[The first in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 6 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]"Lend Me Your Ears"
Written by: Bruce Robbins (Columbia University)
The question that had been posed in the last frame of Season 5-- would Don return to his pursuit of Other Women?-- is answered only toward the end of "The Doorway" (Season 6, Episode 1/2) the 2-hour premier, which finds Don in bed with the Italian wife of his downstairs neighbor Dr Rosen. The Catholic paraphernalia that fill the frame as the camera pans left toward the bed makes the point that this sex involves betrayal, a betrayal in which more is betrayed than Don’s unconscious wife. Perhaps this is why, to my eye at least, throughout the episode Don seems more nervous and burdened than usual. Comments are made by co-workers on how fresh he does or doesn’t look, whether he appears to have benefitted from the Hawaiian vacation we see him enjoying, or half-enjoying, or pretending to enjoy, in the opening minutes.
The idea of an intensified betrayal is prepared by the episode’s mysterious opening: the camera looks up from the floor at the face we will later identify as Dr Rosen, who it turns out is resuscitating both the doorman and Mad Men itself after its long months of hibernation. This is too ponderous to be experienced as a joke, and it’s also too grim. Dr Rosen pops up
again in the elevator, that quintessential place of brief encounter for the series, and then in Don’s office, where he has the rare privilege of overhearing Don in creative mode. There are signs of what may be a budding friendship between the two men, forged perhaps when they shared the near-death experience of the building’s doorman, "Jonesie," who collapses in front of them, thus giving Rosen the chance to show his medical skills. When he visits Don’s office (the company has the Leica account, and Don has offered the doctor a free camera), Rosen refers to their two kinds of work as if medicine and advertising had much in common. Don modestly rejects the suggestion, but the idea has been established of medical life-saving as a standard by which other sorts of work, like advertising, can be judged. We discover that Don has been sleeping with Rosen’s wife only when the doctor is called away from a dinner party at Don and Megan’s to deal with a medical emergency late on a snowy New Year’s Eve--so late and so snowy that taxis will be unavailable and Rosen leaves for the hospital on skis dug up (with Don’s help) in the storage room. From what we have seen, Rosen is a good man who saves lives and has kept his zaniness. This is what Don is betraying.
While Don has been partying on New Year’s Eve (that is, reluctantly watching a carousel-worth of Hawaii vacation slides Megan insists on bringing out for the guests; we remember that carousel), Peggy has been working late. The contrast is something less than a betrayal, but it is certainly pointed and central to the episode. It also seems important that the problem that keeps Peggy and her creative team at the office on New Year’s Eve is, in a sense, the Vietnam War. Now working for another firm, now in a position of authority (she tells her two subordinates to share her cold meatball hero--they’re not going home yet), she has had a supposed emergency dropped on her. A Vietnam story has broken about GIs cutting off the ears of the Vietcong and making necklaces out of them, the late-night talk shows are joking about it, and one executive thinks this spells disaster for a planned Super Bowl ad for headphones that used Brutus’s monologue from Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” Peggy’s left-wing boyfriend, Abe, who is sweetly keeping her company as she works into the night, comments that at least the Vietnam War seems to be having some effect. Peggy’s eventual solution may not hold up to full allegorical analysis, but it is suggestive: in a sequence of outtakes, a young male head, headphones on its ears, makes expressive face after expressive face, utterly without inhibition, as if knowing that these shots don’t count. Grooving like this, you can’t possibly hear the news from Vietnam.
Is Mad Men a multiplot narrative in the strong sense, or is it really about Don Draper? On the first page of the wonderful new book Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, like yesterday’s season premiere another eagerly-awaited event, we are told that the show is “about Don Draper,” and that is certainly the idea one takes away every week from the credits. In the credits Don is slowly falling as his world collapses around him. The woman’s foot that gently rises to not quite meet him, timed either to break his fall or give him an extra kick on the way down, is another reason for invoking the old tragic model: a great but flawed individual, his flaw (his desire for women) neatly bound up in the source of his greatness (his understanding of desire). Don has creatively fostered some desires that society had blocked. Near the end of the last season, in the momorable "Commissions and Fees" (Season 5 Episode 11), Don asks Glen what he really wants, and next thing we know Glen is very illegally driving the Jaguar through the night. But the key questions for the series' future will be, alongside his own desire, Megan's ambition to succeed as an actor, which he has not exactly fostered. And Peggy's ambition, which he has both nurtured and undervalued. And whether, as the firm itself prospers, Don himself is finally losing his creative edge.
