* Opening on a scream and someone performing CPR on someone else with a big exploding orange sun-like light above his head, then cut to Megan Draper’s bare midriff while Don read The Inferno? Sold. Gone, gone is the critic who once used the phrase “on the nose” (gag, choke) to describe symbols, dialogue, and scenes in this show — to show that I not only got it, but, I suppose, to condescend to Matthew Weiner a bit for having made it so easy. When you look at the rest of the show, I’m not sure how you conclude that Weiner’s not an intelligent, thoughtful artist in full control of what he’s doing and with full awareness of how it reads. Remember when Eyes Wide Shut came out and people condescended to Stanley fucking Kubrick? “The line readings are stiff!” “That’s not what New York City looks like!””Rich-people orgies are totally different, believe me, you don’t wanna know, nudge nudge wink wink.”
* Like Eyes Wide Shut, Mad Men is working on a hyperreal level where…I don’t want to say the subtext becomes text, but the text is like a thin translucent film overlaid on a subtext that’s pawing and snuffling at the surface to be let out, like the Zuul dog behind Dana Barrett’s door in Ghostbusters. You have to come to it and let it operate on its chosen level, otherwise what’s the point? If all you want to do while watching two hours of Mad Men is chortle over how Don looks like he’s in a coffin while sleeping, that’s your journey, man. It’s not the show’s, and it’s not mine.
* (To be fair, I didn’t see a ton of this on twitter last night, not that I was on Twitter for very long, having gotten a very late start on watching the show. But I saw a little, enough to sense it was the tip of the iceberg, or at least so I thought. If I’m smacking a straw man around here, please let me know.)
* So.
* Sunburns, flowers, fires. I’m glad to see the telltale orange has stuck around in this season’s color palette. I’m even happier to see purple added to the equation. Why does this make me happy? No idea. I’m rolling with it.
* Actual verbatim notes taken during shots of Jessica Paré as Megan Draper in the opening minutes:
Megan stoned in a bra, jesus christ
Oh for the love of god with Megan already
I don’t know where Matthew Weiner found the Being John Malkovich doorway into my id, but I’m propping that shit open permanently if this is the result.
* And you know, it has an obvious narrative purpose as well, making Megan such a first-round knockout in this episode. Don moved on anyway.
* “You some kinda astronaut?” “I’m in advertising.” It’s a lulzy exchange, but it too has a much later echo: Don’s pal Dr. Rosen, whom he’s cuckolding but for whom he has super-obvious and genuine admiration bordering on an especially collegial version of awe, referring to himself and Don as “guys like us” because of how their work brings them in contact with life and death, him literally, Don mentally. He’s an astronaut of the mind, Barton Fink in Buzz Aldrin drag. (There’s obvious guilt here, too: Don’s actual brush with life and death sent him fleeing by any means necessary, and it involved a fellow G.I., etc.)
* “The man who can’t sleep and talks to strangers” would have been Don’s George Hearst-style Native American sobriquet, I suppose.
* Was it Cindy or Sandy, the violin player? Either way I’m sorry to see her go so quickly. So much to unpack there:
** “I can’t imagine it getting any darker than this.” “My mom’s dead.” Laughter. Anyone who can shut down Mrs. Francis that totally is alright by me.
** That violin recital in a pink dress was straight-up Alicia Witt playing the piano for the Haywards and Palmers in Twin Peaks.
** Fascinating, too, to make her the object of erotic fascination for not just Bobby, but also allegedly Henry, and quite clearly Betty as well. They cast a normal-looking teenage girl to play this normal teenage girl, after all, but the combination of youth and talent and girl-ness was enough to drive everyone up the wall anyway. That makes for a more challenging examination of this phenomenon than, say, Pete’s driver’s-ed dream girl getting fingerbanged in class.
** “It just makes me feel so much.” Anyone who can coax this kind of poetry out of Betty is also alright by me.
** Also anyone who can coax a holy shit elaborate rape-of-a-minor fantasy out of Betty. Whoaaaaaa. Betty Raper. (As I’ve said before, “Don Draper” is an awfully…evocative name, though still second place compared to his real name, which is basically Penis White Guy.)
** Betty’s right about things having changed since she was a girl in the city, too, but not (or not only) in the way she thinks. The counterculture provided a whole new established pathway for someone like our violin player. That trail had been blazed, and now your life had a new option.
