I just noticed that we hadn't discussed the lollapalooza "Mad Men" season finale. Was that great TV, or what? A work colleague said the series, which had grown rather sluggish this season, completely redeemed itself in these last few episodes. Couldn't agree more. If you're a "Mad Men" fan, and you haven't been reading Slate's TV Club discussion of it, run, don't walk (start here for the multipart analysis of the finale). A few random notes from me:
+ Betty Draper is a horrible b*tch. She just is. I don't blame her for leaving the cheatin' dirtbag Don, but she is such a spoiled, narcisstic brat for the way she treats her kids. Leaving them alone for Christmas so she can fly to Reno with her lover so she can get a divorce? She's always been one of my least favorite characters, because of her chilly self-absorption and latent hostility to her children, and I could only work up sympathy for her as a victim of Don's philandering. I do think it's a fascinating development that both Betty and Don now realize -- well, Betty more explicitly than Don, but I think Don gets it too -- that they only fell for each other because they were enamored of the perfect but false image each offered to the other. When Betty found out Dashing Don was really a Hick Named Dick, she dropped him. Don's realizing that Betty wasn't really the virginal perfect suburban wife he thought he'd married shattered him briefly, but also freed him. I was really put off by Don's angrily calling Betty a "whore" in their confrontation at the end -- who is a multiple cheater like him to call any woman that?! -- but then I realized that what I was seeing was not a statement about Betty, but a statement about Don's fakey-fake icon being broken. That is, his esteem for Betty depended not on affection for who he is -- all his lovers have been anti-Bettys, in that they've been warm, motherly and fun -- but on a sexist-based glorification of her image as the Virgin of Suburbia (not literally a virgin, but the Perfectly Pure Suburban Wife). Don's got a Virgin-Whore complex that drives his immature relationship with women.
(I think it may be hard for people born in the 1960s or later to appreciate how this sort of thing distorted gender relations. I'll never forget a friend's father giving us 14-year-old boys advice about women: "There's the kind of girl you want to have fun with" -- meaning, a girl who'll put out -- "and the kind of girl you want to marry." He explained that if a girl you're dating won't sleep with you, you know she might be marrying material. He wasn't kidding. But if memory serves, I'd say that man was about 10 years younger than Don Draper. That was another world.)
+ Joan is back! She and Roger are my favorite characters, and her return to the series full-time was inevitable. I think we can all see that those two are headed for marriage, as soon as her brutish husband gets killed in Vietnam, and Roger figures out how to ditch the young nitwit trophy wife he left his admirable wife Mona to marry. I thought Roger had one of the best lines ever the other night when he got off the phone with the new Mrs. Sterling, who'd called to obsess over the Kennedy assasination. He told Don, "She's obsessed! That's the most interest that girl's ever had in a book depository."
+ I really don't like the petulant crybaby Pete Campbell, but his character is one of the better ones on the show (Vincent Kartheiser is terrific in that role), and I have to say that his and Trudy's marriage is probably going to emerge as one of the more interesting relationships in the next season.
+ Departed characters: I will miss Kinsey, though I can see why he had to be left behind for thematic reasons. He was an underperformer who had an outsized opinion of his abilities, based on his status as a Princeton grad. In the more competitive economic order emerging from the breakup of the old one, a talented outsider like Peggy is more valuable than someone like Kinsey. I suspect we'll see Sal, the gay art director, again. There's no way we lose Betty, but I'll be very, very happy that in Season Four, the action will move from Ossining back downtown.
+ There's been lots of speculation over what Don meant when he pitched coming to the new firm to Peggy. From the TV Club discussion:
Don goes back to Peggy with a more elaborate sales pitch, explaining why he needs her: "Because there are people out there who buy things, people like you and me. And something happened, something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable."Question for you guys: What on earth is Don talking about here? The Kennedy assassination? Or some other, more generalized American loss of innocence? Either way, the pitch works; Peggy's eyes well up with tears when Don tells her that if she doesn't join up now, "I will spend the rest of my life trying to hire you."
