“Game of Thrones” thoughts, Season Three, Episode Nine: “The Rains of Castamere”
The death of an idea can hurt just as badly as the death of a person. People are mortal, after all, and come with an expiration date – it’s the cost of doing business with them. But ideas often have a wider impact than any one person. They’re passed down and passed around, like heirlooms or viruses. It’s easy to convince ourselves that an idea that gives our life meaning will outlast our life, any life, in turn. To lose an idea like that leaves us adrift, with no shore in sight.
Premium Brands in the Bedroom: Seeing Mad Men through its ads
My latest column for Wired on the world of Mad Men as viewed through its ad campaigns is up. This week: “It tastes better because it’s more expensive.”
“Mad Men” thoughts, Season Six, Episode Nine: “The Better Half”
* “It tastes better because it’s more expensive. It’s the premium brand, and it’s priced accordingly.” Those two sentences could be unpacked endlessly. Thanks, Ted.
* “Don–I agree with you!” Pete’s on the pay-no-mind list.
* It’s funny to me with the benefit of the entire episode in hindsight, but I actually wrote “Peggy has to choose between Ted and Don” as a note on this scene, as if this wouldn’t be the explicit subject matter of the hour.
* Mad Men‘s soap within the show is in the grand tradition of such things, most notably Invitation to Love on Twin Peaks, the show of which this show becomes more redolent with each passing season.
* Peggy on her two bosses: “You’re the same person sometimes.” But she’s convinced Ted values things other than himself. Perhaps he just has a more palatable way of presenting his self-interest to those close to him. “He never makes me feel this way.” “He doesn’t know you.”
* Abe gets stabbed, part 1 of 2. Taking his muggers’ side in the argument — that’s marvelous, because he’s both totally right and infuriatingly wrong in terms of understanding the role he plays in the life of the person who cares about him: “Fuck those unfortunate teenagers, I love you and you’re supposed to love me!” How can Peggy trust someone who’s on board with his own potential annihilation?
* “They’re two halves of the same person and they want the same thing but they’re trying to get it in different ways.” Mel-via-Megan delivers us another doozy. In a way, Mad Men Season Six has become sort of like All Star Superman, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s superhero-comic masterpiece. That comic primarily pitted a dying Superman against thinly veiled analogues of himself: Bizarro’s the one that would be most famous to non-superhero people, but he also faced the mythical strongmen Samson and Atlas; Zibarro, the one smart person on Bizarro World; superpowered Lois Lane; superpowered Lex Luthor; a small group of fellow Kryptonian survivors, and so on. The drama came from seeing Superman juxtaposed against these non-Superman supermen, discovering what they had to offer that he didn’t and vice versa. Superman always came out on top, because that is his essential superpower. That of course has been Don Draper’s superpower up to this point as well, as drawn out by Don Doppelgangers like Henry Francis and Ted Chaough and Pete Campbell, but mostly those men exist to show us how someone else goes about doing the kinds of things Don does without being Don, and where that gets them relative to where it gets him.
* Case in point: Henry getting revved up by other men’s desire for Betty. His demands that she tell him exactly how his creepy colleague hit on her were very Dom Draper, but remember that Don was always mortified when Betty made her attractiveness evident for the enjoyment of others (or herself).
* Roger Sterling’s a grandpa! Ha, you knew that wouldn’t end well, though I figure the kid really does love his Grandpa Roger, nightmares notwithstanding.
* I am inordinately pleased to see Duck Phillips again. Always am. I love seeing characters continue to live on in the tapestry of a show they’ve departed, for one thing, but I also simply enjoy seeing how Duck’s career marches on in the face of his repeated flameouts. And hey, he landed poor Burt Peterson a plum gig! And hey, he’s doling out life advice! Pete’s in a bad enough place that he might well take it.
* Betty’s a knockout again. When I saw where things were headed with her and Don, I simply typed “Uh-oh.”
* “Is this all me? Because that’ll help.” “…I think about it.” That’s an intense little exchange from Ted and Peggy. I’ll admit I was surprised to see him lay it all on the line like that.
* Bobby Draper gets a scene!
* So both the Drapers have a “let the right one in” situation going on. Arlene sweats her way into Megan’s apartment, while Don is the vampire being allowed into Betty’s motel room. “Close the door. You’ll let the bugs in.” Oh, Betty, there are all different kinds of bloodsuckers.