* The fascinating thing about this season of Mad Men is that we’ll mostly be examining the impact of the counterculture on squares. Weiner famously throws pretty much everything he’s got in the tank into each new season of the show, so this doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny, but you have to figure there was a degree of planned obsolescence to the show’s aesthetic from the start. So much of its appeal in popular culture was in its sharp suits, drinks at the office, cigarettes, girls were girls and men were men Rat Pack aesthetic, which reads as stylish today — yet he had to know where things would be headed, and that he might alienate his audience by going there. Flash forward eight years from the start of the show and there are elements of the counterculture that read stylish today as well, no matter how much people still like making fun of hippies, but we won’t really be looking at the counterculture head on, will we? No, we’ll be examining the counterculture through its impact on square culture. Those clothes are mostly ugly, that version of hedonism is mostly ugly. Stoners in the office, big beards and goofy mustaches, Pete’s sideburns, loud jackets. It’s going to be interesting.
* Hey, the doorman is Little Carmine from The Sopranos! Still at the precipice of a crossroads, I see.
* Roger in therapy is fucking phenomenal — he really is Watchmen‘s Comedian. I mean, almost verbatim, if you ask his therapist: “What exactly are you joking about?” He’s so funny in this episode, as in all episodes — “Either it’s funny or it’s not; I don’t know how you can control yourself”; “A stroke. In the bathroom.” “…Well, I asked, didn’t I.”; “Takin’ pictures?” “Yeah, we’ll be done in a second.”; “This is my funeral.”; “He was just saying what we were all thinking.”; rubbing his secretary’s back with a drink in each hand — yet his outlook is so relentlessly hopeless and bleak. Marvelous.
* Human ear necklaces! Just a nice long multi-minute scene featuring people poorly recounting something they saw on TV, the purpose of which is to keep us thinking about human ear necklaces for a while in the middle of the show. Sure, go for it.
* Don: “I had an experience.” Sea breezes and the sound of the ocean in his head, instead of explosions. He wants to be blank.
* I loved, loved, loved Peggy as Don in drag. And I say that as…well, not an insult, if not a compliment. You can hear his speech patterns in her voice, for pete’s sake, so I don’t think it’s an inaccurate description; compare her to her appearance and demeanor in the pilot episode and it’s a total transformation that took place under Don’s tutelage, so it’s fair. And she’s not quite got it down just yet — note the repetition of the phrase “a great ad” as she tries to sell the headphone people on not just going with the first idea they come up with. But there’s a kindness in her that Don usually lacks, and I think her underlings and clients — and boss, who gave her quite a look there at the end — respond to that even when she’s not showing it and they’re not aware of it. That’s her trade-off for Don’s white-hot melancholy and sociopathy. I’ll take it.
* “Why are we contributing to the trivialization of the word?” Don Draper, white-knight for love. Between this and “the jumping off point,” I really love out not in control he is of his own subtext becoming text. That’s usually the makings of great art, but great advertising? I’m not so sure.
* “In life we often have to do things that are just not our bag.”/”I want you to be yourself.” Can we get Roger’s therapist in here to break up this superego/id fight?
* Don begging Little Carmine to tell him what’s on the other side is one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen on a television.
* Not insightful, but at least honest: I just enjoyed the contrast between the old spaces — the ornate home where the wake took place, the Francis mansion — and the new space — never-better-looking SDCP. Like cutting from Cleopatra to 2001.
* What to make of Roger’s collegial relationships with the women in his life? What to make of Joan’s mostly-absence from that group, other than receptively overhearing his compliment while she posed on the stairs?
* Until I read it online it never even registered that Peggy and Rizzo don’t even work together anymore. Like, literally, when Ted Chaough told her to send her people home because they’re afraid to leave without her express permission, and Rizzo came back on the phone and said he heard the whole thing, I thought “Man, he’s in good spirits considering she’s keeping him at work late.” So I’m now cribbing this from whoever first pointed out, but how nice is it to see Peggy and Stan have this late-night phone-call work-wife relationship now that they’re not even working together anymore.
* Bob from accounts = classic late-season Sopranos means-to-an-end supporting player. Which means we’ll probably be seeing more of him than that.
* Ken taking him down was Ken at the meanest we’ve seen him since his gross womanizing days earlier in the show. But I don’t even think he’s in the wrong.
* By the end of the show my notes really just dried up. “The jumping off point.” “Giorgio died.” “Vacation slides. The Carousel.” “The skiing doctor, amazing.” Weiner found the route to the real and he’s just going back there over and over and over again. (With director Scott Hornbacher’s considerable help in this episode. Man oh man.)
* A little bit devastated by that final reveal, frankly. Où est le Diamond Head d’antan?
Tags: Mad Men, reviews, TV, TV reviews
This was a very funny one. any episode that has that much roger is a good thing.
