Lance Mannion

Playboy and the Donald

Posted Friday night, September 29, 2017.

 

“Hugh Hefner and his then-girlfriend, 19-year-old actress Barbi Benton, surrounded by Bunny Girls at the Playboy Club in London in 1969. (AP)” via the Washington Post.

Don't want to make too much of this, but I think Hugh Hefner and Playboy contributed to our being stuck with President Trump.

Through his magazine empire, Hefner convinced two, even three generations of men they were entitled to lives that included among many pleasures the affections and sexual favors of beautiful young women who would get happily naked for them in the shadows created on the shag carpeting by the track lighting while the ice jingled in the glasses and another LP dropped onto the turntable. All men had to do to enjoy this was earn the money needed to pay for the carpeting and the liquor, money to which they were also entitled and that would fall into their laps as easily as the naked girls.

Didn't work out that way for the great majority. Most men resigned themselves to lives lacking in sexual adventure, just as they resigned themselves to not having the money to pay for new carpeting, good booze, and the latest LP, 8-track, or CD whenever they wanted. They did not, necessarily, resign themselves to being resigned.

Trump's strongest appeal is among men---white men---of a certain age who grew up expecting to be heroes but are now facing the fact that they didn't just miss their chance, they never had a chance.

They never were going to score the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. They were never going to be rich.  They were never going to be Mayor never mind President of the United States. If there was ever a time in their lives when pretty young women were happy to get naked for them, that time was brief and long ago and ended with marriage to one of those young women, who, no matter how much they loved her and how happy their lives together have been, suddenly seemed to have neither the time nor the inclination to get as happily naked and was instrumental in their reaching a premature, dull, and dulling middle age in which their lives have been defined by work, the kids' schedules, and paying bills without money.

Playboy taught them to look at their lives like this.

Playboy hadn't just taught them to dream of a very different life than the one they ended up with. It taught them that to end up with the lives they did was to be a failure to yourself. Here within the magazine---centerfolds, articles, cartons, ads, letters and columns taken together--along with Hef's personal example were detailed instructions on how to avoid failing yourself in the way you did, and you goofed. Things could have worked out differently, should have worked out differently, would have worked out differently, but you didn't follow the instructions.

Then, to add to the insult, Playboy--and Hef--continued right on as if time didn't matter to anybody but you. It certainly didn't offer any solace or give instructions in how to enjoy the life you did end up with.  It did give you reason to suspect it was your own fault you'd failed to become the ideal Playboy playboy.

You weren't smart enough, hardworking enough, ambitious enough, talented enough, strong enough, brave enough, man enough.

Playboy didn't do this all by itself. Playboy and its ethos were idiosyncratic expressions of the can-do, go-go spirit of the post-war era. Like most successful entrepreneurs, Hefner saw an opportunity and took advantage. He sold what people already wanted, they just may not have known they wanted it until the first issue hit the news stands. While the economic powers that be and the social and cultural institutions that benefited from them tried to sell men gray flannel suits and pushed them to be Organization Men, Hefner and others---manufacturers of sports cars, makers of soft drinks, airlines, Frank Sinatra---sold them on the idea that it was possible to be a rebel within the system, to wear a tie to work (or carry a lunchbucket) and still live a free, independent, fun, sexy life. All you needed was the money that came with a good job within the organization. In fact, the organizational life would finance its own subversion from within.

That's Don Draper's story arc---Don finishes seemingly have broken free.  But what he's doing at the end of the final episode is figuring out how to sell the illusion of rebellion to a new generation of young men and women. (Yes, I know he came up with the Coke ad not the Pepsi campaign.) A romantic, rebellious, fun, and sexy life is a matter of buying the right stuff.

The first step was to teach men to expect pretty young women to take their clothes off. The next step was to teach the pretty young women to do it.

The problem became and remains that young women learned other things, among them that it was their choice whom they took their clothes off for.

There's a metaphor in here somewhere and if you give me a minute I'll find it.

Here it is.

More of a synecdoche, really.

Playboy is a part that symbolizes the whole.

Playboy was part of a collection of forces, economic, social, cultural, and political that sold Americans on the notion that material happiness and individual happiness were pretty much the same things. This sounds like a bad thing, and in many ways it was.

Life in post-war America was fun-filled, pleasure-filled, but soulless and joyless. It was based on the buying and selling of the latest toys and gadgets and gizmos. To take part in the fun you had to have the money to buy the toys and gadgets and gizmos. To make the money you had to be employable.  Employable meant having the skills and the talents and the education and the personality traits employers deemed worth paying for because those things would make them more money than it cost to employ them---and that's what they employed, those things. Not you but those things. You were simply the package they came in. Which is to say the qualities that made you you to you made you a thing, a container of things. And employers were---are---always on the lookout for ways to have the things without having to pay for the container.

So you had to prove you were worth it. Constantly. You had to produce. You had to be productive. You had to be a product or at least sell yourself as one, which amounts to the same thing.

Of course this isn't how it was put. You had or didn't have what it takes. You had or you didn't have the right stuff. You were or you weren't master of your own fate. You were or you weren't the hero of your own life.

It was all up to you. It was your doing if you succeeded. Your fault when you failed.

You were on your own.

But the key words were material and individual. Integral to the notion was that individuals as individuals were meant to be happy in the material world, that is, here and now, on earth, in the United States.

The problem is that for individuals the material world ends. Time runs out for all of us. We're all done too soon.

That's existential.

On a more mundane level, for the majority of us the material world is done with us too soon.

The opportunities didn't come. We didn't know where to go looking for them or if we knew we didn't have the wherewithal to get there. Those of us who did weren't always welcome or arrived too late or too soon.

What good did it do to serve the best meal in town if no one wanted to live in your town? What good did it do to sell the best shoes clothes furniture toys gadgets gizmos at the best prices if people could just go online and buy the same shoes clothes furniture toys gadgets gizmos at better prices?

What good is it to have been the world's best spot welder if all the spot welding is done better by robots? What good is it to have been a devoted, go getting, hardworking, hardcharging organization man or woman if the organization decides it doesn't need you or stops being an organization?

What good does it do to have an apartment, a whole house, a garage, a backyard full of toys and and gadgets and gizmos if nobody want to come over to play?

Whatever happened last in the election last fall, it’s clear that much of it was due to voters’ feeling something had gone terribly wrong, that the good life they were promised when they were young was being denied them. To an extent, there was an almost universal rejection of the go-getting era that Playboy had helped define. It wasn’t our fault. We weren’t the masters of our individual fates we were told we were, and the reason we weren’t heroes of our own lives was we were victims.

The opportunities and possibilities to which we thought we were entitled were being closed off to all but a privileged few.

And Hillary voters and Bernie voters and many Republican voters were determined to do something to change this.

But a great many Trump voters decided what they wanted to do was resent and place blame. And the blame wouldn’t be placed on themselves. The resentment wouldn’t be self-directed.

Sunk in self-pity and a permanent sense of grievance, they looked around for others to blame, others to resent, others to punish.

It's them. Those others! It's their fault. The immigrants, the blacks, the Muslims, the Chinese, the feminists, the gays, the Millennials, the elites and intellectuals and scientists and professors and teachers and lawyers who support them and combine and conspire to take what's ours by right and by birth and give it to them!

