Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 5.5
“Furtive Realism and a Sock in the Jaw”
Guest Writer: Eleanor Courtemanche

Monday, April 16, 2012

posted under , , , , , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[The fourth 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]


“Furtive Realism and a Sock in the Jaw”

Written by Eleanor Courtemanche (English)

From a writerly point of view, Mad Men Season 5 Episode 5 (“Signal 30”) ends with a pleasing moment of self-referentiality. We see account executive Ken Cosgrove in bed engaged in an illicit nighttime activity—not whoremongering, like his colleagues, but writing stories. It turns out that Ken, who seems so bland on the surface, has a secret life as the science fiction and fantasy writer Ben Hargrove, specializing in robots and distant planets. After he’s confronted by Roger Sterling, who’d prefer his employees to spend all their imaginative energies on their day job, Ken promises to quit. In the dark of night, though, he starts scribbling in a new genre—suburban realism—with the tougher new pen name of Dave Algonquin. And what he’s writing is a recap of the episode we’ve just seen, with a thinly-disguised Pete Campbell spiraling into bourgeois despair in a series of self-destructive acts that, in this episode, culminate in his being literally flattened by the poncey Brit Lane Pryce. After admiring Ken’s speed at being the first to blog this episode, the viewer must ask: is there any part of Mad Men that we couldn’t imagine as being written by Ken Cosgrove?


Mad Men was famously inspired by both Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique and Richard Yates’s 1962 Revolutionary Road, as well as the heroic adman George Lois, who has a new book out with the crusty-sounding title Damn Good Advice. When Ken narrativizes Pete’s “soul-sick” anomie, the episode recalls not just Yates but other chroniclers of suburban male adultery like John Updike. This episode marginalizes the women’s perspective, leaving them to guess the men’s intentions (Is Ken trying to get a new job? thinks Peggy when she spots him at lunch. What phrase of clichéd submission will turn Pete on? wonders the call girl at Roger's friend's "party") or literally expelling them from the boardroom so the men can fight. Peggy and Joan have to eavesdrop outside the window, though they miss none of the gory details. (The one female triumph is Trudy’s: she finally gets Don and Megan to come for dinner – though she doesn’t notice that they’ve forgotten Cynthia’s name, and doesn’t find out -- or not yet -- that Pete has visited a prostitute.)
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