* “What did you think when you saw me?” “That you are as beautiful as the day I met you.” Good answer, apparently!
* “Fine….No, I’m ‘fine’ with being a tease.” Arlene’s advances and Megan’s rebuffs were endearingly clumsy, if only because I still tend to believe Arlene that she and Mel won’t take it out on Megan.
* “Status quo antebellum: Everything as it was.” Cut to Don and Betty, post-coital. Nice.
* “I can only hold your attention for so long.” Jeez, that whole bit about the look in his eyes was so good, especially because Jon Hamm’s eyes are unusually communicative in a sexual context. I’ve written before that he never looks more human or more vulnerable than when he makes a move, his eyes all hazy and cloudy with lust and hope just like anyone.
* I typed this out as fast as I could: “Why is sex the definition of being close to someone?” “I don’t know, but it is for me. It is for most people.” “Just because you climb a mountain doesn’t mean you love it….If we lied here together with you in my arms I’d have felt just as close. But the rest of it, I don’t know, I don’t know, it doesn’t mean that much to me.” That’s a huge piece of the Don Draper puzzle, right there.
* Roger follows Don to the movies, then uses Don as an explicit reason why it was okay to do so. Adorable! I guess that vision in the mirror during his LSD trip wasn’t a one-off.
* The transformation of sleepy morning-after Don into PERFECT DON was just tremendous.
* Joan and Bob! The reveal of his shorts — we see them only after Roger does — was too fucking funny.
* Abe gets stabbed, part 2 of 2. He can forgive random dudes from the neighborhood, but not his girlfriend of several years. And he just annihilates her with resentment. I’m semi-surprised she didn’t grab the knife and finish the job.
* Megan on the balcony in a t-shirt and underwear. Ohhhhh, alright.
* Joan’s got poor Roger’s number like you wouldn’t believe. Worse than Betty had Don’s by telling him loving him is the worst way to get to him, worse than Abe had Peggy’s by telling her she’ll always be the enemy. Roger really can’t be relied upon by anyone except the agency.
* Final note of the night: “Who ARE you, Bob Benson???”
Gloria in Excelsis Deo
Gloria in Excelsis Deo
Sean T. Collins, script
Colin Panetta, art
“Game of Thrones” Q&A: Gwendoline Christie on the Education of Brienne of Tarth
You’ve spoken very frankly about how your unusual height has affected your life, and some of your modeling work seems to touch on this as well – taking ownership of your physical body. Brienne has struggled with her physicality as well. She’s gone a different road, obviously – she’s a warrior, not an actor – but I wonder if you see overlap between her and yourself.
Absolutely. That’s why I wanted to play the part so much. I never thought I’d ever come across a part like this. I was always told about this in drama school, that occasionally you might come across a part where you say, “Yeah, I know that. I know it. I don’t have to pretend to try and get there. I know this.” As soon as I read about the character, I had to play it.
And it’s a character that we don’t see that often. I’m certainly really rather tall at 6 foot 3, and I’ve been this way since I was 14, but for years women who are even 5 foot 10 have come up to me in the street and said, “Oh, it’s so nice to see a woman who is taller than me. I’ve always felt like a giant.” They describe it to me like outsiders. It sounds a bit worthy, but I genuinely feel that as an actor part of my job is to highlight those recesses of human life and human psychology that we don’t see that often. And if I have the opportunity, which I very luckily have, to play the part of an outsider, then I felt like I might be doing some good. Occasionally I get messages from women saying that I’ve brought them some joy, and that’s unbelievably thrilling.
An additional wrinkle for Brienne is that she’s pretty much universally seen as ugly. When you’re made up to look that way, when you change your hair and your demeanor and your physicality to look that way, does it change how you feel?
Yeah, totally. As a woman, we all want to feel attractive. We all want to feel that we’re making the very best of ourselves so we can accept ourselves. It’s like all of these gorgeous, devastatingly beautiful actresses in the show, and then there’s me harrumphing around. [Laughs] So it can be tough to look like that.
