Mad Men Season 8: "Person to Person"

Yes, it is the end of an era.

Time and Horizons

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Mad Men Season Seven: Waterloo

It feels like the end, but what does that mean?

Mad Men Season 7: The Monolith

Do you value your human relationships?

Puddles of My Mad Men Season Six: "A Tale of Two Cites"

On living, dying and the James Salter bandwagon.

Puddles of My Mad Men Season Six: "The Doorway"

Matt Domino's Mad Men recaps return.

Puddles of My Mad Men: At the Codfish Ball

Matt Domino provides a link to his weekly "Mad Men" recap at the Montreal Review.

Puddles of My Mad Men: "Far Away Places"

Matt Domino provides his weekly, traffic-boosting, link to his Montreal Review "Mad Men" recap.

Puddles of My Mad Men: "Mystery Date"

Stifling New Jersey holiday traffic may have delayed Matt Domino's weekly "Mad Men" review, but you can bet that it was worth the wait.

Puddles of My Mad Men: A Little Kiss

 Matt Domino wrote a review of the season premiere of Mad Men, "A Little Kiss" for the Montreal Review and he wants to provide a link as well as get more traffic for Puddles of Myself.

Triptych

 
Usually, the last three episodes of each Mad Men season provide the viewer with a nice, neat (as neat for Mad Men’s scope as is possible) triptych of drama on which to wave the season goodbye.  In Season 2, you had Don’s trip to California in the “Jet Set” and “The Mountain King,” followed by the dramatic conclusion of “Meditations in an Emergency.”  The drama in those episodes coming from Don’s absence in the office and the pending sale of Sterling Cooper to Putnam Powell and Lowe, which was Duck’s attempt at a coup against Don.  In Season 3, you had “The Gypsy and the Hobo,” where Betty confronted Don and Don had to dump Ms. Farrell; “The Grown Ups,” where the show confronted the Kennedy assassination and Betty told Don she didn’t love him anymore; and of course there was the thrilling “Shut the Door, Have a Seat,” where Sterling, Cooper, Draper Pryce was formed.

Perhaps in hindsight the triptych of this season will make itself evident, but at the current moment, there is not a total feeling of “neatness,” that is to use the term in the Mad Men sense, which is a feeling of the season coming to an end, a pressure of drama that eventually must manifest itself in some surprise in the season finale.  That seems to be the description of how most shows work, but Mad Men is especially so, given how many characters and storylines are intertwined and brought to some kind of climax or revelation in their lives at each season’s end.  At the moment, though, there is no sense of neatness to the final trilogy of episodes and maybe that is because we are still waiting for the season finale, which promises to be as pressure filled as any season finale so far in the series.

“Blowing Smoke,” to me, was as understated an episode as you will get in Mad Men.  The themes were all there and they all felt like they were intricately connected, but you weren’t quite sure how to connect them in each instance; the themes being “changing the conversation” or changing your identity, determining worth, and the border of want vs. desperation/addiction.  Since all the themes in the episode seemed to simmer, this allowed the main action of “Blowing Smoke” to draw the attention it deserved – that action being the ad that Don took out in the New York Times.

What led Don to taking out the ad was a variety of things: failure at his meeting with Heinz and his subsequent desperation to get the account (“I could get a date with your mother right now if I wanted to”), the tease of the Phillip Morris account, the lack of effort exhibited by Pete, Ken and Roger and last but not least, Don’s encounter with Midge.  As soon as I saw Rosemarie Dewitt’s (slightly in love with her, wait until Wednesday’s Top Ten Women of Mad Men column) name on the opening credits, I was curious to see how they would use the character of Midge in the current landscape of the show.  Not only does Midge and her initial conversation with Don in the lobby echo the first season of the show (notably the pilot episode, titled “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’), but it also echoes Don’s initial meeting with Roger Sterling in the lobby of the old building.  However, in this case, Don and Midge have an actual history and Don reveals that he was perhaps in some ways hoping to see Midge when he decided to move to the Village. Don’s affair with Midge set the tone for the Draper affair that “works.” He respected Midge in some intellectual way and respected the identity that she had created for herself.  “The Hobo Code” was a perfect example of how Don could have easily fit into the bohemian culture, a culture that is in many ways a variation of the hobo culture that Don has grown and created himself out of.  Here, though we see how far Midge has fallen and how desperate she is for a little bit of money.  Don gives her a check for $300.00, but she needs the cash in order to get her fix.  However, her desperation gives Don an “afterimage” that he can see himself in, as well as his situation.  Don and the rest of the firm have been desperately seeking new clients, client’s that don’t even care about them because they have no worth at the current moment.  He has to “change the conversation,” as Peggy reminds him of advice he once gave her.  So, instead of throwing the painting out, Don looks at it and decides how to change his value and the value of the firm.  He writes a letter and places it in the New York Times as an ad for SCDP.  All of the partners are upset, which was somewhat jarring at first view as you would like to think that some of them (especially Pete after this season and perhaps Lane) would understand the forward thinking. Unfortunately, it causes Bert Cooper to quit the firm, while Roger is pleased everyone can no longer blame him.