And along comes Donald Trump to tell them they're right. Things stink, and you have been robbed, and it is all their fault. There are of course things that do stink, and we have been robbed, all of us, including them, and if Donald Trump was a true populist or the closet Democrat gullible members of the media took him to be for a brief moment a couple weeks ago---and which, you can bet, they'll take him for again---all he offers them is more reason for resentment and the promise to get even.

Everything will be made right, America will be made great again, when they are punished and put back in their place. What's been stolen will magically return.

And one of those things is time.

I've made this point many times. So have plenty of others, smarter and more savvy than me. A great many of Trump's voters voted for the character he played on The Apprentice. But once upon a time he played a different character, one probably closer to his real self. I say probably only because I'm not sure he has a real self. That character didn't have a show of its own, but the gossip mad New York media covered him as if his life was a TV show like Dynasty or Dallas, and in the process they made him a star. He was the Donald, the ideal Playboy male.

Rich, handsome, bold, not bound by rules or conventions. He could buy whatever he wanted. The idol of men and the object of women's desire. Friends with the likes of Muhammad Ali, dater of supermodels. He could have any woman who caught his eye. Didn't even have to ask. They lined up!

This was all a fraud, of course. You didn’t have to look hard to see him for what he was. He wasn’t a swinger, he was a predator. He didn’t seduce women, he procured them. The models he dated weren’t playmates, they weren’t even playthings. They were just things he bought to show off. If he could have, he’d have had them dipped in gold and put on display in his casinos and hotels. He was a monster of vanity and greed but not of lust. The Access Hollywood tape that should have sunk his candidacy confirmed this for all decent-minded people who heard it.

But nearly 63 million people appeared not to have heard it. Many of them didn’t. But many of them simply ignored it or told themselves it didn’t show what it showed. They talked themselves into believing there was nothing really to it. Locker room talk, that’s all. Others shrugged it off as the way the world is. All rich and powerful men are like that. They take what they whatever they want. Others said “So?” Still others said, “Those women should have known what they were getting into,” ignoring that many of “those women” were teenage girls. And still others said, “Good for him.”

But I’m convinced that many men, and not a few women, heard the tape or heard about it, and they folded it into their image of him as a playboy or, rather, they saw him as still fitting their image of a playboy, the character type created by Hugh Hefner.

You’d think that he was now old and fat, that he was bald under that weird construction of hair and plastic he wears on top of his head, that he painted himself orange, that his supposed great health and vitality and stamina and Jovian sexual potency were rumors started and continued by himself would have been obvious tip-offs that he was faking it, that he was well past it, as mortal and as headed as quickly towards his material end as any of the rest of us mere human beings. You’d think.

Apparently not.

People see what they want to see and I think a lot of people look at him and see what they wish they were. Not just rich and powerful, but immune to old age and ill health. They look at him and they think, if he can do it, maybe I can too.

They look at him and think, I’ve still got time.

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True, mon, true!

Posted Wednesday evening, January 25, 2017.

One of the things that helped me enjoy Mad Men was imagining that down the river from the Drapers’ home in Ossining, scenes like this were taking place at Bonnie Meadow Road in New Rochelle…

Goodbye, Laura. Goodbye, Mary.

All the Mad Men and all the Mad Women are taking the Five-Forty-Eight home to Cheeverville

From the start, it was clear that a significant literary influence on Mad Men was the short stories of John Cheever, master of Post-War American suburban ennui.  Cheever’s main themes and tropes, that putting on a suit and tie was putting on a disguise, that a person’s job was a second and pretend life in which he acted out a part handed to him but without also being given a script or any idea where his “story” was meant to go, and that his “real” life, his “real” self, was banal, tawdry, full of disappointment and sexual and emotional frustration, and basically the reason that kept him putting on the suit and tie and going out the door in the morning to play at being someone else, dull, boring, and contemptible as that someone else may be describe the first three seasons of Mad Men in a nutshell.

The difference was that in Cheever’s stories there were moments of physical beauty and emotional uplift that took his characters out of their private purgatories for an instant and then made the prospect of their return to either of their lives and selves heartbreaking.

Don Draper and his cohorts were rarely graced with such moments. All that ever took them out of their sad presents were memories of even sadder pasts. 

Way back then, I thought the Cheever influence was problematic.  Not just because the differences between Cheever’s and Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s visions and where and how they parted ways resulted in episode after episode being bleak and humorless, but because in the early going it was an ongoing question whether or not Mad Men was meant to be an historically accurate depiction of the times.

Among the group of over-thinkers I’m proud to be part of and call friends, there was a forcible contingent of those who thought it was.  They thought that’s what the show was about, in fact, the end of an era, and, by the way, good riddance to it.  It was as if they saw Mad Men as having competing zeitgeists as its main villain and hero.  (Heroine, actually.) The gray, oppressive, repressive hyper-masculine 1950s would be vanquished by the colorful, liberated, feminist 1970s. 

I didn’t care for this idea.  If they were right, I felt, it meant Mad Men was a show I did not want to watch.  I didn’t want to see the history of the 1960s reduced to the curing of the hang-ups of white suburbanites. But their evidence for the show’s being an accurate depiction of what was happening to and among those white suburbanites included how faithfully Weiner and his writers and directors and designers recreated the world of John Cheever. Which meant they saw Cheever’s stories as works of realism.  As you can guess, I disagreed.  I thought their misreading of Cheever was causing them to misunderstand Mad Men.

At least, sometimes I thought that.

Other times I wondered if it wasn’t Weiner himself who was misreading Cheever along with his other literary, cinematic, and television influences.  I wondered if Weiner thought he was being historically accurate based on his mistaking fictions for non-fictions.

Now I think that it was the case that the show was struggling to establish itself and Weiner and his colleagues finding their way.  Whatever Weiner’s original intentions were regarding Mad Men’s relation to history, by Season Four history was there to give the characters things to react to and define themselves by and against and not as a force creating characters by itself.  And the show had shaken itself loose from its aesthetic influences and had become its own chief influence. Mad Men is about Mad Men. It’s the Tragedy (or maybe the Comedy) of Don Draper. The Cheeverishness has faded…or maybe it’s that I grew used to them to the point of not noticing anymore.

At Salon, novelist Rebecca Makkai has posted about her own recent and belated discovery of Cheever’s short stories and her happy sudden awareness of their influence on Mad Men: “Mad Men’s” great influence: A show’s secrets, hidden in plain sight.

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I’m still a season or so behind and haven’t watched any of this season’s episodes yet. But I heard that last night’s mid-season finale ended with a musical number featuring Robert Morse as Bert Cooper showing that he’s still got the stuff and, not incidentally, making a connection between Mad Men and and a certain Broadway classic:

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The Stories of John Cheever are available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon. There’s also a Library American Edition, Collected Stories and Other Writings.

Top photo of John Cheever by Nancy Crampton courtesy of the New Yorker.

The Good Raylan, the Bad Raylan, and…Don Draper?

Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens, not to be confused with Don Draper…or, for that matter, with Raylan Givens.

May not seem the best way to begin a book review, making comparisons between two TV shows.  But here goes.

The book in question is Raylan, Elmore Leonard’s latest novel.  Makes sense, then, that one of the TV shows I’m going to look into here is Justified.  Justified is based on a character Leonard introduced in two novels, Pronto and Riding the Rap, and a short story, "Fire in the Hole"---Deputy United States Marshal Raylan Givens, a slow-talking, quick-shooting, white cowboy hat-wearing lawman helping to bring law and order to the coal mining region of 21st Century Kentucky, which is for all intents and purposes Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone circa 1880 with reliable cell phone coverage.

