"Pete and Repeat"

Written by: Lilya Kagonovsky (Slavic/Comparative Literature)

Episode 3 of the sixth season of Mad Men takes place at the end of January 1968, roughly between the capture of USS Pueblo by the North Koreans and the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive. War (secret, undeclared) is the obvious subtext: between the news about North Korea and the Viet Cong on Pete’s TV and Sylvia’s radio, Roger’s references to “Munich” and the quote from Churchill that he misattributes to his late mother, there is a sense that many of the characters are poised on the brink of violence, hovering somewhere between “war and dishonour.”

As Uncle Mack explains to young Don, he’s the cock in the hen house, which means he gets to sleep with all the hens, including, as we learn at the end, Don’s very pregnant stepmother, Abigail. We already know that Don is sleeping with his neighbor’s wife (but we don’t know that he sneaks in every time the good Dr. Rosen is out of the building), and we’re not surprised that Pete is sleeping with everything he can, including his rather naïve neighbor, Brenda, who—not unlike Sylvia—imagines their affair to be something slightly more than it is (after the first time, she immediately proposes calling Pete at home and hanging up, and leaving small signs of affection, like parking her car on the street, to let him know she’s thinking of him. She cannot even begin to compare to the beauty of Beth from Season 5, drawing a heart on the car window.) Indeed, the moment of violence arrives when Pete’s enjoyment of Johnny Carson (itself about to be interrupted by news from Vietnam) is interrupted by screams and shouting outside the house. Brenda, complete with nightgown, bathrobe, and a bloody face and nose, shows up on the Campbells' doorstep after her husband discovers her dalliance with Pete.

It took me a minute to understand the title of the episode, “The Collaborators.” It wasn’t until Sylvia’s strange statement, “We can’t fall in love. It won’t be so French anymore,” that the episode title came into focus: betrayal, yes, but more than that—a cowardly, dishonorable betrayal. Indeed, the entire episode is about different forms of cowardice: Don’s affair with Sylvia, Pete’s affair with Brenda, SCDP’s relations with Jaguar, Uncle Mack’s relations with Don’s stepmother Abigail. The word “guilt” used over and over in the episode was really a stand in for something else: Megan is too cowardly to tell Don about the miscarriage, let alone to bring up the subject of babies. The conversation about having the conversation (which is the closest Megan and Don come to actually having “the conversation”) was punctuated by Don’s tautological “I want what you want… is this what you want?” Sylvia’s discomfort at being left alone with Don in the restaurant and feelings of guilt about the affair—after all, Arnold and Megan are both “good company”—was another form of cowardice: a way of having the affair and the regret simultaneously. (To this, Don’s by now standard come back of “this never happened,” was repetitive but to the point. “You want to feel shitty till the point I take your dress off,” he tells her. Or, as Roger says to Megan’s mother Marie in “The Phantom,” “stop being demure, you’re already on the bed.”) Even Peggy’s half-hearted refusal to go after Heinz ketchup is a form of cowardice: during the entire episode she has been dealing with the fact that “everyone hates her” and is now afraid to lose the only “friend” she has left—Stan, who, as Ted Chaough reminds her, is actually “the enemy.”

Keeping with the theme of war and betrayal, the two ad campaigns for SCDP are about men trying to score points against other men: in both cases, we see weak men try their best to manipulate Don and Co. into doing what they want (Heinz beans standing in the way of the agency taking on the much more lucrative Heinz ketchup; Herb Rennet, the Jaguar salesman trying to shift the emphasis of the campaign in order to line his own pockets). In both cases, Don does “the right thing.” He argues for loyalty to Heinz beans over the prospect of a better catch (we’ve seen this before with his refusal to throw over Mohawk Airlines—Don, disloyal at home, is always quite loyal at work). And he makes both Pete and Herb look like fools simply by taking their suggestion to its logical extreme: in this case, producing a portrait of an “average” guy in New Jersey, possibly even a truck driver, suddenly able to afford this very exclusive luxury car. Roger calls this “the deftest self-immolation I’ve ever seen” (another direct reference to Vietnam), a form of protest meant to underscore an earlier dishonor—the agency prostituting Joan to Herb to get the Jaguar account. And then of course, there’s Pete, too cowardly to resist temptation and too cowardly to man up to it, even at the cost of ending up alone in a run down apartment with no toilet paper. Of all the characters in the episode, only Trudy comes off as someone who will not “collaborate,” will not continue to appease the other, or to dishonor herself in the hopes of avoiding a war.

