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 5.6
"A Study in Orange"
Guest Writer: Lauren Goodlad

Monday, April 23, 2012

posted under , , , , , , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[The fifth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 5 of AMC's Mad Men, posted prior to the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]


"A Study in Orange"

Written by Lauren M. E. Goodlad (English/Unit for Criticism)


The title of Mad Men’s sixth episode this season, “Far Away Places,” echoes the 1948 Bing Crosby classic. But insofar as it leads viewers to anticipate the kind of glamorous business trip Don took with Betty in “Souvenir” (Season 3, Episode 8), the song’s yearning for real-life encounters with foreign lands is a feint. Although the episode explores far-off places of sorts, the journeys it takes in this rather complicated segment of Mad Men are more psychic and cultural than geographic. “Far Away Places” does not embark on real trips to Rome, or China, or Spain--though it does take us tripping. And in what has become a veritable leitmotif for Season 5, its most memorable tableaux are illusions.

Last week the show put us squarely in male fantasy terrain when Pete, hard at work with an obliging call girl, chose “You’re my king” over other equally tawdry clichés. Episode 6 opens with Abe’s suggesting that Peggy, nervous about her presentation for Heinz, join him at a showing of The Naked Prey. “You're gonna resist the chance to see Cornel Wilde naked?” he asks. Reviewing the movie in 1967, Roger Ebert called The Naked Prey the kind of “pure fantasy” in which an urbane white man, “set loose naked in the jungle,” discovers to his delight that he can “outrun half a dozen hand-picked African warriors.” Poor Abe. He has taken up Kinsey’s mantle of a white man engaged by the aspirations of the 60s with more humility than the often pompous Paul. Abe is clearly frustrated by Peggy’s distracted focus on work. But does he really want to see this movie?
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