[The seventh in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 7 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]
"Let’s Have Another Piece of Pie"
Written by: Lauren M. E. Goodlad (Illinois).
The term pastiche has become synonymous with postmodernism and the reign of signifiers detached from deeper reference or history. But as the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics reminds us, long before pastiche developed its postmodern connotation of using “recognizable ingredients” while offering “no new substance,” the word derived from the Italian for pasticcio “or a hodge-podge of pie containing both meat and pasta.” To say that “Waterloo,” Mad Men’s Season 7 "mid-season finale" is pastiche, is not to condemn a series that, back in 2010, I argued was anything but. For at that time the show—still embedded in the pre-counterculture milieu of the early 60s—turned on a masterful dialectics between historical events like the Kennedy assassination and our own turn-of-the millennium emergencies. Those early-60s stories (as I wrote last June), “in inflecting our imaginary with the ‘history’ we had forgotten to remember as such, added something quite distinct to what we could take for the history of our present.” Yes, Mad Men has changed as it nears its final curtain; and as Caroline Levine wrote two weeks ago, many once-ardent viewers have wearied of its charms. Yet, I, for one, was happy enough last night to pull up a chair and join Roger in the spirit of Irving Berlin’s Depression-era ditty. “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” I say, with a nice hodge-podge of meat and pasta on the side.
Of course, Mad Men has always sported a playful self-consciousness, even during episodes of stunning high seriousness. Almost inevitably, the show has begun paying tribute to its own greatest moments: last week by staging an homage to Season 4’s “The Suitcase”and this week, on the occasion of Bert’s death, by recalling us to Joan’s promptitude in Season 1 when she joined Bert in alerting clients to what then looked like Roger’s imminent demise (“The Long Weekend”).
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[The sixth 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]
"Living in the Not Knowing"
Written by: Sean O'Sullivan (Ohio State University).
The first notably long scene in this episode (running close to three minutes) shows Peggy running through a prospective version of a commercial for Burger Chef—a client that occupies the slightly awkward intersection of low class and national exposure. (It’s the opposite of Jaguar.) There is a lot to consider here, but I’ll spotlight three elements. First, there is the question we have had to live with from the very beginning of the show: namely, is this ad any good? Don will later tell Peggy that their job requires “living in the not knowing”—an inevitable uncertainty about whether any latest idea has intrinsic value, or if it will always be defined by some horrid combination of opinion, guesswork, and business imperatives. Living in the not knowing, of course, is a defining aspect of watching a serial, even one that is approaching the end of its run. I’ll say more about that later, but for the moment I want to think about our quandary about knowing, or not knowing, whether “It’s toasted,” or Don and Peggy’s dueling Heinz ketchup billboards, or any of the other putatively brilliant ideas we’ve seen, are good only because other people within this fictional world seem to think they are. The core anxiety about the twentieth-century loss of fixed cultural values (inherited, in part from Mad Men’s parent enterprise, The Sopranos) affects every aspect of this environment. The Chevrolet XP campaign—which, we learn later, is apparently good enough to get SC&P to the threshold of Buick—has been entirely invisible. Our last sense of it came last season in that hotel bar in Detroit, when Don mentioned a sea of expectant faces, but no glimpses of the product itself, as the initial launch. Where is the thing itself? Later in the episode, Peggy will have an apparent epiphany about what to do with Burger Chef. Her first exclamation is, “That’s it!” Then she immediately modifies the discovery: “That’s more what it is.” We want yes or no, but we can only make do with more and less—a warning of a kind to those looking for satisfaction or resolution in this final season.
A second element has to do with the form of Peggy’s presentation here—namely, two large cardboard rectangles, each featuring six images. If you squint a little and think allegorically, this looks a little like the last “season” we’re getting of Mad Men: something broken into two parts, each part composed of six or seven pieces, with a narrative possibly flowing through the two big pieces. We can imagine this as a version of the whiteboard of writers’ rooms, with a season broken down into episode-sections. The story that Peggy tells here is a clean one of problem (“Mom” needs to feed the kids) and solution (Burger Chef, and the restoration of “family happiness,” in Lou Avery’s words). But what of the divided story of Mad Men’s last “year”? The 30-second pitch that AMC gives us at the end of the episode is not “Next on Mad Men” (despite the prominent tag line) but in fact “previously on Mad Men,” as already-viewed snippets, rapid editing, charged dialogue, and agitated music suggest that the following episode is going to be the conclusion to a teleological season from a very different show. (Boardwalk Empire?) We are told that the next episode is the “mid-season finale.” What the hell is a mid-season finale? It’s a device invented by the economic imperatives of a channel that pulled off the same dubious maneuver with Breaking Bad. It’s a fake destination point, as artificial in its way as the family in Peggy’s ad, an instance of the client dictating copy, of the corporation shaping art. That’s the fact of television, of course; but its display here, like the conversations throughout the episode about whether the Burger Chef ad is good for its authors or good for its paymasters, spotlights the fact that the old shop with which we’re so familiar is prey to the whims of a calculating multinational entity, a big humming computer. Who decided that the last season of Mad Men should be broken into two parts? Why, Jim Cutler did. Will the first part be a problem, and the second a solution—resembling not just Peggy’s ad, but all conventional scripts arranged to meet Hollywood formula? That’s a threat that this episode will itself seem to enact.
