[PLEASUREMAN]

Lookwell!, 03 November 2009 - 02:41 PM:

hey nancyboy what is your response to the women (and sackless men) who see Betty as some sort of modern feminist? Like whenever she does something stupid or childish (like accuse Don of whatever without proof or throw a fit for no real reason) these girls I know are all like "you go grrrl!" and in the latest episode when she essentially throws him out of the house and is having an affair with whosits, the governor or whatever they're like "woo she's showing him what!" and stupid shit like that

Well there is a ton of really dumb commentary on the show (see Slate). It's hard to figure out how anyone could root for Betty, if anything Weiner has leaned hard on her least sympathetic qualities and made her a little too unlikeable for his story, just to justify the inevitable divorce. Or maybe January Jones isn't capable of giving the character humanity. The fact that an actress performs the character a certain way is going to influence the writing.

The two characters who are really uninspired are Joan's husband (a male Betty, except even more pathetic) and the governor's aide. That is a criticism I'd put against the show, because these characters are involved in big storylines. Maybe the aide isn't that badly written but he seems like such an obvious foil and there's no real reason for him to be interested in Betty other than the plot requires it. The doctor seems like an overdone effort toward making the audience root for Roger and Joan to get together (oh that reminds me of the third uninspired character, Roger's new wife Jane).

But slips like these are allowable when the rest of the series is so impeccable. Roger's wedding speech for his sniveling daughter was nicely done, as was the negotiation mediated by Mona between father and daughter. You just don't see scenes like this so deftly carried off.

Speaking of this latest episode, I wasn't ecstatic about the highlight on JFK--Weiner had alluded previously that he wasn't interested in making it a focus--but part of that is my lack of respect for the whole Camelot Cult and the glib mediocrity at its center. Probably people would have generally been upset about it. (My mother-in-law was working the police switchboard in Dallas when it happened, but I've never asked her about the reaction.) Given the significance of the episodes on the election and the season two opener with Jackie giving the White House tour and setting the tone for the season, it made thematic sense to once again use a Kennedy event to show the cracking facade.

Getting back to Betty, she's not a proto-feminist, but she's probably a good example of the "hear me roar" attention seeking housewives that feminism drew in. She compares unfavorably to every other woman in the series--except maybe Jane Siegel. Betty isn't going to grow up and whatever she does it will involve attention seeking rather than any kind of accomplishment. I don't know how anyone can miss that, she's not a subtle character at all.

[rho]

Unfortunately I'm way behind on Mad Men. Season 2 hasn't made it up to the top of the Netflix queue yet. But yeah, the part I liked the most was it seemed to capture an authentic zeitgeist rather than lecture. Draper's fractured character seemed custom-made for the unvarnished liar's factory of '60s ad agencies, Draper being wholly constructed out of fibs and dodges himself.

There's probably some critique there as well, but it's too meta for me to bother with.

I hope season 2 is as good as the first season.

[PLEASUREMAN]

rho, 04 November 2009 - 09:50 AM:

Unfortunately I'm way behind on Mad Men. Season 2 hasn't made it up to the top of the Netflix queue yet. But yeah, the part I liked the most was it seemed to capture an authentic zeitgeist rather than lecture. Draper's fractured character seemed custom-made for the unvarnished liar's factory of '60s ad agencies, Draper being wholly constructed out of fibs and dodges himself.

There's probably some critique there as well, but it's too meta for me to bother with.

I hope season 2 is as good as the first season.

It is, and as with season 3 it also has a subtly different tone so it's not just more of the same. Season 2 feels more like a car swerving off the road and you're caught in the instant when you don't know what it will finally hit. What I also like is that stories develop without concerning the needs of the actors--you know the way that most series keep a character in the game because the actor has fans. Which always hurts the verisimilitude and would be fatal in a series that is largely focused on change.

[rho]

Quote

Which always hurts the verisimilitude and would be fatal in a series that is largely focused on change.