Interestingly enough, it is Megan who understands what Don was trying to do as she says, “its about ‘he didn’t dump me, I dumped him’.”  And that is what Don was trying to do in yet another example of how he tries to rewrite identity. In this case, it was the firm as an extension of his identity.  We never want to be on the losing end of a relationship, so we sometimes construct ways in order to make it seem that we were not the one who was dumped, we were really the ones with the upper hand and even if we are dumped, then it was for some cosmic and mysterious reason, something that makes us interesting and appealing for whomever comes next.  You change the conversation in order to divert attention so no one realizes that you have taken the upper hand.  Now, we don’t know if Don has really taken the upper hand, but he took a risk and perhaps that risk will get him noticed as we come to the final episode.  The firm needs a big client. They can’t stitch together a few accounts.  Some people are guessing that it will be Conrad Hilton returning, while some are guessing by the title of the final episode, “Tomorrowland,” that it may be Disney who comes calling for Don’s service.

In the other storyline, Betty and Sally clash again.  And while Sally speaks with her therapist, we see that she is literally using the technique of changing the conversation to get the upper hand on her mother.  “She doesn’t care what the truth is,” Sally says, “as long as I do what she says.”  Instead of fighting Betty about what really happened, Sally as learned the art of changing the conversation, of biting your tongue in order to fight another battle.  Unfortunately, we see that Betty is just as apt at this as Sally is.  When the therapist tells Betty that she should be seeing a doctor who can treat adults, Betty changes the conversation back to Sally in order to emphasize that it is important that she still goes to see Dr. Edna.  And, later in the episode, after Betty has caught Sally spending time with Glen, she decides to change the conversation from that incident to moving out of Don’s home.  This crushes Sally and we see a very lonely shot of her laying in her bed in the evening sun of September holding the lanyard that Glen made for her.  All I could think of when watching this scene was Sally explaining that the idea of “forever” makes her upset to think about.  This idea of a child understanding forever, of using some experience of image (the butter label) to convey a vast concept is terribly moving to me.  Those are small experiences that you remember from childhood, for the universe has opened up for one small moment to your child’s mind and you begin to understand a size of things far greater than what you normally are able to comprehend. 

The other subplot that interested me, was Faye having to leave SCDP as a consultant due to Dr. Atherton wanting to do business with tobacco companies and the firms that represent them.  Now, as Faye makes it clear, she and Don can have a relationship that is out in the open. It’s hard to read how Don feels about this.  Faye took a risk for him to get the Heinz account. That risk didn’t work out due to extenuating circumstances, but it showed her devotion.  She wants to be with Don, but it is unclear if Don is ready for that, no matter how much he is trying to improve or wants to improve. Faye is a good match for him. She is a strong, smart woman.  But perhaps that’s not what Don wants.  But does he want Megan? No matter how much she empathizes with him in the aftermath of their intimacy both sexually and philosophically in “Chinese Wall,” you still never get the feeling that she’s exactly what Don wants either – that is something that Roger would do.

There were plenty more terrific small moments in this episode and now, replaying all the themes and action of the episode perhaps the classic Mad Men end of season triptych may be in tact.  All that’s left is that last piece next Sunday, which will perhaps change everything, for now, once more for all these characters.

Calling Your Bluff

A couple of quick notes about the blog before I lay down my review of last night’s Mad Men episode, “Hands and Knees.” 

First, you will notice a new section at the top of the blog, entitled “Puddles of My Mad Men” (because it is of course my show).  This is where you can find all of my Season 4 recaps in one place as well as a somewhat brief recap I did of Season 3 last fall.  So, please enjoy all of that because it really is quite stellar writing.

Second, the blog will be back in full swing starting next Monday, October 4, 2010.  I have a couple of great things lined up for you all.  There are some surprises and new additions, some entertaining and inane podcasts, extreme amounts of vanity as well as a long-term plan whose wheels are in motion, which could not only alter the face of this blog but the face of the planet in general.  These are the things you come to this blog for, so, again, my Puddlers, please just sit back and enjoy this ride your on, which is called Puddles of Myself aka my fictionalized and embellished life, which is what we like to call the truth.