The third element has to do with who is in this room: namely, Peggy, Don, Pete, Harry Crane, and Lou Avery. The first four characters were introduced to us within the first ten minutes of the pilot; our sense of Mad Men in the seventh season rests heavily on the characters and interconnections we’ve known all along. Now, Harry has always been a bit of an outlier in the group. But if we entertain the idea of a character having agency (rather than being a victim of authorial whim), then we might go along with Don’s admittedly self-serving claim at the end of the episode, that Harry has been “very loyal”; he hasn’t abandoned us in the ways that Midge Daniels, Sal Romano, and Paul Kinsey did. Harry’s translation into partner—in the episode’s bracketing conference room scene—seems legitimate on a serial level as well. If he’s going to last, perhaps implausibly, as long as he has, we simply have to accept the fact that he has a stake in what Mad Men, deep down, is; like it or not, Mad Men is “more what it is” with Harry Crane than without him.
Peggy, Don, and Pete will have their big moment in the final scene. But what about the fifth character here—Lou Avery? His presence, in contrast with the four stalwarts, underscores not just a central challenge of late seasons but a recurring examination in this episode particularly: namely, the jostling and juxtaposition of people we’ve just met with people we’ve known a long time. How much can/should we invest in despising Lou Avery, who clearly exists to be despised? Peggy condescendingly refers here to Don’s contributions to the work on Burger Chef as “instrumental”—a term that could connote central importance or mere utility. How instrumental is Lou Avery to Mad Men? Until now, he has been a delightfully one-dimensional figure of sarcasm and obstruction. But in “The Strategy” he is much more like a gruff but well-meaning uncle, giving Peggy more than one look of approval and generally getting along with all and sundry. If Lou were important, if he were going to get a few seasons to “develop,” then such a shift might indicate that we need to live with him a bit longer to get a sense of his value—just as we have had to live longer with Pete Campbell, in particular, to move beyond his initial status as a one-dimensional figure of sarcasm and obstruction. But Lou, as a late-season character, is inevitably on a short-term contract. Does he matter—yes or no? The answer, as always, is more or less.
The two principal non-fast food storylines in “The Strategy” hinge on two latecomers to the populace of Mad Men, two immigrants whose uncertain value or impact put their own kinds of pressure on living in the not knowing. Who is Bonnie Whiteside? Is there anything more to her than the faintest sketch of character—“Mom,” “Jimmy,” “Katie”—that circulate in later versions of the Burger Chef ad? Until this point, and perhaps through this point, she has seemed simply the distillation of two primal delights: sex and real estate. She is a body, and she is free-market capitalism. Is that a character? She does the kind of thing, in this episode, that a character is reputed to do—namely, have an arc. She arrives in New York as California Woman, exhibiting her tan for Don and the rest of Pete’s colleagues; she is forced to cool her heels when Pete is waylaid by marital rancor and jealousy in Cos Cob; and she is angry to discover that she does not like Pete “in New York,” demonstrating that she is just learning the characters of the world we know. (“Then you don’t like me,” replies Pete, reflecting his typical obtuseness about nuance and context.) Has anything really happened to her? Has she changed? Perhaps more to the point, have she and Pete broken up by the end of the episode? (I say no; my wife says yes.) Would it matter if they have broken up? Does her run on Mad Men amount to another version of problem/solution—or perhaps solution/problem, a remedy for Pete’s adjustment to the West Coast followed by the rupture of that remedy?
