Reading Twitter reactions to Mad Men last night, I got the impression that a lot of people thought it was a strange episode that just crammed a lot of storylines together in order to ramp up for the next few episodes that close this season down. I agree that there was certainly table-setting going on, but somehow the episode also managed to be a meditation on the theme of desire. In this video, we explore all the ways that people convince themselves that they can truly be satisfied, and how each fails us in the end. I don't spare my criticisms for faith, which is just as bad---if not worse---in offering itself as the solution to your internal hunger than even the material goods that marketers peddle.
Whilst out having drinks with a friend the other night, I found myself launching a theory of Mad Men, which he hadn't yet seen, returning to form. (He waits until the end of each season, so he can devour the whole thing like a book.) My friend complained about the way the show had drifted away from really interrogating advertising as a concept and cultural phenomenon. I argued that while the past couple of seasons were immersed in the interpersonal drama, this season is really getting back to a fundamental investigation of advertising not just as a cultural phenomenon, but as a symbol of the inchoate yearnings of humanity. The Don/Megan relationship has returned us to the essential drama of Don Draper, which is that he is full of want, and that scares him.The reason he's such a good ad man is because he really gets, in his core, what makes people buy stuff, and it's these kind of never-fulfilled desires. Intellectually, he knows that lipstick and baked beans aren't actually going to silence the yearnings, but his ad campaigns have resonance, because on an emotional level, he truly believes that satisfaction is attainable. Because he believes, he can sell that illusion. That's why he gets the staff to buy into his Jaguar-will-save-us pitch, enough so that they don't seem miffed about having to miss Christmas to work.
The whiff of Eastern religion, culture and philosophy has hovered over this season, mostly I think because it became an interest in America, especially in the corridors of the cutting edge like New York City. (Interestingly, there was a nauseating ad for yet another "white people find themselves in the spiritual wholeness of India" movie during this episode, a dream that's set up---rightly---for vicious mockery inside the episode.) "Christmas Waltz" suggests that it was a result of American exposure to Eastern cultures in the most troubling way imaginable: war. Roger gets drunk and sets off on another ignorant rant about Japan on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor (this is when the anniversary's significance started to wane). Megan and Don go see "America Hurrah", which is an anti-Vietnam War play, though it angers Don mostly because he didn't like its criticism of materialism.* This stuff occupies the same episode as a satirical, but surprisingly moving, bit about Hare Krishna. I get the sense that the writers find Eastern exoticism irritating like I do, for roughly all the same reasons: It collapses the divergent cultures into one big mass, it romanticizes and objectifies, and of course, it's inseperable from the imperialist urge that "America Hurrah" critiques.
But it's not like the show is saying, "Eastern philosophy, give me a break," even as it mocks Americans who try to be "interesting" by grabbing at the cultures of the East. The hints of Buddhism that have drifted to the surface have been interesting(previous episodes have hinted at the Tibetean Book of the Dead), because of course, Mad Men struggles with exactly the same themes that dominate Buddhism: desire, suffering, delusion. There's a dialogue there, but my sense so far is that Mad Men rejects the central tenet of Buddhism, which is that it's possible to extract yourself from the cycle of wanting-grabbing-getting-wanting through "enlightenment". In this episode, religion is posited as just another thing we use to delude ourselves into believing we can finally reach bliss, but in the morning, we wake up and the wanting begins again. Enlightenment is a lie; Roger thinks he has it, but it slips away. The Hare Krishnas pretend that they're in a state of bliss while chanting, but Harry is just experiencing the ramp-up of desire.
But perhaps that's okay. I always wondered what it is that we're supposed to do with our time if we ever really do get past wanting, either by having everything we want (the traditional Western answer) or by eliminating desire and reaching nirvana (Buddhist solution). A state past wanting and striving and achieving moments of bliss before wanting again? Always sounded boring to me. To live is to seek. The only real way to cope with this is to accept that the journey is the destination. I'd even argue that Megan's career change is unsettling to the others for just that purpose, since acting by its nature is an endless journey. Not just because there's always the next part to strive for, but because story-telling itself is about desire and striving. People who want for nothing don't make good characters. Acting---creating in general---is giving yourself over to the process, knowing that there will never be that final success that allows you to take a bow and step off the stage forever. And why would you want to, anyway? Death is coming for all of us soon enough, and that's when the wanting will end.**
In this episode, peddlers of religion and capitalists pushing goods are framed in the same way: Telling stories of desires satiated to get you to give them money and power. I don't know about you, but the advertisers come across as the better people, however. At least they don't tell you they can fix your soul.
*Also worth pointing out that he didn't like how blunt it was. A lot of people have complained that Mad Men is losing its subtlety this season, a complaint we can imagine Don approving of. But the show itself suggests that one of the cultural shifts that happened in the 60s was from this kind of soft-and-subtle aesthetic that Don adores to the "sock it to me!" mentality. Don's a fan of doing ads that worm their way into your soul through insinuation---remember him dripping with disdain for Peggy's "sex sells" mentality in an earlier season?---but even he has to admit that throwing snowballs at cops is a more suitable aesthetic for the times. You know, when people were letting it all hang out. I'm not surprised the show is shifting its aesthetic approach in light of this. It's certainly been effective for making it feel more mid-to-late 60s than earlier seasons.
