A Very Good Night

Last night, Sunday, May 27, 2012, was maybe the best night ever for high-end television drama of the one-hour kind.  Both Mad Men and Game of Thrones had epic game-changing episodes.  Both are about power, in different ways.  Tonight I'll talk about the former.

In the antepenultimate episode of the season, "The Other Woman," Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is pitching Jaguar and all they need to seal the deal is for Joan to sleep with one of the three decision makers.  At the same time, Peggy, arguably the #2 character on the show, is feeling ready to leave.  It's a show about choices and prices paid for women to do men's bidding, as filtered through a Jaguar pitch tagline, "At last, something beautiful you can truly own."

So is Peggy owned by a new agency that picks her up for more than her asking price?  And is Joan owned or owner as she take a piece of SCDP for herself and her son?  And is there anything Christina Hendricks can't make us feel?

Then there's Don and his young bride, Megyn.  She wants to act, she's treated like chattel at the audition, and he's terrified that she's going to abandon him for her career.  Their fights are so much more awesome than Don and Betty's because they know each other's secrets, they're at way different points in their lives and they are both New York City sophisticates.  It feels like real adult fights - not TV adult fights.  A little S&Mish at times, which fits with the era.  Just as the Europeans were refinding the Marquis de Sade in literature and theatre.

If there's a project to this season it has to be revealed in the final two episodes.  This year's theme, according to creator Weiner, is "Every man for himself."  So will Don we left isolated - by Peggy, estranged from Joan by the knowledge of what she did and his adamant opposition to it, by Megyn getting the out-of-town rehearsals and previews gig?

We've had seasons with "the return of Don Draper" as the project.  Often with a diminishment of marital or family life.  Would that be a retread?  Or is there something deeper planned?

My pet theory: at the end of the season, Don quits.  Maybe goes West to design surfboards.  Maybe becomes the perfect mix on Don Draper and Dick Whitman.  Maybe quits being Don Draper.

More on Game of Thrones to come.  And if you think this season is big, the third book is oft considered the best.

Enjoy this time of plenty.  Over the next two weeks, it ends.

Mad Zeitgeist

From Chris Matthews' show:

As for tonight's unprecedented two-hour season opener, after an extra year away, I found it promising. I had expected 1966, given the amount of time off, and any further you're in the most amazing year, 1967, Summer of Love, the moment before the fall.

Best line of the night was Roger's wife. He says, "Why don't you sing like that?" and she replies, "Why don't you look like him?"

Yet again on Mad Men, like in Citizen Kane, nobody gets what they really want.

Thank the Good Lord

My role model will return:

AMC, Lionsgate Close To Deal With Matt Weiner For 'Mad Men'

The negotiations, I believe for the final two seasons (leaving us where, say, with Nixon getting elected in 1968? New Year's Eve 1969/1970?), took a long time, so we probably won't see new episodes until into the Fall at the the earliest. It'd be interesting to see Don Draper competing head-to-head with all the fall big network shows, as it's always been the summer up until now.

But he's back. The only bummer is that it'll be more than 39 weeks since we last saw a new episode -- closer to 52.

Another Season Ends

My take on the Season Four final episode of Mad Men is: Who knows. The ambiguity is bigger than in previous years, because Megan is an unknown quantity. Aside from the depiction of suddenly falling in love as massive mutual narcissism, the door is wide open for next season (a painful 3/4 of a year from now) and the only guidance we have is Executive Producer Matthew Weiner's dictum that Mad Men is a show about people not getting what they want.

What's tricky here is that I don't sense the audience favors Megan. We're all a bit pissed at how Dr. Faye Miller nursed Don Draper back to health only to be cast off when the younger, more kid-friendly, bombshell appeared, as if out of nowhere. We suspect that Megan had a plan all along that sprang first when she offered Don a no-strings-attached office encounter. We don't believe she could possibly be as good as advertised. Even if she is a Canadian.

So here's some possibilities for things going wrong thanks to Don's impulsive proposal:

• Megan follows through on her desire to be like Don and Miss Olson and moves into copywriting where, again as the prettier younger model, she gets an unfair amount of approval leading to Peggy finding her position threatened. One friend told me Megan seemed very All About Eve to her, and in this scenario Peggy has to keep looking over her shoulder.
  
  
• Megan becomes Betty II, trapped in housewifery, anxious about what she's given up, even getting a little manipulative with the kids.
  
  
• Betty melts down further and Don has to take custody, leading to Megan actually being the perfect little plot device. Then go to the previous point for what happens next.
  
  
• Megan actually is all those things Don thinks she is, and more. Smart, empathetic, maybe she goes off to get a law degree, etc. And then she is killed in a horrific and avoidable accident. Don is never the same again -- shattered, no trust in the universe, back to old Don Draper (drinking, women) with a vengeance.
  

And what might you think will happen?

Donward Spiral

There must be more copy available to read about the previous evening's episode of Mad Men every Monday morning than the day after any other show in television history. Not just reviews like from the leader, Alan Sepinwall, or reviews as from the advertising industry Ad Age POV or smart semi-civilian writers on Open Salon, but actual "erudite" discussions on sites for The New York Times, Slate and even The Wall Street Journal. So if your water cooler conversation at work or comment exchange under your Facebook status update isn't enough, there's plenty to read...and read...and read. It could take more time than watching the episode itself. And the back-to-back AMC Encore Presentation.