That brings to mind another series I've enjoyed, but for different reasons, MI-5 from the BBC. Not to say that it's high-art, as it's more akin to 24. Lots of flash and running and swoosh-kaboom, which is entertaining in its place. But they regularly kill off major characters, so the series has more of a Love Boat-style rotating cast. Only it's Love Boat where Issac is an insane Muslim terrorist and Captain Stubing has a taste for long pig.

I think the above qualifies as General Shit Talk. My insight on Mad Men runs out too quickly, unless the topic turns to Christina Hendricks's "pendulous tits".

[Moondog]

rho, 05 November 2009 - 11:59 AM:

Quote

Which always hurts the verisimilitude and would be fatal in a series that is largely focused on change.

That brings to mind another series I've enjoyed, but for different reasons, MI-5 from the BBC. Not to say that it's high-art, as it's more akin to 24. Lots of flash and running and swoosh-kaboom, which is entertaining in its place. But they regularly kill off major characters, so the series has more of a Love Boat-style rotating cast. Only it's Love Boat where Issac is an insane Muslim terrorist and Captain Stubing has a taste for long pig.

I think the above qualifies as General Shit Talk. My insight on Mad Men runs out too quickly, unless the topic turns to Christina Hendricks's "pendulous tits".

I should really get around to watching this show. The commentary in this thread is intriguing, and dem's some fine tittays.

[Bumbling American]

Someone over at Sailer's site just recommended the producers hire one James Lileks to help out with period detail. Presumably they'd send the Internet a filled ashtray to take his place.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Bumbling American, 12 November 2009 - 05:31 PM:

Someone over at Sailer's site just recommended the producers hire one James Lileks to help out with period detail. Presumably they'd send the Internet a filled ashtray to take his place.

Yes, Mad Men could use pallet-loads of fart-odored kitsch from some Midwestern clown.

Sure enough, the hick had written a meandering, clueless post about it last year.

Lileks:

Nearly everyone in “Mad Men” is a likeable character in some ways despite their flaws, and nearly everyone in “Sopranos” was mostly unlikable but redeemed for the moment by plot and dialogue. I suppose that’s why the latter was lauded; there’s something perverse and vicariously appealing about caring for bad guys. Aren’t we naughty. But even the not-so-bad people in the Sopranos were unappealing, really; the wives were all shrews content to float along on murder money, the kids were empty shells, and the mobsters – while always fun to watch and listen to – were cruel men without qualities, only tics. Did anyone care if Christopher fell off the wagon? Anyone care about anyone, except whether they would be the Whacker or the Whackee this season? When you think about it, the grand tale of modern mobsters yearning after a bygone time when they had the nabe in their hands is a little like post-Communist block captains lamenting the end of the Soviet Union. Cry yourself a river. Put on the Sinatra and deal with it.

What a terrible writer. He misses the obvious theme of The Sopranos--the modern American as mobster, the amorality and narcissism of contemporary life. That the characters aren't "likeable" is as far from the point as you can get, it's like complaining that the people in A Clockwork Orange don't hug each other enough. It's not that the show is above reproach--it had a few big problems--but Lileks has no clue what its defects are because he has no clue what it's really about--or is too complacent and self-satisfied to appreciate the theme of the show. UGH THESE ARE BAD PEOPLE, DEAL WITH IT.

Lileks:

The primary characters are superior. Don Draper is a better main character than Tony Soprano, period. Smarter, deeper, remote except when he’s not, but even then he holds back. Mysterious past, better father than Tony, better taste in paramours. He doesn’t have neuroses; he has problems. Tony would take Valium; Don would come up with a great campaign to make Tony feel good about taking it. Even though Tony would know it was BS, he’d repeat the tagline if someone saw it on his bathroom shelf, if only to laugh it off

Can you imagine a more asinine riff on the two series? Don Draper is smarter than Tony Soprano? But Tony Soprano can beat up Don Draper! I wonder how either character would fare set in the world of The A-Team? Why don't we ask a manchild.

Lileks:

As far as depicting a culture, well, the world of the Sopranos was narrow and dank; the world of “Mad Men” is far broader, and the lack of a criminal context frees it up to inhabit the world where most people live.

