Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.3
"Pete and Repeat"
Guest Writer: Lilya Kaganovsky

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

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

“Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war.”
Winston Churchill to Neville Chamberlain in the House of Commons, after the Munich accords (1938)

"Pete and Repeat"

Written by: Lilya Kagonovsky (Slavic/Comparative Literature)

Episode 3 of the sixth season of Mad Men takes place at the end of January 1968, roughly between the capture of USS Pueblo by the North Koreans and the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive. War (secret, undeclared) is the obvious subtext: between the news about North Korea and the Viet Cong on Pete’s TV and Sylvia’s radio, Roger’s references to “Munich” and the quote from Churchill that he misattributes to his late mother, there is a sense that many of the characters are poised on the brink of violence, hovering somewhere between “war and dishonour.”

As Uncle Mack explains to young Don, he’s the cock in the hen house, which means he gets to sleep with all the hens, including, as we learn at the end, Don’s very pregnant stepmother, Abigail. We already know that Don is sleeping with his neighbor’s wife (but we don’t know that he sneaks in every time the good Dr. Rosen is out of the building), and we’re not surprised that Pete is sleeping with everything he can, including his rather naïve neighbor, Brenda, who—not unlike Sylvia—imagines their affair to be something slightly more than it is (after the first time, she immediately proposes calling Pete at home and hanging up, and leaving small signs of affection, like parking her car on the street, to let him know she’s thinking of him. She cannot even begin to compare to the beauty of Beth from Season 5, drawing a heart on the car window.) Indeed, the moment of violence arrives when Pete’s enjoyment of Johnny Carson (itself about to be interrupted by news from Vietnam) is interrupted by screams and shouting outside the house. Brenda, complete with nightgown, bathrobe, and a bloody face and nose, shows up on the Campbells' doorstep after her husband discovers her dalliance with Pete.
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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 5.1/2
"Things Aren't Perfect"
Guest Writer: Lilya Kaganovsky

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

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


[The first in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 5 of AMC's Mad Men, 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

"Things Aren't Perfect"

Written by Lilya Kaganovsky (Slavic/Comparative Literature/Media & Cinema Studies)

Mad Men is growing old. I don’t mean that as a criticism;I mean that the show, without being a Bildungsroman (since no one ever grows wiser here, only older), is fundamentally about what it means to be an adult. Don has turned forty. Sally’s voice has dropped an octave. Joan has had a baby. Pete lives in the suburbs. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has entered a period of “stability” (“stable,” as Pete tells us, is that “step backwards between successful and failing”).

Even the ads for Miller 64 aired during the premiere point us to a certain demographic: “brewed for the better you.” The ad opens with an alarm clock about to turn to 6:30am and a picture of someone’s five-year old daughter on the nightstand. We are then treated to a daily routine of working out (“We run a mile before breakfast” goes the song), eating healthy (“I had a salad for lunch”), and the promise, that after a day of “balance” to have a Miller 64 with dinner because, “I’ve worked off my paunch.” Like the Heinz baked beans campaign pitched by Peggy in this episode, which imagines a “bean ballet” set to classical music and strikes the clients as old-fashioned, the Miller 64 ad is not targeted at the young “college” crowd, but at the many Mad Men viewers who, like Don, are turning forty. (“When you’re forty, how old will I be?” Don asks his son Bobby. “You'll be dead,” replies Bobby.) For his fortieth birthday, Harry gives Don a cane and Megan calls him an old man. As Betty tells Don in the Season 4 finale line repeated in the teaser that preceded Season 5’s two-hour premiere, “Things aren’t perfect.”


Season 5 opens with a picket line. Initial close ups of white police officers and passersby are quickly replaced by medium shots of black women and men carrying signs demanding work. This is the Civil Rights Movement, but it is also Occupy Wall Street, with these protests meant to reflect not only on our past, but also on our most recent historical moment. Our next series of shots takes us inside an office, which we immediately recognize as the part of an ad agency, even though we don’t know any of the four men working there: we suspect (and we will be proved wrong) that we are looking at the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce “creative” team — their obvious youth speaking to the next generation of Mad Men. Instead, the agency is Y&R: Young & Rubicam and, living up to their agency’s name, they react to the protests with an appropriate degree of childishness: annoyed by the noise coming from the street, they decide to “cool off” the protesters by first pouring and then throwing bags of ice water out the window. (There is an entire discourse of paper bags, barf bags, and body bags that runs through the episode.)


The opening sequence speaks to a series of changes that have taken places since we last saw our favorite characters seven months earlier (seven months by the show’s clock, seventeen months by ours). Trudy and Joan have both had their babies and each is looking a little worse for wear. As Pete Campbell puts it in his inimitable way, “there was a time when she wouldn’t leave the house in a robe.” Pete of course is speaking about Trudy, but his comment carries over to our first glimpse of Joan (preceded by a baby’s bottom and a hand applying diaper rash cream), still wearing a robe and pajamas in the middle of the afternoon. As her mother sarcastically notes, “You know you’re not exactly at your fighting weight.” (Joan begs to differ.)

