Vanitas vanitatum
I wish there were someone with whom I could discuss Mad Men! Has anyone from the flist seen it and would like to share thoughts?
I said yesterday that the show doesn't switch me onto speculating mode, but it often triggers my analytical mind. It's the kind of show to parse and decipher. And "Severance" was definitely an episode that begged to be analyzed!
I remember that when I watched The Sopranos I couldn't help thinking of Mad Men, all the time. Matthew Weiner created something that seemed unique in style, but actually brought so much from his experience as a Sopranos writer. Surely, there was no true equivalent of Peggy and Pete on The Sopranos (Christopher was never that fleshed out, and, apart from Edie Falco and Lorraine Braco, the show suffered from the lack of great actors to face James Gandolfini) and Don isn't as bad a man as Tony was. He never killed anyone, and although there are morality issues at play in his line of work, being an advertising man is not the same as being a gangster. Yet, the two have so much in common.They are womanizers, unable to be satisfied with what they have, adaptating and yet stuck in a sort of perpetual nostalgia. They can't change. I kinda picture Tony and Don meeting up. What would they talk about? Their last conquest?
I think they would rather talk about their mothers. Deep down, Mad Men is about Don's psyche, the same way The Sopranos was about Tony's, except that Matthew Wiener didn't need a shrink on screen to explore Don's. He found other ways to the point that most of what happens on Mad Men tend to be all symbolism and a mere extension of Don's spirtual/psychological state.
In the last season of The Sopranos, fans looked for clues about Tony's death; Mad Men fans have been speculating about Don's death for years (if only because of the falling man from the credits), and there are already legions thinking that Don is already dead.
Death has always been a prominent character on Mad Men, if only because, technically, Donald Draper is a dead man walking...
In "Severance" Ted voiced a very cliché line about how "there's only three women in every man's life". However Don has had so many women that three seems too small a number.
Who are Don's three women?
The three women he really fell in love with? Betty, Rachel, Megan could be those three then. Or it is the three women who really matters to him in general? In that case I'd say Sally, Peggy and his current love interest- whoever it may be- would fit the description.
But Ted's tag line probably meant something more freudian.
In Don's case, I believe that the first woman is his mother, and like for Tony Soprano, it shaped a lot of things. Dick Whitman's mother wasn't as awful as Livia Soprano, but she was a whore. I wrote it when I reviewed "The Other Woman", prostitution is a big theme in Don's life, not only because of his upbringing in a whorehouse, but because of his work.
Providing fantasies and satisfying the clients is what he does, and this episode reminded us once more of that, through various storylines: Peggy's and Joan's and Ken's. Ken and Joan ended up deciding to be the clients and to be pleased or serviced ("could you?"), echoing Don's private life, instead of his professional one.
And there's the key moment of the episode: Don's weird storyline with the waitress.
It's weird because it seems so unrealistic, even if Roger left a $100 tip, that the waitress would just do that in a dark alley to repay him. The whole scene sounds completely unreal, even later when Don comes back and discusses his dream with her. What she told him about remembering when he had his dream, didn't sound like something a waitress who fucked a client in a dark alley, presumely because she thought he was there to collect on the $100, would tell him later!
The scene does't make much sens on a Doylist level. It's Don's subconscious working there.
The brunette's name is Diana, but when her co-worker calls her, after Don asked the older lady to get the waitress's attention, she shouted "DI!".
In the same episode, Don dreamed of Rachel whom he once loved and with whom he dreamed of eloping. In his dream he casts her as a fur model who tells him that he "missed his flight" (btw I loved the detail of Ted opening the door to her, while it was Pete who shut it at the end!). Apparently later, Don finds out that Rachel has actually died from leukemia. "DI!" sounded awfully like "Die!".
Don has all his women mixed up there. He met Betty when she was modeling, and I believe she was even fur modeling then! The waitress behaves like a prostitute but, on the other hand, is totally Don's type, recalling the likes of Midge, and, to a lesser extent, Rachel. Also, her name DI ANA sounds like a mash-up of the real Donald Draper's wife Anna, and the verb "Die". And Anna died from cancer too.
So basically, the waitress is a mix of Dick Whitman's mother, Donald Draper's wife (an ideal that Don would never touch), and Don's love interests. She is all the women in Don's life.
If we needed another clue, what was she reading? USA from John Dos Passos, which is famous for its uses of stream of consciousness. I think, that in Mad Men, the narrative mode doesn't provide soliloquies or interior monologues, but uses visual situations and encounters or relationships to tell us things about Don's psyche.
Methinks that the three women in Don's life are three archetypes. The mother; the whore; the partner/confident/ideal wife/pair
The problem is that his actual mother was a whore, and the women he married or bedded were never his partners/friends/confidents. The only women he actually trust and respected were Anna, Peggy and Sally. Anna was an ideal's wife but she wasn't his, only in name, she was the real Donald Draper's. She could only be his friend. Peggy is the ideal partner, the one who was his protégé and has sometimes be motherly to him, but even though she wa sonce his secretary, he refused to sleep with her. Sally is his daughter, which means she's kinda a reflection of himself, although she looks like her mother.
