Single father George only wants the best for his 16-year-old daughter, Tessa. So when he finds a box of condoms on her nightstand, he moves them out of their apartment in New York City to a house in the suburbs. But all Tessa sees is the horror of over-manicured lawns and plastic Franken-moms. Being in the ‘burbs can be hell, but it also may just bring Tessa and George closer than they’ve ever been.
This is the set-up for a "Suburgatory", an ABC sitcom that is not fooling me with language in its description like "bitingly ironic" or "single camera". This is what I'm seeing:
Ostensible, pandering message: The horrors of female sexuality can be beat back with wholesome middle American goodness!
Actual message: Try your luck with pulling out, because parents are unreasonable assholes.
Isn't it so adorable and touching when men act like they have a god-given right to have daughters who don't grow into women? Isn't it wonderful when men believe because they spawned female offspring, they should treat them like permanent children? Don't you just want to coo your head off when a man puts his daughter in a position to take risks with her sexual health to avoid alerting him to the fact that she's not in pigtails anymore?
I don't have a problem with sweet sitcoms about middle American life. That's why I like "Parks and Recreation". Of course, that show doesn't act like there's something wrong with you if you both have a vagina and choose to use it. So that helps. But that ABC thinks psychotic parental freakouts are something to sell a sitcom on disturbs me. If Daddy was the villain, okay, but this description emphasizes how "close" they get because he decides that his control over her body matters more than her health or wellbeing.
Ann Friedman has an interesting post about the “smart, attractive women not getting laid” problem, and it centers around the character of Liz Lemon on “30 Rock”. She quotes a couple of dudes who are fed up with the character being lonely, on the grounds that they would totally fuck her and thus she shouldn’t realistically have problems meeting anyone. A sample:
I just can’t take any more of the “Liz Lemon is absurdly, comically unattractive and unlucky in love” plot lines. It’s simply too incongruous with Tina Fey’s beauty, Liz’s smarts, and her position as a successful, prominent head writer and producer of a major network television show…...
Mmm, I think the point isn’t that Liz is actually unattractive, but that she—like a lot of attractive women—thinks she is.
I will forgive these men from looking at the show through a male-only lens, since 95% of movies and TV are told from this point of view, and so shifting so that you see things from a woman’s perspective is like trying to watch a movie backwards for some people, I’m sure. But their analysis fails, because they think of dating as men buying and women selling, and they figure Lemon’s a quality product and so would have been purchased by now. One of them stabs closer to the truth by also castigating Lemon for having high standards, but both of them still buy into the idea that singleness is a curse upon a woman and that relieving it is just matter of having the right marketing.
If I may shift to seeing the character of Liz Lemon as an individual person with her own idiosyncratic needs, instead of a generic Single Woman Cursed With Singleness, I would like to offer another interpretation: Liz Lemon sabotages relationships because Lemon doesn’t want relationships. Yes, on the show she’s always bellyaching about being single, but that’s characterized as part of her neurotic obsession with doing things the right way, filling out a checklist in life. She also bellyaches about now having a better job and not being able to dress better, even though it’s clear that she doesn’t have these things because she doesn’t actually want them. Lemon likes being a comedy writer and a tomboy, and the only downside for her is that people judge her for it. Same thing with being single. She’s characterized as someone who abhors having people in her personal space and is largely indifferent to sex, two personality traits that would be severely compromised by having a boyfriend. When she does date someone, it’s only because she’s convinced herself he’s not going to put any demands on her, and then when he does, she picks a fight with him and leaves. It’s a great portrayal of a loner, and I think it confuses people because we’re all socialized to believe women can’t be loners. And part of the reason is that Hollywood is so dudely, and thus women are always viewed in movies and TV through their relationships with men, and thus can’t be loners. It’s not surprising that one of the very few shows on TV that is so tightly controlled by an actual woman is the first to have such a character.
Anyway, Ann makes gentle fun of these guys for thinking that if a woman is attractive and successful, she will always be neck-deep in dick. The reality is no one thinks they get laid enough. People I’ve known who are always going out with this guy or lady and I wonder how they make time for anything else are still looking at empty beds and wondering WTF. Sex is like food. Even if you generally have enough, if you want it now and it’s not on hand, self-pity sets in rapidly. Ann notes in her post that Neko Case can’t get laid, thought the article is about how female musicians on tour don’t get groupies like male musicians do, and I’ll point out that how much men get hit on varies wildly, and this is a narrow set of circumstances that doesn’t tell us much beyond, “Men who push for one-night stands in bars tend to be more confident if they are hitting on someone they don’t sit around fantasizing is their girlfriend.”
I just don’t think there’s a positive or negative correlation between success and getting laid. Or even conventional attractiveness and getting laid. Nor is there one model for “getting laid”. My theory is people put off different vibes. I know people who always have people clamoring to date them for real, but never get hit on for one-night stands, and vice versa. And it’s hard to point to a single quality they have that makes the difference, beyond just that’s how people perceive them.
Or, and this is where the Genius Ten comes. Perhaps there’s an entirely alternate theory to why Neko Case can’t get laid. And that’s because famous musicians with the initials N.C. can’t get laid. Think I’m crazy? Consider Exhibit #1, the song that will be kicking off the Friday Genius Ten. Leave your lists or thoughts on this conundrum—-or anything at all, open thread—-in comments.
Original song: “No Pussy Blues” by Grinderman (i.e., Nick Cave)
1) “Down on the Street” by The Stooges
2) “Eraser” by No Age
3) “Katrina” by The Black Lips
4) “Free Money” by Patti Smith
5) “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell
6) “Run To Your Grave” by The Mae Shi
7) “Human Fly” by The Cramps
8) “Touch Me I’m Sick” by Mudhoney
9) “Vicious” by Lou Reed
10) “Holes” by Mercury Rev
I’ve been holding off on talking about “The Walking Dead” until after the season finale, because it’s a somewhat slow-moving show and I think it needs to be assessed in a bigger chunk than one episode at a time. Also, I feel like they got off to a shaky start in some respects—-Adam is right that the cartoonishly racist Merle character was a misfire, and one that tends to reinforce the narrative that it can’t be racist if you fall short of donning white hoods—-but on the whole, I think it holds together well. (They did the same thing with sexism, by taking a genuinely interesting look at sexism in the camp and then making it way over the top by introducing a man who beats his wife in front of others, which is super rare in the real world. Not the beating of women—-that’s common—-but the letting others know about it.) As regular readers may know, I’ve read the comic book series the show is based on and have my criticisms just on a suspension of disbelief level. That said, my favorite aspect of the comics is that they are genuinely scary, something that should be a baseline for anything deemed “horror”.
