“Furtive Realism and a Sock in the Jaw”
Written by Eleanor Courtemanche (English)
From a writerly point of view, Mad Men Season 5 Episode 5 (“Signal 30”) ends with a pleasing moment of self-referentiality. We see account executive Ken Cosgrove in bed engaged in an illicit nighttime activity—not whoremongering, like his colleagues, but writing stories. It turns out that Ken, who seems so bland on the surface, has a secret life as the science fiction and fantasy writer Ben Hargrove, specializing in robots and distant planets. After he’s confronted by Roger Sterling, who’d prefer his employees to spend all their imaginative energies on their day job, Ken promises to quit. In the dark of night, though, he starts scribbling in a new genre—suburban realism—with the tougher new pen name of Dave Algonquin. And what he’s writing is a recap of the episode we’ve just seen, with a thinly-disguised Pete Campbell spiraling into bourgeois despair in a series of self-destructive acts that, in this episode, culminate in his being literally flattened by the poncey Brit Lane Pryce. After admiring Ken’s speed at being the first to blog this episode, the viewer must ask: is there any part of Mad Men that we couldn’t imagine as being written by Ken Cosgrove?
The other narratives that hover in the margins of Mad Men, though, are the ones that no one at the time could have read: the perspectives of the baby-boomers not yet writing or making movies. Since the 1990s, verité stories of boomer disillusionment like the 1983 movie The Big Chill have given way to celebrations of the ‘60s as a decade of playful liberation, as in 1998’s simplistic Pleasantville, in which the repressive world of the black-and-white ‘50s gives way to the technicolor ‘60s, and in the 2007 queer dance musical Hairspray. It’s these narratives that Mad Men wants to brush against the grain, focusing instead on the less-dramatic moments of a generation unfortunate enough to be just on the wrong side of a progressive historical narrative—like ours, one might say. From this perspective, the young look less like a heroic revolutionary vanguard (with the exception of Peggy’s boyfriend, the lefty journalist Abe Drexler), and more like terrifying and misdirected puppies.
The narrative of Mad Men has been famously slow during most of the first four seasons, like a patrician lady at lunch. But the audience has been waiting anxiously for the cultural speed-up we know is coming. This season, the series’s genre play has increased in complexity, from the “sexy dance” of Episode 1 ["A Little Kiss"] to the gothic stalking terrors and fractured fairy tales of Episode 4 ["Mystery Date"], and the sci-fi, suburban realism, and desperate farce of "Signal 30".
The attempt to combine historical truth with an entertaining narrative is one of the basic problems of the realist genre, which creates pleasure by transforming the chaotic disorder of everyday life into some kind of meaningful shape. AMC’s other advertising show, The Pitch, can serve as an example of failed realism: it’s almost unwatchable because it shows dull but real copywriters mouthing bad clichés about winning. Mad Men’s first episode of this season was also criticized, ironically, for being too realistic: Will Wilkinson argues that the fact that Young & Rubicam admen really did throw water balloons at protestors is no excuse to insert such a simplistic anecdote into the story. He claims that the writers have a greater responsibility to bring us satisfyingly complicated art than to represent mere history. Thus seeing Ken turn Pete into a suburban anti-hero is extra rewarding for the viewer because we’re let into the secret of how this genre combines real details with artifice: the nom de plume of “Dave Algonquin,” Campbell’s transformation into “Coe.” And we remember where Ken got those details: Trudy and Pete’s dinner party in Connecticut.
In an advertisement, you can assume that every detail has been chosen to create a particular effect, and is meant either to be read consciously or registered by the “lizard brain.” (See Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders for a 1950s analysis of “'depth approach' to marketing” to consumers’ irrational desires.) In historical novels and TV shows, on the other hand, you have to accept that a couple of details are random—“Things seem so random all of a sudden,” complains the high-school girl in Pete’s driver’s-ed class. Some details are just there for textural verisimilitude, or meant to be admired as commodity fetishes, like Roger’s white lounge chair or Megan’s color-blocked dress. As viewers, we’re never certain which details will be significant to the narrative. Ken’s story is our reward for paying attention to the show’s most apparently trivial moments: in this case, the Campbells’ small talk about their new home in the (really-existing) town of Cos Cob.