But you have to step outside of that and think about what these things really mean. I am still a person with a sense of superficiality that I’m trying to challenge. I hope that it makes us examine exactly what “unattractive” is. Perhaps it’s not the conventions that we have or the blueprint in our minds. And if it makes people question for a minute what unattractive is, and the way in which we may respond as people to what we think unattractive is, then it’s worthwhile.
I interviewed Gwendoline Christie, aka Brienne of Tarth, for Rolling Stone. Man, this interview. Even by the high standards of this (in my experience) extraordinarily insightful cast, this was something.
Comics Time: The superhero comics of Kate Beaton
I reviewed Kate Beaton’s superhero parody comics for Vorpalizer. Such a fun cartoonist to talk about, because you can extrapolate general principles from small details. And those eyes!
“Game of Thrones” thoughts, Season Three, Episode Eight: “Second Sons”
Newcomer Daario Naharis is a man the Hound would recognize – a killer for cash. Unlike the Hound, he seems to take pleasure in the badass trappings of a successful sellsword – the rep, the women, the tricked-out dagger hilts – while the Hound himself takes pleasure, and barely, in the act of killing itself. But because of this, Naharis has the flexibility to bend before he breaks. Confronted with a physically stunning, tactically advantaged opponent in the form of Daenerys Targaryen, he kills his comrades and switches sides rather than toss himself into the fray on behalf of a wealthy but likely defeatable city. (As an aside, a show that can find time for an extensive visit to the camp of the Second Sons ought to be able to give Catelyn Stark more to do this season than scold her dopey son Robb. Okay, moving on.) Duty to his captains and his client would appear to leave him little choice, but “Daario Naharis always has a choice,” he tells Daenerys. Judging from her outrageously pulp-fictional bathtub dismount, he chose wisely.
I reviewed last night’s superb episode of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone.
“Mad Men” thoughts, Season Six, Episode Eight: “The Crash”
* Maybe every episode should begin in medias res with Ken Cosgrove being forced at gunpoint to drive a carful of drunken Chevy execs down a dark road at 80mph. I truly thought he might have died.
* Don standing around smoking outside Sylvia’s apartment. Not taking this well, I see.
* Chevy is turning out to be a poisoned chalice. Everyone’s exhausted, and Don’s tearing into Kenny like he’s Pete.
* Even before I knew what he meant, I heard Jim Cutler say “I’m gonna get everybody fixed up” and thought “Cutler, you magnificent bastard.” A lot of the best Mad Men lines are the best because they have a recognizable emotional or narrative tone even though you haven’t been able to locate the context yet. (Cf. last season’s “Far Away Places,” which produced this phenomenon by showing events out of order.)
* I haven’t been crazy about Linda Cardellini as Sylvia, to be honest. I suppose I see what she represents to Don — age, experience, a housewife rather than a budding celebrity; perhaps even her ability to experience guilt and therefore the taboo are appealing — but as a performance…I don’t know, kind of…not a lot of zest to it? That changed last night, during her teary, desperate phone call with Don. Don’s looking for a big romantic moment, but Sylvia’s willing and able to boil their bad romance down to a growled “KNOCK IT OFF!”
* And Don is totally powerless before it. Seeing him in his mighty, Olympian office, hanging on the telephone because he can’t bring himself to hang up, a master of all he surveys except this one thing…it’s rough.
* Coughing fits. “Your face looks like a bag of walnuts.” Yeah, it’s rough on the guy alright.
* Betty’s blonde again. Okay.
* Poor Dawn. Her skill at Don management (Donagement?) is both a blessing and a curse.
* Ted Chaough on Frank Gleason: “He’s a piece that cannot be replaced.” Don, of course, was just replaced.
* A conversation between Roger and Stan! Alright!
* Cutler’s a cold customer, as it turns out. Doesn’t really care about Frank. Didn’t see that coming, frankly. Not that I saw the opposite coming mind you — just that it’s revealing of his character.
* I loved all the build-up to the doctor. They’re talking about him like he’s Col. Kurtz. Turns out he’s Dr. Robert.
* Mad Men excels at build-up, though, so I shouldn’t be surprised. I liked how the nature and effects of the drug were doled out in installments as well: Cutler leaping merrily around, then Cutler and Stan racing, then Don zoning out/zoning in, and so on.
* Don sees Peggy taking care of Ted and then flashes back to a sequence in which his mother failed to take care of him. Hm.