But there are a lot of things I don’t like about the comic that the TV show has been busy correcting. One is the strong libertarian streak that leads to a poor understanding of human nature. For instance, one of the most irritating aspects of the comic book was that the whole Rick vs. Shane thing had more than a glint of Nice Gy® logic to it—-because Rick is the hero and his wife Lori slept with Shane, then that must mean that Shane is a horrible person and was always a horrible person. It didn’t even seem to occur to Kirkman that for this to be true, Lori would basically have to be the kind of woman not worth being married to in the first place. A more interesting and realistic story would be that Shane and Lori both had much love for Rick, and when they thought Rick was dead, they fell in together, because presumably they were already friendly and have a lot in common. And voila! That’s exactly how the show decided to roll with it, and it’s been far more interesting for it. Now it’s about Shane falling apart under the various stresses he’s under, which is more interesting that the “turn your back and your stupid wife sleeps with an asshole because women are weak and needy” narrative of the comics.
In fact, before things degraded into an too on-the-nose wife-beating scene, there was an interesting rewrite of the sexism of the books, at least early in the books. In the books, the women complain a little about being shoved off into traditional gender roles of washing and waiting on men, but then cheerfully accept the strange notion that feminism is a luxury of civilization. (To be fair, the books do get away from this, as I believe Kirkman realized that you can’t exempt half the human race from his notion that people discover new sides of themselves in emergency situations.) On the show, there’s no indication that the women accept this. So that was another example of how the TV show gets human nature much better than the books.
The one thing the show does that the books did that makes me irate is it makes supply-gathering an ongoing problem. I’m sorry, but the entire area around Atlanta is filled to the brim with rural and suburban areas that would be less zombie-clogged than the city and far more full of supplies that you could ransack until the end of time. Including guns. It’s Georgia. Don’t tell me you couldn’t arm yourself to the teeth in under an hour if you had the ability to ransack any sporting goods store you came across.
As for the finale, I agree that it was a dramatic shift away from everything that’s gone on, but I feel better about it than the Onion AV Club did. They’re right that it didn’t feel like a season finale, but more like a mid-season break. In a sense, that’s what it is—-they’ve only had 6 episodes, which is really only enough time to get the characters to make their first big move, which is what happened. I was a little annoyed at how the characters aggressively questioned Dr. Jenner, which was only done to raise tensions in what was basically a big exposition scene. I believe people in that situation would be grateful and conciliatory, especially towards a government official who is the last person they’ll probably ever see who still has some semblance of official authority behind him. Nor should the director have feared that the audience would tune out during this long exposition. I’m actually grateful that it was done early on—-if you have to do it, get it out of the way so the actual story can continue. None of this “Battlestar Galactica” crap, where you wait until the end.
All in all, I think this is a pretty interesting take on the zombie genre. The problem with zombie movies is that the genre really does demand more of a slow burn, which is why George Romero kept being able to return to that well. So even with all its flaws, I’m addicted to “The Walking Dead”. What do you think? Have you been watching?
As someone who thinks pop culture actually matters, even I have to say that the winner on “Dancing With The Stars” has no larger importance, and like Atrios, I wouldn’t be “pissed” if Bristol Palin won. My main emotions would be that mix of amusement, contempt, and pity I feel for the people who decided to show Wingnut Pride by stuffing the ballot box for someone who was routinely described as being not up to the task. It’s a poor kind of pride that drives you to reward mediocrity. It’s interesting to see conservatives embracing values they believe liberals have and denounce them for, such as promoting mediocre people because of identity politics, whereas in my actual world, I tend to see a lot of liberals who have no patience for hacks or mediocrity in general. We will eat our own for it, rest assured.
Anyway, Palin didn’t win. Jennifer Grey did, and I’m counting down until this gets described as a “pro-abort” victory because Grey was the star of an overtly pro-choice movie (one of the few ever, basically).
What’s interesting to me about this is how much it really shows that there’s wankery in them there hills, and it’s basically coming from the conservative side. For instance, I’ve blogged about this ballot-stuffing scandal a couple times at XX Factor, and the theme has always been, “Damn, this must be a culture war if a cheesy dancing show matters to culture warriors that much. Do they not get how stupid they look?” But this is how a wingnut commentator chose to interpret that:
Why is this writer taking time to stop and write? I’d expect her to be bouncing up and down and cackling with glee that someone sent powder in an envelope to her icky and hated Bristol Palin.
I don’t actually hate Bristol Palin. There’s not enough there to hate. I certainly don’t want her to get hurt! She strikes me as a sweet but kind of dim kid, who has no real understanding of the world she’s been shoved in to.
But I think it’s fascinating that this is the only interpretation of my blogging that this person would allow. Either I blindly worship the Palin family and think everyone in it deserves awards and riches no matter how little they work or how little talent they have, or I hate everyone in it, including the children. This is the kind of tribal warfare thinking that fuels the Tea Party. I’m actually not surprised that so many wingnuts took this Bristol thing seriously. It was incredibly important to them to reaffirm this particular worldview, that they are more deserving that other people and that a mediocre member of the wingnut tribe deserves all the goodies, while even excellent Others deserve none. (This is worth considering when you think about how they rationalize claiming Obama is a less qualified person to be President than George W. Bush.) Meanwhile, I think most of the people in the Other category are fairly used to mediocrity winning out, and so are hardly going to lose sleep if someone who sucks wins a network talent contest. I’m actually mildly surprised the best woman won, and quite glad for her.
I guess for the finale, I’m back to doing this “Mad Men” review on a Monday, because, well, I’ve got a lot to say about that. I was wrong that they wouldn’t mention Disneyland, but right that it wasn’t all that important in terms of SCDP’s business. But the idea of Disney—-the fantasy of Disney-dominated fairy tales—-was indeed very important to this episode.
The main problem with the episode is that it, frankly, sucked. Besides the abortion cop-out,* it wasn’t even really the plot or the ideas or the character development. At the end of the day, it was the pacing and the scripting, which were lazy and anvilicious. Matthew Weiner admits they just finished the episode on Wednesday, and I think that’s all you need to know about why it didn’t work. The editing was all off—-the fact that they got home from California and were in his apartment in a quick cut was confusing, and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how long they’d been back in New York. I realize they were trying to speed things up to capture the idea of a whirlwind courtship, but they failed. It’s not like the team behind “Mad Men” can’t do a swift and dirty episode. The end of last season was amazing. But this was just confusing.
Which is too bad, because despite the abortion fakeout,** I thought the plot developments were solid. And I think there were good ideas about how to execute these developments, but the pacing ruined it all. The whole season has been about Don wavering back and forth between becoming an honest person who has a grown-up relationship with a woman and enjoys real friendships with people like Peggy, and retreating back into the fantasy of Don Draper, a man who seems like he stepped right out of a Coke ad. This episode was about him committing to the latter, mostly out of fear, and convincing himself that it’s what he really wants. And I do think that Hamm did a great job of capturing that delusional glint in Don’s eyes as he tells himself that he’s in “love” with a woman that he literally knows nothing about, and the other actors did a great job at displaying contempt and confusion at his delusion. The scene in the restaurant got the most attention for the way Megan “proves” herself by being calm when Sally spills a milkshake, but let’s not forget that Betty (who she’s being compared to) seems to have been a sweet, delightful woman who did everything right before the realities of marriage and children wore her down, and made her double down on the childish fantasy of romance she initially shared with Don. But the takeaway for me in that scene was one thing they did do right, which was to make Megan-and-the-kids look like a Coke ad, something that Don wants to step in to to forget himself.
