Wednesday, May 21, 2014

SEASON 7, EPISODE 6.

(Mild spoilers.) There plenty in this episode but the main thing is Don, Peggy, and Pete, and Burger Chef. Even though it was probably mandated by licensing considerations, I think the choice of a defunct rather than an active burger chain is significant. It ties in with the frequent mentions of Buick -- which brand persists, but in nothing like its former glory -- and Peggy's (widely-noted) observation of the happy-family image her team has been playing with: "Does this family even exist anymore?" In a historical fiction, talking about people and things that the audience knows are doomed is an easy layup -- years ago a friend of mine adopted as a comical catchphrase, "This Hitler will be the death of Germany, mark my words" -- but I like to think the Mad Men staff was going further with the conceit than many of us have noticed.

All Mad Men fans are Don-and-Peggy fans, and it was pure catnip to have them lay down their arms and get cozy in this episode. Note, though, what came before: Some very good scenes about Peggy being pushed, humiliatingly, into having Don "bring home" the pitch. Elisabeth Moss is a marvel in these scenes. I especially like her weird, absent way of saying "what" when people (Don) or circumstances (Ted fucking Cheough popping up on speakerphone!) are discomfiting her; it's as if she's in a dream state. Even better is her response when Don, stunned that he has been proposed as the pitchman, asks Peggy whose idea it was. I love the way she swallows the word "mine." She's funnier than she's been in a while, but no less sad.

Don has less work to do to get to their big scene. We are already well-briefed on his love of Peggy: "I will spend the rest of my life trying to hire you," The Suitcase and so forth. Here, he's only got to be pleased to be asked to the big dance, and walk into his working-and-drinking session with Peggy in a relaxed mood. (It shows a little growth on Don's part that he's able to do that, but not much. Don is coming along but slowly. He may need another lifetime to get where he has to go.) Peggy, on the other hand, has to work harder than anyone else, as usual. She has go through heavy emotional changes, and accept that all Don can do in response is give her a hanky and say "You're doing great."

And the way Peggy's engineered her life, the expense of soul she's been willing to pay for it, it's inevitable that she not only accepts the thin sustenance Don has to offer, she also gets inspiration from it -- inspiration to create... another crappy ad. It may be that I'm suffering from late Sopranos syndrome, where I feel the creator's disgust with his characters seeping in whether it's really there or not, but I want to believe that we've reached the point in the series where we're supposed to see that this "creativity" that Don and Peggy are all about, their search to always go further -- "there's always a better idea" -- is not leading anywhere, even to personal fulfillment; it's just an excuse not to have real relationships with other human beings. And that the things they're lavishing this talent on -- Burger Chef, Buick, the nuclear family -- are doomed anyway.

Peggy's new idea, born of pain, about a place where everyone is family, may be a better ad concept than the previous, but it's still crap to sell burgers, and if it's presented as an adland version of [great artist here] expressing his pain through [great artwork here], then it has to be a joke -- because really, how can we take it seriously? Maybe back when Don was pitching the Kodak Carousel as the wheel of life, his life, we could be stirred by the reflection of his own pain in the pitch, because that was dramatic irony, the spectacle of a guy doing one thing he has to do while feeling something else. In this episode, Don and Peggy are drinking, the lights are low, and they're talking to each other through stupid ad concepts, and finally dancing together -- and how realistic is it that they would, no matter how gamely the actors tackled it? -- to "My Way," a song that embodies the grossest, cheesiest kind of solipsism. To me that's just sad: Really, this emotionally stunted man who can only love her for being a reflection of himself, he's Peggy's family? Along with, in the final scene, Pete, the emotionally retarded, unacknowledged father of her unacknowledged child? Maybe that long dolly out from the Burger Chef -- which, despite the past few episodes worth of references, is the most Kubrickesque thing in the series -- that leaves these three framed in neon and formica, and cosseted in treacly 50s music, is the big honking tell -- that this brief, cheery moment is only an interlude, a little fort made out of slogans and denial, and that the back-biting and disintegration that have been advancing through the season are really what they're in for.

I will only add that it was very clever to mirror Bill Hartley's arrest and Benson bailing him out -- in these current, heady times for gay rights, a bracing reminder of pre-Stonewall realities -- with Roger's innuendos concerning Jim Hobart from McCann ("I think you're making eyes at me"). The world is still turning outside these people's lives.

17 comments:

  1. Disboose1:00 AM

    Everything you write about the obvious meaninglessness of their work rings true, but it's been my experience in corporate life that people can bond over "winning," no matter how transitory the metric for that is. My experience is in digital media, where we've gone from newsmagazines to cat videos in a decade, and I'll be damned if there isn't a sense of camaraderie when you feel like you're doing "it" right.


    So I buy into that godawful family at Burger Chef, because Pete will clearly never have the faculties to do anything but work, and will go insane when he retires. The show is illustrating that work can inspire an illusion of meaning in any schmuck's life, and that can be read as optimistic or idiotic or both, I think.


    Love these episode breakdowns.

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  2. MBouffant6:46 AM

    Could someone/anyone explain the allure of recapping entire telebision episodes on the internet?

