SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
That's enough.
So this week's episode, #5 of Season 3, ironically titled "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency," is the starting gun for the 1960's, and commencement of this season's "Act II." The previous episode climaxed with the birth of the new Draper baby, paying off a piece of business begun towards the end of last season. This episode shakes up things at the office but, more than that, strikes the ominous wild ride tone that was the 1960's.
We engage with narratives essentially on three levels: curiosity (who killed Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick?), suspense (what's going to happen next??) and, most damning, dread. Dread is when you know or are pretty damned sure that something bad is going to happen, and most tragedy has this element, as well as all horror.
Dread is when you see William Holden lying face down in a swimming pool at the start of Sunset Boulevard, then flashback to the beginning of the story. You know he'll die, but maybe you don't want to believe it, but you keep watching. Dread is every Hitchcock movie where you go in knowing he's going to take you the darkest place. It's when at the beginning of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer we see three tableaus of his victims, then see him pick up a hitchhiking girl with a guitar, then see him show up at a friend's house with the guitar but not the girl, and there's another girl, one we'll come to care about, at the house with his friend. We know that by the end of the movie, Henry will try to kill her and, based on his record so far, he's likely to succeed.
I believe that we watch Mad Men with a large dollop of dread. Creator Matt Weiner has said that the show is not about people getting what they want, "it's about people not getting what they want." We know this is true after two seasons, since Don has had trouble avoiding adultery, Peggy is not getting equal pay, Pete is not rising as he expects, and the Sterling Cooper buyout by the British is looking like a bummer for everybody at the New York office.
But the other layer of dread, the big one, is the historical aspect of the show. Anyone who's lived through or studied the 1960's knows that it was an exhilarating time, sure, but it was also a hellish time, when America firmly lost its innocence, beginning with the assassination of the virile, smart young President and continuing through the Vietnam War, draft and body bags. It was a time of marriages torn apart as women broke out of their established traps and the sexual revolution broke down traditional bonds. It was the first big automations beginning to displace American workers. It was a time of forced racial integration met by murder, of campus and ghetto unrest, capped off by our own National Guard shooting down four students at Kent State University and paralyzing a fifth, May 4, 1970 (my birthday).
It was the curse of living in interesting times.
Here's what we know: it's the beginning of July 1963. On November 23rd character Roger Sterling's daughter is to be married, but those of us from 2009 know that the wedding is scheduled for the day after President John F. Kennedy will be assassinated. The nuptials probably won't go as planned.
We also know that we're a year and a month away from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, based on a falsified event in Vietnam that subsequent President Lyndon B. Johnson used to dramatically escalate America's involvement in that debacle, which led to over 47,000 American soldiers killed and unraveled one or two Presidencies.
So this is the first Mad Men episode (to my recollection) where a character mentions the Vietnam War in dialogue, and it's also the one where a gruesome act of mechanical maiming sprays bloods like a Scorsese movie, like the First Lady will be so iconically sprayed with the blood and brains of her husband in four and a half months.
The most disruptive shot in this disturbing series thus far:
The '60's zeitgeist ran from Dallas through Watergate. The Beatles are coming and going before it's over, and the War will drag on a few more years. I believe we're still adjusting -- maybe making final adjustments -- to the changes of that era.
And I think that Mad Men has us right where it wants us.
3 comments:
"It's all about letting go of things so we can get what we want."
Nice post...
Great post, Neddy, but I was hoping to get your semiotician's eye on the recurring theme of light in the episode. Several shots open with light fixtures, lights coming on, turning off (Joan telling her depressed husband she'll come to bed as soon she "closes the light") and the recurring issue of the Draper daughter (??) being afraid of the dark and the installation of a night light in her room to ward off the ghost of her dead grandfather.
What's it all mean, Pal? Letting go? Cursing the darkness? The assertion of human will over natural forces that can't be controlled?
That shot of Joan in her one private moment as her rapist husband headed off to bed was quite amazing. Here's the woman who's all about control and she's losing it, along with whatever dreams came with whatever deal she had made with herself to be with such a sexual retrograde as Greg.
Aside from that, I think you're making the greater observations of this visual motif. Will be interested to see if it continues in other episodes. Nice that this one ended with the small, warm glow of Don in MaDONna position, Sally's head on his shoulder, baby cradled in his arms as he says, as much about Dick/Don as about baby Gene, no one knows who he is, no one knows who he is going to be...
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