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.

Mad Men S1E3 - "It's Hard to Get Caught in a Lie"

Rachel Menken realizes that none of the bullshit artists at Sterling Cooper have even set foot in Menken's Department Store, nor did they ever intend to. Don Draper makes it clear that he will rectify that immediately, telling her, as he walks her to the elevator, that the firm's failure to do so wasn't about lying; it was simply "ineptitude with insufficient cover." She appreciates that. "Something about the way you talk always restores my confidence," she says. "I have a deep voice," he says. Ironically, that's the truth.

Pete Campbell, just back from his honeymoon, notices that Don is doing more than just making Sterling Cooper's new client feel more comfortable about working with the firm. For her part, Rachel notices that Don's cuff link has fallen off, a sure sign that he doesn't come from a world where such things were taught to him at an early age. For his part, Don's making Rachel feel like a person by admitting to what's really going on in advertising. They are at a client meeting, but they are more interested in each other as people. Pete sees it all, and wonders what he's missing out on, even as he has to tell Peggy Olson that their night together, which will have consequences throughout the season, was just one night. How do you talk to women when you're married? 

For Don it's done by not telling the truth. If we weren't sure that Don has the gifts of the gods, we know it when he makes the visit to Menken's Department Store as promised. It culminates with Rachel taking him up to the store's roof - a place that she reveals has been a special refuge for her all her lonely life, as the child of both a father whose only passion was his business and a mother who died giving birth to her. (Are we supposed to see an irony in a Jewish store keeping German shepherds in cages on the roof?) She ends her story with an expectant look at Don, a look that some men don't read correctly and some men choose to ignore out of fear. But old Don knows exactly what to do.

"What is this?" he asks. 

She looks at him. Is he calling her out on making a pass at him? 

Nope. "Don't try to convince me you've ever been unloved." And then he plants one. Boom. 

What's Don doing? Don is doing what he will do for the next few years; he's wandering through the avenues of life where people discover that they love another, an experience that runs entirely counter to the world of his childhood, where all he learned were the different degrees to which he was unloved. He knows the look of someone who's already been loved.

Then I suppose Don has to reveal to her that he's married because she is a client, and he does, right after he kisses her, right after Rachel looks overwhelmed by him. 

"What do you do," she asks, disappointed, "just kiss women all the time? Women you aren't married to?" 

"Of course not," he says. And with that, we've caught him in a lie, even if Rachel doesn't know it.

***

It's Sally Draper's birthday party, and it's amazing to see Sally as she was in 1960, or the actress Kiernan Shipka as she was in 2006. I always loved the way Mad Men portrayed small children as their parents' cocktail waiters and waitresses (though I've had problems with the kinds of things it's asked its child actors to do). Don is happy to assemble Sally's backyard playhouse so long as she gets him another beer from the garage. Sally is a bopping, happy little person, eager to please, so far off from the eventual teenager who will accidentally witness both Roger Sterling getting blown by Don's second mother-in-law and her father making the time with an upstairs neighbor. But then it's still 1960. Lady Chatterly's Lover is the best sex guide available to women in the office. The new neighbor Helen Bishop is a source of fascination for Betty and the other women on the block because she's a divorced mother of two. 

Don assembles the little playhouse in the backyard, looking somewhat bewildered by how a complete home is built. When he goes up for a shower before company arrives for the party, their neighbor and friend Francine asks Don if he'd like company. She asks it in front of Betty. It's still a joke, but it's not. It's not as if people needed the Sexual Revolution to joke about sex.

The party starts. There's plenty of booze in the punch. Pregnant Francine is "so thirsty right now." When I first watched this party, I thought Mad Men was going to begin exploring how the culture of swinging and cheating went mainstream, but I see now that the show had more important things on its mind. In this episode the party reveals that swinging was just the manifestation of one too many lame, drunken jokes among unhappy people who never got permission to go anywhere they wanted in life. The culture of fractured family life is the resulting universe to come.

