Mad Men thoughts, Season Five, Episode Thirteen: “The Phantom”

* “This program contains brief nudity.” YES.

* Don has a toothache. Very “Test Dream.” Perhaps that’s the best way to understand “The Phantom,” from the seen-and-not-seen title on down: an experiment in investing a “real” episode of television with the nervous energy of a dream. Don’s repeated hallucination of Adam was the most obvious element, but there were also a series of gestures of finality that made it seem like various characters were waking up from the events of the season. Megan gets her “big break.” Pete gets the Manhattan apartment he wanted. Roger’s on top of the world again, smiling naked at the skyline, the trickster god triumphant. The agency is flush and ready to expand. Don has his rotten tooth removed, and in the end seems ready to get back up to his old tricks thanks to the most portentous cut to black since The Sopranos. Were Beth and her ECT-induced memory loss — her feelings and actions washed away, leaving her resplendent in recuperation and ready to face a new day — the key? Was it all a dream?

* Pete grabs Beth’s scarf as it trails behind her luggage on the train. Oh, Pete, you hopeless romantic, you. Everything that makes you happy slips through your fingers.

* Now that we know what Harry was asking Joan about in the elevator, I have to give the “Next week on Mad Men” from last week props for a terrific fakeout. Who can blame anyone for assuming Harry, that grinning dope, would be the one to ask Joan about how she got her partnership?

* Adam???

* “I’m so bored with this dynamic.” Right on, Sal. I wonder how much longer Don and Ginsberg will put up with each other.

* Pete’s absurd high-backed leather office chair.

* “Don, I give you my proxy—I’ve got things to do.” “We can do that?” Has there ever been a group of businessmen less interested in being businessmen?

* So Beth is a sick person. I get it now — the joyless simulacrum of pleasure in lieu of pleasure itself.

* I’m not the only one who thought Glen’s the heavy breather on Megan’s phone, right?

* Pete’s plan is to escape to L.A., like Don did. Something about tragedy and farce?

* A door in a dark place Beth wants to go through. Resonant image, man.

* Pete says suicide is “for weak people, people who can’t solve problems.” So that’s how he’s dealing with Lane’s death. I actually did more thinking about Pete’s reaction over the past week than I did about anyone else’s. Surely his feelings toward Lane were mixed, to say the least, after the humiliating beating the buttoned-down nebbish doled out to him a few months back, although it sure seemed that Pete’s horror and sadness over his death were real. How do you deal with the death of someone within your circle who you’ve come to dislike? It isn’t easy, though in my experience the dislike doesn’t change much, except as a marker of the waste inherent in death. That’s how I spent the little time I had dealing with this person? But if Pete feels that suicide is terminal weakness, and a terminally weak man beat him up, what does that say about Pete?

* “I thought you hated advertising.” If you were wondering how Don had really processed Megan’s departure from the agency for an acting career, look no further. “Well you certainly don’t think it’s art, and you’re an artist, aren’t you?” Nasty, man, and targeted not only at her insecurity about who she is and what he does, but implicitly at his own, too.

* Megan gets her own chance to broadcast her deepest problems with their relationship, after she gets hammered. “This is all I’m good for,” she tells Don as she tries to seduce him, and it’s not clear if she’s sarcastically referring to how she thinks he sees her, or how she sees herself. (Answer: C) Both A and B.) Then more shots at Don, alleging he wants her to fail so that she can be the proper homebody he supposedly wants her to be. I’d say that this isn’t true, that he always works to temper his initial unpleasant reactions to news of the demands of her career in a way he never did after fights with Betty, and that after he sees how fucked up she is over her failures he goes ahead and gets her the commercial gig after all. But is that because he truly values her happiness, or simply the peace and quiet that goes with it?