*****

I’m not sure that I would ever make a good critic.  I enjoy the things that I enjoy almost too much and can’t speak about them without great amounts of praise, while simultaneously feeling the need to make the person I am speaking to or arguing against feel foolish for having the opinion of the object in question.  You could call this the Michael Jordan syndrome and it is usually the sign of a bad critic – although the trait does make the best basketball player, athlete and competitor of all time.  A good critic will stick to his opinions, will investigate an object, will allow for various view points, expand on them and entertain them and ultimately resolve that there is probably not one specific way to view an object but you should take his word that perhaps his view may be the most revealing.  Now, this all sounds fairly dry, but the thing about criticism is that when it is good it is written with a passion that belies its distance, but also strengthens it.  This is almost true of good fiction, except distance is essential and cannot be compromised as much as in criticism.

All of this being said, I enjoyed last night’s episode of Mad Men, which was entitled “Hands and Knees.”  It was not the best episode of the season or the series by far, but it did put pressure on the final three episodes.  This is not a pressure to deliver on expectations, but rather a dramatic pressure.  So much of this season has been focused on Don’s fall and his search for some way out, that an episode like “Hands and Knees” almost becomes essential in order to point the narrative towards its climax.  This would explain the fact that much of the criticism of last night’s episode is about how it felt like a soap opera, or to be more eloquent, that the action was not true to life, that the instances that all occurred in the span of time conveyed in last night’s episode would not all have occurred in the same span of time.  Now, this very well may be true, but the tool of dramatic irony – on full display in the conference room scene and the Betty Draper interview scene – have been used for centuries.  The conference scene was a perfect example of dramatic irony. Here you have a scene where pivotal characters in the show and in the agency are in the same room together, each one coming from a different vantage point; vantage points that each contain their own secrets and pieces of knowledge.  We as the audience are left to cringe at what we know and about what isn’t being revealed, every piece of acting becomes magnified because of the knowledge that the character has in relation to the knowledge that other characters don’t have, but we as the audience have – we make the scene even more dramatic than it inherently is.  So, perhaps the paperwork slipup that leads Don to sweat out G-Men hunting him down would not have actually happened in the same week as SCDP losing the Lucky Strike and perhaps Joan would not have found out she was pregnant at the same time that Lane Pryce has a clash with his visiting father – these are not things we can actually determine and they are maybe fruitless to critique and as Lee Garner Jr. says to Roger, “There’s nothing you can do.  Nothing you could do.  That’s just the way it is.”

This episode was obviously about the secrets that the characters must conceal just as the entire show is about the secret that Don conceals, which is an extreme, dramatic (in the best sense) example of the secrets we all conceal.  I wrote an ill-advised, amateurish novel during my senior year of college about friends who meet up during their last year of college only to realize how much each of them as changed and at the secrets that they each conceal from each other and have concealed.  I didn’t intend for the focus to be on the secrets, but my writing teacher, Steven Milhauser, informed me that that was where the drama lay, in the concealment of information. “All of your characters are friends,” he said to me, “yet they all conceal information from each other. And it seems that much of their relationship with each other has been based on concealed information.”  Since this novel was somewhat autobiographical (my influences being Joyce, Proust, Wolfe and Kerouac) I began to question the secrecy of my own life, and how much I kept from other people and from the world, which is to say that I kept a lot. I decided that no matter how honest I decided to be about myself and about the world in general, how much I would live honestly, that I would always be a concealer of information – this I because we are all concealers of information, our being, is always pointing to something else, pointing to an information or pieces of information that we contain, whether about ourselves, a topic, a romance, or another person.