Here's what I think it is. Remember, until Peggy confessed to Pete that she had his baby, Don was the only character who knew her secret. He knows that like him, Peggy has a terrible, life-changing trauma in her background, one she's triumphed over, and kept her secret. I suspect it's starting to dawn on him that the reason he's so good at advertising -- and that she's such a natural -- is that they both understand to the marrow that good advertising works by bridging the emotional gap between what is and what we would it to be. Privileged Paul Kinsey can't possibly know that. Peggy, like Don, has lived it. That gives them a huge creative advantage.
Your thoughts about the final episode, and where the series goes from here? Share them in the comments thread.
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Indy,
It's funny how your supposed "independence," "moderation," et al go out the window where Palin concerned.
You won't hear an unflattering word about Obama, and you also won't hear an unflattering word about the clear and manifest misogyny -- and, for that matter, class-bigotry -- of left-liberal Palinophobes.
Which can't help but lead one to conclude that you are nowhere near as "moderate" or as "independent" as you take yourself to be.
BTW and in closing: The view of Palin as "not a woman" is a direct, notorious, and widely-cited quote from some prominent left-liberal feminist or other whose name escapes me know. I believe the quote was from an essay in the New York Times. It was certainly from some comparably prominent left-liberal publication and could easily be googled if you want to see the context in which it appeared.
PS: I don't want to derail this thread by making it yet another debate on Sarah Palin, whom I defend and whom I sympathize with, whom I think would have made no worse a President than the President we presently have and probably a slightly better one, but for whom, nonetheless, I did not vote.
Crustacean, I don't doubt that some liberal feminists have said some wacky things about Palin and others. I've laughed at them myself. And I think it is entirely all right to criticize Obama the same as it is to criticize any other President. I said on the other side that he has a similar temperament to mine, where Palin does not. It is entirely possible to have trouble relating to Palin’s temperament and still be a moderate.
But I agree that there is not point in moving to side issues. The debate about Pete and Peggy is interesting. Since he did not know about the baby, he had no say in what she chose to do about the child. As for her sister, you make some interesting points. Had I been in the position of those two sisters, back in those days, which I never have been, I can’t say for sure whether I would have acted more like Peggy or her sister. Quite likely, more like her sister.
I think you all are making the mistake of assuming that Peggy's sister adopted Peggy's baby. She didn't. The sister was pregnant at the same time, and the baby that Peggy sees/holds at her sister's house is her nephew. Matthew Weiner has made this clear in interviews (which is good, because I think he made it needlessly confusing in the series).
This fact doesn't change the central debate about Peggy, but it eliminates idea that her sister's traditional values and sacrifice allow Peggy to remain in the progressive world.
Rhymnocerous, I think you're right although the overall recap at the amctv.com site doesn't get into that. I'll have to rewatch some of season 2 on my dvd and look at the message board at AMC.
Rhymnocerous is correct. Peggy's sister (Anita) did not take in Peggy's baby. I agree that Weiner made that needlessly confusing. At any rate, Anita had her own baby, so Peggy did not "outsource her moral responsibilities" to Anita. Certainly, Anita underwent a period of (understandable) anger and bitterness toward Peggy, culminating in her confession to Fr. Gill. This is too small a point to undermine Crustacean's thesis (which I don't think I entirely buy, though I'll go along with some of it), but Anita's anger seems to be genuinely resolved by the time we see Peggy, Anita, and their mother together in the episode this season in which Peggy buys her mom a TV and tells her of her plans to move to Manhattan. Anita is very supportive of Peggy in that scene.
I just keep wondering when Pete's actual "Chekhov's gun" (the one he got in exchange for the chip & dip) may go off. Did you notice him toting it over his shoulder when they moved their stuff out of SC? Wonder if he's stowing it at the Pierre? I would think Joan would have none of that. Anyhow, so far, it's been a fairly comical prop, but of course absolutely anything could happen with it.
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