Bob Benson gives us a very different instance of the late-season addition. He was a vague, comic figure throughout Season 6, only gradually working his way closer to the center of the show, culminating in the revelation that he was a Dick Whitman-like fraud. But he’s existed merely as exposition in this season, metonymically connected to “Detroit,” and best remembered on the Web as one of Mad Men’s favorite GIFs. Suddenly, in “The Strategy,” he’s front and center, rescued from the kind of exile that has overtaken poor Ted Chaough, alone on his desk on a perpetual conference call. My guess is that we all feel the loss of Ted—as Peggy originally saw him, as the optimistic and turtlenecked antidote to Don’s alcoholic misery. But did we miss Bob Benson, other than as comic relief? Now, he’s not only back, but he’s definitional to the episode. His sexual identity becomes a plot point! He’s the first to learn Chevy’s plan to dump SC&P! He proposes to Joan! The sequence between Bob and Bill Hartley, the GM executive whom he bails out of jail for sexual misconduct, spotlights the potential peculiarity of Bob’s role. The likes of Hartley are legion in serial drama: the one-off character who exists to reveal a secret about a recurring, central part of the show. But when Bob himself works as a kind of cameo, what is the relative consequence of Hartley’s instrumentality?**
That unexpected marriage proposal operates as the middle event in a three-scene sequence that looks like the heart of the episode—a cluster nearly twelve minutes in length that begins with Peggy and Don first sitting down to re-think Burger Chef, moves to the high drama of Joan’s apartment, and concludes with That Dance and That Kiss. Bob’s suggestion that Joan serve as his beard in a rise to GM stardom stuns her, perhaps most pointedly in his last, surrendering remark: “I’m just being realistic.” Joan says that she wants love, and that she would “rather die hoping than make some arrangement.” Joan may have the smartest, no-nonsense business head in the office; but she apparently thinks she’s living in an opera, or at least a soap opera. Realism and romance, the plausible and the fanciful, have been the twin forces of Mad Men from its beginning—an apparently scrupulous commitment to showing how things are/were intertwined with “creative hijinks” (Jim Cutler’s phrase of a few weeks back) like Don’s secret family in Westchester—secret to us throughout the pilot—and Don’s secret past in the sticks. As the show reaches its stopping point (and its mid! season! finale!), the tricky interplay between those core narrative strategies gets ever more focused on the stopping points of the show’s characters. Will we get a realistic or romantic cessation for Joan and the rest of the partners in the industrial project that is Mad Men?
It’s hard to imagine that it can ever get more romantic than in the longest scene of the episode, wherein Don and especially Peggy seem to crack the conundrum of Burger Chef (however temporarily), and where Sinatra’s “My Way” provokes him to tender, and her to accept, an invitation to bring their bodies together and sway.Who ever thought that Mad Men would give us such a lurid piece of fan service? “The Suitcase” is one of the most beloved episodes, if not the most beloved, in the show’s run—the two-hander between Don and Peggy in his office on the night that Anna Draper died. Here we are once again in Don’s office—or, rather, we are in the office that late-character Lou Avery is renting, the office that seems destined to become Peggy’s. The power of “The Suitcase” (see also Michael Berube's post) was its melancholy, its affirmation that Mad Men was about the relationship between these two characters. The scene here gives us something much sweeter, a reconciliation that goes out, like a song dedication on an oldies station, to those who were there way back when--1960/2007. The central couple of the show asserted their longevity in the conversation that precedes their act of nostalgic entitlement—at one point, each of them says, about some date or past behavior, “I don’t remember.” Late characters don’t get to say lines like that; it’s the privilege of the core members of the show, those who make it more what it is—and of course it’s also the privilege of the viewers, who have been around long enough to forget. Take that, Bonnie Whiteside.
The end is near, Old Blue Eyes tells us. And we get what looks exactly like a final curtain, the camera tracking back to show us the couple in long shot—the image echoed mysteriously in a mirror that seems to have been installed for just this purpose, perhaps by director Phil Abraham. Meanwhile, the music switches from a distance—part of the overheard lived world of the show—to a place loud and present, metamorphosed into soundtrack. Followed, swooningly, by a dissolve. This fake-closure seems dangled in front of us by the show’s makers—perhaps a parody of fan service, or maybe just an alternative version (a flash-sideways) of what this show might be, indeed how the series might end, under a different aesthetic administration. But we will get a second ending, subsequent to a montage of Bonnie and Megan heading back to the Coast, and the plot revelations about Chevrolet and Buick. Doubles and multiples of conclusion have been a recurrent technique of Mad Men, although typically at the ends of seasons. The two versions of Don’s homecoming at Thanksgiving in the first year, accompanied by Bob Dylan’s “Don’ Think Twice, It’s All Right”; the strains of “You Only Live Twice” in the fifth year, as Don walked from the make-believe of a film set to a barely-believable bar; Judy Collins’ “Both Sides Now” as an accompaniment to Don revealing his double identity to his children, last year. It seems curious to get it here, as almost a parodic, internal version of “next”—or more likely “much later”—on Mad Men.
Arguably, the actual ending of the episode is even more romantic. For the second week in a row, we are treated to a ménage-a-trois. Last time, it was a late 60s fantasy of Southern California seduction, as “Amy from Delaware” (a late-season avatar if ever there was one) visited the Draper marital bed. Now, it’s the three characters on which the show has arguably always been pitched. Two of them are parents of a child neither has ever seen; the familial relation of the third (Don) to these other two has never seemed more uncertain. But it’s a contained uncertainty—not an instability produced by new personnel from the outside.