So here's the little I have to add to the talk about last night's themes, the main one of which appeared to be people not getting the credit they deserve or, often, thinking they aren't -- Peggy for Don's Clio, then Peggy not taking it for Rizzo's storyboard of her idea, Don for the job applicant's hack line, a drunken Duck Dunn for whatever he thought he deserved from working with the Clio emcee way back when and, best of all, Roger wanting to get credit for "hiring guys like him." When, in fact, memory/flashbacks reveal that Roger didn't hire Don -- Don got Roger drunk and the next morning made Roger think his memory lapsed and that he had hired Don.

In fact, just as Dick Whitman promoted himself to Don Draper, so did Don Draper hire himself into Sterling Cooper. This puts the four seasons of Don neglecting to thank Roger or give him credit for hiring him into perspective -- it makes sense when you realize Roger had a lot less to do with Don's success than just being well-positioned and pliable with booze.

Which leads to the biggest theme I can find this season: alcoholism. Specifically, Don Draper's alcoholism. We've seen this plot reflected in Fred Rumsen who came back thanks to AA and in Duck Dunn who lost his marriage to alcoholism and can't seem to stay on the wagon, ultimately making a public fool of himself in front of his own industry, hanging on by his fingernails and slipping off the ledge to oblivion. In both cases, healthy or promising careers were shattered by this very 20th Century disease, and if you add Roger as a third reflecting subplot, you've got a heart attack awaiting Don as well.

But for the first time the special threat to Don was revealed: alcohol twice caused him to forget who he is; that is to say, the character he has worked so hard all along at playing. At the Life cereal pitch we saw Don Draper slip away as the forelock fell and the studied professional became the desperate-to-please Dick Whitman. We could see how much his manner and voice matched that of the young Dick Whitman, fur salesman, in the flashbacks. And to make the potential for jeopardy even greater, at the wake-up moment during his lost weekend, when the sophisticated brunette copywriter in his bed Friday night morphed into the tawdry blonde coffeeshop waitress with 36 hours of blackout in-between, waitress Doris referred to our man as "Dick," revealing that in losing himself inside the bottle he had lost track of his adopted identity.

Who knows who else might have heard Dick Whitman reveal his true identity during an alcoholic blackout period?

I knew Don was over the edge when we learned he's stopped eating his meals and starting drinking them, from several episodes of his not being hungry, not eating dinner, giving up on the perfectly cooked steak in front of him without a bite. And there can only be one place this goes, especially when two of his family members have already been in therapy.

Don doesn't get out of this condition by drying out on his own. He has to have a crack up. He has to end up in a sanitarium for a spell. The water cure. The DTs. The heebie-jeebies. Pink elephants in the air and creepy crawlies all over his body.

Nobody watches Mad Men to watch typical TV-style therapeutic recoveries. It's a show about people not getting what they want or getting what they want and finding it's a punishment or a trap. It's also always about some sort of Don triumph in the last episode of each season, even as another part of his life slips away, at the expense of his family.

After next week, we'll be over the halfway point in this season, episode seven of thirteen.

Don hasn't hit rock bottom yet.

Mad Memories

Just a reminder of the wit and wisdom of Donald Draper.

Mad-Capper

Yes, SPOILERS.





My favorite line in the Season Three Mad Men finale, "Shut the Door. Have a Seat," is one that doesn' t make much sense out of context, but at the point it arrives within this singularly upbeat episode, it causes a smile even upon repeat viewing. It's said by Don Draper when Lane Pryce, having been offered a partnership in the new firm if only he'll fire the first three partners, says, "I imagine it's worth considerably more than that." Don's eyes light up as he says it: "So now we're negotiating."

If, as creator Matthew Weiner says, every episode of Mad Men is meant to be a different genre, this one is the caper movie. Sure, it has it's melancholy counterpoints, most notably when Don and Betty do their typically terrible parenting job in explaining their impending divorce to the kids, certainly in the flashbacks to Don's father's farm failure and accidental death, which are much of what goads him into taking decisive action and set the caper in motion. There's a scary late night fight scene with Don returning home drunk, having just learned from Roger of Betty's new paramour, her "lifeboat," Henry Francis, is another classic of physical acting between Jon Hamm and January Jones, at her best. But most of all there's joy, and I'd put the relief of seeing Betty on an airplane to Reno in this same category.

Joy is an emotion missing from so much of Mad Men and hard-won when it comes, typically offset by tragedy, like the Season One closer when Don gave the triumphant, moving, instantly famous Kodak Carousal pitch, only to arrive home too late to spend Thanksgiving with his family. The success of Don reuniting with Betty at the end of Season Two was fraught with the tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis, playing over the a.m. radio as they reached out to hold hands across the kitchen table. But this time Don takes all the sturm und drang of the season and boils it down to his biggest move yet, leading Bert, then Roger, then Lane and ultimately four others to break away from PPL just as their fates are being sold to the huge corporate advertising factory of McCann Erickson, to take the biggest gamble of their lives and start Sterling, Cooper, Draper & Pryce.

There's the gathering of the team, like a Danny Ocean movie (most moving when Don apologizes to Peggy), the jaunty, jazzy score that kicks in as the team begins taking what they need from the old office, working quickly over the weekend to avoid getting caught or leaving behind anything important for client continuity. There's the breezy conspiratorial smiles, the sense that everyone chosen has a part to play, and the scrappy new beginnings, if one can call a suite at The Pierre hotel "scrappy."