Mad Men is about a “successful” man who is handsome but who conceals his identity from his wife and children, from his colleagues and from most of his lovers. This is a show about people who hide information about pregnancies, about whose children they have fathered, about having children, about whom they have slept with, about whom they have been raped by, about whom are gay.  What I enjoy about the show is about how these characters all attempt to continue to live their lives amid all this untruth, because sometimes to continue on in this world you have to lie about things, you have to lie to yourself.  Now, obviously, we always want to avoid the lying - we never want to lie so much to ourselves that we end up forgetting who we actually are.  In the end, lies will always catch up to us as they continue to do for Don.  We have to sacrifice great portions of ourselves in order to keep the lies afloat.  We can clearly see how much Don has suffered at his lies, what he has lost.  In the boardroom, we see the slight twinge of regret on his face when Roger lays into Pete for “losing” the North American Aviation account.  We see how much Joan has lost by lying about her affair with Roger, about having multiple abortions in order to cover up her affairs.  She has held a place for romance with a man who is tremendously quick with his wit and his postures of romance but who doesn’t recognize which tragedy Joan is talking about when she speaks to him after she has gone to perhaps have an abortion.  We see how much Lane has suffered and will suffer unless he goes back to London to see his family. He has perhaps been living a lie as an American and as a lover to his black girlfriend.  It is interesting to note that Pete comments to Trudy about how people who are liars get through life while the good people must suffer, even though he still carries the lie of his affair with Peggy and the fathering of the child she gave away.  Pete seems to want to come out of this situation, out of the boardroom as someone who is clean, but who really has hands that are as dirty as anyones. And, of course, Roger must lie about the Lucky Strike/American Tobacco account and its fate, only putting off what seems inevitable.  Although, we knew Lucky Strike was going to go this season one way or another.

All this being said, why then does the truth seem to pale in comparison to lies?  Don seems to be less attracted or to shy away from telling Faye the truth.  We want people to see the personas that we put up and not who we really are, but then we feel isolated when we realize how distant we are from them when we don’t tell the truth.  The truth is always more painful, which has been well documented, but it will save us in the end where the lies will destroy us.  Willie Stark in All The King’s Men said that “the end of man is to know.”  We always seem to want to know the truth but when we do, we hope for the lie, because the truth can’t be what it seems – it isn’t what we bargained for.  Then, how do we live honestly? How do we look for the truth? How do we accept the truth, when it is the lie that protects us, when it is the lie that pleases our eye?  These are questions I can’t answer for you in a review of Mad Men.  All I know is that once Don reveals his identity to Faye at the end of the episode, he first notices Megan, his new secretary, who apologizes to him for the paperwork issue and tells him that everything worked out.  Is that a lie that Don wants?  Or is it just a reminder of how thin the web of lies we all live in can be, that one slip of paperwork by a secretary can ruin even the longest-running and most concealed of secrets.  What does that say about us in general and the secrets that we keep from each other?  Perhaps as Lee Garner Jr. says, “There is nothing you can do.  Nothing you could do. That’s just the way it is.”

There’s one secret I won’t keep: Joan is still pregnant.

Three more episodes left.

Wasted at the Waldorf

As I posted on my new Twitter account this morning, I was going to try to give a slight play-by-play of last night’s Mad Men episode, but again I was left confused and thrown back as I have been nearly every week this season. “Waldorf Stories” was a difficult episode to watch at many times as we saw the different characters of Sterling, Cooper, Draper Pryce in less than desirable or admirable positions.  Much of this had to do with the allures of alcohol, which brought Don Draper to perhaps the lowest depths that he has fallen to all season.  We also saw explicitly, at least for the first time since “Six Month Leave,” how dangerous all the drinks that these men throw back can be.

This post will hopefully not come off as a diatribe against imbibing alcohol as god knows I like to take the sacrament with the best of them, but “Waldorf Stories” illuminated how fine that line of inebriation is; that line of overdoing it that we all look out for and acknowledge so well.  It’s been well documented this season that Don is in the throes of a serious drinking problem.  We saw him curb his thirst last week only to fully unleash it this week in the aftermath of his winning his first Clio award.  Don and Roger have already started in on their drinks before the award ceremony and they continue drinking at it.  They watch as Duck Phillips, their former colleague and enemy, makes a fool of himself during the ceremony because he is too drunk and has fallen completely out of the sober state he was in during Season 2.  Then, Don wins the Clio and in the spirit of the moment decides to try and seal the Life cereal campaign with an impromptu pitch back at the office.  In the meeting, Don rambles through a pitch. This is not the Don we are used to seeing, especially as he tries to drum up another powerful presentation about the pains of growing older in order to sell Life cereal.  However, due to his inebriated state, Don is unable to completely win over the Life people – his presentation didn’t cause goose bumps or tears like his Kodak “Carousel” presentation did in “The Wheel.”  They want a better tag line.  Don tries to impress them by riffing on the spot, which becomes an embarrassing display that is hard to watch. Finally, he stumbles upon “Life. The cure for the common cereal,” which is a line he had stolen from the rejected copywriting candidate he had met with earlier that morning.  Peggy immediately recognizes this fault as she was in the meeting, but no one else does.  Everyone is pleased and it is cause to continue the celebration.

