Mad Men Meme
I did this meme for Mad Men for 12_12_12. I had too many characters in my answer to be contained in a less than four comments. I'm just writing a separate entry- which I generally like doing on these memes anyway. Feel free to ask more fandoms. So far I've done the Buffyverse, Harry Potter, The Good Wife, and Mad Men.
Give me a fandom and I'll tell you about ...
the character i least understand
interactions i enjoyed the most
the character who scares me the most
the character who is mostly like me
hottest looks character
one thing i dislike about my fave character
one thing i like about my hated character
a quote or scene that haunts me
a death that left me indifferent
a character i wish died but didn’t
my ship that never sailed
the character i least understand: I love Joan so much but she's more opaque to me than the other characters. Partly because big moments happen in her life and then, you don't see the fallout. Like, Joan's roommate and best friend from the college came out as a lesbian who's been love with Joan forever and followed her through NYC hoping that they'd end up together. Joan reacts that night with a combination of kindness and cruelty- trying to push the verboten declaration under the rug to spare Carol embarrassment but enforcing a night of compulsory heterosexuality. But then, what? We never see Carol again. Did they drift apart or did Joan extricate herself out of living with Carol. S5 resolves the question of whether Joan recognized that Greg raped her, no matter that they were engaged. However, it takes until S5 to learn that. So, how did Joan talk herself into marrying someone who she regarded as a bad man ever since he raped her?
There's such a story that Lane was in love with Joan that it begs the question of whether she returned any of those romantic feelings or possibly could. For that matter, was she in love with Richard? How much of a personal sacrifice was it to pick her fledgling business over him at the end of the day? To what extent was Joan looking for the partners at SC to believe that she should be above whoring herself out for Jaguar and to what extent did she find Don saying that condescending and annoying? Was her "You're a good one" sarcastic or sincere? I can think of plausible, good explanations for Joan's choice here- but I find it hard to parse that Joan refused Roger's completely owed and appropriate child support checks for Kevin but she whored herself to Herb to provide for Kevin.
What should we make of the revelation that Joan had a rather eventful past life before she got to SC- college, terrible first marriage, multiple abortions.
Joan is a great character. Possibly my favorite Queen Bee characters- when I don't exactly go nuts for the trope. To some extent, this is partly *because* she's opaque. She's so invested in her various performances that her true motivations are very difficult to tangle, especially since she's the not the central POV character like Don or purely emotional POV like Betty to compare her to her performative counterparts.
interactions i enjoyed the most: Don/everyone. I've answered this question as "character/everyone" before I particularly mean it for Don. His interactions are invariably A+++. I need this to include his most important relationships (Betty, Roger, Sally, Peggy, Pete, Anna) and his relationships with more secondary characters (Ted, Bert Cooper, his string of mistresses, his string of secretaries especially Miss Blankenship and Meredith, Ginsberg, Harry, Freddy, Connie Hilton) and frankly, one-episode characters who have this outsize importance to me beyond their twenty minutes on the screen in defining crucial themes of the series (Dennis, the prison guard, Private Dinkins, the Rolling Stones teen fangirl, Leonard, Joy and the Eurotrash jet set crowd, Andy, the grifter maid, Lee, the alcoholism widow and plane fantasy)
For the other relationships, there's a lot. Betty/Sally, Roger/Joan, Pete/Trudy, Peggy/Pete and Peggy/Joan are my other favorites. Then, there were some other relationships who weren't front and center but were invariably excellent when the interactions occurred like Betty/Francine or Bert/Roger or Roger/Mona or Pete and his main mistresses- Beth and Bonnie. Or were a seemingly mismatched pairing but filled me with such glee at seeing the mismatch like Peggy/Roger, Sally/Roger, or Pete/Ted in CA.
the character who scares me the most: As I've said, Don is extremely unnerving on a lot of levels- both as an outside threat of male aggression and as a very unflattering mirror for me (see next). However, the series ending a lot of suspense about him reassures me about him on rewatches. Betty also scared me as I was first watching the series- but I was worried about her children and her cold child abuse escalating through S3-5 rather than me finding her personally threatening. And I was only scared of her in those scenes.
