Spoilers!
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.