Most of all, there's the triumphant return of Joan. She's re-introduced with the reaction shot of the team hard at work, looking up as the camera tracks in on them, then the joyful-to-tears reverse of Joan striding in, wearing black slacks, no less, list in hand, already planning all the infrastructure steals and moves they'll need to make it work. Following it up is the equally gratifying moment of Don kicking in the locked door to the Art Department, with only the continued absence of Sal making it just a little wistful.

As for where the show picks up, one guesses it will be somewhere far enough in 1964 that there will be a new office, albeit not nearly the size yet of the old place, perhaps as early as February 9, 1964, the night The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and the 1960's began shaking off the ache of JFK and kicking into gear. There will be reversals, losses of clients, reaches for bigger fish, money pressures, renewed personality clashes, old addictions and new temptations. Maybe Betty will find Henry Francis less than she imagined and want Don back, although one hopes there that a constant retread cycle in our viewing future. Maybe Don will take Peggy for granted again, maybe Pete will feel under-rewarded again, maybe Bert will die or Roger take up with Joan and even lose the next half of his fortune in a divorce from his second wife.

If nothing else, the stage is set for SCD&L to represent the new age of advertising that succeeded the Sterling Coopers of their day, as the medium exploded with creativity, visual pleasures and a savvy wit that matched the rocketing cultural changes of the times.

It's been a great first three seasons, but if the 1960's themselves are any guide, the best is yet to come.

Time Stands Still

Mad Men, SPOILERS.
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This week's episode, "The Grown-Ups," is the one that will be shown in history classes deep into the future when professors want their students to understand the pivotal nature of this particular week in U.S. history, when our fresh young President was assassinated and the man accused of the crime was himself erased just a few days later.

What Mad Men did so successfully with their extensive use of archival television broadcast footage, and the backdrop of the epic story built around Dick Whitman's exhausting quest to be the best Don Draper he can be, was to contextualize the footage so we viewers could both experience what first nationwide trauma shared over mass media felt like as well as understand why it was the turning point, the end of the 1950's, the moment with all its unanswered questions that continue to haunt our nation to this day.

Kennedy's assassination puts the world in a tailspin, with all of the characters glued to the TV to try and make sense of what has happened. Back then there was no such thing as channel surfing, mainly just sitting on one of the three network channels with whichever newscaster(s) you preferred. There was no mosaic reality of current media choices, no multitudes of cable channels or infinite Internet space, no amateur video footage of planes crashing into buildings showing up scant hours after the disaster -- even the Zapruder film is yet to be developed in a film lab. We relied on the trusted newscasters, many of which had earned our trust as part of Edward Murrow's crack WWII reporting troupe, to interpret for us in black and white, replete with vertical roll, nothing so tethered as today's digital reliability. A world a-jitter, hanging on by a thread.

This was certainly the moment Mad Men has been building towards since the pilot, per the mid-century anthropological theme that is the show's foundation. Presidential assassination is perhaps the most taboo of homicides, as it not only affects individuals and families like all other murders but, in cases like Kennedy and Lincoln, can change a nation's fate. While it's an axiom of drama that true character is revealed under pressure, Mad Men shows how this impossibly momentous trauma causes several characters to make long-simmering, life-changing decisions. Veils are lifted, scales fall from eyes. Authority is ignored -- after all, as Pete points out, if we can't protect the most wanted man in America from vigilante justice while under police protection, then there is no functioning system.

What's interesting is how those making these decisions do so by connecting with a partner, while other characters do not so much change as remain boxed in.

We see a new Betty, still processing the forced revelation of her husband's terminal duplicity, now seeing the world with an adult's skepticism rather than the childish moods of the past. She no longer cares what Don knows or finds out: "He's been lying to me for years." Film director Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune, Barfly) in his first Mad Men engagement delivers a Vertigo-like moment for Betty, a vision made more dreamy by the dissolve that leads into it, as she emerges from the powder room at the end of Roger's daughter's wedding and walks towards two men at once, Don and Henry with their backs to each other, and up until she takes her husband's arm we're not exactly sure who she'll choose to leave with. The real decision comes after Oswald's assassination by Jack Ruby, which jolts her out of her chair to cry, "What the hell is going on?!?" and drives her to Henry's promising arms, as much a reaction to Don's refrain, "It's all going to be okay."

These were the two repeated refrains from the episode, beginning with Don's spooky turn around a corner in the office, all the telephones suddenly ringing and the main room empty as employees gather around Harry's television. "What's going on?" he says but quickly gets the picture. And while he's the one taking on the expected daddy role by claiming everything with be fine throughout the show, it's Peggy who has the last repetition, referring to the time they have to redo the AquaNet ad before shooting, now too reminiscent of the assassination scene to be broadcast.

Pete is the other rebel, joining with Trudi in what now appears to be a smart and solid partnership where she agrees with him that the system is broken, both in the government and at Sterling Cooper. While Pete is odious in so many other ways, he's actually the most forward-looking executive at the company, but is dealing to a corporate loss to Ken Cosgrove, ironically referred to by Pete as "Ken and his haircut," just as JFK's detractors would say America elected the haircut, not the man.

Meanwhile Don is increasingly cut off from all humanity, whether powerless at work to hire a quality Art Director due to Lane's budgeting edicts, shorn of his soul-mate elementary school teacher, estranged from Betty due to his tangle of dishonesties, unable to connect with Roger at the wedding thanks to his previous resentments. Roger is also finding himself isolated, with his young wife acting childish and denying him a grown-up partner, reaching out instead to Joan who now lives on the show's narrative margins, she the most capable adult of all.