Pete, meanwhile, has switched places with Don. An over-the-shoulder shot of Pete on the train is meant to remind us of our first glimpses of Don in Season 1: Pete has replaced Don on the commuter train moving between the city and its suburbs. While Don and Megan have moved into a gorgeous modern flat with a visible Manhattan skyline and audible traffic, Pete and Trudy have bought a house in the suburbs, and the shock of seeing their home for the first time is quite profound: nothing remains of the young modern couple with their well-appointed flat on the upper (upper) East side. Instead, Pete walks into what we first take to be the Drapers’ old kitchen, with the same kitchen cabinets and old-fashioned wallpaper. (To be clear, it is actually a different set, and we see a clear shot of a galley kitchen with a double sink on the right and a double stove on the left, as Pete despondently eats dry cereal out of a box — Trudy, it seems, has not yet mastered Betty’s homemaking skills.) The dingy-patterned wall paper, linoleum floor, and dark wood kitchen cabinets with their wrought-iron hinges no longer speak to the sense of bourgeois stability we first got from the Drapers’ home, before the cracks began to show. What might have passed for proper suburban upper-middle-class style five years earlier, now, in 1966, looks unbelievably shabby and depressing.

Style-wise, Season 5 does not disappoint: 1966 looks great, maybe even better than 1960 — skirts are shorter, heels are flatter, hair is longer. The colors, open space, and interior design that we first glimpsed in Palm Springs (Season 2, Episode 11, “The Jet Set”) are now part of the new Drapers’ new Manhattan home, and while we might miss Betty and her fainting couch, we know that Don has once again made the right move (“Marry early and often,” Ken Cosgrove’s wife jokes, looking at the plumper Jane Sterling.) But we also note those who are being left behind — not just Roger, who has no clients, no meetings, and has to share a secretary with Don, or Bert Cooper who waits patiently in the conference room for a meeting that’s taking place in the hallway, or Lane, who tries to seduce a young woman over the phone — but also Joan, Trudy, Jane, and even Peggy, whose clothes all speak to women aging out of the desirable twenty-something demographic. (We have yet to see Betty, of course, but I imagine that she, like Grace Kelly in Rear Window, always knows how to wear proper clothes.)

Mad Men has always been concerned with age because, unlike so much television, it is not a show about being young (it stars a leading man, for example, who even in his twenties always looked “mature”). And while we tend to associate the 1960s profoundly with youth, Mad Men wants us to see what it would have been like to live through it as adults — the “college kids” “sitting in” are not our focus. Instead, we are placed firmly inside the corporate world of bourgeois white conformism. As the Heinz client points out, speaking metaphorically for an entire generation, “beans” are not good by themselves, they are really better in a group.

Indeed, the Heinz baked beans ad campaign is one of the places we see this concern with age manifest itself. Peggy’s attempt to elevate the baked beans to the “art of supper” with new micro-photography and humor backfires, but the point is well taken: the desire to take something of humble origins to new heights. The clients wonder about the “message” — what will the viewer take away from the ad? Peggy’s claim is that it puts beans on your mind and shows you have a sense of humor, because beans are portrayed as far more important than they are. “Did you ever see beans up close?” asks the client, “They’re slimy… they look better in a group… beans is the war, the Depression, bomb shelters. We have to erase that.” “They have to be cool,” he continues, “I want kids in college… they have a hot plate, they’re sitting in… maybe it’s someone with a picket sign saying, 'We want beans!'”


A similar age gap manifests itself in Megan’s misguided desire to throw Don a surprise birthday party — she imagines that everyone loves birthdays (and surprises), while Don, as he puts it, hates to be the center of attention. That is of course not quite true: what Don hates is being the butt of a joke, which is precisely what he becomes. The title of the episode, “A Little Kiss,” is a translation of the French song Megan sings at Don’s surprise party, and it is of course not the first time that the show gives us a performance that reminds us that we are watching a spectacle. (Previous memorable sequences included Roger in blackface singing “My Old Kentucky Home,” Pete and Trudy dancing the Charleston, and Joan performing her own French song “C’est magnifique” while playing an accordion [“My Old Kentucky Home,” Season 3, Episode 3]). Megan’s “Zou bisou bisou” routine recalls Brigitte Bardot’s famous over-the-top dance in the 1956 …And God Created Woman — and while Megan is not as curvy or brilliantly seductive as BeBe (earlier, she admits to being a bad actress), the dance is excessive in the same way, breaking the bourgeois codes of propriety by turning on all the men in the room, except for Don. As is typical for Mad Men, the dance is then performed again and again as a kind of comic/traumatic repetition: first by Roger, then by Harry, then by Lane.