That night at the bar, Roger, Joan and Don all continue to celebrate.  Roger makes sly remarks about not being appreciated.  Roger mutters, “They don’t give you an award for what I do,” to which Joan replies, “And what is that again?”  This is one of several times in the series where what Roger does has been questioned as it does show exact results as Don’s ad campaigns or even Layne’s accounting pragmatism.  Roger always feels the unease of never being appreciated and never truly being able to articulate his role. In fact, Burt Cooper has to explain to him what his job is about in “Guy Walks into an Ad Agency.”  Here, Roger tosses off the line, “Find guys like him,” as he looks down the bar at Don who seems to be having the time of his life.

At this moment, we get another terrific moment between Don and Faye Miller.  Don brashly  “rescues” her from a conversation she is having.  The body language and the chemistry are immediately present as they begin to speak.  Faye and Don discuss the merits of winning an award and Faye says, “Award or no award, you’re still Don Draper,” to which Don responds, “Whatever that means.” This is a fantastic line not only for the viewer who knows how loaded a statement that is, but also because there are often situations where someone will say, “no matter what, you are [insert name].” That is very often a statement that one has difficulty responding to, because that requires a person to understand how another person sees them, to comprehend their appearance and their meaning to others – that is not an easy thing to do and in fact it is something we struggle with throughout our lives.  Faye seems impressed by Don’s remark, which is surprising because she seems to be a character beyond being impressed by the simple, humble and somewhat pretentious brush-off of her statement. Instead, we have to strive to respond to those kind of moments with a casual understanding that other people do see us in different lights and ascribe many different meanings to who we are and that is one of the great truths of life that we have to accept in order to continue to move forward.  However, Don is having trouble moving forward and again he makes a drunken pass at Faye Miller and spoils another intimate moment between them.

Meanwhile, back down the bar, Roger is getting spiteful and Joan wisely says to him, “you’ve crossed the line from lubricated to morose.”  Joan tells him goodnight and Roger hesitates, but finishes his drink anyway. Don continues his night be going home with another Clio award winner who hums “The Star Spangled Banner” while Don falls asleep to only be woken up by Betty who tells him what day it is and that he has forgotten to pick up the kids as he was supposed to.  Don wakes up to find a different woman in his bed and he realizes that he has seriously overdone it. If you saw the episode, you know that Peggy comes over, lectures Don and forces him to fix the situation of the stolen tag-line, which Don does by giving Danny a copywriting job.  Yet, that image of Don running the shower and hiding from the waitress he slept with is stuck in our minds, as  well as Don pouring a stale glass of whiskey to ease his terrible hangover.  That is the depth of a Sunday after a bender that some of us may know too well and that was an incredibly painful scene to watch for anyone who has felt the creases of their couch and no matter how many showers you’ve taken, you still don’t feel clean or prepared for the world.

The drunken weekend was nicely framed by the narrative of Roger “hiring” Don to work at Sterling Cooper.  We finally get the back-story of how Roger found Don at the fur company. Don was overzealous and still contained very many of his Dick Whitman mannerisms as he tried to impress Roger with his ad campaign for Play-Doh.  The poignancy arises when Don shows up at the Sterling Cooper offices and offers to buy Roger drinks. After a morning of drinking, Roger staggers out of the bar, his arm around Don, with Don offering him to get him a cab home.  The next time they see each other, Don has once again showed up to the Sterling Cooper offices to bother Roger. However, this time to Roger’s surprise, Don informs him that he’s been hired and a puzzled Roger is left to wonder if he really had.  This calls to mind Alison’s insulting Don by calling him a drunk who “never remembers anything.”  Don has made a slip as well by having to hire Danny since he drunkenly stole his line and can’t pay him off for it.  The kid is hungry and he wants a job, not just a buy out check.  Like Roger, Don is in danger of slipping, of losing his edge and his hunger.  Don and Roger are tied together in many many ways, which we knew before, but “Waldorf Stories” helps to cement and further illuminate this fact.

There are always counterparts in Mad Men and without getting too much further in plot summary, Peggy’s episode with the new Art Director in the hotel room showed how very intuitive and on her game she is.  She is able to outwit the new Art Director and force him to do some work instead of continue to be a “chickenshit” as she calls him.  She also has the confidence to go to Don’s apartment and point out that he was wrong in stealing Danny’s line and that he has to make it right.  Peggy eschews the drink, even though she is a part of this man’s world and she is able to perform her job at a continued high level.  Pete plays into this counterpart as well when he is confronted with the news that Ken Cosgrove (of course the viewer is happy) is coming back to the firm.  Seeing that his importance may be in jeopardy, Pete sits Cosgrove down as soon as he comes to the office and tells him bluntly that things have changed. Cosgrove tries to laugh Pete’s statement and posture off, but is confronted by a grim and terribly professional looking Pete.  Ken has no response. Pete notices the change in Ken’s posture and then leans back in his chair and asks Ken how his wedding plans are going.  Pete resists alcohol  (he did drink more in earlier episodes, but has been seen doing it less on screen) and has continued to do so as the show has progressed.