* “Do we know each other?” Hoo boy. “I meant from somewhere other than from this moment.” Zooms. Bells. It’s a drug episode! Hold all my calls!
* “Some kinda love transaction between a parent and a child and the greatest gift of all: a Chevy.” Ginsberg: straightedge by nature, messianic in his approach to crafting ad copy.
* “I hate how dying makes saints out of people.” Solid, true line, but I prefer the way it reveals the complexity of the workplace. Frank’s been painted as the perfect friend/partner by Ted, so to learn he was a dick to his underlings reminds us that everyone’s story has different heroes and villains.
* “I wanna write stuff down so it looks like I’m working.” Ginsberg nails it.
* “I’ll have 15 campaigns for you by then but you have to get me in a room so I can look them in the eye. The timbre of my voice is as important as the content. I don’t know whether I’ll be forceful or submissive, but I must be there in the flesh.” “You understand that I have no power whatsoever….I’m their favorite toy.” My first thought upon hearing this Don-Ken exchange: This drug transforms your subtext into text!
* “I know you’re all feeling the darkness here today, but there’s no reason to give in. No matter what you’ve heard, this process will not take years. In my heart, I know we cannot be defeated, because there is an answer that will open the door. There is a way around this system. This is a test of our patience and commitment. One great idea can win someone over.” I feel like that first sentence should be written on an anonymous notecard and pinned above Don’s hospital bed someday, Tony Soprano-style.
* Soup! Don’s looking for chicken soup for the soul.
* Whoa, it’s the next day, suddenly. That came as a shock.
* “Her name is Wendy.” I thought we were going to push the age limit for Don’s thing for brunettes, but he’s not feeling it, and in retrospect it’s easy to see why: He’s crafting the ultimate Draper Pitch, his product is Don Draper himself, and he’s got a target audience of one in mind.
* “I’ve got six hundred and sixty-six ideas!” HAIL STAN
* Complaints about Mad Men trying too hard or being too obvious or god help us being on the nose miss the point because that is the point. Symbolist TV. It’s all right there, dredged to the surface. If it’s obvious, well, aren’t we all, when that happens? Case in point: Wendy the would-be psychic, wearing a stethoscope while telling Don he wants to know if someone loves him. “I wanna hear your heart. Oh — I think it’s broken.” “You can hear that?!” “I can’t hear anything. I think it’s broken.” I mean, the show’s making a joke of it. This is not Matthew Weiner trying to be subtle but screwing it up.
* “You’re on TV every day. Don’t they know that?” Bobby Draper gives Megan the validation Don Draper can’t deliver.
* The old William Tell trick!
* “You’re pretentious, you know that? I love that.” Again, this is not Matthew Weiner making a mistake.
* “But you hate him!” “…I hate apples more.” Ginsberg’s great in this episode.
* Jesus, Don, not at Sylvia’s again!. Then an endless, immobile closeup of his head against her door. “Out of my head over you.”
* Doors: Don knows the perfect idea can open the door. His ultimate Draper Pitch involves telling Sylvia not to shut the door. He tells Ginsberg he’s got it when Ginsberg says he has to get his foot in the door. He tells Sally it’s all his fault since he left the door open.
* “You’re lucky I don’t like beards.” “Women say that, but they don’t act like it.” YESSSSSSSSS, PEGGY AND STAN / YESSSSSSSSS, BEARDS
* “You’ve got a great ass.” “Thank you.” is this generation’s “I love you.” “I know.”
* Sally’s reading Rosemary’s Baby. Girl, you’ll be a woman soon.
* Whoa, who is this lady? Grandma Ida? It was clear she was robbing the joint, but when she asked “Your daddy Mr. Donald Draper, or not?” I thought she was trying to rip off a very different Don Draper. That was a creepy moment.
* “Because you know what he needs.” And thus begins a game of connect the dots with beauty marks, from Amy the prostitute to the oatmeal mom to Sylvia.
* “Do you wanna know what all the fuss is about?” “No.” Famous last words, Don.
* Don’s first is a blonde. He marries a blonde, but spends his free time chasing brunettes like the mother who badly beat him for having sex while screaming at him that he’s filth. So there you go.
* “Are we negroes?”