Don’s concern over being the butt of a joke (“You’re wondering what they’re laughing about. It’s not you,” Roger tells him; but a few scenes later, admits that he is in fact making fun of him). On some level, Don understands that his impulsive marriage to a woman nearly half his age makes him both comical and clichéd. His defense mechanism is to exercise total control over the woman he’s married, making sure that he is still our man: he demands that Megan open her blouse in his office, assumes that his own work schedule always takes priority (even when it seems he has nothing to do), and uses a fair amount of force to subdue his sex-kitten-turned-pouty-teenager. (As Don famously says to Ken in “The Hobo Code,” “you’ll realize in your private life that at a certain point seduction is over, and force is actually being requested.” [Season 1, Episode 8])

This concern over being the butt of a joke leads us back to the prank with which the episode started—the ad execs throwing water bombs out the Y& R office window. Y & R’s childish prank becomes a sign of their immaturity and bigotry, yet, in this episode, it is also an interesting device because it accomplishes, in a subtle way, a crossing of a racial divide that brings the problem of race “home,” or in this case, from the street into the office. To rub salt in their competitor’s wounds, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce puts an ad in the Times claiming to be “An equal opportunity employer. Our windows don’t open. We are committed to proving that Madison Avenue isn’t all wet.” Rather than Y & R, however, Joan becomes the ad’s first victim, assuming that it is meant as an advertisement for her own position. Reassured by Lane that she is as needed as ever, she tries to put into words her feeling of isolation: while Lane assures her that “Nothing’s happened,” she reminds him that, “Something always happens. Things are different. Someone tells a joke and you don’t know what they’re talking about.” “There’ve been no jokes, not without you,” Lane says. “Not even at my expense?” Joan asks.

The “equal opportunity” ad is of course a joke precisely at her expense, as a series of humiliations precede the revelation of truth. While Joan initially suspects that the ad is not real, she nevertheless brings the baby to the office to see for herself — and her first set of encounters, from difficulties opening the door, to a receptionist who has never heard of her, to learning that her job is being handled by two other secretaries — leads her to a tearful breakdown in Lane’s office. (As Mary Jacobus has long ago argued, a joke is almost always at woman’s expense.Indeed, as the episode draws to a close, SCDP is in fact in the process of hiring a new girl — and the imaginary threat of replacement is made real.)

But while Joan may be the joke’s first victim, she is not its only one. Because by the time the episode is over, the joke has played out to its logical conclusion: stepping out the elevator, Don and Megan find that the SCDP lobby is full of job seekers, black men and women who have answered the want ad. While SCDP thought it was addressing itself to its competition, it was really hailing a very different group — unconsciously, it was speaking to the group that we see picketing outside the Madison Avenue offices. For the first time ever, I think, Mad Men has a message, and it is about the fact that the outside world is about to be brought inside.

The letter, Lacan says, always arrives at its destination.


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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 4.13
"The Blue Pill"

Thursday, October 21, 2010

posted under , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[This second of two final entries in our multi-authored series of posts on the fourth season of Mad Men, prior to publishing MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, is by Lilya Kaganovsky. The first post was written by co-editors Lauren Goodlad and Rob Rushing]

"THE BLUE PILL"

Written by Lilya Kaganovsky (Slavic/Comparative Literature)

In 2008, six years after The Wire first aired on HBO, Film Quarterly published a review of the complete fourth season on DVD, which described (in a positive way) the show’s fans as junkies and the show as a drug. Fans come to video stores, wrote J. M. Tyree, jonesing for a hit, desperate for another dose of a show that missed its audience only by finding it (much like Proust suggests a good novelist does) after the fact, when its five (really four and a half) seasons were nearly over:

There is a growing cult around The Wire, although many of its members do not subscribe to HBO, appearing instead like junkies at their local video rental stores months after the original broadcasts, and helping the show continue its extraordinary afterlife.

If Season 4 of Mad Men has been about anything, it has been about addiction. Cigarettes, alcohol, and sex appeared this season no longer bathed in the retrospective glow of nostalgia, but as vice, pure and simple, starting with Don’s masochistic sex with a prostitute in the first episode, and ending with Midge’s heroin addiction. As with so much television since the 1990s, and in the realist novel before that, smoking and drinking are used only to show weakness of character, a man (or woman) out of control. Pete, for example, who has been a much more upstanding citizen this season, doesn’t smoke and barely drinks, and the same goes for Henry Francis, as he holds his moral high ground against Betty’s fits of rage. “You need a drink? What are you, a wino? You need a drink?” he snarls during a memorable car ride home (“The Summer Man,” 4.8). No wonder Don vomits twice during this season: his very being is rejecting the thing he has become, while addiction itself is linked to cancer that eats away at you from the inside (another theme that begins with Anna Draper’s illness and ends with a possible anti-smoking campaign for the American Cancer Society).

But what, as Avital Ronell asks in Crack Wars, do we hold against the drug addict? What do we hold against the drug addict?