The episode begins with Pete asleep and ends with Don anesthetizing himself yet again, having come to the office with no other place to go on the sudden National Day of Mourning. Pete wakes up over the course of the episode but Don ends it hitting the bottle, sticking with his dream state. Don finds Peggy also at the office and the two of them are kindred spirits, both alone in their own ways, survivors who can take the events of the week in greater stride than others due to their own traumatic experiences, but Don is still unable to make a complete connection. He's too full of grief from Betty's declaration of no longer loving him, too isolated by the role he's built for himself in terminal pursuit of the American Dream. Peggy goes off to watch the funeral in Bert's office while Don returns to the shadows that are the dominant visual for him this week, once again trapped visually in a doorframe, reaching for the bottle. It's obvious by now that Don is an alcoholic, and that it's as much a trap as his adopted identity, company and marriage.

The rebels, the ones more alive now, are in cells of two, a foreshadowing of the 1960's political cells to come -- the ones committed, sometimes violently, to creating change. While the Beatles will be important culturally should the next season pick up in 1964, it's five more years until the next big hits, when both Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy fall from assassin bullets within two months of each other, by which time the more festering trauma of the Vietnam War will be tearing our nation apart.

The question for the season finale is whether we'll see Don Draper somehow rising to the occasion and pulling back together the threads of his life at home and at work, as he's done with varying degrees of success in each of the previous two seasons. Is the change creator Matthew Weiner has touted all season is a permanent trajectory or simply a more sophisticated form of standard television series machinations? Will Betty discover Henry to be a fraud and return home to Don? Will Joan return as Office Manager and Sal as Art Director? Will Pete someone get over on Ken and take the top account position? Will Peggy and Don unite to become a team again?

From the very beginning the big vision and big promise has been depicting the decade of greatest, most rapid change in modern American history, at least since the Civil War one hundred years earlier. If, as Weiner has said, Mad Men is a show about "not getting what you want," then the potential for real dramatic and potentially structural change must be met. Especially the week after so convincingly depicting the historical earthquake that began on November 22, 1963 at 12:30pm CST in Dallas, Texas.

We'll all be watching.

It's Collegiate!

Okay, Mad Men is the show of the moment, but The Wire is enduring, and now it's a course at Harvard University:

The class will be taught by sociology professor William J. Wilson, one of the best-known African American history professors in the country, who has made no secret of the fact that he is a huge fan of the show.

"I do not hesitate to say that it has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality, more than any other media event or scholarly publication," Wilson told the audience before poking fun at himself, "including studies by social scientitsts."

Nothin' new, though, per Associate Professor Jason Mittell at Middlebury College:



Mittell treats The Wire as he should, in the same league as the novels of Dostoevsky or drama of Shakespeare, at five episodes a week. And there's word of a similar course at Dartmouth.

Yep, best show cop show ever.

And arguably the finest fictional television series yet produced.

Anniversary

Nettertainment friend DeRosaWorld is promising thirty count 'em thirty JFK assassination facts in 30 days, one for each day in November. I'm guessing it won't take the whole thirty to make the case for conspiracy rather than lone gunman, but follow for yourself.

This is particularly timely as the final two episodes of this Mad Men season hurtle towards that fateful day of November 22, 1963.

Today's fact has to do with Lee Harvey Oswald's contract with the American embassy during his extended stay in Russia...

Duets

Mad Men SPOILERS per this week's even more brutal episode than the previous four.
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Okay.

Just watched the episode again, "The Gypsy and the Hobo," and see the structure as 5 duets of varying length, not a lot of group scenes, only as backdrop for the Roger and Ex- Flame story. In terms Don's reveal with Betty it's one of two reflective subplots, this one about two mature people rediscovering each other after a quarter century and learning the truth about who the other really is. In this one the man has the upper hand over the woman, who he sees as having deceived him, or at least his heart, leaving it broken. This one ends without reconciliation, and like all the stories in the episode, it's about identity, both the idea of changing the name on a label (i.e. Whitman->Draper) and identifying the "meant to be" provider of love:

"You were the one."
"You weren't."

This one has to end up broken up so that we can finish with Don and Betty together.

The second major duet is between Joan and her psycho-baby husband, Greg. We learn that he's hid a huge part of his past from her, possibly the very thing that cripples him emotionally and vocationally, he mother having run off and his dad's subsequent nervous breakdown. Greg continues to shatter after a poor interview, his confessions continuing to mirror those of Don later in the episode, only he ends with a brand new choice of identity, joining the army to continue as a surgeon (and we surely pity those soldiers who will end up sacrificing their lives under his knife). Ironically, he's going the opposite way of Don, who left the army to assume a new identity.

Again, in this reflection the couple stays together but it looks like it could blow at any moment.

The two minor duets are Joan's call to Roger and Don's swan song with Suzanne. Joan and Roger once again get the best lines, the closest to Adam's Rib style Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn tight and brilliant 40's style dialogue. There's a real affection there (was Joanie "the one?") as between two equals, with both knowing what's going on but acting like adults, again an inversion and welcome relief from the troubled Don/Betty duet, the "positive." And Joanie once again gets an instant classic line, "Look at you figuring things out for yourself." Even Roger has to laugh and give her credit.