So for who really scares me on rewatch, Bob Benson is unnerving. At the very least, who the hell hears that the "friend" that you set up with your business associates' mother murdered her and then, deals with that by trying to sabotage the business career of said business career?
the character who is mostly like me: So when I answered this meme for The Good Wife, I said that it was hard for me to relate to the characters because I believed that they were mostly as sharp, put together, professional, and disciplined as they appeared on the outside whereas I can only fake sharp, disciplined professionalism on the outside but I feel spazzy messy vulnerable lazy chaos on the inside. SO OF COURSE I GET THE MAD MEN CROWD MUCH MORE.
I relate to Don and Peggy most all, right down to how I had The Suitcase-night with my college debate professor. I think I have Don thoughts and instincts but end up acting like a Peggy most of the time. Which, ironically, is also Peggy's position.
hottest looks character: Don for the guys with Roger as a honorable mention. Although, I always feel the need to say that Ben Feldman is so gorgeous and they really uglied him to play Ginsberg- but he was still pretty fine. I think Betty is the most exquisitely beautiful of the ladies but she's rarely "hot". For the ladies, I pick Suzanne and Jane Siegel Sterling.
one thing i dislike about my fave character: OK, given that my favorite character is Don, LOLOLOLOL.
I kind of...don't know where to start. To pick one dynamic, his standard life long dishonesty really gets bone-chillingly terrible when he commits to it even though both the harm and fruitlessness of the lie is obvious, even to him. Containing to lie about Bobbie Barrett, even though Betty's driven to the brink of insanity looking for the proof to confirm the truth and then, treating Betty like she's stupid and irresponsible for investigating the truth. "Would you stop? How much have you had to drink?" Even though he really knows perfectly well that Sally saw him banging Sylvia, go for the lie if there's a scintilla of a chance that he can talk her out of what she just saw.
one thing i like about my hated character: I kind of don't *hate* the most odious, contemptible characters that we're clearly supposed to root against- Greg, Cutler, Duck, Lou, everyone who raised Dick Whitman. No one has clean hands on this show, especially the men. These tertiary characters' evil just feels necessary for the plots and the aura of the show.
Plus, they all some redeeming quality that still doesn't amount to much but is...there. Greg really wants to be A Good Man, and includes a real desire to be an amazing doctor and healer in that category. He also says and does nice things on a racial basis- providing free medical care to poor black kids, pivoting the discussion of the racial riots into a compliment of the bravery that he sees among the black soldiers in Vietnam. But his version of "goodness" is identical to "power"- which is evident in how he mistreats Joan and acts like he's the biggest victim of not being made Chief Resident when it was because he dangerously botched medical procedures and then lurches to the Vietnam War because the aggression of war ups his feelings of power = goodness.
Cutler isn't nearly as smart and business-like and professional as he thinks he is but he can talk sense and do correct business things- like promoting Joan to an accounts office, calling Ginsberg and Stan hypocrites for taking Dow and Chevy money but hating Cutler for his not so hidden conservative politics, championing Harry and his lucrative computing.(Even if Cutler is ignorant and disorganized in how he goes about the advocacy. He didn't know that SCDP didn't have an onsite computer up until five minutes ago even though 1969 COMPUTERS HUGE AND YOU CAN'T MISS THEM but then, suddenly Cutler made it priority #1 to get a computer as Some Thing to pick over continuing to have Don as a partner. And then, blithely said that they can buy Don out and get a computer at the same time until Roger owns his ass, "You are not allowed to use the words "long term" in this office. It'll be 1974 until we're even."