**Of course, if you believe in reincarnation, that throws a wrench into this whole philosophy.
Had some folks asking, and now I can finally say yes, I saw "The Avengers" on Friday night. And yes, I liked it. I like to tweak the noses of fanboys who brook not even the mildest criticism of their heroes, but I'm sure regular readers know I'm a big lover of Sir Whedon, and thought he managed the impossible: A coherent movie based on all these characters from other movies that still had enough action to make big overseas box office. It's a miracle, really, even if personally speaking, I thought "Cabin in the Woods" was a whole lot better.
My biggest complaint with the movie was casting. Not all of it, just I really thought Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo dragged the whole thing down with their wooden performances. Which is a shame, because the Hulk is fun* and Black Widow, upon reflection, was the best written part in the movie. I know Whedon fought hard to keep that character in the flick, and the reasons he gives for these things are admirably ideological---he hates the sexism of geek culture---but I also can't help but imagine he's thinking like a writer. Which is to say, he knows what he's good at, and in trying something new, he wants to bring his A game. And he's really good at writing female characters. That's not just ideology, but something that he just excels at. Talent is a bit of a mystery that way.
Anyway, point being, the first thing my friends and I talked about as we left was recasting Black Widow with someone who has not just beauty, of which Johansson's is legendary, but charisma and can act. Because it was clear to me that if the right actress had been in that role, the fact that Black Widow is the hero of the movie would have been more obvious. She certainly has the most layers of any character, besides perhaps Tony Stark. I can see why some audience members didn't really grasp her importance as a character because of this. You go to action movies expecting to sit back and be taken for a ride, and calculations like, "This character is well-written but poorly acted" aren't something you get into.
But there's no excuse for movie critics making the same mistake. Which is why I was really sad to see this round-up of male movie critics who downplayed, ignored, or otherwise minimized Black Widow's role in the movie. The character has, from what I recall, more separate individual actions that lead to victory than any other character, with Tony following right behind her, and yet, well, I can't state it better:
Writing in The Guardian, Henry Barnes noticed Black Widow but could not be bothered to isolate just what she did in the film. The New York Post’s Kyle Smith dreamed of a Black Widow who would perform one errand and and then be gone.
The New York Daily News’ Joe Neimaier admitted that Black Widow “kickstarts” things, but by deleting her from the rest of his coverage, implied that was that. Still, that was a lavishment compared with the treatment by A.O. Scott, who in his New York Times review found it beneath himself to even give Black Widow a job description, while The Globe and Mail went with “token sexy female,” clearly hoping only young boys and people who hadn’t seen the film were reading.
Meanwhile, in The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern claimed Black Widow “spends lots of time looking puzzled or confused,” while Steven Rea's Philadelphia Inquirer review dispensed with Black Widow’s name, suggesting we “watch Scarlett Johansson clench her brow” while in “Ninja garb.” The Miami Herald’s Rene Rodriguez wasn’t as generous—his single sentence also accused Johansson of playing dress-up, but, perhaps mercifully, did not specify what in.
That last one hurts the most, because there's no more blatant sexism than sneering at a woman for playing "dress-up" in a movie where the men around her are dressed in tights and robot costumes. The belief that superhero movies are a No Girls Allowed zone couldn't be more obvious.
It seems to be part of a mini-trend of some men throwing a fit over the very idea that women might have a role in fiction besides decorative objects and damsels in distress. You had Lee Aronsohn treating a small uptick in female roles like it was the beginning of a horrific gynocracy. And of course, there's the over-the-top reaction to "Girls" and Lena Dunham. Outside of reasonable complaints about yet another show lacking in racial diversity when it would have been easy to make it diverse, most of the criticism of Dunham has a strong grasping-at-straws quality to it. Gawker especially has been humping the insinuation that the show only got on air---wait for it---because women's stories are like a freak show to attract lookee-lous. Anything but accept that it could be that the show is good. Apparently, we were supposed to just know that cringe comedy is a man's territory, and Gawker is terribly, terribly offended that women think they get to be in the club. I mean, look at the illustration they came up with:
The implication couldn't be more clear: Merely having to endure a woman's point of view is for men just as unsettling and oppressive as being adrift in a male-dominated world is for women.** Sure, women have to live in a world that values them less, and where that means they get an extra dose of humilation and bullshit just for being female. But man, that's nothing compared to the misery of a hip dude having to think about women's experiences from women's point of view. Ugh, I mean, really, could you stuff a cock in it already?
I think it's all about sex, which is why the reaction to "Girls" is the ugliest example of this. Cringe comedy is a "man's" genre because so much of it relies on laughing at bodies. Men laughing at their own bodies and at women's bodies, and especially at the sexual desires emanating from them and the awkward and often futile ways we try to satisfy those bodies. If women adopt this comedy form, then that puts women in a position where we're not only laughing at ourselves, but at men. Turning the tables in this way makes a lot of men deeply uncomfortable. I've often seen that this kind of sexism in pop culture gets its ugliest when a woman is in a position to say that men are only human, and let men know that we look at them in the same way they look at us. That is the great cultural taboo, and "Girls" is breaking it, and reaction is fierce.
I think the same underlying urges are why there's such heavy guarding of the superhero genre from a female presence. It's just coming at it from another direction. If cringe comedy is about looking at human bodies as comically frail, superhero movies are about projecting fantasies of strength. But as long as the fantasy is male-only, fans can sort of convince themselves that it's something more than just a fantasy, because the strength of the male superheroes is seen as just an extrapolation of men's supposed physical superiority over women. If you put a female superhero in the mix and have her body performing the same unreal feats, it's a lot more obvious that it's just a fantasy. In fact, neither men nor women are superbeings. The notion that men are closer and therefore more plausible as superheroes is just ridiculous. We are reminded by the presence of female superheroes that we're all actually just human. Which provokes a lot of men into discomfort, this realization that actually they're just deteriorating sacks of muscle and bone, just like women.