The Don-Suzanne plot serves to give us Dick Whitman in his most ideal state, i.e. in the bedroom being vulnerable with an understanding woman/young mother figure as was missing from his childhood. Besides the obvious suspense of her waiting in the car as he heads into his nearly twenty minute duet with Betty, Suzanne is another road not taken, most keenly represented and felt in the shot of Don framed by the doorway after his initial confession to Betty, what John Ford fans know as "The Searchers shot" that opens and most notably closes the picture, both times framing John Wayne's Ethan Edwards, a man eternally adrift. That Don chooses not to pass through it speaks to the courage that makes him a character worthy of dramatization. When Betty busts him for his big identity lie, he turns from Don to Dick but with a difference from times past. As Jon Hamm says, when Don gets in trouble, Dick runs.

Not this time.

In fact, besides the Emmy-inducing work of Hamm in his breakdown before his wife, and the extraordinary strength January Jones draws up in her confronting him, what comes through is how fragile the thread really is, that thing that holds together our identities -- family, house, job, spouse -- all a construct to weep over, weep for what was lost or denied, for the mistakes we made to get ourselves into these very traps, yet how terrifying it would be to suddenly have them stripped away. David Byrne once sang, "And you may ask yourself, how did I get here?" Don't asks Betty, "Would it have made any difference?"

The costumes for Halloween are the icing on the cake, and as Don and Betty bring the kids to a house where the father giving out candy is the same dad who discussed teacher Suzanne with Don in the lead-up to the affair, we get the emblematic line of the episode, if not the series: "And who are you supposed to be?"

Per this episode, you might have to ask your partner.

The Starting Gun of the 1960's

If you are not caught up on AMC's Mad Men, stop reading, because herein lie


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.

Mad and Not-So Mad Women

Since every episode of Mad Men is so crammed with plot nuance and character information, and this week's penultimate Season 2 episode "The Mountain King" more than usual, and since I'm crunched for time I just want to touch on the striking (SPOILERS AHEAD) pre-feminism female characters.

Peggy's the easiest this time out -- she's learned her lessons from Don Draper well and has ascended to the office next to his, thanks to her hard work, grasp of creative advertising values, and increasing sense of self-worth. What a change from Season 1.

While Peggy is sitting in her darkened late-afternoon office with drink in hand contemplating her next moves, Joan is suffering from her pre-consciousness choice of fiance, a handsome but horrific doctor who handles his gripping feelings of sexual inadequacy by raping Joan in Don's office, violating everything she's all about in that workspace. Joan deals with it the same way she deals with him rejecting her mounting him (can't handle not having the dominant position, fearful that she wasn't a 31-year-old virgin when they met) the night before, by staring off and focusing on something else. In the bedroom it's the late night movie on TV, and in the office it's the end of Don's coffee table. Out of mind = out of sight.

One hopes that Joan will realize her consciousness long before the 1960's are over, and her respectful showing towards Peggy's ascension (while the guys in the office are furiously jealous) bodes well for their potential future partnership. Maybe Peggy will give back to Joan, as Joan helped her understand Cooper Sterling when she first joined.

Betty is a whole other case, learning consciousness by necessity, endorsing Don's paycheck and trying to raise her kids without him. She softens towards her daughter, doing the classic divorced parents move of buying her off while delivering bad marital news. Betty is a witch to the friend she set up for an affair, but maybe the verbal slap she received for it has awakened her a tad. What to make of her sudden bleeding -- miscarriage? Sudden illness? Breakthrough bleeding? The latter two would, with Don absent, put her in the jackpot situation, either threatening to leave her kids as orphans or forcing her into a backalley abortion. That would be quite the feminist capper on the season.

And then there's Anna Draper, wife/widow of the real Don Draper, seen in the present and flashback as Don/Dick returns to San Pedro for rebooting. Anna is the platonic ideal for Dick, the one with whom he can be himself, sharer of his secret and enabler of his better self. She tells him that the only thinking standing between himself and his happiness is the belief that he is alone. He says "People don't change," but as is the rule with characters talking about themselves, I don't believe it true of him. He just needs a partner (an underlying theme of the episode).

Am I the only viewer who found a certain parallel between Anna and Barack Obama's mother? Both are/were women ahead of their times, living with their own strong sense of morality, making their own bold choices at a time when (per the rest of the episode) women weren't encouraged to do so. I'm sure I'm mythologizing Obama's Kansan mom, but she was a contemporary of the fictional Anna, clearly an intellectual (who doesn't wear it on her sleeve) with an open mind and strong sense of self. Even through the pain.

My prediction for next week is that Don makes it home by the time the season tails out, prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis, his heart open to Betty in a way it wasn't before (and her to him due to the bleeding), maybe helping to scuttle the Sterling Cooper buy-out in alliance with a relieved Bert, screwing Roger financially thanks to his impending divorce. Somewhere along the way he'll be the guy who popularizes hot-rodding to the masses, maybe going to a race or picking up a wrench before the international crisis sends him home, the conquering hero, the artist reborn.

Vroooooom!

And then: The long, hellish wait for Season Three to begin.

Dick Whitman

The core question of Mad Men seems to be not so much who the hell is Don Draper -- we know he died in the Korean War, that his identity was presumed by Depression baby Dick Whitman, and that he was, per the few moments we have of him in the show, a very decent guy.

No, the core question is how Dick Whitman went from taking Don Draper's name to becoming the much admired and envied Creative Director of Sterling Cooper ad agency -- and whether that Madison Avenue man is a character that Dick Whitman can continue playing for much longer.