The Volkswagen that single mom Helen Bishop arrived in is the car of the future, just as the messages of "Lemon" and "Think Small" are the new vanguard in advertising, and the guys at Sterling Cooper don't yet get it. The crude little husbands at Sally's party don't see that, either. Nobody understands the strange freedom in the small Volkswagen. It's a car for individuals, not large families of the postwar boom. To some people, it's just a car for circus midgets, while to others, it's still a Nazi car. 

VW owner Helen tells the women at the party that sometimes she just goes for walks around the neighborhood to clear her head.

"But where?" Francine asks. Where do you go?

"Anywhere," Helen answers.

Meanwhile, through six seasons we can now recognize the blurred numbness that Don wears after countless drinks at Sally's party. Still, he recognizes the expressions of barely disguised malice of the husbands, the "boys," as he calls them, whose wives are alternately fascinated and repulsed by Helen in the kitchen, and so he drinks some more. I suppose that Don probably first recognized those same expressions on horny men who came in and out of the whorehouse in which he grew up, but then did Matt Weiner see that far ahead in his character?

Say cheese.

For the moment, Don sees it all through the 8mm camera he uses to film the party for Betty's sake. Kids dressed as Cowboys and Indians stroll through; the one boy who didn't make the cut in the cure for polio moves past on crutches, dressed an an Indian, of course. The guffawing husbands come to some composure when they realize they are on film. But then Don sees one couple standing alone, not knowing that they're being filmed, truly in love, and it disturbs him. The image of the children playing Cowboys and Indians on the lawn outside are no different from the people playing games within, but true love is something that jars him when he sees it. 

"We got it all, huh?" Francine's husband asks Don, admiring his house.

"Yep," Don says. "This is it."

What does "it" all mean to him, the natural-born outsider, still looking in? "It" means nothing. So he drinks some more. Betty has to remind him to go get the birthday cake again, so he goes. But he doesn't come back until the party is long over. He temporarily disappears, one of his many, many vanishing acts to come.

***

At the beginning of the episode, Don is on the train to work. Suddenly he's reunited with a guy on business with IBM in Armonk, a guy from his old infantry in Korea who calls him "Dick Whitman," a name that, at this point, we've never heard before. We sense Don has, though. What's going on?

"Draper?" Harry asks, when Pete asks jealously about him. "Nobody's ever lifted up that rock. He could be Batman for all we know." 

By the end of the episode, we are left with an image that will become all-too familiar - Don alone, in his car at night, staring off into the distance, smoking. The box containing his daughter's untouched birthday cake is next to him on the bench seat; he's contemplating what we presume are the conflicts created out of his fractured life. We don't yet know how deep they run, but we at least know that the rock is weighted heavily with whatever he's thinking. 

But now, with hindsight, there's something else. We see he's sitting at the local railroad station, the lights blinking at the crossroads. A train is coming. He rests, waiting. The train roars past, its lights reflected in the windows of his car. Perhaps Don is considering another crossroads in his life. Or maybe it's something else, something that we'll take for granted by the end of the sixth season. All he would have to do is roll the car onto the tracks, and it would all end so quickly.

But he doesn't. Instead, we see him back at house again, still blurry with drink. Sally wipes away the whiskey kiss he gives her when he finally gets back too late, and he puts his head back. Betty still isn't ready to confront him about "who's really in there." Things can stay as they are for the moment.

Mad Men S1E2: "What Do Women Want?"

Is Bridget OK?

It's the question Don Draper starts asking the boys in creative. Then he asks Sterling, and then his Village mistress Midge Daniels. It's the question that maybe Peggy starts asking herself when she looks into the mirror of the Ladies Room near the end of the episode. Joan Holloway seems to already know what she wants, but then we know that's going to change. She may lecture Peggy on what she should want, but then we know that Joan -  once she's gone through the transformations that come about after getting a husband and a child - is craving the same successes in Season Six that Peggy has gotten. A wise person once said to me that in the United States, it's the reverse of the Rolling Stones' song: You always get what you want, but you don't always get what you need.

One of the best things about Mad Men was that, after its first season, it managed to stop trying to convince us to see the way things were back then and to prove its historical accuracy to the 1960's through awkward bits of dialogue and props. Even shows like The Wonder Years never quite got beyond this stage (though I always appreciated Kevin Arnold's authentic 1969 Jets jacket). 