Again, there are plenty of themes that I am skirting over such as how we show respect and thanks to others, and how much we can really attribute our individual success to the other people in our lives.  Yet, this stuck out to me as the show pointing towards the short comings of alcohol and, being in my mid-twenties it gave me pause as so many of us turn to the bottle for some kind of self-medication or a way to show us an answer.  I’m not calling for abstinence, I’m just calling for self-awareness for I am as much in fault as anyone and am as lost as anyone (see Puddles of My Podcast theme song).  I’m just looking for some kind of answer and Mad Men is a damn good TV show that I watch at the end of exhausting weekends.

Plus, you have to love Layne telling Pete, “On a personal note, I like you very much and it pains me to hear you think otherwise.”

Until next week.

Confessions of a Geisha

I was raised a Catholic and one of the pillars of the Catholic faith is the value of confession. As early as seven years old you are taught the joy and reward of confessing your wrongs outward to someone who isn’t your mother or father or your sister or brother, but a man in a uniform, someone who can talk to God – a person just like Santa Claus in the Department Store, a proxy who can speak to the person you want to speak to.  And you are also taught at that time, at the time of Reconciliation that perhaps if you are good and concentrate hard enough you can speak to God as well and admit all of the things you have done wrong, as though at seven years old you have a grasp about what is good and what is bad.  You only have vague notions of people and of what causes pain – you are on the road to understanding these objects and words of the world but lack any true fundamental experience to create concrete definitions that can be chartered through your world, your various worlds as they begin to develop within in you in your Youth.

Now, I was raised a Catholic but I believe in the religion of Mad Men, which also preaches the values of confession and the detriment that it can cause on your life if you do not communicate or open up to the world.  Clearly Don Draper is a character who obscures the truth and does not often confess what is troubling him – and of course he did not confess his true identity to his wife until Season 3. Now, confession is not as dire as having to admit that you are living in sin and have comitted a holy injustice – for perhaps in the end there is nothing so much as a holy injustice for our religions are made up of injustices and there is only the universe in the end, so perhaps the only injustice could be one against the universe and as far as I’ve learned in my life, the only injustices that go against the universe have something to do with love and light, but I’ve been struggling for over ten years to try and put what that is to a word or words that are discernable to other people.  However, Mad Men has always explored that idea of sharing and admitting when you are wrong.  We saw this in “Shut the Door, Have a Seat,” at the end of Season 3, where Don admitted to Peggy that he had been hard on her, when he admitted that he had taken advantage of Roger’s relationship.  Don had already admitted his identity to Peggy so he was able to open the door slightly and make these admissions or confessions to the other important people in his life.

Our current 1965 Don Draper has drawn the shade back across himself.  He has thrown himself into his office life, still concealing his true identity and finding no satisfaction either professionally, personally or sexually.  I bring up “Shut the Door, Have a Seat” because it is closest in theme and tone to  last night’s episode, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.”  In “Shut the Door, Have a Seat,” Don found himself against a wall and instead of running away as Dick Whitman is wont to do, he decided to fight and ended up taking control of his professional life.  Here, Don is up against a wall in so many areas of his life: Betty and Henry living in his home, no woman to love him, inability to connect with his kids, another agency gunning for him and trying to take his business.  Earlier in the season we have seen him in disarray, but in this episode he decided to take control of the situation once more by leading the agency on his scheme to fake the Honda motorcycle commercial in an attempt to drive the competing agency into bankruptcy.  This was a brilliant sequence as there is no show more exhilirating than Mad Men when they kick into a frisk gear, when the whole agency is working together towards a cause as they were at the end of Season 3.  Everyone pitches in, from Joan and Don working together to lead the director on, to Peggy riding around the empty sound stage with the Honda motorcycle.  Don was able to unify everyone in the great cause of fighting for the agency, which has had its up and downs and growing pains in its first year of existence.