Anyway, it's all very annoying and I wish people would cut it out. Let women have our comedy and our superhero fantasies without demanding that it become an existential crisis for men who have had these things all along.
*In my ideal world, it would be Brad Pitt, who does somber-to-maniacal really well. I realize that's unattainable, but still, a million actors are better the Ruffalo.
**For those who don't know what I'm talking about, "Exile in Guyville" is a seminal album from Liz Phair where all the songs were held together loosely by the common theme of what it's like to be female in a world where men have more social power, which they wield in ways both overt and subtle, leaving women feeling a nervous and a confused, and often angry.
Looking around at reviews, I get the general impression that the feeling about last night's episode is it's a B episode in an A season. Which is okay; there's been so much intensity this season in some episodes that lighter---and dare I say more soapy?---episodes help relieve pressure. But really examining the take Marc and I had versus other critics, I realize this episode was far denser than it initially appears. Most recaps I've seen so far focus on how the episode was tying up loose ends, but Marc and I, as you'll see in the video, mostly focus on the future. This episode was tons of set-up for future payoffs. Some of that set-up, we suspect, was perceived by the audience as mostly background stuff.
As "The Orange Couch" has gone on, one of our goals has been to really explore as many of the allusions and the historical and artistic context the show draws on. Which, in prep for the show, usually means just trying to decipher where the title comes from and learning about that reference. That hasn't been too hard generally; we know who Shirley Temple is and I've read a lot of Sylvia Plath. But in the lead-up to this, I realized I didn't actually know much about "Dark Shadows". The movie looks wretched,* but it turns out that the original series is streaming on Netflix. So I fired it up, figuring I'd start in the second season when things got good (which is actually where Netflix starts the series at all), and that I'd take in a couple of episodes to get a feel for it. What happened instead is a bit of a "Dark Shadows" binge. That show rules. It's like eating candy. Deliciously campy candy, replete with silly vampire stuff and great 60s hair. It also meant we went into this episode with a much different mindset than most people, who were only comparing it to the rest of "Mad Men". Watching a bunch of DUM DUM DUM soapy stuff made the homage to soap operas in this episode so much fun.
I think soap operas tend to be viewed as "women's entertainment", and so their self-awareness and their skill at story-telling is discounted. (As well as their ability to churn out an astounding amount of product with limited resources.) But "Mad Men" actually owes a great debt to soap operas. To write a great soap opera, you have to be able to go a long time onscreen with "nothing" really happening---i.e., lots of relationship-building and table-setting, but no big plot twists---without boring your audience to death. As is suggested in this episode, one way soaps do that is with delightfully hammy acting, which "Mad Men" obviously has to shun. But mostly they do it by making you care about the characters so that their little dramas seem as important to you as they are to the characters. "Mad Men" takes this best part of soap operas and uses it to great effect. Soap operas love the drama of mundane family bullshit, and "Mad Men" smartly sees that's because supposedly mundane domestic concerns are actually the stuff of great drama. I'm glad they played tribute to their soapy elements. I mean, think about it! A mysterious and deceased ex-wife? That's some soap opera shit right there, even if the lesson the characters learn is that our secrets often only have as much power as we give them. The soap opera is a form that's basically dead---they're all getting cancelled in favor of reality TV and game shows---so maybe that's why it's finally okay to pay loving tribute to it.
Using "Dark Shadows" as a frame of reference allowed us to see the Michael storyline differently, as you'll see in the video, as well. Todd VanDerWerff describes Michael as the "villain" of the season, but if he is, he's a soap opera villain like Barnabas Collins. You root for him, because he shakes things up. Plus, Don has it coming, doesn't he? He's been such a genuine villain for so long, and he's never really paid for it. Maybe Michael is here to dispense a little cosmic justice. I have more thoughts on that in the video, plus we speculate about what's going on with Peggy.
Stray thoughts:
*Megan disses "Dark Shadows"! Clearly, she just hasn't seen it.
*When Peggy starts to talk about New Yorker cartoons, I immediately thought of, how a few years ago, there was a meme of recaptioning every New Yorker cartoon with "Christ, what an asshole". Example:
And sure enough, Michael immediately started to act like an asshole. A loveable, vampiric asshole. Coincidence? Is anything on this show?
Thoughts about this episode? About "Dark Shadows", or soap operas in general?
*By the way, it can't be a coincidence that this came out the same weekend as the movie released, can it be?
I get the feeling that this episode is going to be controversial, but I love it. It's a classic example of how good "Mad Men" is about pulling the rug out from under your expectations, but doing so in a way that works really well. The title of the episode is "Lady Lazarus", which is one of Sylvia Plath's greatest poems, and is known as a suicide poem. But as we point out in the episode, they don't do anything so obvious as make the episode about suicide. No, it's actually smarter than that. It's like they actually bothered to read the piece they're referencing, and noticed that it's about not just death, but rebirth, of dying as part of living. Plath calls dying an "art" and a "calling" in the part we quote in the video, but there's another part of the poem that clearly inspired Megan's storyline here.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Is Megan rising? Does she eat men like air? I'm not so sure, but it's intriguing. The more obvious man-eater in this episode is Beth, who has some of Plath's traits: She's depressive and uses evocative imagery to capture her own self-pity. I'm not trying to be mean; I think that there's a place for self-pity, and anyway, bouts of intense self-pity are basically what depression is.