SPOILERS FOLLOWING.

As with the 13-episode arcs of most classic HBO dramas, the final three episodes comprise the last act of the season, and Act 3 of Season 2 of Mad Men kicked in on Sunday night with "The Jet Set". Don Draper's marriage looks to be over and between the business compromises and personal scandals infecting his office life, he grabs an opportunity for a business junket to Los Angeles. Although he's there to seduce the aerospace (jet set) industry, he's clearly disturbed by an atomic missile annihilation presentation, hearkening back to the moment when Don Draper was killed by airstrikes at their remote two-man outpost, and he swapped his dogtags for those of his superior officer. Combined with a fleeting vision of his estranged wife, Betty, and the seeming replacement of her by a young, wealthy free-spirit named Joy, Don takes up her offer of "Why would you deny yourself something you want?" and jumps in her convertible going AWOL to Palm Springs -- to be adopted into the jetset world of the idle rich.

Stripped of his own clothes, his ties to family and Sterling Cooper, floating with the topless Joy in a pool while another couple makes love downcurrent, Don has a momentary identification with an unhappy young boy dragged along by his divorcee father, muses on a crack in a glass, gives up even his bed in this house and awakens virtually naked on the couch the next morning, taking the moment when Joy goes off to pull close the rotary phone, dial a number out of his address book and intone the first tease of the big backstory payoff we've been waiting for all season:

"Hello, it's Dick Whitman."

The person on the other end gives him an address to scribble down, the camera switches to behind Don in a mirror image of the opening title silhouette image (also echoed by the first shot of Don in this episode standing overdressed staring out at his Los Angeles hotel pool), and we cut to his missing baggage being delivered to his Westchester doorstep.

Don's cut loose. Now Dick can return.

There have been two references this season to the person I believe Dick will visit in the next episode, along with a throwaway mention of his father's name after punching out obnoxious comedian Jimmy in a secret NYC gambling club several episodes back. The first was a mysterious addressee to whom Don sent his copy of Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency at the end of this season's first episode. The second was in "The Gold Violin" episode, where his consideration of a new car purchase triggered a memory in Don/Dick, of when he was selling used cars and a blond woman arrived (more Kim Novak than Grace Kelly, but a Hitchcock blonde nonetheless), who then called him out for not being Don Draper -- not being the man as advertised.

My best guess, and judging by some of the passionate online posts Monday morning I'm not alone, is that this woman is exactly who he called and is going to see. Maybe she was the real Don Draper's wife, maybe a sister. Maybe Dick Whitman got close to her; maybe she acted as a benefactor, helping him get to New York City and get his first job writing ad copy for the furrier mentioned in his brilliant Kodak Carousel pitch in the first season's final episode.

Based on the brevity of the call and Don/Dick's side of it, the person on the other end wasn't shocked to hear from him, nor did that person require much explanation. One wonders what Don may have learned from this person, what he may owe, what he may have left behind and if, for some reason to be revealed, that was o.k.

According to the "Inside Mad Men" online video for this week, this episode is all about being your true self, i.e. letting your true self come out, as reflected in Peggy's makeover, her haircutter's coming out, and Duck Dunn's renewed drinking triggering the type of bold business move he was previously known for executing:



If the theory I offered a couple months ago that this season is all about Don Draper as repressed artist, then the next two weeks could give us his opening up, a period of renewal and growth, maybe a new or newly invigorated Don Draper emerging.

After all, he is the "hero" of the show, or at least it's central protagonist. One thing we know about him is that he's a master of reinventing himself. (Not incidentally, a grand tradition of California adoptees.) We know that beneath his cool, relatively silent exterior is an intellect keenly sussing out human situations for what they really are. We know that he has the power to act decisively, for good or ill, in his Don Draper persona.

According to the chronology of U.S. history at the time of these final two episodes, there's about to be a Cuban Missile Crisis, as foreshadowed by the MIRV conference presentation that seemed to trigger something in Don. And the final episode has the same title as the Frank O'Hara book.

It's 1962 and when the series returns, if it holds to the time-scheme set up so far, it'll be 1964 with America still raw from the President John F. Kennedy assassination and Beatlemania about to sweep the world. The 1960's as most people characterize it didn't really begin until then, just as it didn't really end until maybe 1972 (Nixon's re-election) or maybe 1974 (Nixon's resignation).

So what's the "Emergency" going to refer to? Soviet missiles in Cuba? Sterling Cooper under corporate siege? Don's marriage in final crack-up?

Or the 1960's finally taking off.

Like a jet.

Most Sublime

The most sublime show on television right now is Mad Men. Now four episodes into Season 2, I think I've figured out what it's about, what the whole period/historical/cultural anthropology thing means, what they're doing this season and how it plays into the overall series. Why they're jumping years to take us to 1970 by the end of Season 5.

The key to figuring it out is that this season Don Draper is trying to walk the path of righteousness. He's learned his lesson about dalliances, yet there's a new affair that's pursued him, with Jimmy's wife. It doesn't make him happy, but he doesn't say no, because as Peggy so cogently put it in season 1, these are people who want to see things they haven't seen before.

Don reads a book of Frank O'Hara poetry, sneaks out to Antonioni's La Notte, and comes up with the big ideas that no one else at Sterling Cooper could ever think of.

Don's clearly dissatisfied with his conformist consumer life, but unlike last season he isn't watching from a distance, he's trying to figure it out, trying to break out of the box that he (and everyone around him) is trapped in.