* At least now we can see why he has the problem he has with her acting career, particularly as it takes on a more commercial manifestation: He now cannot help but see her as a product to be sold. Watch his face curdle as he watches her test real, the smoke in the air solidifying the beam of light from the projector and literalizing the male gaze like it’s one of Cyclops’s force blasts. (The circle on the chest of Megan’s dress is the bullseye.) He goes from pride and enjoyment to…bleh, something’s wrong with this. Of course, what’s wrong is that he’s watching her in the conference room where he’s no doubt screened a million ads for a million products. “Megan Calvet” is just the latest thing he needs to figure out how to sell. This circles back to his reaction to her performance of “Zou Bisou” in front of their friends and coworkers — he didn’t want them to have access to her, and to his relationship with her, in that way. (Note how the sophisticated, sexy “European-ness” of “Zou Bisou” has now been transformed into a comical, over-the-top mirror image for the commercial.) It circles back to his reaction to her departure from advertising — he wants her to be in the elite, the people who are in on it, the salesmen, not for her to be the thing being sold. It circles back to his reaction to Joan’s indecent proposal, and to his worst-ever insult for Betty a season or two back, and to paying a prostitute to hit him in the face, and to Lane’s wife use of brothels as the coup de grace in her dressing down of Don when he visits her to drop off the check — because of his mother, he is horrified by the idea that a person can be bought and sold.

* About that check: I think Don really does think he’s done something kind for Lane’s family, and not in a self-congratulatory way, either, but because he wants to be kind to Lane’s family. He and Joan don’t even bring it up for a vote, not even after Joan says they ought to: He’s going to do what he can to make it up to Lane, and by proxy to his brother. (Ah, proxy: “We can do that?”) For her to throw it back in his face like that must have been genuinely upsetting to him.

* If Lane had been able to hang on for four months he’d have been fine.

* Jeez, Maman is a monster. It’d take an awful lot of work on being deliberately awful for me to get to a place where I’m comfortable dismissing my own daughter as having the artistic temperament without actually being an artist. What a devastating line. If this is secretly Maman’s self-assessment, as Megan alleges when she throws her “the world couldn’t support that many ballerinas” comment back in her face, that only makes it worse, the same way that Don’s self-doubt only fuels the worst elements of his reaction to Megan’s career.

* Just as devastating: Pete, telling Beth/himself that his life with his family is “just a temporary bandage on a permanent wound.” Pete is horrible in many ways, but at that moment could you feel anything less than total sorrow and sympathy for him? How do you get out from under an injury that deep? Say whatever else you want to say about Pete, but it takes strength and bravery to face yourself like that and declare that your whole life is a waste. It’s a courage you don’t really even want to have.

* At least there’s Roger around to brighten things up — the Loki of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce pantheon. Look how happy he is just to have successfully tricked Don and Megan with his Emile impersonation! Watch as he finds the single funniest, smuttiest thing to do or say in any given situation: “What is ‘Regina’?” Witness his triumphant gaze and mighty buttcheeks as acid sends him the message that he is indeed the master of all he surveys!

* Many lovely, haunting shots in this thing. Megan leaving the frame as she turns on the shower, her bright pink robe hanging on the wall like a gun waiting to go off, which it later does. Roger and Megan’s mom on that vast gold bedspread. Lane’s empty red chair looming in the background as Don passes his wife the check. The glory shot of the five partners silhouetted against the window of the new office space.

* “Give me an old fashioned.” Oh, Mad Men! Seriously though, that kind of directness is a lot of fun. If this were an action show they’d make points by shooting people, and if this were a straightforard comedy they’d make points with jokes, and here they make points with symbolism. Why not enjoy it?

* “Are you alone?” I guess it depends. Adam tells Don it’s not the tooth that’s rotten; at just around the same time, Don’s relationship with Megan appears poised to permanently sour. Was it the good part of Don that was removed? Did they take out his sweet tooth instead?

