I’m stuck trying to figure out what that smile - then quick turn away and frown thing meant when the prison guard and Don passed in the hallway.

Was it “Oh there’s that guy I shared WAY TOO MUCH with! Shit!”
or
“Hey I was wrong about that guy - he’s kind of an asshole.”?
Or something else!
I’ve watched an re-watched those few seconds about 6 times now and I still am not getting it.

What do you think Amanda?

“I’m interested in seeing more of how Madison Avenue processed the political and cultural changes going on out in the world, and then fed them back to the people to create the feedback loop between culture and counterculture that we all know today.”

Amanda, Tom Frank (of What’s the Matter with Kansas? fame) tells just this story in his first book, The Conquest of Cool:
http://tinyurl.com/ny7p4j

I highly recommend it.

Danica, the prison guard said he’d be a better man now, turn over a new leaf.  Am I mistaken or did I see him with a black eye?  So maybe he was embarrassed that he didn’t change at all, and the “moral” (if any) of the story is that men don’t have to change when they become fathers.

I did note how separated and at loose ends the men do feel from their wives who are giving birth.  When the prison guard talked about how he’d feel if his wife died, even admitted how he’d hate the baby, Don gave him some line about how nothing is so fearful as it is in our own minds.  So maybe he was ashamed that he showed emotion at all, that he wasn’t the stoic winner type Don projects as.

Glad Betty got her way in naming the baby.

Nice repeat of the idea that Black people don’t all know each other, like the conversation between Granpa Gene and the maid.

Kathy, I referenced that book in my article!  I suspect that book was a big inspiration for the show.

I think that it’s interesting how Pete, who has always been very difficult to like, seems to slowly be shaping up to be much more modern in his thinking than nearly anyone else on the show.  I’m very interested in seeing where they go with that.

With the ending scene with Betty and the baby, I think it’s definitely critical that when she pauses and then soldiers on, the dream fog music plays. I think it underlines how the repetition of the process has become entirely a rote routine devoid of her involvement and I think there was also something to how much she regressed into childhood both in the dream sequence and going to the delivery room.

The scenes with the guard were awkward. I think I missed a lot of the nuance going on in there, I got the impotence, the desire for rebirth, the notion of what it is to be a man, the misreading of Don, and some hints to both inmate abuse and spousal abuse, but I think there was a heck of a lot more there that I was missing.

It was also interesting how they’re depicting the evolution of the corporation from the old long-term product-focus model to the screw-the-worker-the-next-quarter-is-the-only-quarter model that exists today and how that lends itself really naturally to increasing the inequalities. It definitely seemed like Don would have been open to sneaking something under the table in the old model, but that the new model gives him the excuse to completely dismiss her. I wonder though if he isn’t going to have to cave in in the next episode just to keep her on the team.

Also, the whole Karl Marx statement by Kinsey seemed to be very similar to the neocons, I wonder if this is some hint to the number of former socialist radicals who ended up being warmongering neocons in old age.

I was wondering if anyone had a better sound system and knows what the freedom ride news stories that were playing in the background were saying. I suspected they were just big hints to the March on Washington that will probably be occurring in the next episode or two, but I couldn’t tell if they were referencing a bigger event.

I think another big theme was the oppressed making a statement of impatience with their oppressors. Hollis and Peggy are still browbeaten in their roles, but both make very “politically dangerous” statements hinting at a change to the natural order and seem to be emboldened by the increasing changes to make those statements without too much fear.

I also find it interesting how Pete is all about the integration idea in the epic fail meeting, but that the entire rich northern world he inhabits has been scrubbed clean of most black people to the point that he had to practically assault Hollis just to get a black perspective. It really underlines how after integration there has been a long held battle just trying to get social integration to also occur with all the whites going out of their way to avoid others.

And I realize I’m now practically writing a novel, but does anyone have a theory on the dream sequence with Betty’s parents. Especially the warning Betty’s mom gives about not speaking up for yourself as she puts the bloody cloth on the black man’s neck? It seemed like a hint at what will be happening all this and next season with the silencing of black and liberal voices by assassination but that seemed a little too obvious. Does anyone have a better theory?

