[The eleventh in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 5 of AMC's Mad Men, posted prior to the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing. Kritik welcomes anonymous comments so long as commentators choose an identification such as initials or a number. We also welcome you to check out our series of posts on Season 4 of Mad Men which begins here and ends here.]"Catch a Body"
Written by Faith Wilson Stein (Comparative and World Literature)
“You really have no idea when things are good, do you?” Peggy said to Don in last week's episode of Mad Men (“The Other Woman,” Season 5, Episode 11). The rejoinder this week would seem to be that they were never really good in the first place. Peggy didn’t know the moral cost of winning the Jaguar account and, with no part in the firm’s ethical failings, was wholly absent from last night’s episode, “Commissions and Fees.” Also absent were copywriters Stan and Ginsberg. Indeed, "Commissions and Fees" has no heady creativity (“writing sexy,” as a rival ad exec says to Don in the opening scene); no dramatizations of inspiration which weave compelling advertising strategies from the detritus of the everyday; or discussions of how desire is invented, stoked, and (allegedly) satisfied by advertising. Instead, it is all business: while money is discussed it remains merely representational, like Lane's forged check. Lane’s wife is baffled at his “refusal to recognize the successes when they come” and the irony is all too bitter. To be one of “the grownups,” as Cooper admonishes, is to recognize that pleasure is always just a promise, and an empty one at that.
This season has been marked by distinctly gothic elements, from the macabre and murderous fantasies of Betty and Don to the discussions of Richard Speck and Charles Whitman (oy, that name!) and the reported news of the escalating conflict in Vietnam. Last week’s prostituting of Joan seemed like a culmination of sorts and it certainly literalized the season-long pattern of men using women to satisfy the demands of their professional causes: Henry expects Betty to attend political functions, Roger appeals to both of his ex-wives in order to make business deals. (Lakshmi’s seduction of Harry, on the other hand, turns out to be a ploy to control Paul). “You’re a grimy little pimp,” Lane sneered at Pete in Episode 5 – before making a pass at Joan himself. But “Commissions and Fees” shows that the gothic motifs can be even more subtle than murder and prostitution. The show’s physical settings, particularly its use of windows and doors, have also contributed to the mounting sense of unease and even dread, starting with the first episode’s opening scene of Sally peering through her father’s bedroom door and continuing with Don’s surreal peek into an empty elevator shaft (Episode 8) and Betty’s spying Megan through the windows (Episode 9). 
In this episode, we see a suicidal Lane through the windshield of that cruelly unreliable Jaguar. Lane’s hanging corpse is not discovered through chic floor-to-ceiling windows like those on the Drapers’ patio but, rather, glimpsed from the small window at the top of Pete’s office wall. The door is blocked by his lifeless body which must be shoved past in order to enter. Don’s horrified guilt is most likely compounded by the memory of his half-brother Adam Whitman’s suicide by hanging (“Indian Summer,” Season 1, Episode 11), another instance in which Don instructed someone to disappear, seemingly for their own benefit but really for his own self-preservation. Lane vomited as Don did last season when confronted with exposure; but Lane does not confess to his wife as Don did to Faye Miller. Trying to contain secrets, to keep them shut in and unseen, only results in self-destruction.
Early in the episode the “commissions and fees” of the title are discussed by SCDP’s partners including Joan. Jaguar has requested a fee structure model of payment, rather than the usual commission. (“Well that is interesting,” snarks Roger.) With a fee structure, Lane explains, “The client merely pays for the work being done.” Rather than the use of one’s body for a particular time span, the dynamic allegorized in last week’s episode and analyzed by Todd McGowan, or the ad agency’s customary preference for a percentage of the sale of ads to television and print media, Jaguar wants to barter goods and services for direct payment. Lane, however, seems confused about what belongs to whom: he confesses to forgery and embezzlement but insists, “That was my money!” Having banked on the presumption of a bonus, he rationalizes the theft as his due “compensation” for the time, energy, and professional risk he has expended for the firm. Although Don rejects Lane’s rationalization he also debunks the agency status quo in his pitch to Ed Baxter of Dow. With their current agency, Don argues, Dow is “subsidizing all the great creative work they’re doing,” for other clients “and paying for new business lunches.” And yet Don doesn’t try to sell Dow a new ad campaign. Sure, he knows about their controversial products. What better way to reverse the damage done by his insincere “ethical” stand against selling cigarettes in Season 4 than to flack for napalm? But instead of offering Dow a new pitch, Don offers himself, reminding Ed that their share of business is only 50 percent: “You don’t want most of it, you want all of it. And I won’t stop until you get all of it.” In one of the series’ pithiest distillations of the logic of advertising and, perhaps, life, Don asks: “What is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.” Don sells them the illusion of advertising itself.
