"PITCHING"
Written by Michael Bérubé (English, Penn State)
Well, that was an episode. Peggy breaks down and cries. Don breaks down and cries. Anna appears as a spirit with a suitcase. Peggy and Mark break up. Cooper has no balls. Duck drops his drawers, decks Don. And oh yes, Clay beats Liston. As Don says to Peggy, by way of explaining why he slept with Allison despite his “rules” about “work,” “people do things.” Where to start?
I’ll start where Sandy Camargo left us last week, with her post about the metatextuality of Mad Men. The Meta Mad Men were on full display in episode six (“Waldorf Stories”), of course, because of the Emmy/Clio awards and the Breyers ice cream ad. Episode seven, “The Suitcase,” is less extravagantly meta (though Hellmann’s Mayonnaise has picked up where Breyers left off), but perhaps makes the point all the more effectively: it’s all about the pitching, at every level.
But before we take the plunge, first let’s go back to “Waldorf Stories” for a moment, to the profoundly cringe-inducing pitch to the boys from Quaker Oats. Don’s impromptu taglines should be cited in academic committee meetings whenever people are flailing and just trying to make shit up on the fly (which is often): life ... the reason to get out of bed in the morning! Enjoy the rest of your life ... cereal! Yes, post-Clio Don is smashed, and his immediate reversion to Eager Don (the fur-selling Don we see in the flashbacks with Roger) is embarrassing. But the original “eat life by the bowlful” line, with the little kid and the big bowl and spoon, isn’t bad at all. Granted, it’s not nearly as good as the famous “Mikey Likes It,” and surely Weiner chose it for that reason: everyone and her brother associates Life with that ad, and rightly so. But if you compare the “bowlful” ad to what Life was actually doing back in the day, it’s frickin’ genius:
(Hat tip. Check out the 1967 ad, as well.) So I like the Life pitch. Kids will like the giant bowl of cereal. Moms will see it and get a twinge about how little their kid still is, even though they have to deal with life. Get those two together in a market and I think we’re gonna sell some cereal. Perhaps if Don weren’t so drunk, he could have worked the nostalgia angle the way he did for Kodak, masterfully, instead of burping and stumbling through it. But the idea itself is really pretty good. And the response from Quaker Oats? “It’s a little smart for regular folks.” The rejection recalls the Jantzen response (skin in a bikini ad, oh my!) and Conrad Hilton’s crazy-old-coot response to Don’s global-Hilton campaign (where’s the moon? I wanted the moon!). For anyone who has ever pitched a good idea to anyone, in any business (including academe? oh, absolutely), moments like these are infuriating. How much more infuriating it is that the slogan they like is the tired, predictable one Don stole from Danny. “A home run,” indeed. “That dog will hunt.” The meeting ends as a kind of class reunion of sales clichés, Don thinks he’s saved the day again, and off we go into the lost weekend. My point is not that I identified with Don for a moment, even as I cringed at his rapid-fire, erratic, weak-sauce slogan pitches; my point is that anyone who’s ever had a reasonably good idea shot down by “it’s a little smart for regular folks” should be identifying with Don at that moment. And much of the ambivalence of Mad Men toward its own metatextual success—that is, its own spectacular success at selling itself to us—depends on that dynamic. That’s not to say that everything MM does on this score is a success: notably, Ginia Bellafante wasn’t buying Jon Hamm’s performance in the flashbacks. “Hamm,” she wrote, “wore the same goofy, eager-beaver expression he did when we saw him as a car salesmen in the early ’50s a few seasons ago. He tries too hard to make the early Don seem like an ingratiating rube, so hard, in fact that the effect is to make Don’s eventual transition to a cool, everybody-comes-to-me, know-it-all seem utterly inconceivable.” Which is to say, in meta-speak, that Hamm tries too hard to show Don trying too hard. (I disagree; I think one of the points of the Life pitch is that Don’s subject-supposed-to-know facade can drop in a second. Such is Don’s ... life. But the point is that not everyone likes how Hamm handles Don’s self-presentation. Like that Mikey kid—he hates everything.)
Don: Stay and visit. Peggy: I’ve got nothing to say. Don: Sure you do. Peggy: No. It’s personal. Don: We have personal conversations. Peggy: No we don’t. And I think you like it that way. I know I do. Don: Suit yourself.Whereupon Peggy immediately opens up: “We’re supposed to be staring at each other over candlelight, and he invites my mother?” What a lousy offer that is: Mark’s pitch, like Duck’s, sucks. Note that until we get to “he,” it’s not entirely clear who “we” are.