[The next in our continuing multi-authored series of posts on the fourth season of Mad Men, posted prior to the publication of Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s by Duke University Press. This week’s guest blogger is Sandy Camargo, a Lecturer in English and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies.]"CURE FOR THE COMMON..."
Written by Sandy Camargo (English/Media & Cinema Studies)
While always metatextual, this week’s episode of Mad Men (Season 4, Episode 6, “Waldorf Stories”) made its metatextuality explicit in several ways. Broadcast on the very same evening that the show received its third consecutive Emmy for Best Drama Series, the narrative of this week’s episode centered on the ceremony of the Clio Awards for best TV commercial. As Don, Roger, Joan, and Pete celebrated their victory, the Emmys won by Mad Men were celebrated by AMC during two of the commercial breaks.
During the second commercial break, Breyers aired a faux-Mad Men commercial for their ice cream. The mise-en-scène of the commercial duplicated the décor and wardrobe of the show, and the script parodied the kind of off-the-top-of-the-head creativity that was parodied in the episode itself, through Don’s drunken attempts to come up with a new slogan for Life cereal, and Stan’s looking at the pictures in Playboy to liberate his creative “juices.” This commercial is part of a new deal with Unilever to use Mad Men imagery and narrative situations to market a range of their products. Even the appearance of John Aniston, Jennifer’s father, as the emcee of the Clio awards offered a metatextual reference to the television genre most directly linked to advertising—the soap opera—since John Aniston played a villain on Days of Our Lives from 1987 until 2010.
In his classic 1974 study Television, Raymond Williams introduced the idea of flow as an important complication in the interpretation of television texts. As an Englishman unfamiliar with commercial TV, having grown up with the commercial-free BBC, Williams reported having quite a difficult time decoding the TV programs he watched in his hotel room during his first visit to the United States. The textual boundaries that we take for granted—between show and commercial, between commercial and promotional announcements for films and other TV shows, between the show and news bulletins—didn’t exist for Williams. Mad Men’s use of the metatextual references I’ve described complicates flow as Williams understood it, blurring the lines between elements that remain discrete in the majority of TV series.
Thinking of the show as a continuous text encouraged me to pay special attention to the “Previously on Mad Men” segment that starts every episode. Since the story world of the show is so rich and so much has happened to these characters I wanted to see which specific parts of the narrative thus far the writers had chosen to foreground this week. I was also curious to see how the format used, the motifs introduced, and the actions foregrounded in this segment might shape a reading of the “real” episode.
In this week’s “Previously” segment, we first see Don and the Advertising Age reporter who asked the “Who is Don Draper?” question that previous posts by Kaganovsky and Goodlad have seen as a kind of umbrella-idea, not only for this season but for the whole series. But the reporter this week reminds us of the earlier problems surrounding the campaign for Glo-Coat. We also are reminded about Pete’s rivalry with Ken; Don’s rivalry with Ted; the tension between Don and Betty over the children; Don chatting up Faye in the kitchen at SCDP; Roger saying that it was he who found Don and hired him; and, finally, Don explaining to Peggy why he is hard on her.
Each of these seven references to previous episodes ends with an unreturned conversational volley, an unanswered question or a comment un-commented-upon. This conversational gap is a typical device used in episodic TV to encourage viewers to keep watching, since they will want to hear the answer or the response, even if the action and reaction are interrupted by a commercial break. Moreover, the fact that the modality that directs viewer attention is sound rather than image embodies one of the tenets of classic TV criticism: that a key distinction between cinema and TV is the dominance of sound, since the visual habit that structures TV viewing is seen as the glance rather than the gaze of film.
Used in the “Previously” segment, of course, since these are fragments clipped from past episodes, and their conclusions will not recur in the current narrative, this conventional narrative tactic is deconstructed, drained of its critical force.
Don appears in five of the actions included in “Previously,” but only speaks in three, each time to a woman. When Betty scolds him for leaving the children with a sitter, whom both she and Don use as a scapegoat when Sally cuts her hair, Don fires back, “Because you’re so good with them?” (As a side note, Betty Draper was linked with Joan Crawford and Medea as “worst mothers ever” in this week’s Entertainment Weekly “Bullseye”—a continuing trend for the character’s popular reception.
The second time that Don speaks is to Faye, though the editors cut the conversation after she admits that she isn’t really married. Of course, this extract gives an inaccurate representation of their conversation by cutting it off at this point. Don’s being left apparently speechless by Faye’s revelation prepares us for his lack of success with her later in this week’s episode.
The third time Don speaks is to Peggy, from the Season 3 finale (“Shut the Door, Have A Seat”), which earned a writer’s Emmy on Sunday. He says he’s been too hard on her “only because I think I see you as an extension of myself.” In a way, it’s to this idea—of weak ego-boundaries in Don’s relations with women—that each of these vignettes refers.