Duck really appreciated Peggy and Pete's value early on and he tried very hard to be a really good friend to Pete, even if the friendship wasn't reciprocated, and kept Pete in his mind until the penultimate ep of the series to deliver a dream job. I also think, compared to the other guys in the series like Don and certainly Roger, Duck's alcoholism is the most overwhelmingly chemical/genetic compulsion as opposed to more of a social choice to drink too much despite the easily predictable consequences which is a point of sympathy in itself. And so on and so on.
a quote or scene that haunts me: WHERE TO START? Don getting reports from Betty's psychiatrist. Betty finding out about the betrayal and reaching out to little Glenn, on the sly from his parents, "I can't talk to anyone. It's so horrible." Duck throwing Chauncey out on the streets of Manhattan. Cutler pushing speed on the entire office (in an apparent repeat performance) and then, cackling as Stan plows Wendy Gleason, the day after her dad's funeral as he invites Peggy to watch. Really, EVERYTHING, about The Crash. Don's Richard Speck fever dream- "A mistake you love making. And you'll love it again, because you're a sick, sick SICK... " Really quite a few of Don's hallucinations. "Dying doesn't make you whole. You should see what you look like." Seeing Adam hang himself. And then, seeing Lane's corpse hang off his office door, face purple and visible bruises all over his neck. Joan's face as she surrenders to Greg raping her. Joan wearing the fur coat that Roger gave her to her prostitute-appointment with Herb. Peggy refusing to look at her baby, despite the nurse begging her to do so, to not give up her resolve to give her new son up for adoption.
How we leave Sal, fired, in a seedy looking park, lying to his wife that he's fine and working late and looking like his life is over. How we leave Midge as heroin addicted, pimped out by her "husband" for his next fix, unable to take Don's bigger check and having to just settle the lesser cash in his pockets in exchange for her painting. "So do you think my work is any good?" "Does it really matter?" Sally trying to self-soothe after Grandpa Gene's death with news reporters of the Vietnamese priests self-immolating. How the hospital staff infantilized and bullied Betty through her delivery of Gene, and her twilight sleep dreams. "You're a housecat. You're very important and have little to do." When Lucky Strike fires SCDP, Roger begging for a few week delay in frustrated desperation. "AFTER ALL THE LIES I TOLD YOU FOR YOU, YOU OWE ME THAT!" Seeing Kinsey at Hare Krishna rock bottom- "I try to clear my head, but I can't. It's too busy in there. Everybody else looks so happy. You know, I got there and I started trying to figure out who Prabhupad likes best. It's the same as everywhere I go. He doesn't like me. No one likes me. Sometimes I think Krishna doesn't even like me. No one but Lakshmi."
a death that left me indifferent: Wow, NONE. I had an unnaturally intense emotional reaction to all of the onscreen deaths in the series- Adam, Lane, Grandpa Gene, Rachel Menken Betty's likely death in the near future, Anna, the real Don Draper, Archie Whitman, Bert Cooper. Even though I was laughing at the wheeling Miss Blankenship's corpse by the clients, I got an emotional reaction out of her eulogies- "She died as she lived. Surrounded by the people she answered phones for." vs. "She was born in 1998 in a barn. She died on the thirty seventh floor of a skyscraper. She's an astronaut." There's an ice-cold comedy to Petes' parents deaths- but then, that in and of itself was emotionally affecting running the gamut between funny, incredibly sad, infuriated me towards a lot of people involved.
I dunno, I guess I didn't get to know Frank Gleason to care as much about his death?
a character i wish died but didn’t: I don't know. There's a lot of vile characters in this series who seem like they're mostly a destructive, terrible force in the world. And you know "I can't wait until next year when all of you are in Vietnam. You will be pining for the day when someone was trying to make your life easier. And when you're over there, when you're in the jungle, and they're shooting at you, remember you're not dying for me because I never liked you" becomes a righteous art-form of a comment when struck back against non-stop bullying and misogyny. But the characters on MM are all emphatically human and I don't root for ordinary humans to die. More than basically any other show, they're assholes but those assholes are my friends, my coworkers, my grandparents, I RECOGNIZE YOU ALL.