This episode also highlighted another great thing about "Mad Men" that other TV fails at: capturing ambivalence. Having characters suffer ambivalence is often fatal for TV, because viewers want clear roles for the characters: The Ambitious One, the Old-Fashioned One, the Ballsy One, the Sad One. We want to know what they want and see if they get it. But reality isn't like that. Most people carry more ambivalence with them than we're ready to admit. Don is sad this whole episode because he really doesn't know what he wants from Megan. Pete also doesn't know what he wants. Megan's decisiveness is discomforting because it exposes how much others don't have it. The key is to do what John Lennon says and try to go with the flow a bit, let that ambivalence sit and play out, just to see what happens. Don doesn't like that, but Pete is maybe a different story.
If we sound sympathetic to that little weasel Pete in this episode, well, we're aware of that. On the whole, I think he's a dick. And the first time I watched this episode, I was bleating the whole time about what a dick he is. But rewatching it while we wrote out The Orange Couch, it seemed way more ambiguous. It's incredibly telling that he wasn't blowing smoke up Beth's ass when he said he is listening. The bout of self-pity he expresses at Harry is annoying as hell---he's a well-off white guy who has clients coming to him and a wife that loves him!---but my anger was moderated by realizing that Pete is incredibly depressed. Depression makes it nearly impossible to see things clearly. And she is pulling his chain, so he's not entirely wrong about that. He's just wrong about his belief that he has to play along. And yet. And yet..... Well, watch the video. I think maybe he does have to play along, on some level.
Beyond just the riffs on Plath's surprisingly dense themes in "Lady Lazarus", I loved the Beatles stuff in this episode. They got it exactly right, which is why I think Weiner was lucky to pull off the amazing feat of getting the rights to use "Tomorrow Never Knows" in this episode. The behind-the-times people are just getting around to accepting the reality and implications of Beatlemania, but they don't realize that the Beatles have effectively put those days behind them. Don sitting on the couch, expecting to hear some teeny bopper tunes and hearing some psychedelic experimentation instead was just perfect. He already was annoyed that he doesn't get the Beatles, and he was thinking of the first incarnation. This new incarnation of them is beyond even his ability to know that he doesn't know what's going on. But what I really loved was that it wasn't some clunky condemnation of people who couldn't keep up with the changes in the 60s. There's a surprising amount of sympathy there, and I felt like I got a real understanding of how impossible it may have felt to be 40 (which isn't even that old!) and have everything changing on you so incredibly fast.
Weird as it may be to say this, but this was a relatively light episode of "Mad Men". I realize the image of poor Sally Draper getting an eyeful of blow job is a shocker. Learning that Megan's parents are awful is no fun, either. But this was probably the most optimistic episode of the season so far. Of course, it ends with everyone sad, so that's not saying a whole lot, I guess. But despite the disappointments and terrors, things were not a complete shit storm. I think we're meant to believe that while Sally's none too happy with what she saw, she's also going to be just fine. Most kids have some kind of traumatic experience when they first get a glimpse of adult sexuality, and when they grow up and become adults, they're better able to make sense of it. It's probably a good thing that Sally has a reason to slow her roll when it comes to wanting to be a grown-up, anyway. Also, while Peggy and Don both got disappointed in this episode, they also have a better idea of where they stand in the world. Better to know than working in ignorance.
Beyond what's in the latest episode of "The Orange Couch", I just want to say this: I'm curious what it means for Don to learn that Megan also has wretched parents. Like all other things about Megan, I suspect Don had her family life built up in his mind as some kind of fantasyland. He complains constantly about her closeness to her mother, something she regrettably threw in his face. Now he knows that actually, it's not so great for her. While he still had it much worse, they have this in common. Not that I think it's going to change his hot/cold problem with her---he has this problem with all women---but maybe it's going to complicate things.
Anna Holmes and Alyssa Rosenberg are in disagreement about the aggressive nudity on "Game of Thrones". I agree with both of their points, to an extent. Alyssa defends it, arguing that it's rarely just prurient, especially in the second season.
I’d say I think they’re being somewhat more thoughtful in season 2. There are scenes in season 1 that are just ludicrous—Littlefinger’s yammering around his prostitutes, the Dothraki wedding sequences. That said, I feel nudity is a driver of personality more the show gets credit for in Season 1. I really like the good cheer of the prostitutes bursting in on Tyrion in our introduction to the character. I rarely feel like it’s okay to use female nudity solely to advance our impression of a male character, but given the show’s very impressive investment in Peter Dinklage as a sex symbol, I thought that scene was kind of remarkable. I also liked the scene of Ros flashing Theon as she leaves for King’s Landing, a moment that showed her comfort with her body as a commodity while also reinforcing Theon as kind of a randy idiot. And Dany’s nudity at the end of the finale felt powerful to me for the same reason Margaery’s does: her femininity is as exposed as it can get, which should make her vulnerable, and instead it’s a moment of triumph and dignity for her.
Anna has a different take:
These scenes seem not only forced but exploitative. As Huffington Post television critic Mo Ryan put it in a review: “Sometimes ‘Game of Thrones’ uses sexual scenes to shed light on character. But quite often, it shows naked women because it can.” It is telling that few, if any, of the series’ most fully realized and complex female characters — and there are many — are ever shown naked, with the exception of Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen and the just-introduced Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer). And it’s probably no coincidence that as the character of Ros — a titian-haired prostitute played by Esme Bianco — becomes more nuanced the less the series requires her to disrobe.