    Sure, lebenty-zillion yrs. ago many didn't get HBO or didn't even have cable; now, I'm led to understand, everyone & their mother are all watching crap 24/7 on their Obamaphones & devil-boxes & in the back seat of their shitmobiles, on demand, anytime they want. No one could possibly miss an episode, & it's all available forever now anyway.

    So what's the point? Fine, review the show, but is every effin' episode of every one of these worth a lengthy, detailed effort?

    P.S.: No offense intended to our otherwise unimpeachable & gracious host. If you're just hung up on Mad Men, well, no one's perfect.


    Full disclosure: Watched the first episode of it, enjoyed it, taped several more, but for whatever reason never got around to watching another episode & now just don't care

    But this recaps, wtf? thing has had me going for a month.

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  3. When I was watching Mad Men I really enjoyed some people's version of the recap because some people just had a better handle on the cultural references or the imagery or even just the clothing than I did. For instance Tom and Lorenzo's blog did an amazing job of breaking the code of the color and clothing choices and showing how very deliberately the designer/costumer used particular colors to tell the viewer about something else that was happening in the episode. Other blogs--SEK at LGM--focused on things like the way the shots were framed. Still others did a good job of explicating little details like the musical choices, album covers you saw out of the corner of your eye, jewelry or restaurants.


    Other recaps are really dull but even those can be interesting because they give you a glimpse into the mind of the reviewer--it can be dissapointing but illuminating to find out that the reviewer missed key plot points or imagery because they are in love with a particular character, or because it was too subtle for them.

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  4. Disboose9:00 AM

    Sometimes people like to discuss stories and their interpretations. There you go, allure explained!

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  5. FlipYrWhig9:38 AM

    I commented at Pandagon that the closing shot reminded me of Edward Hopper's _Nighthawks_, but the tone was cheery instead of dreary. But if that's deliberate or ironized, then it would fold into Roy's reading that doom is all around and the creativity that makes new kinds of families isn't a hope after all. And on a different wavelength, how can anything be hopeful if it includes the horrible and oblivious Pete Campbell?

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  6. Ellis_Weiner10:04 AM

    "...to "My Way," a song that embodies the grossest, cheesiest kind of solipsism."


    You're too kind. The idea that anyone in advertising (where you live for the approval of the client) could do anything His or Her Way is to laff. Even the songwriter, Paul Anka, didn't do it his way--he re-wrote the lyrics of a French original.

    Re the dancing, a group of wiseguy writers of which I'm part asked that question--"Who really dances alone with someone?"--and more than one person said they'd done it themselves.

    I love these write-ups, although the intellectual pleasure they bestow is mitigated by the relentless awareness of what a passive, dumb-bell viewer I am. I never see the stuff Roy and others point out. At most, while watching, I think: "Burger Chef! I used to go there with the rest of the stage crew after rehearsals!"

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  7. edroso10:07 AM

    J'essaie, baby, j'essaie.

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  8. The original French lyrics to "My Way' are a suicide note.

    I'm not making this up, BTW.

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  9. J Neo Marvin12:07 PM

    I really expected that, at some point, Mad Men would pull out a different cheesy Sinatra hit from that time. "Cycles" is like the perfect Don Draper anthem. It's a gloriously shitty song of wounded male pride.

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  10. Ever hear Ricki Lee Jones version? It's transplendent.

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  11. J Neo Marvin12:58 PM

    I could imagine. I have heard Leonard Nimoy's version, and that's......something.

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  12. AmusedAmused1:14 PM

    Delurking here.
    I just want to point out that "Comme D'Habitude" -- the French song whose tune was appropriated for "My Way" -- is not about suicide. It's about a day in the life of a couple whose love has died. What's remarkable about the lyrics, written in the first person -- especially remarkable because French is a gendered language -- is that it's impossible to tell whether the speaker is the wife or the husband. The couple in the song is much like Don and Megan are in this season: they interact occasionally, say nice platitudes, even kiss and make love, but mostly they lead separate lives. The speaker reiterates several times that (s)he will go on pretending and living this empty life, devoid of meaningful interaction because that's just the way ("comme d'habitude" means "as usual", but "habitude" also means custom or habit).

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  13. My bad. I was thinking of the original French version of What Now My Love.

    I regret the error.

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  14. MBouffant2:07 PM

    O.K., you'll like this then.

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  15. cleter8:29 AM

    All I remember of Burger Chef is that their hamburgers were kind of crappy, and their ads with the cartoon characters Burger Chef and Jeff, who were basically Peabody and Sherman if Peabody had been a guy who made hamburgers instead of a talking dog. I was hoping we would see Stan creating them.


    Also, when they went belly-up, their locations in my town appeared to be cursed, housing a series of doomed short-lived little restaurants. Nothing could live in a place once befouled by Burger Chef. So for me, the whole Burger Chef plot is just suffused with doom and failure, in a way that it wouldn't be if the client was Burger King or something.

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  16. PulletSurprise10:52 AM

    I know of one Burger Chef location that is still making it as a burger joint...

    http://www.yelp.com/biz/schroeders-drive-in-danville



    ...but nostalgia is about the only growth industry in Danville IL. Everyone I know from there always thinks about it as it was, or refers to locations as "where such-and-so used to be."

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  17. MMGood10:07 PM

    Not to complain too much about the free ice cream I receive here (http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/08/Thanksforallthefish.shtml), where't the review of the latest episode?

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