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

Monday, April 29, 2013

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

"A Tense Experiment"

Written by: Dana Polan (New York University)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 4.12
"Gearing Up/Winding Down"

Monday, October 11, 2010

posted under , , by Unit for Criticism
[The latest in our multi-authored series of posts on the fourth season of Mad Men, was posted prior to publishing MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s (Duke University Press), is by Dana Polan, professor of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.]

"GEARING UP/WINDING DOWN"

Written by Dana Polan (Cinema Studies, New York University)

When the Larry Sanders Show went off the air, Carole King’s lament “Will you still love me tomorrow?” played over its final image. When The Sopranos ended its run, the musical group Journey did the musical deed by commanding “Don’t Stop” as the image famously went to black. These were moments of finality but rendered ironic by lyrics that spoke of the possibility (albeit fraught) of something after. In contrast, as Mad Men prepares for a season-to-season hiatus, its second-to-last episode of the its fourth season, “Blowing Smoke,” needs to promise real continuation, if not continuity, and its end-credit song is thus about an offer (albeit a pleading one) of abiding confidence, of faith, and of future potential in which both partners in the relationship have their role to play: “Trust in me in all you do. Have the faith I have in you. Love will see us through if only you trust in me” (and then an expression of doubt which is also an exhortation for the future: “Why won’t you trust in me?”).

Even more perhaps than a season finale, the penultimate episode of a serial television show has a complicated narrative burden. It must sow seeds for episodes way in the future (and this is even more complicated in the case of Mad Men where new seasons begin not where the narrative moment of the previous ones left off but at some later period in the future – which may or not coincide with the number of months the show has been off the air). But the second-to-last episode must also feed into the finale itself which has to wrap some things up, perhaps offer a few cataclysmic surprises (a death is always possible), and also dangle out some cliffhangers that will keep spectators trusting in the show over the long winter of televisual absence. The second-to-last episode then is about immediate story pressures but also long-term ones, and it engages in a complex narrative game.

To take just one example (perhaps a minor one—but who knows?), there might seem to be a conflict brewing with the triangle Faye-Don-Megan (figured in several shots in “Blowing Smoke” where Megan as secretary is shown between or behind the other two). Will it become an explicit battle next week? Will it just simmer below the surface? Will Megan likely be there a season from now (the length of time it will take to make new episodes, the length of time within the narrative universe of the show where it might be unlikely that Megan would be kept around that long)?

Where, in the show’s fictional world, clients keep wondering what Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s status will be in six months, we might take such a question at meta-level and see it as a comment on the continuing serial itself: how does it keep going and keep interest going? What will it be like a season from now? Will anyone keep faith with it through its long hiatus? How can it get anyone now to trust what it promises to be then? The faith that the end-credits song speaks of is not only about Don and the people around him, but about Mad Men itself and a confidence in its ongoing storytelling abilities which it promises to display and asks us to endorse.

The complex relation to several futures – immediate and long-term – contributes to multiple forms of temporality in “Blowing Smoke” as a penultimate episode. Above all, it would seem, the primary thing to avoid – both for the ad agency within the show but also for the show itself which must keep its customers (the viewers) from turning away (what the cable industry calls “churn”) – is too much of the same old, same old – what SCDP’s consultant describes as the risk of being “perceived as stagnant. . . or, worse, as decaying.” Through the episode runs a motif of repetition and of a spinning around in space (the Heinz man tells Don that “food is cyclical”; Pete declares that advertising opportunities “come in streaks”). At the extreme lies the existential dread of a samenesss that goes till the ends of time: as Sally puts it, “When I think about forever I get upset.”

Sally’s image for endless entrapment in repetition is the Land O’Lakes butter image of a woman holding a box that pictures a woman holding a box that pictures a woman . . . . and on into an infinitesimal void (and her description of this creeps creepy Glen out to no end). This is a spatial rendition of nothingness (and it’s perhaps also another form of meta-commentary: the show Mad Men enacts the same issues of survival as does the ad agency within its narrative universe; the show is a box around a fictional box) but serial television, as its very name implies, also confronts repetition as a temporal question: how to deal with the risk of formulaic sameness from episode to episode?

Of course, a more episodic form of television embraces repetition wholeheartedly: think, for instance, of I Love Lucy, where for many sessions, one after the other, Lucy tries to get onto Ricky’s show, is defeated, and is returned to domesticity only to start out again, either not having learned her lesson or, as rebellious female, not wanting to learn it.

To be sure, Mad Men has a bit of this: most strikingly, the end of Season Three was all about starting over as many of the most important Sterling Cooper workers regrouped to begin a new agency (with a number of fans wondering when/if they might bring Sal Romano back!). This narrative move again was one within the universe of the show but one that also had its meta-dimension: it was about a serial narrative going back to some of its generative roots and rebooting the story as it were. That the consequences – demonstrated over the course of this fourth season – went in narrative directions that the characters didn’t welcome (i.e., the new firm’s endless battles to survive) doesn’t take away from the sheer gambit of the reboot itself, both as narrative conceit and as tactic of the series itself.

But as Don tells Peggy toward the end of “Blowing Smoke,” when she suggests renaming the agency and rebooting yet again, “We can’t start over.” Repetition can only go so far and, against it, the episode holds out the possibility of radical initiative, of dramatic and new actions that re-constellate the given terms of the narrative and throw it all up for grabs. This is what Don claims to be doing when he rips all the previous pages out of his notebook to start writing a new message, this time a public one, that he sends off to the New York Times to shakes things up fundamentally.

