecting narratives or use them as cures, and it invites readers to participate by recalling their emotional experiences as test-cases. Reading Statistical Panic demands that we examine the speculative “cultural hypotheses” that it puts forward about grief, anger, beaurocratic rage, and statistical panic through our personal experiences of these emotions. By integrating analysis and story-telling, and by inviting readers to do likewise, Statistical Panic disrupts what Woodward calls “professional cool,” an overreliance on measured argument pervasive in academic writing, which is itself a symptom of postmodern flattening of affect.
In her introduction, she reminds her readers, like the graduates in her seminars: “We all have experience of the emotions and shouldn’t hesitate to draw on it—reflecting on it, turning it over in our minds, watching when a certain emotion subsides and is replaced by another, and placing it in perspective in the arc of our own personal lives and in the context of social constraints, commands, and controls as well as larger historical change.” With what space remains, therefore, I would like to offer my reflections on how I experience the “equal opportunity emotion” of statistical panic, keeping in mind Woodward’s insistence that psychological emotions can originate in social interactions or create the basis for shared communities.
As I reflected on when I’ve felt statistical panic in the last few months, one dominating instance involved statistics that do not claim to represent me. The examples of medical statistical panic that Woodward selects describe people who feel personally represented by the statistics that haunted them. And we identify with these accounts because we, too, have bodies vulnerable to illness. I find, however, that I have strong emotional reactions to statistics, even when I am removed from the represented group. In particular, I recently had a strong emotional reaction to hearing that close to 1/3 of women veterans say they were sexually assaulted during their service, that 80-90% of sexual assaults go unreported in the military, and of those reported, only 1.6% end in both conviction and dishonorable discharge for the offender. I remain deeply disturbed by these numbers, even though I am not and will not be in the military, nor do I have female friends in the service. How do we respond to statistics like these, which represent other groups of people that have quite different experiences from ourselves? Do such statistics remain intensities, or can we experience them emotionally? With these questions, I draw upon Woodward’s analysis of liberal sympathy, which she approaches with skepticism, but ultimately finds more compelling than compassionate conservatism because it recognizes of the embodied experiences of actual suffering persons. I ask these questions because activism partially relies on other people caring about statistics that may not directly represent their own risk. I am concerned that in managing risk, we sometimes care very little about the risk of others, and that a lack of shared risk helps perpetuate injustices that disproportionately affect only one segment of the human population. The US government’s use of robotic warfare is only one instance in which minimizing risk to one group, American soldiers, makes war more palatable by ignoring the risk to another group, civilians living in war zones.
Another kind of statistics—those related to higher education—deeply affect most of the people I know. I’ll hint at just two of many possible topics where I suspect we may feel statistical panic, collectively. First, the statistical panic of public funding: In 1980, 44.5% of the budget for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was funded by state taxes, compared with 16.4% of funding that now comes from the state. We are all aware of the barrage of statistics associated with state funding, concerning salaries, undergraduate tuition hikes, and the racial and economic diversity of our student population. And second, graduate students in our profession live in a constant state of statistical panic when applying for jobs. Inside Higher Education reported last December that we should expect a 35% drop in positions this year, which means a 51% drop in total over the last 2 years, arriving at a historic low. Only half of these jobs will be for tenure-track positions. Our response, as students, to these statistics is personal to the point of atomizing: I must work harder at my job application materials; I must consider alternative employment outside of the academy; I must not be the one who succumbs to risk. A personal risk management response to statistics that affect a group can reinforce the problem at hand by making it a matter of personal responsibility. It is my fault if I do not get a tenure-track job, even though the lack of tenure-track jobs is systemic. Can statistical panic be used, instead, to form communities that share risk?