Yes, the New York City advertising world and its upscale executives--so much broader a canvass than Jersey mobsters. Because he's a tasteless boob, he can't explain what is superior about a drama except by talking about how inferior he thinks another drama is. He moons inanely about how much better a wife and mother Betty Draper is than Carmella Soprano--a pretty dumb thing to say a year ago, and miserably stupid at the close of this season, with Betty abandoning her children for six weeks so she can get a quickie divorce and marry her substitute father.

I almost forgot Lileks' unerring ability to focus on the dumbest things, his provincial Midwestern outlook, and his grotesque sentimentality. Thanks for reminding me!

[cleon]

Jane is the hottest bitch ever. I love dem tittays. Betty is a narrow ass skank whore.

[PLEASUREMAN]

cleon, 13 November 2009 - 03:46 PM:

Jane is the hottest bitch ever. I love dem tittays. Betty is a narrow ass skank whore.

It's Joan but she's a great throwback to when women were women...she's the woman to Betty's daddy-fixated child. Jane is Roger's skinny Jewish wife, I don't think she's the one you like. Spoiled cunt.

[Jeff Fries]

PLEASUREMAN, 12 November 2009 - 06:10 PM:

I almost forgot Lileks' unerring ability to focus on the dumbest things, his provincial Midwestern outlook, and his grotesque sentimentality. Thanks for reminding me!

Time: 25 Best Blogs 2009

[PLEASUREMAN]

Jeff Fries, 14 November 2009 - 04:18 AM:

PLEASUREMAN, 12 November 2009 - 06:10 PM:

I almost forgot Lileks' unerring ability to focus on the dumbest things, his provincial Midwestern outlook, and his grotesque sentimentality. Thanks for reminding me!

Time: 25 Best Blogs 2009

ahaha, every blog on their list is an example of the worst shit the Internet has to offer

Time must be praying that healthcare reform goes through so that no one unplugs its readership from their ventilators

[PLEASUREMAN]

Season 3 post mortem -

Lining up seasons 1, 2, and 3 against each other, the third season of Mad Men is restrained, bearing a transitional tone. There are parts of the season that seem like an attempt to reboot the characters and setting, culminating in the final episode when Sterling Cooper is dissolved and the core team forms a new agency. It is also a strange and unexpected follow-up to the careening second season, where Don Draper seemed in full self-destruct mode as a consequence of his personal demons. "Meditations in an Emergency" provided a perfect theme for this introspective, dreaming, tormented character. The final dissolution of the Draper fantasy life dispenses with this tension-building element without having released any of that energy, or provided new insight into Draper himself. The teasing interplay between Draper and Conrad Hilton dissolves with the same sense of anti-climax. In effect, everything that is built up is allowed to disappear.

Without knowing what is to come in season 4, this restrained, transitional season is more difficult to evaluate. Certainly were the series to end at this point the result would be completely unsatisfying, but Weiner had his guarantee for a fourth season. But even beyond its transitional nature, the season is somewhat uneven. Certain episodes seem designed far in advance to work out specific plot points and character reveals, which gives them an overplotted, inorganic feel at odds with so many of the great moments in the series. Sal's departure and Pete's episode with a nanny fall in this category. Other subplots involving secondary characters fail to impress--Joan's disappointing doctor husband and Don's affair with a schoolteacher are hampered by the inadequacies of the actor and actress playing opposite these two formiddable characters. Both give enervated, bland performances where a spark of life is badly needed. (And to be honest, I've never warmed to January Jones, who doesn't seem entirely human as Betty; whether that is intentional or not, it creates dramatic problems.)