It took me a minute but after i realized who it was.. seeing Linda Cardellini in a good juicy role was really exciting. I recently re-watched Freaks and Geeks and was thinking how good she is, lamenting her not doing much since then (which is apparently not even true, shes done a bunch of voice acting and some tv i never watched like boy meets world).. also she is looking really super foxy
So I take it you are not among those who believe the show laid an egg last night.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lie5xcvP5H1qbhziqo1_500.png
Probably all anti-Megan people.
The show not only didn’t lay an egg, that was probably the best of the double-size episodes, with very solid stuff for all four major characters. I loved the contrast between Betty and Don, both confronted with young people in situations much like they once were. Don recoils from it, though possibly because his self-loathing makes him want to keep his bad juju away from an obvious target like Newlywed Soldier With 10 Months Left, while Betty tries to save her young charge, though also possibly to convince her to be a conformist like her. Don ends up delegating the right thing to do and Betty gives up. I did not at all see Betty’s bizarre rape comments as reflecting any fantasy of hers. Betty is a) mentally ill, b) not used to using humor, and c) obviously jealous of Sandy’s ability to captivate the men in her life with her special talent–Sandy brought beauty into their home with her music. Betty tried to rattle Henry and also tried to get some affirmation of her own sex appeal, and it came out about as ugly as possible.
I liked that Don had a brush with death (the doorman), went to Paradise, but brought the Inferno with him. For some reason it’s important that I know whether he started the affair with Mrs. Rosen before or after he began to genuinely admire Dr. Rosen, though I’m sure we’ll never know. On a misogynist scorekeeping level, sneaking out to cheat on your spouse after a New Year’s Eve party you threw is an astonishing achievement.
I wasn’t really disappointed myself – or rather, let me rephrase that. I was mildly disappointed while watching because, well, it had been a while and I don’t think I was alone in having high expectations. But it was a slow-burn of an episode that, obviously for some viewers, simply came off as slow. The moment it was over I started to think it over and realized that, yes, there was a lot there under the skin – a whole lot, actually – such that even if it didn’t immediately seem like the plot was kicking over they laid out a whole feast of themes, sufficient to run through these last two seasons and more.
But then, even if we as greedy TV viewers want the juicy plot details NOW NOW NOW (and are impatient at having to sit through all the exposition that comes with rejoining the characters in media res after eight or ten months in their lives), MAD MEN is one of those shows that has a deft track record for always managing to conjure up plots from the unlikeliest material. I’m sure all the weird non-sequiturs that we ignored or dismissed will add up to something by June – they always do.
But with that said, I did audibly groan at the last-minute reveal.
99% of the time, if someone tells me something was “slow” (or “weird” in a way that implies “bad”), they lose credibility with me, not that it was you saying it this time. I do think in some of the prior long Mad Mens, you could kind of feel like the material was stretched or edited with a more lingering eye just to make it fit the longer running time. I didn’t feel that here. You’re right about how the show will circle back to stuff you thought was finished or abandoned or not worth revisiting and do something surprising and interesting with it (like Sally’s weird boyfriend). It was awkward to have Sandy just dropped into our laps out of nowhere, suggesting that she’s really just there to reflect Betty than be a character in her own right, but who knows? Maybe she’ll be back as part of Paul Kinsey’s hippie death cult 😉
Sean was right about Joan in that purple, which is still burned in my brain. Not only was it striking, it really emphasized how, partner though she may be, she’s an alien to these men.
BTW, I have to throw out a recommendation for above-average, New Zealand-set police procedural Top of the Lake, with Elizabeth Moss, Holly Hunter, and a great actor I didn’t know, Peter Mullan. Sundance Channel.
My favorite Roger moment comes during the Hawaii hotel pitch. The client has raised the specter of suicide by referencing an unnamed movie where James Mason swims into the water intending to kill himself. Don brushes it off as perhaps “a personal association for you,” and Pete underlines that by saying nobody else who saw it thought of that, and just as Pete is practically saying “Okay, moving on . . .”, Roger snaps his fingers and says, “A Star Is Born!” Maybe not such a “personal association for you” after all. Thanks a whole fucking lot, Roger!! Of course, Pete’s assertion is pretty close to contradicted when Don asks Stan whether the image reminds him of suicide, and he says around a mouthful, “Of course! That’s what’s so great about it!” The whole scene is the kind of tour-de-force MAD MEN churns out on a regular basis–in its own way, as great as the original Kodak Carousel presentation.
And while this might be digging too far, A Star Is Born somewhat echoes the Roger/Don relationship.
Yes, and the Don/Peggy and Don/Megan relationships.
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