[The next in our multi-authored series of posts on the fourth season of Mad Men, posted prior to the publication of MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s by Duke University Press, is by Adam Kotsko, visiting professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College and author of a forthcoming book, Awkwardness. Kotsko is also a blogger at An und fur sich]
"THE HAIL MARY PASS"
Written by Adam Kotsko (Kalamazoo College)
I was jealous that I wasn’t the one to write on the last episode, which was arguably one of the best of the series. Even more, though, I was worried about writing on the episode immediately after one of Don’s epiphanies, because the writers have a habit of making Don backslide as quickly as possible. Thankfully, they avoided that signature gesture this time, with a result that was low-key but satisfying.
Coming off an episode that focused on the relationship between Don and Peggy, the writers maintain that focus, organizing the narrative around parallel plots involving each of them. The two only come back together when Peggy decides to take care of the raucous boys—a group so obnoxious that it strained credulity to think that anyone would act like that at work—and Don advises her that she’ll be better off if she resolves the problem herself.
Alan Sepinwall claims that Joan’s response to Peggy shows that Don’s advice was wrong, but I would argue instead that it shows the intrinsically impossible position Peggy is in, the dynamic where asserting greater authority in the male context only alienates her further from women. She could perhaps choose a more “feminine” mode of authority, but when her primary examples are that are Bobbie Barrett and the tragically diminished Joan, one can hardly blame her for taking Don’s advice.
In the rest of this post, however, I would like to focus on Don’s storyline, which is the episode’s real emotional center of gravity. Throughout this season, which to me has often felt scattered and disappointing, I have been thinking back on season two. Watching it one episode at a time, I was just as dissatisfied, but when I rewatched it in a couple days in preparation for Season 3, everything seemed to fall together. I wrote an article in the wake of that experience, arguing that the writers cycle through a variety of ways for Don to approach his identity. Having saved his identity as Don Draper from the threats posed by his brother and Pete, Don does everything he can to ensure that no similar crisis can happen again. Yet as Don tries and fails to control his personal brand, his life slowly falls apart, leading him to return to the zero-point of his current identity: the home of Anna Draper, who knows him as Dick Whitman and graciously gives him permission to use the identity he stole. In a symbolic baptism scene, he accepts the gift of Don Draper’s identity and returns home to find a variety of other gifts: a half million dollars, a legal loophole that allows him to maintain his creative integrity and humiliate his rival Duck, and an unexpected pregnancy that brings Betty back to his arms.
If Season 2 portrays the breakdown of Don’s strategy of trying to unilaterally control his identity, Season 3 undercuts the newfound strategy of receiving everything as a gift. His serendipitous relationship with Conrad Hilton blows up in his face, as does his devastating self-revelation to Betty. The season concludes with one of those inspired Hail Mary passes that define Don’s sociopathic genius—just as he seized control of his destiny by stealing Don Draper’s dog tags and accepting symbolic death, here he steals the Sterling Cooper identity from the British firm that is about to sell them, and condemn him to creative stagnation.
That season finale was one of the most invigorating episodes of the series, and in the wake of that, the first half of this season has felt like a gratuitous evacuation of everything appealing about Don. Instead of a suave seducer, Don became a pathetic drunk living in a dark apartment, hiring a prostitute to punish him for his transgressions. In fact, he became embarrassing to watch, with his inept attempts to pick up women, his violation of seemingly his only moral principle (don’t sleep with the secretary!), and his needy attempt to come up with a slogan for Life Cereal off the top of his head. When it’s revealed that Anna, his sole emotional anchor, has cancer, it seems clear that he is somehow going to find a way to go even further downhill—yet exactly the opposite happens. Why?
I think that the key is found in the swimming pool. Many have pointed out the apparent parallel to John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer”; I believe that the real reference for the swimming pool is actually the aforementioned baptism scene from Season 2 ("The Mountain King"). The contrast is between letting the waves wash over him and fighting his own way through the water. The waves, we could say, are Anna’s love—as she says in Episode 3 ("Good News"), “I know everything about you, and I still love you.” Taking the two halves of that sentence, we could say that, based on last week's episode, "The Suitcase," Peggy represents the person who doesn’t know everything about him and still loves him—and the person who knows everything about him and doesn’t love him is Don himself. Anna doesn’t just love Don, she loves Don for Don (or, rather, Dick for Dick), taking the place of Don’s own self-love. In exchange, Don takes care of her, just as he doesn’t take care of himself.