* Don’s ultimate Draper Pitch uses history to attract its audience, even while Don’s lack of history is being used to bamboozle Sally and Bobby into giving up the goods to the world’s kindliest catburglar.
* “Have you been working on Chevy at all?” And that was the moment I finally realized what he was preparing to sell.
* Don finally opens the door, and walks into a nightmare tableau of broken domesticity — his ex, the wife he’s cheating on, his replacement, his abandoned kids, a cop. Lights out.
* That elevator ride. I was happy for both of them when it ended.
* Woof, Wendy was Frank’s daughter. Cutler is Roger if Roger were a sociopath rather than merely a nihilist.
* “Every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse.” The door into Don Draper is shut.
RIP BCGF
Partners Gabe Fowler, Bill Kartalopoulos, and Dan Nadel have announced that they are discontinuing the annual Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. There won’t be another one.
BCGF was (god, it sucks to put it that way) the very best comics show I’ve ever been to. Hands down. Every year I went there was something interesting at every table. That’s unheard of — a freakishly high level of talent among the exhibitors. That speaks directly to the partners and curators’ pedigree and clarity of vision, which will be very difficult to replicate. It’s a huge loss for alternative comics.
All this on the very landmass I live on, a 40-minute drive away. I am so sad. Thanks Bill, Gabe, Dan. You did it.
Future Shock
William Cardini and I made a short horror comic called “The True Black” for Future Shock #4, edited by Josh Burggraf and featuring work by Jordan Speer, Michael Rae Grant & Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Victor Kerlow, Vincent Giard, Anuj Shrestha, Alex Degen, Kevin Czapiewski, Sean T. Collins & William Cardini, Max Bode, Zach Hazard Vaupen, Lale Westvind, Saman Bemel Benrud, and Josh Burg Graf. We hope you like it. Order it here.
The Boiled Leather Audio Hour presents FEASTDANCE
Episode 20 of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast the Boiled Leather Audio hour is up! This week, my co-host Stefan Sasse and I are discussing the combined reading order for A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons that I came up with in order to reunite what is effectively one giant book split by character rather than chronology. It’s worth doing!
“You Exist for My Pleasure”: Seeing Mad Men through its ads
My latest column for Wired on the world of Mad Men as viewed through its ad campaigns is up. This week: dominance, submission, and margarine.
“Mad Men” thoughts, Season Six, Episode Seven: “Man with a Plan”
* My favorite parts about the blow-up Don overhears between Sylvia and Arnold: the complete absence of Arnold’s voice, it’s just his stuff sitting there in the hallway, like the discarded clothing of the man who wasn’t there in Don’s Royal Hawaiian ad; Don’s frantic button pushing to close the door before he gets caught listening in.
* Margie! Nice to meet you, female copywriter! We hardly knew ye.
* When Peggy introduces Ted to her old colleagues she calls Stan by his first name and Ginsberg “Ginsberg.”
* Blink and you’ll miss it, but Bob briefly tails Peggy and Ted as they walk to their offices.
* No chair for Pete at the meeting. Never let it be said that Mad Men doesn’t place enough banana peels in front of that guy!
* “Now that we’ve dispensed with the gallantry.” Roger, you magnificent bastard.
* Cutler = Roger 2
* “Ted’s a pilot!” I swear you could hear Don’s balls shrivel.
* Pete’s mom was so lucid in her senility that she briefly had me confused. I kept mixing up her allegations regarding Pete’s late father — who died in a plane crash, which is worth noting in this plane-heavy episode — with the truth about Pete’s very much alive father-in law.
* Re: Roger’s firing of Burt Peterson: holy shit, Roger. Like the Comedian from Watchmen, to whom I will never stop comparing him (which fact renews my confidence somewhat in the idea that Watchmen has things to communicate outside its art form and era), this cackling nihilist has a mean streak a mile wide. Every line was a punch in the throat.
* “I need you, and nothing else will do.” Sylvia’s got a future in copywriting ahead of her.
* “A little rap session about margarine in general.”
* My notes for the beginning of Don and Sylvia’s hotel-room tryst: “No dom/sub games for Sylvia, Don, sorry.” [line break] “Whoops, I stand corrected.” Sorry, but that was all some hot shit. Don’s confidence comes from being unpleasant and adored for it.
* Don’s thoroughly out-alpha’ing Ted.