She adds:
Like the writers of “SNL,” I’m trying to have a sense of humor about “Game of Thrones” — or, at the very least, look on the bright side of all the breast-baring. It’s a great source of unintentional humor, for starters. I can often tell by the sort of dress a female character is wearing whether she is likely to disrobe. (If it has buttons, they will come undone.) I marvel at the semi-medieval society’s standards for personal grooming, which seem to anticipate the Brazilian waxes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: I call the pubic hair pattern so often seen on Westerosi women “the King’s Landing Strip.”
The fact that no one has a medieval-style bush does suggest that Anna wins this one on the evidence. But I agree with both of them, to an extent. Anna is right that it's basically there for gratuitous reasons, and you could cut it in half, easily, without missing a beat. But I also don't mind it, albeit for a slightly different reason than Alyssa. I remember what John Waters wrote about Russ Meyer in his book Shock Value:
Russ Meyer is the Eisenstein of sex films. He is single-handedly responsible for more hard-ons in movie audiences than any other director, despite the fact that he has refused ever to make a hard-core feature. Married couples have flocked to his films for twenty years because they know Russ delivers and feel that the erotic images he is so famous for give them fodder for fantasies and actually add a little zing to their dull sex lives.
So there you have it: HBO can be congratulated for saving marriages. Isn't that more important, strictly speaking, than whether or not all this sex can be justified as non-gratuitous? It's downright pro-marriage to have so much bumping and grinding on TV. That said, there are shows that absolutely make the sex stupid and tedious, but I don't think "Game of Thrones" is one of them. "Game of Thrones" usually stays inside the line by, as Alyssa says, combining the gratuitous nature of it with attempts to advance the plot and characterization. "True Blood" also gets a pass, because they aren't pretending to be anything but a really strange soft core porn.
I'm actually happy that Americans have an appetite for titillation in fiction. The accessibility of porn online does carry the threat of dulling our national erotic imagination. Porn has its place, don't get me wrong! But if that's where our entire erotic imagination is housed, then it becomes kind of soulless and mechanical. What's awesome about putting hot sex in shows that have pre-existing characters and plots is that it explores another angle of eroticism, the kind that is a tad more whole-person oriented, instead of the nameless people that populate porn. (I mean, I realize they play characters and have names, but basically the only people who care are those who are kind of obsessed with porn.) The reason the sex doesn't seem that out of place to me on "Game of Thrones" is that the show is so much about how these people live on a day to day basis, and sex is a major and important part of that. In life, people spend a lot of time naked, so why not on TV? I actually am more distracted when shows have scenes where people in real life would be naked, but characters are wearing clothes because they don't want "too much" nudity. For instance, TV characters have a lot more sex with clothes on than people in real life do. "Game of Thrones" manages to avoid that problem.
Well, sort of. They do need to show more dudes naked. They really need to take a hint from "True Blood" on this front.
An absolutely devastating and amazing hour of television: That's the first thing I want to say. The show has been escalating the levels of dread and fear for three episodes now, to the point where I was genuinely afraid that someone out there had murdered Megan because Don abandoned her. As we discuss in this episode, the theme was about the tension between "home" and "far away". Peggy lays it out in her ad campaign: Home is safety, love, warmth. Out there is scary, cold, and dangerous. But the ad gets rejected, because, as we learn in this episode, it isn't that simple. Some times home is where you can't be, and some times going on journeys leads us to greater truths. Even if they're scary. Watch the video for more on that.
I just want to add one more thing about all this: Because of all the talk of "far away places" and danger---particularly how badly it shook Peggy, understandably so, to learn that in another place and time, goofball Michael was almost surely born in a concentration camp---I think it was entirely reasonable to think Megan was in great danger after Don abandoned her. "Mad Men" is rarely that straightforward, however. We discover instead that where Megan isn't safe is in her home. She tries to be safe in there; she barricades the door and refuses to answer the phone, creating a little bubble of seeming safety. But Don kicks the door down (in a disturbing echo of season three, where he kicks the door down in an act of sheer awesomeness), popping that bubble and any illusion that home is where safety lies. Realizing that, the rest of the episode really came together, and we realized that "trips" often seem scary but can be exactly what you need, and "home" is not always so great. After all, Michael's first home was a concentration camp, and in order to feel safe, he imagines that he's actually from somewhere very far away. Still, like all things, it's complicated. I think we're meant to find it good that Peggy has a home with Abe, that he provides an anchor and makes her feel safe. It's not that home is a bad thing or trips are good. Just that we need both, and that home needs to be more than just home to be safe. That home has to be stable, and while a lot of people are uneasy about Peggy's storyline, I think it's clear that one thing that's true about her relationship is that she is with a man who really is kind and stable. In this world, that counts for something.
The historical context is important here, as well. It's important to know that "Mad Men" is a very New York show, and the city's decline is a major issue here. The larger "home" of all the characters---New York City---is increasingly unsafe and unstable.
On a side note: I read some forums last night after the episode aired, because it was a dense episode and I struggled to sleep after watching it. I wanted to see if others were picking up on the themes Marc and I lay out in the video. Unfortunately, the ones I read all were about adjudicating the fight between Megan and Don. I wish I could say I was surprised to see that most people I was reading right after the episode were Team Don, even though Don puts Megan through unholy hell, for no other reason that he genuinely fears that on some level, she doesn't want him. That's some classic domestic violence shit, and it's telling how many people out there are unwilling to see that Don is a bad fucking guy.
What were your thoughts? Did this episode make you rethink the Megan character as much as it did for Marc and myself?