The reason Don’s bold gesture at the end of Season 3 doesn’t finally work, might be best summed up by paraphrasing a famous quote from former Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf: “Don doesn’t control his destiny, he doesn’t even control himself.” Don can’t control his public image unless he can gain some kind of control over his internal life. Viewers might see Don’s moments of weakness as a humanizing gesture, but it’s important to attend to the content of those self-revelations. His moments of letting the mask down consistently reveal little other than self-pity, defensiveness, and panic—and his loss of control over his life and subsequent loss of control of his drinking have allowed all that to bubble up to the surface. The loss of his last life-preserver, Anna, could easily have resulted in him drowning, but instead he decided to learn to swim. In what might a bit of a stretch, we could say that just as he takes over the real Don Draper’s life when the latter dies, so he takes over Anna’s role of loving him when she dies.
This reversal is less striking than his two dramatic acts of identity theft and the end of Seasons 2 and 3 respectively, but it is arguably more extreme: for a man who has built an entire life out of a string of lucky breaks, and two or three moments of genuine inspiration, a turn toward introspection and self-control may be the greatest Hail Mary pass of them all.
[Kritik is pleased to publish the second in a series of posts by Samantha Frost, associate professor in Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies. As the recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, Sam is enrolled in undergraduate courses in biology and neuroscience with the aim of enhancing her research on materialist accounts of perception, judgment, and subjectivity. Last spring and over the summer, she took the pre-requisite courses in organic chemistry, basic physiology, and molecular biology. This semester, she is taking a further 12 credits of courses in biochemistry, cell biology, and neuroscience.]
"SECOND WEEK OFCLASSES"
Written by Samantha Frost (Political Science, GWS)
This week, I am at a conference, the annual American Political Science Association meeting. I am missing my classes (anxiously), keeping up with my readings, trying to remember the various online quizzes and homework assignments that I must do. And of course, I am hanging out with my political theory colleagues from everywhere. And a number of these colleagues, in their astonishment if not disbelief that I am studying cellular biology, jokingly inquire if I aspire to be able to explain to them what life is. The. Big. Question. I know that they are joking, but even so, it makes me want to share my reflections upon mitochondria.
In the cells of animal and plant life, there are different subunits called organelles that perform functions related to the cell’s persistence and self-reproduction. There is a nucleus, which houses and produces all the genetic information of the cell—and of the organism of which it is a part. There are little factories that produce proteins and other chemicals that are useful and necessary. There are millions of pieces of protein scaffolding that give shape and flexibility to the cell and that also serve as tracks for the transport of the cell’s nutrients, products, and waste. And there are mitochondria, small subunits that produce the energy that the cell needs to do everything that it does.
What is interesting is that all the organelles except the mitochondria are produced according to the genetic information in the cell’s nucleus. By contrast, mitochondria have their own DNA.
The speculated reason for their having their own DNA, rather than being dependent upon the cell’s nucleoid DNA, is that way back when life first formed, there was a constitutive parasitic relation between the formation of a cell and a form of bacteria.
I will likely run roughshod over the beautiful details, but the story runs something like this. And, let me say, it is a story in which are centered the kinds of hydrophobic interactions I mentioned in my last post, i.e. in which molecules which are insoluble in water end up being bound together because of the entropic movement of water.
So, in the chemically rich primordial soup, a bunch of insoluble molecules bind together in such a way as to create a membrane—a membrane whose edges meet themselves so perfectly as to create a sphere and to constitute an inside separated from the outside. Because of the force of entropy, this ends up being a pretty stable formation. Voila: a simple cell. Over time, the concentration of chemicals on the inside and on the outside of the cell membrane differ, a difference that creates a chemical gradient. This chemical gradient provides the occasion for the movement or diffusion of different chemicals in and out of the cell.
