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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 5.4"Eight Million Stories in the Naked City"Guest Writer: Dana Polan

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[The third 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 (forthcoming Duke University Press, March 2013), Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]



"Eight Million Stories in the Naked City"
Written by Dana Polan (Cinema Studies, New York University)


For the committed Mad Men viewer, it's easy to have become caught up in the series' production of narrative suspense -- what's going to happen? Certainly, this has seemed all the more the case with the start of the current season given the extent to which the previous one had ended with a big cliffhanger, Don's plan to marry Megan. For many viewers, I would bet, the money was on Megan being "history" by the beginning of the new season, relegated to the past and perhaps not even mentioned again so impulsive and even wrong-headed did these marriage plans appear. Obviously, that's one prediction some of us fortune-tellers (readers of "Tea Leaves," to quote the title of last week's episode?) got wrong.


But, at another level, I must confess, I find it hard to get too invested in the question of what's going to happen to these fictional characters in a commercial apparatus designed indeed to keep us watching through strategies like narrative suspense precisely. The large-scale serial works to a very large degree by assembling a set group of characters in a set of situations and then working out permutations that generate new narrative possibilities (including the even more unpredictable and generatively rich possibilities that ensue when you throw some new characters into the mix). Given that the characters in serials have a certain degree of real-life approximation (they're often somewhat like us and confront problems we have or could imagine having), it's tempting to identify with their stories and we can get caught effectively and efficaciously in the suspense, but it's also so game-like: a set of moves -- expected and not, within the rules and not -- are being set up for us by an entertainment machine. It can seem random and arbitrary (even if the writers and producers have a master-plan, such as setting us up to not know what happens to Tony Soprano after the cut to black). It can also seem mechanical (which is not in itself a bad thing; we can take pleasure in watching how the game unfolds and even sets out to snare us). For instance, if in the 1960s a character is deployed to Vietnam (as happens to Joan's husband Greg in Mad Men), a set of possible narrative moves is put into place -- he can live, he can die, he can get wounded, he can return unscathed, he can (although this is a more unlikely set of options) turn anti-war or find a way to get sent home (but Don Draper already did that from an earlier war so it's probably not going to happen here). It's easy to be caught up in the guessing game about which option will be enacted but once the narrative game gets going, there's no possibility that one outcome won't happen. Something has to happen with Greg, and whatever that something is, it is productive of new story telling situations. That is, unless the situation is simply forgotten by the show and never followed up on, a possibility I'll return to later. Or unless the series chooses to render the specific narrative line irrelevant and investigate other narrative possibilities (so, for instance, it might be that Greg's walking out the door in the current episode is definitive and signals the end of interest in his story by the series). When narrative lines start to get exhausted, they can simply be abandoned (with more or less narrative finesse: if indeed Greg is now out of the picture, the departure of his narrative line has been given some motivation).

In television history, astuteness about how to keep narrative going, when to shift its terms, how to generate suspense and new story-lines have all been the province of soap opera and stand indeed one of its formal accomplishments (despite the genre often seeming to the critical establishment to be beneath contempt). Need to reinvigorate your narrative?: have a long-lost brother show up, have a key character get a potentially fatal illness (say, a heart attack or a tumor), have a foreigner who doesn't completely know the local mores move into the locale, have your protagonist turn out to have been someone else in the past, have couples break up and begin anew with other partners, and -- once you've shaken things up in such ways -- just return to the initial set-up and start the narrative again.

Of course, I'm citing narrative conceits from Mad Men as well as from typical soap operas. Like the soap opera, Mad Men is a narrative generator, a game-machine for evolving new moves for the kept-guessing spectator. (For example, its way of starting the machine over is to have a team from the first ad agency decide to initiate a new company. This is a story-line within the world these characters inhabit but it's also, at a meta-level, the series deciding to reboot by simply beginning again. If only they could have figured out a way to get Sal back into the mix, though!)

The ultimate inconsequentiality of any narrative line in multi-character serial drama is amplified in the case of those dramas set in a fictional world that is itself often about inconsequentiality. That is, narrative outcome may not matter if it's in a world where the characters don't take it to matter. Take The Sopranos, for instance: we care about the titular characters and the regulars who assemble around them, and we see the frequent importance of the fiefdoms they are fighting for. But this is also a world of endless replacement -- a capo gets whacked (or dies on the toilet, as happened in one episode) and there will always be someone around to be named to take his place. Somebody dies?: get over it, and just move on. The narrative seems to be stuck?: well, just have some new character released from prison to stir things up. In like fashion, Mad Men's narrative world is one of continued replacement in the workplace (in this week's installment, "Mystery Date" [Episode 4], Peggy tells Dawn that she, Peggy, was once a secretary too; there's always room to move into a new place in the hierarchy and in the narrative) and in the domestic realm as well (we can now compare Don's life with Megan to his with Betty, and Don has enough former girlfriends around so that you can always bring one back for new narrative conniptions).

