Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 7.4 "What's Next?" Part 2 Guest Writer: Dana Polan | Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory

[The fourth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 7 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication ofMADMEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, andthe 1960s(Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]

"What's Next?"

Written by: Dana Polan (New York University)

Part 2

Please, dear reader, make sure to peruse Part 1 of this blog before you read this part. There, in Part 1, I talked generally about what we seem to think we know about any episode of a continuing TV serial before it airs, and I made some very tentative suggestions (the stronger word is "predictions") about what I imagined might happen in tonight's episode of Mad Men. I now, having actually seen the episode, want to go back to those predictions and then talk about other aspects of this installment of Mad Men.

In the very first lines of the episode, Pete Campbell out in Los Angeles--out, that is, in an entirely different world of narrative possibilities than the ones that Mad Men, whose title referenced, among other things, New York's Madison Avenue, had initially initiated--was telling his girlfriend Bonnie that there were essentially three choices. He was referring to the places they could go to for their vacation but, coming at the very beginning of the episode, his lines could also meta-narratively be a comment on narrative possibility and narrative logic itself: when an(y) episode of a show like this begins, there are any number of directions it could go in, and most of them are not predictable for the viewer even though most of them will in retrospect make sense for that viewer once he or she has gotten through them.

So, vanity aside (I'm generally not good at futurology), I think I'm batting pretty well in my guesses for this episode (and the baseball metaphor perhaps works pretty well itself for an episode that's about going to -- but never arriving at -- a Mets game but, even more importantly, is an episode that has an explicit discussion of metaphor and meaningful symbolism: TV shows like this can have depths of significance but it's particularly noteworthy when they directly tell us that):

1. I mentioned the dangling phone that we saw last week in the "Next on Mad Men" and suggested it might mean a lot but more likely would mean very little at all. In the episode as it aired, Don arrived at the office and found chaos reigning, including that phone off the hook, but the phone was then hung up and explanations for the chaos were proffered: that particular future which we might call the computer revolution was being installed. We might want to ask how that phone got off its base but really, ultimately it didn't matter.

It wasn't really a prediction but I did suggest that death wasn't something that tended to happen to the central figures of this series. No deaths occurred in this episode indeed but I do take it as significant that Pete Campbell learned that his wife's dad had had a heart attack: as I had noted, it's more likely in Mad Men that potentially fatal things happen to lesser characters and not to the Pete Campbells and such-like that serve as its narrative foci.

2. Dawn, the black secretary, had one line of dialogue (advising the white staff at the office as to how to deal with the disruptions of office space from the entry of a computer into it). That's it for Dawn. As I anticipated, blackness had gotten its token treatment a few episodes back and now we're back to the world of white people dealing with their white collar issues.

3. Wow, I really got this one right: I predicted that the all important question of Megan and Don might drop out, and it really, really did. (I also wondered if Betty might not disappear, and I'll claim brownie points for that guess too.)

Last week's episode put Don and Megan's marriage on the rocks but in today's episode, it was as if that marriage--and its breakdown--had no existence. Instead we got an emphasis on the slogging everydayness of repetitive work (for instance, how many tags, whatever they are, does Don and his co-workers have to come up with to satisfy the assignment?) and we also got:

4. Roger going upstate to Kingston, NY to try to rescue daughter Margaret (now Marigold) from a commune. This, admittedly, doesn't really count as confirmation of my prediction that very specific events of the time might insinuate themselves into the show. I had suggested that real history was overdue for an appearance on the show and wondered, among other examples, if 1969's Woodstock might not be ready to take a bow. We really didn't get that sort of historical imposition in any direct, concerted sense but I think Margaret's story comes pretty close. For what it's worth, Kingston is in fact not far from Woodstock (or from the Bethel farm of Max Yasgur that the rock festival actually took place at) and there's a way in which the entire subplot of Roger and his daughter is about a broader history insinuating its force into the lives of characters who are generally more defined by what goes on at the office...

5. And in that respect, the office is really where it's all at in this episode. We certainly think of the Roger-Margaret story as little else than a subplot and but for it and a few minor moments, everything else transpires at the workplace. This is that slog I referred to: I don't claim any special clairvoyance here since it's this slogging that is centrally what the show is about. Yes, there is a world outside the office in which there are (among other events) old people who die, unwanted pregnancies, real people who get assassinated, weird grandmas who weird you out, suburban alienation, renters who want their landlords to provide basic services, hitchhikers you can't trust, class trips that just go bad (see last week's episode), and on and on and on. But “The Monolith” (7.4) keeps coming back to the office and it's there that the really consequential things might be happening. On the one hand, Don does decide to tow the line and be the subservient drone. I don't want to push it too far but it might be worth connecting what is perhaps the most famous moment in the history of Mad Men--Don scoring a big win at the office by showing off the Kodak carousel--to the Hollies' "Carousel" song that plays over Don's acquiescence in the present episode: in the earlier case, Don had used repetitiveness and pastness (the Kodak carousel's cyclical spectacle of nostalgia) to move his career forward; now, like the rider on a carousel animal who in the Hollies song can't catch up to the figure ahead of him, Don seems to have little future and is just going round and round. (At one point, after one of the many slights he suffers in the episode, we see Don leave the office in what we think is a huff of storming off the job only to seem him check back into the job in the very next moment; for this episode, he's stuck there).

Just as Matt Weiner's previous show was pointedly titled The Sopranos in the plural, and not "Tony" or "The Tony Soprano Show" or some-such, this show is Mad Men in the plural--and not "Don Draper" or some-such. Both shows have a protagonist but within the fictional world and for the shows as televisual events, there is directly the question of how in control that protagonist really is. In the current episode of Mad Men, Don directly is treated as a menial and it might almost seem as if the series is not merely commenting on that but engaging in a transition from Don to other figures. Is it noteworthy, for instance, that one very common visual motif of Mad Men--namely, figures shot from the back, and thereby pitched into veritable silhouette, as they look blankly out from the office into the world beyond their window blinds--is in the current episode not accorded to Don (as it commonly was in past episodes) but to other characters such as Peggy and Lou (and when Lou is seen standing in this way at the window, it's commented upon as if the show wants us to think about this resonant visual motif)? Is Don really the center of this world any more?

The title of "The Monolith," seems a reference to 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey (already referenced in Deanna Kreisel’s perceptive post from last week). There are fears about computers, references to psychedelic transport, a mention even of "The Dawn of Man." But there is no transcendence in this episode of Mad Men, just a brute wallowing in the mud for Roger, and a brute recognition of the fixities of identity for Don. Dave Bowman in 2001 shut down the Hal 9000 computer and then moved through various stages of being into new levels of existence. Don Draper in Mad Men watches impassively and even passively as a computer is fixed into place in his work world, and all he can do there is, as the Hollies intone, go "Round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round."

One wonders if that's his predictable future. And perhaps the future of this television series.