I’m not sure Pete is all that modern in his thinking. He seems more motivated entirely by the emotions of a child as he’s a rich spoiled brat and the modernity is just that, a superficial desire to be in on something that he’s cluing in on. I mean, when you compare him to Kenneth, who is definitely being left behind by all of his same-age co-workers, he’s modern, but in general, he’s pretty archaic in his thought processes and he tends to bring decades of baggage to every attempt to be modern.

He definitely shows the archetype though of the pseudo-liberal though with the need to pat himself on the back with unearned lack of racism, while simultaneously trying to dominate Peggy and Hollis who he sees as uppity inferiors. I feel that Hollis only got out safe career-wise by Pete’s need to view himself as a good guy who with this short exchange did the equivalent of cure race relations.

I think he might be dawning though to the fact that he’s young enough that he should be on to the growing modernity, but is too married to the fictional past to really grasp it on a human level. I suspect that was also the hint in the big dance scene two episodes ago.

There are a couple of things they’re about five minutes away from in term of advertising history—the birth of the creative-only agency and the big move away from mass marketing (AKA target marketing). There were plot elements in this show that foreshadow those movements.

Something tells me Don’s about to pull a Jerry Maguire and start his own creative agency. If he’s smart, he’ll take Peggy with him. If the show’s writers are smart, they’ll make them competitors.

Roxanne-
I would suspect, considering the unavoidable potency of the metaphor that the truly huge shakeups on those scores will coincide with the months of fear where all the great men were shot.

Could be. The show is making an inherent argument, too, about how the acquisition of knowledge (television) shaped the era. So, I think the storyline about how African-Americans are buying Admiral TVs is more important than just a discovery about the potential of target marketing.

I think of Sally watching the monk burn. And how she’s curious about Medgar Evers. TV did that.

I remember when I was all, like, “Amanda, what do you think of ‘Mad Men,’” and you were all, like, “What’s ‘Mad Men’?”

It’s that combination of “respect and reflexive sexism” that’s so chilling in Don’s behavior with Peggy: he’s completely flip and dismissive of her concerns, no matter the proferred Scotch. Her secretary doesn’t respect Peggy, because Peggy only makes $71 more? We’ll get you a cheaper secretary; comparing Peggy’s request for a raise she not only deserves, but needs, to the minuteae of “paperclips.”

I don’t doubt that Duck’s wooing of Pete and Peggy has more to do with screwing Sterling Cooper (and Don) than his admiration for either of them: Duck even got their office politics wrong. Peggy maybe shouldn’t make that move, but I’d love to see Peggy go to Don from a position of strength: an offer from Grey for her services.

Pete’s hamhanded assault on Hollis for information, is apiece with his hamhanded client meeting with the Admiral people.

Unwilling to understand that Hollis resents being badgered with the idea that all negroes buy alike, being pumped by an overlord, Pete, who has no genuine interest in what Hollis thinks, but is desperate for an angle to save his own hide.

Exactly the opposite from the opening scene of Episode One of Mad Men: Don may be desperate for an angle, but he treats the black waiter as a person, with a genuine interest in why he smokes a particular brand, putting off the man’s racist boss in the process. Whereas Pete’s attitude seems to be threatening Hollis in his workplace, including stopping the elevator.

Pete, so desperate for an angle to save him, that he doesn’t pick up on the undercurrents in the client meeting, either. That the Admiral (middle-aged white) men are actually making opposite day statements—it’s not that they think negroes will want to buy something that whites do, but they fear whites won’t want to buy what negroes do. That makinng public Admiral negro interest will somehow devalue their product.

Roger is well aware of institutional racism: so much so that he sings it. He despises Pete for not understanding the power structure.

Whereas Lane, from a culture that hasn’t yet had to deal with it’s own negro problem, sees Pete as a seer in finding a new, under-advertised market.

Throw in Medgar Evars bleeding in Betty’s dream, induced by the drugs meant to make women forget their childbirth experience, and we have another brilliant Mad Men dramatic interweaving of the themes of racism and sexism.

Roxanne-

Put that way, I think of the parallels between the onset of TV and the onset of the internet.

I always thought before that the advent of television lead to the worsening of susceptibility to message that seems to plague the people sending the email forwards, but I wonder, if TV didn’t have a similar effect to the internet by suddenly making people viscerally aware of the bigger world out there and the interconnections there were. They already raised a note about Twilight Zone and Rod Serling was big on slipping things under the censorship radar even in his playhouse 90 days.