… that he cuts himself off from the world, in exile from reality, far from objective reality and the real like of the city and the community; that he escapes into a world of simulacrum and fiction. We disapprove of hallucinations. . . . We cannot abide the fact that his is a pleasure taken in an experience without truth.

Ex-stasis, going beyond/outside of yourself, the “high” of transgression. For pleasure to be what it is, says Ronell, it has to exceed a limit of what is altogether wholesome and healthy. Otherwise, “it’s something like contentedness, which can be shown to be in fact an abandonment of pleasure.”

Heroin is “like drinking 100 bottles of whiskey while someone licks your tits,” says Midge, poetically.

There has been some debate about what Mad Men has meant for its viewers. Its most vociferous critics have insisted that there’s something false about the show, that the emperor has no clothes, that Mad Men, like a variation of the Matrix, is a “world that has been pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth.”

Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room… It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo… After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.

(“I want a third pill!” says Zizek about this particular form of forced choice. As an aside, we might note that the man dealing drugs here is called Morpheus, and that “truth” he is offering is a trip down the rabbit hole.)

Critics of the show cannot understand how others have become hooked, what keeps them coming back week after week asking for more. As one respondent to Jason Mittell’s post "On Disliking Mad Men" put it,

At first I was excited to see Mad Men. But my reaction was similar—a feeling of deep repulsion… I kept trying to sample it, hoping the drama/characters would “click.” When peers raved, I’d mutter something vaguely unenthusiastic, then have to listen to them “explain” that MM was really about the “crisis of masculinity” or some such.

Given “the horrendous peer pressure to love MM,” the same critic writes, we miss seeing the bad acting, the bad writing, the nonsensical characters with their inexplicable behavior. We are seduced by the set and costume design and so fail to notice that we are getting glamour without substance, surface without depth, simulacrum without truth. “Not only is it disingenuous,” she writes, “it’s repulsive.”

Season 4 of Mad Men ends with an inexplicable choice: in a moment of what can only be perceived as delusion or addiction, Don chooses Megan-the-secretary over Dr. Faye Miller. Surely he should know better by now! But the show, as we know, is not a Bildungsroman. Characters do not change or grow but, like addicts, repeat the same destructive acts because what they are addicted to is the fantasy itself. Faye offers Don a relationship “in the open.” She suggests that he can start trying to be a “person like the rest of us.” That he is a “type,” whose actions are known in advance. And Don even takes a step toward this new found “maturity” when he links his two names, Don and Dick, for Sally. And then he reverts, falls off the wagon, goes back for another hit. He proposes with another man’s ring, once again insisting on a fake identity over the real one. “I feel like myself when I’m with you,” Don tells Megan, “but—the way I always wanted to feel.”

Literature, cinema and television are about addiction. In order to be a good reader or a good viewer you have to allow yourself to be transported by the text, consumed by the fictions it offers. Children age 8, pediatric guidelines suggest, should have their TV viewing limited to an hour a day. Fiction offers us a way out of our daily lives, out of the monotony of existence, a way to move beyond the self. Ronell calls this “Narcossism”: our relation to ourselves structured and mediated by some form of addiction and urge. To get off any drug, she says, or anything that has been invested as an ideal object—something that you want to incorporate as part of you—precipitates a major narcissistic crisis.

Season 4 has been precisely about this narcissistic crisis. It’s been about trying to get off drugs—cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, bad sex, living a lie. It hasn’t been pleasant to watch. It’s been as if the show itself is trying to de-cathect its viewers by suddenly refusing to occupy that position of “ideal object,” as if the show itself is trying to resist “the horrendous peer pressure to love MM.” In essence, “Blowing Smoke” was the final episode of season 4, the episode where all the myths and fantasies of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” were seemingly rejected in favor of the “truth.” American Tobacco replaced by the American Cancer Society. Midge Daniels smoking pot replaced by Midge Daniels shooting up heroin.

But “Tomorrowland” is about something else. Let’s call it a “fresh start” because, like Don, we really only like the beginnings of things. There’s a wonderful episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Normal Again” 6.17) in which Buffy is offered a choice similar to the one Morpheus offers Neo, that is, between taking the blue pill and waking up a slave to fantasy, or taking the red pill and seeing the “truth.” The choice offered Buffy in “Normal Again” is similar: go back to the fantasy world in which you are a superhero and all your friends have superpowers, or stay in the “real” world where your delusional fantasies are just that—a sign of addiction and mental illness. Neo chooses the red pill. (We disapprove of hallucinations, says Ronell. We cannot abide the fact that the addict’s pleasure is taken in an experience without truth.) Buffy chooses the blue.

>Because to choose “reality” over “fantasy” is to give up on your desire. It means settling for contentment over jouissance, for Dr. Faye Miller over Megan. For the moment, Mad Men has pulled back from that particular edge, where it’s been heading all season long. The final coup belongs not to Don but to Peggy who not only singlehandedly breaks SCDP’s losing streak by signing a new client, but delivers one of the best lines of the entire season: “Well, I learned a long time ago to not get all my satisfaction from this job,” Joan tells her, in a moment of female bonding over men and a cigarette. “That’s bullshit!” says Peggy, exhaling smoke.

