Mad Men thoughts, Season Six, Episode Eight: “Lady Lazarus”

* Nothing worse than someone who interrupts you when you’re reading during your commute. Dude deserved to be cuckolded for that alone.

* I’m really glad this show is not above a bit of comic business involving some schmoe lugging skis and ski poles around. Or as Roger approvingly put it, “And I got to see that!”

* Actually, that echoes his line during Pete and Lane’s fight, doesn’t it? I like the image of Roger as a hedonist observer. All the world’s a stage and he’s got great seats.

* Pete’s skis: the telltale use of orange of the night.

* “No one can keep up. It’s always changing.” Megan gets the Matthew Weiner “this is what this season’s about” line of the evening.

* Guest starring Rory Gilmore as Gloria Trillo!

* At least that’s where I thought it was headed at first, though it turns out Beth was the one slamming the brakes on her dalliance with Pete, not Pete. In fact, I got it backwards: Pete gender-flips Gloria Trillo’s trademark move and initiates the inappropriate incognito meeting with the cuckolded spouse, rather than the other way around. I think what threw me was her wildly inconsistent and inappropriate affect during their initial encounter. She just seemed, you know, potentially mentally ill. But something Salon’s Willa Paskin tweeted made her click for me: She’s just the Betty Draper of a show we’re not watching.

* The Don and Megan Show is so fucking good. It’s only in this episode that I cottoned to why, though: Megan’s an actress! She can fake a rapport with a product and a client (by masking it as a rapport with her husband) naturally, in a way it took Don a long time to master by his own admission.

* Don suggesting Megan work at another advertising firm was the key to that late-night conversation. On the one hand, it’s really, really sweet. He might have changed his tune eventually, but Don’s first instinct when Megan tells him she doesn’t want to work at the agency anymore is not “Oh no, I’m losing her!”, it’s “Oh no, I’ve made things too unpleasant for her at work, but she’s really talented — she’s gotta find another place to do this.” Only upon further thought was I like “Hmmm, maybe he’s concerned that a rejection of his profession as the road to fulfillment is a rejection of him, too?”

* Don plays his true feelings about what he does for a living close to the chest, mostly by expressing very different things about it at different times. He’s been visibly and sincerely thrilled by finding the right line, or when a pitch goes well, or when he won his Clio, but at the same time he’s been dismissive of grand ambition and ars gratia artis. He tells Megan we don’t always get to choose where our talents lie, implying that part of him wishes his own talents lay somewhere else. So in the long run it’s tough to say how he’ll feel about Megan’s departure from SCDP as a reflection of his professional and creative life.

* But it’s perfectly clear how he feels about it short-term and in the gestalt of his marriage: miserable. The hilariously direct dissolve from his slowly deflating smile after dittoing her line about being everything she’d hoped for to his miserable punim during that excruciating Cool Whip test-kitchen pitch with Peggy says it all. Yes, she’s super-duper hot. Yes, she cooks barefoot and plants a steamy kiss on him while she’s at it, while playfully admonishing him not to expect this kind of thing all the time. Yes, she’s honest with him and brings out the honesty in him. Yes, she rolls with his dark side, from his secret identity to his sexual fetishes. But last episode Don told her, with something like awe in his voice, “You’re good at all of it.” Not anymore. No more walking into work together — that part of their life is over. Now she’s definitionally not good at “all of it,” and that disappointment’s going to weigh on Don the same weigh Megan’s realization that following Don’s career path (however legitimately great she might be at it) wasn’t going to fulfill her weighed on her.

* Christina Hendricks is really a master of Joan’s elaborate social kabuki. Listen to her delivery when she asks Don “I mean, she’s not disappearing is she?” A hyperbolic joke covering a straightforward question about whether Megan’s going to make herself a stranger to her former colleagues covering an implied question about Megan’s future with Don.

* Rizzo nails it. “For what? Heinz baked beans.” Peggy’s dilemma is that she can’t blow off the inconsequentiality of what she does for a living and still be (apparently) happy like Rizzo, nor can she cut bait and admit it doesn’t make her happy and go do something else like Megan. Personally I’m not sure whether she really is unhappy, mind you — I think she’s not quite sure. She just hasn’t faced up to the “I’m good at this, and now let me figure out if that means anything or not” internal discussion yet.

* Don’s tin ear for rock music is funny, but I seized on something different in that scene when the guys come in to play him the song the client picked for the commercial: He says “help yourself”, but no one else drinks.

* When did music become so important? Michael Ginsberg tells Don the song’s making him fucking nauseous and all Don can do is express bafflement at the harsh language, but that’s the kind of thing I’ve said probably hundreds of times. When did this change take place? When did music become the core cultural thing by which cultural-people define themselves? At least I do, and always have, more than film or books or comics or TV or anything else. I assume the first example of this is beat/jazz culture in the ’50s, but I don’t know.