That would seem to be the case the writers are making this season with Sally’s connections and how critical the black tv thing was.

Or it might be some of both, considering the TV was where Madison Avenue really hit their gravy train in market manipulation.

Ah!

I knew I missed something big. I’ll admit that my civil rights history isn’t as strong as I’d like and I totally missed the connection of Medgar Evers. That also brings the englishman’s statements and Hollis’s angry retort in much sharper relief, especially as this is the beginning of the assassination campaign that will be lasting throughout this and perhaps the next season.

It’s also beyond time that I see Ghosts of Mississippi.

Thanks Judy.

or I should say one of the big two assassination campaigns, the other being in 1968.

Last week I noted that it seems that Peggy gets paid less than Paul for doing twice the work and holding the same title, and I wondered if she’d find the courage to ask for more.  Well, she did!  We know Peggy’s not going to sue Sterling Cooper, but the game changer is the job offer from Duck to work for Grey Advertising.

Peggy’s mistake, born of understandable inexperience and class background, is in not giving Don ammunition to demonstrate her value to Sterling Cooper. One never should justify a request for a raise simply by saying one needs the money, especially when the firm is in belt-tightening mode. If she had, say, Ken’s business savvy she would have told Don to think about how he’d be able to pick up another ultra-competent but underpaid female copywriter if were to have a better offer—not like women creatives are thick on the ground on Madison Ave in 1962.

That said, Pete’s epic failure to sell his idea of selling advertising in black-oriented publications and markets may not be completely due to his lack of people skills.  Pete suffers from a permanent case of being ahead of his time.

Which is another reason he’d be better off at Grey, at least as represented by the apparently revitalised Duck. Duck is off the bottle, having a lunchtime coffee instead of a martini, and making his way full ahead into the new world, wearing the turtleneck and jacket that’ll be in vogue for the next decade or so. He’s already casually using the Yiddish word “nosh,” while back at that horrible hospital Betty still prefers a potentially inebriated WASP doctor to the talented Jewish on-call ob-gyn.

This conflict between Pete, who is legitimately well-meaning but ignorant, and Roger Sterling, who isn’t even slightly well-meaning, was hinted at earlier in the season (most obviously when Pete was annoyed by the black face routine), but it blew up in the post-epic-fail meeting.

I’m not sure if it really blew up—Roger’s heart wasn’t particularly in the flogging, and he was more interested in putting on a show and indulging himself in the class privilege of being perfectly frank without suffering any real consequences. The comment about business often coming down to “I don’t like that guy” was nasty but dead-on, and the elevation of personality and politics over competence and performance is only going to get worse as the Human Resources Culture continues its forward march.

It was also interesting how they’re depicting the evolution of the corporation from the old long-term product-focus model to the screw-the-worker-the-next-quarter-is-the-only-quarter model that exists today and how that lends itself really naturally to increasing the inequalities.

I said something like that at the beginning of the season, in terms of the changing social compact in America. We also saw it last week in the “private profits, public risk” business approach of the jai alai idiot Ho-Ho. It was also implied in the way the layoffs decimated the firm.

I’m interested in seeing more of how Madison Avenue processed the political and cultural changes going on out in the world, and then fed them back to the people to create the feedback loop between culture and counterculture that we all know today.

The feedback can be virtuous (e.g. Uhuru on Star Trek) or, more likely, vicious—a ghetto-isation of “negro advertising” into magazines like Ebony and Jet. If Sterling-Cooper goes into that line, they’ll probably be selling Kools and Colt 45 malt liquor, patting themselves on the back for being “forward-looking.”

I’m stuck trying to figure out what that smile - then quick turn away and frown thing meant when the prison guard and Don passed in the hallway.

I was trying to figure that out, too. They were keeping it vague, but notice that there’s no baby in the guard’s wife’s lap as he wheels her down that bare, institutional-green, flourescent-lit hall. One way to read it is that they lost the baby after the breach birth, and the guard’s reaction shows he’s discovered that his supposedly sharp instincts were wrong—he knows what we already know about Don, that he’s not an honest man.

As always, the episode did have some internal consistency in its theme. This one was explicitly about being unable to see the reality in front of your eyes, and the capacity (aided by society, most especially Madison Ave) to delude yourself about it.