What’s bothersome to me is that there was a great episode buried in that mess. The name “Tomorrowland” was completely ironic, since the fantasies the characters were indulging were the nostalgic ones that actually dominate the Disney franchise. The references to sexist, retrograde fairy tale fantasies abounded: Cinderella, “The Sound of Music”, and Sleeping Beauty was implied when Don woke Megan up and proposed. Peggy and Kenneth are shown eagerly taking a piss all over Cinderella as a tired, old fantasy (and Kenneth also backs that up by having a moment where he basically argues that there is life after “happily ever after”, and marriages do need care and feeding after the curtains close), but the rest of the characters eat up the fantasy. Marc pointed out that Megan and Don’s conversations are all about their romance, and how “good” they think each other is. Their actual compatibility is as relevant as that in a Disney story. She’s the princess, he’s the prince—-they don’t even need to like each other.
Betty and Henry are the “after” in this little tableau. After the whirlwind, fairy tale romance has ended, and you find yourself married to a stranger, then what? Betty has become a complete monster now, and because of the half-assed storytelling in this episode, it’s only those of us in the audience with elephant-like memories who grasp what they’re stabbing at—-when Don first met Betty, she was Megan. Except she spoke Italian and not French. One of TWOPers joked that Megan spent the episode playing the role of a Miss America contestant, and I think that was the point. Here’s me in evening wear. Here’s me in a swimsuit. I just love children, and I speak two languages! I have many vague aspirations to artiness, but no actual ambitions. She might as well have done a baton-twirling act. But it works on Don, and it did when Betty ran the same standard feminine con on him. And as it worked on Henry when Betty did it to him. But there’s always an “after”.
The problem was that they failed to get the audience emotionally invested. Producing the ring early in this episode made everything that followed as predictable as humidity after rain. Marc also made the good point that if they had Anna’s family send Don the ring in the mail right at the peak of his happiness with Faye, then they could have distracted us and made us feel the impact when this precious gift from a dead friend ended up being the prize in the Miss Wife contest instead of a legitimate token of real love between Don and Faye.
What was also confusing was why Peggy was so upset. It could have been more clear that it was in part because Don compared Megan to her in a fit of rationalization. But I think that’s what fueled a lot of it, because this man whose respect and friendship she thought she had basically compared her actual ambition and actual talent to the baton-twirling act of Miss Wife USA. It’s not that she wants to marry Don, especially not when she has sexy Village Voice journalist in her bed. She thought she was valued as a human being and a worker, but her gender will always keep real respect out of her hands. I do think the one scene that really, completely worked was the one between her and Joan. For years, Peggy has tried to befriend Joan by being her usual Peggy self—-optimistic, sunny, looking to Joan as a mentor without thinking about how this makes Joan feel when Peggy outranks her. But when she comes to Joan full of bitterness because the scales have fallen from her eyes? Now they can be friends. I thought there was a rather valuable point made about feminism in there, too. There’s a lot of whining from conservative women about evil feminists shutting them out instead of believing in some generic idea of “sisterhood”. I think that scene showed more the reality. Their moment of feminist sisterhood is rooted in a shared critique over a system where their actual skills and accomplishments are discounted because they’re forever going to be treated like the gender whose role is to twirl batons in a bikini.
There are a lot of questions after Sunday’s episode of “Mad Men”: Will Don’s gambit work? What’s going to happen to SCDP, especially with Bert gone? What’s going to happen with Faye and Don? What about Megan and Don? Is it a little “Forrest Gump” to show Midge again, but this time as a drug addict? Is Pete going to regret sticking by SCDP? Will the ACS account amount to much? What’s Sally going to do now? What about Betty?
But the main question I have is, what does Don’s choice to “quit” tobacco mean? And even if we can answer that question, does it matter?
It’s not that these other questions aren’t as important, but they are mostly unanswerable, especially on a show known for its unpredictability. But the real question for me is the question of why Don chose to write that letter to the NY Times. The assumption shared by the other characters is that Don is purely cynical, that his choice was only a PR move. He definitely didn’t nothing to dissuade them from seeing it that way, choosing instead to chain smoke while denouncing cigarettes as a deadly addiction. (Both of course, he’s also an addict and he can’t just put them down.) Even Megan assumed that it was a cynical move, even as she suggested—-which I’ll get back to—-that it doesn’t matter if it was.
But was it?
The very thing that rescued the Midge interlude from being a “Forrest Gump” moment was that it not only genuinely rattled both Don and the audience, but it ended up having meaning. As Heather at Salon noted, Don saw something in Midge’s situation that he also saw in himself, or at least in SCDP. Midge didn’t care how much money that Don gave her, as long as it got her to the next fix and perhaps kept her from having to sell her body to strangers for a few days or so. And so SCDP was willing to be with this new cigarette brand, which I’m assuming is Virginia Slims. He saw desperation, and how deeply ugly it is. And so he started to hand off those attachments that kept him desperate.
The number one thing is money. I don’t think it was subtly drawn, but in case it was: Did you notice that Don is giving away the farm? It’s not just the $150 grand that he put in the company, but he was giving away smaller amounts of cash to Midge and her husband, too, which was mostly symbolic. With Betty and Henry moving out, he’s probably going to sell the house, too, which is his last attachment to his long stint of building the American dream that was stifling him so much. Don has severed connections and remade himself before, so this isn’t something he’s unfamiliar with. It’s his main go-to strategy. And in case we didn’t get the picture, you also see Faye happy that losing her job that was beginning to weigh on her conscience makes her free to date Don openly.
The other argument for why Don did the right thing because it was the right thing to do is that we’ve already seen Peggy bring up to him the idea that ethics should be a part of business. He shot her down when she suggested they shouldn’t work with racists, but that he has been wrong in a quarrel with her before was mentioned in this episode, when she joked about how she thought he didn’t go for shenanigans. If Don is becoming more Peggy-like when it comes to shenanigans, then perhaps he’s becoming more Peggy-like when it comes to having a conscience.
As you can probably tell from my post where I broke up with “Glee”, Marc and I DVR a lot of our shows and watch them some time after air date. I don’t mention this because I think that’s uncommon or anything, but to note that we have a lot of shows we like and a DVR box with a very small hard drive. This makes us even more critical than normal of stuff sucking, since we don’t want to waste precious DVR space on shows that aren’t worth our time. Which is why last night we decided to stop taping “The Office”.