In this way, Don is exactly like Peggy, determined to escape her Catholic borough past, grappling with her familial ties. When Don calls the "creative" staff into his office on a Sunday in tonight's episode, it underlined the point that although "creative" is as far as they're allowed to go in the world of their office and maybe as far as Don is willing to deign himself, Don is an artist, and Peggy might turn out to be one herself.

Seen through this prism, everything else in Mad Men makes sense. Of course these men and women are mad. They're trapped in their own social constructs, prisoners of the tropes of their day, the culture for which they as adults have as much responsibility now as anyone.

I imagine that we're going to see Don go all-out by the end of even season 4, divorced, on the West Coast, blowing doobs and designing his own house, maybe with a short beard, long hair. Confident in the art world setting. Comfortable with a surfboard and modern jazz.

It's the nexus of the creators' interest in the characters. It makes everything in Season 1 look like planting. It takes Jay Gatsby into the Jackson Pollack era.

The greatest creation of the artist Don Draper is, of course, turning Dick Whitman into himself.

Regarding

Regarding the John Edwards affair, as this politician wasn't out selling hypocritical family values or God or any of those non-issues which make it so much more fun for Dems when a Republican is revealed for having done as he does but not as he says, I'd like to quote Bert Cooper, the fictional co-founder of the fictional 1960's advertising agency at the center of AMC's brilliant Mad Men, as he responded to the very truthful accusations by Pete Campbell about Don Draper's true identity:

"Who cares?"

And furthermore:

"This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you've imagined here."

John McCain and his doppleganger Karl Rove are trying to turn this election on a fabrication about Barack Obama they want to shove down our throats and into our psyches, while the guy who blatantly cheated on and dumped his wife for a beer heiress, millionaire McCain's burgeoning bad judgment is revealed to again bode ill, having caused a huge loss of jobs in Ohio, and he's trying to chastise the Obama campaign for mentioning it -- a real issue.

And a real, true, character issue.

McCain is worthless now. Here John Edwards, the only candidate amongst both parties, over 15 of them, who put tackling U.S. poverty at the top of his agenda. Multi-millionaire McCain doesn't care, except in the abstract. When was the last time he left one of his eight houses, got out of his private plane, and actually helped a poor person build a house, maybe on a visit with Jimmy Carter. He's not some benign alternative to Obama -- he's the aging side of the American oligarchy, and if he's their front man this year, so be it -- he'll say anything he has to, allow his Rovian campaign to run any lowlife ad it wants to and say he's proud of it, he'll do his job to keep the lid on investigations, true change..and true growth.

Beyond anything else, this country needs to grow. It can only grow in a sustainable way with change.

Russia just invaded neighboring Georgia. I'd think I'll do as Elizabeth Edwards asked today, extraordinarily quick, forthright and free of self-pity. Her husband isn't running for anything right now. Let private citizens be private.

Lather Despair Repeat

Who is Don Draper?

"Draper? Who knows anything about that guy. No-one’s ever lifted that rock. He could be Batman for all we know."

- Young media buyer Harry Crane
to rising account exec Pete Campbell.

We know he has a Purple Heart in his desk. We know someone recognized him on the commuter train as a war buddy, but addressed him as Dick Whitman. We know he didn't have a nanny growing up, yet has somehow come out refined. We know he's no stranger to working with his hands. We know he is often the smartest guy in the room.

We also know that he's medicating himself to death with nicotine and alcohol, that he's serially cheating on his marriage, that he's emotionally unavailable to anyone in his family, that he doesn't want to talk about his past.

We also know that he feels epic unrest with his perfect and enviable 1960 affluent ad exec/suburban husband & father life, that he's not so sure he wants what he's attained, that he is watching his life pass him by.

Same as it ever was.

You may ask yourself, how did Don get here?

AMC's Mad Men is the best dramatic hour show since The Sopranos, and creator/exec prod Matthew Weiner was on the staff of that show. It's amazing how quickly it's hit the air after that earth-shattering blast of black that ended Tony's reign, but it's again the most innovative drama going, not even bothering to toy with our affections towards the main character as much as David Chase did with his neurotically unsatisfied married professional.

Draper's counterpart, his ingenue secretary, Peggy Olson, who's maybe not quite from the same pool as the others, more easily elicits sympathy, but no one gets away clean. This is John Cheever, the series. This could be Blue Velvet-land, just shed that paranormal Lynchian vibe. This is Douglas Sirk on Benzedrine looking ahead to Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, self-repressed truths and scandalous stolen moments.

While getting praised for bulls-eye period art direction, costuming and hair, and getting suspect for actually portraying a credible vision of period sexism, anti-Semitism and racism, it turns out that Mad Men is, even more than The Sopranos, a gilded vision of hell, and for each of us a hell of our own making.

"Advertising is based on one thing--happiness. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams the reassurance that whatever you're doing, it's OK. You're OK."

- Don Draper

So Don isn't happy. So maybe Don isn't Don. Maybe something happened in the war. Maybe he was once Dick. Maybe he's half-Jewish, on his mother's side, and that's why he's drawn to department store heiress and owner Rachel Menken. Maybe he was poor and went big-time for the American dream, and actually achieved it, and now he's contemplating suicide by the side of a bridge.

Will Don discover beatniks before he divorces his family and strands his wife circa 1961-62? Will Peggy start going to readings and run into copywriter Paul Kinsey and end up in the sexual/cultural revolution together? Will sec pool queen bee Joan Holloway land a steady man before The Beatles are on Ed Sullivan?

