Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.13
"The Only Unpardonable Sin"
Guest Writer: Lauren Goodlad

Monday, June 24, 2013

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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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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.12
"Baby Blue"
Guest Writer: Jeremy Varon

Monday, June 17, 2013

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[The eleventh 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]

"Baby Blue"*

Written by: Jeremy Varon (The New School)


In a rare and, perhaps, unique bookending of an episode by near-identical images, “Quality of Mercy,” the penultimate episode of Season 6, begins and ends with Don curled up in the fetal position. The first, besotted pose (in the children’s room in his apartment, no less) is prompted by his visceral shame at Sally’s recent sight of him bedding his neighbor’s wife and sense of the cascade of disasters that could follow. Alcohol, as for countless drunks, is a powerful tool for Don, used by him to humiliate rivals (Ted Chough melting on the margarine campaign), loosen the loins of desiring women (Betty and the bottle before their cabin tryst), and craft his suave persona as a man of both mystery and mastery. But it also can be his one true companion in moments like these of exquisite misery, whose promise is a certain numbness by day (now begun with a furtive nip) and oblivion by night: the desperate salve for those times when one can’t cope with the mess made of one’s life and wishes to have never been born.

In the episode’s closing, Peggy’s admonition that he is a “monster” (a reprise of Sally’s stinging line the he makes her “sick”) for what she perceives as a betrayal of her and Ted lands him curled on the couch. No doorways or passages or choice-points connoting possibilities for threshold crossing and transition. Instead, a defeated image of total inertia seeking the repose of the womb, before the trauma of birth and fall from grace.

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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.11
"What Sally Knew"
Guest Writer: Corey K. Creekmur

Monday, June 10, 2013

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[The tenth 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]

"What Sally Knew"

Written by: Corey K. Creekmur (University of Iowa)


“Don, I owe you,” Dr. Arnold Rosen asserts, after nudging his son Mitchell to offer thanks and a handshake to Don Draper for intervening in an attempt to prevent the young man from being drafted into the Vietnam war. Don’s wife Megan, until this moment unaware of his efforts (“It’s not our problem,” he had earlier insisted), adoringly tells him “you are the sweetest man.” However, his daughter Sally, burdened by her new knowledge of her father’s actual motives and deception, immediately announces “you make me sick” before storming out of the room.


The dramatic climax of this eleventh episode in Season 6, titled with deceptive simplicity “Favors,” summarizes an installment of Mad Men tightly organized around the rituals, rewards, and risks of obligation and debt. If Don’s favor to the neighboring Rosen family, which itself requires a favor to Don from his new business partner Ted, succeeds in keeping Mitchell out of the war, does it then matter that, as Sally knows– as does Sylvia and we viewers – that Don’s favor is motivated by his selfish desire to recapture his neighbor’s wife as a sexual conquest? Do the ends justify the means, or must genuine favors be offered in sincere, good faith without the demand of repayment? What is the final balance when calculating the acquisition of admiration from one’s wife and gratitude from one’s neighbor against the simultaneous debit of disgust from one’s daughter and (perhaps) self-loathing from the neighbor’s wife? (Arnold informs Don that “Sylvia sends her gratitude,” adding that “she is overwhelmed,” and unlike him we know to isolate rather than link those closely stated but significantly distinct claims.)

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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.10
"Us, Them"
Guest Writer: Caroline Levine

Monday, June 3, 2013

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[The ninth 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]

"Us, Them"

Written by: Caroline Levine (University of Wisconsin-Madison) 


Carnation Instant Breakfast or Life cereal? CGC employees or the SCDP team? On the one hand, this episode is pretty relentless in its insistence on division. It’s either them or us: New York or Los Angeles, Joan or Pete, Humphrey or Nixon, demonstrators or cops. Don reminds Megan that she’s Canadian, not a US citizen. Avon Cosmetics faces a choice between getting groovier and waxing nostalgic. Joan think she’s on a date, but it turns out to be a business meeting. She then replaces Pete at breakfast, while Carnation replaces breakfast itself. Not both. One or the other.


And yet, in California, “everyone shares”—at least according to Don’s drugged fantasy of a hippie Megan. Don has always been two rather than one: Don Draper and Dick Whitman, husband and lover, outsider and insider, ethical hero and repellent antihero. And his preference for both/and turns out to govern this episode as much as either/or. Ted shuts Pete up with the assertion that “we’re all working together: all agency business is your business.” Peggy, after fighting bitterly with Joan, rescues her. And of course, the episode ends with the overcoming of a bitter conflict. A shared identity for the agency replaces a string of separate names and letters in a new prospect of togetherness: Sterling Cooper & Partners. “Partners” in the name does double work: the word itself is a compromise that requires both sides to give up their individual identities, and what it conveys is an assertion of their new identity as partnership rather than opposition.


But what can be shared, exactly? “The whole world is watching,” chant the protestors at the Chicago Democratic Convention as they are brutally beaten by the police on national television. We watch Don, Megan, and Joan watching, sharing the televised experience of the Convention with millions of others. But this is togetherness without amity, without concord, without partnership. Megan is scared, Joan horrified, Don dismissive. The experience of network television news joins but also separates, inviting us to enter the common world of public life from the privacy of our living rooms. And the world it allows us to share is a scene of violence and discord.

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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.9
"Margins, Regressions, and Betty’s Little Smile"
Guest Writer: Eleanor Courtemanche

Monday, May 27, 2013

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[The eighth 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]

"Margins, Regressions, and Betty’s Little Smile"

Written by: Eleanor Courtemanche (English)

It might be summer 1968 in the world of Mad Men, but it’s freezing cold outside. Nothing’s worse than being left alone, either at a breakfast table, on the balcony of your posh Upper East Side apartment, or in the middle of a sterile advertising agency. A thug might shoot you as you’re walking alone through Central Park!


We first hear the sirens when Megan fails to interest Don in dinner, and they sound louder and louder until the rock comes crashing through the window of Abe and Peggy’s apartment. Worst case scenario: you yourself are the midnight thug. You knife your boyfriend in the gut by accident, and then have him break up with you in the ambulance before he passes out. No, even worse: you tell your crushworthy boss about your sad breakup and he gives you the cold shoulder, disguised as a cheery admonition to get to work. At least you have your mentor … but then Don closes his door as well, leaving you—Peggy—stranded outside the empty conference room, in the episode’s last chilly image.


In scary circumstances (let’s not forget that Bobby Kennedy was shot in a hotel kitchen at the end of the last episode), people seek shelter. But relationships in this show are a game of musical chairs: someone always gets left out. So this episode is a series of frantic transactions as characters try to maximize their desirability to others while keeping their own choices open. Peggy starts the show as the fulcrum of the new hybrid agency SCDP/CGC: when Ted and Don can’t compromise between their competing margarine pitches, they both turn to Peggy to break the tie. Peggy wins, clearly—Pete’s protestations that he “agrees with Don” only emphasize his total irrelevance in the agency’s power structure. Nobody wants you, Pete! Pete, your only superpower is your massively receding hairline.

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

Monday, May 20, 2013

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

"Leaving the Whorehouse"

Written by: Todd McGowan (University of Vermont)


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, May 13, 2013

posted under , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism

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

"The Pause That Refreshes"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Monday, May 6, 2013

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

"Get Your Wargasm On"

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

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

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


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

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

Monday, April 29, 2013

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

"A Tense Experiment"

Written by: Dana Polan (New York University)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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