"Kids today, they have no one to look up to. Because they're looking up to us."
The time has come for me to join the twenty-first century. So that I can join the twentieth.
By which I mean: does anyone know how to stream TV episodes for free online? What are good sites? Which sites may contain viruses that may cause my computer to crash? I have never had need of illegal online downloading before, because I believed in paying for my media.
I don't believe that anymore. I believe in feeding the addiction.
At least with regards to Mad Men, which I started watching two days ago. I found season 1 on DVD while I was unpacking boxes, and got nothing productive done because I had to finish season one in two days. THAT ADDICTING.
First of all, Mad Men? The show sweeping off the stage with all the statuettes at award shows? It seems like it would be a Boring Old People show (it's not), because my dad watches it, and he's Boring Old People by definition. (Just kidding. Love you, dad.)
It's about an advertising firm in the 60s. Lots of Coke bottle glasses, "I like Ike," but "Kennedy is cool too," and beatniks and women with beehive hairdos. (Disclaimer: there are a lot of beehive hairdos.)
The plot mainly revolves around an ad man, Don Draper, his prowess in the boardroom, and his total inability to keep it in his pants, even though he's married to a drop-dead gorgeous Grace Kelly lookalike.
Also, there's Roger Sterling, who is a total sketchball with women (direct quote: "Whenever God closes a door, he opens a dress") but sort of loveable, silver-haired and dapper. He's a partner (the firm is called Sterling Cooper) and involved with sexpot--sorry, there's just no other way to accurately put it--Joan, the red-headed bombshell secretary.
Pete Campbell is the snot-nosed brat who wants Don's corner office, who harasses the new girl Peggy, Don's secretary.
This show is very "Bell Jar." I don't think anyone is going to put their head in an oven, but virtually all the women are targeted for sexist jokes or treated like pieces of meat, or both. Thanks to an amazing script, though, it's the women who kick the most ass in this show.
For instance:
Rachel Menken is Don's mistress. But that description would be too limiting --she's also the heir apparent of Menken's department store, a Manhattan staple her Russian-Jewish father built from the ground up, and wants to transform her store into a higher-end luxury store, "like Chanel," she says. She goes to Sterling Cooper for help with this, and Don is so discomfited to find a woman in the boardroom, he invites her over for drinks. The rest is history.
I love, love, love this character and the brilliant actress who plays her, Maggie Siff. Once Rachel finds out Don has a wife and children, it torments her. But she needs Don for several reasons: one, she needs his creative abilities to market her store, and two, she's wildly attracted to him, and he to her. Don, who is usually tight-lipped, spills secrets about his childhood to her.
Their relationship is fascinating because it shows how inadequate and shallow most male-female relationships of the time were--Don and Rachel are equals, both businesspeople, and as he tells her late in the season, "You are the only person who knows anything about me." Possibly because, I don't know, she has a brain?
Yeah, I hardcore ship Don and Rachel. Rachel explains their relationship with this metaphor: "In Greek, the word utopia had two different meanings: one, eutopos, the good place. The other is utopos, or the place that cannot be." Then, with the supreme dignity and grace of most women on this show, she gets up and leaves Don all alone in the restaurant, smoking his cigarette, stunned, having earlier in the season opined: "Love was invented by people like me to sell nylons."
Don's wife Betty, who seems to be subconsciously aware that her husband's a cad, develops a strange condition that causes her hands to shake, but since no one can find what's physically wrong with her, she goes to a Freud-loving psychologist who says "Tell me more about that," after every sentence. There she expresses the first stirrings of anger towards the system that would make her into a housebound doll. But it's a slow process.
A former model, Betty attaches her self-worth to her looks; after getting into a car accident with her son and daughter, says that she would rather have her daughter die than have her live with a scarred face. (Fortunately for the poor girl, she survives intact and unscarred.)
Peggy Olsen is Don's secretary, also played by a remarkable actress, Elisabeth Moss. She begins as a timid, mousy girl who hangs onto every word of Joan's (somewhat skewed) advice. Her character begins as a trope of sorts: the Virginal New Girl Meets Reality. Every time she came on screen, with her ponytail and poodle-skirt and sweaters, I had to stop myself from singing, "Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, flouncing with virginity" since she's kind of a dead ringer for Olivia Newton John in Grease early in the season.
However, like everyone else in this show, she slowly reveals new shades of Awesome. After consorting with wet-behind-the-ears jerk Pete, she quickly learns her own ways of surviving in a man's world, which do not involve canoodling, but rather writing her own ads (known as "copy"). Since to the men, women are nothing but sex toys, mothers, or secretaries, this is not met with resounding approval.
But she's and keeps developing ads for a lipstick company, and eventually becomes (sort of) one of the guys. She also deals with the whole sexual aspect of 1960s female employment in an interesting way: she gains weight. Eventually, the guys who harass her are no longer attracted to her and leave her alone. The end result is that she is actually taken seriously as a copywriter. Her ad campaigns are cute, clever, and original: she sells the lipstick with the idea of a "basket of kisses," and strikes a balance between selling a wide variety of lipstick colors and still making women feel special: "Every woman wants choices, but in the end, no one wants to be one in a box of one hundred." A classic example of a woman genius born in the wrong era, but she does well for herself.
Joan Holloway mentors Peggy early on, offering words of advice like: "What men want is something between a mother and a waitress."
The beautiful Christina Hendricks plays Joan, and in case you've been living under a rock, Christina Hendricks is on the cover of Esquire every week. Her figure is all but mathematically impossible (just Google her, you'll see what I mean), and her character has a sort of love-hate relationship with the attention it gets her. Joan views men as little more than animals and sees sex as the only instrument women have to survive. Her worldview does indeed land her the role of office Queen Bee that she craves, but you can practically smell the envy coming off the screen when Peggy learns to win the respect of the office in other ways.
See what I mean about kickass female characters? I suppose the men are okay too. I spent a long time trying to figure out why everyone seems to think Jon Hamm, the guy who plays Don Draper, is sexy. He mopes a lot. He has a dark past. His eyebrows bother me.
Joss Whedon fans: he's just like Angel, basically, except an advertising executive, not a vampire (though just as allergic to sunlight--he's really pale). And you can base your probable reaction to Don on your reaction to him. Also an Angel connection: Vincent Karthieser (you remember sketchball Connor?) plays in Mad Men as--surprise-- total slimeball Pete. It seems Kartheiser is typecast as The Guy You Want to Hit. It works SO WELL.
So, in the interest of world peace, tell me how to get season 2 online. And know that if you watch this show, you will be doing yourself an immense favor if you like complex, conflicted characters with massive issues (who happen to be stuck in the land of Wonder Bread and Ike Eisenhower.)