In all honesty, it’s been a long time coming. Every week we watch the show, and every week we ask ourselves, why are we watching this show? It’s basically out of nostalgia, because “The Office” used to be the funniest thing on TV, back when it was a dark satire of life inside the modern American economy. Over time, however, it switched genres and is now a rather pointless romantic comedy that valorizes the characters that it used to viciously mock. The show used to offer up a searing critique of the way that modern corporations are ruining the American dream for ordinary working people, but now that those particular chickens are really coming home to roost in the real world, the economic fortunes on the show have turned inexplicably sunny, with the threat that they are all going to show up and find their jobs have disappeared evaporating. In fact, the company seems to have an unlimited budget for just hiring new people. They didn’t even put up more of a fight when Pam basically created a whole new job (and salary) for herself. The actors increasingly seem to be phoning it in, and worst of all, it’s sentimental for no good reason. Plus, for some reason, they seem to think that the audience should think Pam and Jim are awesome, when, if you look at it objectively, Pam and Jim are assholes. The pranks they’d play on Dwight used to have meaning and purpose, for instance—-Dwight was a suck-up and pointlessly competitive at a job that Jim thought he was too good to do, so he took his frustrations out on Dwight, who had it coming. Now Dwight seems to just be the weird guy, and Pam and Jim are the cool kids picking on the weird guy because he’s weird. And we in the audience are supposed to think well of them because of all this, even though they’re actually pretty pathetic. And the capper of it all is they steal jokes from viral videos on YouTube done by non-professional people that I’ll bet they never give a dime to.
As Marc noted, it’s the same trajectory as “The Simpsons”—-it started off as a vicious satire, but the writers grew fond of the characters and started to change up their motivations and their fates so that we like them more. The most recent episode was a really good example of how the show has lost its way.
To start off with, Michael Scott. As usual, Michael got into trouble and embarrassed himself. But they pulled their punches by having most of the horrible stuff that happened to him be accidental. Letting go of the balloons and dropping the bottle so it rattled around? That honestly could have happened to anyone. Even the booing bit was a pulled punch. Back in the day, they would have had Michael be horrible to Andy because Andy has a part at all, and he was jealous. But they want you to like Michael some, so instead they show him being nice to Andy by going to the show, praising his performance, and comforting him when he was down. They don’t even have the heart to put Michael through the romantic horrors he’s lived through in the past. The last bad girlfriend plot was limp and dispensed with quickly.
Pam and Jim, as noted before, are now assholes. But we’re supposed to like them and think they’re awesome because they’re “normal” compared to the weirdos they work with. In the past, the smallness of their lives and their inabilities to achieve their ambitions gave them depth, but now they’re just smug married people who sneer at people they think are below them, instead of yearning to be more than they are. In this episode, they sit in their car drinking Irish Cream and orange juice and we’re supposed to be charmed by how cute and in love they are, instead of appalled at what wankers they’re being. I don’t care about them, their marriage, or their baby. They should have written them off the show.
Meanwhile, this last episode made it clear that they’re actually recycling the Pam/Jim arc with Andy and Erin—-the salesman loves the receptionist, but he’s too cowardly to tell her, and she’s dating someone else in the company. We didn’t even get to see Gabe steal Erin from Andy, presumably because they don’t have the courage to make Gabe a real asshole or Erin stupid enough to be dating someone that’s bad for her. So you’re left with this storyline where you’re expected to feel bad for Andy, but instead you’re thinking, “I don’t know. She seems happy. He should just move on.” I fail to see why we should root for them outside of the fact that they’re both characters that we’ve come to know on this show.
Back in the day, the show did a bang-up job of portraying the awkwardness of working with people that you don’t particularly like that much. The socializing events outside of the office were awkward and forced, and many of the characters couldn’t wait to get home and live their real lives. Now, it seems like the people in the office don’t have lives outside of it at all. They only socialize with each other. The episode where Jim and Pam got married really epitomized this. Their office mates reconstruct the viral video wedding aisle dance. Except in real life, the people that did this were the couple’s actual friends, not their coworkers they have little in common with and feel so superior to. That’s because this is something that your actual friends do for you, not your coworkers. Plus, what was the point of doing that? It was amazing to watch it on YouTube, because it was original and it was awesome to see a bunch of non-professionals pull it off in one shot. A bunch of professional actors doing it in a situation where they have multiple takes to get it right? It was like an inverse of everything that made the video they ripped off cool.
So, we’re also done with “The Office”. There’s way too much good stuff on TV to waste your time on a show that’s jumped the shark.
Sorry I didn’t post yesterday; the site’s been screwed up. It still is, but apparently people are reading it and I can write, so I’m going to throw something up quickly.
Tuesday night, Marc and I broke up with “Glee”. The first half of the first season was really an amazing show—-funny, strange, campy. And then they started to get sentimental. In small doses, this was acceptable, as long as they returned immediately to Sue Sylvester busting someone’s ass. But the sentimentality got thicker and started to take over entire episodes. This week’s episode about religion was the final straw.
Watching “Glee” was like being in a toxic relationship. Just when you’re about to throw the towel in, they sucked you back in with an episode that reminded you of the glory days. The Britney Spears episode was nearly perfect.* The fact that they teased the audience some more with the the Brittany/Santana stuff was awesome. It was hilarious. They made fun of Will for being a dork. I was in heaven.
But this week’s! This was the final straw; the rock bottom where you realize that this relationship is never going to work out. It’s not just that the theme of the episode was, “Yeah, yeah, atheists may be logical and actually correct, and believers may be weak people who look the other way when churches oppress people because they need their fairy tales for comfort, but atheists should be the bigger man and take all sorts of shit from believers with a smile.” I can deal with watching a show that has a message that I disagree with. But it was the way they did it, particularly with the ruthless combination of actual heartlessness combined with over-the-top sentimentality pretending to be heart.
The main thing that really pissed me off was that Kurt’s friends know that he’s an atheist. Moreover, the show even went with the annoying “atheists are just mad at god” route, though they did rescue that somewhat by conceding that atheist arguments are nonetheless logical. (I actually think the writers are atheists who decided to pander because most Americans are believers. Which is even more annoying.) But by making Kurt angry, they really drove home the point that this is important to him, and especially in a time of crisis.
So what do his supposedly loving friends do? They go over his head and pray over his father. Now, this would have probably been okay if the result was they all realized that in their frenzy of defensiveness about their fairy tale beliefs, they hurt an actual human being, and the moral of this anvilicious show is that religion is evil and compels people to do things that are immoral and inhumane, but no. That would have taken hormone-secreting glands of a non-gender-specific nature. No, instead Kurt has to come around to seeing that they were just being nice, blah blah. No they weren’t. They were passive-aggressively trying to punish him for rattling their long-standing and unquestioned beliefs.
To make the cowardice worse, the characters that end up standing in for believers are not the characters that have previously been portrayed as religious before, mainly Quinn. She has like two lines defending her belief. The characters who get the most screen time talking about faith are Rachel and Mercedes, who belong to faith groups that are, let’s face it, still oppressed minorities in the U.S. In case you don’t get that, Rachel makes a comment about faith traditions revolving around escaping slavery. This is, to say the least, putting your thumb on the scales. There was no real time given over to the big league churches in the U.S. that dominate the cultural discourse. Maybe they thought the only way to balance the logic being dished out by Kurt and Sue was to completely ignore Catholicism and the Christian right? Or maybe it was just pandering. The number of crocodile tears being squeezed out onscreen, I’d say pandering.