Although even though I love Roger, he's almost infuriatingly lucky to have two heart-attacks in 1960 and then, spend his next ten years continuing and arguably exacerbating the same unhealthy lifestyle that led to the first heart-attacks and ending the series in fine health. While Betty dies very, very young from just the smoking.
Give me a fandom and I'll tell you about ...
the character i least understand
interactions i enjoyed the most
the character who scares me the most
the character who is mostly like me
hottest looks character
one thing i dislike about my fave character
one thing i like about my hated character
a quote or scene that haunts me
a death that left me indifferent
a character i wish died but didn’t
my ship that never sailed
the character i least understand: I love Joan so much but she's more opaque to me than the other characters. Partly because big moments happen in her life and then, you don't see the fallout. Like, Joan's roommate and best friend from the college came out as a lesbian who's been love with Joan forever and followed her through NYC hoping that they'd end up together. Joan reacts that night with a combination of kindness and cruelty- trying to push the verboten declaration under the rug to spare Carol embarrassment but enforcing a night of compulsory heterosexuality. But then, what? We never see Carol again. Did they drift apart or did Joan extricate herself out of living with Carol. S5 resolves the question of whether Joan recognized that Greg raped her, no matter that they were engaged. However, it takes until S5 to learn that. So, how did Joan talk herself into marrying someone who she regarded as a bad man ever since he raped her?
There's such a story that Lane was in love with Joan that it begs the question of whether she returned any of those romantic feelings or possibly could. For that matter, was she in love with Richard? How much of a personal sacrifice was it to pick her fledgling business over him at the end of the day? To what extent was Joan looking for the partners at SC to believe that she should be above whoring herself out for Jaguar and to what extent did she find Don saying that condescending and annoying? Was her "You're a good one" sarcastic or sincere? I can think of plausible, good explanations for Joan's choice here- but I find it hard to parse that Joan refused Roger's completely owed and appropriate child support checks for Kevin but she whored herself to Herb to provide for Kevin.
What should we make of the revelation that Joan had a rather eventful past life before she got to SC- college, terrible first marriage, multiple abortions.
Joan is a great character. Possibly my favorite Queen Bee characters- when I don't exactly go nuts for the trope. To some extent, this is partly *because* she's opaque. She's so invested in her various performances that her true motivations are very difficult to tangle, especially since she's the not the central POV character like Don or purely emotional POV like Betty to compare her to her performative counterparts.
interactions i enjoyed the most: Don/everyone. I've answered this question as "character/everyone" before I particularly mean it for Don. His interactions are invariably A+++. I need this to include his most important relationships (Betty, Roger, Sally, Peggy, Pete, Anna) and his relationships with more secondary characters (Ted, Bert Cooper, his string of mistresses, his string of secretaries especially Miss Blankenship and Meredith, Ginsberg, Harry, Freddy, Connie Hilton) and frankly, one-episode characters who have this outsize importance to me beyond their twenty minutes on the screen in defining crucial themes of the series (Dennis, the prison guard, Private Dinkins, the Rolling Stones teen fangirl, Leonard, Joy and the Eurotrash jet set crowd, Andy, the grifter maid, Lee, the alcoholism widow and plane fantasy)
For the other relationships, there's a lot. Betty/Sally, Roger/Joan, Pete/Trudy, Peggy/Pete and Peggy/Joan are my other favorites. Then, there were some other relationships who weren't front and center but were invariably excellent when the interactions occurred like Betty/Francine or Bert/Roger or Roger/Mona or Pete and his main mistresses- Beth and Bonnie. Or were a seemingly mismatched pairing but filled me with such glee at seeing the mismatch like Peggy/Roger, Sally/Roger, or Pete/Ted in CA.
the character who scares me the most: As I've said, Don is extremely unnerving on a lot of levels- both as an outside threat of male aggression and as a very unflattering mirror for me (see next). However, the series ending a lot of suspense about him reassures me about him on rewatches. Betty also scared me as I was first watching the series- but I was worried about her children and her cold child abuse escalating through S3-5 rather than me finding her personally threatening. And I was only scared of her in those scenes.