In Season 1, much of the show's work of giving us a sense of the times comes through the character of Betty Draper, whose hands keep locking up for no apparent reason in Episode 2. I had forgotten about this part of her storyline. It's as if her body is rebelling against her need to simply move on after the death of her mother. Standing with Mona Sterling in front of the mirror in the Ladies Room of Toots Shor's, Betty stammers out the time since the death of her Mom, realizing that it's actually further away from what she thought - it's been three, not two months. It feels sooner, but the two need to keep applying makeup; they've stood there too long, and the matrons of the Ladies' Room are eager to let other ladies use the mirror. It's a long night for other people, too.

Betty on the couch.

Betty's interior world slips out again and again in this episode, and to be honest, what I had forgotten was how genuinely helpless and frightened she seems. She isn't the Ice Queen yet, eager to snuff out other people's passions as quickly as hers have been. She is sharp with Sally, of course; when Sally arrives with the laundry bag over her head, Betty upbraids her because she assumes that her daughter has messed up the dress that it came in (Sally's also wearing it because she is playing the role of astronaut; Mad Men challenged us early on to see two different metaphors in one). Betty's trips to the psychiatrist are going to mark her permanently; it'll be the first real betrayal she'll feel from her husband, and it's going to hurt. But it will lay a foundation for dealing with everything else he's going to do to her down the road.

In Episodes 1 and 2, Don Draper is still trying to get a handle on how to be in this world he looked into for so long and is now a part of. In last week's episode, he insulted a female client for speaking to him directly; he disregarded the advice of Dr. Guttman on the human death wish (an idea he will unconsciously bring to Sheraton in Season Six with "Hawaii- The Jumping Off Point") and Sterling has to remind him that he's still missed a button on his shirt. He has a gift, but the gift is still a little ahead of him, not behind him as it seems to be in Season Six. He manages to be the Don we will recognize more and more by silencing Paul Kinsey and the other boys with, "Maybe I should stop paying you," when they don't produce what he wants.

But when Betty tells Don that she's still struggling with her anxiety, he looks at her as a boy would with a toy that he thought had been fixed but he now realizes is still broken. He doesn't recognize that this is what starts him wondering about what women want. Advertising really is all about psychology, even (or especially) when the advertisers themselves don't recognize how that relationship works.

Peggy is still the center of things, the character whose introduction to Sterling Cooper is really our introduction. Paul Kinsey leads her through the office, but he's really trying to lead her to the couch in his office. Peggy is the object of a bet to see who's going to get her first and then, we presume, just put her on the disposable pile. Is that what the women are crying about in the Ladies Room? that they are merely the dessert to the larger meal? Peggy is just about to get to the bottom of it when she sees Bridget, who will someday be Sterling's secretary, weeping copiously into her handkerchief. But Joan waves Peggy off; Bridget is just one of those girls who can't handle it. Don't bother. Joan is trying to give Peggy the tools to handle a world in which men bother women all the time, and Peggy's not sure she wants that, or even needs it, especially when Joan's brief ex-fling Kinsey expresses interest in her.

"You're the new girl," Joan tells her, with a mixture of malice and curious jealousy. "And to tell you the truth," she adds, "you're not much, so enjoy it while it lasts." But when it's Peggy's turn to cry in the Ladies Room, she sees yet another one of the disposable women in the office crying. So Peggy looks in the mirror and finds the strength not to do it. 

One interesting note is how lousy the character of Kenny Cosgrove seems. He's just another one of the predatory but wimpy boys in the office who talk a big game about "going to zoo and seeing some animals." It's hard to reconcile this Ken with the one who will develop into a science fiction writer, or the author of "The Miniature Orchestra." Urging the other boys in the office to be impolite to women so that they'll know how to treat the boys isn't the Kenny we come to know and like, but he's in there, apparently.