The theory is that when the membrane enclosed, it enclosed around a form of bacteria which happened to be able to produce energy, i.e. break apart molecules to release the energy of the electrical bond that holds the molecules together. That electrical energy made the diffusion of chemicals in and out of the cell easier and more efficient, which of course made it easier for the bacteria to survive.
Eventually (think: long evolutionary history), the bacteria loses many of its bacterial features, its development emphasizing instead the ever more efficient production of energy: it becomes a mitochondria. And eventually (long evolutionary history), the chemicals inside the cell, interacting with the energy provided by the mitochondria, form into differentiated proteins and subcellular units that ever more efficiently sustain and reproduce the cell… that nourishes and sustains the mitochondria whose energy enables the cell to persist and reproduce itself.
There are number of things I find striking in this. One thing is that, if one conceptually inhabits the relation between the mitochondria and the cell—I mean, really inhabits it—it is as if one could say that all these fabulous forms of life we see about us are the amazing habitats encouraged, provoked, or grown by these incredibly highly evolved bacteria-mitochondria. Life as we know it could be the condition and beautifully refined product of a bacteria that luckily found itself within an environment set off from the soup. This is a bizarre kind of displacement or decentering—not of the human, because it is bigger than that, but of what we imagine to be the units or driving force of life.
A second thing, related, is that the special nature of the mitochondria is that it complicates our sense of the singularity of the cell. That is, what occasions the cellular life that we currently recognize as plant or animal life is this accidental but effective parasitic relationship between a cell and a mitochondria: neither could survive or develop without the other. The mitochondria is not of the cell—hence its distinctive DNA—and yet it could not be without the cell. Just as the cells could not survive, develop, and evolve without the mitochondria.
So, there is a constitutive heterogeneity in the very possibility life. A cell is neither one nor two: because of the mutual interdependence and development of the mitochondria and the cell, unitary terms (i.e., one cell, two cells, three cells) are not adequate to the task of thinking about cellular life.
It reminds me of those debates about the anomaly of the pregnant body: is it one? is it two? and how that anomalous status complicates the legal concepts we use to negotiate (or undermine) women’s rights. How might we re-imagine that debate if that heterogeneity is the basic form of life.
It also makes me wonder what might happen if such a model of heterogeneity were incorporated into efforts of theorists to imagine or figure the vitality or virtual liveliness of material, informational, and cultural systems or phenomena (for instance, Jane Bennett's fabulous new book, Vibrant Matter or Brian Massumi's book Parables of the Virtual). It may not be enough for a system to be distinct from its environment (albeit in porous interrelationship with it). Would one need to incorporate this parasitic moment?
I want to say, in response to the last thought, that in our current situation, perhaps the human is akin to the mitochondria. Which makes me think that, as I reread Bennett and Massumi, I also need to revisit Michel Serres’s book Parasite in which the parasitic relation is conceived as, in some sense, the fundamental form of relation.
[The next in our multi-authored series of posts on the fourth season of Mad Men, posted prior to the publication ofMAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960sby Duke University Press, is by Michael Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor of English at Penn State (and honorary lifetime affiliate of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory]
"PITCHING"
Written by Michael Bérubé (English, Penn State)
Well, that was an episode. Peggy breaks down and cries. Don breaks down and cries. Anna appears as a spirit with a suitcase. Peggy and Mark break up. Cooper has no balls. Duck drops his drawers, decks Don. And oh yes, Clay beats Liston. As Don says to Peggy, by way of explaining why he slept with Allison despite his “rules” about “work,” “people do things.” Where to start?
I’ll start where Sandy Camargo left us last week, with her post about the metatextuality of Mad Men. The Meta Mad Men were on full display in episode six (“Waldorf Stories”), of course, because of the Emmy/Clio awards and the Breyers ice cream ad. Episode seven, “The Suitcase,” is less extravagantly meta (though Hellmann’s Mayonnaise has picked up where Breyers left off), but perhaps makes the point all the more effectively: it’s all about the pitching, at every level.
