So much of this season has felt like the prelude to a disaster. Last week we passed through the eye of the storm and last night, for the first time in such a long time, Mr. Weiner allowed us to let go of our breath, sink back into our chairs and finally, enjoy it all a little.
For now, at least, the worst is over. So let’s all eat Trudy’s cakes and sandwiches and remember why it was we wanted to get into this business in the first place.
Much criticism has been leveled at this third season for walking away from the office dynamics in favour of the crisis on the home front. Last night it struck me that this was most probably all part of the masterplan (duh). As Don lost his way, so did we, as he became increasingly disinterested in work and arrogant in his approach to it - alienating Peggy, Roger and feeling Cooper’s bared teeth - the day-to-day business of Sterling Cooper receded into the background. It just didn’t seem to matter as much any more. But last night Don was forced to make a decision, to stake his future on a job he’s shown brilliance at performing, but an inability to commit to. Last night, Don wasn’t too good for advertising any more.
As that song most eloquently puts it, ‘When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.’
Last night was about letting-go and starting again, with his family falling apart, Don grappled to put, ‘everything back the way it was,’ at Sterling Cooper, but learned that sometimes the best you can do is start from scratch. Thus, Sterling, Cooper, Draper & Price was born. Roger and Don were re-united once again, Peggy and Don reconnected and Joan, oh Joan! was back to save the files and the day! Sweet sweet release!
The building of this new dream team had all the cinematic excitement of the training montage in Rocky IV (and I mean that as a compliment). First the four key players aligned on their dastardly scheme, then Peggy threw a curve ball in Don’s arrogant face, and we got another dose of comedy genius in the form of a Pete Campbell all tousled (and dare I say it looking damn fine) in a bath-robe and suit pants with Trudy listening in from the bedroom. The emotional denouement was delivered via Peggy and Don, with Don making the kind of heartbreaking plea to Peggy he was ultimately unable to make to his wife. The entire arc was littered with comedy gold, from Pete forcing Don to articulate his ‘talents’ to his face, to the look on Campbell’s face when Peggy walked through the door on Sunday afternoon and her subsequent refusal to get Roger coffee. I am Peggy, hear me roar… then go f**k a duck (god, I can’t believe I only just thought of that now.)Seeing Don finally let go of Betty was the thing we didn’t realize we’d secretly been wishing for until it actually happened. Thank. God. While I still seriously question the motives and integrity of Henry, seeing Don and Betty finally give into the inevitability of the ridiculousness of their match, was like being released from a set of handcuffs. Again, the woman was icy and immovable, letting Don call her a whore without uttering a word to him of his own frequent indiscretions, but their final phonecall, filled with weary resignation said it all. ‘I hope you get what you always wanted,’ Don said to Betty – because all she ever wanted was certainly not Dick Whitman. Don is a broken man - in the same way Peggy is a broken woman – he will save his fight to rescue someone equally damaged, or damaged in the same way as he is.
And so it all came full-circle; the death of Don’s father, Betty on a plane to Reno, Don moving into his new apartment and his new life, Sterling Cooper half-empty of talent and a new little family born in a suite at The Pierre… all to the lilting tones of the incomparable Roy Orbison …
“Shahdaroba, Shahdaroba, means the future is much better than the past, Shahdaroba, Shahdaroba in the future you will find a love at last.”
That means you Roger and Joan.
Until next time. This has been, Mad About The Men. Line of the week: Roger on Jane: “Most interest that girl’s ever had in a book depository.”
Diligently construed by E. Nolan Photos by Carin Baer
Tonight Wes Anderson (at right) and Noah Baumbach will be at the New York Public Library to discuss their collaboration on their stop motion-animated Fantastic Mr. Fox, adapted from the Roald Dahl book. The film releases this Friday 11/13 in NYC.
Celeste Bartos Forum, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Ave. & 42nd St., (212) 930-0800. 7 p.m. $15 students, $25 general.
Two weeks ago in Hells Kitchen (art gallery, wine, Anderson Cooper) L.L. Bean showed off a glimpse of their next generation: LL Bean Signature. The collection, which launches in March, is a full line including 200 pieces ranging from evening attire to requisite buffalo plaid shirts, camp dresses and Maine-ified sailboat or buoy patterned pieces. Nothing exceeding $150. The new collection is being compared against J.Crew and Rugby and is headed up by creative director Alex Carleton— the man behind Rogues Gallery, our other favorite Maine-based clothier. Their long term goal: free-standing stores.