One last small example of that is seen with Paul: even after spouting off about Marxist economics, and despite having a black ex, Paul is still looking at race as a matter of fashion and culture—it’s all supply and demand and capitalist cycles until you bring the negroes up, then it’s “cities with great jazz musicians.” Lots of ways not to get it.

The whole episode was so dreamlike, that I’ve reached the conclusion that Don’s interaction with the guard happened in the fog of his imagination, and did not literally happen That would be one explanation of why the guard did not speak to Don later.  They never really talked much.  Near the beginning of their conversation, Don makes the odd comment that time has stopped.  Clearly, the guard is meant to portray Don’s conscience confronting him for being a shitty father.  He wants to do better,  takes a vow to do so,  and makes Don repeat out loud that he heard him.  Then he gently touches Don’s face.  This is not the interaction of two fathers-to -be in a waiting room.

Also, a great line:  Sally to Don, “Are you looking for a chick?”

Miss Farrell drunk dialling the Drapers’ house LOL.  This was an amazing episode.

laruab@17: i think you mean pete…

Kudos to all the commenters tonight!  Some of the best I’ve read about this episode.

Put that way, I think of the parallels between the onset of TV and the onset of the internet.

exact-a-mundo. that’s their point.

I thought Paul’s talk about Marx’s perceptiveness as an economic historian was a clever bit of foreshadowing about Pete’s suggestion to Admiral that they advertise to Negroes.  My understanding of Marx is that once a class has enough economic power, it has more say in the system (e.g., merchants in the feudal system).  You see it hit home when Pete explains to Roger “I suggested a way for [Admiral] to make more money.  Why would they object to that?”  Pete is willing to deal with Negroes, because that’s where some money is.

It’s not a perfect theory, especially when you compare Blacks to other groups in the twentieth century that went from outsiders to accepted (i.e., it wasn’t money that made the Civil Rights movement successful), but I think the juxtaposition of Marx and money with a heretofore disenfranchised group wasn’t coincidental.

16 Gracchus- I don’t know, I saw Kinsey’s reaction to be less about his obsession with black culture as a way to blunt the rather rude way Pete was regarding the knowledge about potential black buyers. He more successfully dodges having to be the educator to Pete in a way Hollis is unable to owing to Kinsey’s inherent privilege.

There is some similarities between the two though in that both are awash in privilege they refuse to examine on any hard level, but Kinsey at the end of the day likes black people and black culture whereas Pete wants as little contact as possible as an everyday thing. You can see that in the very different way Kinsey interacted with Hollis earlier on. Still unbelievably presumptive and tone-death, but a more friendly sort of dominance.

In some ways, they represent the two sides of the “cool” target market. Kinsey is obsessed with cool and living it and trying to find out what else is hip and incorporates it into his life when he can whereas Pete is interested in cool in the idea that he’s missing something other people are into and doesn’t want to be suddenly behind the times and so wants to engage in the minimum amount of cool to get by.

In a modern sense. Kinsey would be someone who was a college hippie and went to Woodstock cause it’s cool, while Pete would still go to school in a suit and spend the next decades bitter that he missed something big and feeling he needed to punish those hippies.

Clearly, the guard is meant to portray Don’s conscience confronting him for being a shitty father.  He wants to do better, takes a vow to do so, and makes Don repeat out loud that he heard him.  Then he gently touches Don’s face.  This is not the interaction of two fathers-to -be in a waiting room.

jackspratt, that was precisely my interpretation, too.  Don is a writer at heart, and as writers are wont to do, he passed the time by filling in the gaps of that scene, by imagining a narrative; it’s natural—and to be expected—that his imagination is fueled, in part, by his conscience.

One thing that was obvious in hindsight (from a series that doesn’t sugarcoat) but surprised me at the time was how creepy Betty’s labor was—routine shaving and enema, knocking Betty out with scopolamine.

I remember hearing stories about this sort of thing from my older female relatives. As apparently have the writers of Mad Men. (They must talk a lot to people who were the age of MM’s characters during the Kennedy Administration—they’d be in their 70s and 80s now.)