The episode starts with the Samsonite team doing its pitch to Don; that failure is followed by Duck’s pitch to Peggy, which sounds enticing for a few seconds until Peggy realizes there’s nothing behind it but a drunk and a business card; Don declines Roger’s invitation to come out and get hammered (again), saying wryly, “that’s an attractive offer”; Peggy’s mother chides her for standing up Mark, “I don’t know how many nice boys you think are lining up for you.” Don and Peggy have it out over who deserves the credit for Glo-Coat. And later, at the diner, Peggy tells Don she’s just not interested in the pitch her world is offering her: "I know what I'm supposed to want," she says, "but it just never feels right, or as important as anything in that office." Fittingly, the episode is punctuated by scenes in which Peggy is about to leave the office—and decides not to. The only time she leaves, the episode actually gets more claustrophobic, as Peggy and Don talk about advertising and life in a series of tight shots in a diner and a bar.
Duck really is a lousy ad man, by the way. The decision to court American Airlines was foolish—and you know very well Don’s never forgotten the Season 2 moment he had to tell Henry Wofford that Sterling Cooper would be dropping Mohawk Airlines. Here, Duck blows his pitch almost immediately, responding to Peggy’s perfectly reasonable question, “so what do you have so far?” by grousing, “I know it’s not a diamond necklace, but I did spend some money on those cards.” At which point Peggy knows more than enough to say (a) she appreciates the gesture and (b) does not take it seriously. Things go downhill from there, and then, at the end of the episode, right off a cliff.
But before we take the plunge, first let’s go back to “Waldorf Stories” for a moment, to the profoundly cringe-inducing pitch to the boys from Quaker Oats. Don’s impromptu taglines should be cited in academic committee meetings whenever people are flailing and just trying to make shit up on the fly (which is often): life ... the reason to get out of bed in the morning! Enjoy the rest of your life ... cereal! Yes, post-Clio Don is smashed, and his immediate reversion to Eager Don (the fur-selling Don we see in the flashbacks with Roger) is embarrassing. But the original “eat life by the bowlful” line, with the little kid and the big bowl and spoon, isn’t bad at all. Granted, it’s not nearly as good as the famous “Mikey Likes It,” and surely Weiner chose it for that reason: everyone and her brother associates Life with that ad, and rightly so. But if you compare the “bowlful” ad to what Life was actually doing back in the day, it’s frickin’ genius:
(Hat tip. Check out the 1967 ad, as well.) So I like the Life pitch. Kids will like the giant bowl of cereal. Moms will see it and get a twinge about how little their kid still is, even though they have to deal with life. Get those two together in a market and I think we’re gonna sell some cereal. Perhaps if Don weren’t so drunk, he could have worked the nostalgia angle the way he did for Kodak, masterfully, instead of burping and stumbling through it. But the idea itself is really pretty good. And the response from Quaker Oats? “It’s a little smart for regular folks.” The rejection recalls the Jantzen response (skin in a bikini ad, oh my!) and Conrad Hilton’s crazy-old-coot response to Don’s global-Hilton campaign (where’s the moon? I wanted the moon!). For anyone who has ever pitched a good idea to anyone, in any business (including academe? oh, absolutely), moments like these are infuriating. How much more infuriating it is that the slogan they like is the tired, predictable one Don stole from Danny. “A home run,” indeed. “That dog will hunt.” The meeting ends as a kind of class reunion of sales clichés, Don thinks he’s saved the day again, and off we go into the lost weekend. My point is not that I identified with Don for a moment, even as I cringed at his rapid-fire, erratic, weak-sauce slogan pitches; my point is that anyone who’s ever had a reasonably good idea shot down by “it’s a little smart for regular folks” should be identifying with Don at that moment. And much of the ambivalence of Mad Men toward its own metatextual success—that is, its own spectacular success at selling itself to us—depends on that dynamic. That’s not to say that everything MM does on this score is a success: notably, Ginia Bellafante wasn’t buying Jon Hamm’s performance in the flashbacks. “Hamm,” she wrote, “wore the same goofy, eager-beaver expression he did when we saw him as a car salesmen in the early ’50s a few seasons ago. He tries too hard to make the early Don seem like an ingratiating rube, so hard, in fact that the effect is to make Don’s eventual transition