Monday, July 15, 2013

Mad Men S1E4 - "You Picked the Wrong Time to Buy an Apartment"

Didn't you? Sal Romano's snarky little dig at Pete Campbell after Pete's just been fired by Don is terrific. It reminds me of all those great moments in the show over the past six years when characters at Sterling Cooper et al have gotten a chance to put Pete in his place. And where his place is in society is very much at root in Episode 4, titled "New Amsterdam." Born into a family of shaky, old wealth, Pete has a sense of entitlement that is palpable to anyone who has so much as a business lunch with him. Yet the precariousness of his family's wealth means that he really must act as a self-made man.

Still, Pete can't help but demand it all now from everyone at Sterling Cooper, particularly Don, and be recognized as indispensable - the way he thinks he should be. Why? Probably because he is a Campbell and a Dykman - particularly as a Dykman, the Dutch family that owned most of the land above 125th Street, as Cooper reminds us. (I always thought Weiner got the name Campbell from the Campbell Apartment, a large ground floor space at Grand Central Station once leased to a millionaire financier of that name by the Vanderbilts. It's now a present-day bar catering to contemporary wealthy financiers.) Pete is a Fitzgerald-like character because his old money is gone, but the self-importance that goes along with his name never will be, and he doesn't seem to be aware of that. He is a new man, yet one rooted in old Amsterdam just the same.

"Remember Pete Campbell's last day?" says Don. "It's today."

When Don and Roger go to Cooper's office to officially dismiss Mr. Campbell for his showing up Don in a meeting with Bethlehem Steel, we see a moment of brilliance that is true to Mad Men's commitment to showing without telling, to allowing the audience to be smart enough to figure out the significance of things without it being spoon fed (like I'm trying to do right now). Aside from his apparent attachment to Japanese decor, there's never really any explanation for Cooper's need for shoes to be removed in his office. But Roger and Don do just that before going in. Don goes first and then Roger, who noticeably drops down about an inch and a half in his stocking feet. Don notices it and seems almost surprised that his boss is not quite what he thought for a second there.

It's not Pete's last day, though. Cooper tells Don that the mere appearance of being cruel to a Campbell and a Dykman (even without their old money) would be an offense to the names of old families that keep the gears and levers of New York - "a watch" - wound tight. 

"Sounds more like a bomb," says Don, unconvinced of this metaphor for a city. 

Roger recognizes what Cooper's talking about. Pete's staying, and Don isn't going to be happy.

"You're going to need a stronger stomach if you're going to be in the kitchen seeing how the sausage is made," says Cooper to Don.

Don knows he's not getting his way, and he's also not going to win the war of the new versus the old, the one he is always fighting when he fights with Pete. He will have to content himself with merely correcting Cooper's inconsistency with literary devices. 

"Thought it was a big watch," he says, bitterly.

***

Don't go into the bathroom.
Episode 4 has one of Mad Men's first truly shocking moments - when little, strange Glen Bishop barges in on Betty Draper just so that he can look at her going to the bathroom. It's unpleasant. I needed to fast forward through it. There's nothing worse than accidentally walking in on someone sitting on the can; I would argue that it's even worse than being walked in on. I can't quite describe it. But then Glen is a curious boy, and all of us can remember being caught as a child at being unduly curious. But I wonder how Matt Weiner feels (or rather how his son Marten feels) about the character being referred to throughout the years as "creepy Glen." Why me, Dad? He is creepy, all the more so because Betty finds something fascinating about him. The image of the two of them on the couch (above) is filled with an unsettling imagery : he holds an apple with a bite out of it underneath a symbolic tree. Theirs is one of the oddest relationships since Ruth Fisher became enamored of Rainn Wilson's Arthur on Six Feet Under. She is happy to give a lock of her hair to Glen when he asks for it.

One of the fascinating things about Betty in these early episodes is how poorly she conceals what she really feels, what she really wants to say. It could be that with Glen, she feels she can say things truthfully. She certainly doesn't do it in therapy, where theoretically she should tell the truth. Instead in therapy Betty professes to sense how jealous Glen's mother Helen must be of Betty's happy husband and home. If the silent psychiatrist sees through it as he copiously scribbles away, then he isn't letting on. Of course.

***

Another?
Finally, there's the tete-a-tete about drinking between Don and Roger at the end of the day that Pete Campbell didn't get fired.

"We drink because it's what men do," says Roger. "Because it feels better than unbuttoning your collar." "Because it's good."

These are all different kinds of reasons, but his point is that Don's generation doesn't know how to drink and enjoy it. The people of the postwar generation that Roger sees coming up in the world are filled with "gloomy thoughts" that are, he feels, just illusions. You shouldn't drink to escape, he says. There's nothing to escape. Never mind that Roger never endured the pains of the Great Depression the way Don did. He's also overlooking the nightmare of constant war, the bomb, the sense of corrosion at the heart of consumption for its own sake. Or he just doesn't see it.

Not all of those things are imaginary wounds, says Don. And he means the wounds he's also endured today, when Pete has been shown to be more important than Don because of twerp's surname. Roger tries to dissuade Don from trying to fight for "the world" with people like Pete, but it hurts Don all the same. 

"Maybe I'm not as comfortable being powerless as you are," Don says, astutely. 

The First Step in Alcoholics Anonymous says, "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable." Don and Roger are already functioning alcoholics. By the end of Season Six, Don has devolved into a non-functioning drunk who has all but lost his job to his longtime protege, has possibly lost his wife, and has certainly lost the semblance of a decent relationship with his teenage daughter. Meanwhile Pete still has his position, such as it is. Here in Season One, the two men are talking about powerlessness in the world even while they are powerless to the two drugs that absorbing more and more of their restless days - nicotine and drink. The fear of a lack of control simply creates a lack of control somewhere else. 

The subject shifts back to generational differences. I remember wondering early on how these two would survive the world of change in the 60's to come, one that will very much be dictated by the values of different generations. 

"Kids today," Don says with a smile. "They have no one to look up to. Because they're looking up to us." Don seemed at this point to know that something new is on the horizon, something transformative, and that the wounds that drugs pretend to heal are not imaginary.

But Don is no one. We now know in 1968 more than ever how hollow at the core he truly is. Ironically, at the end of Season Six, it's Roger who still possesses a shriveled and fragile heart that he's trying to keep alive. Give Mad Men credit - in 1960, Don may have been more insightful than Roger about the pain of life, but as we approach what might be the the show's final season, Don has missed every possible epiphany that the changing times could have opened to him, and he will probably pay even more very dearly for it in the very end.

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