Photo of Alex Carleton by Jennifer S. Altman for The Boston Globe
Let’s start at the end shall we. It seems appropriate somehow.
This week’s episode closed with an old time fave of mine, Skeeter Davis’ 1963 classic ‘The End of the World’. And so it seemed, the world did indeed, if not end, at least stutter to a halt as JFK lost his life in the motorcade and Betty told Don she doesn’t love him any more.
Metaphor and double entendre plaited around each other like the braids in Sally Draper’s hair, as every time Don and Betty spoke they were talking about the death of a president, and about themselves.
I lost track of the number of times someone said ‘it’ll be OK’, ‘everything’s going to be fine’ or some other cold, useless platitude. I kept thinking of that line by Joan Didion when she says, ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to survive.’ Don Draper tells stories for a living, but for a while now, and especially this week, he lacked the smooth phrases to convince or reassure. He was the man who gave us the Kodak ‘carousel’ back in those heady early days when we were still drunk on our love for him, now he’s almost monosyllabic, unable to find the right words, or any words at all.
As we watched the shockwaves ricochet through the lives of the characters, who among us did not think of September 11th 2001? All of use glued to our TV screens, watching it play and replay over and over; the same shocked faces, the same talking-heads stuttering out statements of disbelief, the same phones that stopped ringing…
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.*
And as the centre collapses, doors start to open, exits we have been looking for become available and catastrophe itself becomes the reason, the motive, the justification for doing that thing we’ve been too afraid to do before the world turned on it’s head and nothing mattered anymore.
So, personal agendas were quick to bubble to the surface. Betty had the permission she needed to flee into Henry’s arms and give a voice to her true feelings towards Don; for Pete and Trudi it was grist to the mill of their bitter ambitions and petty dissatisfactions – Pete’s manipulation of Trudi, convincing her to skip the Sterling wedding was masterful as was how he railed about a lack of ‘justice’ for Lee Harvey Oswald, quite clearly talking about himself and his own situation at the office with Ken Cosgrove. Dastardly Duck’s priorities were also all too clear and watching him quickly unplug the TV when Peggy arrived for their ‘nooner’ so she wouldn’t be distracted by the news, was utterly repellent.
So leave it to Joan and Roger to provide what was, for me, the one true emotional moment of the episode. There was more warmth and love in that phone conversation than in any of the physical interactions we observed all episode – hey, maybe all season - especially Betty and Henry’s dead-fish kiss in the car. Just as Don’s stories failed him, so too did Roger’s humour. He’s a man who was born to give a father-of-the-bride speech, caught in a situation where a joke wasn’t going to cut it. As Joan said to him, ‘there’s nothing funny about this.’ And when there’s nothing funny to say, where does that leave Roger? With tears in his eyes on the phone to the woman he loves while his silly drunk wife is passed out on the bed beside him. The people we choose to reach out to in times of crisis, say a lot about where our hearts really lie.
Mad Men is as good as it is because the past never feel like a curio or a museum piece, these people aren’t aspic-pickled day-players in a Masterpiece Theatre special, they are viscerally relevant to us. Their struggles are our struggles, at work and at home. Their costumes are not costumes they are clothes. They don’t speak lines from a script, they have conversations. The past of the characters and the present in which we watch them are inextricably linked, the weight of history, the manner in which we are seemingly doomed to repeat ourselves, JFK, 9/11, the death of love, the death of a president, the death of idealism, none of that has gone out of fashion, and ‘I don’t love you,’ will always mean the same, devastating thing.
Line of the week: Trudi: Have you been drinking? Pete: The whole country’s drinking.
Next week: The end. Say it ain’t so!
*W.B.Yeats ‘The Second Coming’
Diligently construed by E. Nolan Photo by Carin Baer
We just got back our well-loved copy of Legs McNeil's oral history on the origins of punk in New York City and beyond. We pass our copy along like the family bible, evangelizing its uncensored, gritty details that have spewed forth form the likes of Iggy, the Asheton Bros, Jim Carroll, Bebe Buell, Wayne Kramer, Malcolm McLaren, Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Dee Dee Ramone, Lou Reed, Nico, and on and on... It's hilarious yet tragic. It felt like a third of those, to whom we found ourselves emotionally attached (that's you, Johnny Thunders), never made it out of the proverbial Bowery alive. It happens to be a perfect companion piece to Rotten's Filth and the Fury. However, Legs likes to set the record straight that punk, in every sense of the word, was born on this side of the pond despite continuing debate.