Towns---whole counties---are wide-open. Crime is a bulwark of the economy, particularly the dealing of meth and oxycontin and the growing and selling of marijuana. Armed robbery is a daily hazard. Buses get held up like stage coaches. Banks get held up like...well...banks. People cross back and forth across the line between outlaw and honest citizen, sometimes in the course of an afternoon. Guns are everywhere and it seems more people die by bullet in car accidents or from old age. And many of these casualties met their justified demises after making the mistake of drawing on Raylan Givens.

I’ve lost count, and I suspect Justified’s producers have too, but over the course of three seasons Raylan may have carved more notches in his gun than Marshall Matt Dillon carved in twenty.  It’s getting embarrassing to the point that the show has become conscious of itself on that point.  Cracks appear in the fourth wall whenever characters discuss Raylan’s latest showdown.  In some episodes now, you can feel the writers scrambling to contrive ways for Raylan not to shoot anyone. 

Raylan, the novel, chronicles some of Raylan’s adventures outside what we’ve seen so far in episodes of the TV show and recapitulates a few things we’ve seen in episodes of Season Two. So I can hardly write about the book without writing about the TV show.

But the other TV show I’ll be writing about?

Mad Men.

Different types of shows. Different settings. Different genres. Different styles. Different aesthetics. Different ambitions. Different almost everything.

But their leading men have more in common than just both being tall, dark, and handsome.  Don Draper and Raylan Givens are both men with burdensome pasts.  Both have mean streaks that get them into trouble and get them out of it.  Both have self-destructive impulses.  Both can’t walk away from situations they know they’ll regret not having walked away from later.  Raylan is not as self-indulgent as Don but he is not a paragon of self-denial.  Put something in front of him he wants bad enough and he’ll reach for it.

Fortunately, Raylan is a man of few needs and ordinary desires, mainly love and sex.

Which is how he’s wound up sleeping with a witness in one of his cases and having an affair with his ex-wife while she’s married to the man she left him for.

Don can’t be happy because everything he has is stolen, in a way.  I should say he can’t be allowed to be happy because he is a fictional construct in a moralist’s universe.  Matthew Weiner is making an example of him to make a point.

Don is what is wrong with America.  He can’t be content or enjoy himself because that takes discipline and focus.  He is living a life that many people would consider ideal.  On other TV shows and in movies it is ideal.  But he’s not living his life.  His mind is too much in the past and in the future. 

On Mad Men, all the characters are being contradictorily punished. They're being punished for the sin of being themselves and punished for the sin of wanting to be somebody other than who they are. Don is only the chief sinner.  The character all the others double.  Roger, Peggy, Pete, Joan, Betty, and Lane are just as divided between who they are and what they want to be as Don.  Damned if they do and damned if they don't because they are just damned.  Their lives are little, private hells of their own making.

Leonard is not a moralist.  In his fictional universe, life is what it is.  People are happy or they're not. It depends on their circumstances, but more on their temperaments. In Leonard’s world, there are cheerful villains, grumpy ones, soft-hearted ones, tortured ones made miserable by doubt, conscience, personal sorrows, worries, ulcers, headaches, bad backs, bad marriages, leaky faucets, insomnia, or congenital irritability.  And it’s the same for the good guys.  Sins aren’t punished here.  Mistakes can cost you, but not always and when they do not as much as you’d expect or far more than they should.  There is no purpose or meaning to life except what we bring to it. It's full of pleasure and pain, sorrow and bliss, but it's all mixed up and spread unevenly, not available to everyone equally.  Up to us to make the best of it as we can.

One of the great favors we do for each other is treat each other as if our existence matters and our lives have meaning. The threat from the sociopaths, people for whom order and meaning have no meaning and not the least bit interested in helping you maintain the illusion that you matter, isn't only physical, it's metaphysical.

Like Don, Raylan gets himself in trouble over women. Unlike Don, however, he is loyal and chivalrous and always ready to help a lady in distress. Don requires rescuing.  Raylan, in riding to the rescue, has done things for Ava and Winona that he knows could cost him his career, his freedom, and his life.

Both men are heroes in the eyes of others, but far from heroic in their own minds.  They are conflicted, tormented, guilt-ridden, and tempted towards self- destruction. Raylan’s life is as full of turmoil and worry as Don Draper's and, although not as much or as constantly, still requires some lying, deception, and double-dealing to keep it together.  The differences are that Raylan, although by necessity, is a liar he is not a fraud so he can take some pride in himself for doing his job well .  Work for Don is at best an escape from himself. He can lose himself in the act of creation, which is to say, by creating new fictions or, if you’re a cynic about advertisting, new lies to sell to the public.   Raylan can be himself at his best while at work.  And he's basically a cheerful man.

Not a happy one.

Just a cheerful one.  And that makes him capable of the kind of small moments of pleasure and joy Draper is denied.

He's also a friendly man. He likes people. He enjoys their company. He gets a kick out of their quirks and idiosyncrasies. He's tolerant of their flaws and foibles, forgiving of their mistakes, and sympathetic in their moments of vanity and weakness. He is glad to see things from other's points of view.  To a degree, and, again to a degree, this includes criminals he's come to arrest.

The point isn't that Raylan is a better person than Don Draper. That’s irrelevant to a discussion of fictional characters.  But the point isn't that Raylan is a superior creative achievement either. He's a more easily likable character and that makes it more fun in the usual sense to watch Justified than Mad Man. The point is---because remember this is still a book review---that none of that cheerfulness, good nature, or friendliness is in the Raylan we meet in Leonard's novel.

The Raylan of Justified is full of displaced and barely sublimated angers and resentments.  The Raylan of Raylan is more ornery than angry.  The Raylan of Justified is mostly in control of his wants and desires. Mostly.  Raylan’s Raylan is not self-indulgent but he's not self-denying either.  The TV Raylan is a social drinker. The novel's Raylan likes a drink and has one when he wants one.  He has more self-regard.  He is full of self regard, in fact. But he is less self-regarding. He takes himself for granted.  It's enough for him that he's one of the good guys and nothing that happens in the book makes him doubt that even in the way the TV Raylan doubts it about himself, by recognizing that he's tempted by the same things as people he knows are bad guys or sinners. The book's Raylan isnt tolerant or forgiving or the least bit sympathetic.  He's just indifferent.

People's motives or characters make him no never mind. He doesn't like or dislike anybody. He gets along with them or he doesn't. If it happens that he has to put someone he gets along with in jail, that's how it breaks. Doesn’t mean though they can't go right along getting along until he has to out the cuffs on them...or shoot them.  Which is how he nearly winds up in bed with each of the book's two femme fatales, even though he knows both are murdering sociopaths who intend to kill him.

That’s not something it’s easy to imagine happening to Raylan on Justified.  His weakness lies in the opposite direction.  Justified turns the film noir convention around.  It’s not the femme fatales who undo the hero.  It’s the good women.

The two Raylans are that much different that as I was reading I wondered what Leonard was up to.  I’d expected that the novel would be a companion to the TV show but as it went along it seemed more like a critique and a correction.  I suspected Leonard of trying to steal his character back from himself and bring him back in line with Raylan as he was in Pronto and Riding the Rap. 