to a cool, everybody-comes-to-me, know-it-all seem utterly inconceivable.” Which is to say, in meta-speak, that Hamm tries too hard to show Don trying too hard. (I disagree; I think one of the points of the Life pitch is that Don’s subject-supposed-to-know facade can drop in a second. Such is Don’s ... life. But the point is that not everyone likes how Hamm handles Don’s self-presentation. Like that Mikey kid—he hates everything.) OK, now to Samsonite. This time, it’s Don who doesn’t go for the pitch, and though he’s nowhere near the level of cluelessness of the Quaker Oats boys, we see that yet again, Don doesn’t have the pop-culture chops he’s going to need for the second half of the ‘60s. “Endorsements are lazy,” Don says, “and I don’t like Joe Namath.” Sure, endorsements can be a cheap shortcut. But the “football” premise isn’t terrible -- arguably better than American Tourister’s “suitcase in a gorilla cage” campaign (1970, but alluded to here by way of the “elephant on a suitcase” suggestion), and light-years beyond Samsonite’s recent Cosmolite campaign. And who knows? Maybe that Namath kid will make a name for himself after all. But Don blows off the Namath idea, just moments after he’s plunked $100 down on Liston because Clay is a “loudmouth” who proclaims he’s the greatest and therefore can’t be. Don wasn’t so hot on that Kennedy kid, either; he was flat-out flummoxed by Doyle Dane Bernbach’s VW “Lemon” ads; and he doesn’t seem the least bit interested in the Fab Four. (DDB, btw, was also responsible for “Mikey likes it.”) So there’s your setup: the failed pitch is the premise for the entire episode, or, as Peggy puts it when Don tells her she doesn’t have to stay, “I do have to be here because of some stupid idea from Danny, who you had to hire because you stole his other stupid idea because you were drunk.” Moss’s delivery is brilliant (and the line follows another Peggy zinger, “it’s not my fault you don’t have a family or friends or anywhere else to go”). The stupid idea keeping them there? Samsonite is tough. But as Don notes at one point in the evening, every time we get down to working on it, we abandon the toughness idea. Indeed we do: the ideas are too obvious—football, elephants, throwing suitcases off buildings. “I can’t tell the difference anymore between something that’s good and something that’s awful,” Peggy confesses in the diner. “Well, they’re very close,” Don replies, anticipating Spinal Tap’s classic formulation, “there’s a fine line between stupid and clever.” “But the best idea always wins, and you know it when you see it.” Reassuring words—except that it doesn’t, and you don’t. Sometimes “the cure for the common breakfast” wins, because the clients are dolts. Or sometimes the creative director doesn’t like “Lemon.” Or, to take a contemporary example, sometimes the same agency that’s capable of producing the brilliant “aliens stole our moon rover’s tires while we were dancing to ‘Jump Around’” Bridgestone ad is also capable of producing the stupid and sexist “what if Mrs. Potato Head lost her mouth and had to stop yapping in the car” Bridgestone ad. You know, the one that played during the first commercial break in episode seven. Besides, the problem with “Samsonite is tough” (and, perhaps, the reason we keep abandoning it) is that it seems there’s something else lurking in the margins, something we don’t want to acknowledge. Like making that phone call to California. Or Uncle Mack’s line about how a man needs to keep a suitcase packed because he “needs to be ready to go any moment.” “Maybe it’s a metaphor,” Don murmurs. And when spectral Anna appears at the 3 AM of Don’s dark night of the soul, we get the point—yes, it’s a metaphor, all right, but surely we can’t build a pitch around Samsonite: Memento Mori. We learned in “Waldorf Stories” that life is “a scary word to anyone at any age.” Yes, well, just try death. That dog won’t hunt. Besides, who wants toughness, anyway? Duck Phillips is tough—why, he killed seventeen men in Okinawa, and here he is in a drunken rage, prepared to smash Don’s nose up into his brain. (Seventeen kills! Don’s Korean experience, not so impressive.) And what a ridiculous attempt at a punch that was! Good for Don for wanting to KO Duck for saying to Peggy, “I guess when screwing me couldn’t get you anything you had to go back to Draper” and calling her a whore. But not even Sonny Liston would have pretended to go down on a phantom punch as bad as Don’s. No, Don doesn’t do “tough” very well. He winds up on Peggy’s lap, barely able to get out one last slurred sentence, “sorry if I embarrassed you.” “Let’s go someplace darker,” Don said, quitting the diner. Well, they did. On the way to that tableau, the long evening reveals