Every year I put together a brief summation of the television I enjoyed or alternatively didn't during the previous twelve months. My 2013 commentary is a little different, all confined to a single post and occasionally lacking the detail I've given previous round-ups. My television viewing has changed, though, along with my own aspirations as a writer. Anyway, television. No real spoilers this year.
Don Draper exists in a state of perpetual control. Gotta be the top dog, the one holding the power, sharing the pie if and as he pleases. But something has changed this season, as if the people he surrounds himself with have experienced those trademark maneuvers one too many times, and they're not going to take it anymore. On a grander level, the world is going to hell. People in the greatest positions of power and respect are being murdered, and it makes a lot of sense for mere mortals, the bystanders, to try and hold onto the few aspects of their lives that they have control over. Man with a Plan is about that struggle, that determination to take ownership of something in a world where power is constantly out of your grasp. For Don himself, however, it's domination that he seeks, a hideously cruel distortion of a universal truth.
For Immediate Release sees Don's internal conflict clashing with the collective togetherness of the people he works with, Joan outraged that his actions make her sacrifice last season ultimately fruitless, Pete once again driven to rage at the thought that he's getting phased out of the company. It's important to remember that Don himself wasn't aware of the public offering engineered by the others, but that their group anger was more a product of his many arguably selfish choices over the years, and not only this specific incident. It's another indication of long-standing tensions surfacing, Don once again growing ever alone.
Mad Men's sixth season is still coming off like a series of disparate elements, the only real link between each character's personal story being that they themselves just happen to work with or operate in the world of the other characters on the show. It feels more and more like a season built upon a cut-up technique, random bits of story tossed together here and there, small insights into lives formed with the smallest of actual arcs. That doesn't necessarily mean The Flood is another underwhelming episode, however. In truth, it's probably the strongest hour since the premiere, even if it maintains the drifting, unspecific structure that made the previous couple of episodes so troubling.
If we're to take the title of this week's episode literally, then there's a huge difference between actually having something and merely holding onto it. It's always been a major factor in Mad Men, much of what we have being the mere illusion of a 'thing', truth under the surface being vastly different. I feel like I've repeated that mantra so often in these reviews that it's effectively this show's mission statement. But Joan's recent arc has been one of the more literal variations on that theme. She has a title, and a position, but it's ultimately fruitless. And she only got it through controversial means. The fact that it's constantly thrust in her face, consciously or not, just keeps drawing out the underlying tragedy of her character.
Mad Men is, at its heart, a soap opera. It's heavily serialized, is primarily driven by relationships and the emotions of its protagonists, and generally restricts its characters to three or four prime locations. What it's never truly done, however, is become "soapy" -- its writing static or strained, or overly reliant on contrivance. Its something that sets Collaborators apart from so much ordinary Mad Men, since it sometimes descends into ham-fisted plotting in order to push the narrative forward. Annoying as it is to preface 'average' episodes of this show with an elaborate 'in defense of Mad Men' thing, it's only because of the show's natural finesse that an episode like this one feels off-key in comparison. And so forth.
As much as you try, as much as you work at your life, your surroundings, or your sense of self, we eventually all just spin around to the exact same patterns time and time again. Mad Men has often been distracted by the impossibility of change, that trying to break a repetitive cycle is a futile activity, one that only ever leads to disappointment -- the crushing inevitability that life always seems to bring. Like so much of season five, The Doorway is heavily indebted to themes of death and futility, an array of characters working to break down a cycle, only for truth to ultimately smack them square in the chest.
The job of a wheel is to go round and round, a machine engineered to push something forward, or accelerate speed. It's used literally this week as a slide projector, something that projects memories and past emotions, but it's also used as a metaphor for the ways our lives constantly unravel, the wheel keeping on turning despite our occasional eagerness for it to stop. Because sometimes life unfolds so perfectly -- you get that promotion, or you realize the importance of family and the love around you; but the speed of life insists on moving past that point in time. And that leads to disappointments, or a surprise baby, or loneliness. Motion is everlasting, and it's impossible to pull the brakes. This is a flawless finale, but you probably knew that already.
The campaigns for Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy both represented these enormously influential political frameworks, in which age was seen as a flaw, youth and sex appeal forcibly promoted, and backgrounds carefully smoothed over depending on which corner you wanted to exploit... or suppress. It's an idea that provides season one's penultimate episode its most interesting symbolism, Don and Pete representing both extremes -- Don the self-made man in more ways than one, who rose through the ranks to get where he is today; and Pete the silver-spoon son of money, bristling with entitlement because of what he believes should be the natural order of things. They finally collide here, not only due to Pete's blackmail and Don's package of secrets, but because of their own social complexities.
Peggy has long worked as an audience surrogate for us at home, not only because she's discovering the world at the same time as we are, but also because she so often represents the values and work ethic that a lot of us take for granted today. She's somebody at the forefront of all that change, and it's easy to root for her as she becomes one of the first women to break through that glass-ceiling. It's obviously still early days, but she's getting there. But something that surprised me during this re-watch is how little she's been used so far, not anchoring as much of the series as Don, Pete or even Betty. As season one develops, however, she's coming into her own as a character, and Indian Summer really promotes her importance as a major Mad Men player.
