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 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.