Plus, it’s just factually incorrect that the kids were forbidden to sing faith songs if they want. It’s just that Will couldn’t assign them. This seems like a small thing, but the myth that mean old atheists keep believing kids from professing faith in school is widespread, and it’s a lie. It doesn’t need “Glee” promoting it.
They need to simply avoid these kinds of topics. Frankly, they should in the interest of good taste, since that was completely stupid and tasteless and shameful, even if it was more fair-minded. But they couldn’t even be fair-minded, and the pandering made it exponentially worse. The ruthless attempts to make you cry were off-putting. Honestly, I think the only reason they did this episode was to give Mercedes a chance to belt out some gospel. Here’s a better idea: just incorporate the actress more into the show. She’s got the best voice on it. Just give her more parts to sing in general.
But they won’t, and I’m sick of waiting around to see if they will, so I’m done with “Glee”.
*Except for that shit with Artie wanting to be a football player. First of all, as Marc noted, this is illegal in 15 different ways, mostly because the chance of someone getting maimed or killed is near 100% if you actually put a guy in a wheelchair on the field. Second of all, it seems like all Artie-based story lines involve his anger at being in a wheelchair. Give the kid some more dimensions, for fuck’s sake. He wasn’t disabled yesterday. Why not show someone who has come to terms with it and is living a full, happy life in a wheelchair?
SFCararmia noted on the “Mad Men” blog Basket of Kisses that Don’s hat is a prominent symbol of his backsliding, his inability to get with the times.* Don and Roger both prominently and repeatedly wore hats in this episode, and there was a lot hat-oriented business going on. This is bad news.
So, wow, a lot happened. Before I get into this, let me pose this week’s discussion questions, just so I can get everything straight: Is SCDP going under completely? Is Pete going to bail early? Are Faye and Don finally done for? Is it a good thing that Peggy has decided to give Abe a chance—-and appears to be falling in love? What’s going to happen to Roger? Do you still think Joan didn’t get an abortion? Is there a light at the end of this tunnel? Is Don just backsliding, or is he blowing his chance at becoming a better version of himself?
On the last question, I think the door is open to believe that Don backslid but isn’t permanently done for. He backslid on the three major behaviors he’s trying to get better at: tomcatting, alcohol abuse, and using a female partner instead of just loving her. The last was probably the most traumatic for the audience at the end of the day. When Don treated Faye the same way he treated Betty—-your needs always come second to mine, you should abandon everything that’s important to you to serve me—-Faye didn’t put up with it. And then she quite realistically gave in. Matt Zoller Seitz said, “Between the psychology of the character and the politically delicate position of working women in the mid-‘60s, this turnabout felt believable to me.” The ugly truth is not much has changed in that department—-most women still keenly feel the expectation that they put their male partners first at all times, which is one major reason there’s still a sizeable wage gap between men and women (and one that gets worse when women marry).
But the infidelity was probably the most viscerally shocking. Megan’s pushiness in that scene was really driving a lot of the Facebook chatter about it—-so completely different than most of the women we see who let men take the lead. My sense is that her pushiness represents how much temptation it really is taking for Don to backslide. He only drank too much, pushed Faye around, and slept with a secretary when he literally sees the ship he built going down. Which doesn’t excuse him in any way. As Faye notes, he actually has no reason to panic. He won’t be unemployed for long. (It’s up in the air if he’s still independently wealthy, or if he just sunk all his cash into SCDP.) The huge difference between what this means for the characters onscreen in the 60s and what this would mean to people nowadays was keenly felt. Peggy seemed relaxed, even through much of the chaos. In part, this is because she’s in love and it’s making her happy. But another part of it is that she lives in a world where there are still jobs, and she’ll get one—-something we’re reminded of when Stan notes he was at an agency that went down (but he’s still working and is just fine).
The situation with Peggy and Abe was the one bright spot in the whole debacle. I joked that Peggy should snatch him up, because in 1965, a guy whose main flaw is a tendency to mansplain but who is genuinely good at heart is probably the best bet going. But it was even better than that. We earlier saw Peggy actually absorb what he was saying that was absolutely true in their conflict, even as she correctly resisted the way he was treating her like a prop in the Story of Abe. And now we see that he actually thought about things and is learning. In my mind, a willingness to learn and change is even more important than being someone who is right all the time. I have a good feeling about these kooky kids. I appreciated the way the whole business with Stan went. On one hand, it was another way the show drives home the routine cruelties that men could dish out to women without ever facing any consequences. But the way it resolved was actually kind of funny, and you get the feeling that Peggy is going to let her new love affair give her strength to deal with the assholes at work. Which makes sense—-any feminist can tell you that the good guys are the ones that give you hope when the assholes got you down.
Well, that episode was completely packed with iconic images of the 60s that are, above all other things, forward-looking and revolutionary: the Playboy Club, NASA, the Beatles. It was also all about female sexuality, though not as thoroughly as last week’s episode was about female power. You had commodification of female sexuality at the Playboy Club, another reminder of the unfair restraints on female reproductive capacity with Joan having another illegal abortion (we think, which I’ll get back to), and a symbol of an outpouring of female desire with the Beatles concert at Shea Stadium. Indeed, if you wanted to have fun with that concert, you could use it as a symbol of how women’s desires are bigger than the Beatles—-and you know the Beatles are bigger than Jesus—-because that concert was legendary for being basically unhearable over the screams of the girls in the audience. Since the writers are prone to using pleasingly explosive symbols of burgeoning feminism, I wouldn’t put it past them.
What was really strange was that all these signposts are optimistic, cheery ones dropped into an episode that was all about sadness and secrets. The Playboy Club fittingly served as a crossroads symbol, befitting Playboy’s mixed legacy of sexual liberation coupled with its anti-feminism that dated it rapidly. Yes, it’s a symbol of changing times, but there was that elaborate business with the key, a symbol of secrets and the keeping of appearances, very 50s concepts. The one character who take advantage of the times by trying to live openly instead of having a shadow life is quite literally beat down and violently forced to return to the 50s way of doing things. (Even though they tried to complicate Lane’s situation by imbuing his new relationship with creepiness by making her way younger and a Playboy bunny, in the end it was hard not to feel wildly sorry for him. He and his girlfriend love each other and they want to make a go of it, despite the obstacles, and it’s hard not to root for a couple like that. Also, he bought his son a big, goofy Mickey doll.) Everyone else is swamped by secrets. Don’s is the most obvious and troubling in the episode, but you also have Roger’s secret about Lucky Strike and Joan and Roger’s secret about the pregnancy and abortion. You also have three scenes where characters talk about honesty and not keeping secrets in an intimate situation, and in two of those, the people talking up the importance of openness and honesty have secrets they don’t reveal. Betty tells Henry that she doesn’t want secrets (but she keeps the one about Don’s identity) and Pete whines about the importance of honesty to Trudy (who still doesn’t know his secrets). Only Don comes clean, but ironically it’s because he’s the one in the best situation to do so. Pete would lose his marriage if he came clean, and frankly it’s not Betty’s place to rat on Don to her new husband. But Don once again tells the truth to a woman he’s involved with and once again he finds more sympathy than he probably expected. Each time he tells his secret, you’ll notice, he reveals a little more of it—-this time he admitted that he wasn’t just a victim of circumstance when his identity was switched with Don Draper’s.
