In order for you to fully understand my comments about last week’s episode of Mad Men you must first read Will Wilkinson’s post regarding same (hat tip: Jonah Goldberg.) Will’s main point is this:
I see Mad Men as a show about status and status anxiety in an age of cultural ferment.
In order to demonstrate this point, Will contrasts the situations of Joan and Peggy. Joan, as I pointed out last season, is the keeper of the keys at Sterling-Cooper. She thrives in the man-dominated world at SC, using her charms and looks to get what she wants. Here’s what I said last year:
She's the ultimate 1950's woman, a woman who revels in being a woman, who loves the attention of men. She'll use her looks to get what she wants without ever questioning whether to do so is wrong. She's comfortable in a man's world. This new beat generation is threatening to her. She's the keeper of the keys at Sterling-Cooper and the world SC thrives in and she doesn't want it disturbed.
Will says something about Joan similar in his post:
Joan is omnicompetent, authoritative, and in full control of her abundant femininity. She has fully mastered the arts of mid-century haute bourgeois womanhood and she knows it.
Peggy, on the other hand, was a virtual non-entity in that world. Shy, not particularly attractive, she was noticed by the young men at SC early in the show’s run only for her status as a potential sex-partner. Once she got fat (during her pregnancy) she became the butt of their jokes. Only Don noticed her talent. But change is clearly in the air. Peggy’s story has dominated the last two episodes and in ways that make it clear she is to be the embodiment of the social and cultural changes that take place in the 1960’s: two episodes ago it was her new-found sexual freedom, last week it was her experimentation with marijuana (“My name is Peggy Olson and I want to smoke some marijuana.”) Her growing confidence is shown in other ways also, as when she scolds Harry during the diet soft drink commercial auditions, telling him to remember he was only a guest there. Will again:
She is anxious and awkward about how she stacks up in the world of women and she is anxious and awkward about how she stacks up in the world of men. But she is toughly confident in how she stacks up as a creative worker. The new willingness of the world to reward her for what she does rather than for what she is grants her a power to independently realize her ambitions unavailable to perfect, normatively realized women.
Peggy, show by show, is realizing that the world is opening up for her. By the end of last week’s episode she is assuring her old-school secretary that she should worry about her: "I am going to get to do everything you want from me."
For others, however, the curtain may be closing. Joan is perhaps one of them. She’s doing what is expected of her: she rose as far as she could expect at Sterling-Cooper and now she has married a dreamboat doctor, Greg. However, the dreamboat was unsupportive of her when she was proof-reading the television scripts last season (something she clearly loved) and he later forced sex on her in Don’s office, implying that she must have done it before. Last week during their dinner party for the chief of surgery she discovers quite by accident that Greg may not be so hot a surgeon after all – it comes out that he blundered an operation. To cover his embarrassment, he forces Joan to take out her accordion and sing for their guests. She sings Cole Porter’s "C'est Magnifique," which should be the perfect song for Joan. But the look in her eyes betrays her sadness. It’s a heart-wrenching scene.
Last week’s episode made it pretty clear that Roger Sterling and his type are not long for the world. I was more than a little uncomfortable with how Roger was portrayed in the episode, perhaps because I like his character so much. His devil-may-care, don’t take the world or yourself too seriously attitude gives the show a breath of fresh air but those days seem to be over, which. for me, is too bad. I suppose I see nothing wrong with this quintessential 1950’s rake. They meant no harm. They just wanted to have a good time. But the show last week made it clear that Roger is to be a fool – Don actually tells him he’s foolish, echoing my comments last week that Roger was now seen by others as frivolous. Perhaps Roger’s sin is that he has started taking himself seriously. He’s searching for happiness, the middle-aged man’s excuse for leaving your wife for a younger woman (though Roger’s ex-wife Mona is much more attractive than Jane.) I thought last season he was ready to give it all up for the prostitute Vicki (played by the gorgeous Marguerite Moreau). Instead, he threw over Mona over for Jane, to whom he is now married. In last week’s episode, he and Jane give a reception at their country club. But I think the show over-stepped with his black-face routine. Would a man as worldly as Roger Sterling not know in 1963 how grotesque this appeared? Remember, as the show itself made clear, this was a gathering of Rockefeller (read: liberal) Republicans. They were pro-civil rights. There was much talk of civil rights legislation and there were marches going on all over the country. Roger Sterling is an ad man on Madison Avenue. It’s his job to know what’s going on in the world. It is impossible to believe that he was not aware of the cultural trends that would make the black-face routine an abomination. Likewise, I also found it hard to believe that everyone but Don Draper would laughingly approve of such a thing. I think the show got the cultural zeitgeist of the time wrong (perhaps this was plausible in 1953, but not in 1963) but what is worse is that they could have gotten the point across – that Roger and his type are dinosaurs on their way to extinction – in a much subtler way.
The less said about the storyline with Sally and her grandfather, the better. I’ll mention one thing. The book Sally is reading to Gene is Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” This must be considered another hint at where the show is going. New York City is in decline, the man-dominated world of the 1950’s is on its way out, another world and other cultural types are on the way in. That’s the direction the show is going. I may have more to say about this later in the weekend but I’ll leave it here for now.
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