[The seventh in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 7 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]
"Let’s Have Another Piece of Pie"
Written by: Lauren M. E. Goodlad (Illinois).
The term pastiche has become synonymous with postmodernism and the reign of signifiers detached from deeper reference or history. But as the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics reminds us, long before pastiche developed its postmodern connotation of using “recognizable ingredients” while offering “no new substance,” the word derived from the Italian for pasticcio “or a hodge-podge of pie containing both meat and pasta.” To say that “Waterloo,” Mad Men’s Season 7 "mid-season finale" is pastiche, is not to condemn a series that, back in 2010, I argued was anything but. For at that time the show—still embedded in the pre-counterculture milieu of the early 60s—turned on a masterful dialectics between historical events like the Kennedy assassination and our own turn-of-the millennium emergencies. Those early-60s stories (as I wrote last June), “in inflecting our imaginary with the ‘history’ we had forgotten to remember as such, added something quite distinct to what we could take for the history of our present.” Yes, Mad Men has changed as it nears its final curtain; and as Caroline Levine wrote two weeks ago, many once-ardent viewers have wearied of its charms. Yet, I, for one, was happy enough last night to pull up a chair and join Roger in the spirit of Irving Berlin’s Depression-era ditty. “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” I say, with a nice hodge-podge of meat and pasta on the side.
Of course, Mad Men has always sported a playful self-consciousness, even during episodes of stunning high seriousness. Almost inevitably, the show has begun paying tribute to its own greatest moments: last week by staging an homage to Season 4’s “The Suitcase”and this week, on the occasion of Bert’s death, by recalling us to Joan’s promptitude in Season 1 when she joined Bert in alerting clients to what then looked like Roger’s imminent demise (“The Long Weekend”).
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[The first in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 7 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]
"Terminally Uncool, Unfunny, Lame"
Written by: Bruce Robbins (Columbia)
The opening credits have been predicting Don Draper’s fall at the beginning of every episode since Mad Men began airing. Last year, at the end of season six, it looked like the moment of professional collapse had finally come. But it also looked like Don’s breakdown in front of the Hershey brass and the indefinite time-out decided for him by his partners might be balanced by some sort of moral redemption. The breakdown itself comes in the form of compulsive and disinterested truth-telling, and the final sequence of last year’s final episode involved more of the truth: Don showing his children the brothel where he was raised.
As the new season premiered last night, many viewers must have been asking themselves how this impulse would or wouldn’t take over and work itself out as the show draws to a close. To put this in a series of questions: what might moral redemption look like, if that’s what’s coming? Would it mean turning against advertising itself? When Don says (during the meeting where he self-reveals and self-destructs, but also earlier) that Hershey’s chocolate doesn’t need advertising, he is echoing a theme that the show has already raised and that may be its most fundamental link with the political vision of “the Sixties”: is the work these advertisers do worth doing at all? Is it good for us? If the answer is no, then what? We find ourselves lost in a dark forest of contradictions. Wouldn’t a rejection of all that professional success mean turning against the vice-ridden virtues by which viewers have been so charmed--turning against what got us so involved in the show to begin with? Are we ready for that?
In particular, what would a critique of the profession mean for the gradual emergence of women into the ranks of the professionally successful? After all, that emergence has become the show’s single most emotionally compelling line of development as, season by season, the men seemed to get more and more exhausted, empty, and self-repeating. Could Don redeem himself morally without undercutting the rising trajectory of Peggy and Joan? And if their success, too, is going to be undercut, will we get the familiar and distorted logic that associates women’s achievement at work with failure and desolation in private life? I’m not sure I can survive any more of that moral.
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[The twelfth 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 Only Unpardonable Sin"
Written by: Lauren Goodlad English/Unit for Criticism)
The literal referent of “In Care Of” is a letter received from the District Attorney of the County of New York addressed to Miss Sally Beth Draper, “c/o Mr. Donald F. Draper.” But in a more a figurative sense, the motif of care—and of care of another—runs throughout this final episode of Mad Men’s Season 6. As the season concludes, the only care Pete exhibits for his mother’s passing is his getting his fair share of her furniture, having determined that an all-expense paid private eye to “bring [his] mother’s killer to justice” was not worth the cost. (This and the black comedy in which the scene between Pete and the SS Sunset Princess was played, left us little time to contemplate the apparent treachery of Manny—a/k/a “Marcus Constantine”—who seduces Pete’s mother while she is in his care, marries her for the money he believes she has, and then throws her over the side of a ship into shark-infested waters.)
Caring for others is not much on the mind of Manny’s friend Bob Benson, though he has taken great care to rid himself of Pete, the keeper of his secret, who now will set off for LA as a (not-so-gay) divorcé. Bob still retains the air of his enigmatic beginnings: was he a corporate spy, we had wondered? Or just an empty suit with a penchant for sucking up? Did he know Manolo was a gold-digger? Whatever else he may be, we know that Bob is a gay man more at ease in the closet than Sal Romano ever was—but with a contrived identity that clearly doubles him with Don (just like his alliterative, tri-syllabic name). Bob’s providing a handy Best Guy Friend for Joan may, perhaps, be a sincere form of care—which would make him the ultimate example of what Mad World contributor Alex Doty called the type of the “helper homosexual.” But what “In Care Of” makes entirely clear is that Bob’s stunt in Detroit—as he manipulates Pete into exposing himself as the one man in Motor City who cannot drive a stick—is the kind of maneuver we’ve seen Don pull off many times.
