* Yeah, Episode Four: The premiere counted as two, apparently.
* Twin Peaks debuted 20 years ago today. Mad Men just started celebrating one day early is all.
* Seriously, what a treat to see Madchen Amick, who like all Lynch veterans takes his numinous energy with her wherever she goes. (See also Jimmy Barrett.) Even though it was reasonably clear that her continued presence in the episode and in Don’s apartment was a facet of a fever dream (otherwise why have the fever stuff going on in the first place, right?), her ability to disrupt Don’s life with her ever-increasing bluntness and directness had an uncanny air to it that went beyond “oh, it’s just a dream.” She literally only entered the story due to a physical separation between Don and Megan; she disappeared from Don’s apartment through a crack in the wall — that Gothic staple, a secret passage, one which may or may not exist in real life; she gave Matthew Weiner the opening for his most direct riff on David Lynch yet. (I ended up a little disappointed that the show hadn’t cast Sheryl Lee herself, and I half expected Don to start shouting about Missoula, MON-TANA!!!!!! Also did I detect some Angelo Badalamenti homages in the music round about the time Megan showed up in a halo of light?)
* Also, y’know, any excuse to look at Madchen Amick.
* The actual murder scene made my jaw drop and kept it that way for quite some time, even though I knew on some level — even just a narrative-television level — it couldn’t possibly be real: This wasn’t the sort of thing they’d do about three-fifths of the way into a fourth episode, involving a character we barely knew, in which the whole scene elapsed in what couldn’t have been more than two minutes. But it worked as well as it did nevertheless, in large part because we’ve always suspected Don has this in him. Remember the bit of business in the first season when he goes to his brother’s hotel room and you think he has a gun?
* I do feel like bluntness is Season Five’s stock in trade so far, for whatever that’s worth. Personally I’m not sure it’s worth much. Okay, it’s blunt. Okay, we get that Don telling hallucination-Madchen that she won’t ruin this for him, then strangling her, is his subconscious saying this same thing to the part of himself that cheats. (Although it’s important to note that he cheats first and kills later.) Okay, we get the connection between Madchen under the bed, Sally under the couch, and the survivor of Richard Speck’s Chicago nurse massacre under the bed. Okay, we get the connection between Time magazine being all “Enough with the riots already, this nurse massacre has some juice” and Peggy being freaked out about the massacre but oblivious to the potential and much more real violence Dawn could be facing. Okay, Peggy’s self-congratulation for helping Dawn out and for having been in a similar (but not really comparable) position of frowned-upon uniqueness at the office in the past is belied by both that obliviousness and her instinctive temptation not to leave the cash-filled purse around Dawn. I didn’t feel like I was being made to work too hard to put any of that together, but nor am I terribly tempted to complain about that. Is there such a thing as blunt elegance? Because I think that’s what this show has. There’s something to be said for making a clear point, but making it well.
* I do wish the connection between The World’s Most Intrusive Accordion Player and Joan’s own prowess with the squeezebox (pun intended lol) had gone unspoken, however. And “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” was the most on-the-nose music cue in all of recorded human history.
* I find myself fascinated by Joan’s mother precisely because she’s not “fascinating.” (I realize this runs counter to my point about bluntness being okay, but whatever.) Compared to the nightmarish mother figures we’ve seen on this show, from Betty Draper to Don’s dead prostitute birth mother and cruel stepmother to Henry Francis’s steamroller of a mom to Peggy’s standard-issue loving-but-cruel outer-borough Catholic widow, Joan’s mom is…reasonable, basically. Which is weird on a show like this! They butt heads some, yes, but no more than you expect two adult members of a family to butt heads; there’s obviously some unresolved issues regarding Joan’s service-member dad, yes, but not to a degree that cancels out her advice regarding Joan and Greg, I don’t think. When she tells Joan that Joan’s plan to greet Greg with their (“their”) baby was the right one after all, I internally cheered. A lot of moms on this show could not be persuaded like that.
* Loved the actual filmmaking in this episode. Quick cuts (my favorite was right up front, when without having first gotten an establishing shot, we’re suddenly just looking at Rizzo with pantyhose over his head) and more of the Kubrick influence from last week (Sally Draper as spooky little girl who should not be there is as direct a reference to another film/show as I’ve seen on Mad Men so far).
* And all that salmon and orange! This is quickly becoming this season’s hallmark, and one of my favorite things about it to boot. High point in this episode: Cutting from Joan in her apartment to Peggy in hers, Joanie’s orange walls collapsing from the periphery into the center of the frame in the form of Peggy’s pajamas.
* I laughed when Joan and her cleavage came out of the bedroom and asked her husband, mother, and son “What are the three of you up to?” Joan must get that question a lot.
* With all the horror stuff going on in this episode (btw, good to see Don and Henry’s mom both acknowledge the haunted-mansion vibe of the Francis’s house), I couldn’t help but see Joan’s exquisite moment of catharsis against Greg — dumping him, throwing him out, mocking him with how much effort it’s taken her to make him feel like a man, directly denying his inherent goodness, citing his rape of her as Exhibit A, god it was glorious — as Joanie’s revenge, the last-reel triumph of a horror-movie heroine against her antagonist. Joan was the episode’s Final Girl.