a striking number of Don-and-Peggy intimacies: Peggy speaks of how Mark doesn’t understand her; tells Don that her mother believes he is the father of her child (precisely because he was kind enough to visit her in the hospital); asks slyly about Allison; admits to grieving over her child; and, of course, acknowledges that she had an affair with Duck during a “confusing time.” Don, for his part, reveals that he’s a yokel from a farm, that his father was kicked to death by a horse (Peggy laughs, thinking he’s kidding), that he never knew his mother, and, breaking down, that he’s just lost the only person who knew him. “That’s not true,” Peggy replies, having come to know Don pretty well—except, of course, for the part about the war and Dick Whitman. (Speaking of which, am I crazy to be seeing in Don occasional allusions to Robert Crumb’s “Whiteman”?) But anytime you’re telling your boss that everyone thinks you slept with him to get the job, and that everyone thinks it’s funny, like the possibility is so remote ... well, that’s kind of intimate. As is trading stories of witnessing one’s father’s death. Echoing Don’s office-kitchen conversation with Faye in episode five, the Don-Peggy intimacies begin with a disavowal. Then, it was Don’s “why does everybody have to talk about everything?” followed by his admission that he doesn’t know how to be with (or without) his kids. Now, it’s this exchange:
Don: Stay and visit. Peggy: I’ve got nothing to say. Don: Sure you do. Peggy: No. It’s personal. Don: We have personal conversations. Peggy: No we don’t. And I think you like it that way. I know I do. Don: Suit yourself.
Whereupon Peggy immediately opens up: “We’re supposed to be staring at each other over candlelight, and he invites my mother?” What a lousy offer that is: Mark’s pitch, like Duck’s, sucks. Note that until we get to “he,” it’s not entirely clear who “we” are. But Don’s and Peggy’s will not be, must not be, a romantic intimacy. It’s not merely that Don has rules about work—rules he observes as he does all other rules, irregularly. It’s that the only way Don and Peggy can maintain the right workplace intimacy—holding hands as they gaze on the sketch of Samsonite-as-Ali looming over a defeated Tourister, mutely acknowledging all they have gone through on their way to producing this image—is by finding the right place for the “personal.” “Don’t get personal because you didn’t do your work,” Don snaps when Peggy reminds him that he stole Danny’s line because he was drunk. The personal, I might say, is not a pitch (except on a TV show where it is part of the pitch). And when we stop pitching for a moment, we can admit to ourselves that we still think about the child we gave away, or the children we miss and don’t know how to care for. But everything else is a pitch, which is why Mad Men seems so ambivalent about the success of its pitchers. Don’s degradation this year has been the subject of much discussion, and by now—with Roger sneaking off to a bar in the middle of dinner, complaining that the AA crowd is “self so righteous,” Don retching his guts into the toilet, and Duck trying to defecate in what he thinks is Don’s office—it almost appears as if Weiner and company are working overtime (perhaps staying in the office all night!) to make sure his clients don’t decide they like his product for the wrong reason. Is the show going over the top in its insistence that its leading men are hopeless alcoholics? Mad Men caught on in part because of its impeccable sense of style, because its promise to reveal How We Lived Then (and maybe How We Got Here), and because (as one Lauren Goodlad put it), the leading man is hot. Well, Jon Hamm is indeed hot, and when Draper becomes the sujet supposé savoir, he embodies a form of masculinity that remains extremely attractive to men and women alike. But in season four, we’re getting a different pitch, one that puts Peggy at the center—a center from which we can see why that traditional form of masculinity isn’t worth aspiring to, and why the things Peggy is “supposed to want” will never feel right. Peggy has entered the door of the men’s room this time, and Don leaves his door open to her in the end. Will the pitch work? I’m sold, but then, I was sold on “eat life by the bowlful,” too. As long as one doesn’t regurgitate life by the bowlful as well. One final thing. Why is there a dog in the Parthenon? I don’t know. Why is there a mouse in Don’s office? Read more
[Faith Wilson Stein, a graduate student in Comparative Literature, is the author of the next in our multi-authored series of posts on the fourth season of Mad Men, which anticipated the March 2013 release of MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s by Duke University Press.]