And, in an intriguing way, the fictional world of Mad Men is also about inconsequentiality -- of seemingly momentous things not always having the impact they should. The men of this world of advertising have to know how to deal with crisis, how not to show their panic in front of a client, how not to break a pose of confidence, and so on (to quote a later famous ad slogan, the goal is to not let them "see you sweat," although Don Draper sometimes seems in violation of that stricture). There are surprises galore in this world, but the guys have to take them in stride. The series indicated its resilience (and the resilience of its fictional characters) toward game-changing crisis in Season 1 [Episode 12 "Nixon vs. Kennedy"], when, faced with Pete's threat to reveal his alternate identity as Dick Whitman, Don immediately called Pete on his bluff and goaded Pete into announcing his discovery to Bert Cooper only to have Pete learn that Bert didn't care. By the first episode of the current season, Megan could casually cite the name "Dick Whitman" as if this once momentous plot twist had now been absorbed into the ordinariness of slowly unfolding everydayness.




Think of how many narrative lines have petered out in the first three episodes of this season (which isn't to say they're narratively dead; there might be surprises ahead): for instance, Betty is ill and then she isn't, Pryce is in a flirtation on the phone with a young woman and then he isn't, Greg is part of Joan's life and then he isn't. And what about, in this week's episode, the narratively fraught issue of Peggy having to come up with a successful Mohawk Airlines campaign over the course of the weekend? It never was given its pay-off. Of course, the biggest instance of narrative inconsequentiality in the episode is Don's dream-murder of a former lover. When Don starts strangling, we're ready for the series to be shifting its terms in a fully new direction, but we're also as ready for it all to turn out to be a dream. The "it was a dream" way of flirting with momentous narrative and then disavowing it is again a conceit of soap opera form (for instance, the infamous nighttime soap Dallas where an entire season was revealed to be a dream) and, revealingly, of quality-TV also (The Sopranos, famously, was loaded with such dreams; an episode where Tony, while ill, imagined a flirtation with a beautiful woman from the old country is very similar to Don's having hallucinated his assignation with Andrea).

The inconsequentiality of narrative -- any story line can peter out, be dropped, be reshaped in relatively random fashion -- has its own consequences for something that's intrigued many viewers of Mad Men especially as it moved toward Season 5: its fictional world's engagement -- or not -- with the larger real-life narrative history of the times. I've used the word "flirtation" several times above, and this week's episode might be said to be about -- or even itself be -- a flirtation with history. If the Don story-line here operates in the realm of fantasy (a sexual encounter and a murder that didn't happen), two other story-lines allude directly to the times: Joan and Greg's fight and break-up has the war in Vietnam as its backdrop, Peggy and Dawn's bonding over beers has the fraught geography of New York for African American women as its theme (and, more remotely, the race riots in Chicago and elsewhere that Peg's boyfriend is covering and that she vaguely alludes to). Here, in a sense, the series flirts with issues of scale and distance: what might have seemed elsewhere and even far away comes confrontationally into the space of domesticity (the pocketbook, for instance, that Peggy glances at, knowing immediately that Dawn will know this glance means racial suspicion; suddenly, civil rights is right there, in the room). But in this slow, even meandering narrative universe, it is hard to know if politics can ever come to mean anything more (this after all is a narrative universe in which one ad executive turns off TV coverage of the Kennedy assassination so that the woman he is about to have sex with won't be put off her game).




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In this respect, it is consequential perhaps that the 1960s event that got the most attention in this episode (by the characters as well as the episode itself) was Richard Speck's killing of eight nurses in Chicago. The 1960s were about politics but they were also about psycho killings (the decade begins with the Hitchcock film of that name and then comes to include, most famously, Speck, Charles Whitman, and Charlie Manson, with the last sometimes being forced into being a comment on the politics of the time -- the Age of Aquarius turning to a sympathy for the devil). The Mad Men episode comments on the media-circus around ghoulish response to such infamously grisly happenings, but it also engages in a visual ghoulishness of its own when Henry's mother creeps Sally out in a sort of campfire-scary-story evening.



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In a response to last week's blog by Rob Rushing, Lauren Goodlad presciently wondered, "it would be interesting to see something develop with this gothic Francis narrative.... What might Mad Men's version of the shower scene be?" This week's episode luxuriates in the Gothic motif and perhaps even gives a version of psycho-murder in Don's "killing" of Andrea. Here, no doubt, there's a bit of flirtation with politics: from the foot-ware campaign that would play on Cinderella being menaced by a man in the dark to whom she's also attracted, to Speck's sex murders, to the allusion to Greg's rape of Joan, to Dawn's fears of being out in the city at night, to the strangulation, this episode of Mad Men raises issues of violence against women but ultimately it mixes them with the frisson of scandal, the illusions of fantasy, irony (the one character to denounce the media circus around the Chicago nurses is a guy we haven't yet come to embrace in the series and even perhaps disdain) and, again, narrative inconsequentiality (it's hard to know if we should care about story-lines that may disappear).

But Mad Men does remind us at times that the seeming inconsequential can come back to haunt us (as when, in the first episode of this season, Peg, alone in a hallway, was holding Joan's baby, a poignant but brief allusion to her own child, given up for adoption). No narrative is without its potential for future exploitation, expansion, and elaboration. There have been times in the history of television when a flirtation with the political turns into something more (for me, the supreme case was the transition from Season 1 of The Wire to Season 2 where suddenly entirely new dimensions of urban politics -- for instance, blue-collar labor and unionization, globalization and the traffic in women -- came into play in what had been more a street-corner saga). You never know. I still very much want to see where Mad Men is going to take us.