Then I got to thinking that what I see in the character of Raylan on Justified has been put there by Timothy Olyphant who plays him as an affable, easy-going, self-effacing, hopeful and, let me repeat, cheerful man.  On the surface, at any rate.  He’s turned his lawman from Deadwood, Seth Bullock, inside out.  Bullock wore his anger and self-doubt along with his righteousness, his resolve, his grit, and his potential for violence on the outside, symbolized by his black hat, black frock coat, and black mustache. Olyphant plays Raylan as more Jimmy Stewart as Tom Destry by way of Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp than himself as Seth Bullock. 

But it’s not just Olyphant.  The show’s writers and producers, who include Leonard, although Graham Yost is the creative guiding hand, routinely put Raylan in the company of or up against characters he can interact with with kindness and warmth or at least react to with kindly and warm amusement.

He has his friends among the other marshals and lawmen and women.  He has, on and off, Winona and Ava.  He had someone I won’t mention by name in case any of you who watch the show haven’t made it through Season Two yet.  He has bonds of sympathy and history with any number of villains he’s crossed paths with.  Most dramatically intriguing he has his complicated relationship with his sometime friend, sometime enemy Boyd Crowder.  And then there are the victims of the bad guys’ crimes and depredations towards whom Raylan is usually, although not always, comforting, protective, more than necessarily and professionally helpful, and deeply sympathetic.

In the novel, the other marshals are on hand only to provide exposition.  Ava is offstage entirely. Winona only enters to be quizzed about Raylan by the femme fatale but never gets near Raylan himself.  Boyd figures prominently in the story but he and Raylan barely come into contact.  The villains are all either lowlife scum with no redeeming characteristics even as comic relief---except for Dewey Crowe who appears pretty much as he does in the TV show, being so stupid you can’t help but feel sorry for him and rooting for him to survive even though he’s put himself in a position where his continued survival isn’t just in doubt it would be a gigantic mistake on the part of fate---or they are grinning and leering sociopaths, including the femme fatales.  And the only victim Raylan has any fellow feeling for is himself.

But the even bigger disappointment waiting for fans of Justified is the immediate recognition of having been there and done that.

The central storyline of Raylan is taken pretty much straight from three episodes of Season 2 of Justified in which Boyd is hired as a “security expert” and bodyguard by a scheming mining company executive who intends to manipulate him into committing murder. And if the Raylan as written in the novel makes you appreciate what Timothy Olyphant has brought to the role, then Boyd’s appearance in the novel will have you in awe of what Walton Goggins has been doing with the character on Justified.

Meanwhile, the chief villain of the subplot, Dewey Crowe’s uncle Pervis Crowe will seem awfully familiar and sadly imitative.  He’s a male Mags Bennett.  Almost.  He runs a criminal fiefdom similar to Mags, being, like her, the chieftain of all the marijuana growing and the attendant criminality in Harlan County.  He runs the same legitimate business as a front, a general store.  He has two equally dimwitted sons with the same first names as Mags’, Dickie and Coover.  He even repeats many of Mags’ lines of dialog, word for word.

But since he’s not played by Margo Martindale or written to be played by Margo Martindale, he has none of Mags’ superior intelligence, none of her deceptively cuddly parental warmth, none of her wit, none of her manipulative charm, and none of her capacity for real hate and violence because he doesn’t have a heart, even a black and twisted one like Mags’.  He’s just a mean and greedy old coot who doesn’t care who gets hurt as he pushes people out of his way as he schemes for what he wants.  We believe it breaks Mags’ heart to have to smash her own son’s fingers to bloody pulps with a hammer, because for her it’s the case that a mother has to do what a mother has to do.  And we believe that Pervis could shrug off without a tear or a pang anything that might befall his boys as long as it also doesn’t befall him.  But who’s the more interesting and fun to believe in, the dirty old man with a hole where his soul ought to be or the devoted mother whose love is perverted to the point that she can think of torture as just her version of a grounding and who assures a man she’s just poisoned that she will look after his about to be orphaned teenage daughter as if she’s confident he will appreciate and be grateful for this kindness as he writhes in agony?

Which brings me back to the question of just what Leonard is up to with the novel?  Who did he write it for?  For fans of the show looking for something to enjoy while waiting for Season 3 to come out on DVD or Season 4 to roll around, it fails for the obvious reason---if you want repeats you can watch Season 2 on DVD.  As an introduction to the TV show for fans of Leonard’s writing who may not have watched any of Justified yet, it has the problem of leaving out just about everything that is likeable, enjoyable, and intriguing about the show.  And for fans of Leonard’s writing who don’t care that there’s a TV show with the same characters, I think it’ll be a disappointment.  There’s a slapdash quality to Raylan, as if it was put together in a hurry out of spare parts with the intention of just putting something on the road until something better rolls out the shop doors.  And I think I know why.

Raylan is a cut and paste job.

I think what we have here is a hastily stitched together collection of adaptations of scripts and treatments Leonard wrote for Justified that Graham Yost and his writers re-wrote and made better.

Damn.

In the last fourteen or so months I’ve written around twenty-five book reviews and only two have been negative.  This one makes three and wouldn’t you know, it’s of a book by one of my favorite writers.

But there are reasons Leonard’s one of my favorite writers and those reasons are on display in the book, so reading it wouldn’t be a total waste of time.

I just think that if you haven’t seen Justified yet, you’ll have more fun introducing yourself to that.

Raylan by Elmore Leonard, published by William Morrow, available from Amazon in two varieties, hardcover and kindle.

Pronto, Riding the Rap, and the short story collection that includes “Fire in the Hole” are available in paperback and kindle editions.

A Mad Mannion follows the Mad Man into the Naked City

While waiting for the train into New York for the Hillman Prizes. Tuesday afternoon.  May 1, 2012. Adapted from my Twitter feed.

Wearing a jacket and tie to this shindig cuz the invite stipulates "business attire." But what if your business is show business?

If you're an actor, doesn't business attire mean showing up in costume? That's fine if you're in the cast of Mad Men.

But what if you're on Broadway doing Spider-man Turn Off The Dark?

Or say you're from New Jersey where you do a "legitimate" business. Is a white tie with a black shirt acceptable?

I'm going with the traditional blazer, gray flannels, and blue Oxford. I don't want anybody to mistake me for somebody interesting.

Whenever i take the train to NYC I feel like Don Draper. Sneaky, furtive, fraudulent, worried someone from my past'll recognize me.

Does Don Draper still feel that way? Haven't had a chance to watch any of this season yet so I have no idea how he's feeling these days.

But then, as usual, Don Draper, being Don Draper at the same time he’s not Don Draper, probably doesn't know how Don Draper feels.

So by not knowing how Don Draper feels I'm actually feeling like Don Draper?

Would be a lot easier if I just felt like Rob Petrie.

All the mad men and all the mad women have died and gone to heaven

It’s starting tonight but it’s over so I’m not all that excited.  Mad Men completed itself with the final episode of Season 4.  The story arcs of three of its four leading characters concluded, happily, for all of them.  There’s no where to go for Pete, Peggy, and Don but backwards.

Pete became a man.  He realized he loves his wife and their life together.  He’s a father and to his surprise it’s made him happy.  He stood up to his father-in-law.  He became a force within the ad agency.  And he got one on Don in a way that makes him Don’s moral and emotional superior.  He always wanted to be like Don.  It turns out he’s better than Don.