The scene begins with what seems, at least to me, another installment of the self-conscious reflections on what this show has been, and what it can still become in the little time we have left. “Now we have nothing,” Pete announces, ventriloquizing the likes of Caroline Levine, “only weeks away.” This is the dead end of Burger Chef as the dead end of Mad Men. Don and Peggy, however, will have none of this. Don told Peggy earlier that his solution to artistic crisis is to “start at the beginning again, see if I end up at the same place.” The episode began at one kind of Burger Chef, and it ends at another. That first one—with Peggy and John Mathis desperately buttonholing customers in the anonymous Midwest—was Burger Chef as abject realism: a bedraggled mother, kids whose names (whose specificity) are of no interest to anyone, “convenience” rather than desire the operative term. In culinary terms, it’s the “arrangement” for which Joan would not settle—not the “love” that advertising absorbs as its currency, a word (Don told Rachel Menken in the pilot) invented by guys like him to sell nylons. Or, in this case, to sell fast food. Don tells Peggy, in the first ending of the episode, that her latest version of Burger Chef—in effect, the version she lived in the first scene of the episode—is “too sad for an ad.” And, apparently, too sad to conclude this episode of Mad Men.
Because what we get, in the second valedictory camera track-back of the episode, is a portrait of Pete, Peggy, and Don in as romantic a version of dispensable Americana as the show can muster. Don’s final scrutable gesture is to point affectionately toward Pete’s chin, showing him where he needs to clean off some condiment. Since when does Don Draper care that Pete Campbell has condiment on his chin? This is the “family happiness” incarnation of the show, and its principals, sealed behind the glass/screen of a simulacrum of communal delight. Will Mad Men really opt for romance at the end? Is that really more “what it is”? Is the cost of fractious relationships with late characters a suffocating, sentimental relationship with early ones? Bonnie Whiteside’s earlier, irritated rejoinder, in the hotel room, to Pete’s attempts to make nice may encode a possible warning to the creator of this show, as he makes his final moves. Matthew Weiner, you’re not going to fuck your way out of this.
**The third visitor to New York, along with Bonnie and Bob, is Megan Draper, one of the least beloved members in the category of “late” characters. Is she indeed “late”? Not perhaps by a purely mathematical accounting. But she followed Bobbie Barrett, and Suzanne Farrell, and Faye Miller. What makes her something other than a variation on a theme? We are perhaps no more sick of her than we would have been of Bobbie or Suzanne or Faye. But she may always seem to be an interloper, as far as strict constructionists are concerned—always a symptom of post-classical Mad Men.
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[The fifth 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]
"Loyalty"
Written by: Caroline Levine (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“The Runaways” was an episode that returned us again and again to questions of loyalty, and I found myself wondering whether the show might be referring in some way to the precarious loyalty of its audiences. Ratings have dipped over time. Lots of viewers have been willing to let Mad Men go, and if my acquaintance is anything to go by, many who have stuck with it are more disappointed than satisfied, their commitment to watching now brittle and strained.
Of course, the series’ slow pace has always been hard on those who are afraid of commitment. Critic Logan Hill says, “It’s a show that has always been built for the obsessive fan, and hasn’t really cared very much for the casual fan… It’s been kind of cocky about that.” Casual—like the worker who lounges on the sofa or like the boyfriend who would rather go back to jail than stick with the mother of his child. If Mad Men has always sought a loyal, committed relationship with us rather than a sequence of one-night stands, its characters’ stories, dominated break-ups and firings, haven’t given us great models.
Should we be more loyal? Should “guys like us” stick together, as Harry Crane says, because “we go back a long way”? Should we try to do our best to make sure that Mad Men is “still important,” even though we are really having trouble figuring out exactly how to do so? Certainly loyalty feels like a troubling value coming from a Philip Morris executive, who moralizes that his company “won’t turn on his friends as easily” as Don does. It’s tough to be inspired by those who stick to their friends precisely so that they can go on killing them.
Mad Men teaches us a lot more about falling out of love than about building loyalty. But then what, exactly, has happened to the relationship between the show and its audiences? Perhaps these days we are more likely to dally with Game of Thrones, to be excited by True Detective or Top of the Lake. But what was it that attracted us to Mad Men in the first place, and what’s turning us off or splitting us up now?
There were once many kinds of attraction. Some who loved the first seasons fell for the early sixties style, and dwelled happily on the elegant clothes and sleek furniture. The late sixties is now quite deliberately betraying that style. Don looks awkward in his sports shirt compared to Megan’s sexy dance partner, and beautiful Stephanie clearly needs a bath. The couch that used to be an object of desire is now in the wrong spot and too heavy to move.
Another group who loved Mad Men in its youth were drawn to its richness as historical fiction. From casual racism to littering to drugged childbirth, Mad Men invited us to imagine a time just long enough ago to feel distant, just close enough to feel familiar. Matthew Weiner is famously obsessed with historically authentic detail, and the show has always raised interesting, troubling questions about his glossy, glamorous version of an old boy past. These days, the show offers up a world that feels less gorgeous and less exclusive, and yet not ever radically disruptive enough. It’s a hodge podge of approaches to life—West Coast as well as East, hippie commune emerging out of suburban elite, behatted executives alongside beards and miniskirts—that won’t let us settle into a single, smooth vision of the past (nostalgic or critical as the case may be).