* Quick question about Greg: Greg says the Army makes him feel like a good man, contra Joan’s initial assessment. Does this mean he’d previously suspected he wasn’t good? Or has his life remained unexamined and this is just him patting himself on the back? I’m honestly not sure.
* Great zinger by Dawn (who through her disappearing act the morning after is the episode’s real Final Girl, I suppose), leaving her impeccably polite note right on top of Peggy’s purse. (By the way, I think Peggy’d drunkenness played a big part in her racist fear that Dawn would steal her money. This is someone she works with, who moreover she has all the contact information for, not some catburglar or mugger. What was Dawn gonna do, take the money and run?)
* Once again we see that Megan’s got moxie that few of the other women in Don’s life possess. She will run head-on into the infidelity issue, for example, but not with moralizing — with an “okay, I get that that’s a part of you, but it’s not a part that’s going to work for us, Don, do you get it?” attitude that’s refreshing both in its candor about the problem and its vulnerability in acknowledging her concerns about it.
* Crackpot theory of the day: Megan and Michael Ginsberg? Something about the way Ginzo’s been framed so far makes me wonder. His introduction was given a prominence that’s hard to explain. He’s the only non-Don person the show’s described as a genius. Megan said in the premiere that she’s concerned by her co-worker’s cynicism; Mike literally flees the room rather than share cheap thrills over the crime-scene photos. (Critic Deborah Lipp suggests some hypocrisy in the juxtaposition of that reaction with Mike’s darkly sexual Cinderella pitch to the shoe company, but lots of people can draw that kind of line between real and imaginary behavior.) Then there’s stuff that suggests the pairing on an almost subliminal level: Mike’s key line, “She wants to be caught”; the shoe exec’s suggestion that the woman in the ad be French; the direct address of infidelity in the Don/Megan marriage in the same episode where Mike gives his Draperesque spiel. Am I crazy? (I also think Roger’s going to die this season, but enough about me.)
Tags: Mad Men, reviews, TV, TV reviews
“Is there such a thing as blunt elegance? Because I think that’s what this show has. There’s something to be said for making a clear point, but making it well.”
YES. It seems to me like in the last few years, “on the nose” has become such a go-to phrase for critics that people now assume it’s automatically gauche for the writer to deliberately arrange related things in any noticeable way, regardless of whether it was well executed or not; if the audience notices, then the writer has been busted somehow. (At least for anything that’s not clearly a joke; if you’re pretty sure it’s a joke, then the thing now is to say “I saw what you did there”, to make sure everyone agrees it was a joke. This drives me nuts. Also, people should get off my lawn.)
You do a little bit of that in your next paragraph– or, I guess, I just disagree about the first example (it was inevitable and in character, given that Joan’s mom was there; she can’t help but try to drag the conversation back to nice things and of course she’s going to point out the accordion thing), and I’m not sure what the point of the second one is. The show has pretty often used end-credits music in exactly that way, and it is a period song (well OK, it’s a couple years out of date).
Of course there’s also plenty of stuff the show could point out but doesn’t bother to… like the fact that in season 1, Peggy did have money stolen by a co-worker, and inadvertently got one of the building’s black employees fired when she reported the theft.
“people now assume it’s automatically gauche for the writer to deliberately arrange related things in any noticeable way, regardless of whether it was well executed or not; if the audience notices, then the writer has been busted somehow.”
That’s really well put, Hob. I mean, in the end this gets pretty subjective — who can really tell whether something is “really” “too on-the-nose” or just not super-well-executed? To return to the example with which you disagreed, I thought the “You know, Joanie plays the accordion” line fell flat as a joke, quite aside from the question of whether or not it was wise of the show to so directly address the connection between this scene and the show’s previous awkward Joan-based accordion scene. Which was the “real” problem for me? Hard to say.
I stand by my ambivalence about “He Hit Me,” though. I honestly don’t remember any previous music cues that were this direct on a “Let’s use ‘Gimme Shelter’ in the trailer for our movie about the Vietnam era” level. (Just writing that made me appreciate the odd choices of pop music Kubrick made for Full Metal Jacket. “Surfin’ Bird”!)
“I thought the ‘You know, Joanie plays the accordion’ line fell flat as a joke, quite aside from the question of whether or not it was wise of the show to so directly address the connection between this scene and the show’s previous awkward Joan-based accordion scene.”
Well, just to beat a dead horse: I don’t really get what you think the joke there was supposed to be, or how it’s “addressing the connection” between anything. It seemed to me like a pretty simple thing: Joan and Greg start fighting in front of everyone; they’re interrupted by this musician and his presence is annoying, but no one wants him to go away and have the fight resume; but Joan’s mom can’t stand to let any awkward pause go unfilled, so she says the most obvious yet irrelevant thing she can think of. The accordion itself doesn’t have any significance, except that it’s one of the few things we know about Joan’s personal life; if mom had chimed in with some fact that we weren’t aware of, like “Joan sang ‘Santa Lucia’ in school once,” it wouldn’t have the same effect of mom contributing absolutely nothing. In my opinion.
I absolutely think Roger will die this season. Incredibly astute.
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Any scene in which Joan’s mother appears, I have real trouble not thinking of this woman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnnTqFTHGuc
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