#18 jackspratt and #25 litbrit—I’ve read this interpretation at a few other places (like @ what’s alan watching where they deconstruct the scene cuts and editing looking for clues that we are viewing Don’s dream.) It intrigues me but I’m not convinced. I think we’re supposed to accept the encounter with the guard as reality. But it is anesthesized reality (substitute the Red Label for the scopolamine), inhibitions are relaxed, drunken bonds and promises are made - “I will be a better man”.  Then the next day, the fog lifts and Man is the same; Dennis senses he has promised too much, shown too much of himself and averts his eyes in embarrassment when he sees Don passing in the hall. It reminded me of the biblical fall of Adam, maybe because he substituted Don for God the night before. He was ashamed and looked away.
The scene was subtle, ambiguous and slightly unsettling. All the Mad Men qualities I respect!

I didn’t see any typical Mad Men clues that Don’s interaction with the guard was in any way a dream sequence.  I don’t get why this theory is floating around the internets.

Lots of great discussion here. Someone brought up Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool earlier and I think that book must have been an important one for the staff. Weiner has also talked about the influence of The Feminine Mystique on the show as well. I think what we’re seeing with Paul, Pete and Harry this season has been the influence of Nixonland on the show.

In Season 1, you loathed Pete, but found Harry to be the most softhearted and likable of the chipmunks. When Harry screwed up and had the one night stand with the secretary in Nixon vs. Kennedy and was duly punished by his wife you empathized with how his one drunken transgression had such consequences while rest of the men on the show could cheat with impunity. In Season 2, Harry started the TV department and found himself being taken under the wing of Bert Cooper, a staunch Republican devotee of Ayn Rand. Soon he was lecturing the others on how the top marginal tax rate was destroying the work incentive and generally acting more piggish in casting calls, enough that Peggy asked him to stop attending. We saw Harry and his wife attend what was presumably their first high society work function at Roger’s party and yet they were outcasts the whole night (orthogonians). They couldn’t even sit with Harry’s office & age appropriate peers (Pete and Kenneth) at dinner. Harry is the backlash vote that Nixon exploited in 68. Interesting that his initial fall from grace should have occured on the night of Nixon’s 1960 defeat.

Paul, on the other hand has been one of the shows reliably liberal voices in a very conservative atmosphere, however he’s pompous and arrogant, an Ivy League product who wears his liberal convictions more as a fashion statement than as a matter of principle (a Franklin). Paul may claim high ideals, but lacks the skill or courage to act appropriately on them. His crucible was to get on his high horse to tell off the MSG people instead of trying to work constructively to show them how they could market successfully the preservation of the old MSG and other NYC landmarks.

Pete is more interesting and maybe doesn’t fall into the Nixonland mold quite so much. He was born into the most priveleged of the priveleged, and yet he’s always shown himself to be ahead of his time. Even before the Admiral pitch, he saw the appeal of JFK when the rest of the SC staff wrote him off as a loser, he thought taking the psychological researchers advice to market smoking as a “death wish” and appealing to consumer;s rebellious side was a good idea. While his motives are not entirely pure, I don’t think his idea of courting African American dollars was purely opportunistic, otherwise he wouldn’t have reacted so viscerally to Roger’s performance. He clearly does not have any clue how to personally relate to the black people he sees every day, but then Pete has trouble relating to his cultural peers as well. Pete may have been born into the upper crust, but his father had pissed away the entire family fortune leaving him with nothing but an impressive family tree. From this perspective it’s easy to see why he would find no problem with letting African Americans move up the socio-economic ladder. For Pete privelege has been a mixed blessing at best, his birthright meaningless. Between his father’s death and Peggy’s revelation, he’s gone from irritation towards his wife to starting to realy on her for moral support and (seemingly as we havent seen enough of Trudy this season) treating her as more of a partner in their relationship. His story is perhaps the most fascinating to me on the show because I don’t know where exactly he’s going to end up on the other side of the decade. He has the brains, but he has a long way to go to be able to navigate the world as it is going to be.

I didn’t see any typical Mad Men clues that Don’s interaction with the guard was in any way a dream sequence.  I don’t get why this theory is floating around the internets.

I thought I noticed that the guard was rolling his wife out of the hospital sans baby and thought maybe it had died. If that’s what I saw and if Don noticed it too ...it might explain the non-verbals.

I don’t get why this theory is floating around the internets.