This is why I’m coming around to the notion that the theory flying around that Joan lied about her abortion to Roger may turn out to be true. It goes against her pragmatic character, sure, but the last scene we hear her speak in before she talks to Roger, she straight up tells a lie, and so we’re reminded she’s capable of it. Her supposedly advanced age has been hammered at all season (irritating, because she’s only in her mid-30s, but shows how times have changed), and the whole discussion with both the sad mother at the clinic and with Roger were cryptic and demonstrated the Joan’s feelings about this are perhaps not as resolved as they were when she had abortions in the past. It suits the storyline, but part of me will be irritated if they have the fake out abortion. It’s like the “oh no, she lied about a rape!” storyline. It would be less of a problem if it wasn’t always the fucking storyline. On TV, most rapes turn out to be false accusations and all planned abortions result in someone changing her mind at the last minute. “Friday Night Lights” broke the protocol and actually showed a realistic storyline where a woman gets an abortion and that’s that, so I would hope “Mad Men” wouldn’t be that cowardly. Particularly since they’ve already done the “we want to discuss abortion without getting letters, so we’re going to reference past abortions or potential abortions, but never show someone affirmatively making the choice to go through with it” maneuver. But it’s tough—-you don’t want to say a story is bad simply because another story doesn’t get told.
Abortion or potential not-abortion aside, the real question mark of the episode is what’s going to happen next. As I noted at the top of the post, mixed signals were the order of the day. On one hand, SCDP lost two major accounts that are basically going to put them under. With Lane taking a leave to go home to his family, if only to hammer out the divorce, we got the standard issue tragically ironic statement that signals that shit is about to go down—-Lane saying their finances are in order, with a laugh emanating from the show’s Greek chorus Roger, in case the irony was lost on a single soul. Once that sort of thing is uttered, you know someone—-or in this case, something—-is meeting a tragic end.
Or is it? “Mad Men” knows how to throw curve balls, that’s for sure. And all this sadness and tragedy is contrasted with the cheery, hopeful aspects of the 60s that by and large did work out—-rock music, space exploration, and sexual liberation. It’s hard to feel bad when the last thing that actually happens, plot-wise, is that Don gets Sally’s tickets to the Beatles. Of course, that was undercut by an alarming shot of Don leering at his temporary secretary, hinting that he may backslide from his new found ability to make happy, responsible choices. Still, I’m entranced by the image of Don Draper standing in a stadium full of young women letting lose their adolescent sexual energy by screaming their heads off in such a way that it’s hard not to think of a bacchanalian frenzy. Not that I think he’s going to be a lech about it—-he’s generally sure to make sure his eyes are firmly trained on women who are of age—-but he’s a clever man. Exposure to such an unusual situation is exactly the sort of thing that could get his creative juices flowing.
If he can keep his personal life on track, that is.
What do you think about what is a very ambiguous episode? Is Joan still pregnant? Is Don going to stop running and admit he’s Dick Whitman? Is SCDP done for? Is Roger done for? (His stress levels are pushing him to gobble heart pills.) Is Trudy going to find out Pete’s secret? What the fuck was Trudy wearing?
Quadmoniker didn’t like Ida Blankenship’s death, suggesting it was a cheap shot to serve as the show’s conflict. I suppose it’s going to surprise no one to say that I disagree. Not with the general principle, of course, but I don’t think the death really served as a conflict point. If anything, it was like the vending machine bit in last week’s episode—-a comic subplot that, as comic subplots are supposed to do, echoed the larger themes of the episode and the season while providing laughs. I know it was a dark piece of comedy, but it was nonetheless played for laughs. Ida Blankenship died how she lived (on the show): as comic relief. Sadly, I fear that the end of Blankenship will become a pivot for the show, like the birth episode last season was: an idle moment of life happening before shit hits the fan. We’ll see.
If Blankenship’s death was a comic subplot, the question is, what purpose did it serve? Well, I think that’s obvious in an episode that focused on four—-count ‘em, four!—-important female characters who have, for various reasons, found themselves stepping on a path that is different than the narrow one prescribed for women at the time. The point of the episode is that stepping off the beaten path isn’t easy, especially when you feel alone. That’s the reason the final shot was on the three women in the elevator, staring into different directions and not speaking. Their pain, their lovesickness, their confusion—-all this would be relieved if they actually turned to each other, but they don’t. In case you don’t get what’s stopping them, you have Peggy’s sexy if overbearing new love interest naming it for you. The idea of a “civil rights march” for women still seems ridiculous. They gather around in horror and awe as Sally Draper throws a massive temper tantrum because she doesn’t want to do as she’s told. But haven’t Joan, Peggy, and Faye all thrown temper tantrums of their own? They don’t want to go live with sad Stepford families in the suburbs. They want to live in the city! But because they have no community or marches or leaders naming their problem, they just stare into space, wondering why they can’t resolve these internal conflicts between what they’re supposed to want and what they do want.
Which brings me to Ida Blankenship. I think the initial read is that Blankenship’s death makes everyone sad because they feel like she didn’t really have a good life. Like Roger said, she died how she lived, answering other people’s phone calls. (The indifference of the Young Turks only makes the concerns of the older people more poignant.) The women might worry that their unusual paths in life that lead them to be standing in an elevator at their age instead of out in the suburbs means that they’re going to die old and alone, like they think Blankenship did. But then we have the scene with Bert, who we’ve come to understand was involved with Ida. In fact, before she dies, you get a hint that they’re basically an old married couple, doing crosswords together. I turned to Marc and said, “Actually, I think Blankenship died exactly how most of us kind of hope we do—-with little pain after spending some time with the person we love the best in the whole world. And doing something, instead of just being idle and completely forgotten in a home somewhere.” Dying at your desk is mostly horrifying because it’s considered undignified, but the only reason it’s considered undignified is that it’s such a massive pain in the ass to other people. But what I got from Bert’s line about how she was an astronaut was that we shouldn’t cry for Ms. Blankenship. Her life may not have followed the prescribed path for women, but then again, who wants that when you can be an astronaut?
The real point of conflict in the episode was Sally Draper’s temper tantrum. I want to point to the way, however, that it’s paralleled to Blankenship’s death. They even go down the same hallway path from Don’s door to the front door when their inconvenient death/tantrums disrupt the flow of the office. A very old and a very young woman causing trouble—-a harbinger for the trouble that mass numbers of women in the prime of their lives are just about to cause.