Some early viewers were just there for the plot. It started out a really good one: we were drawn into the precariousness of a life built on secrets. Would exposure of Don’s past unsettle his career, with his talent for seducing us with appearances? Would plotting blue-blooded Pete take down Don, the social impostor? That plot is distant, now. We’ve had some good dramatic tension since that has been organized around the success or failure of the company, and yet those moments too feel far away in this season. The narrative is not just slow but motiveless. Don seems to be sinking slowly, or is he rising again? Joan has climbed to the top and seems secure there. Peggy remains single. Roger sits perched pretty well in his own complacency. There’s no suspense here, no readiness for sudden crisis or revelation.
For many audiences, the series once did really well when it came to complex and richly rounded characters. Especially the white women who were trying to figure out how to live satisfying lives: Peggy, Joan, Betty, and Sally. Pete was also fascinating in his aspiration to succeed, and amoral Roger was disturbingly charming. All of them have receded into minorness now. The number of characters has expanded, but most are forgettable. Who is that Cutler, again? Who are the many boy creatives who laugh at Lou?
The show holds on, wrongly I think, to a loyalty to Don as its central character. Megan’s a frustrating figure, I believe, in part because she too keeps up her hungry adoration for Don. She holds him too much at the center, just as the show does. In “Runaways,” she’s first warm to Stephanie, and then suddenly jealous when Stephanie blurts that she knows all of Don’s secrets. Megan drives Stephanie away, despite her promise to hold on to her for Don. Megan then tries to make herself important to Don by making him feel important, at the center of a sexy threesome: will sharing him with Amy, whom he has continually tried to reject and dismiss, put Megan back at the center? Structurally, this seems like a strategy that can’t possibly work. It’s as though Mad Men both did and did not get its own message that it’s impossible to try to organize a meaningful life around a debonair professional ad man.
If the series has turned off audiences by failing to deliver up some of its earlier pleasures—pleasures of style, historical detail, suspenseful plot, and complex character—one place where it continues strong is in the complex interweaving of its themes. Advertising brings together seduction and work, social climbing and courtship, nostalgia and strategy. There are rich resonances in every episode.
In “Runaways,” for example, Lou’s absurd dream of a wholesome Saturday cartoon that upholds values of patriotism and loyalty finds intriguing echoes in both Megan and Betty, “who can take anything but an order.” Betty rebels against Henry’s authority, paradoxically, when she holds on to her right to speak up in favor of traditional authority and against youthful rebellion. “Leave the thinking to me,” Henry orders. This command never works in Mad Men, where women always refuse this particular model of loyalty. As Betty says simply, “I can think all by myself.” Meanwhile, the computer, which poor paranoid Michael is not entirely wrong to see as coming for all of us, hums away where the writers and artists used to work, literally taking the place of human thought.
Mad Men plants echoes in its smallest details. Two characters in this episode passingly exclaim that Megan’s apartment is “out of sight,” at once offering up a little pieces of sixties lingo and hinting at the distance between what is on view—Stephanie’s “obvious” pregnancy, exposed in a public phone booth—and what is protected from prying eyes. Betty and Stephanie both refuse to eat outside, asserting their will by remaining, each in her own way, out of sight.
This thematic interweaving is a very literary pleasure. As a literary critic myself, I was trained to notice such patternings, and I love to feel their richness, and to unravel the connections. Other television often fails at this, even when it does well on other grounds. And for this viewer, it is enough to keep me coming back to Mad Men.
I can’t imagine that simple loyalty—just “going back a long way"—will work for audiences in part because Mad Men simply doesn’t teach us loyalty as a value. It goes so far as to mock its characters’ demands for loyalty, and its plot thrives precisely where loyalty fails. Perhaps the show knows it needs to woo us in some other way. It’s no accident that Don spells “strategy” carefully in “Runaways” and concludes the episode with a surprising new strategy for the cigarette business. But then again, as Lou says, it may be too late for that now.
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posted under
commune
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Dana Polan
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Mad Men
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Mad World
by Unit for Criticism
[The fourth 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]
"What's Next?"
Written by: Dana Polan (New York University)
Part 2
Please, dear reader, make sure to peruse Part 1 of this blog before you read this part. There, in Part 1, I talked generally about what we seem to think we know about any episode of a continuing TV serial before it airs, and I made some very tentative suggestions (the stronger word is "predictions") about what I imagined might happen in tonight's episode of Mad Men. I now, having actually seen the episode, want to go back to those predictions and then talk about other aspects of this installment of Mad Men.