***

One additional heavy-handed cue to the history of the times is the short-lived work that Sterling Cooper does for the Nixon campaign in 1960. As if to dramatize the dynamics of the race, Cooper emphasizes to Don the importance of advertising's growing role in politics by saying, "the last eight years have been good to us because they've been good to Procter and Gamble and the United Fruit Company." What's been bad for peasants in Latin America in an era of American corporate dominance is good to a bunch of executives in New York who themselves serve the monsters who keep the cities at their feet, as Robinson Jeffers might say. 

A bit heavy, yes, but then we remember that in Draper's office, his minions are fiddling around with the new aerosol technology available through Right Guard (I still remember the smell of it). Just as Cooper says, "We'll give our people what they want," someone inside his office manages to find a way to light the flame of an aerosol spray, and the resulting, brief flash of fire seems to emanate from Cooper's head. That was the moment that sold me on the show. Advertising keeps business as usual in countries whose politics are dictated by United Fruit and the CIA, and it will also encourage the use of a product that will punch holes in the Earth's atmosphere. It is the devil. Still heavy-handed, but two metaphors in one again, and clever all the same. 

But the best of it all is that Right Guard is the key to answering the main question of the episode. Don decides that what women want is merely to get closer to men. Whether or not he (or Midge, with whom he wakes up the morning he thinks of it) really believes it is not important. It never is.

***

In Seasons 1 and 2, African-American characters are in the background of events, but they are given two dimensions of substance that act as commentary on the privilege of the white principals. At the show's outset, Don engages the black waiter in a conversation about brand loyalty to cigarettes after assuring the menacing white bartender that the old man isn't just being "chatty." The matrons in the Ladies Room of Toots notice how cheap the new rich white people are with tips. 

(Samuel's right behind Peggy.)

My favorite is Samuel, the guy who works the "pie cart." Using "Negro slang," Kinsey tells him, "That drape, man, it's sadder than a map." Samuel, giving him no real expression, says, "Well, it's lightweight, and it tells me I'm at work" - a perfect response to a white advertising executive's criticism of a black working man's uniform. It's spoken like a utilitarian ad-line, and Kinsey doesn't even notice.

"But you sure can talk, Mr. Kinsey," he adds, with very little enthusiasm.

Pie-cart man 1 Kinsey 0.

Here Mad Men sets the pattern of its use of African-American characters; they provide the occasional (and less frequent as seasons unwind) objective view of the white principal characters. The problem is that by hinting that these characters are more than just backdrop scenery they made me believe characters like these would be three-dimensional in the seasons to come, and they haven't. This opens up the ongoing question about the show - whether it's the show's problem of not addressing the race problems of the 60's with authentic characters or the problems of the 60's advertising world in not seeing African-Americans as authentic citizens and consumers? We know the latter was true, sure, but does that mean it always needs to be so hard for Mad Men?

Kinsey frequently uses slang to appear above the level of intellectual and cultural thought in the field of advertising, and while he seems genuine enough in guiding Peggy around the office, Samuel is the first real clue that Kinsey is just another phony, maybe even the biggest one of all. Kinsey is working on a novel, but Kenny Cosgrove is the real novelist. In fact, it pains me to say it, but it's true: Kinsey was born at the wrong time; today he'd be able to satisfy himself with blogging about television.

Mad Men S1E1: "There's Nothing Wrong With a Woman Being Practical About the Possibility of Sexual Activity"

So says Dr. Emerson, the doctor to whom Joan Holloway sends the new hire, Peggy Olson. Yet the good doctor also pushes Peggy to remember that a promiscuous girl doesn't usually land a husband. Welcome to 1960. A young woman's guide to sex is called It's Your Wedding Night.

She's been sent there because she's a new offering to the most dynamic executive Sterling Cooper has. Peggy is more intelligent than anyone really grasps at the moment, yet even she is uncertain as to whether or not she appreciates the attention that the length of her skirt is getting from Pete Campbell. Pete's an asshole, but he thinks she's pretty, and she is wondering which is more important. The greatest twist in the introduction to the world of Sterling Cooper is that Joan tells Peggy that the group to whom she should be most "supplicant" are the firm's telephone operators, three women who, ironically, also encourage Peggy to show more leg.