Peggy too got one---several---over Don.  She wanted him to adopt her.  Now she’s his big sister.   More important, she’s clearly on the path to becoming his boss or at any rate his professional superior.  From here on in her story’s a matter of marking time until she opens her own agency, the way Smallville marked time in its last two seasons putting off the day when Clark donned his cape.

And Don died…and was reborn.  He fell into the hell whose rim he was always circling and then fell deeper and then deeper until Peggy caught him by an ankle and held him in place until he found the strength to pull himself out.  Back on earth he reconciles the two sides of himself, Don Draper and Dick Whitman by splitting the difference between them, mourns the death of Anna, the woman who was everything to him---mother, sister, wife, best friend---but also the living symbol of his divided self.  He’s rewarded for his repentance with the love of Laura Petrie---I mean, Megan, who in turn saves his daughter Sally from the monster Betty has become, and at a critical moment when the old Don would have lied he tells the truth.  He transforms and redeems himself by choosing to be loyal to Anna’s memory over protecting himself.  He risks losing Megan in order to be true to Anna and for that he’s rewarded again with Megan’s Yes!

And that’s that.  There’s nothing more to be told unless Matthew Weiner undoes all three happy (although admittedly ambiguous) endings or turns Mad Men into a comedy or Pete, Peggy, and Don become supporting characters in a show now rebuilt around the one important character whose story was left unfinished.

Joan.

We’ll find out tonight.  Two-hour season premiere begins at 9 PM Eastern.  Meanwhile, there’s this video essay by Serena Bramble and David Ehrenstein:

Nude with Sitcom: A Study in Mores, also known to art historians as Laura Petrie naked

Not Laura Petrie.

A blogger’s life is like the king’s, according to Alice, terrible hard.  In order to write my review of Dick Van Dyke’s memoirs I had to do some intensive research that required me to watch eight or nine episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

You’re feeling bad for me already, I know it and I appreciate your concern.

All the episodes are available to watch online and I put links to a few of the ones I watched in the review.  More Easter Eggs.  You’ll find them.  One of the episodes I watched but didn’t link, though, to is called October Eve.

That’s the one about spending 24 minutes imaging Mary Tyler Moore naked.

Actually, there were two episodes about that.  The other was Never Bathe On a Saturday.  You remember that one.  Laura and Rob are spending a night in a hotel and Laura gets her toe stuck in the bathtub spout and Rob has to help her get it unstuck, except that the bathroom door is locked, so he has to think up all kinds of ways to break in most of which lead to him hurting himself?  We never actually see Laura naked in the tub but of course we “see” Laura naked in the tub.

In October Eve, a nude painting that Laura posed for when she and Rob were newlyweds and that she’d thought was destroyed, because she’d thrown a pot of black paint at it, resurfaces in a swanky gallery in midtown Manhattan where all the world will see it.  Fortunately, Sally sees it first and calls Laura to warn her and eventually the painting is sent to a mountaintop in Brazil before anyone else Rob and Laura know can see it.

Now it’s important that Laura hadn’t actually posed nude for the painting.  We learn what happened in a flashback. She’d posed in a new outfit Rob loved.  But the artist, played by a surprisingly handsome, young and dashing-looking Carl Reiner---sans toupee, so it must be the beard---insists on his vision. He paints what he sees, he tells her, when, horrified and mortified she finally views the finished painting.  And he’s dumbfounded that she expected him to paint anything else. He’s too much of a genius in his own mind to bother painting what’s expected of him, particularly some “peasant’s” housewife in slacks and a sweater.  “For that kind of picture,” he informs her, “you take a camera, go down to Central Park, get on a pony, and snap your brains out!”

Laura’s anger and her feelings of having been humiliated and in a real way violated, although played for laughs, are also meant to be taken seriously and they make sense in the moment.  She has been betrayed and taken advantage of.  She trusted that one thing was going on while the whole time this stranger was up to something very different.  She has no more understanding of his attitude than he has of hers.  It also makes sense that she didn’t tell Rob about it when she got home.  For one thing, she’d have been worried he might rush down to Greenwich Village and get in a fight with the artist.  But, more to the point, she’d have been worried that Rob wouldn’t believe that she hadn’t taken her clothes off for another man.

This is projection on her part.  Rob is not the type whose jealousy would carry him away to where he thought Laura would lie to him about that, although for a minute or two his imagination might get the better of him and he’d be upset by thinking about how upset he’d be if she really had posed nude.  But what Laura is feeling is guilt.  She’s blaming herself for having allowed herself to be used like that.  She can’t help thinking that she should have known what the artist was doing, what kind of person he was.  She can’t help thinking that she should have looked at the work in progress and put a stop to it.  This is one of the things that’s done to a victim, blaming.  And the blaming can come from within as well as from without.

So it makes sense that when the painting resurfaces that all those feelings of Laura’s would also resurface, that she would again feel humiliated, violated, and guilty.  It also makes sense that Rob, finally finding out what happened but also finding out that Laura had been keeping a secret, would have some trouble processing the information.  And it makes sense that both Rob and Laura would be embarrassed by the thought that people they know might see the painting.  The artist was right about one thing.  He had genius.   Naturally, we don’t see the painting, which the artist has titled October Eve—Eve as in naked in the Garden of Eden Eve, but also possibly eve as in evening.  Since he “saw” Laura naked he could have just as easily have seen her in the twilight as in the light of mid-day in his studio.  But we’re convinced that it is beautiful, and its beauty isn’t just due to it’s being of Laura.  It’s also apparently erotically charged and incredibly life-like.  It doesn’t matter that Laura didn’t actually pose nude. October Eve is so real and so much like her that she might as well have.

More to the point, though, is that anyone who sees the painting won’t be able to look at Laura without thinking of October Eve, that is, they’ll “see” her naked.  They won’t be able to look at her in the same way again.

They won’t be able to think of her in the same way either.  On some level, they will always wonder.

Which explains something that didn’t make sense to me when I watched the episode the other night or anytime in the past when I watched it before.

Sally’s reaction.

Again, it makes sense that Sally would be embarrassed on behalf of her friend.  She’d know how she’d feel if a painting of her like that turned up in a busy and famous gallery in New York City where not just friends but people she works with and has professional relationships with not only could but very likely would see it.

And it makes sense that Sally would wonder.  The Laura Petrie she knows wouldn’t pose nude for a painting and might very well not pose for a painting at all.  And the artist who is suddenly famous is also suddenly notorious, in that way all artists are notorious even if they haven’t done anything that would make them notorious.  Artists are suspect.  Sally can’t help wondering how Laura could have hooked up with this guy and, although she wouldn’t have used the phrased, if she hooked up with him.  Artists and their models, after all…

What doesn’t make sense to me is Sally’s desperation for an explanation.  It’s not simply the case that she’s curious and wants Laura to explain how this odd thing happened.  She wants Laura to explain it away.

It’s as if Sally isn’t just thinking of Laura in a different way but thinking of her as a different person and as person she might not like.

I don’t get this.  Sally is in show business.  She’s a writer.  She works on The Alan Brady Show.  She lives in New York City.  Her circle of acquaintance includes people who work in the movies and in theater.  Almost certainly, she knows and is even friends with writers and musicians and actors and dancers and artists and their models, which means that almost certainly she knows other women who have done things more…um…bohemian than what she’s reluctantly suspecting of Laura and who are still her friends.