Is Don Draper actually J.R. "Bob" Dobbs?

David Chase gave us the gift of dread, he ended that way and people acted surprised, but Weiner, with topnotch HBO staple director Alan Taylor setting the tone with the first two episodes, is giving us a brand new version, and it is crazy compelling. You can read great analysis of the most current episode, "The Marriage of Figaro" (like Chase's titles, the meanings are loaded), from Alan Sepinwall and Andrew Johnston. These critics are re-watching their screeners up to four times, and it's because like with Chase's show, so much of it is unspoken, so unlike typical TV that ,upon restudy, dangerous layers and threatening revelations of meaning emerge. A deeper plan than might appear on the smooth, stylish, nasty surface.

I desperately don't want to give out spoilers on the episode endings, but they've been uniformally devastating and I've only seen the first three. Just start watching, catch the back ones later, or get them on iTunes. Supposedly the fourth episode is a big one, and I just can't wait.

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

- David Ogilvy

Yeah, but what's it doing to Don's (Dick's?) soul?

Mad About the Sixties

There's something in the entertainment air, a callback to the 1960s I've experienced these past couple weeks. It started with the premiere episode of AMC's new series set in the year 1960 among the advertising agency gods of Madison Avenue, Mad Men; continued with a visit to 1962 Baltimore in the movie musical Hairspray; jumped to 1966 with Don Cheadle's Oscarbait turn as legendary D.C. deejay Petey Greene in Talk to Me; then circled back tonight with ep. 2 (TiVo) of Mad Men.

What is it about the '60's that's got it coming back? Is it the failed policies of the anti-evolutionary forces these past seven years? And why start with 1960 -- picking up in the cigarette haze where George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck left off?

My own theory is that these creators were all children during that era. I, personally, was born somewhere in the middle of what will be the first season of Mad Men. So this isn't the nostalgia of those who lived through that decade as adults or even cognizant teens. These are the legends, the revisionist legends, filtered through a child's view of that mysterious, threatening, alluring adult world of the time.

Since Talk to Me takes place both later and is based on true material, I'm thinking to discuss it later. I can tell you that it is well worth seeing, not just to see Don Cheadle break out like you've always known he could, but also for the power of the story, and a great evocation of the constant tensions of the times.

In the middle of watching Hairspray I realized why it was succeeding in an age where the numbers in movie musicals are either performed onstage in sagas about musicals, or awkward breaks in otherwise naturalistic direction. The difference is that this adaptation of the recent Broadway smash hit, itself based on the 1988 film by indie camp king John Waters, is the first Mad magazine movie musical, applying that populist ironic voice to the very decade where its readership blossomed. Just enough youthful disrespect has survived.

When I watched Batman back in the mid-1960's, I was a little kid so I took it seriously. I'm generally not a big fan of camp, which I find replaces subtext with a rather obvious mocking knowingness. The rare exception would include The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, which not only had subtext but showed a lot of reality in the shooting (vast landscapes, faces with age) and was genuinely moving. While his movies have always been satiric and filled with meshes of parody, what makes John Waters the biggest exception of all, at least for me, is that his career-spanning theme is so honestly delivered, the floor upon which all his laughs dance:

Accept yourself for yourself; accept everybody else for who they are or "kiss my ass." (That last quip courtesy of the character Link to the racist authorities in the movie.)

The genius of the core Hairspray story has always been a previously unrecognized equation of overweight people with the Civil Rights Movement. Tracy Turnblad goes from local dance show aspirant to crusading protester over the course of the picture, with the enemy being prejudice, plain and simple. But beyond where it gets all the metaphors right, it's as far from reverential as you've ever seen in successful mainstream musical, opening with a number about Baltimore that includes Tracy singing to sidewalk rats, the neighborhood barfly, pregnant ladies smoking as they drink martinis, and Waters himself in a cameo as the local flasher.

The whole cast is great, with John Travolta bringing a well-suited new version of Tracy's mom, Edna, a somehow mandatory cross-dressing role played by Divine in the original movie and Harvey Fierstein among others on Broadway. Travolta goes for the vulnerability, with no obvious winks at the audience, and his performance somehow endorses the movie: Waters' vision finally hits the big time.

When I was a kid movie musicals had the ability to get you choked up, but these days overflowing emotion in musical numbers provoke audience embarrassment more than any desired effect. But I found myself wiping tears away at crazy moments in Hairspray. Is it that purity of theme, or the commitment to depicting that very real racial equality struggle from our lifetime, or maybe just the joy of seeing John Waters writ large?

I'll have more to say about Mad Men in the future as well, but I can say that also reaches towards parody of real world early-1960's conventions, albeit in a different kind of high stakes dramatic setting. AMC has boldly evolved itself to where they've now launched the best new drama series since The Sopranos, and lo and behold it's written and directed by vets from David Chase's show.

If Hairspray is a blast of exhilarating teenage life accelerating a ready to rock culture into new openings and acceptance, one struggles hard here to discern the sprouts of life desperate to pop through a crack in the morally bankrupt affluence that kicked off our modern era. There are clues all over the place, in the free-spirited career girl, in the closeted Art Director, in the cracking-up suburban wife.

For those of us who remember from growing up in that era, the populace of Mad Men had best start fastening those seatbelts -- the ones none of them appear to be wearing.