Joan is a mother, but she's also a wealthy partner in the firm now, and yet she had to wait with the models in order to have a chat with "busy Don", and Peggy kinda suggested that she still dressed like a whore.
Joan embodies Don's complex and conflicting views of women. We know that Joan did prostitute herself in order to be a partner in "The Other Woman", or rather that she got her partnership with that sacrifice (and Roger's approval/complicity, which was here echoed by his $100 tip!) and we know that Don was desperate to prevent her from selling herself to a client. He used to respect her until that moment.
As for Peggy's storyline, it seemed disconnected from the rest of the episode. She started rather happy and confident, until the meeting with the sexist guys, and, above all, until Joan's mean comment on her looks in the elevator scene. So Peggy finally accepted to go on a date with a stranger. With the help of wine she was entertaining the idea of a fling, and even of an escape to Paris with a new love interest (just like once upon a time Don dreamed of flying away to California with Rachel), but she couldn't find her passport. She missed her flight too! Her storyline actually subtly echoed Don's. The office is their true home.
And even in his dreams, Don finds a professional punch line "You are not just smooth, you're Wilkinson smooth"! Back to work indeed. But does that mean that work is life? Is that all there is?
Don's office actually looks more and more like his tomb, the place where he shows up LATE (!!), only to lie down before the door is closed. The name on his door is a dead man's name after all.
Vanitas vanitatum...is "that's all there is"?
Many women looked at themselves in a mirror in the episode. The fur models - who really looked and behaved like whores in those furs, especially the first one! -, the dream!Rachel, and Joan...
But, as we used to say about BtvS, it's all about Don Draper!
When Don went to pay his respect to Rachel, her family was sitting shiva so the mirrors, of course, were covered. Don tried to briefely look into one of them before pulling the veil back over the glass.
One last thought about the moustaches! It isn't only a period detail. Don doesn't sport one (I'm glad they didn't disfigure Jon Hamm with one!) and it's telling. He even still carries a hat (when he returns to the luncheonette after the news about Rachel's death, and later when he's arriving at the office), still looking as he did ten years earlier when the show began.
Donald Draper is a man of the 50's who wouldn't fit in the 70's.Our protagonist stole the identity of a man who died in the Korean War and cheated death, in a way, but death is still there. Don often sees ghosts of dead people, and the mid-season finale ended with his seeing a singing dead Bert.
The quick fuck in the dark alley had a lot of eros/thanatos vibes. The brunette represented all the women, but was also the personification of something Don is quite familiar with.
I said yesterday that the show doesn't switch me onto speculating mode, but it often triggers my analytical mind. It's the kind of show to parse and decipher. And "Severance" was definitely an episode that begged to be analyzed!
I remember that when I watched The Sopranos I couldn't help thinking of Mad Men, all the time. Matthew Weiner created something that seemed unique in style, but actually brought so much from his experience as a Sopranos writer. Surely, there was no true equivalent of Peggy and Pete on The Sopranos (Christopher was never that fleshed out, and, apart from Edie Falco and Lorraine Braco, the show suffered from the lack of great actors to face James Gandolfini) and Don isn't as bad a man as Tony was. He never killed anyone, and although there are morality issues at play in his line of work, being an advertising man is not the same as being a gangster. Yet, the two have so much in common.They are womanizers, unable to be satisfied with what they have, adaptating and yet stuck in a sort of perpetual nostalgia. They can't change. I kinda picture Tony and Don meeting up. What would they talk about? Their last conquest?
I think they would rather talk about their mothers. Deep down, Mad Men is about Don's psyche, the same way The Sopranos was about Tony's, except that Matthew Wiener didn't need a shrink on screen to explore Don's. He found other ways to the point that most of what happens on Mad Men tend to be all symbolism and a mere extension of Don's spirtual/psychological state.
In the last season of The Sopranos, fans looked for clues about Tony's death; Mad Men fans have been speculating about Don's death for years (if only because of the falling man from the credits), and there are already legions thinking that Don is already dead.
Death has always been a prominent character on Mad Men, if only because, technically, Donald Draper is a dead man walking...
In "Severance" Ted voiced a very cliché line about how "there's only three women in every man's life". However Don has had so many women that three seems too small a number.
Who are Don's three women?
The three women he really fell in love with? Betty, Rachel, Megan could be those three then. Or it is the three women who really matters to him in general? In that case I'd say Sally, Peggy and his current love interest- whoever it may be- would fit the description.
But Ted's tag line probably meant something more freudian.
In Don's case, I believe that the first woman is his mother, and like for Tony Soprano, it shaped a lot of things. Dick Whitman's mother wasn't as awful as Livia Soprano, but she was a whore. I wrote it when I reviewed "The Other Woman", prostitution is a big theme in Don's life, not only because of his upbringing in a whorehouse, but because of his work.