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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 4.1
"The Missing Piece"

Thursday, July 29, 2010

posted under , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[This post was published in anticipation of completing a co-edited volume that includes collected papers from February's symposium, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press), we are very happy to present the first in our multi-authored series of posts on Season 4 of AMC's Mad Men.]

"THE MISSING PIECE"

Written by Lilya Kaganovsky (Slavic/Comparative Literature)

Donald Draper, or “Don” as he is known (perhaps in an attempt to appear humble), is a handsome cipher. One imagines somewhere in an attic, there’s a painting of him that’s rapidly aging.

Advertising Age, profile of Don Draper


The new agency of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has no conference table and no second floor. The conference table in particular produces quite a bit of concerned humor: “Atherton thought the lack of a conference table was deliberate,” Bert Cooper explains, referring to a recent visitor. “He felt that a circle of chairs demands a conversation.” “About why there is no table,” Don quips. Likewise, the missing—or rather—imaginary second floor of SCDP, part of a PR stunt meant to give clients the impression of a bigger firm, is used (un)successfully by Don to sell the Jantzen bikini: “So well built, we can’t show you the second floor.” “I wish we really had a second floor, so I could jump off it,” says Harry Crane.

In many ways, “Public Relations” (Season 4, Episode 1) is about the “missing piece”: the missing conference table, the missing second floor, the “missed opportunity,” the missing leg of the reporter for Advertising Age (“A wooden leg,” says Roger, “they’re so cheap they can’t even afford a whole reporter”), the missing top of the two-piece bikini, the missing Don Draper: “My job is to write ads, not go around talking about who I am,” says Don. “Who knows who you are?” replies Roger.

As Slavoj Zizek puts it, the missing piece “is the paradox of desire at its purest: in order to sustain itself as desire, to articulate itself, a piece must be missing.” Zizek is talking about Lacanian truth as written for children: specifically, the difference between “desire” and “drive” as it appears in two Shel Silverstein classics, The Missing Piece and The Missing Piece Meets the Big O. But this is, of course, also the idea behind advertising pure and simple: the desiring subject looking for its missing piece that would fill in the gap and change it into a complete subject. The circle of chairs around the place where the conference table should be organizes conversation; the “handsome cipher” Don Draper, whom no one really knows but everyone is trying to please (“We’re all here because of you,” Peggy reminds him, “all we want to do is please you.”)

"Everything in its Right Place"

But the episode is also built around dirt, or our notions of dirty and clean. The “choir boys” over at Jantzen are appalled by the very clients they are trying to attract: “Do you want women who want bikinis to buy your two-piece, or do you just want to make sure that women who want a two-piece don’t suddenly buy a bikini? … You’re too scared of the skin that your two-piece was designed to show off,” Don tells them. The Jantzen clients are trying to find a way to market a two-piece bathing suit “without playing in the gutter.” Their reaction to Don’s ad is one of shock: “It’s somehow dirtier, not seeing anything,” Bob says.

“I like how they sit there like a couple of choir boys,” murmurs Roger, “you know one of them is leaving New York with VD.” Don’s housekeeper Celia doesn’t think the shoeshine kit belongs in the middle of the floor. Henry Francis is upset to find the dog in the house. Sally Draper’s histrionics at the dinner table have to be cleaned up with a rag. Don’s Glo-Coat “Shield” commercial promises that, “Footprints on a wet floor—that’s no longer a hanging offense!”, while the original ads claimed that, “Glo-Coat shields against black heel marks.” During Don’s Jantzen presentation, one of the clients puts his feet up on a coffee table, filled with cups and saucers. “Can I put my feet on this?” he asks. “Pretend that it’s your living room,” Roger tells him.

But “dirt,” as Mary Douglas reminds us in her 1966 work, “is matter out of place”:
As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread of holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behavior in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment.

“In short,” writes Douglas, “our pollution behavior is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications.” “What separates a bathing suit from underwear?” Don asks, before answering: “the cut and the print of the cloth, and some sort of gentleman's agreement.”

One of the cherished classifications at stake for upper-middle-class whites in the 1960s is the distinction between married and single, and the notion of the “family,” which is confused by the reality of divorce. “That’s what’s become of this country: everyone’s got two Thanksgivings to go to,” says Henry’s mother. The reporter from Ad Age suggests a variety of options to answer the question “Who is Don Draper?” including, “Knock-out wife, two kids, house in Westchester”—a description that might have, of course, fit Don to a tee—until this season.