Peggy wants to succeed and yet is afraid to fail at work, and in love, or whatever passes for love when the goal for every woman, it would seem, is to land a "house in the country," where, as Joan tells her, "she'll never have to work again."

What fascinated me from the outset of Mad Men was the way it portrayed the world my parents inherited. They were poor, smart city kids who met on a subway to night school; my father fell in love instantly and never forgot her. My mother was already in love and instantly forgot my father. Then they met again five years later, this time in an elevator in the building where they both worked - my father as an entry-level executive for Getty Oil, my mother as a Katherine Gibbs School executive secretary for one of the partners of an investment firm. The world they lived in was already changing. They both fell in love this time, and after a few years of incidents and negotiations, they got married. Eventually they bought a house in the country where my mother never needed to work again.

Growing up in that house, I observed that the whole arrangement, guaranteed to make life so clear and simple, was not at all perfect because nothing ever is, no matter how it is advertised. Though Mad Men has always made Don Draper the central core of its universe, I fell in love with the show first because of Peggy. She's an intelligent Catholic girl from Brooklyn, just like my Mom, and it's a strange new world she's about to enter.

What's wonderful is that we see from the start that she has her own mind, and she possibly wins a fan in Don Draper by knowing early on what he needs (to wake him from naps, to give him an aspirin) and yet she has the self-assurance to say that she doesn't really want to keep Pete Campbell busy outside his door while Don assembles himself because, well, Pete is an asshole.

Sex is a simple biological process, but it's complicated for human beings. We possesses both a deep need for inner fulfillment and, as Don's researcher reminds him, a death wish. We want to live fully, we long to die. Peggy wants happiness - the home, the husband, the children. But she also wants happiness as defined by Don Draper, the message that screams that "whatever you're doing, it's OK." She longs to be free from fear of punishment, judgment. Somehow Peggy already knows what Don does - "that you're born alone and you die alone," and the rules that are thrown onto people are intended to make people forget that. So she lets Pete into her apartment even though she knows he's getting married on Sunday. That's the point. So she touches Don's hand, thinking that this is how it's done. Whatever it is Don sees in her, he tells her he will not be her boyfriend, only her boss, and when I first watched the show years back, I thought how unfortunate that was. I thought that because he doesn't take her as his latest offering that they'd someday actually make a great couple. Obviously I wasn't paying attention.

***

Consider the characters that are kept in their little bird cages - Peggy, the smart girl who has to admit that she's glad that the typewriter is so simple that even a woman can use it; there's Sal, who has to pretend that he'd prefer not to go to Pete's bachelor party at the strip club because "if a girl's gonna shake it in my face, I want to be alone so I can do something." We don't realize just yet that Don's pretending, too, but there's something great about the little detail of his needing to reassemble the Purple Heart he pulls out of his desk drawer. It almost looks like Weiner's leading us to believe it's a fake; it's not of course, but it is.

***

Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff) is one of the great characters of Mad Men, and maybe the very best of all of Don Draper's women. I loved her from the moment I saw her, and it was a testimony to Don's potential for depth that he fell in love with her when she set him straight about how she knew her own business better than he. Of course, Don loves women who rebuff him; it gives him exactly the "electric jolt" that he so often says that love - or whatever it is he calls love - gives him.

I don't really know how Don charms her back again to consider Sterling Cooper. Maybe she falls for that cruel arrogance that women like in a handsome man, but she also sees that he's "disconnected." Rachel Menken is the first woman who sees through Don, and this enables him to see women as being much more than what he has socialized to believe about them. It hurts to watch her because you know that after this season, she'll get no more than two minutes onscreen in Season Two. I want her back.

It's a great touch that after his meeting in the night club with Rachel, Don returns back home to his family. Of course he has a family. The man who believes that love is created by advertisers to sell nylons, the man who believes that you die alone, would also have to have a life that would mimic the existence of someone who thinks otherwise. The most powerful image to me in Episode 1 is what Don sees before falling asleep on his office couch; it's one that many of us who sat in doctor's offices and classrooms with flourescent lights remember: the image of a fly trapped inside a ceiling light fixture, in love with the light yet doomed to die up there. We wonder how it managed to get in there and if it will ever get out.