There is very nearly a sense that the season ends with a reset in order to dispell the ennui of the preceding twelve episodes. However, whatever one might think of this grousing, there are pretty impressive moments. John Slattery and Christina Hendricks are as usual dangerously good--the danger being that they might too greatly outshine everyone they share a scene with. Slattery is game enough to pull off the performance of Roger in blackface at a Kentucky Derby party (at which Pete and his wife perform a very entertaining Charleston--a reminder of their class and the upbringing common in those pre-negro-latino days). Perhaps it is only due to Mad Men's "selective appeal" that this did not result in the usual negro offense-taking--it is the characters who take offense at Roger's good-natured performance who seem stiff and humorless. There are a couple of on-the-nose speeches by Peggy, but these are redeemed by her excellent chemistry with Draper and finely illustrated superiority to the WASP pseudo-rebels Paul and Smitty. (A reminder that what led to today's overrepresentation of women and their negatively feminizing influence on business and politics was in part the unfairness to the exceptional women who did deserve opportunities and were capable of playing by the rules of the game.) The excesses of the managerial class are also in evidence. They designed the failed business and political ideologies of today. They are our present elite.

My expectations are higher for the fourth season. One saving grace of season three is that it has thrown all the established dynamics into the air--Weiner will have no excuses for a less than brilliant fourth season.

[PLEASUREMAN]

http://www.hulu.com/...s-pitch-meeting

http://www.hulu.com/...n-drapers-guide

[PRCalDude]

I watch the show because, as PM stated, the writing is excellent. Also, it gives me a picture of what things were like for my parents' generation before things completely went off the rails in the 60s and 70s.

I find it much easier to sympathize with Betty than with Don Draper. Don is essentially a rich nihilist who sabotages all of the good things in life (family, marriage) with trivial pleasures (skanks, too much drinking, pursuit of ever-more wealth). Betty is an uncomplicated and shallow person, but that's who Don married. I haven't watched the entire second season, but it seems to me that her main gripe was with Don's obvious philandering and dodging of marital duties (ie, boning her and being home with the family). No wife would tolerate such behavior from a husband without an enormous amount of sub-surface anger accumulating. In therapy sessions with the psychiatrist in the first season, she basically reveals the cause of her anxiety disorder: Don's cheating.

Sure, Betty leaves a lot to be desired personality-wise, but at least with her WYSIWYG.

Quote

I believe it is no accident that the series came to fruition in the past few years; I think we are living through a period of equally chaotic change today, following a similarly chimeric prosperity, and that this sense of fluidity has produced a madness comparable to that which is still awaiting the characters in the series (the current season being set in 1963, the year of the JFK assassination).

Agreed.

Quote

He's an enigma, a locked box of a man who resists, maddeningly, easy explanation. And yet he excites an attraction among women—particularly ones my age, women in their late '20s and '30s who were born after the era that Mad Men portrays—that seems unmatched by any leading man on television today... We describe our obsession in words that, like the show itself, are somewhat retro. "He is a straight-up man. He makes me feel like a woman via the TV." "He's a throwback to a time when men were men. "It's the thickness of his body." "Shoulders to cry on and a jaw that causes women to swoon."

A man's man. A virile man. A masculine man. Strong terms. And ones that would make our postmodern gender-studies professors blush.

Of course Don is everything women want. If only the pudgy men trailing behind their domineering wives in Target would get this through their thick skulls.

Quote

The Newsweek article is terrible of course. A stupid, fannish essay banged out in maybe thirty minutes, most of it filled with repetitive superlatives and summaries and to be sure's. The second half of the article is a limp justification for worshipping effeminate ciphers like Barack Obama, the third president in a row with daddy issues and a crippled psyche. Women who consider themselves "professionals" (i.e. have a libarts or business-lite degree and do practically nothing of value) will always prefer an office filled with beta males they can dun into taking them seriously.

Of course when you look at the modern office, even the alphas are betas--weak men who gained power through a mysterious consensus after years of expertly sucking management dick and creating new synergies in risk aversion, men who are in fact the creatures of a workplace that is 50% female (and suffers for it). I don't know that today's manchildren will ever snap out of it and change this, but all it will take is men grabbing what they want and never apologizing for offending some useless libarts shrew and the she-male faggot who cries after sex.

Deserves an entire thread.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Maybe my main problem with Betty Draper is that January Jones looks like a child no matter how they dress her

[PLEASUREMAN]

[Samborai]

Yo P-Man, I haven't really watched the show much, other than occasionally catching an episode once in a great while, but a site I frequent happened to have a post up about how the fourth season of Mad Men has, so far, been pretty terrible. Is this true?

