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.