Monday, May 04, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 12.


The very best thing in the entire episode, and maybe in the series, was the scene at the Wisconsin house, and the dark daughter lurking in the shadows of the home of Di the Death Waitress' ex-husband: blandly resentful, shaggy, never giving a sign of being part of these waxy, pale Christians (and vice versa), she gave me real chills.

The ex-husband was pretty good too, not ostentatiously crazy, merely vicious -- a man with a good enough explanation for his ugliness that you might not at first consider how horrible a husband he must have been, and must still be (did he really say in front of his wife that she didn't know any better?). I begin to see not only why Diana left, but also why Don is so obsessed with her -- her horrible pre-life replicates his own, except she had no magic to escape it with. Don is retracing his own steps through her.

In the home stretch Mad Men is getting stranger, and it’s easier to see why it has to in Don’s scenes than in anyone else’s because he’s the haunted one — everyone else is trying to figure out the life they’re in, and Don is trying to figure out the life he never had. Several people have speculated that Don is already dead (“and he’s finally realizing it”), and that’s getting to be a good bet, but for the moment I’m looking at it as a simpler proposition: Don knows that the life he took up is not his, that it’s unsustainable, and he’s leaving it behind.

His departure from the Miller meeting signals this by being super-weird; no one makes anything of the newly-imported hotshot leaving in the middle of a presentation except Ted, and his reaction is absurdly inappropriate — it looks like, “Oh, that son of a gun.” (I thought people would beginning clearing their throats when Don spent all that time staring out the window at the crucifix in the sky.) And Don is super-weird through most of the episode; tightly-wound in his meeting with Boss Hobart, hallucinating Bert, unconvincingly lying and apologizing at the Wisconsin house, there’s nothing comfortable about him until he decides to make that detour.

Maybe after a while the heightened scenes with Peggy and Roger will seem as necessary, but like I said, Peggy has a more real-life problem to figure out, so the roller-skating and badass slo-mo strut are jarring. Peggy’s become such a knotted-up, suffering careerist that she’s earned a more genuine nervous breakdown. Joan’s fight with the arrayed forces of sexism is more realistic, and it’s interesting in a trad TV social-commentary way. But we came here, or at least stayed here, not to see the Sixties spin out, but to see what happens to Don. It won’t be long now.

12 comments:

  1. JohnMyroro12:39 AM

    Roy, are you drunk blogging again?

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  2. you've actually made me kind of give a darn about this series again.

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  3. javamanphil6:31 AM

    Completely missed the crucifix. Excellent catch. This episode seemed most defined by every important woman in Don's life rejecting him (most passively) as a part of their current world. Joan, Sally, Betty, Di, Peggy, even Anna with the envelop of his made up life. Don fits nowhere and never has. And each year as the world changes (but none of its characters, at least not below surface level), it becomes more and more evident. But will he notice? Will anyone? Who will be first to leave this life of bullshit?

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  4. sundaystyle6:41 AM

    I agree Don's obsession with Diana is finally starting to make a weird kind of sense. The whole family dynamic in Wisconsin echoed Dick Whitman's childhood. The absent mother, the stepmother, the totalitarian type dad, the child on the sidelines, watching everything. And Don is headed west again (well, northwest) from Racine to St. Paul.
    I'm sorry for Joan, and part of me wanted her to take up her boyfriend's offer to send "the right guy" to have a little chat with Jim Hobart. But the term sexual harassment didn't exist in 1970, so she has no chance of legal victory. I'm much more optimistic about Peggy, and her tentacle-porn laden strut down the hallways of McCann was a joy to behold. It's still going to be a totally shitty place to work, but from a survival standpoint Roger may have given her the right weapon for her arsenal: why worry about making men feel comfortable? Maybe, just maybe, if she freaks them out enough they'll leave her alone.
    I think Weiner indulged in a little self-satire with the Hobart/Sterling scene: Hobart points out Don walked out of a meeting days ago and hasn't been seen since. Roger's shrugging reply: "He does that."

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  5. P Gustaf10:58 AM

    "Several people have speculated that Don is already dead" That would be an annoying cop-out of an ending.

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  6. I love your Mad Men blogging. Makes me wish Mad Men wasn't ending!

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  7. Robert Massing3:21 PM

    How does he not die in the end? He has been falling from the top of a skyscraper every episode since the very beginning, and he noticed that in his new office in a different skyscraper the window opens.

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  8. BG, puppet making crank calls3:34 PM

    Peggy’s become such a knotted-up, suffering careerist that she’s earned a more genuine nervous breakdown. Joan’s fight with the arrayed forces of sexism is more realistic, and it’s interesting in a trad TV social-commentary way.



    I disagree. Peggy and Joan are generational polar opposites. Joan ran from one man to the next to solve her girl" problem, until the last one shot her down and revealed what they all have been thinking all along: that, in their minds, she is nothing more than a pair of big tits. Roger, ever the cynical realist, bottom-lined it when he told her to take the money and run. Her sexual power ultimately bit her in the ass.


    Perfectly enough, his advice to Peggy, usually the non-sexy one (man, her clothes are butt-ugly), was exactly the opposite when she said she had to avoid intimidating men. His response was basically, "Fuck that shit" and he insisted that she take the octopus painting and hang it in her office. That last scene of her walking down the corridor, hung over, wearing sunglasses, cigarette hanging from her lips, was the female incarnation of Roger. She is going to kick some ass, not get bitten in it.


    Too bad for McCann that she wasn't sitting in the "light beer" meeting. I can see her cracking open a bottle and telling them that the first agency who figured out that women, not men, were their market would dominate the industry. And, as we know, she would be right.


    A friend of mine has the theory is that she is modeled after the woman who came up with the slogan, "If I have one life to live, let me live it as a blonde" which was apparently revolutionary. I think he's right.

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  9. BG, puppet making crank calls3:36 PM

    I think the hitchhiker he picks up leaves him stranded in the middle of nowhere.

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  10. edroso3:39 PM

    Thank you.

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  11. cleter9:40 PM

    I thought Peggy walking into McCann with Burt's vintage fetish p0rn was the greatest moment of the series so far. That should have been the final shot of the series finale.

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  12. cleter9:42 PM

    That would make me want to track Weiner down and beat him severely with some rolled-up moldy old scripts from "LOST."

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