So for who really scares me on rewatch, Bob Benson is unnerving. At the very least, who the hell hears that the "friend" that you set up with your business associates' mother murdered her and then, deals with that by trying to sabotage the business career of said business career?
the character who is mostly like me: So when I answered this meme for The Good Wife, I said that it was hard for me to relate to the characters because I believed that they were mostly as sharp, put together, professional, and disciplined as they appeared on the outside whereas I can only fake sharp, disciplined professionalism on the outside but I feel spazzy messy vulnerable lazy chaos on the inside. SO OF COURSE I GET THE MAD MEN CROWD MUCH MORE.
I relate to Don and Peggy most all, right down to how I had The Suitcase-night with my college debate professor. I think I have Don thoughts and instincts but end up acting like a Peggy most of the time. Which, ironically, is also Peggy's position.
hottest looks character: Don for the guys with Roger as a honorable mention. Although, I always feel the need to say that Ben Feldman is so gorgeous and they really uglied him to play Ginsberg- but he was still pretty fine. I think Betty is the most exquisitely beautiful of the ladies but she's rarely "hot". For the ladies, I pick Suzanne and Jane Siegel Sterling.
one thing i dislike about my fave character: OK, given that my favorite character is Don, LOLOLOLOL.
I kind of...don't know where to start. To pick one dynamic, his standard life long dishonesty really gets bone-chillingly terrible when he commits to it even though both the harm and fruitlessness of the lie is obvious, even to him. Containing to lie about Bobbie Barrett, even though Betty's driven to the brink of insanity looking for the proof to confirm the truth and then, treating Betty like she's stupid and irresponsible for investigating the truth. "Would you stop? How much have you had to drink?" Even though he really knows perfectly well that Sally saw him banging Sylvia, go for the lie if there's a scintilla of a chance that he can talk her out of what she just saw.
one thing i like about my hated character: I kind of don't *hate* the most odious, contemptible characters that we're clearly supposed to root against- Greg, Cutler, Duck, Lou, everyone who raised Dick Whitman. No one has clean hands on this show, especially the men. These tertiary characters' evil just feels necessary for the plots and the aura of the show.
Plus, they all some redeeming quality that still doesn't amount to much but is...there. Greg really wants to be A Good Man, and includes a real desire to be an amazing doctor and healer in that category. He also says and does nice things on a racial basis- providing free medical care to poor black kids, pivoting the discussion of the racial riots into a compliment of the bravery that he sees among the black soldiers in Vietnam. But his version of "goodness" is identical to "power"- which is evident in how he mistreats Joan and acts like he's the biggest victim of not being made Chief Resident when it was because he dangerously botched medical procedures and then lurches to the Vietnam War because the aggression of war ups his feelings of power = goodness.
Cutler isn't nearly as smart and business-like and professional as he thinks he is but he can talk sense and do correct business things- like promoting Joan to an accounts office, calling Ginsberg and Stan hypocrites for taking Dow and Chevy money but hating Cutler for his not so hidden conservative politics, championing Harry and his lucrative computing.(Even if Cutler is ignorant and disorganized in how he goes about the advocacy. He didn't know that SCDP didn't have an onsite computer up until five minutes ago even though 1969 COMPUTERS HUGE AND YOU CAN'T MISS THEM but then, suddenly Cutler made it priority #1 to get a computer as Some Thing to pick over continuing to have Don as a partner. And then, blithely said that they can buy Don out and get a computer at the same time until Roger owns his ass, "You are not allowed to use the words "long term" in this office. It'll be 1974 until we're even."
