Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 5.6
"A Study in Orange"
Guest Writer: Lauren Goodlad
Monday, April 23, 2012
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howard johnson
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Mad Men
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Mad World
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repetition compulsion
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the naked prey
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Thomas Frank
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Timothy Leary
by Unit for Criticism
"A Study in Orange"
Written by Lauren M. E. Goodlad (English/Unit for Criticism)
The title of Mad Men’s sixth episode this season, “Far Away Places,” echoes the 1948 Bing Crosby classic. But insofar as it leads viewers to anticipate the kind of glamorous business trip Don took with Betty in “Souvenir” (Season 3, Episode 8), the song’s yearning for real-life encounters with foreign lands is a feint. Although the episode explores far-off places of sorts, the journeys it takes in this rather complicated segment of Mad Men are more psychic and cultural than geographic. “Far Away Places” does not embark on real trips to Rome, or China, or Spain--though it does take us tripping. And in what has become a veritable leitmotif for Season 5, its most memorable tableaux are illusions.
Last week the show put us squarely in male fantasy terrain when Pete, hard at work with an obliging call girl, chose “You’re my king” over other equally tawdry clichés. Episode 6 opens with Abe’s suggesting that Peggy, nervous about her presentation for Heinz, join him at a showing of The Naked Prey. “You're gonna resist the chance to see Cornel Wilde naked?” he asks. Reviewing the movie in 1967, Roger Ebert called The Naked Prey the kind of “pure fantasy” in which an urbane white man, “set loose naked in the jungle,” discovers to his delight that he can “outrun half a dozen hand-picked African warriors.” Poor Abe. He has taken up Kinsey’s mantle of a white man engaged by the aspirations of the 60s with more humility than the often pompous Paul. Abe is clearly frustrated by Peggy’s distracted focus on work. But does he really want to see this movie?
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