Indeed, Don is most upset not when the reporter compares him to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (with a portrait rapidly aging in the attic), but when he claims that Don is married. “Jesus, he never asked me that. Did he check any facts?” Don asks. “I’m breaking a lot of my rules seeing a divorced man,” says Bethany Van Nuys, Don’s date. “I know what you see in her, and you could’ve gotten that without marrying,” Henry’s mother tells him, in reference to Betty. “We are a family company” the Jantzen boys remind Don. Even the call girl has family to go to on Thanksgiving. And of course, there’s the final comment from Henry’s mother that goes right to the point: “Honestly, Henry, I don’t know how you can stand living in that man’s dirt.” When Don sends the Jantzen “prudes” packing, he is cleaning house (something he tries, but fails, to do with Betty).

"The Importance of Being Earnest"

Don’s Glo-Coat commercial opens with a shadow cast across a white floor, and then to a close up of hands clutching prison bars. Cuts away to the clock remind us of High Noon. When the camera pulls back we see a boy trapped behind a wooden chair, screaming, “Lemme out of here! Lemme out of here!” “I’d like to lift a shadow off this evening,” says Bethany Van Nuys, by way of breaking the ice.

“Public Relations” is obviously staging the difference between public and private: the well-lit offices of SCDP and the dark and dirty Village apartment (incidentally, located at Waverly Place & 6th Ave., mere blocks away from Washington Square, on one side, and the Stonewall Inn, on the other); Don’s official sexuality (divorced man, no date in a year) vs. his unofficial “dates” with the call girl. In the end, Don learns to perform for the big Other—the reporter, the public, the client—to narrate a version of himself that fits into the one they have already created in their minds. He is no longer telling the “truth” as he did with the Ad Age reporter, but a cinematic version of the events of the past year: “I knew I could either die of boredom, or holster up my guns,” he says to Bert Cooper’s “man” from the Wall Street Journal.

But we see clearly that somewhere in an attic, there’s not simply a portrait that’s rapidly aging, but a mad man, screaming to get out. Read more

MAD WORLD: "Looking at Gender, Antonioni, and the Soviet Sixties"
Guest Writer: Andrea Ferber

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

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


[The last in our series of posts from the Unit's 2/19 symposium, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, describes a panel that featured papers by Lilya Kaganovsky, Robert A. Rushing, and Diane P. Koenker.]

“Looking at Gender, Antonioni, and the Soviet Sixties”

Written by Andrea Ferber (Art History)

Though Roger Sterling, speaking from Mad Men's vision of the early 1960s, firmly believes that “psychiatry is just this year’s candy pink stove,” every presentation in last month's MAD WORLD symposium focused heavily on psychology in relation to both sides of the screen—from fictional characters to the appeal for audiences. The second panel, which included talks by Lilya Kaganovsky, Robert A. Rushing, and Diane P. Koenker, addressed character development through analysis of cinematic techniques, style, spectatorship, and sexuality.


Lilya Kaganovsky discussed the gendered gaze and the spectacle of masquerade á la Berger and Mulvey, focusing especially on season two’s “Maidenform” episode of Mad Men in which Sterling Cooper is approached to rethink advertising for feminine undergarments. While arguably most shows (and any media, for that matter) display sexualized bodies for the pleasure of consumers, this episode seems tied together by a web of gazes. In addition to Don, the three main female characters Betty, Joan, and Peggy flaunt themselves for their own gratification and ours; the men at Sterling Cooper categorize each female employee as either a “Jackie” or a “Marilyn”; and the episode ends with a striptease—during which the gaze with the most tension is not the audience's ogling the showgirls but Pete’s mean stare toward Peggy.


Comparing Don to other male characters, Kaganovsky argued that Don may be more comfortable in his masculinity because he recognizes it as a construct to be performed. Don’s character is the epitome of smoothness—he can save the otherwise-bombed business meeting with Lucky Strike with a catchy sales pitch (“It’s Toasted”) and always has a suave reply to his woman-of-the-hour. Yet it is his innocent, doe-eyed daughter Sally who most unnerves him. Don finds Sally’s loving, admiring gaze extremely disconcerting because he knows that she sees him as something he is not: a virtuous man of integrity worthy of respect. Pulling all these gazes together, Kaganovsky argued that even beyond this episode, Mad Men questions the meanings and effects of looking.

Borrowing from the season two episode “The New Girl,” in his title, Rob Rushing presented “It Will Shock You How Much This Never Happened: Antonioni and Mad Men” drawing numerous parallels between the AMC television show and the work of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni.


Both Matthew Weiner and Antonioni emphasize visuals or surface appearances, especially that of people, and the fragility of identity. Just as Antonioni’s characters have little or no interiority, so Mad Men encourages us to read superficially, based on clothes and body language. Furthermore, Rushing asserted, both Weiner's show and Antonioni's films reveal an interest in watching things disappear. Citing the interchangability and shallow subjectivity of characters such as Claudia and Anna (L’avventura, 1960, image right), Locke and Robertson (The Passenger, 1975), and Dick and Don in Mad Men, Rushing persuasively made comparisons beyond obviously similar sixties chic. Overall, “[Mad Men’s] larger project is tracing the disappearance of a set of economic, sexual, and racial relations that seem unimaginable to many of today’s spectators. Don knows that the first thing that people want is to forget,” Rushing stated.