The fact that Don was able to do this was in no small part due to the confession he was able to make to Faye Miller in the SCDP kitchen when they share the drink of sake that was sent over by the competing firm as a joke (it had a very “I drink your milkshake” vibe).  Faye Miller admits to Don that her wedding ring is a fake, she uses it as a defense to keep people away so that she can get work done – it is an identity she uses and plays into as a means to shield herself.  Don recognizes this confession because there isn’t anyone who has used an identity to shield the world more than Don Draper.  Don admits to his insecurities regarding spending time with his children since he and Betty were divorced and admits his great sadness at feeling relieved when he drops them off and then crushed when he misses them again during the week. As Don says, “its not going well.” 

Don is able to own up to his shortcomings and his faults, just as the Japanese are when Don points out that they did not honor the rules of their own ad contest.  The Japanese know honor and they end up giving SCDP the account for their upcoming Honda car line.  We have seen Don acknowledge his situation on his night out with Lane as the two men share the same pain of loneliness and divorce.  However, that was an evening of simple action between two men.  The intimate moment with Faye Miller, will her stockings off, washing her dish in the sink while she and Don sipped sake was something very different.  He was able to make a confession. And I don’t care if you are Don Draper or another man with an  illusion of toughness or aloofness, you never feel more comfortable or open then when you confess something to a woman – it becomes your chance to tell a story, even if you lack in that area.

This was the theme that drove the episode.  In the early stages when Betty and Don argue about Sally’s hair, it is Betty with Henry Francis’ help that admits she was too hard on Sally, though that breakthrough is soon lost when Betty finds out about Sally masturbating and must take her to therapy – althought the strange moment when Betty smiles at the doll’s house seems like some kind of obscure admission in Betty’s own mind, though that remains to be seen.  Roger even has to come to admit that the Japanese must be forgiven and that he has been living in the past for so many years and can’t afford it professionally and perhaps personally to stayed tied to old grudges and prejudices.

While Don, Faye Miller, Betty and Roger have to come to their confessions in this episode, we see that Peggy, Pete and Joan have already made some sort of confession and admission about who they are.  Clearly, Pete and Peggy reached these admissions last week when they exchanged their glance between the glass windows of the office and admitted the different directions they were taking in life.  We don’t know if they will regress from the progress they made through the exchange of information that Pete would be a father with Trudy, but the beauty of Mad Men is that with a simple shot of Peggy riding on the scooter, looking carefree and iconic, that her lesson seems to have stuck. This is not to overlook the confidence and poise Pete shows in standing up to Roger’s prejudice and lack of business vision, as well as his willingness in joining Don to “risk it all” in order to land the new account.  Meanwhile, Joan, very quietly and simply acknowledges that her husband is going to be going to Vietnam and admits that perhaps the world is not a better place after World War II, but that is what the war was fought for and we have to believe that our wars and our battles whether personal or national are fought to sustain good in the world, even if the world may not ever bet better or good.

And again, this is all only scratching the surface.  We could delve further into Sally’s character and the road she is going down, but that storyline seemed to speak for itself in the sheer weight of what that little girl is experiencing. I’d like to reserve judgment until her character and storyline develops a little further in this season.  But, speaking of reserving judgment you have to love a show like Mad Men where in the first twenty minutes you can’t figure out which character is in the wrong. Whether its Betty slapping Sally, Don going on a date while his kids are visiting or Henry Francis for suggesting Betty had something wrong with her by going to therapy (and for still living in Don’s house yet chiming in about how to raise his kids).  And in the end, none of them is worse than the other because they are all human and we have to see how they try to make it through despite it all.

This is only five episodes into Season 4, traditionally, Mad Men gets stronger around episode 8 each season.  We’ll see where we’re going from here.

Snap Out Of It!

 

The title of this post refers to quite a few things, one of those things being the jarring scene in Episode 1 of Season 4  (“Public Relations”) where the viewer witnesses Don Draper being slapped by a prostitute in his Greenwich Village apartment on Thanksgiving, away from his family who are having a rather dysfunctional holiday upstate with Henry Francis’ family.  In any event, as many of the initial reviews of Season 4 of Mad Men have mentioned, lots of things have changed in the universe that surrounds Don Draper.

And this is not surprising considering how Season 3 ended with Don, Sterling, Cooper, Lane Pryce, Pete Cambell, Peggy, Harry Crane, and Joan leaving Sterling Cooper as it was known and forming their own agency.  “Close the Door, Have a Seat,” as that episode is titled, was one of the best episodes in the three seasons of Mad Men.  It dealt with, in a very natural way, how our relationships with the people we work with, live with and spend much of our time with can be neglected and fall apart and how we sometimes have to learn the hard way how important those people and relationships around us are. This was done under the guise of a renegade plot of rebelling against conformity and gathering the troops up a sort of “getting the band back together” feel aka the theme of the upcomin 2010-2011 Boston Celtics season.  So, once that episode and season concluded with Don accepting the end of his marriage with Betty and the beginning of his new ad agency in his suite at the Pierre, any Mad Men fan could get the sense that the show as we knew it was most likely over.