In case you were wondering, yes, I do have opinions on the show "Girls" and all the press it's been getting. I wrote a piece that I definitely hope you check out at The American Prospect on the whole thing, were I lament how much ink is being spilled about how it's scary and upsetting to see women performing the same kind of comic tropes that men have done for roughly forever. Now, most critics don't see it that way. They didn't stop for a second to wonder if they'd issue the same criticisms if it was a male-centric show. For instance, I highly doubt Madeline Davis of Jezebel would write a piece where she lambasted a sitcom about a man because the comic main character made a bunch of stupid choices she feels are irresponsible and she hopes that young women out there don't make. Like I said in my Prospect piece, the double standard is staggering. Men in comedy get to be stupid, get to make mistakes, get to make bad decisions and have comically exagerrated bad sex, and we all laugh because we know it's a comedy, not a symposium on How To Act Right. That so many feminist-minded women don't notice what they're doing here is distressing to me. The only critique that I really felt was something other than an excuse not to watch the "girl show" was Jenna Wortham's at The Hairpin, mostly because she isn't interested in that narrative at all, but using the intense media scrutiny of this show to anchor a larger discussion about lack of racial diversity on TV.
The great unspoken issue here is what I like to call the politics of the remote control. It's one thing to get men to agree that women should have equality in the workplace and the doctor's office, but the great taboo in our culture is really delving into the inequalities that persist in the home. Point out that women still do domestic labor more than men, after all, and expect to be buried under a sea of rationalizations and "nuh-uhs!" in comments. As I note in the piece, "Girls" is an extremely rare thing---a show about women where there's no male authority to calm anxieties---which means it's going to make a lot of men uncomfortable. They're going to look for reasons to get out of having to do what women are used to, which is watch a show where none of the important characters are the same gender as you. Let's be honest; most men wouldn't watch this unprovoked by a woman.
And that's where this gets interesting. Women by and large get to avoid having to deal with men's unquestioned sexism around what's acceptable on TV because there's not really any completely lady-dominated shows that they might want to watch and then have to go through the ordeal of listening to their partners come up with a bunch of rationalizations for why this show somehow doesn't seem quite like all those other shows that he likes that are very much like it. The issue basically doesn't have to be dealt with. Now "Girls" has come along, and it basically cuts off many objections by being obviously influenced by "Louie" without being a rip-off, and so it's basically forcing the issue. Finding a reason that it's not quite perfect and therefore not even giving it a shot keeps things where they're at, where women watch shows with prominent or even exclusively male characters, men don't have to watch shows where men aren't in charge, and no one has to discuss if possibly there's sexism emanating from the couch and not just from Hollywood. I'm acutely aware of this dynamic because in past relationships, I've experimented with standing my ground on lady stuff I like, mostly in the way of music, and it's been pretty upsetting to see how much bullshit a man who identifies as liberal can come up with for suggesting your otherwise excellent taste failed you, in a truly remarkable coincidence, when the product you like is being made by women. In fact, the terror of this is so ingrained that a lot of women just sort of generally avoid being too femme-y in their tastes, even when it comes to the good stuff, for fear that it's threatening to potential boyfriends and not just actual ones. I'm just saying, I bet even avid straight female fans of "Girls" won't be putting it on their OK Cupid profiles.
This kind of pressure, I think, helps explain why the strange belief that female characters on TV need to be paragons of virtue and excellent choice-making for their very existence to be defensible. You know, even though that's boring. The heightened emotional stakes around women watching women have created this sense that women need to be getting something important and useful out of this, because if it's just about having a good time, why not just stick to the guy shows and make it easier on everyone? There's other reasons that women on TV have unfair expectations that they abandon being entertaining and instead be educational for their female audiences (which is just so.....paternalistic), but I suspect couch politics don't make it any better. At this point, the belief that a female character's job is to be a Good Example for her apparently child-like female audience members is so ingrained that it's beginning to go unquestioned. Thus, arguments that "Girls" is troubling because the main character makes stupid decisions. Well, look, people who always make good decisions are boring as characters. TV relies on drama to work, and good decisions are often ones that minimize drama. (Except when smoking out unexamined prejudices, then it's necessary drama that good decision-makers sometimes provoke.) Young women who have men and sex all figured out, who don't struggle to know what they want out of their careers, and who know better than to experiment with drugs are great role models, but watching a show about them sounds about as interesting as watching paint dry. Comedy especially is interested in the foibles of human beings, and women are half of human beings. For fuck's sake, they should be able to have foibles. I don't see why this is such a hard concept to grasp.
This Orange Couch is a little later than I usually like to get it up, but I've been running around trying to get my IDs replaced after losing them in a bus.
Last night's episode cemented to me that this season of "Mad Men" is going to really focus on how chaotic the 60s actually felt for people at the time. Marc and I focus on three aspects of the episode: the overt examination of masculinity and male violence, the various ways that fantasy plays out in life, and the entire Pete situation. Marc and I are both from Austin, and so the Charles Whitman shootings loom larger in our imaginations than perhaps the rest of the country's; knowing so many details about Whitman and his crime made it clear how much the show was drawing a direct line from Pete to Charles Whitman. Watch Orange Couch to hear our thoughts.