StellaTex, it’s not a theory, it’s just an interpretation of a scene in a television show!  A small number of people were struck by the episode’s overall theme of fog—of fugue states and the symbols and truths sometimes contained therein—and merely expressed their interpretation.  What is interesting now, in a meta sense, is the way a number of the majority of viewers who interpreted the scene in the literal sense feel threatened or undermined enough to jump on us and make sure we know we’re wrong.  It is theatre we’re talking about—art, if you like—and there is room for the possibility that the writers meant for this scene be open to interpretation: depending on the viewer or perceiver in question, the constructed line between reality and imagination would no longer be quite so impermeable.  As commenter less of me says above, the subtlety and ambiguity of the writing is what makes MM such wonderful, unique television.

@ #27 less of me and # 28 StellaTex

It truly doesn’t matter if it was a dream or not.  The guard represents Don’s conscience or inner voice.  The shadows of prison bars figured prominently throughout the episode.  Don may feel like a prison guard at work.  Roger had a fit when Don took off half a day and the inmates in the creative dept. didn’t do anything.  The guard warns Don not to bring that role home.  But at home, Don may feel like an inmate, trapped by the circumstances of his family.  That would be too bad, because he is not imprisoned by his family, but by male privilege.  The point has accurately been made thousands of times on this blog that male privilege is also bad for men.  It keeps them from being the people they would be happier being.  Don is becoming self aware, as evidenced by the baptism in the Pacific ocean and his understanding of Peggy’s talent.  But in human growth, he is right at the point of the new infant son that he has just helped bring into the world.  At least he has gotten started.

@ #30 Roxanne:  I originally thought that as well, but there was no medical staff with them and no suitcase, so the guard’s wife wasn’t being discharged yet.

Roxanne @30: I’m pretty sure Dennis and his wife are smiling before Dennis looks up and sees Don, so I doubt anything happened to the baby. They were probably just going down the hall to look in the nursery window.

I was trying to figure that out, too. They were keeping it vague, but notice that there’s no baby in the guard’s wife’s lap as he wheels her down that bare, institutional-green, flourescent-lit hall. One way to read it is that they lost the baby after the breach birth, and the guard’s reaction shows he’s discovered that his supposedly sharp instincts were wrong—he knows what we already know about Don, that he’s not an honest man.

True Gracchus. I was thinking that too- I kept on slowing it down and trying to see if there was anything going on with the guard or his wife physically - (like signs of physical abuse) I didn’t (or can’t make out on my TV ((not HD!!))) a black eye or anything like that (I know that all abuse is NOT physical so there’s probably some psychological stuff going on in that relationship no doubt). The only thing missing is the baby. I assumed that he’s wheeling her to a nursery or something since the baby isn’t there. Or, maybe, the guard is caught in a lie - there was no baby- or like you said that baby has died or has something seriously wrong perhaps…??
I don’t know how possibly that guard would have twigged on that Don is a dishonest guy- this is the first (and might be only) time that they’ve seen each other outside of the emotional waiting room.

So many questions!
Also - when the guard asks if Don in the waiting room if what his nightmare about Sing Sing looks like…. very interesting.
Hmm….

I think the prison guard was just ashamed of getting drunk and sentimental.  I’m sure at least some of us have had a passing experience with that emotion.

Excuse the following shameless suck-up to the host - (but I am new around here)

You deserve the props for the Prospect article, Amanda. (insert sound of sincere, non-ironical golf clap) Well done.

I think you’re correct about how the producers are working counter to the generally accepted mythos of the “Turbulent ‘60’s”.  Instead of great leaps forward, it’s the slow grind of evolution they are portraying.  Ya know, everyone says nothing happens!! on this show.

36-

I think that’s really key for younger audiences. My generation has always been beaten around whenever we protest for not being more like the 60s or not as good as the 60s or for trying and failing to be the 60s and the criticism is based on the myth that all it took was that one big protest and suddenly people everywhere were radically altering their behavior in sudden knowledge.

It’s worth remembering that the 60s were a time of a thousand cracks that just dragged forth the evolution. I suspect in a very different way, the 2000s have been a similar time that will again likely take a decade to see most of the cultural effects (most of the great “60s” media that shows the victories came out in the late 60s, early to mid 70s).