“For, in the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms, to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and upstairs again to the new fire-escape, all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings—the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle stickey.” (Our Mutual Friend, Chapter 2)
Ken accurately reads Pete’s veneer of pride in his too-big stereo as a testament to his inner emptiness and frustration. He then reassembles trivial details from Trudy’s story about the historical origins of the town’s funny name (“So the Coe family claims it was them—Coe’s Cob—which became, through Yankee arrogance, Cos Cob”) and takes his pen name from Pete’s throwaway comment -- undercut with self-loathing at his commuter status, that the name Cos Cob sounds “like the Algonquin word for briefcase.” Ken’s adoption of the name “Algonquin” links him not only to the New England milieu of Updike’s and Yates’s adultery stories, but also to the famous Algonquin Round Table of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley: reflecting, perhaps, his dreams of a more glamorous literary lifestyle. The details that would appear random to a casual reader of Cosgrove’s story (including the buried pun on his own real name) are revealed to the Mad Men viewer as pleasurably meaningful, just a little harder to access than the obvious allegory of a name like “Veneering.”
We must be justified, then, in our over-reading of every other detail in the show, such as the bad plaid sport coat Don wears to the party. Does this coat mean he’ll be unable to resist the tide of dubious fashion we know is coming, or that he’s willing to submit himself to Megan’s control? It’s likely to mean something: or perhaps, in accordance with the demands of realism, it’s just “random.” (In last week’s Mad Men blog, Dana Polan discussed the number of apparently significant narrative moments that turned out to lead nowhere, like Betty’s cancer test and Lane’s flirtation with Delores.) Does the explosion of the faucet at the end of the dinner party allude to the perpetually interrupted dinner party of Luis Buñuel’s 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie? Does it symbolize the return of the repressed energies of hidden secrets, magnify Pete’s sexual humiliation, and give Don an excuse to take off his shirt, mitigating the uncoolness of his ridiculous coat and lobster bib in a later scene? (Yes.) 
Conspiracy is the most paranoid, hyperreal, and overdetermined, and therefore one of the most satisfying kinds of narrative—just as in an advertisement, every detail turns out to be significant. In his advice about dinner with the Jaguar executive, Roger advises Lane to massage his client’s ego by sharing personal problems: “and then, you’re in a conspiracy. The basis of a quote-friendship.” (More insider knowledge: John Slattery, who plays Roger, is the director of what he calls this “little gem” of an episode: see this interview in The Atlantic.) While we enjoy knowing the inside scoop about Ken’s story, though, the rest of the episode constantly punctures the characters’ attempts to preserve a core of mystery in their lives. Roger’s attempt to initiate Lane into the mysteries of seducing a client ends badly, with Lane spilling too many personal details about his dreary marriage. Ken’s secret life as a writer of robot stories is outed by his wife at the dinner party, leading to his reprimand by Roger. Pete and Roger attempt to woo the Jaguar executive Edwin Baker in more traditional fashion, by taking him to a brothel, but their plan is exposed, farcically, when Baker’s wife discovers chewing gum on her husband’s “pubics,” and they lose the account. Even Don’s attempt to veil the boardroom fight is inadequate: the curtain is translucent, and the girls outside hear everything.The episode’s action climax, of course, is the fight between Lane and Pete. The episode’s title, “Signal 30,” refers to the grotesque driver’s ed film shown in Pete’s class, leading us to expect either some kind of random violent event (like the sniper at the University of Texas), or a moment when Pete engages in some twisted act of violence (such as assaulting the high-school girl, perhaps – an act we know he’s capable of). Personally, I was hoping to find that the title “Signal 30” referred to a science fiction story from the '60s, like Ken’s story “The Punishment of X-4,” in which an oppressed robot worker removes a single bolt from a bridge, destroying it. Like Dickens's Veneerings, “The Punishment of X-4” is a bit too openly allegorical for this generally moody and furtive series.
But when the fight comes, it’s surprisingly funny, and much less sinister than the driver’s ed movie. Lane blames Pete for the “gory details” of the chewing-gum-fuelled collapse of the Jaguar account, calls him a “grimy little pimp,” and challenges him to a duel by fisticuffs. The other partners decline to intervene: in fact, Lane should really be fighting Roger, who took the client to the brothel. But Pete is carried forward by the inexorable narrative of his swinishness, and when the older Lane decks him across the jaw, the rest of the office approves. Poetic justice has been served, though Pete slinks off, like a future super-villain, to confess miserably to Don that “I’ve got nothing.” Ken may be exaggerating by comparing Pete’s despair, in his story, to Beethoven’s love of beauty, but in ennobling the sordid and trivial—as well as puncturing and mocking it—he steps closer to being Mad Men’s hidden narrator.