Without trying to sound too much like Jerry Seinfeld, who decided that television needs to be about anything? Every episode of Mad Men feels propulsive in one way or another, that's a given. Just here we have childhood revelations, medical emergencies and romantic consummation. But there's also a real feeling in Mad Men of nothingness, that all these instances have just fallen into place rather than methodically planned. It's a rewarding by-product of this kind of storytelling, and just like Red in the Face a couple of weeks ago, Long Weekend jumps from one experience to the next, every character merely existing within a certain moment, conversing or performing a generic routine, and unexpectedly stumbling into new corners of their lives.
Is there any greater statement on suburban malaise than the Betty montage that closes this episode? She does the laundry, fusses with her children before she takes them to school, and sits passively smoking in the kitchen, bored out of her mind. So she goes outside to curb it, shooting a bunch of her neighbors' pigeons with an enormous rifle. Did it really happen? Was it just an elaborate fantasy? It doesn't really matter, but wonderfully depicts how desperate Betty is for some kind of excitement in her life; a break from the monotony of her existence and eager for something that can quell her inner rage.
I'm probably showing my age when I say this, but there's always something so rewarding when you're watching an episode of this show and suddenly spot the overriding theme that seems to link all the storylines. I'm sure it's usually a narrative idea that hits most people like a freight-train, but it's hard for me to not get a sense of excitement when the various subplots, seemingly so disparate at first, are all of a sudden all connected and written to express a certain sentiment or a specific concept. It happened here towards the very end, the three storylines clicking together and being all about signals and warnings, both those we use to impart messages to others, as well as the ones we're not entirely conscious of, but which alter circumstances all the same.
Or, alternatively, 22 Short Films About Mad Men. Some of the very best episodes of this show explore the most mundane corners of everyday life; the brief interactions we have with others, returning unwanted gifts to a department store, buying groceries, the rambling conversations about various different subjects, from celebrity divorces to our personal histories. Red in the Face is a collection of short stories, veering wildly in tone but each individually celebrating the small minutiae of people merely existing. It's a testament to how strong this show is, too, the fact that an hour lacking in any real cohesion or overruling theme is suddenly rendered something ambitious and appealing, instead of merely feeling scattered.
Due to their close proximity at the office, there's always been this 'compare and contrast' vibe with Peggy and Joan, something the writers utilize over and over as the series goes on. Babylon is the first episode to truly explore their vastly different mindsets at the very start of the 1960's, Peggy such a forward-thinking woman eager to claw her way into the areas typically reserved for men, and Joan still a little fearful of overstepping her boundaries. The Belle Jolie focus group is such a wonderful depiction of gender differences already, but it's also where both ladies reveal their respective niches.
5G brilliantly exposes the uncomfortable merging of the life you lead in public and the secret life you try so hard to keep from those around you. Everybody has that, to a certain extent, but this episode explores that theme from an aggressively masculine corner, the men at Sterling Cooper all hiding secrets and hoping that somebody else will somehow pick up the pieces when the inevitable fallout occurs. Naturally, all of that is symbolized by this week's ad campaign, a bank seeking promotional materials about their new private account service, specifically marketed to men eager to keep certain financial areas to themselves. Hilariously, this isn't a modern invention -- they're merely cashing in on a market that is already there. And 5G goes out of its way to prove it.
Being perfectly blunt, it's a difficult job to make you feel something for a character born into wealth and notoriety; grandeur and success handed to them on a silver platter and the family name opening doors that would ordinarily stay firmly closed. But this is the very first episode to portray Pete Campbell as something of a tragic figure, just as reliant on his parentage as he is eager to strike out on his own. It's very much about his own insecurities as a worker, a husband, a son and as a man, each one nowhere near as strong and reliable as he would like.
Whether we like it or not, marriage usually arrives as a construct, or an idea that we feel we need to buy into. But something that feels decidedly modern is the ability to pull the idea of marriage apart, and wonder if it's truly the be-all and end-all of everything. What Marriage of Figaro does so well is depict the early '60s anxieties created by marriage, as well as exposing the hypocrisy that so easily exists within the confines of a legal union between two people.
Even before the episode fades out on a lingering shot of an oven, Sylvia Plath weighs down heavily on the character of Betty Draper. Betty leads the superficially ideal existence for '60s females: a carefree wife and mother, pristine homemaker, married to a successful businessman, and affluent enough to have hired help to take care of the dirty work. She spends her days cooking and cleaning and yakking with friends, waiting for the time in which she can pick her children up from school, and preparing her husband a meal for his return home from that big job in the city. But there's an anxious temperament slowly creeping into Betty's life, manifesting itself as a series of hand spasms along with a tendency to break down in bursts of nervousness and fear. One of the largest themes in Ladies Room is the idea of happiness, and how it should be so easy to experience... once you reach a certain point in your life or consume enough material riches. It's an idea that crosses beautifully with Betty herself, somebody so outward in joy, but rapidly crumbling beneath the surface.
So much of Mad Men is about the tease, something you breathe in like a lit cigarette, full of overwhelming pleasure but still detached and mysterious. In Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, you don't get a total picture of these characters and their individual quirks, instead just a rough sketch of people living lives of dissatisfaction. It's all about those corners of ourselves that we keep hidden, the expressions we make when people aren't looking, and the fears and self-doubts that we experience in our quietest moments. Even as a man, successful and attractive and right at the top of the food chain, there's still a disconnect from everybody around you, running from the truth but unknowing of the destination in which you're headed.
