[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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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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