Season 4 opens with Don Draper being interviewed and the cliched question of “Who is ___?” is directed at Don, which is clever because of the obvious nod towards perhaps the main theme of the show.  However, we know that things have changed because Don is now in more of a public position.  In the past three seasons there have been allusions to awards and awards ceremonies honoring Don, but they never seemed that palpable.  You could never picture Don really receiving these awards or giving interviews.  And we see quickly that Don is certainly not comfortable doing that now that he is the face of the new company.

The office of Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce is different as well, reflecting some of the changing tones and styles of the 60’s as the show has now moved into late 1964.  Peggy has yet another new haircut and has gained another level of poise and confidence in her work and her work persona.  Pete Cambell is still eager to please, but has gained a certain polish of professionalism or maturity that was lacking in previous seasons.  Perhaps he is, as he said in Season 1, starting to “do his best to emulate Roger.” That’s not to say that Roger is professional, with his quips about Don “stuffing” Jane’s friend and also getting “butter squirts” on her at dinner while they eat their chicken kiev.  In this episode Roger is able to run wild, but, being in such close quarters with Pete, we see that Pete is closer to developing the panache that Roger has – because it is more of a panache than a level of maturity in many ways.

However, what I watch the show for is usually Don and his conflicts.  I’ve explained my fascination with the themes that surround Don: secrecy, crafting an identity, how different identities clash in different environments, the inability to be satisfied and balancing a creative streak and a drive to work with the other elements of life. Now, with this prostitue scene we do have to add “self-loathing” and “self-flagellation” to his conflicts and, with the innuendos Don’s new maid makes about him not eating, perhaps even “deprivation” or “self-torture.”  I find myself thinking about the words Joy once said to Don in Season 2 when she asked him, “why would you deprive yourself of something you want?” 

Season 4, casts Don in a dark light in its first episode.  He is in the position he always wanted to be - he has his own firm where he can exert his power and creative influence – yet he is still not happy.  He has the freedom the “Dick Whitman” in him always seeks out, not only professionally, but personally since he is no longer married. However, although he may seem freer, he is actually more of a father and husband now that he was when he was married because he is legally forced to soley take care of the kids on weekends but also emotionally forced because he sees how bad of a mother Betty is.  Professionally, Don is also trapped because the business does soley rely on him to bring in business and the firm will be cast in public light and persona Don gives off – his talent is what will make the company’s name.  Now, more than ever, Don can’t just run away.  He has an entire company resting on his back, not just the corner office of the Creative Department where he could brood and unleash his genius advertising campaigns on the world. And when the Jantzen’s bathing suits representitives don’t understand Don’s clever campaign to sell their “two-piece” bathing suit, he loses it and kicks them out of his office for not recognizing his vision.

I read a theory that Don doing this was a means of him taking control of this new business and his current situation to create a stir in the Advertising Papers to bring some attention to the firm.  After watching the episode 2-3 times, I buy into this theory. Don finishes kicking out the Jantzen guys and immediately requests to get on the phone with Cooper’s “man at the Wall Street Journal.” Then, the episode closes with Don beginning to rehash the story of forming Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce by seemingly taking all the credit.  As Don eases into the story, the song “Tobacco Road” by the Nashville Teens crunches in as the credits come up and begin to roll.  It’s a muscular and exciting ending to the show as it feels like Don is now in a position of control.  He made a strong move at the end of Season 3, but it seems like in the time we have left him that he’s been boxed into a corner by clients, the press, his ex-wife, his own demons and perhaps even the changing times.  However, after getting slapped in the face by a prostitute, his wife, and clients in the course of one episode, Don has certainly seemed to snap out of it. And perhaps is on the course to crafting yet another identity for himself, one where he "holsters his guns."

Mad Men season openers are usually slow, slow burning episodes for an already slow show.  They set the table for what is to come in the rest of the season sometimes to the chagrin of fans of the show.  However, this was the most eventful and exciting first episode to season – perhaps even more than the pilot.  No matter what happens, this show is going to be different this season and  you have to salute Matthew Weiner and his staff for making that move and seemingly running with it.

And now that Mad Men is back on the air, I feel like I was snapped out of some summer malaise as well.  Sunday evenings are back in style.