I can't help but wonder if the rise in the shows' popularity may have something to do with this supposed (sudden?) shift in the writing of the series. I mean, when you see a headline in some grocery store tabloid/TV guide like "Will Don and Betty Get Back Together?", it may be time to stick a fork in the show and call it done.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Samborai, 13 August 2010 - 02:18 PM:

Yo P-Man, I haven't really watched the show much, other than occasionally catching an episode once in a great while, but a site I frequent happened to have a post up about how the fourth season of Mad Men has, so far, been pretty terrible. Is this true?

I can't help but wonder if the rise in the shows' popularity may have something to do with this supposed (sudden?) shift in the writing of the series. I mean, when you see a headline in some grocery store tabloid/TV guide like "Will Don and Betty Get Back Together?", it may be time to stick a fork in the show and call it done.

It's not true, but a certain contingent of conservatives has always hated the show, and has always felt deeply distrustful of what Weiner's "real agenda" is. I can't tell if this guy is one of those conservatives, but his complaints sound very familiar.

The Last Psychiatrist:

Here's the Season 4 approach to this: four white guys are sitting at a Christmas party, and one says, "if they pass civil rights, it'll be a slippery slope." That's all he says. Get it? White male privilege. Never mind that the phrase "slippery slope" wasn't in popular rotation in the sixties-- it's only there to call to mind its use by the cast of Fox News and The Supreme Court who cry "slippery slope" at every progressive agenda. Got it.

I don't know (or care) whether "slippery slope" is an inconsistency in dialogue, but people back then had this sort of conversation, regardless whether conservatives feel embarrassed about it today. Dig up old issues of National Review, which was stridently against civil rights as well as the expansion of social welfare programs. These were hotly debated issues at the time, and concern about the spread of communism was about as acute as it ever was.

And by the way, writing vernacular period dialogue is extremely difficult--you can't just watch some old episodes of Dobie Gillis or The Patty Duke Show. You have to really immerse yourself in the period and keep an ear tuned to figures of speech or differences in word choice and sentence structure, to manners, generational differences, cultural influences, and so on. Generally Mad Men does a decent job with this, although they can't be perfect. They have to balance story and character while trying to avoid contaminating period views with modern views. They have to be anthropologists and dramatists at the same time. (The show has gone through a few stables of writers; it's impressive that Weiner has kept the tone relatively constant.)

The show has always fallen somewhere between very good and iffy on that score--the party scene isn't notably bad, and the Pete Campbell elevator scene isn't notably good. Sometimes the show uses shorthand references because it doesn't have time to unpack every little difference in the way people thought and behaved. And the show has employed these shorthand references from the start--the writer here is just conveniently forgetting about it for purposes of complaining about the first three shows of season four.

Speaking of those shorthand references, I think one of the best moments of the show was from season two, when Draper goes to California and sees a defense industry film that starkly illustrate the vastly destructive nuclear armaments being built. I thought it was an effective way of showing the undercurrent of insanity that society was flirting with as a result of the rise of technology and the frightening new reach of global conflict--no longer an ocean away for Americans.

Conservatives hate the show because they fear it is using the disreputable viewpoints of the past to criticize their viewpoints today. I think mostly conservatives feel this way because they are insecure about who they are, and probably not quite sure what their views really are in the face of 50 years of radical social change. The show has all along used its depiction of the period as a two way mirror--its setting would be wasted if it didn't--but its critique of who we are now is something conservatives should embrace. For example, the show has spotlighted the rise of the managerial culture, the destruction of jobs by technology (the massive photocopier that appears in the Sterling Cooper offices plays like the murder in an Agatha Christie yarn), the spoiled indulgence of American society, the weakening of social mores, the collapse of institutions (remember Betty's line when her daughter asks why they don't go to church every week: "because we don't need to").

As I've said before, if conservatives can't get behind these critiques of modern society, then they need to get off the political stage, because they will have become completely useless.