Maintaining the focus on cinema, Diane Koenker aligned early sixties youth culture in the Soviet Union as depicted in films of the era: in particular, Nine Days of One Year (1961) by Mikhail Romm, and I Am Twenty Years Old (1965) and July Rain (1966, image below), both by Marlen Khutsiyev.




The young protagonists, not unlike the American counterparts depicted in Mad Men, are decidedly hip with thick eyeliner, bouffant hairdos, skinny neckties and grey suits. Likewise they share an addiction to chain smoking and concern themselves with pursuing romantic relationships. On the other hand, according to Koenker, sex and sexuality was depicted far less openly in the media of the Soviet sixties than in the United States and Western Europe.



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Photos from MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, 2/19/2010
First series

Monday, February 22, 2010

posted under , , , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
Michael Szalay delivers his morning
keynote address on the advent of market
segmentation in 1960s advertising.

Leslie Reagan and Clarence Lang speaking, respectively. on women's reproductive experience and civil rights in the 1960s.


Lilya Kaganovksy discusses gender and spectatorship.

Photos from the MAD WORLD symposium,
February 19, 2010.




Irene Small discussing art and aesthetics in Mad Men and its contexts.







Lynne Joyrich delivering the second keynote address with allusion
to a Sesame Street satire on Mad Men.



Dianne Harris speaking on Mad Men and interiors.

 Rob Rushing fielding a question on the topic of the Italian director Antonioni.
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The Heat in FLB

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

posted under , , , , by Unit for Criticism
Written by Lilya Kaganovsky, Slavic and Comparative Literature

Those of you who do not work in the Foreign Languages Building may not be aware of a perennial problem, known over email by the subject heading “The heat in FLB.” This subject line generally precedes a message about the heating system’s failure—either to generate air conditioning when the temperatures outside reach over 90 degrees, or heat, when the temps fall well below freezing. Actually, the trouble is that the heating system, like my boyfriend’s basement apartment in Michigan in 1992, generally manages to turn on the air conditioning when the temps fall below zero, and turn up the heat when they reach over 90. The most recent crisis, which precipitated the current maintenance work on the heating and cooling system, was that the heat came on in the middle of the heat wave, bringing the temps in people’s offices to well over 100 degrees. And as you know, when people get too hot, they become cranky.

The last postings from FLB maintenance looked like this:
Heat Issues - FLB [ 6/10/2008 ]
Tuesday, June 10, 2008 9:50 AM

There are heat issues currently being experienced throughout the building.

F&S has reported a ‘Chilled Water’ programming error has created the issues we are currently experiencing.

These issues should be corrected as soon as possible.

Please continue to report issues you may have so they can be relayed to F&S.

UPDATE - Heat Issues - FLB [ 6/10/2008 ]
June 10, 2008 12:57:24 PM CDT

The Building (FLB) is currently experiencing multiple issues with the HVAC with many offices reaching temperatures in excess of 90 degrees.

Not all of these issues are overlapping as the building is serviced by multiple fans.

Please submit your issues directly to me in e-mail so I can forward the issues to F&S.

Individual calls and submissions are not showing up on the buildings work request list.

WEDNESDAY UPDATE - Heat Issues - FLB [ 6/10/2008 ]
June 11, 2008 9:24:15 AM CDT

F&S/O&M has isolated what appears to have been the main issue contributing to the heat issues we have been experiencing.

Adjustments have been made and appear to be working in the offices I have checked up to this point.

You can verify that things are improving by feeling the air coming from your system. If it’s not 100+ degrees it is working.

This cool down may take a little while as it is a building wide problem.

Please check your thermostat to see that it is set to a comfortable level and not 55.

If you have air that is heated coming from your system

PLEASE LET ME KNOW IMMEDIATELY

I will continue to monitor this situation as necessary to ensure we receive the quickest resolution possible.

Your patience through this issue is greatly appreciated.

In addition to reporting issues please report as things return to normal so we will know your individual issues have been resolved.


Now, generally speaking, the heat in FLB is not much of a concern to me (other than freezing or overheating on the days when the system goes haywire), although it does seem to stand for a certain general attitude of the building: nothing ever works quite right here. So, to repeat, not much of a concern until earlier this week, when I received the following email forwarded through various channels, with the subject line, “Possible problem you need to be aware of”:

This is a heads up for you. [name] had a report from one of the F&S steam distribution workers this morning that he is planning to file a complaint with his supervisor about a picture Lilya Kaganovsky has displayed on her desk. He finds it offensive and considers it child pornography. This worker is in the building cleaning the heating/AC coils in every office.