When Sally arrives unexpectedly at Don’s apartment, she is the voice of the counterculture: “She’s such a phony,” Sally whines about her mother to Megan. The line triggers an association with J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Ryewhich echoes throughout the rest of the episode. A Holden Caulfield-like Glen, ditching prep school and its “sadists,” takes Sally to the Museum of Natural History and tells her she’s like a little sister to him. But any desire to preserve innocence, to catch those young bodies, comes too late (like Don’s effort to save Joan last week). Sally has been ordering coffee and considering age-inappropriate movies with Megan and her friend. Glen has what Sally generously calls a mustache, she’s wearing those go-go boots that made Don nervous a few episodes ago, and her experience of menarche has been confirmed by the world’s expert on the topic!
But phony though her mother may be, the onset of womanhood finds Sally running home to her mother for comfort. Sally and Glen’s portion of the episode is not as disconnected from the plotline of Lane’s suicide as it may seem: as Sally pours copious amounts of sugar into her coffee, it – and the shot – dissolves into the image of Lane lying awake in bed (glasses on, secrets untold). Before he arrives, Glen says he needs to type up his paper and we transition to Lane typing in the office. He is presumably writing a suicide note and yet at the end of the episode it’s revealed to be a “boilerplate” resignation letter. The compulsive repetition of empty writing, like a forged signature (as Caroline Levine so elegantly unpacked), comes to a tragic ending. The letter reaches its destination, as commentators on Kritik have observed paceLacan, but it doesn’t say anything.
Part of the pleasure of Mad Men, as Eleanor Courtemanche observed, is in our attendance to the details, which can then be shaped into some sort of narrative. Whereas that episode introduced us to Pete’s 7-foot Hi-Fi, the emblem of his suburban ennui, this episode gives us.the extra-textual echoes of Holden Caulfield in Glen and Sally’s storyline. Lane’s unexpected suicide inevitably brings us back to his furtive phone flirtations in the season’s first episode (“A Little Kiss”). Does this enable us to make sense of his tragedy? To derive satisfaction from our ability to piece together a narrative of referential decline? (It is fitting, albeit in a highly cynical sort of way, that an actual advertiser for AMC’s broadcasts of Mad Men – Jaguar, no less! – both invests in an “authentic” reading of the show, as though its events were real, while co-opting the “authenticity” of emotional response in order to sell its product.When Don instructed Lane to tell his family that “the next thing will be better, because it always is,” the wording is rather ambiguous. Is Don assuring Lane that things will get better or is that simply what Lane should repeat to them? If previous seasons have posed the question, “Who is Don Draper?” Season 5, so far, has seemed to ask, “What does Don Draper want?” Glen for one seems to know that the question is moot: “Everything you wanna do, everything you think is gonna make you happy, just turns to crap.” Ever the salesman, Don asks him what he wants. In that dark moment, Don wants to provide someone else some happiness, however fleeting.
And so the episode ends with Glen behind the wheel of Don’s car, in a scene reminiscent of an earlier, happier time – a young(er) Sally driving her Grandpa Gene’s car under his amused supervision. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Butchie’s Tune” segues us into the credits, underscoring that the moment’s joy is transient and, thus, all the sweeter: “Don't give me a place for my memories to stay, / Don't show me an end or a light to find the way. / I ain't got time for the things on your mind, / And I'm leaving you today – / On my way.”
There will be more happiness in the next moment.