In the very first lines of the episode, Pete Campbell out in Los Angeles--out, that is, in an entirely different world of narrative possibilities than the ones that Mad Men, whose title referenced, among other things, New York's Madison Avenue, had initially initiated--was telling his girlfriend Bonnie that there were essentially three choices. He was referring to the places they could go to for their vacation but, coming at the very beginning of the episode, his lines could also meta-narratively be a comment on narrative possibility and narrative logic itself: when an(y) episode of a show like this begins, there are any number of directions it could go in, and most of them are not predictable for the viewer even though most of them will in retrospect make sense for that viewer once he or she has gotten through them.
So, vanity aside (I'm generally not good at futurology), I think I'm batting pretty well in my guesses for this episode (and the baseball metaphor perhaps works pretty well itself for an episode that's about going to -- but never arriving at -- a Mets game but, even more importantly, is an episode that has an explicit discussion of metaphor and meaningful symbolism: TV shows like this can have depths of significance but it's particularly noteworthy when they directly tell us that):
1. I mentioned the dangling phone that we saw last week in the "Next on Mad Men" and suggested it might mean a lot but more likely would mean very little at all. In the episode as it aired, Don arrived at the office and found chaos reigning, including that phone off the hook, but the phone was then hung up and explanations for the chaos were proffered: that particular future which we might call the computer revolution was being installed. We might want to ask how that phone got off its base but really, ultimately it didn't matter.
It wasn't really a prediction but I did suggest that death wasn't something that tended to happen to the central figures of this series. No deaths occurred in this episode indeed but I do take it as significant that Pete Campbell learned that his wife's dad had had a heart attack: as I had noted, it's more likely in Mad Men that potentially fatal things happen to lesser characters and not to the Pete Campbells and such-like that serve as its narrative foci.
2. Dawn, the black secretary, had one line of dialogue (advising the white staff at the office as to how to deal with the disruptions of office space from the entry of a computer into it). That's it for Dawn. As I anticipated, blackness had gotten its token treatment a few episodes back and now we're back to the world of white people dealing with their white collar issues.
3. Wow, I really got this one right: I predicted that the all important question of Megan and Don might drop out, and it really, really did. (I also wondered if Betty might not disappear, and I'll claim brownie points for that guess too.)
Last week's episode put Don and Megan's marriage on the rocks but in today's episode, it was as if that marriage--and its breakdown--had no existence. Instead we got an emphasis on the slogging everydayness of repetitive work (for instance, how many tags, whatever they are, does Don and his co-workers have to come up with to satisfy the assignment?) and we also got:
4. Roger going upstate to Kingston, NY to try to rescue daughter Margaret (now Marigold) from a commune. This, admittedly, doesn't really count as confirmation of my prediction that very specific events of the time might insinuate themselves into the show. I had suggested that real history was overdue for an appearance on the show and wondered, among other examples, if 1969's Woodstock might not be ready to take a bow. We really didn't get that sort of historical imposition in any direct, concerted sense but I think Margaret's story comes pretty close. For what it's worth, Kingston is in fact not far from Woodstock (or from the Bethel farm of Max Yasgur that the rock festival actually took place at) and there's a way in which the entire subplot of Roger and his daughter is about a broader history insinuating its force into the lives of characters who are generally more defined by what goes on at the office...
5. And in that respect, the office is really where it's all at in this episode. We certainly think of the Roger-Margaret story as little else than a subplot and but for it and a few minor moments, everything else transpires at the workplace. This is that slog I referred to: I don't claim any special clairvoyance here since it's this slogging that is centrally what the show is about. Yes, there is a world outside the office in which there are (among other events) old people who die, unwanted pregnancies, real people who get assassinated, weird grandmas who weird you out, suburban alienation, renters who want their landlords to provide basic services, hitchhikers you can't trust, class trips that just go bad (see last week's episode), and on and on and on. But “The Monolith” (7.4) keeps coming back to the office and it's there that the really consequential things might be happening. On the one hand, Don does decide to tow the line and be the subservient drone. I don't want to push it too far but it might be worth connecting what is perhaps the most famous moment in the history of Mad Men--Don scoring a big win at the office by showing off the Kodak carousel--to the Hollies' "Carousel" song that plays over Don's acquiescence in the present episode: in the earlier case, Don had used repetitiveness and pastness (the Kodak carousel's cyclical spectacle of nostalgia) to move his career forward; now, like the rider on a carousel animal who in the Hollies song can't catch up to the figure ahead of him, Don seems to have little future and is just going round and round. (At one point, after one of the many slights he suffers in the episode, we see Don leave the office in what we think is a huff of storming off the job only to seem him check back into the job in the very next moment; for this episode, he's stuck there).