What I want to add is this: There's a tendency with history for complexity to get mowed over as time passes. Now that we're 5 decades past the 60s, it seems that people are beginning to forget that it was a time of great dread for the nation. We tend to look back and see it mostly through a political lens, which is appropriate because it was a political time: Hippies and anti-war? Check. Feminism and civil rights? Check. Reactionary responses to all of the above? Check. But what that tends to paper over is that it seems there was a lot of cultural change that's harder to box in. It would be nice to say that the dread was simply the result of reactionary anger about changing social norms, and sure, there was a lot of that. But it was more existential than all that. This episode really managed to touch on a lot of cultural shifts that were optimistic and awesome, especially when it comes to Ken's writing and the 60s explosion of highly imaginative genre fiction that is still with us today. (See: "Mad Men"'s chatter competition, "Game of Thrones".) I'd definitely put Don and Megan's playful sexuality and just Megan's overall life into that category. It was an era of embracing the possible, and that was good. Thus, the moon landing. But it was also an era where there was a definite sense that the old gods, as it were, were bubbling up and spilling blood. Thus, the Manson family murders less than a month after the moon landing. These things don't fit into neat political boxes, but are more primal than that, about our greatest hopes and our worst nightmares. And this episode really dwelled on that. It built on last week's episode, which was about a more banal kind of masculine violence.
I'm not sure what to make of all this. I think they're going to go dark places, which is appropriate. "Mad Men" is at its best when mining the 60s for the complexities that most people forget about, and the growing fear of crime and the air of violence in the 60s is something that fits in that category, fading with time because it's so hard to categorize or explain what it meant. I'm really curious to see what they do with these themes.
I wasn't in town to record for this episode of "The Orange Couch", but I helped write it and find the "Mystery Date" video. Oh, the marvels of digital communication!
Like Marc, I'm not too fond of the dream sequence crap. They've been escalating the amount of time we spend in Don's head on this show, and it's my least favorite part of the show. We don't need to have direct access to Don's mind to understand what he's going through. The show is better when it sticks to surfaces and makes the audiences work for our understanding.
Outside of that, the episode was masterful at playing with the various ways we understand crime and violence, from the titillating fantasies to the soul-destroying paranoia to the grim realities. It's a difficult subject to handle without sensationalism, and I think the trick of using people's reactions to a sensational crime worked marvelously. The use of The Crystals song "He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)" worked really well, too. The song's history is one of the more interesting pop music stories. Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote it for Little Eva, who babysat for them and whose screwed-up rationalizations for her boyfriend's violence provided the inspiration for the lyrics. Phil Spector's choice to play it straight, as if it's romantic and not messed up to think this way, certainly fits with everything else we know about his controlling, misogynist, murdersome personality. But despite all this, the song does provide a fascinating glimpse of how violence against women is framed in romanticized or titillating ways, and that does, whether we like it or not, make it much harder for our society to deal with the whole problem honestly.
As promised, this week's edition of The Orange Couch, where Marc and I analyze the latest episode of "Mad Men". I'm particularly pleased with my thoughts towards the end comparing the Michael Ginsberg storyline to the Rolling Stones one. Weiner is doing something much more interesting with the younger generation than simply positing that the times they are a changin'.
Next week, The Orange Couch will return to Mondays and with a special guest next time!
The Orange Couch isn't going anywhere. For what should be the only time in the run of our new online video series about "Mad Men", an episode will have to be delayed a day. But we have a very good reason!
Sorry, y'all. As much as I love "Mad Men", I wasn't going to miss Wild Flag's triumphant show that happened to coincide with the airing of "Mad Men" last night. No one with sense would have missed that; it's probably the best show I've seen in years. And I go to a lot of shows. It was an amazing reminder of what rocking out can really feel like.
(Please, no "Portlandia" jokes. It just reminds me that Carrie Brownstein is more famous for a sketch comedy show on an obscure channel than for being a fucking genius of rock. Which makes me depressed, because it tells you what's so wrong with this country. I love that show, I really do, but the dwindling lack of interest in music as an art form, even amongst my generation, and even amongst the "hip" crowd that watches "Portlandia", is just depressing.)
Despite this, I still have some quick thoughts on a TV show before we hit you with the wallop of "Mad Men" analysis. Who saw the most recent episode of "Community"? The answer is "probably not many people", which is a shame, because they actually found a great way to both get their product placement money and satirize the crap out of Citizens United and the claim that corporations are people, a claim Romney made famous.
The joke was that because a business on campus had to be owned by a student, Subway actually incorporates into the body of a human being, so he can take some classes at Greendale and dodge the restriction. This was both hilarious and kind of depressing as a joke, because I'm guessing a lot of the audience wasn't able to piece together the connections between this supposedly over-the-top satire and real life, where corporations have been declared persons in the court---but only if it gives them more rights. (They still don't have person responsibilities.)
But of course, corporations aren't people, and people aren't corporations. Because corporations can't do things like fall in love and have kinky sexual desires, but people can. And "Subway" falls in love with Britta---and vice versa---creating all sorts of chaos.
A few things about this episode really stood out to me. One, while "corporations are people" is funny enough to build a sitcom plot around, the writers made the joke even funnier than that. They also managed to send up the relationship between out of control capitalism and the misogynist, sex-phobic bullshit that eats up so much of our political energy. Decades of Beltway belief that these are entirely separate issues is dismantled within minutes of scathing satire on this show, as the Subway representatives lay a major bout of slut-shaming on Britta because she knows how to have a good time when getting naked with someone. The conservative impulse to own and control and to squelch actual humanity with all its glorious passions is seen as the commonality between prudery and corporatization of America. Corporate-conservative America is not down with your kinky sex or your desire to eat tasty food, instead of that factory-stamped crap they dish out at Subway.