We see this desire for connection with women throughout this week’s episode: Don’s holding hands with Joan at the awards ceremony and kissing her after the announcement that Glo-Coat has won; his moves on Faye and the jingle writer’s moves on him at the Pen and Pencil; his bedding Doris (which may not count because he used his “Dick” persona, to borrow the pun that Mad Men itself exploits). Despite the comment in the “Previously” segment that he sees Peggy as an extension of himself, his several conversations with Peggy are full of tension and largely unpleasant for both of them, perhaps because Peggy is continually desexualized, by herself and by the men she works with.The only male with whom Don has a similar connection in this episode is Roger. While Mad Men has used flashbacks in the past, the flashbacks in this episode are unusual because they are Roger’s memories, not Don’s. Like the women that Don beds, Roger is anxious about being used and discarded. He feels the need to remind Don that he should be grateful to him. Indeed Don does owe Roger much for hiring him, though, as we have seen over four seasons, that debt has been repaid many times.
The narrative of this episode opens with Don and Peggy interviewing a candidate for an internship, Danny Siegel, a young poseur and cousin of Jane Sterling, foisted on them by Roger. Not only is the young man’s creativity limited to labeling all products “a cure for the common [chair, beer, etc.],” he is also a plagiarist, putting the ads created by other agencies into his portfolio. But Don is forced to hire Danny, not because he is related to Roger’s wife, but because Don has stolen his only idea and sold it to Life cereal as “a cure for the common breakfast.” Roger’s flashbacks of meeting Don and hiring him (and could Danny and Donny be any closer?) invite us not only to compare the dashing young Don to the awkward Danny, to the former’s advantage, but also to compare Roger as recruiter, to Don’s great disadvantage.
The flashbacks amplify our understanding of Roger in a more intimate way as well. According to Matthew Weiner, the character of Roger Sterling was originally conceived as “the office grown-up.” In this episode, however, Roger is explicitly called a child by Lane and spends a good part of the episode reliving his childhood.
While Roger’s hiring of Don seems to have come about as a result of Roger’s having had too much to drink before lunch, just as Don’s excessive drinking at the Clio awards and Peggy’s chiding lead to Don having to hire Danny, Roger sees it through because he responds to Don’s sincerity. Roger himself poignantly says that his one great talent, the ability that sums up his career, is finding men like Don. This is the kind of statement that men make when they are feeling their age and worry that life is passing them by and that their legacy is smaller than they had hoped. Bracketing Roger in the present with all that Roger was in the past, as represented in the flashbacks with Don and Joan, emphasizes this poignancy and might be a palliative to Roger’s distasteful behavior with the men from Honda in last week’s episode.
The images that I chose to accompany this post foreground the idea of reflection, of appearance and reality. Such images, where one can see the character and his or her reflection simultaneously, suggest a divided self. Some divisions in the self may be conscious: the character is consciously projecting a false front, as Don does, in the image we see here.
In the fur shop, Roger is reflected in the mirror, but not Don, suggesting that, at this moment, Don is behaving more authentically and sincerely, a nice contrast with the image in Don’s room later in the episode. Roger’s actually trying on the fur feminizes him, momentarily giving Don the upper hand, an idea that conforms to the conversational pattern in the “Previously” segment, in which Don only spoke to women.
Other mirror shots may represent a self in conflict between possible alternatives. The final mirror shot is thus the richest because both Joan and Roger are in it, and it’s anybody’s guess as to whose wishes and dreams are being projected in that mirror. This revisiting of their affair brackets Roger’s revisiting his chance meeting with Don: a time when his relationships with both of these people ratified Roger as the master of his universe. His making Don thank him before he gives Don back the Clio award that the boozing Don has carelessly left behind, and Joan’s holding hands with Don under the table at the awards ceremony both testify to the passage of that earlier time.Joan is already holding hands with Roger when Don reaches down and takes her other hand, situating her as a contested prize. The shot under the table as Don makes his move suggests that this gesture is underhanded and, while not an attack on Roger, at least could be seen as ignoring him. Roger’s fixation on his childhood in dictating his memoir demonstrates Don’s famous point about the pain of remembering the past (Season 1, Episode 13, “The Wheel”). It’s painful, but only when it’s compared to the present.
To briefly return to the “Who is Don Draper?” motif: we do have privilege here. Unlike some others in his life, unless Don is still holding out on us, and he might be, we know who he is. The question isn’t who he is, but whether he can hold his fragmented self together. So, before we leave the hall of mirrors, there is a third possible decoding of such images. The use of the mirror in such compositions may be a visual representation of a character having a psychotic break. We see Don in the mirror after his two-day bender, of which he can remember very little. The use of the lighting cues to represent a transition from night to day leads us to think that the arm of the woman lying next to him belongs to the jingle writer he picked up at the Pen and Pencil. It is a shock to us, as it is to Don, that the woman is a waitress he has no recollection of having met. This moment of empathy, created by this narrative aporia, is a gesture toward encouraging us not to judge Don too harshly in this instance.