I suppose it could be that the possibility that Laura has an…er…artistic side cuts so much against what Sally “knows” about Laura that she just can’t accept it.  It could be that she has such a high and idealized opinion of Laura that something other women could do without comment or censure would strike her as terribly wrong if Laura did it.  The feet of clay or in this case body in oil syndrome.

It could be that Sally is so familiar with Rob and Laura’s shared biography that she knows there’s no way Laura could have “posed” for this artist until after she married Rob.

But all that is the kind of backstory and subtext that would only occur to the most obsessive of fans---like me.  Casual viewers were only going to see that Sally is thinking Laura needs to explain it away.

It’s simply a plot device.  If Sally of all people is shocked by the painting then of course everybody else Rob and Laura know will be too.

This means that the episode depends on the audience being, if not shocked themselves, understanding of why most other people would be shocked.

And I don’t understand.

This post, you probably won’t be surprised to learn, is really about me.  Aren’t they all?

I don’t need the painting’s existence explained.  I need to have it explained why it needs to be explained away.

Which is what I’ve been up since the other night, explaining that to myself.  And I’m having a hard time.  Not explaining it.  Accepting the part of the explanation that says there’s anything to find shocking.

My explanation of course begins with reminding myself that it’s not 1961 anymore and hasn’t been for a very long time.

Back then nudity was not at all common in the movies.  The only thing close to the mainstreaming of pornography that we now pretty much take for granted was Playboy and there’s something almost innocent to our eyes about the centerfolds from those years.  The idea that one of those girls who looked like the girl next door might actually live next door was part of the allure, but if it turned out that you knew that the girl next door was one of those girls…?  Times were changing---and one sign of that was this episode and the fact that they could get away with a whole episode about Mary Tyler Moore naked and that it could be treated as a joke and not a dirty joke.   It was assumed that the audience, although they’d understand why some other people would be shocked at the idea of Laura having posed nude and might even be a little shocked themselves, wouldn’t be too shocked.  James Bond movies were about to hit the theaters.  Rock and Roll was already here to stay.  Nevermind October Eve, plenty of other episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show were built around the possibility that love---and sex---with a proper stranger could tempt the most loving and devoted husbands and wives, including Rob and Laura. But still…

So you might assume that my inability to grasp the concept is due to the difference between 1961 and 2011.  Except, you know, what is the difference?  Really?  In many ways we are not all that more sophisticated or forgiving.  You could find evidence that in many ways we are even less so. 

Thanks first to Polaroid and now to digital cameras there are many contemporary Laura Petries with nude photos in their pasts.  Photos?  Videos.  You don’t have to do a thought experiment.  We know what happens when one of these gets seen by strangers.  Even people who pride themselves on their sophistication and tolerance find themselves going “Ewww” when they learn about them, although I’d guess the more usual still somewhat prudish and judgmental reaction is “What was she (or he) thinking?”

And even actors and actresses who have appeared naked on camera, professionally, will be embarrassed when something they did privately becomes public.  And that’s the crucial matter.  It’s a violation of their privacy.  It was the same for Laura.  That artist violated her privacy twice, the first time when he painted her in a way she hadn’t consented to be painted and the second time when he put the painting on public display.

So that part of it I understand or I would understand or understand better if October Eve had been a photograph.

The fact is that the reason there’s a part of me that said, “I don’t get it” when I was watching is that October Eve is a painting.

Now here’s the other thing.

I’ve never been able to grasp the concept and that’s always been because it’s a painting.

I wasn’t old enough to stay up to watch The Dick Van Dyke Show when it was on in prime time.  Since I was a little kid, I’ve watched it in re-runs and I’ve been doing that so much and for so long that I’ve completely lost track of when I first---and last---saw particular episodes.  I can’t tell you, then, what I thought the first time I saw them.  You don’t remember anything anyway.  You remember the last time you remembered it.  I’m sure that things I now take for granted went right over my head the first time I saw them and so although I can’t tell you what I did think the first time I can make some pretty good guesses about what I didn’t think.  Sometimes, still, I’ll come across an episode I hadn’t seen in a long while and I will be surprised.  I’ll say to myself, “I can’t believe they got away with that!” and then I’ll know that I must have been fairly young when I last saw that episode because one of the reasons they got away with it is they could count on kids like me not getting it.

Still, there are a few episodes I do remember watching for the first time.  It’s not that I remember when or where or under what circumstances I saw them.  It’s that I remember them vividly.  They fixed themselves immediately and permanently in my imagination.  With most of them it happened because they were so darn funny.

But there are a couple that stuck for other reasons.  And one of them is October Eve.

Because I watched the show only in reruns, which meant that I watched it on rainy days after school or mornings when I was home sick or very late at night when I was the only one in the house  left awake, it was a long time before I had watched almost every episode.  I’ve learned since it’s become available on the web that there are still some episodes I haven’t seen or haven’t seen since I was so young I can’t remember having seen them.  But this also means that there are episodes I saw for the first time when I was in college and if October Eve was one of those that might explain my “So what if she posed nude for a painting” reaction.

I had several friends in college who picked up extra money posing for art classes.  I didn’t think anything of it except maybe I should register for some art classes.  My friends were actresses (and an actor) and dancers, one of them was an artist herself, so there was something almost expected about their modeling.  We were all young bohemians together.  This is an important distinction, though.  They weren’t posing.  They were modeling.  There was a professional relationship between them and the artists and art students, even if, as it was in a few cases, they were having affairs with those artists.  But that’s how I know I saw October Eve before I got to college.  By that time I was old enough---or enlightened enough---or had been wised up enough by women who were my friends---to understand the importance of consent.

I have no way of knowing since I’ve long lost contact with most of them, but I’d bet that few if any of my friends would mind or mind that much if one of the paintings or sketches they modeled for suddenly appeared in a gallery near where they lived.  They would, however, probably be mortified if something else was the matter.

This is something that happened to two girls I knew.  Each one posed for some photographs by the same photographer who managed to talk both of them (separately) into posing nude for him after he had taken a number of shots of them clothed.  I still don’t know how he did it.  Neither of my friends was all that uninhibited.  Neither of them were among the friends who modeled for art classes.  And the guy himself wasn’t someone you’d guess many women would choose as a guy they’d want to see them naked under other circumstances.  I guess there’s just something very persuasive about a camera.  At any rate, the photos of them clothed were for a class in portrait photography and of course the guy’s teacher and classmates got to see them.  The nudes, as far as anybody knows, remained in his portfolio.  Still my friends were embarrassed by their existence and terrified for a long time that the photos would escape his almost certainly less than careful keep.  This guy was not to be trusted in anything, which makes it all the more inexplicable to me that they took their clothes off for him.

The point is that I understood the violation that would have occurred if those pictures had turned up on the walls of the campus art gallery one day and I know I didn’t think about that the first time I saw October Eve.

All I understood when I saw it the first time was Laura’s embarrassment.  Of course she was embarrassed.  Who wouldn’t be embarrassed to be caught naked in public?  Her mortification and her self-recrimination and her fear went right past me.  So, like I said, I know I didn’t see it for the first time in college.  I saw it when I was younger.  Much younger.  But not when I was a little kid.  Probably when I was around 12 or 13.