This episode was also further evidence for my theory that Britta, and not Abed as some think, is the moral center of the show. They make ruthless fun of her all the time in the group, and she certainly has all the irritating flaws of the overearnest lefty, but Britta tends to be right more often than not, if you're watching carefully. (That's why people hate her!) As Alyssa Rosenberg notes:
Britta gets a bad rap for being a buzz-kill, but I appreciate the show acknowledging that it may only be within the disastrous dynamics of the study group that she’s a bore, and there’s a place where her passion is a better fit, and where there’s someone who shares her values and is available for gratifyingly kinky sex.
Once again, the show posits that Britta is just fine for being cheerfully liberated about sex, and that it's the people around her that pass judgment that are the problem. If anything, this was one of the most remarkably sex-positive plots I've ever seen on a TV show. Sex isn't just shown as being okay, but as a subversive force against the dulling of our country through corporatization. This isn't an accident, either, since the characters make overt references to "1984", and the way that sexuality is a symbol of subversion simply by virtue of being messy and human and wonderful for all of that.
After this week, episodes of The Orange Couch will be coming out on Mondays.
Marc and I have taken our love of "Mad Men" and television in general to the next level. We've created an online video series called "The Orange Couch", where we discuss the latest episode of our favorite watercooler shows, over clips of the episode in question.The debut video is about---what else?----the premiere of "Mad Men".
After all, the main appeal of critically acclaimed, low-rated TV is that it gives the smart set something to chatter about. That's why Marc and I love it, and we have great conversations about our favorite shows, something I suspect is a common experience out there. By boiling down our rehashing and analysis into a short video, we thought we'd celebrate this aspect of these shows, and give everyone a chance to further the conversation. So please enjoy and tell me what you think in comments!
The plan is to replace traditional "Mad Men" recapping with this video recap/analysis, so please, feel free to offer not just thoughts and comments on the video, but the usual discussion about the episode. I'm especially curious to hear what people think of the show's attempts to grapple with race, and what you think of the Megan/Don situation.
One of the things I really like about this strategy of TV exposition and criticism is that having the video rolling underneath helps prove the argument. I met with a lot of skepticism when I suggested that the lawnmower accident was a symbolic re-enactment of the JFK assassination, but when you hear the argument over the footage rolling that makes it clear the visual parallels between that awful day and the episode, it's much harder to deny.
"Mad Men" is coming back on Sunday, and I imagine that I will have some exciting blogging for it. It's been too long since this blog has had a regular series to blog about!
Spoilers, for people who struggle maintaining the maturity levels not to hold the entire internet responsible for your inability to work through what's saved on your DVR.
Last week, I published a piece where I adopted the role of the bearer of bad news: TV's silly-but-loveable feminist Leslie Knope is getting defanged by NBC, probably in a last-ditch attempt to get the ratings up. Since the show is a spin-off of "The Office", which started off as a sharp satire of ordinary American work life but devolved into an unfunny but typical sitcom about the glories of the patriarchal family, I wasn't particularly surprised. Americans love the comfort of unfunny sitcoms that romanticize this stuff. It's our comfort food. Applying sharp comedy to gender role-playing is especially unwelcome; we don't want to come home after a hard day's work and have some snooty TV writers make us all uncomfortable with the sexism we perpetuate and rationalize by wrapping it in a blanket of romance. "Parks and Recreation" has shitty ratings, and as I've pointed out before, they clearly have no desire to blow a raspberry at the almost-inevitable helpful network suggestions that they dumb it down a little like "Community" did, so seeing them move in the direction of "The Office" isn't surprising.
However, my article, which came out the same day that the Valentine's Day episode came out, was controversial, with Maya at Feministing offering a rebuttal. This didn't surprise me, so I wasn't upset. The evidence that the show had taken a turn was far from conclusive, and my hope in writing the piece was to start dialogue, not offer the final word about it. At the time I wrote it, the show's direction was ambiguous enough to really allow for multiple readings, as it were.
But the episode that aired on the same date that my piece was published, titled "Operation Ann", removed all doubt. That episode was a fundamental betrayal of both the characters of Leslie and Ann, and of the show's quiet but persistent feminism they're now selling down the river in a desperate bid for ratings.
Since when is Ann Perkins one of those women who has so little going on in her life that the mere idea of being single sends her into a spiral of self-loathing? As far as I remember, Ann has never once suggested that being single is such an awful thing that one should seriously consider lowering your standards to rectify the situation. As recently as last year, in fact, Ann was having a fun time tearing through every dude in Pawnee, having fun sleeping with them but refusing to settle down. Nor was Leslie ever Ms. Everyone Should Have A Boyfriend. Sure, both characters like having boyfriends, but they've never considered it more important than having a full life with lots of friends or meaningful work. Nor have they ever thought that having a boyfriend is so important that considerations like compatibility or attraction should be shoved aside. Old Leslie, if Ann had been in a funk about being single, would have bucked her up like she did to Chris in this very same episode: reminded her that she has a lot going on and there's no rush. But now the show has a double standard. If Chris is sad about his single status, he needs to just cheer up and remember life goes on. Ann, however, should hurry up and settle down with the first person that she can have a halfway reasonable conversation with. Who turns out to be Tom. You know, the resident douchebag of Pawnee. I love Aziz Ansari, of course, but the whole point of Tom's character is that he's an insufferable douchebag.
Maybe the show will right itself. But right now, I'm skeptical. While I doubt that they're going to capture a bigger audience by abandoning the feminist subversion for more mainstream sexist romantic cliches, I can see that it might seem like the only hope of getting ratings up.
By the way, it's just telling that we live in a world where Zooey Deschanel has her own show, but no one can ever figure out what to do with the beautiful and talented Rashida Jones.