Just as Matt Weiner's previous show was pointedly titled The Sopranos in the plural, and not "Tony" or "The Tony Soprano Show" or some-such, this show is Mad Men in the plural--and not "Don Draper" or some-such. Both shows have a protagonist but within the fictional world and for the shows as televisual events, there is directly the question of how in control that protagonist really is. In the current episode of Mad Men, Don directly is treated as a menial and it might almost seem as if the series is not merely commenting on that but engaging in a transition from Don to other figures. Is it noteworthy, for instance, that one very common visual motif of Mad Men--namely, figures shot from the back, and thereby pitched into veritable silhouette, as they look blankly out from the office into the world beyond their window blinds--is in the current episode not accorded to Don (as it commonly was in past episodes) but to other characters such as Peggy and Lou (and when Lou is seen standing in this way at the window, it's commented upon as if the show wants us to think about this resonant visual motif)? Is Don really the center of this world any more?
The title of "The Monolith," seems a reference to 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey (already referenced in Deanna Kreisel’s perceptive post from last week). There are fears about computers, references to psychedelic transport, a mention even of "The Dawn of Man." But there is no transcendence in this episode of Mad Men, just a brute wallowing in the mud for Roger, and a brute recognition of the fixities of identity for Don. Dave Bowman in 2001 shut down the Hal 9000 computer and then moved through various stages of being into new levels of existence. Don Draper in Mad Men watches impassively and even passively as a computer is fixed into place in his work world, and all he can do there is, as the Hollies intone, go "Round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round."
One wonders if that's his predictable future. And perhaps the future of this television series.
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posted under
Dana Polan
,
Mad Men
,
Mad World
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TV serial
by Unit for Criticism
[The prelude to the fourth 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]
"What's Next?"
Written by: Dana Polan (New York University)
Part 1
What do we know about any episode of a continuing TV serial before it airs? I want today (literally today: Saturday before my assigned episode airs tomorrow) to, paraphrasing a key science fiction series from the time of Mad Men, boldly go where no (Mad) men have gone before, and try science-fictionally to predict what tomorrow's episode will be about. I won't do a lot of that, and will concentrate more generally on what we know going into any episode such as this. In Part 1, I want to talk about how we move toward endings and, as well, toward the next installment of a series we know is ending. In Part 2 (to be written after tomorrow night's episode), I'll look at what I got wrong and analyze what we were given instead. I do expect to get it wrong. While there are certain aspects of Mad Men that might make us think we're in a predictable narrative universe--for example, the myriad plot lines of the myriad characters, our background knowledge about the ways this show interweaves plot lines and deliberate veering and unpredictability, our even broader background knowledge of what happened in each moment of the 1960s (quick, go check out "1969" on Wikipedia!)--and that we might want to draw on as aids in figuring out where the story is going (to the above, we might add the "Next on Mad Men" montage we see at the end of each episode, something I'll return to), I think little of this really helps us in knowing what's next, even though we know something's coming. (As a famous song from the beginning of the Sixties "predicts": "Something's coming, something good, if I can wait! Something's coming, I don't know what it is, but it is gonna be great!")
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[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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[The second 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]
"The Working Day"
Written by: Corey K. Creekmur (University of Iowa)
“ … in secret as it were, the contraband of modes of behavior proper to the domain of work, which will not let people out of its power, is being smuggled into the realm of free time.”
-- Theodor W. Adorno, “Free Time”
Everyone agrees: last week’s season-launching episode, “Time Zones,” was a bummer, to use a term current in early 1969, when this final (half) season of Mad Men begins. “This is the end,” Jim Morrison was already announcing in 1967, the actual musical touchstone for the episode’s two framing songs, by the Spencer Davis Group and the Vanilla Fudge. Or at least this is the beginning of the end for Mad Men, and the rather grim episode seemed to announce that the last season would trace a downward spiral. Grounded in its historical moment by Richard Nixon’s January 20th inauguration (another beginning of the end of an era, perhaps), we might, in the time travel we conduct in the consumption of historical fictions, remember what is coming, since our past is these characters’ immediate future: not just the cultural high points of the Apollo 11 moon landing or Woodstock, but the Manson Family murders and Altamont (both in California, of course, now one of the series’ regular locations).
Among the major characters, “Time Zones” left Don Draper looking terrible and alone on his freezing New York City balcony, while simultaneously across town Peggy Olson broke down in her lonely apartment. Back at the office, an overworked and one-eyed Ken Cosgrove complained that he doesn’t even have time to take a crap, and for all of her efforts for the firm, Joan Harris is again reminded that she isn’t the boss. Only Pete Campbell in Los Angeles (feeling good vibrations, unlike everyone else) and Roger Sterling in New York seemed to be having some fun at the tail end of the 1960s, Pete by comically assimilating to a California lifestyle (Don cluelessly calls him a hippie), and Roger by fully indulging in the last gasp of the free love movement. Don – previously suave and smartly dressed – now seems fully out of time and place, arriving in LA (in an homage to Benjamin Braddock’s return home from school at the start of The Graduate [1967]) in a suit and hat (a hat! in 1969!) that now render him entirely uncool, especially in contrast to Megan’s trendy mini-dress. Perhaps the most telling evidence of a drastic shift in the energies of Mad Men’s final season is marked later in the episode when Don chooses work over sex; moreover, across the entire episode, all the characters are eating more than they are drinking, like never before.