How do I know that?

Because what fixed the episode in my memory was the idea of Mary Tyler Moore nude.

Not the idea.  The image.

I had to have been just old enough to draw what she looked like without her clothes for myself and have the image boggle my mind but still too young---too stupid and immature---to consider what, besides its being a little embarrassing, it meant to Laura that some stranger was “seeing” her naked.

So I’m telling you and expecting you to believe me that I remember thinking at the time, So what if she posed naked for a painting?

I thought that if anybody the Petries knew saw the painting that instead of being ashamed and trying to explain it away all Laura ought to have had to say was, The painting’s beautiful and the man’s a genius, the rest is none of your business.

(Maybe I was beginning to understand the privacy issue.)

This makes me a little impressed with my young self.  It means that I understood the difference between Botticelli’s Venus and a centerfold.  It means that by the time I was in seventh or eighth grade I was already corrupted.  I was already making exceptions for artists.  I already believed that works of art and art were special.

It means that I was already setting myself up for a life that was disappointing, maddening, frustratingly full of failure, and very, very interesting.

_______________________

October Eve was written by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff who Ken Levine will tell you made one of the best comedy writing teams in the business.  They apparently made exceptions for artists too.  They let the painter off the hook in the end.  Both Rob and Laura get over their shock and embarrassment and Laura forgives him for taking advantage of her.  And the Petries are sophisticated people.  They recognize the painting’s beauty---its own beauty as a work of art apart from its being a beautiful picture of Laura.  It turns out they own the painting.  Laura paid fifty dollars for it in advance.  They could demand he destroy it, but they don’t.  They could demand he give it to them.  They don’t do that.  They could ask for part or all of the thousands of dollars he’s to make when the painting sells (again).  They don’t do that either.  All they ask is that it be sold to someone who will display it far, far away where no one they know is ever likely to see it, which is how it ends up on that mountaintop in Brazil.

The fact that at the end the Petries and the artist have become friends strikes me as more a sign of the times than anything else.  Our times and their times.  I can’t imagine that that character in a TV show today would get away with it like that or that we’d wind up liking him.  Unless the show was Bored to Death.

But think how this would have been handled on Mad Men in an episode where an October Eve of Betty turned up.  Right off, we’d know that everything Sally wonders about Laura would be true about Betty.  The fun part would be watching the different ways first Henry then Don tried to deal with the painter.

At any rate, if you want to judge for yourself, here’s the episode.  The Dick Van Dyke Show episode not the Mad Men episode.  Matthew Weiner hasn’t gotten back to me on the script I sent him on spec yet:

What did he say?

I lost count…

Thanks to Matt Zoller Seitz.

All the mad men and all the mad women are about to go Galt

Mad Men is wrapping up its fourth season tonight, and what have I been doing to prepare?

Re-watching episodes from Season One with the blonde and Uncle Merlin who are trying to catch up.

The other night we watched Episode 8, The Hobo Code, which includes a scene between Don Draper and Bert Cooper having a short discussion of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Bert has called Don into this office to surprise him with an extremely generous bonus check, and while Don sits there sockless in his eccentric nipponophile of boss’s Japanese shrine of an office, baffled at what he’s done to deserve all that money all at once, Bert suddenly starts a book club.

Bert, played by the elfin Robert Morse and looking like a leprechaun about to reveal the secret of how to catch him and get at his pot of gold, points to a book on his shelf and says, “Have you read her?”

Don, still reeling from the surprise of the check, can hardly fathom that Bert is talking to him, let alone changing the subject or seeming to change it.  Bert illuminates him.  “Rand.  Atlas Shrugged!  That’s the one!”

It turns out that Bert sees himself as a Randian hero and sees himself as a Randian hero recapitulated in Don.

“When you hit forty,” Bert explains, “You realize you’ve met or seen every kind of person there is, and I know what kind of person you are because I believe we are alike….By that I mean you are a productive and reasonable man and in the end completely self-interested.  It’s strength.  We are different, completely unsentimental about all the people who depend on our hard work.”

It’s an odd thing to say, considering that he’s just made a very sentimental gesture towards Don based on an unreasonable self-romanticizing self-appraisal.  But Don just promises to read the book and Bert goes back to pruning his miniature bonsai tree, as if not only has Don already gone but as if he was never there.

As in most workplace comedies and dramas that aren’t set in police stations, firehouses, hospitals, or court rooms, the actual work done by the characters in Mad Men is accomplished mainly offscreen and is generally irrelevant to the particular doings of this week’s plot or that season’s narrative arc.  The office is a stage where the characters have their exits and entrances and in their time play their parts and the work they do, or supposedly do, is the explanation for why they are there and gives them each a stake in each other’s troubles and worries, but the proximate cause of those troubles and worries, a project, an assignment, a deadline, an obstreperous client or an uncooperative coworker, although work-related, work-created even, is merely the stressor that forces the characters to reveal themselves.  The story is about the people not the work.

At Sterling Cooper (and its Season Four reincarnation as Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce) work happens in order for us to see Pete tormented by his insecurities, Paul tripped up by his own vanity and sense of superiority to his job and his coworkers, Harry flummoxed and paralyzed by his dithering and incompetence, Sal terrified by the latest threat to open the closet door, and Peggy constantly driven two steps forward, one step back, three steps sideways by her ambition and her ambivalence about that ambition.  The actual work they do while they deal with these recurrent plot threads doesn’t matter, which is why we rarely see the finished product of that work.  The Mad Men and Mad Woman of Sterling Cooper are often seen beginning a project or presenting one in progress, usually in a scene ending with them being sent back to the drawing board, but I can’t recall any time in the first three seasons our being presented with a successfully completed ad.  The closest have been the few times when we’ve seen a client successfully sold on the idea that will eventually turn into a finished ad.

That’s because the dramatic point has usually already finished well before the campaign has gotten beyond the sketch and storyboard phase or, considering that Sterling Cooper has been on a steady downward slide since the first episode, the dramatic point has reached its conclusion with the failure of an idea.

But The Hobo Code is one of the few episodes in which work matters.  Not the work, so much.  The work as work, and the episode is concerned with what work is worth.  This is the episode in which Peggy takes her big step up from secretary to copywriter.  She is beginning the move from worker to producer, and in her transition, we see the sad fact of life in a Randian world like the offices of Sterling Cooper, work in and of itself has no worth and bestows no dignity.

As a mere office functionary, Peggy the secretary is useful to the Mad Men but that means she is there to be used.  If and when she becomes one of them, she will be not their equal but their competition.   The men’s jealousy of her success, which relative to their own so far is minor, reveals their fear that their continued success is in doubt.  They are not sure how much their work is worth.  They aren’t sure that it has worth, which makes them doubt that they have worth.  They are reacting to the inertia of Peggy’s rise.  A body in motion tends to stay in motion.  At the moment, it looks to them as though Peggy is going to keep going up and up.  Looking at her that way, they can’t help but see themselves as standing still.  They aren’t on the rise.  They are bodies at rest and bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.  Peggy’s sudden launch forces them to consider the possibility that they are stuck on the ground as a probability.

Work, as far as they’re concerned, is not its own reward.   They don’t take pride in a job well done because they can never be sure that they will continue to hold that job no matter how well they do it.  Someone who can do it better will always come along to impress the bosses and where will that leave them?  People who just work don’t have worth no matter how well or hard they work.  People who just work are just useful to the people who produce.

