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.

 Read more

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

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