Providing fantasies and satisfying the clients is what he does, and this episode reminded us once more of that, through various storylines: Peggy's and Joan's and Ken's. Ken and Joan ended up deciding to be the clients and to be pleased or serviced ("could you?"), echoing Don's private life, instead of his professional one.
And there's the key moment of the episode: Don's weird storyline with the waitress.
It's weird because it seems so unrealistic, even if Roger left a $100 tip, that the waitress would just do that in a dark alley to repay him. The whole scene sounds completely unreal, even later when Don comes back and discusses his dream with her. What she told him about remembering when he had his dream, didn't sound like something a waitress who fucked a client in a dark alley, presumely because she thought he was there to collect on the $100, would tell him later!
The scene does't make much sens on a Doylist level. It's Don's subconscious working there.
The brunette's name is Diana, but when her co-worker calls her, after Don asked the older lady to get the waitress's attention, she shouted "DI!".
In the same episode, Don dreamed of Rachel whom he once loved and with whom he dreamed of eloping. In his dream he casts her as a fur model who tells him that he "missed his flight" (btw I loved the detail of Ted opening the door to her, while it was Pete who shut it at the end!). Apparently later, Don finds out that Rachel has actually died from leukemia. "DI!" sounded awfully like "Die!".
Don has all his women mixed up there. He met Betty when she was modeling, and I believe she was even fur modeling then! The waitress behaves like a prostitute but, on the other hand, is totally Don's type, recalling the likes of Midge, and, to a lesser extent, Rachel. Also, her name DI ANA sounds like a mash-up of the real Donald Draper's wife Anna, and the verb "Die". And Anna died from cancer too.
So basically, the waitress is a mix of Dick Whitman's mother, Donald Draper's wife (an ideal that Don would never touch), and Don's love interests. She is all the women in Don's life.
If we needed another clue, what was she reading? USA from John Dos Passos, which is famous for its uses of stream of consciousness. I think, that in Mad Men, the narrative mode doesn't provide soliloquies or interior monologues, but uses visual situations and encounters or relationships to tell us things about Don's psyche.
Methinks that the three women in Don's life are three archetypes. The mother; the whore; the partner/confident/ideal wife/pair
The problem is that his actual mother was a whore, and the women he married or bedded were never his partners/friends/confidents. The only women he actually trust and respected were Anna, Peggy and Sally. Anna was an ideal's wife but she wasn't his, only in name, she was the real Donald Draper's. She could only be his friend. Peggy is the ideal partner, the one who was his protégé and has sometimes be motherly to him, but even though she wa sonce his secretary, he refused to sleep with her. Sally is his daughter, which means she's kinda a reflection of himself, although she looks like her mother.
Joan is a mother, but she's also a wealthy partner in the firm now, and yet she had to wait with the models in order to have a chat with "busy Don", and Peggy kinda suggested that she still dressed like a whore.
Joan embodies Don's complex and conflicting views of women. We know that Joan did prostitute herself in order to be a partner in "The Other Woman", or rather that she got her partnership with that sacrifice (and Roger's approval/complicity, which was here echoed by his $100 tip!) and we know that Don was desperate to prevent her from selling herself to a client. He used to respect her until that moment.
As for Peggy's storyline, it seemed disconnected from the rest of the episode. She started rather happy and confident, until the meeting with the sexist guys, and, above all, until Joan's mean comment on her looks in the elevator scene. So Peggy finally accepted to go on a date with a stranger. With the help of wine she was entertaining the idea of a fling, and even of an escape to Paris with a new love interest (just like once upon a time Don dreamed of flying away to California with Rachel), but she couldn't find her passport. She missed her flight too! Her storyline actually subtly echoed Don's. The office is their true home.
And even in his dreams, Don finds a professional punch line "You are not just smooth, you're Wilkinson smooth"! Back to work indeed. But does that mean that work is life? Is that all there is?
Don's office actually looks more and more like his tomb, the place where he shows up LATE (!!), only to lie down before the door is closed. The name on his door is a dead man's name after all.
Vanitas vanitatum...is "that's all there is"?
Many women looked at themselves in a mirror in the episode. The fur models - who really looked and behaved like whores in those furs, especially the first one! -, the dream!Rachel, and Joan...
But, as we used to say about BtvS, it's all about Don Draper!
When Don went to pay his respect to Rachel, her family was sitting shiva so the mirrors, of course, were covered. Don tried to briefely look into one of them before pulling the veil back over the glass.
One last thought about the moustaches! It isn't only a period detail. Don doesn't sport one (I'm glad they didn't disfigure Jon Hamm with one!) and it's telling. He even still carries a hat (when he returns to the luncheonette after the news about Rachel's death, and later when he's arriving at the office), still looking as he did ten years earlier when the show began.
Donald Draper is a man of the 50's who wouldn't fit in the 70's.Our protagonist stole the identity of a man who died in the Korean War and cheated death, in a way, but death is still there. Don often sees ghosts of dead people, and the mid-season finale ended with his seeing a singing dead Bert.
The quick fuck in the dark alley had a lot of eros/thanatos vibes. The brunette represented all the women, but was also the personification of something Don is quite familiar with.