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11 Responses to Mad Men thoughts, Season Five, Episode Thirteen: “The Phantom”

  1. Justin Aclin says:

    Briefly: As wounded and devastated as Pete is in that scene, he certainly sounds spritely in the next scene pointing out that he’ll have the same view as Don. The only thing that ever seems to make Pete truly happy is measuring himself against Don, which is equally depressing.

  2. Gardner says:

    The heavy breather on Megan’s phone was Roger–he tells Marie he called about a dozen times but kept getting Megan.

  3. Kory says:

    I really hoped that Don+Megan was going to be a positive relationship. I felt that Megan would help him adapt and connect with his more progressive tendencies. Sure, while not a perfect relationship, it was one that could overcome their individual, selfish designs to return to each other. I like the take away that she wasn’t “in” on it anymore and that she was being packaged, bought and sold instead of in on it. But, I wish that wasn’t all it took for him to go back to being “old” Don and I wish Megan’s ambitions were so quickly compromised.

  4. Sean, just when you almost had me convinced that Don and Megan were going to be okay…

    I hate playing armchair psychologist, but there was something in Beth’s quote (“We have the same problem”), his breakthrough in her hospital room (“a permanent wound”), Trudy complaining about his blues…all against that grim ’60s POV of depression on display in Beth’s transformation…I wonder if they’re going to a place where Pete is going to come to terms with something serious within himself, depression or otherwise.

    Interesting that the montage at the end included only Peggy, Pete, and Roger. It felt thematically resonant.

    That glory shot of the partners felt ominous to me. Here are five people who have done a lot to survive. Who is going to be next to fall, like Lane?

    That music cue at the end! Amazing. “Once for yourself and once for your dreams.” Don walking through a blank, dark landscape as the brightly painted fantasy recedes and blurs behind him. “The nervous energy of a dream” indeed!

  5. Dave Bruce says:

    It’s fascinating to me how just a couple of scenes can recontextualize Pete Campbell so effectively. I don’t know why, but all his tantrums and miserably base behavior this season being painted as possible symptoms of severe clinical depression just really made me feel for the guy. Trapped in his own mind, the arithmetic of his life just no longer making sense, acting out.

    A lot of critics/recappers seem to be seeing Don’s actions in this episode as wholly shallow and self-serving, so I was glad to see you pick up on how happy he was to see his beautiful wife and that reel and how crestfallen he becomes near the end. There’s a moment where she looks at the floor in the reel and looks terribly sad for a second that prompts his face darkening. And God, that scene of drunk Megan just laying into him with despair might have been the saddest thing for me in an entire season of very sad things.

    Don despises feeling like the sole provider of happiness for a woman as much as he likes pushing for the women in his life to let him be that provider. And assuming that role for Megan – who he adored for not basing her happiness on his authority – gave him all the cues he needed to finally emotionally recuse himself.

    God, what a show.

  6. bg says:

    Great post as usual. Don’t know if you saw the interview with Weiner in the LA Times last week, but he touched upon Don and Megan’s marriage:

    “People should assume like Don does that he will be married to this woman for the rest of his life,” said Weiner. “This is not one in a series of marriages for Don. This is the good marriage after the bad one. Of course, he’s part of his time though. Can he really deal with an independent person?”

    I too worried about their relationship going south, as i think most people have, to varying degrees. But i’m not so sure that’s going to happen. The show has never really been in the business of giving the viewers what they expect.

  7. substrom says:

    Peggy’s glimpse of dogs fucking in the night was the highlight for me. Superb.

  8. madeleine says:

    * I’m not the only one who thought Glen’s the heavy breather on Megan’s phone, right?

    I totally thought that at first, too.

    “What is Regina?” was the best line of the episode. I love Roger Sterling.

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  10. Pete says:

    There were two James Bond audio cues that signify… something. Don and Peggy were watching Casino Royale (the one where everybody from David Niven to Woody Allen was James Bond) and then the opening moments of You Only Live Twice. I’m not sure what their importance is, but they were both fun to catch.

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