The case for the series as genuine multiplot narrative hangs on how rich it can make the plots of the women: Megan, Joan, Betty, and above all Peggy. As Alessandra Stanley pointed out in the New York Times,the men seem played out,
The idea of an intensified betrayal is prepared by the episode’s mysterious opening: the camera looks up from the floor at the face we will later identify as Dr Rosen, who it turns out is resuscitating both the doorman and Mad Men itself after its long months of hibernation. This is too ponderous to be experienced as a joke, and it’s also too grim. Dr Rosen pops up
again in the elevator, that quintessential place of brief encounter for the series, and then in Don’s office, where he has the rare privilege of overhearing Don in creative mode. There are signs of what may be a budding friendship between the two men, forged perhaps when they shared the near-death experience of the building’s doorman, "Jonesie," who collapses in front of them, thus giving Rosen the chance to show his medical skills. When he visits Don’s office (the company has the Leica account, and Don has offered the doctor a free camera), Rosen refers to their two kinds of work as if medicine and advertising had much in common. Don modestly rejects the suggestion, but the idea has been established of medical life-saving as a standard by which other sorts of work, like advertising, can be judged. We discover that Don has been sleeping with Rosen’s wife only when the doctor is called away from a dinner party at Don and Megan’s to deal with a medical emergency late on a snowy New Year’s Eve--so late and so snowy that taxis will be unavailable and Rosen leaves for the hospital on skis dug up (with Don’s help) in the storage room. From what we have seen, Rosen is a good man who saves lives and has kept his zaniness. This is what Don is betraying. While Don has been partying on New Year’s Eve (that is, reluctantly watching a carousel-worth of Hawaii vacation slides Megan insists on bringing out for the guests; we remember that carousel), Peggy has been working late. The contrast is something less than a betrayal, but it is certainly pointed and central to the episode. It also seems important that the problem that keeps Peggy and her creative team at the office on New Year’s Eve is, in a sense, the Vietnam War. Now working for another firm, now in a position of authority (she tells her two subordinates to share her cold meatball hero--they’re not going home yet), she has had a supposed emergency dropped on her. A Vietnam story has broken about GIs cutting off the ears of the Vietcong and making necklaces out of them, the late-night talk shows are joking about it, and one executive thinks this spells disaster for a planned Super Bowl ad for headphones that used Brutus’s monologue from Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” Peggy’s left-wing boyfriend, Abe, who is sweetly keeping her company as she works into the night, comments that at least the Vietnam War seems to be having some effect. Peggy’s eventual solution may not hold up to full allegorical analysis, but it is suggestive: in a sequence of outtakes, a young male head, headphones on its ears, makes expressive face after expressive face, utterly without inhibition, as if knowing that these shots don’t count. Grooving like this, you can’t possibly hear the news from Vietnam.
Is Mad Men a multiplot narrative in the strong sense, or is it really about Don Draper? On the first page of the wonderful new book Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, like yesterday’s season premiere another eagerly-awaited event, we are told that the show is “about Don Draper,” and that is certainly the idea one takes away every week from the credits. In the credits Don is slowly falling as his world collapses around him. The woman’s foot that gently rises to not quite meet him, timed either to break his fall or give him an extra kick on the way down, is another reason for invoking the old tragic model: a great but flawed individual, his flaw (his desire for women) neatly bound up in the source of his greatness (his understanding of desire). Don has creatively fostered some desires that society had blocked. Near the end of the last season, in the momorable "Commissions and Fees" (Season 5 Episode 11), Don asks Glen what he really wants, and next thing we know Glen is very illegally driving the Jaguar through the night. But the key questions for the series' future will be, alongside his own desire, Megan's ambition to succeed as an actor, which he has not exactly fostered. And Peggy's ambition, which he has both nurtured and undervalued. And whether, as the firm itself prospers, Don himself is finally losing his creative edge.
The case for the series as genuine multiplot narrative hangs on how rich it can make the plots of the women: Megan, Joan, Betty, and above all Peggy. As Alessandra Stanley pointed out in the New York Times,the men seem played out,
while the women are still full of surprises.) The men have definitely lost their mojo. Peter Campbell never had any charm to begin with, so no audience tears will be shed as the world starts looking dark and empty to him. Roger is charm itself-- indeed he seems to have taken over some of Don’s earlier charm duties on the show. Both his ex-wives show up at his 91-year-old mother’s funeral, and the first, completely clear-eyed about him, still manages to make him feel loved. The scenes of him with his shrink, useless as therapy, make for television that’s both funny and about being funny. (“I can’t laugh at everything you say,” the shrink tells him.) But he too seems to have nothing much to do with himself other than try to make dates with twenty-somethings while staring hard and tediously into the end-of-life abyss. When he cries over the shoeshine man’s box, it’s unclear whether he is crying more for his mother or for himself. Neither option makes one very curious as to his next step in life.Megan’s career on the other hand has taken off via television. Joan’s baby and her status as full partner are full of narrative promise although she has only a minimal part in the season opener: we see her only as aesthetic spectacle, posing for a company photo on the internal staircase which underlines the fact that the office now occupies a prosperous duplex. (Christina Hendricks also makes a dazzling appearance, hors texte, in a whisky commercial.) Like other fascinating villains, Betty now faces the somewhat scary prospect of narrative redemption. She takes an apparently unmotivated interest in Sandy, the 15-year-old violinist who smokes in the kitchen at night (like Don, she seems to have trouble sleeping), lies about herself (again like Don), and then disappears (yes, like Don again). This interest leads Betty to track down the violin, if not Sandy herself, in a squat in the East Village that makes a refreshing visual and social contrast to the Rye mansion.
But now, even more than in earlier seasons, it’s Peggy who matters most to the fate of the show. Peggy stands in for women trying to make it in a man’s world on talent alone. (Joan, with whom she is paralleled, has all the professional competence anyone could possibly need, but she is not permitted to rise on that basis.) Thus Peggy’s sub-plot offers the single strongest claim the series can make for this to be a genuine multiple plot narrative, or a multiple plot narrative in the strongest sense--that is, the claim to a (rising?) story that’s as compelling as Don’s predicted fall. The question that haunts this pairing of the two is where her creativity comes from if not, like Don’s, from an intimacy with anarchic desire.