Worse than this fixation on whether they are being attacked, conservatives also ignore the healthy amount of criticism directed at liberal ideas and biases. If the show has ever had a broad caricature, it was Paul Kinsey, the insufferably smug liberal copywriter at Sterling Cooper, who dates a black woman mainly to look good with his social set (they have nothing in common) and who lectures blacks on what advertising has to offer the civil rights movement. He's consistently outshown by Peggy and his main achievement at the agency is an unused ad campaign that he literally masturbates to. His whole milieu is viciously satirized as perhaps only another liberal with an ear for that kind of pretension can do.

And I appear to be the only person who realizes that Sal Romano's failure with the Patio commercial was an oblique hint that Sal's gay sensibility interfered with his work (a problem referenced in the very first episode of the show--people have short memories). The subplot simply makes no sense otherwise, with Sal's plainly off-putting direction and inability to capture feminine charm the key to the commercial's failure. (Peggy encounters similar problems when she tries to direct a radio spot and reduces the voice actress to tears.)

Then there is the simple orderliness of a time when young people still casually hitchhiked, women jogged in the dark of night, and people were not killed for their wallets by roving packs of niggers. Colin Hanks' Catholic priest, while betraying a modern approach in his dealings with Peggy, remains a respectful depiction of the more formal and serious religiosity of the time. It's hard to see these as terrible indictments of the past.

Meanwhile, the writer of that piece hasn't figured out that Don Draper has been on a downward slide since season one, episode one. Recall that at the end of that episode, after Draper has had sex with an illustrator, flirted with a department store head, and brushed off a pass from his secretary, the surprise twist was showing him returning to his idyllic suburban home with loving wife and two adoring children. That was Draper's peak, and it's been a ragged downhill ride since then, albeit embellished with hollow material success. (Symbolic of which is his Cadillac, a meaningless gift to his wife because it costs him nothing to attain, and which he later totals while having a drunken fling with a client.)

The character has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is down. So in season four we have an emotionally wrecked Draper who hires prostitutes because he doesn't have the drive or emotional pulse to do otherwise. If it doesn't come easily, he can't be bothered. The combination of stress, personal failure, and drinking is making Draper predictably sloppy. The Last Psychiatrist's interpretation? "Hint: this means men are pigs." Perhaps he missed a line of dialogue before Draper's secretary runs off to her degrading assignation, when a male SCDP underling calls Draper "pathetic".

Drama is about conflict. It's hard to see what the point of Mad Men would be if it were four seasons of what a great guy Don Draper was, although I suppose there is an audience for conservative porn along those lines:

Quote

The dashing Don Draper, white male ad exec, has single-handedly delivered yet another successful ad campaign while downing seven whiskeys (neat), making every woman envious of his perfect wife, shooting a nigger rapist with his concealed handgun, and pushing a feminist onto the subway tracks!

Episode 100. (Note: that audience is comprised of failures.)

The first comment under his post gives away the main grievance of people who hate Mad Men:

Luis:

You mean I should be happy I have never watched that goddamn TV show because it sucks for the same reasons some people think Ayn Rand's writing sucks? Thanks for making sure I don't waste time on yet another heaping serving of preachy BS.

"Thanks for writing an opinion for me to have. No I haven't seen the show. Back to my dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged!"

[violent retching]

http://www.bbc.co.uk...son_avenue.html

blind leading the

[PLEASUREMAN]

violent retching, 31 August 2010 - 03:00 PM:

http://www.bbc.co.uk...son_avenue.html

blind leading the

beginning with this unquestioned assumption that the last 50 years of change have been a net positive for society (despite all his rather doom and paranoia-flavored documentaries)

Adam Curtis:

And as we watch the group of characters from 50 years ago, we get reassurance because we know that they are on the edge of a vast change that will transform their world and lead them out of their stifling technocratic order and back into the giant onrush of history.

Is that what people want? Or is it what our clever silly elites want? I suspect the average person would vote "no" 100 times out of 100 for "vast change that will transform their world".

Adam Curtis is also just about the last person I would turn to for an objective, informed retelling of history. The man puts his thumb on the scale like a butcher with three mortgages. (Although he does show how much Weiner has drawn on real advertising history and competing trends--but we all knew that already, the show is quite explicit in this regard.)