The opening exchange between Roger and Joan—she practical as ever while he indulges in his own personal salesmanship (whether “the tenderloin of your distress” is a greeting she finds charming is anyone’s guess)—establishes the episode’s central theme: the power of fatherhood, from the literal to the symbolic, and the need to grapple with it. We see Don winning back Sally’s affection with tickets to the Beatles concert at Shea Stadium. (One hopes that despite her precocity, at 10 years old she has not yet developed a sense of irony, acute or otherwise). This explicit reference to the “British Invasion” is overdue for a show so richly packed with cultural history, and it is cheekily followed by an English incursion on a much smaller scale, as Lane, still holding the gifts with which he’d hoped to charm his own child, is surprised by his imperious father.
In this three-part beginning, the issue of Roger’s paternity (pun regrettably intended) is a problem to be eliminated; Don’s shoddiness as a father is at once ameliorated and confirmed with his bribery; and Lane is denied the chance to act like a doting father and is instead put in the position of humbled son. (Note as well how the revelation that Roger “inherited” the Lucky Strike account, and his rolodex of dead clients, further attests to his shortcomings as a procurer of accounts in his own right.)
In Season One, Roger’s cardiac distress precipitated Don’s seeking confession and comfort with a woman; this time, however, the transition requires the viewer to connect the dots as the scenes shift. For the second time this season, Don is ill in front of a woman, left vulnerable and exposed. But whereas Don’s revelations to Peggy were limited, his confession to Faye divulges more of his true history, linking physical purging to a disgorging of his sins. Nonetheless, the intimacy it would seem to create between him and Faye feels tenuous. By contrast, the other couples in the episode give the impression of greater stability, perhaps precisely because they do not share their secrets. Trudy, to whom Pete does not tell the story of Don’s identity, assures him, “Everything’s good here.” The line recalls Betty’s statement to Henry at the end of “The Summer Man”: “We have everything.” Although Betty doesn’t tell Henry the full truth regarding the Department of Defense’s questions about Don, she appears content with Henry in the promise, however false, that there are no secrets between them.
The episode nears its conclusion with Faye standing in Don’s open office doorway, uttering innocuous professionalisms to cover over the intimacies they had been sharing moments prior (even while their office romance is another secret Pete has discovered). Faye’s faked exit parallels Joan’s behavior with Roger in the opening scene and suggests that the brutal underside of their relationships – the need to abort what one has conceived and to vomit up the fundamental lie at the center of one’s life – bubble up beneath the faked detachment necessary to maintain the professional status quo.
Finally, through the open office door, we see Megan and, then, we see Don seeing Megan. Looking up from the Beatles tickets he had anxiously checked on throughout the episode, he stares at her, wearing a wholly inscrutable look. Is he in awe of her youth and ingenuousness, unencumbered by the knowledge of who he truly is? Is that then a source of lust? Would she tell him that everything is good here? Or if he told, would she promise that (as Anna told him in the third episode of this season), she knows everything about him, and still loves him? Does a relationship founded on truth hold the same appeal to Don that it once did, or does he desire guilelessness and the patched together resolution of a clerical error that appears to have been fixed?