This disruption of the status quo is also what Don is asking for the others around him to trust in, this is also what this season is asking for trust in as it winds down: believe, they are asking, that we can deliver on the promise of freshness, believe that change can happen. (As Megan enthuses to Don about the letter’s effect, “It feels different around here.”) Don’s description in his letter of the burdensome sameness of the product he was shilling could also be a comment on the repetitiveness of cyclical, episodic television itself: like the cigarette, formulaic television is a “product [that] never improves” and that its makers perhaps “knew . . . wasn’t good for us” but “couldn’t stop” making.

And Don’s letter is not the only promise of things being shaken up in “Blowing Smoke.” In a series that takes us incessantly from the work world to realms of private play and domesticity (as Caroline Levine nicely put it in her blog for last week’s episode: “the series distinguishes love from business as insistently as it brings the two together,” creating what she terms a “troubling logic” that “grows only more tangled and complex as the episode unfolds”), “Blowing Smoke” is particularly insistent on making formal connections between the various spaces of life for these characters (for instance, the opening scene of Don’s meeting with the Heinz man ends with dialogue from the next scene – Betty’s calling Bobby and Sally to the table – playing over it). Thus, the bombshell of Don’s letter is followed quickly by the promise/threat of Betty and Henry moving their family elsewhere. This is another potential reboot, both for the characters and for the show (just as, to return to an earlier example, I Love Lucy tried to reinvigorate a formula that was beginning to seem tired by moving the family to Hollywood and then to suburban Connecticut). How will Sally deal with this? What new narrative possibilities for the series will it generate?

“This is the age of taking action,” the voiceover for a Viagra ad shown during one of “Blowing Smoke”’s commercial breaks asserts, and one of the advertising history factoids during another break explains that the new directions in 1960s advertising are summed up by the term “Creative Revolution.” The Sixties, we might have imagined, is the name for a revolutionary rebooting of all cultural and social givens. But for all the dramatic shake-up that Don’s New York Times letter and Betty’s household announcement portend, we shouldn’t necessarily see the taking of action for disruptive ends as a positive virtue in Mad Men. (In passing, we might remember that “revolution” etymologically both implies radical change and cyclical repetition, the turn of the wheel back to where it already was.)

Despite the shrieks of joy with which Sally, two episodes ago, greeted the chance to see the Beatles – and despite the bigger fact that the ad men seem to be losing out in history by being on the wrong side of the 1960s (as Don said in Season 1, “Dick Nixon is me”), Mad Men does not always see the move into the new decade as a liberation, an opportunity, a chance to open up in new realms of possibility. (Don pointedly had his crisis of identity in a prior decade and the 1960s seem to be closing in on him rather than giving him new chances.)

Thus if in the first season, bohemian Midge might have seemed to offer a new style of hipness so unlike the seemingly cool but really uptight world of the suited sophisticates from Madison Avenue, her re-appearance in “Blowing Smoke” in Season Four confirms just how much of a dead-end the bohemian lifestyle would turn out to be for so many burned-out denizens of 1960s lifestyle. (And in any case, her world was shown to be sanctimonious and silly from the start, so one should never have expected much in the way of revolution there anyway.) Midge offers to prostitute herself (and is encouraged in that by her ersatz husband) in an episode that pointedly began by suggesting that Madison Avenue work is itself a form of pimping (the Heinz man says to the desperate pitches of an over-eager Don, “I bet I could get a date with your mother right now”) and thereby implies a connection between these two worlds of selling-out by selling out one’s self. Likewise, Midge’s heroin addiction is in its own way a form of non-progressing cyclicity (you shoot up only to have to do it again), not some revolutionary strike for the future, and it bears comparison as an unbreakable, filthy habit to Don’s incessant smoking as he writes his supposedly virtuous missive about the dangers of cigarettes.

This, then, is the show’s own rejoinder to the proclamation in the Viagra ad that one needs to take action. Blowing smoke as he writes his screed, Don is setting out to shake things up but his actions are hypocritical and stand for no consistent or heartfelt ethical position (about the closest he comes to being a nice guy is helping out Pete with a loan to the company and apologizing to Faye when he realizes his letter got her fired). Likewise, Betty’s declaration that it is the right time to move the family is clearly not about what is good but about her working out her own complicated relation to both her daughter and to Glen himself (as we see, when she and Sally spar over who knows the kid better).

Even Faye – who seems to strike a blow for a liberation into honesty and authenticity by taking her termination as a cigarette researcher as an opportunity to bring her relationship with Don into the open – is treated as no more virtuous for doing that: she is shown to be pointedly catty in treating Megan as nothing but Don’s office “girl” and she both puts off Peggy’s call for feminine solidarity and confesses that she (Faye) is in fact not a role model who doesn’t have to play at games of insincerity.

So this is where Mad Men seems to be leaving us as it gears up for the future (the future that is the 1960s for its characters; the future that is the show’s run on television through its seasons): it asks for us to keep the faith with its world of faithlessness, it asks us to see the entrapments and dead ends that its characters confront as sources of new and open narrative possibility. In this, it is both a series unlike others and yet one that is so eminently representative of what television watching is all about today.
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