The episode closes with a by-now familiar sight (though we perhaps did not expect to find it again so soon)—Don collapsed in the hallway, outside his front door. This was a staple mise-en-scene of Season 4, with Don repeatedly coming home too drunk to manage the lock on his door. Indeed, we have already had a hint of this darker “season 4” side of Don from his unconscious association of Sylvia with the prostitutes at his uncle’s whorehouse, to the point where he actually seems to once again be paying for sex (by giving Sylvia the money her husband didn’t). Yet, it is Don himself who is clearly the prostitute here, the one whose role throughout this episode has been to appease, to collaborate, and to give everyone what they “want.” The closing musical number, Bing Crosby’s 1931 “Just a Gigolo” neatly ties together the themes of war, collaboration, the problem of being an “average guy,” and prostitution, while at the same time, serving as a kind of sonic flashback that takes us back to Don’s childhood memories. The original version of the song was a poetic vision of the social collapse experienced in Austria after World War I, represented by the figure of a former Hussar who remembers himself parading in his uniform, while now he has to get by as a lonely hired dancer. In the English version, Irving Caesar eliminated the specific Austrian references and, in the often-omitted verse (but included in the 1931 recording by Bing Crosby), set the action in a Paris cafe, where a local character tells his sad story.

But Don’s inability to walk through his apartment door in the last shot may be more symbolic than at first appears. The first episode of Season 6 (discussed by Bruce Robbins last week) was called “The Doorway,” its meaning seemingly encapsulated by Roger Sterling’s monologue to his therapist: “What are the events in life? It’s like you see a door… the first time you come to it you say, oh, what’s on the other side of the door? Then you open a few doors, then you say, I think I want to go over that bridge this time, I’m tired of doors. Finally, you go through one of these things and you come out the other side and you realize, that’s all there are—doors and windows and bridges and gates and… they all open the same way. And they all close behind you.” But while the doorways in “The Doorway” were largely metaphorical (while the main visual metaphor was cinematic, or in any case, photographic*), in “The Collaborators” doorways become the main visual structuring element of the episode: from the opening shot, elevator doors, front doors, back doors, doors opened and closed, thresholds and keyholes play a major role. As Joan says to the unpalatable Herb, “I had no idea you’d be darkening my doorway.”

Writing about Crime and Punishment in his The Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Russian Formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin pointed out the ways Dostoevsky relied on the image of the threshold to structure his novel:

In Raskolnikov’s dream, space assumes additional significance in the overall symbol-system of carnival. Up, down, the stairway, the threshold, the foyer, the landing take on the meaning of a “point” where crisis, radical change, an unexpected turn of fate takes place, where decisions are made, where the forbidden line is overstepped, where one is renewed or perishes.

makes almost no use of relatively uninterrupted historical or biographical time, that is, of strictly epic time; he “leaps over” it, he concentrates action at points of crisis, at turning points and catastrophes, when the inner significance of a moment is equal to a “billion years,” that is, when the moment loses its temporal restrictiveness. In essence he leaps over space as well, and concentrates action in two “points” only: on the threshold (in doorways, entrance ways, on staircases, in corridors, and so forth), where the crisis and the turning points occur, or on the public square, whose substitute is usually the drawing room (the hall, the dining room), where the catastrophe, the scandal take place.

If Bakhtin is any guide to Mad Men, then what we have just witnessed in the end to “The Collaborators” is a turning point of sorts. It is not just the Vietnam War that is coming to a crisis point, but the characters, too are on the brink of catastrophe. In choosing dishonor over war, they will still get war. And soon.

*I am grateful to Joan Neuberger for this observation.