From Mad Men

We Are All Close Readers Now: On Season Five

I wanted to be the 45,931th person to blog each episode of Mad Men this season, but it was not to be. I could try to be noble and say David Simon’s arguments got to me instead of, you know, life.  Just as a counterpoint to Simon, though, I think it’s kind of awesome that so many people spend so much time dissecting them, from acting and costuming to character motivations to each period reference. Sure, there are more important things we should be doing, but when is there not? When I was a kid there were lots of earnest pieces by the serious concerned types about how TV was making everyone “passive.” Now these serious (semi-serious?) people say that TV is brilliant art and it’s the interactive 2.0 stuff that’s killing us, what with how we’re all “distracted” instead of “absorbed.”  I’ve spent more than my share of time around my English department comrades lamenting how hard it is to get people to close read, or how students resist analysis by saying “they didn’t really think that much about it.” But of course people love to “close read” as soon as there’s something they’re invested in, and no one is saying Weiner doesn’t think this shit through. 
And so, at this belated hour with two of thirteen episodes to go, ten ways of looking at season five:
1) Over at slate, John Swansburg asks the big question: Is it possible Don is actually becoming something like a better person?  Weiner of course comes from The Sopranos, where the whole arc was about Tony setting out half-heartedly to see if he could be redeemed, when it was actually clear all along that he couldn’t. As with Tony, we forgive Don too much because of his charms, but of course we’re operating in a very different moral universe here (no matter what that stupid fantasy murder scene thought it was trying to do), one where redemption would seem to be more possible. The real obstacle seems to be the narrative one: this is a serious show, so it has to be a tragedy, right?

I remember reading Crime and Punishment way back and being struck by how Raskolnikov kept falling back into justifying his actions after he’d seemed to have a breakthrough. The Sopranos used the long form to capture this even more acutely. We think we have epiphanies, we think someone’s “life can change in an instant,” as the melodramas would have it, but more likely the change is just another thought we had about ourselves. Don sunk low in the fourth season, and seems to be crawling back up, but who knows. It’s not just that these multi-season shows can have characters ebb and flow over years instead of having the one arc Christopher Moltisanti thought he should have, it’s that we get the feeling we’re dipping into lives that continue off-stage, a whole texture of experiences that are as much like the formless unfolding of lives – or history – than the constructed lives of tragic personalities.

Of course the tragedy could be that he becomes a better person too late: one of those men who becomes such a devoted husband/father the second time around, in part because the first set can never forgive him. I loved Ken’s line about Don and Megan’s cool whip act, how it’s a twist on the normal schtick because “they actually like each other.” Our girl from Montreal isn’t at all the Betty 2.0 she seemed to be last season. That would be a very take-this-to-the-seventies outcome, but it feels pretty unsatisfying. 


2) I’m struck again and again by how, with all its bang up research, the thing that really makes the period detail work is that it’s a little “off.” And as with The Sopranos, the dialogue is also a bit off – a little over the top, a little too metaphoric. It fills in what would be outside the dialogue in a story, punching it up to where it feels real instead of being realistic in a mimetic sense. This shit isn’t easy to do. Likewise the reference points are not inaccurate, just not the trajectories or reference points you’re expecting. Even the Beatles thing hit at this – the unexpected choice, the last song off the album, after an episode of fake-Beatles. Being interested in the period I’ve seen enough films and documentaries that hit the exact same notes to realize how important this is. It’s the sixties as lived before people knew what “the sixties” were.

3) Hey, do you remember when the woman who played Daphne on Frasier was pregnant and instead of writing the pregnancy into the character or trying to disguise it they put her in a fat suit? Yeah. Fat suits and fake chins need to die. I had a problem with the Peggy stuff in the first season but there you could at least make a case for it. There’s no excuse for such a perfectionist show to have something so visually unconvincing, as if we don’t know what non-thin bodies look like and will just accept the signifier. Find something reasonable to do with Betty Draper or let her go.

4) Speaking of pregnancies, what happened to little Kevin? Yes, yes, Joan’s mom is at home, and yes there was no attachment parenting in 1966 but she seems awfully unencumbered.  Mad Men has done a great job with Sally, but Bobby, Gene and Kevin all seem to follow the pattern of existing as plot points. Obviously there are practical reasons for this but it would be nice to see a little of how these little ones affect the texture of these everyday lives.

5) Also speaking of pregnancies, is that memory out of Peggy’s life for good? Narratively speaking it seems so. I want her to triumph as much as anyone (which is to say, a lot), but it doesn’t seem likely that she would have put this behind her in any meaningful way – as far as we can tell she only discussed it honestly with Don once, in “The Suitcase,” and even then somewhat obliquely. And from what we know, adoptions of this period proved highly traumatic in the long run.