Tonight we have one extra hour of witching, thanks to the daylight savings fall-back. As we sit here, mouths agape, watching the Halloween horror show that has already begun at Wisconsin between the Badgers and the Boilermakers, we're also considering how to take advantage of this extra long night. These photos remind us how innocent things used to be when Halloween really was only about witches, masks, skeletons and pumpkins versus the thick mob of Lady Gagas and Twilight vampires we hope to be treading through tonight at the West Village annual Halloween parade.
Spoiler Alert. Season 3, Episode 11: In a season – as in an era - that’s been all about the first awkward movements of grappling female ascendancy, last night’s episode left us with a simple message - for now at least – wifey always wins.
Now, don’t get me wrong, these may be short-lived, or in Joan’s case, hollow victories, but in each of the three storylines last night, it was the matriarch that won out. Roger shunned the drunken advances of his horse-pulverizing Annabelle Mathis, because hey, he actually seems to love his wife; Joan smashed a vase over her stupid undeserving-of-her-greatness husband’s head and he finally realized she’s a pretty good catch; and Don left Miss F sitting in the car, putting an end to their strange little Alice in Wonderland affair. (Is she the gypsy and he the hobo of the title?). Joan, Betty and Mrs. Silver Fox, all had their day, but as with everything in the world of Mad Men, we were left with a sour taste in our mouths, because frankly, we just don’t believe it.
Joan became a fresh re-imagining of Annabelle Mathis - already on the plane with the wrong man (who up and joined the Army without even asking her) in her version of Casablanca. Betty saw the true narrowness of her options when the family lawyer laid out cold what divorcing Don would really mean, and though Roger may no longer have eyes for Annabelle, surely it’s only a matter of time before he finds himself snuggling in Joan’s ample bosom once again? Could those two really be meant for each other?
Hollow victories.
The mythical shoebox finally yielded its secrets after almost three seasons. The scene between Betty and Don was masterful, and it was utterly satisfying to see him shaken, fumbling, dropping his cigarette on the kitchen floor and finally reduced to tears. Betty was able to thrown out some killer lines, in particular when Don told her he could explain, she came back with the zinger, ‘you’re a very very gifted storyteller.’ Ten points Betty.
If Miss F represented the light to which Don was drawn then Betty, here, was very much about the darkness. Or, to put it a better way, Miss F was fantasy, Betty is reality. In a nice little moment of symbolism Miss F left the lights on in her apartment to greet Don when she went out to buy groceries and Don later came back to the Draper household shrouded in darkness, even though Betty was already home, lurking in the shadows. Surprise honey!
I think I felt genuine sympathy for Don last night, I think… it’s hard to tell. That great back shot of him hunched at the sink in his pajamas was, to me, the clearest representation of the broken man. He was haggard, bleary-eyed and undone, with nowhere else to go. It was also particularly interesting that when he called Miss Farrell to end the affair, he finally called her by her first name, Suzanne, thus cementing her in adult reality at last. The end of escapism.
But more than anything what was clearest last night is that Don will, forever and always, return to Betty. She is his centre, his weight, his home Finally Weiner couldn’t resist leaving us his trademark closing nudge nudge wink wink last night, when the kids went trick or treating and the man who answered turned to Don and Betty and asked, ‘and who are you supposed to be?’
Wonderful stuff.
Line of the week: Betty to Don: ‘You don’t get to ask any questions.’ Next week: Mrs. Silver Fox gets mad about Joan.
Diligently construed by E. Nolan Photo by Carin Baer
Seeing Don finally let go of Betty was the thing we didn’t realize we’d secretly been wishing for until it actually happened. Thank. God. While I still seriously question the motives and integrity of Henry, seeing Don and Betty finally give into the inevitability of the ridiculousness of their match, was like being released from a set of handcuffs. Again, the woman was icy and immovable, letting Don call her a whore without uttering a word to him of his own frequent indiscretions, but their final phonecall, filled with weary resignation said it all. ‘I hope you get what you always wanted,’ Don said to Betty – because all she ever wanted was certainly not Dick Whitman. Don is a broken man - in the same way Peggy is a broken woman – he will save his fight to rescue someone equally damaged, or damaged in the same way as he is. 