* Joan assumes Megan will be the failed second wife. That’s one of the slots she has available, and she’s gonna make that square peg fit, by god. For my money, Peggy has the right of it: Megan’s gonna be good at what she does. We’ve already seen what an actress she can be.

* Pete tricking his way into his inamorata’s home reminded me of how he pressured the au pair into having sex with him a few seasons ago. When he wants something he has a hard time understanding he can’t always have it.

* The invisible woman at the test kitchen.

* MAD MEN CAN AFFORD THE FUCKING BEATLES MOTHERFUCKER

* In all seriousness, the use of “Tomorrow Never Knows” does more than put paid to all the knowing critic jokes about what songs Mad Men can and can’t afford to use this season, it serves as a declaration of ambition. Not that we didn’t know how ambitious Mad Men already was, mind you — don’t let’s forget it soundtracked a Don-looking-badass shot with “Satisfaction” last season, though obviously Mick & Keith are way more profligate than the Apple corps with the usage rights if the price is right. But to use an original Beatles song, any Beatles song much less a landmark like that one, is to take a run right at a cultural monolith/megamyth. Hell, I was thrilled enough when Don whistled “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” a couple episodes back. Watching him wrestle with “turn off your mind, relax, and float down stream” was a higher order of pop-culture pleasure.

* My favorite thing about it, though? The credits continued the song after Don shut it off, like Matthew Weiner was saying “Okay, Don may not care for it, but this song’s awesome, why don’t we keep listening?” Endearing.

* I can’t remember the last time I found something on a tv show more frightening than that open elevator shaft. That it didn’t pay off in any concrete way made it even scarier. It was a Hitchcocky image, for sure, in an episode that referenced Hitch explicitly (The Birds) and implicitly (Beth had a tortured Vertigo vibe to her), as well as the Hitchock-acolyte elements of David Lynch–there was something Blue Velvet/Laura Palmer about Beth’s tender feminine damage, and the shaft was a flash of the unexplained uncanny as darkly luminescent as the ear on the front lawn or, insofar as it’s a portentous absence, the disappearing angel in picture on Laura Palmer’s wall. The thread will be torn, Mr. Draper, the thread will be torn.

* Whoa: Did you know that if you take the first letter of the first sentence in each “next week on Mad Men” teaser clip this season, it spells out “P-E-T-E-C-A-M-P-B-E-L-L-I-S-G-O-I-N-G-T-C-O-M-M-I-T-S-U”???** I wonder what the next letters are!

** not true, at least as far as I know

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9 Responses to Mad Men thoughts, Season Six, Episode Eight: “Lady Lazarus”

  1. Hob says:

    I think there’s room for overlap between “the Betty Draper of a show we’re not watching” and “potentially mentally ill.” The lines about never managing to get to the market, and assuming that pictures of the Earth remind everyone of being helpless in the void, were huge red flags of depression which would’ve seemed more heavy-handed if not for the counterpoint of Pete blundering along obliviously as if this were some kind of romantic thing.

    “The credits continued the song after Don shut it off”– I guess that could be Weiner saying “this song’s awesome”, but it also seemed to me like a continuation of the Don-versus-the-’60s thing. Don shuts off the song within his little bubble, but it’s still playing everywhere else and there’s nothing he can do about it.

    • Jon Hastings says:

      Also – “If we paid $250K for that song – we’re going to play the whole damn thing.”

  2. SeanPBelcher says:

    When Don turned off the song, I was left wondering if he was rejecting the message (and the new culture) or if he really didn’t “get it.” How much of that is stubbornness and how much is just him being a man who can’t keep up?

  3. Justin says:

    Watching Don listen to that song, it seemed like the soundtrack to his world spinning out of his control.

  4. As thrilling as it was to see/hear “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Mad Men, and of course from the title to the music it’s a terrific example of both the “everything’s falling apart” theme of this season and how the generation after Don is roaring ahead of him into uncharted territory, it sure was a bad choice by Megan for a cut to start Don off with from Revolver!

    I didn’t pick up on the color choice for the ski scene like Sean does, but I did wonder what the point of the scene was. I’m not sure if Roger’s gift is due to some post-LSD bliss and open-heartedness, whether he’s just enjoying his role as warmup act for the client, not having to do the dirty work like Pete or Ken, or if it was an acknowledgment of Pete’s elevated status, like a lioness letting the head lion have the choice cuts of gazelle.

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  6. Alex S. says:

    I loved “Tomorrow Never Knows” showing up on this episode — and it was possibly my favorite part of this season. But, I did get slightly irked at Megan pointing to the top of the record, when everyone knows it’s the album’s final track. 🙂

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