"A Study in Orange"
Written by Lauren M. E. Goodlad (English/Unit for Criticism)
The title of Mad Men’s sixth episode this season, “Far Away Places,” echoes the 1948 Bing Crosby classic. But insofar as it leads viewers to anticipate the kind of glamorous business trip Don took with Betty in “Souvenir” (Season 3, Episode 8), the song’s yearning for real-life encounters with foreign lands is a feint. Although the episode explores far-off places of sorts, the journeys it takes in this rather complicated segment of Mad Men are more psychic and cultural than geographic. “Far Away Places” does not embark on real trips to Rome, or China, or Spain--though it does take us tripping. And in what has become a veritable leitmotif for Season 5, its most memorable tableaux are illusions.
Last week the show put us squarely in male fantasy terrain when Pete, hard at work with an obliging call girl, chose “You’re my king” over other equally tawdry clichés. Episode 6 opens with Abe’s suggesting that Peggy, nervous about her presentation for Heinz, join him at a showing of The Naked Prey. “You're gonna resist the chance to see Cornel Wilde naked?” he asks. Reviewing the movie in 1967, Roger Ebert called The Naked Prey the kind of “pure fantasy” in which an urbane white man, “set loose naked in the jungle,” discovers to his delight that he can “outrun half a dozen hand-picked African warriors.” Poor Abe. He has taken up Kinsey’s mantle of a white man engaged by the aspirations of the 60s with more humility than the often pompous Paul. Abe is clearly frustrated by Peggy’s distracted focus on work. But does he really want to see this movie?
In a post on “Tomorrowland,” last season’s finale, Rob Rushing and I wrote that Don’s unpremeditated proposal during a trip to California signaled a kind of repetition compulsion. In works like his famous essay on the “pleasure principle,” Sigmund Freud contemplated the strange human compulsion to repeat disturbing experiences so as to create the illusion of mastery. Don’s sudden decision to marry his secretary, Rob and I noted, was marked as repetitious first by Roger (who applauded Don’s following in his own footsteps) and then by Joan who mused, “It happens all the time.” Viewers who had warmed to the maturity of Dr. Faye Miller rolled their eyes as Don tethered himself to yet another gorgeous projection of the idealized mother he never had. Would Megan turn out to be a crafty “actress” who had played her boss?
As yet, the answer seems to be no. Instead of a Don/Roger dyad, Season 5 has focused on aligning Pete Campbell with the Don of yore. As Eleanor Courtemanche noted in her great post on last week’s episode, Pete has become the star of a suburban saga: an unhappy commuter with all of Don’s former wonderlust and little of his charm. By contrast, Megan, whose supposed love of children has vanished without a trace, is hardly eager to make babies in “the country.” In fact, unlike consummate trophy wife Jane Sterling, Megan is genuinely invested in work. More like Ken and Cynthia than Roger and Jane, the New Drapers could relate to one another as fellow professionals as well as husband and wife. Could, that is, if Don truly considered Megan a colleague like Peggy. But does he?
Of course, Roger’s original plan was a different kind of pairing. On the morning of Peggy’s Heinz presentation, he proposes the kind of “completely debauched...‘fact-finding’ boondoggle” which (as Don reminds him) once landed him in the hospital after playing with twins (“Long Weekend,” Season 2, Episode 10). Entreating Don to join him on a road trip to Plattsburgh—home of the Howard Johnson’s “flagship”—Roger imagines a decadent escapade for “a couple of rich, handsome perverts.” But Don, who as Bert says is still on “love leave,” has a different idea of “playing hooky”--not an upstate hook-up but a Long Weekend with his wife. He leaves Roger both mocking and pining for his partner’s uxorious passion.
"Meanwhile," the Sterlings’ denouement coincides with a conjugal road trip that has Don almost panting for the excitement he felt at Disneyland. When Megan worries about Peggy and Heinz, Don cajoles, “Remember California?” When she continues to demur, Don pulls rank: “I’m the boss. I’m ordering you” he says with a poke. Always ready to have his cake and eat it too, Don anticipates a “love leave” with a little labor on the side. But just as Peggy frustrated Abe with her focus on work, so Megan resists Don’s vacation vibe. When she expresses her guilty sense of letting down coworkers, Don speaks to her straight from the phallus: “There has to be some advantage to being my wife.”
The road trip in other words, is saturated with signals of impending failure—my favorite of which is the way it harks back to the fabulous trip to Rome in “Souvenir”, including Don’s buying actual souvenirs for his kids. When Don says to Megan, “I got something for you” and then holds up a plastic back scratcher, can anyone miss how the man who took his first wife to the Hilton in Rome now expects his new wife to feel the magic of a HoJo’s in Plattsburgh? (The contrast between Conrad Hilton and Dale Vanderwort is almost too cruel to emphasize.) Too late Megan’s mother reminds Don that his wife is allergic to gold alloy.
In making Don’s story a Study in Orange, Mad Men builds a not-so-subtle bridge between the kind of psychedelia for which one needs an actual sugar cube, and the dreams and illusions that come to us courtesy of an emotional world. At some level we know that Don’s boorishness and foolery are all about guarding the fleeting happiness Roger has already lost. Like his daughter Sally, this forty-year old man does not want his “vacation to end.”
It is a lesson learned for Peggy who, while she hasn’t yet mastered the difficult art of being a woman in a world made by and for men, has at least no special compulsion to repeat her mistakes. Abe, we hope, will stop congratulating himself for not being a “pig” or Peggy will, perhaps, fly solo again. If the counterculture comes to mean something at all for Mad Men, one suspects that she will be on its front lines.
At any rate, that genie is out of the bottle.