6) How great that the least angsty of the bunch, Ken, continues his run as the show’s one true artist? And too bad for Paul that wishing don’t make it so. Like Pete, no one likes him, but unlike Pete, he’s not an asshole, just kind of foolish. If he’d kept his mouth shut in his early romance with Joan she could have broke it to him gently and helped him find out he had a talent for gardening or some such and maybe they would have moved to the country together . . . 

7) “Signal 30” and “The Other Woman” were to me the strongest so far. “Signal 30” is a perfect short story – what Cheever or Updike would have written with the benefit of feminist insight. And putting them together, it’s striking how much Joan’s situation owes to this little worm. Pete’s another example of the zig-zag in the long-form approach to storytelling: for a while it seemed like he and Trudy were actually the best-matched couple on the show, but like Pete and, like one suspects, Trudy before too long, we had another thing coming.

8) Speaking of which, Trudy seems the perfect candidate to get radicalized. I’m afraid the show won’t totally go there in later seasons out of the misplaced fear of being too explicitly political, but for all the talk about how it would be ahistorical for people on the show to speak from contemporary values, there’s a point at which ignoring radicalism will become the real ahistorical path. Joan’s too caught up in the games she’s learned to play – the feminist insight about femininity as role playing wouldn’t be a shock to her at all. Peggy’s too invested in her ambition, and Betty’s just too Betty. But Trudy is still young, she’s obviously well-educated and nobody’s fool, and watch out if she finds out just a fraction of what the man she’s hitched her star to has been up to. 

9) Speaking of radicalism and the ahistorical, there had really really really better be some payoff with Dawn in the next few episodes.  Seriously, I don’t care how realistic you want to make the period’s racism, there were, you know, still actual African Americans who have personalities and stories. Start telling them, like, way before yesterday.

10) Is it time for the Mad Men death/suicide pool?  Pete was the early and perhaps too obvious choice, Roger would have made more sense a while back, and Joan – well, can’t bear to think about that. My money’s on Lane.  

The Rise of Peggy Olson, the Fall of Don Draper and the Affective Life of Capitalism

So the new season of Mad Men started last night. The official posters, with Don looking at a pyschadelic print, aren’t out and out historical gaffes like this Netflix ad, but they point to a lot of the problems the show had last season. Season six was, I think, one of false starts and frustrations.  A lot  them came from having to sustain a long-running show that’s worked through a lot of its premises, but others point to something interesting that’s been there since the start. Mad Men started out as fundamentally a show about hierarchies. (“It’s a hierarchy!” Ken cried desperately in last night’s premier.  Well, it was – and largely still is – but more on that later.) Peggy’s first day tour of the office showed us the lay of the land in all its beautiful horror. We knew part of the long arc would be about how the people at the top – whom we’d more or less been asked to identify with – had their positions challenged. But the show’s strength was always in showing the everyday cruelties of the old order.  Many of the best episodes, like “The Gold Violin” from season 2, or “Signal 30” from season 5, have the feel of a certain kind of old school New Yorker story. As Vivian Gornick described it in “The End of the Novel of Love”:

In the fifties John Cheever’s stories of marital disillusion seemed profound. That famous climatic moment in Cheever when the husband realizes holds him in contempt, or the wife knows husband is committing adultery, these moments delivered an electric charge. The knowledge encoded in them seemed literally stunning, leaving the characters riven, their lives destroyed. Who, after all, could go on after this? Then came the shocker – the thing that made the story large, awesome, terrible – they did go on like this. 

This describes the lives of many of Mad Men‘s characters throughout the early seasons. Then, of course, as Gornick recounts “within a generation . . there was divorce. And psychotherapy. And sex and feminism and drugs . . . ” Some of the suspense came in who would crack first, and how, and at what cost.  Betty seemed doomed if she was forced to live outside her illusions – this was true and not. Would it be Pete unable to live with his own contempt, or would Trudy beat him to it? Don and Roger, while threatened by certain aspects of social change, are poised to benefit from others – they trade in their spouses with little reprisal. Except, of course, that they discover nothing has really changed. For Roger, this works insofar as we can experience his semi-nihilistic questing as a comedy, but it’s left us impatient with Don.  The wonderful Emily Nussbaum pretty much nails  the corner into which Don had been painted by the end of last season. The aside about sneering and swingers is interesting too: in an odd way, our favorite horn dog is a bit of a prude: Roger might have the most depressing stoned group sex ever, but he’s still game and mildly amused. Don’s still caught up in the guilt and secrecy. (The show’s attempts to show him as kinky, like with the prostitute who smacks him, fall flat, the way so many shows still use mild kink as a shorthand for sad people having sad sex.) I remember reading somewhere about when the Diggers who set up a free store, they had to explain to people who tried to shoplift why that was impossible at a free store. There may be sex in the streets in 1968, but Don still prefers the neighbor and hotel rooms with heavy curtains. No one needs to tell Don there’s no such thing as free love. The scene when his daughter discovers him is devastating – but where can we go from there?

