posted under
Mad Men
,
Mad World
,
Season 6
,
Varon
by Unit for Criticism
[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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posted under
Mad Men
,
Mad World
,
Varon
by Unit for Criticism
[Our multi-authored series of posts on Mad Men season 4 prior to the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press)
continues this week with guest writing by Jeremy Varon, co-editor of the journal, The Sixties.]
"TROUBLE DOWN THERE"
Written by Jeremy Varon (The New School for Social Research)
Mad Men, in its weightier engagements, has always been for me about three things: capitalism, history, and race. The great puzzle and fun of the latest installment, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” (Season 4, Episode 5), is in understanding how these three are arrayed.
Shortly into the episode, Roger Sterling peruses a newspaper headline about trouble Down South, prompting the following exchange:
Roger: This Selma thing is not going away. You still don’t think they
need a civil rights law?
Bert: They got what they wanted. Why aren’t they happy?
Peter: Because, Lassie stays at the Waldorf, and they can’t.
Don (entering): Please tell me I missed everything.
Such dreck is standard for the Mad Men. They repeatedly react with insensitivity or indifference to the epic civil rights struggle taking place both off screen and off their moral radar. They have, in short, an otherness problem, defined by their lack of curiosity about the experiences of those outside their privileged milieu. The urgent issue of racial inequality is the aspect of the Sixties, and of history more generally, that neither the show nor its characters has yet embraced.
Their racial clubbishness is underscored with special force — and to surprising effect — in the current episode. It features the Mad Men’s greatest foray yet into otherness.
In the selfsame scene, the generals of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, sans Roger, are quickly worked into lathers of excitement at the challenge of landing Japan’s Honda corporation as a client. Doing so requires a crash course in cultural difference across a divide of custom and race, lest their dealings with the Japanese get hopelessly lost in translation.
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