But was there ever a worse time to ask “What would Don Draper do?” The answer, of course, is both yes and no. Less the finale of a single season than a turning point after 77 hours of serial television, for Don, we might say, “In Care Of” marks the best of times and the worst of times. Dante scholars can debate where precisely he was throughout most of this season in the trajectory marked out by the premiere’s opening reference to Inferno: “Midway in our life’s journey/I went astray from the straight road/And woke to find myself in a dark wood.” What is clear by the end of “In Care Of,” is that Don may soon be leaving Hell and heading for Purgatorio. For Dick Whitman has, at long last, heeded the words he heard from an itinerant preacher thrown out from the whorehouse many moons ago: “The only unpardonable sin is to believe God cannot forgive you.”
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[On April 26-27 the Unit for Criticism, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and affiliated colleagues in Sociology and Art History convened Beyond Utopia? Art, Theory, & the Coming of “Spring,” the end point of our semester-long faculty/grad student seminar on this topic. Below, the first post in a series from the event, is Lauren Goodlad’s opening remarks.]
"Opening Remarks," Day 2: April 27, 2012
Written By Lauren M. E. Goodlad (Unit for Criticism/English)
Welcome everyone to the Unit for Criticism’s co-organized conference, Beyond Utopia: Art, Theory, and the Coming of “Spring.” I’m Lauren Goodlad, Director of the Unit and it’s my very great pleasure to welcome you here. Yesterday you heard from Dianne Harris who directs the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and who, along with J. B. Capino, Nicholson Associate Director of the Unit; Zsuzsa Gille, affiliate of the Unit and associate professor of Sociology and Global Studies; Irene Small, affiliate of the Unit and assistant professor of Art History; and Markus Schulz in Sociology and Transnational studies (in Germany right now but still with us in spirit)—worked to convene the events of yesterday and today.
Since its first iteration by Thomas More in 1516, the term utopia has been marked by deep-seated ambivalence. Etymologically the word conjoins the Greek for “no place” with the homonym eutopia, or “good place.” The potential for making the world a “good place” has, to be sure, motivated a variety of modern standpoints including democratic, equalitarian, and socialist political philosophies; Cold War-era modernization theories; and even the fascist vision of a millennial Reich. In his 1967 essay, “The End of Utopia,” the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse defended the term against accusations of unrealizability. Post-structuralism and postmodernism ushered in new kinds of critique which saw universalistic notions like “utopia” as, by and large, eurocentric and teleological tools of the powerful.
Utopian ideals have continued to inspire movements aimed toward resisting economic injustice; decolonizing the so-called developing world; instituting human rights; achieving racial, gender, and sexual equality; stewarding the environment; and ensuring world peace. Yet, the idea has seemed unlikely to regain the central place in avant-garde politics and art which it claimed in transitional periods such as the late eighteenth century, the turn of the twentieth century, and the 1960s. In his 2000 polemic, The End of Utopia, Russell Jacoby argued the “dream of a future qualitatively different from the present” has all but died. His words came at the end of an era in which capitalism’s ostensible triumph over socialism had prompted Francis Fukuyama to proclaim “The End of History” in a much-discussed 1992 book.
Who reading Jacoby or Fukuyama could have anticipated the advent of popular uprisings in the Middle East alongside street protests and “occupations” across Europe and the United States? As the historian Mike Davis wrote last year, “the electrifying protests of 2011—the on-going Arab spring, the ‘hot’ Iberian and Hellenic summers, [and] the ‘occupied’ fall in the United States”—have provoked comparison to “the anni mirabilis of 1848, 1905, 1968, and 1989.” Yet, Davis also worried that “spring” was becoming “winter” all too soon.
In response these historical and intellectual currents our conference poses “Beyond Utopia?” as an open-ended question for multi-disciplinary exploration. Along with some of the most exciting scholars in anthropology, architecture, art history, cinema studies, art history, political theory, sociology, and the visual arts, we in this room want to consider the relation of art, politics, theory, and new social movements: asking whether how today’s revolutionary aspirations reaffirm, reinvent, or renounce the utopian conventions of earlier generations. I thank our distinguished guests for joining us today and you in our audience for being here.
Let me thank just a few more people individually. As many of you know, every spring the Unit works with the director of another unit along with individual faculty members to create a semester-long faculty/graduate student seminar and an associated series of events leading up to a state-of-the art conference. This year’s theme was chosen partly to resonate with this year’s co-organizing unit, IPRH and their 2013 theme, “Revolution.” More than 50 grad students and faculty members, from UIUC and neighboring campuses, took part in the seminar in some fashion and it’s my pleasure to thank the participants who led the various sessions along with the co-organizers: Abbas Benmamoun, Kevin Hamilton, Sharon Irish, Hina Nazar, Melissa Orlie, and Bruce Rosenstock.
At the Unit I rely greatly on the help of JB and our wonderful graduate research assistants Mike Black and MC Anderson. I also want to thank Nancy Castro who became Associate Director of the IPRH a few months ago and has been a welcome member of this team. Finally, I want to thank the various sponsors who provided the financial support necessary to a conference of this size: The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Center for Advanced Study, the School of Architecture, the Program in Jewish Culture & Society—both of which are co-sponsors of this morning’s keynote lecture--the Department of English, the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy initiative, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Sociology and the Transnational Sociology Area, the Department of Religion, the School of Art & Design (another co-sponsor of this morning’s keynote) , the Center for Global Studies with the aid of a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant, the Department of Political Science, the Center for South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, and the Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities.
Without further ado, let me introduce this morning’s introducer.
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