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[The first in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 7 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]
"Terminally Uncool, Unfunny, Lame"
Written by: Bruce Robbins (Columbia)
The opening credits have been predicting Don Draper’s fall at the beginning of every episode since Mad Men began airing. Last year, at the end of season six, it looked like the moment of professional collapse had finally come. But it also looked like Don’s breakdown in front of the Hershey brass and the indefinite time-out decided for him by his partners might be balanced by some sort of moral redemption. The breakdown itself comes in the form of compulsive and disinterested truth-telling, and the final sequence of last year’s final episode involved more of the truth: Don showing his children the brothel where he was raised.
As the new season premiered last night, many viewers must have been asking themselves how this impulse would or wouldn’t take over and work itself out as the show draws to a close. To put this in a series of questions: what might moral redemption look like, if that’s what’s coming? Would it mean turning against advertising itself? When Don says (during the meeting where he self-reveals and self-destructs, but also earlier) that Hershey’s chocolate doesn’t need advertising, he is echoing a theme that the show has already raised and that may be its most fundamental link with the political vision of “the Sixties”: is the work these advertisers do worth doing at all? Is it good for us? If the answer is no, then what? We find ourselves lost in a dark forest of contradictions. Wouldn’t a rejection of all that professional success mean turning against the vice-ridden virtues by which viewers have been so charmed--turning against what got us so involved in the show to begin with? Are we ready for that?
In particular, what would a critique of the profession mean for the gradual emergence of women into the ranks of the professionally successful? After all, that emergence has become the show’s single most emotionally compelling line of development as, season by season, the men seemed to get more and more exhausted, empty, and self-repeating. Could Don redeem himself morally without undercutting the rising trajectory of Peggy and Joan? And if their success, too, is going to be undercut, will we get the familiar and distorted logic that associates women’s achievement at work with failure and desolation in private life? I’m not sure I can survive any more of that moral.
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[The twelfth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 6 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]
"The Only Unpardonable Sin"
Written by: Lauren Goodlad English/Unit for Criticism)
The literal referent of “In Care Of” is a letter received from the District Attorney of the County of New York addressed to Miss Sally Beth Draper, “c/o Mr. Donald F. Draper.” But in a more a figurative sense, the motif of care—and of care of another—runs throughout this final episode of Mad Men’s Season 6. As the season concludes, the only care Pete exhibits for his mother’s passing is his getting his fair share of her furniture, having determined that an all-expense paid private eye to “bring [his] mother’s killer to justice” was not worth the cost. (This and the black comedy in which the scene between Pete and the SS Sunset Princess was played, left us little time to contemplate the apparent treachery of Manny—a/k/a “Marcus Constantine”—who seduces Pete’s mother while she is in his care, marries her for the money he believes she has, and then throws her over the side of a ship into shark-infested waters.)
Caring for others is not much on the mind of Manny’s friend Bob Benson, though he has taken great care to rid himself of Pete, the keeper of his secret, who now will set off for LA as a (not-so-gay) divorcé. Bob still retains the air of his enigmatic beginnings: was he a corporate spy, we had wondered? Or just an empty suit with a penchant for sucking up? Did he know Manolo was a gold-digger? Whatever else he may be, we know that Bob is a gay man more at ease in the closet than Sal Romano ever was—but with a contrived identity that clearly doubles him with Don (just like his alliterative, tri-syllabic name). Bob’s providing a handy Best Guy Friend for Joan may, perhaps, be a sincere form of care—which would make him the ultimate example of what Mad World contributor Alex Doty called the type of the “helper homosexual.” But what “In Care Of” makes entirely clear is that Bob’s stunt in Detroit—as he manipulates Pete into exposing himself as the one man in Motor City who cannot drive a stick—is the kind of maneuver we’ve seen Don pull off many times.
But was there ever a worse time to ask “What would Don Draper do?” The answer, of course, is both yes and no. Less the finale of a single season than a turning point after 77 hours of serial television, for Don, we might say, “In Care Of” marks the best of times and the worst of times. Dante scholars can debate where precisely he was throughout most of this season in the trajectory marked out by the premiere’s opening reference to Inferno: “Midway in our life’s journey/I went astray from the straight road/And woke to find myself in a dark wood.” What is clear by the end of “In Care Of,” is that Don may soon be leaving Hell and heading for Purgatorio. For Dick Whitman has, at long last, heeded the words he heard from an itinerant preacher thrown out from the whorehouse many moons ago: “The only unpardonable sin is to believe God cannot forgive you.”
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