* Pete to his brother: “I don’t have a chair!” Wah wah wah.
* Ted Chaough asserting that every advertising archetype has its Gilligan’s Island analogue anticipates several decades of meta-pop.
* The best thing about Draper Pitches, as we see in his margarine spiel, is that he can take the most absurd and banal subjects imaginable and make it seem like he’s taking you through the stargate in 2001.
* Bob! “Just walk with me, and I’ll bother you all the way out. No one will know.”
* Bob! Furniture polish improv! Okay, maybe this guy’s a good accounts man after all.
* Unexpected and fascinating to get such a direct window into Ted’s thoughts about Don, during that conversation with Gleason. Ted’s amazed that Don seems more interested in him than in their work, because he doesn’t feel interesting. “He doesn’t talk for long stretches and then he’s incredibly eloquent.” Gleason’s got Don’s number, though: “Give him the early rounds. He’ll tire himself out.”
* “Peggy, he’s a grown man.” “So are you! Move forward.” Peggy, audience stand-in.
* I guess it should go without saying that Don’s playing control games because it makes him feel the most like himself and the least like his life is out of control in any other area.
* Don and Ted in a plane! Hahahahaha! Like something out of a single-camera comedy.
* “Sometimes when you’re flying you think you’re rightside up but you’re really upside down. Gotta watch your instruments.” Ted Chaough, accidental philospher.
* “No matter what I say, you’re the guy who flew us up here in his own plane.” Don’s been out-alpha’d.
* “Not every good deed is part of a plan.” Joan’s mom, voice of optimism.
* “My mother can go to hell. Ted Chaough can fly her there.” Pete Campbell, winner, line of the night.
* It’s a dopey tv-critic thing to worry about, I know, but what a sad state of affairs that Jon Hamm may never win an Emmy. What a marvel that guy is in this role! Don gets dumped, and it plays out on his face like someone dynamiting the sculpted surface of George Washington right off Mount Rushmore.
* Joan saves Bob, just like that. A good deed goes unpunished!
* Oof, that fadeout on Megan’s voice, brutal.
* “They’re shooting everybody.” With that, Pete’s mom disappears, walks behind the glass, becomes a silhouette, a ghost. Very creepy.
* That shot of Don arms akimbo, in the foreground of the shot, out of focus, Meagan and the news report behind him. Well done, Slattery.
* People are finally getting together.
* Using the assassination of Robert Kennedy to comment on the state of Mad Men, rather than the other way around, is the most Mad Men thing Mad Men has ever done, an act of creative hubris that would do Don himself proud.
“Game of Thrones” thoughts, Season Three, Episode Seven: “The Bear and the Maiden Fair”
It’s a remarkable turnaround for a character we first really got to know when he took a break from fucking his sister to toss a little boy out a window. By that time in his life Jaime had spent 17 years wearing his last great crime, the murder of the king he was sworn to protect, like a crown. He’d made a decision in the heat of the moment and adamantly refused to submit himself to anyone’s judgment, even if it meant hiding the fact that he’d saved, by his estimation in this episode, half a million lives. Squint at it long enough and it’s easy to see his defenestration of Bran Stark in a similar light: Kill this boy to cover up the crime, or watch as an enraged King Robert kills the sister he loves, the children they secretly had together and Jaime himself – and probably his father and brother for good measure. Prolonged exposure to Brienne, his first close contact with someone outside the closed systems of his family and the Kingsguard in years, forced him to think outside his snap-judgment comfort zone. With any luck, she’ll be the first of many people to benefit from his growth.
Illuminati/Vampires/Ewoks
I’ve been busy over at my dayjob blog.
I wrote about The Lost Boys and obeying the rules of vampirism.
And I wrote a whole lot about Star Wars: John Williams vs. Bernard Herrmann the AT-AT, Jabba the Hutt, the Duel of the Fates, the Tattooine Sunset, the Ewoks, The Emperor.
“Game of Thrones” Q&A: Aidan Gillen on the Life of Littlefinger
How do you avoid mustache-twirling supervillain stereotypes while performing [Littlefinger’s malevolent monologues]?
Keep the mustache short. That helps.
I interviewed Aidan Gillen, aka Lord Petyr Baelish, aka Littlefinger, for Rolling Stone. This was a fun one.