Which leads me to the painful but realistic squabble between Peggy and Abe in what was supposed to be their first date through ambush. I don’t think I have to spell out why both of them made good points but also screwed up badly because they have blinders on. Peggy doesn’t want to examine too closely her complicity with racism, and she gets all hepped up on rationalization through the Oppression Olympics. Abe hasn’t even thought about how sexism is a massive problem, for basically the same reason—-he’s complicit with it because he benefits. (Which I think was the point of Peggy’s mealy-mouthed attempts to broach the issue of the client’s racist policies. She wants to throw that out there, so that when it gets rejected she can say she tried without paying any real price in terms of loss of business. She gets a feel good moment, but she still retains all the benefits of complicity with racism.) He projects all his desires on Peggy and then is completely confused when she keeps acting like a subjective human being with a mind of her own. What I do want to point out is that in their battle over who has it worse—-black people or women?—-they basically ignore the fact that half of black people are women, a fact that’s ignored precisely because it destabilizes the parameters of the conflict and calls into question why people should even get into this space where they’re squabbling over scraps instead of pulling a Sally and demanding it all. And if we didn’t get the point about who is being ignored in this “black people vs. women” squabble, Don actually utters the line, “Where’s Carla?” when he sees his daughter (a 10-year-old symbol of white feminism) standing in his office, making demands.
What seems on its surface to be even remotely simplistic, politically speaking, on “Mad Men” often turns incredibly complex if you look a little closer.
It’s painful for viewers to see the three adult women that are the focus of this episode fail over and over again to really take control of their lives and own their desires. I saw more than one person on these here internets moan that even Faye can’t just feel good about living her life by her own rules, despite being a spitfire. But I think the episode did a bang-up job of showing how constrained the views of women really were at the time, and how much that would weigh on individual women trying to find their way. I don’t think, for instance, that Don was actually trying to test Faye in any way when he foisted Sally on her. He just assumed that women know what to do with children. I don’t think he’s even that invested in that stereotype; he just never once had cause to question it in his whole life. So why should we think that in an environment like that, where there was literally no space whatsoever to talk about the woman who doesn’t have a maternal instinct, that Faye would be able to feel confident about herself despite what was definitely contextualized as a massive, even dehumanizing lack? I bet her entire education and career in psychology was dominated by discussion of how all women are fulfilled by motherhood, that this is the apex of female fulfillment. No wonder she feels like a freak.
And that’s the same story for all three women we see in the final shot. Their faces tell it all: they’re so thwarted from their own desires by social expectations that they mainly feel confusion and distress. But I was even more intrigued by the shot where they all stood in horror over Sally as she threw her tantrum. One thing you can say for sure about Sally is she knows what she wants and she’s willing to work towards her goals, even if it inconveniences everyone around her. In the final shot, I suspect each woman staring off into space and thinking about how much they want in life is wishing they could grab a little more of that Sally Draper moxie.
What did you think about the episode? Did you want to hide in the couch cushions when Abe and Peggy got into it like I did? Frankly, every time Abe walked onscreen, I hid in the couch cushions, since conflicts of the most uncomfortable sort always arose. What do you think of the Roger/Joan story line? I love the direction, by the way. Notice how his office and clothes are all gray, black, and white, and then Joan walks into his office and she’s all bright colors.
I guess I’m just going to have to give up and call these “Mad Men Tuesdays”. Sorry.
My ambivalence about the “inflict your character with alcoholism and/or cancer” type of storyline this season is receding. It seems that they’re not going there with the quiet-music-character-humbly-enters-AA-hat-in-hand-now-everything-is-okay cliche that makes me want to scratch my eyes out. As I noted to Marc, Don isn’t a joiner, and I don’t think he’s a believer. They hat tipped AA for its champions with Freddy. I think they now feel free to look at the situation while avoiding cliches. With that in mind, I appreciated the detail work involved in showing Don cutting back on his drinking. He’s sipping his liquor. He’s going with wine or beer over hard liquor. He’s pouring smaller drinks. Most importantly, he’s paying attention to when the alcohol brings with it a numbing effect that keeps the world shut out, and he’s choosing to scale back even more when that happens.
That said, I want to to talk about Joan first and then get back to Don. Marc made the observation that the Don at the beginning of the episode is dressed very 1960 in a sea of people dressed 1965. By the end of the episode, Don has a 1965 look that he’s rocking. He’s not going to be yesterday’s news. But Joan doesn’t have that choice, and I think the quiet tragedy of her story was the bleakness that kept this episode from really being a note of pure optimism.
Joan’s conflict with the Young Turks in the office immediately reminded me of something I read years ago that made me realize exactly what kind of misogyny second wave feminists were up against, which in turn made me realize that “Mad Men” is hardly an exaggeration. I suspect the writers had this in mind, too—-an interview the Beatles gave to Playboy in 1965.
Paul: Some of those American girls have been great.
John: Like Joan Baez.
Paul: Joan Baez is good, yeah, very good.
John: She’s the only one I like.
George: And Jayne Mansfield. Playboy made her.
Paul: Actually, she’s a clot.
Ringo: Says Paul, the god of the Beatles.
Paul: I didn’t mean it, Beatle people! Actually, I haven’t even met her. But you won’t print that anyway, of course, because Playboy is very pro-Mansfield. They think she’s a rave. But she really is an old bag.
The praise of Joan Baez is condescending, but what really is upsetting is the way that Paul just dismisses Jayne Mansfield completely. The implication—-beyond just her actual age—-is that the girl who can’t help it is completely passe because her sex appeal isn’t what’s hip anymore. And with that, it was basically over for Mansfield. Some sexist little fuck who’s still wet behind the ears declared her an “old bag”, and at least according to this biography, that was that for Mansfield’s career as a Playboy model. It certainly was a symbol of the times. A little googling shows that Paul’s contempt for Mansfield seems to have been really strong, since the band took the time to meet the actress, but Paul didn’t even show up.
In other words, you can think you’re a big deal, but they can still draw a picture. For the young guys in the office, but especially for Joey, the fact that Joan keeps insisting that she matters, even though she’s over 30 and doesn’t have a fashionable body anymore, just strikes them as preposterous. The worst part is that you read this Playboy interview, and you really get the impression that women’s bodies and women themselves matter mostly to these young guys as tokens with which to communicate with other men. Paul McCartney didn’t have a vendetta against Jayne Mansfield because she personally pissed him off, I’m sure. Notice who he’s really swiping at—-Playboy for being so old and out of touch with their love of buxom blondes. Swiping at Mansfield is a way of sneering at the notion that he had to pay his dues and respect his elders. He’s here to toss them out and conquer the world, and she’s just a symbol of the old school that has to disappear completely before he’s satisfied.
Sorry this is yet another Tuesday. Holiday, you know. Also, spoilers!