The problem gets more complicated – but it still feels like a problem – when we think about the show’s broader historical and social canvas. Here too, the show was wonderful in its depiction of the repressive Before. But once that order is shaken, it has been largely unable or unwilling to present anyone who stands for this challenge in a serious way. African-American characters appear in the background, and occasionally make a telling comment. The counterculture mostly exists insofar as it embodies aspects of Don’s psychodrama. (Or, Betty’s, in the first and strongest episode of season six. Her implicit sympathy for the hippie kids was a fascinating thread that was unfortunately dropped.) And then there was the hippie punching throughout season six. Or, rather, hippie stabbing. When Abe and Peggy argued about civil rights and women’s rights a few seasons back, some of it was an easy gibe at Abe, but some of it actually got at the ways it’s easier for people to support justice from a distance, when it doesn’t bring their own position into question or even just make for an awkward conversation. But by the end of season six he was mostly shown as a fool. He becomes absurd the way the Beatniks Don smokes up with in the first season is absurd.

Now, it’s certainly true that in any time period, even one of mass political action, the majority of people are not activists, and mostly experience change through the mundane of their daily lives. The episode on King’s assassination was trying to show that in an interesting way. But there’s something perverse in the way that the show keeps suggesting that while the old ways were unjust, those who directly challenge them are fools. 
Which brings us to Peggy. Some of the publicity for this season – along with the shot late last season of her in Don’s characteristic pose – suggests this will be “her season.” It’s an intriguing possibility – perhaps the most radical and astute solution to the Don Draper problem would be if he simply fades away – like characters in The Wire, who are significant only for the ecological niche they inhabit. It also points to show’s ambivalence about social change, though. That awful Netflix ad isn’t just grotesquely historically ignorant. It also points to a certain reading of Peggy – she’s a feminist, kind of, but not part of feminism: she represents change and the struggle for respect through her story, but doesn’t have a relationship to the organized social movements of the time. Now, when you point things like this out, everyone rushes to explain to you, yet again, the difference between art and politics, or to complain you’re looking for agitprop. What is interesting to me about that is the idea that any portrayal of collective movements – or even of characters having some relationship to them – would automatically detract from complexity. Certainly it is easy to imagine a poorly executed story line where Betty or Peggy or Joan get their Consciousness Raised. But would it really be so impossible for some one in the Mad Men universe to have some real relationship to this movement, or the Civil Rights movement, or the anti-war movement, which captured the imagination of so many? And if we can’t imagine it doing so, what does that tell us? 
At the same time, though, I think Peggy’s story does reveal something interesting about contemporary feminism and its discontents. I cringed a bit at the end of last night’s episode, when she cries alone in her apartment after a bad day at the office, so lonely she wanted the plumber to hang out.  But the thing is, Peggy’s rise has always been more interesting precisely because it’s in advertising, a field that can’t possibly live up to the creative and personal energies she has put into it – as so many of our jobs cannot, not because we more properly should put them all into our home and family lives, but because of that little thing the show is actually largely about: capitalism. Much is made about Don and Peggy’s affinity for each other because they are both outsiders who struggled for respect. But that outsider status also gives them a certain take on what they are doing – they take advertising seriously and are good at it precisely because in some ways they aren’t taking it seriously – they know how to manipulate want and need, if often unconsciously, and they know it can always be manipulated because it can never be satisfied. We want Peggy to triumph, but we don’t have illusions about what triumph looks like in the venue she’s in. (Not, one should note, the venue she has ‘chosen’, simply the one she found herself in.) This doesn’t mean that Peggy is an unappealing, proto-Sheryl Sandberg or some such. It just means that when it comes to work, we are all still living in the Before. 


Before Feminism

So says Netflix.

“A hundred years of brilliant personalities and important events have also been erased from American history. The women orators who fought of mobs, in the days when women were not allowed to speak in public, to attack Family, Church and State, who travelled on poor to cow towns of the West to talk to small groups of socially starved women, were quite a bit more dramatic than the Scarlett O’Haras and Harriet Beecher Stowes and all the Little Women who have come down to us. . . But most people today have never even heard of Myrtilla Miner, Prudence Crandall, Abigail Scott Duniway, Mary Putnam Jacobi, Ernestine Rose, the Clafin sisters, Crystal Eastman, Clara Lemlich, Mrs. OHP Belmont, Doris Stevens, Anne Martin. And this ignorance is nothing compared to ignorance of the lives of women of the stature of Margaret Fuller, Fanny Wright, the Grimke sisters, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Stanton Blatch, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Paul.”

So said Shulamith Firestone. (Dialectic of Sex, 1970)