Mad Men Again

I have never done anything I love halfway, or once.

Sounds intriguing, doesn't it? I actually heard somebody say that at a party the other day. Maybe he was hoping I'd picture something exciting, like a menage a trois, hang gliding, mescaline, jumping out of an airplane, and so on. In fact, I'm a little disappointed as I write this that I haven't done any of those things.

If his self-description could be applied to me in any way, I guess it would be more appropriate to say that I tend to be slightly obsessive with a certain things, and with a need to repeat the experience in question again and again. At my other blog (read: I'm a mostly unread writer) I too need to keep repeating memories and experiences - in this case of being a lifetime fan of a particularly frustrating football team. I'm sure my wife would love it if doing handy work or gardening were among my obsessions, but they are not.

I am however obsessively attached to the AMC show Mad Men.

Recently, a contributer to what used to be called "The Week In Review" in the New York Times discussed the decline and fall of the English major. I think that the article is an exaggeration since it's written by an English professor; every professor I ever had in any discipline would wail on about the decline of Western Civilization because of the intellectual failings of the generation sitting right in front of them. I've been a high school English teacher myself for almost 15 years, and I also taught years before that as an adjunct composition instructor at colleges around Philly. I could wax on about how vital it is to read and write, but on the surface, these talents are not terribly well rewarded in a culture in love with the actual unreality of reality TV (is it even worth pointing such things out anymore?). English majors can often pretend like they're jedi holding onto a vital, lost tradition, but if you think you're cool because you've taught Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or "The Waste Land" (I do), you're not getting anywhere in Peoria. And I say that as a person who loves this beloved country.

Then came Mad Men, a TV show made for English majors. It's a successful show that's actually English major porn. Its mixture of brief and extended metaphors, its titillating red herrings, its themes of spiritual annihilation and cultural depravity are wonderful for the English teacher who's taught Lord of the Flies and The Crucible way too many times and still enjoys it. The show references poetry by Frank O'Hara and Dante. It uses a painting by Mark Rothko as a prop. Each season's promotional poster is deconstructed online in such a way that you'd think people were still looking for clues that Paul McCartney is dead. The show is crack cocaine for the literary dork.

Needless to say, when Mad Men wrapped up its sixth season last night and told us we'd be seeing them again - presumably for the last time - in 2014, I knew couldn't handle it. So I've decided to revisit - every week - every episode from Season One on until it's back on the air again, and write about each episode with the benefit of hindsight, knowing that we are coming to The End. It will be consoling, maybe occasionally revealing, or just a great way for me to avoid actual work.

Having said that, with this hindsight, here are some things I am going to be persistently referencing as I return to Mad Men week after week.

- Where are the black people? The limited role of people of color on the show is either the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about, or has become the elephant in the room that the homeowner regularly feeds, cleans up after and points out to guests as an unusual but appropriate piece of decor. I have no idea whether or how that latter metaphor works.

- Wha happened? The bits of popular culture and newsworthy detritus that floats in and out of the character's lives, and why some things get emphasized over others. For example, why does Richard Speck's 1966 killing spree get more airtime than Bobby Kennedy's assassination? And where was the 1964-65 World's Fair? No reference to the Jets' Super Bowl season, other than "Broadway Joe on Broadway?"

- I see what you did there. Little bits of symbolism, maybe even some that Matt Weiner and company didn't even put there, but that I see. Oh, I see it.

- Red Herrings. Yes, I thought Pete Campbell would hang himself. Yes, I thought Sylvia Rosen would jump to her death after being knocked up by Don.

- Don's women. They come and go, but they never come back, and it bugs me. I wanted to sleep with all of those women when I was single.

- Where'd they go? Characters that should have returned. Sal, obviously, sure, but what about Kurt: "I have sex viz de men?" Didn't he end up working with Cutler Gleason and Chaough?

- I can't watch. I will point out scenes through which I will be fast forwarding. Many of them will probably involve Don's memories from his past, Betty's little cruelties toward Bobby and Sally Draper, and any scene involving Jimmy Barrett.

So, anyway, it starts this week.