Duck really appreciated Peggy and Pete's value early on and he tried very hard to be a really good friend to Pete, even if the friendship wasn't reciprocated, and kept Pete in his mind until the penultimate ep of the series to deliver a dream job. I also think, compared to the other guys in the series like Don and certainly Roger, Duck's alcoholism is the most overwhelmingly chemical/genetic compulsion as opposed to more of a social choice to drink too much despite the easily predictable consequences which is a point of sympathy in itself. And so on and so on.
a quote or scene that haunts me: WHERE TO START? Don getting reports from Betty's psychiatrist. Betty finding out about the betrayal and reaching out to little Glenn, on the sly from his parents, "I can't talk to anyone. It's so horrible." Duck throwing Chauncey out on the streets of Manhattan. Cutler pushing speed on the entire office (in an apparent repeat performance) and then, cackling as Stan plows Wendy Gleason, the day after her dad's funeral as he invites Peggy to watch. Really, EVERYTHING, about The Crash. Don's Richard Speck fever dream- "A mistake you love making. And you'll love it again, because you're a sick, sick SICK... " Really quite a few of Don's hallucinations. "Dying doesn't make you whole. You should see what you look like." Seeing Adam hang himself. And then, seeing Lane's corpse hang off his office door, face purple and visible bruises all over his neck. Joan's face as she surrenders to Greg raping her. Joan wearing the fur coat that Roger gave her to her prostitute-appointment with Herb. Peggy refusing to look at her baby, despite the nurse begging her to do so, to not give up her resolve to give her new son up for adoption.
How we leave Sal, fired, in a seedy looking park, lying to his wife that he's fine and working late and looking like his life is over. How we leave Midge as heroin addicted, pimped out by her "husband" for his next fix, unable to take Don's bigger check and having to just settle the lesser cash in his pockets in exchange for her painting. "So do you think my work is any good?" "Does it really matter?" Sally trying to self-soothe after Grandpa Gene's death with news reporters of the Vietnamese priests self-immolating. How the hospital staff infantilized and bullied Betty through her delivery of Gene, and her twilight sleep dreams. "You're a housecat. You're very important and have little to do." When Lucky Strike fires SCDP, Roger begging for a few week delay in frustrated desperation. "AFTER ALL THE LIES I TOLD YOU FOR YOU, YOU OWE ME THAT!" Seeing Kinsey at Hare Krishna rock bottom- "I try to clear my head, but I can't. It's too busy in there. Everybody else looks so happy. You know, I got there and I started trying to figure out who Prabhupad likes best. It's the same as everywhere I go. He doesn't like me. No one likes me. Sometimes I think Krishna doesn't even like me. No one but Lakshmi."
a death that left me indifferent: Wow, NONE. I had an unnaturally intense emotional reaction to all of the onscreen deaths in the series- Adam, Lane, Grandpa Gene, Rachel Menken Betty's likely death in the near future, Anna, the real Don Draper, Archie Whitman, Bert Cooper. Even though I was laughing at the wheeling Miss Blankenship's corpse by the clients, I got an emotional reaction out of her eulogies- "She died as she lived. Surrounded by the people she answered phones for." vs. "She was born in 1998 in a barn. She died on the thirty seventh floor of a skyscraper. She's an astronaut." There's an ice-cold comedy to Petes' parents deaths- but then, that in and of itself was emotionally affecting running the gamut between funny, incredibly sad, infuriated me towards a lot of people involved.
I dunno, I guess I didn't get to know Frank Gleason to care as much about his death?
a character i wish died but didn’t: I don't know. There's a lot of vile characters in this series who seem like they're mostly a destructive, terrible force in the world. And you know "I can't wait until next year when all of you are in Vietnam. You will be pining for the day when someone was trying to make your life easier. And when you're over there, when you're in the jungle, and they're shooting at you, remember you're not dying for me because I never liked you" becomes a righteous art-form of a comment when struck back against non-stop bullying and misogyny. But the characters on MM are all emphatically human and I don't root for ordinary humans to die. More than basically any other show, they're assholes but those assholes are my friends, my coworkers, my grandparents, I RECOGNIZE YOU ALL.
Although even though I love Roger, he's almost infuriatingly lucky to have two heart-attacks in 1960 and then, spend his next ten years continuing and arguably exacerbating the same unhealthy lifestyle that led to the first heart-attacks and ending the series in fine health. While Betty dies very, very young from just the smoking.