a belated UnREAL post for Valentine's Day

[pocochina]

UnREAL: quite possibly the best new show of 2015. All of the praise that it's gotten has been well-earned. The one thing sticking point I have is the repeated claim that Rachel Goldberg is “the female Walter White.”

Now, I have nothing against the idea of a female Walter White character. Walt's comedic doppelganger was a woman; some day soon he'll

Comments

[sunclouds33]

Small correction, Lane Pryce was the work colleague who committed suicide, not Duck Phillips.

This is wonderful. I have a problem in general with too much lumping of the socially sanctioned Rachel and Don with outlaw Tony Soprano or Walter White. To a great extent, I think it's a way for the audience to claim some moral superiority that they don't have. Most of the educated, wealthier audience of UnREAL or Mad Men wouldn't join the mafia or deal meth but they either would jump at the chance to be a producer of one of the most highly rated reality shows or a millionaire advertising creative director or it's already their job. MM and UnREAL particularly challenges its audience to hold a mirror up to themselves, instead of to feel EVEN BETTER about themselves or smug about the 2000s vs. the 1960s, as the problems captured in UnREAL indicate in present-day media land

[sunclouds33]

However, I think there's also a critique of our current Gilded Age in seeing how non-heroic, capitalist characters like the SC crew still felt a societal pressure for partners to forgo Christmas bonuses to give the staff bonuses in a tight fiscal year or for partners to try to retain more staff after Lucky Strike leaving by putting up capital contributions from their own fortunes or for characters like Peggy to feel righteously upset that their personal career plans weren't taken into consideration in an agency merger or for the partners to feel a little guilty and defensive about their choice to merge with McCann even though it would create redundancies on their staff. It's the old, "Republicans want to live in the 1950s while Democrats wants to work in the 1950s" canard. IMO, the UnREAL network world is more socially liberal but more economically cut-throat than the MM world and I think that's right. Corporations have been even more anti-worker and there's an even bigger disparity in wealth now than in the '60s. A Rachel can't even

[sunclouds33]

There's a direct parallel that there's something mentally and emotionally rotten in Rachel so it's not wrong to assume that she needs therapy. However, the way that her mother and Jeremy went about it is its own kind of sick. Meanwhile, there's also something deeply unhealthy in how Peggy entered into her affair with Pete in S1 and how she convinced herself that she wasn't pregnant until she was delivering the kid. However to a great extent, Peggy and Rachel absorb the sickness of their society to become their own mental illness which society than pathologizes them for. And the sickness continues in the end of S1- with Jeremy/Olive trying to get Rachel somehow committed and Peggy actually being committed to a mental asylum. Don and Quinn offer similar advice to slough off the familial concern, abusive familial control, wrong diagnosis or correct diagnosis all in one

[pocochina]

Rachel is very meta on this level. Like, part of what's wrong with her probably is just a lifetime of being told that something's wrong with her. But Quinn just telling her that pain doesn't exist is another way of manipulating and controlling her.

[pocochina]

Oh, I like that. I do think Rachel and Peggy are very different in terms of disposition and social finesse. Like, Peggy is just not someone who could get away with pulling the crap Rachel pulls, IMO. But in terms of their being women in the work force both as being self-interested and not morally heroic, it's a really interesting dialogue.

In large part because part of Abigail's abuse was that Dick's soul really couldn't be saved anyway because of the circumstances of his birth and because Abigail also had no credibility as the firm god-fearing Christian that she claimed to be after Dick saw her whoring herself out with Mac.TBH I don't think Rachel's mother is any less of a hypocrite, preaching good liberal feminism while abusing her power as a psychiatrist. But that's something which is by design a lot harder to pick up on. And her pathologization of Rachel - changing her diagnosis to be whatever's ~trendy but always insisting that there's something wrong with her - is a decade- and class-adjusted version of "you're never going to

[pocochina]

oops, thanks for the correction.

MM and UnREAL particularly challenges its audience to hold a mirror up to themselves, instead of to feel EVEN BETTER about themselves or smug about the 2000s vs. the 1960s, as the problems captured in UnREAL indicate in present-day media land.

TRUE. Put like that, it's even more impressive that Mad Men was so successful, LOL.

The advertising is problematic and offers fodder for critique, but IMO, it was progress that the American class of consumers who expected a car, disposable diapers, vacations became bigger and bigger to the point that it became mass consumerism as opposed to only goods for the wealthiest people......To a great extent, there WAS economic progress from the 1930s through the 1960s but the later decades had more and more reactionary and selfish leadership and was less and less able to cover for the excesses and corruptions of the few with the rise of other economies in the world and the rise of consumer debtYeah. And Mad Men takes place on the back end of that window of progress,

[sunclouds33]

Yeah. And Mad Men takes place on the back end of that window of progress, I think is what I'm trying to get at? These are the people who are going to benefit from it and then destroy it. Like, we know what was wrong with Lucky Strike and Big Tobacco and we at least have the option to avoid it. Coca-Cola, though, we haven't even been able to make it so that people can cheaply and easily avoid HFCS.This is very true, and well put. I don't subscribe to this notion that SC&P was more moral or whatever than McCann. I'd even argue that there was such a failure of leadership in S7 that the agency would be tanked if it wasn't bought out quickly at its peak. SC&P just operated more on an "all hands on deck, including particular women and Jews" because it was smaller. However, the buy-out still serves as a negative harbinger of the corporatization of America and eliminating a wider variety of voices. IMO, UnREAL also sets up how two essentially immoral organizations- Everlasting and The Network- also compete on which is the frying pan and which

[sunclouds33]

However in the Millenial v. Silent Generation divide, I think it's key that Peggy becomes financially independent younger without any college while Rachel really has to suffer and struggle miserably to be financially independent from her parents which she needs in order to ward off her mother's abuse and smothering- even though they're both the hard-working rising talented stars of their glamorous and lucrative fields. Peggy does even better because she broke a glass ceiling by being made a copywriter- but even if she was a secretary, Joan still acted like there was a 1960 guarantee that she'd still be upwardly mobile."In a couple of years, with the right moves, you'll be in the city with the rest of us. Of course, if you really make the right moves, you'll be out in the country,and you won't be going to work at all." That's terrible- but at least, it's better than the unspoken, "You may have just gotten a job but rents are so high in Manhattan, in part due to foreign investment properties and understanding that the largest cities in