[The third 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]
"Mr. Draper Goes to Town"
Written by: Deanna K. Kreisel (U of British Columbia).
The third episode of Mad Men’s Season 7, in addition to being unusually orange, was also remarkably cinematic. While the show often trades in subtle cinematic in-jokes (see, for example, Robert A. Rushing, “‘It Will Shock You How Much this Never Happened’: Antonioni and Mad Men” in Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s), “Field Trip” is fundamentally structured by two key movie references, one overt and one fleeting, which offer different points of entry into Don’s characterological arc. The first appears in the opening seconds of the episode and depicts Don’s own preferred point of identification: an aimless, handsome New Wave hero wandering 1960s LA while juggling a couple of feisty, beautiful women. The film is Model Shop (1969) by French director Jacques Demy (best known for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), and the show’s opening sequence thus rather heavy-handedly signals Don’s growing investment in a new cool self-image. The first seconds of the episode feature a bright disorienting star of light in the blackness that eventually resolves into that most hoary of movie-within-movie clichés, a projector beam in a dark theater, as the camera tilts to reveal Don staring intently, bemusedly, and almost longingly at the images flickering before him.
The film sequence on screen features the hero, George, a temporarily unemployed architect with grandiose dreams who is waiting to be drafted, driving his antique convertible down a Los Angeles boulevard while the wind ruffles his hair (the show’s designers doubtless wish their own simulacra of mid-century style could match the aching perfection of the depicted avenue). But the real crux of the film, for Mad Men’s purposes, is its ending. George telephones Lola, a French model with whom he has had a brief fling, but learns from her roommate that she has just gone back to France. George delivers his speech instead into a black rotary wall phone: “I just wanted to tell her that I loved her. I just wanted her to know that I was going to try and begin again. You know what I mean? That I was— I just wanted her to know that I was gonna try. Yeah, sounds stupid, doesn’t it? But I can, you know. I’m gonna— a person can— always try, you know? Yeah, always try. Yeah, always try.” Fade to black. The intrusive sound of jets overhead establishes another connection to Don’s situation—one of the forms his “always trying” has been taking is flying back and forth to LA to keep his marriage patched together.
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Deanna K. Kreisel
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sovereignty
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The Killing
by Unit for Criticism
Written by: Deanna K. Kreisel (University of British Columbia)
There is a clear and dramatic break between the first two seasons of “The Killing” taken together—the “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?” mystery—and season three, the “Pied Piper” case. This break represents more than just a shift in Linden and Holder’s object of investigation: it’s a reboot of the show’s themes, cast of characters, politics, and ethics. Even the quality of the rain changes—perhaps after a couple of seasons filming in Vancouver the writers finally twigged to the fact that it hardly ever pours buckets in the PNW. If the guiding spirit of the Rosie Larsen case was the familiar American obsession with the disappearance and murder of middle-class young women, and the staggering public resources that can be marshalled to bring justice and closure to one family, then the spirit of season three is the equally staggering callousness and indifference that greet the mass murder of poor, marginal, racialized, and unwanted young women who live on the streets: “human garbage,” as the revealed murderer calls them in the season finale. The antithesis between treasured children and disposable children functions as the emblematic difference not merely between the concerns of the two cases, but also between the themes of the first two seasons and season three. If the subjects of the former were sovereignty (Native land rights, juridical records, the autonomy of the self) and the struggle to express sovereignty through overcoming addiction (to cigarettes, to sex, to power, to revenge), the third season reverses these concerns and focuses relentlessly and painfully on helplessness and entrapment.
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