Let me state up front that I don’t like ghost images. I don’t like the cute “is she or isn’t she real?” implications. I don’t like the ham-fisted symbolism of them. I don’t like the self-centered fantasies that ghosts would bother to haunt the living. Don’s journey was well-enough conveyed by the other events of the episode. I really wish they hadn’t included the Anna fantasy, especially since I get the strong feeling that Don is not exactly a believer. The ghost thing is the dumbest move I’ve ever seen the folks at “Mad Men” make.
However, the fact that Anna was carrying a Samonsite was funny enough that it made me forgive them just a little.
The episode was kind of a strange one, because the actual events of it were incredibly depressing, but the symbolism that pulsed throughout the episode was not. Two major symbols: suitcases and the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston fight. The Ali-Liston fight was possibly my favorite aspect of the episode, because it was clearly a symbol of the new tossing out the old—-swiftly but controversially—-but it was played without flashing lights or big signs. The young people are drawn to Ali (and Joe Namath), but all the old, out-of-it men stand by Liston. And when Liston loses, they refuse to believe there wasn’t a fix.
In other words, they want their country back!
Of course, it’s a credit to the writers that Don complaining that Ali is a loudmouth had a double meaning. It not only hinted at the generational tensions in play, but it also touched on one of the other big themes of the show, which is Don’s unwillingness to open up even a little bit to basically anyone. His motto of doing and not saying is clearly not serving him well. His belief that these two things are mutually exclusive is proven quite decisively wrong by Ali’s win. And so while watching him act like an idiot and an asshole and a thoughtless piece of shit was hard, I think there’s reason to hope that things might be turning a corner for Don. Old Don, when asked about the war, just refused to say anything about it. New Don confesses he saw men die and that hurt him. Indeed, the quiet, unspoken impact the wars had on the mental health of these men has always been quietly touched upon on the show, but lately it’s been roaring to the forefront. Roger losing his shit over the Japanese businessmen. Duck drunkenly freaking out on Don, threatening to kill him by suggesting that he killed 17 men in Okinawa. And for Don, the boundaries between Dick Whitman and Don Draper are beginning to fade.
Old Don also wouldn’t have cried in front of Peggy. Old Don pretended to the New York world that Anna Draper didn’t exist. New Don has her picture on his desk and tells Peggy a little bit about her. It seems small to us, but to him, it’s a revelation.
Sorry that “Mad Men” blogging is late yet again. We were traveling to El Paso, where it’s still 1996 in many ways (especially according to the music in the bowling alley), and internet access was spotty, if available at all. I didn’t even get to see the show until last night! So, it’s yet another Tuesday. Hopefully, next week, things will be back on schedule.
As I’ve noted before, I’m wary of alcoholism as a plot device in the same way I don’t love inflicting any kind of horrible disease on a character to raise the stakes. I don’t mind having characters that are alcoholics, just if that’s being used as a cheap plot device. I feel, on “Mad Men”, that we had alcoholic characters all along, but it was played with a bit of subtlety. Now, we’ve had another episode about how Don has gone way past “functional alcoholic” and deep into “blacking out and losing entire weekends” territory. Alcoholism is an easy card for drama writers to play, but it rarely means much onscreen besides a stern message about the evils of excess and the horrors of addiction, both of which amount most often to as much as saying, “Cancer sux.” Are the writers of “Mad Men” going to give us more than that?
So far, I’m still feeling good about this storyline, for a couple of reasons. One is the usual ability of the “Mad Men” writers to take a done-to-death topic (like, say, “The 60s were a time of tremendous social change!”) and breathing new life into it, often by employing a heavy dose of bluntness that usually makes most writers fearful they’ll scare off the audience. And they usually do a good job of making the shocking stuff onscreen mean something, something more than, “Would you look at that?” And so far, we’re getting that with the alcoholism storyline.
Don’s low points aren’t being rendered in quite the same cliched terms that you usually get. He’s not screaming and throwing things, getting into fights, or getting in accidents. His personality doesn’t change, but he just becomes less inhibited when he’s drunk. At the end of the episode, you get the impression that the biggest losses are his ability to control his situation and his mental capacities. We discover that, since he’s really been hitting the sauce, he’s basically not had a really good idea since they started SCDP. On the contrary, his big Clio-winning coup was actually created by Peggy, who gets no credit for her work. And worse, Don gets wasted and steals a crap idea from a crap applicant that he then has to hire.
Which leads me to my biggest question about the comic parallels drawn in this episode. We’re led to believe that Don basically used Roger’s alcoholism, albeit in a more crafty way, to get a job. And Danny stumbles into this job because of Don’s alcoholism, though he doesn’t actually do anything to make that happen. So, what are we to make of this? We’re led to believe that Don deserved the job he got, that he was entitled to exploit Roger a little because the Rogers of the world don’t just let the working class Dons of the world in the door. Roger didn’t even look at his work! But there’s no reason to think Danny actually deserves the job. In most ways, he’s the opposite of Don—-he’s a hack who is using his connections to get in the door, instead of a talented person who has to use cunning. They’re not the same at all, really. So why the parallels? To draw attention to how useless Don has become? Is Danny a symbol of the mediocrity Don has invited into his life by getting wasted every night?
Entitled hacks were a real theme of the show, which I enjoyed. The writers took a swipe at the very kind of writing I criticize at top, which is to be shocking for its own sake. The new art director is pretty much idea-free, but he gets away with it by adopting the persona of a shocking, belligerent artist who is constrained by stupid middle class mores inflicted on him by a sex-withholding matriarchy. He’s simply ahead of his time, of course—-born a couple decades later and he could go on to found American Apparel and then run it into the ground. As usual when something on the show is as over the top as this, there’s a conflict. It seems to buck the norms of restraint that we expect on a critically acclaimed show like this, but on the flip side, to be less than over the top is to sacrifice accuracy. Douchebags like that are, in the real world, like a million times worse. Probably more so in the 60s.
This is why we can't have nice things (via Atrios):
I’ve been holding off on talking about “The Walking Dead” until after the season finale, because it’s a somewhat slow-moving show and I think it needs to be assessed in a bigger chunk than one episode at a time. Also, I feel like they got off to a shaky start in some respects—-
As someone who thinks pop culture actually matters, even I have to say that the winner on “Dancing With The Stars” has no larger importance, 
Spoilers.
There are a lot of questions after Sunday’s episode of “Mad Men”: Will Don’s gambit work? What’s going to happen to SCDP, especially with Bert gone? What’s going to happen with Faye and Don? What about Megan and Don? Is it a little “Forrest Gump” to show Midge again, but this time as a drug addict? Is Pete going to regret sticking by SCDP? Will the ACS account amount to much? What’s Sally going to do now? What about Betty?
As you can probably tell from 
Sorry I didn’t post yesterday; the site’s been screwed up. It still is, but apparently people are reading it and I can write, so I’m going to throw something up quickly. 
Spoilers.
I guess I’m just going to have to give up and call these “Mad Men Tuesdays”. Sorry. 
Sorry this is yet another Tuesday. Holiday, you know. Also, spoilers!