Just in case you were wondering, the offending art in question is not a picture of my six year old son Sasha caught in some uncensored moment, but a poster by the artist Tierney Gearon called “I am a Camera” that I bought at the Saatchi Gallery gift shop in 2001 in London. I’ve had it in my office for the last 7 yrs, and so far, the only comment it received was from a student who knew Gearon’s work and the child pornography controversy that surrounded it. Here is some useful information on Tierney Gearon, immediately collected by Robert Rushing, after five minutes on Google:

1. The London police concluded that the images were not pornographic (of the hundreds of visitors to the Saatchi gallery, only three complained).
2. The offending image is widely available on the Internet from art gallery web sites, Gearon retrospectives, art blogs and the like.
3. The images are featured in a film about the artist, entitled Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project, shown at the Sundance film festival, available on Netflix and Amazon, and soon to be shown on the Sundance Channel.
4. The poster in question is a poster. Purchased at a gift shop. In an art museum.
5. Similar Gearon images are available for sale in poster and art shops:


Here’s the original photograph from which my poster was made:


'Untitled', 2000, from the Saatchi Gallery exhibition 'I Am A Camera', 2001


My image is of the boy on the right, with mask and crossbow and penis and the words “I am a Camera.” It’s a very good poster.

Now, my first thought was, I should move the poster out of the way while the maintenance worker lets off steam (literally), and do I really want to be the next cover story of the DI or the Chronicle of Higher Ed (“Feminist Accused of Child Pornography” or “Newly Tenured Professor Fired over Moral Turpitude”)? My second thought was, my love of strange and bizarre art has finally come to bite me on the ass. I have another lovely poster in my office at home which features a manikin/woman holding up a champagne flute of yellow liquid and the words, “Save Yourself: Drink Urine.”
This one I picked up at the Diesel Store in Rome and it is a part of a long brochure advertising different ways to “save yourself” (another one features the woman reproduced several times with the words “Save Yourself: Cloning”).

And then I took another look at the contents of my office:

In the fall, I am once again teaching a course on Nabokov, including, of course, Lolita.

I have, on my film theory bookshelf, Linda Williams’ Hard Core and The Porn Studies Reader.

My favorite novel to teach is Madame Bovary. I generally use Molly Bloom’s monologue from Ulysses to demonstrate jouissance and stream of consciousness.

I have been known to project images of male genitalia onto the ceiling of the Levis Faculty Center (it was a question of masculinity in the film Fight Club)—but all these, I suppose, are a question of context.

What the maintenance worker encountered was an image out of context. He had no class assignment, no art gallery visit, no clever book intro to place the poster/work of art into anything that would make it make sense. All he saw was a boy with a penis. Titillating? Not at all. Erotic? Clearly not. Disturbing? Shocking? Provoking? Certainly. And therein probably lies the issue: in our daily exposure to the strangeness of art we have become used to images of fisting in Mapplethorpe, and “Piss Christ” and dung; we are no longer shocked the way Baudelaire, Benjamin, the Russian formalists, and other people writing about art at the beginning of the 20th century thought we should be. We are neither the bourgeois French reading public, nor the uneducated Soviet “masses” that saw pornography and decadence wherever they turned. But I suppose it’s nice to know that there are still people out there that can be shocked by art. Nice, until they report you and you start making the news.

So: there’s no turning this poster to the wall. But I may have to chain myself to Lincoln Hall if the heat in FLB is elevated beyond “threat level: orange.” In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a quote from Alfred Appel’s well-known introduction to The Annotated Lolita, and some moments in art/porn history:

I was Nabokov’s student at Cornell in 1953-1954, at a time when most undergraduates did not know he was a writer. Drafted into the army a year later, I was sent overseas to France. On my first pass to Paris I naturally went browsing in a Left Bank bookstore. An array of Olympia Press books, daringly displayed above the counter, seemed most inviting—and there, between copies of Until She Screams and The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe, I found Lolita. […] [T]his title was new to me; and its context and format were more than surprising, even if in those innocent pre-Grove Press days the semi-literate wags on fraternity row had dubbed Naokov’s Literature 311-312 lecture course “Dirty Lit” because of such readings as Ulysses and Madame Bovary (the keenest campus wits invariably dropped the B when mentioning the latter). I brought Lolita back to my base, which was situated out in the woods. Passes were hard to get and new Olympia titles were always in demand in the barracks. The appearance of a new girl in town thus caused a minor clamor. “Hey, lemme read your dirty book, man!” insisted “Stockade Clyde” Carr, who had justly earned his sobriquet, and to whose request I acceded at once. “Read it aloud, Stockade,” someone called, and skipping the Foreword, Stockade Clyde began to make his remedial way through the opening paragraph. “ ‘Lo… lita, light… of my life, fire of my … loins. My sin, my soul … Lo-lee-ta: The… tip of the… tongue… taking… a trip…’—Damn!” yelled Stockade, throwing the book against the wall. “It’s God-damn Litachure!!” Thus the Instant Pornography Test, known in psychological-testing circles as the “IPT.” Although infallible, it has never to my knowledge been used in any court case.



On book censorship in the US

On Tierney Gearon at the Saatchi Gallery

The Meese Report

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