Now, The Hobo Code is not an endorsement of their Randian world view.  In fact the episode and the entire series is a refutation of the idea that the world of work and business is a world of solitary and independent heroes carrying the parasites along on their broad shoulders.

It’s silly for Bert Cooper to think of himself as a Randian hero considering that his success derives from having spent his career serving the interests of actual John Galts.  Sterling Cooper only exists because these people have already produced the wealth Bert and his partners and employees are about to skim.  Ad men, in the Randian scheme of things, are parasites not producers.

But if it’s silly, and self-delusive, for Bert Cooper to think of himself as a John Galt, it’s ridiculous to even consider the clients who pass through the offices of Sterling Cooper as heroes, for all the wealth they produce.  Most of them are vain and stupid without any qualities that explain how it was they were able to build their companies and amass their fortunes.  There’s nothing Galt-like about them.  They are mediocrities who have struck lucky.

The most Galt-like of them all, Conrad Hilton, who is Galt-like in that he is intelligent and resourceful and innovative, is also eccentric to the point of being annoying, cranky, capricious, often unreasonable, terribly sentimental, vainer than the vainest of the rest of Sterling Cooper’s clients, and frequently childish.  We can see how he’s been able to build his little empire of hotels across the world’s Monopoly board.  We can see qualities in him to like and admire.  We can’t see much reason, though, to emulate him.  He spends most of his time in Season Three coming close to being as big a drag on Don Draper’s time and emotions as Betty’s father is on hers.  In fact, he is to Don what Gene is to Betty, a constant source of guilt and self-doubt leading to self-loathing.

He’s not a hero, at least not anymore.  He’s a too easily disappointed and disappointing father figure.

The Randian view of the world as divided into heroic producers and the merely useful and the worthless is also refuted in Mad Men by the very nature of work itself.

As I said, we don’t see much work being done onstage, but we see enough of it to know that, even when it has its germ in the lonely head of Don Draper, work is collaborative and it is social and it is socializing.

Peggy’s idea lifts her out of the secretarial pool.  But only after Freddy has edited it, Sal has put it into pictures, and Don has sold it.

Peggy may be a budding genius like her idol Don, but no genius, not even Don, gets an ad campaign going all on her or his own.  The work is shared.

As an aside, even if Don had read Ayn Rand he’d still have been baffled by Bert’s flattering him by comparing them both to the hero of Atlas Shrugged. The Randian hero Don resembles isn’t John Galt.  It’s The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark.

Like Roark, Don is an artist.  He doesn’t produce wealth.  He produces ideas that others---the mediocrities---make money off of.  With his consent, of course.  But I suspect that like Roark Don believes he still owns his ideas even after they’ve been bought and deep down he reserves the right to take his ideas back if he sees them being misused or degraded.  The difference is that, unlike Roark, he is reasonable and unsentimental, at least about himself, and being reasonable and un-self-sentimental, he can see the worth of other people’s work.  It never occurs to Roark that “his” building might be equally “owned” by the developer who put up the money to get it built and by the engineers who made sure that it got built right so that it stayed built, and by the steelworkers, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers that actually built it or that without them his idea would have been just that an idea.  Don knows what he owes to others.  It’s not his management style to gush or even to praise.  But he acknowledges his team’s contributions.

However, as he sees it, or tries to see it, work is its own reward.  A job well done is a source of pride.  Which is why he is constantly rebuking Peggy when she looks to him for approval.  “Why do you need me to tell you you’ve done a good job?” he’s asked her in various ways in various episodes.   He’s also, unfairly, scolded her for wanting extra praise for simply doing what she’s supposed to do.  If she wants more praise, she needs to do more.  She has to do better.  The unfairness in this is in that we know that he will constantly keep raising the bar.

Meanwhile, it’s not to be lost on us that the praising of the productive Randian hero is being delivered by the least productive person at Sterling Cooper.

Does anybody know what Bert Cooper does all day?

Don is unsentimental about himself, but he doesn’t undervalue what he does.  He knows how much he is worth to the firm.  He’s taken aback by the size of the bonus Bert’s giving him, but he doesn’t for a moment wonder if he deserves a bonus.  In fact, in the first season Don is at the point of deserving more than a bonus.  Mad Men began with the end of Don’s time as a junior executive. If he had read Atlas Shrugged, he might have reacted to Bert’s Randian fantasy with a sharp, though probably unspoken, “And what have you done lately, old man?  I’m the one doing all the producing around here.”

He might.

But he’d have let the thought pass because he’d know that while Bert wasn’t doing much now he had done something once.

Mad Men’s creator, Matt Weiner, and his writers haven’t gone very deep into the history of Sterling Cooper.  We know that Bert and Roger’s father founded the firm in the 1920s but we don’t know under what circumstances or what each partner brought to the partnership.  In the one picture we’ve been shown from those days Bert and the elder Sterling are in a group of other men and we don’t know what their jobs were or what roles they played in the founding of the firm.  Based on what we’ve seen of Bert we can surmise that he was the people person, the one who handled the clients and the staff, and possibly also the business head, which would make Roger’s father the creative force.  But unless Weiner decides to give us a lot more of Roger’s memoirs or devote an episode or two to those days (like St Elsewhere’s brilliant two-parter about the founding of St Elegius) we’re left to wonder just how productive Bert Cooper was in 1920.

We also don’t know much of what happened in between then and the show’s now.

At some point, Roger took charge.  We can guess that it was shortly after he returned from World War II.  We can also guess that he took over under circumstances that put him in command quickly, since he is way too comfortable as the boss for his having recently ascended to the throne.  His father dying, probably, but possibly his establishing himself as the better ad man, and better businessman, than either his father or Bert Cooper.  It would make sense, given what we’ve seen of him, that he spent very little time having to prove to people that he wasn’t just the boss’s son.  It’s a point of interest that there’s nobody around the offices of Sterling Cooper, besides Bert, as old as or older than Roger.  Did he run all the old men out of the place when he took over or did time and the nature of the business, not to mention booze and cigarettes, clean house for him? 

(I’m talking about the first three seasons.  This season we were introduced to another character who knew Roger when.  Miss Blankenship.)

However it came about, at the beginning of Season One Sterling Cooper is Roger’s firm.  Bert is still a king, but he’s ceded the running of the kingdom to the more vital and competent Prince.  Roger consults Bert and often defers to his judgment, but that’s a matter of respect.  Well, and money.  But another, meaner prince, would have eased Bert out of there by now.  Bert is still around because Roger remembers and cares.  He’s not there because he’s necessary and productive.

This is life.  People grow old.  They get tired.  There comes a point when they can’t do at all what they used to do with ease.  However much of a Randian hero Bert might have been in his prime, he is not a hero now.  He is an old man, a bit of a silly old man, and his place in the firm is that of a dependent.

Talking to Don, Bert refers to all the people “who depend on our hard work.”  At the moment, at least, he is forgetting how dependent he is on Roger and not just for Roger’s hard work.

He is dependent on Roger to remember and care that at one time he was something other than he is now.

He needs Roger to be different than a Randian hero by being sentimental about at least one person who is dependent on his hard work.

I’m still talking about Season One.

At the beginning of Season One, Bert’s time has passed, but Roger’s time is passing.

Through Seasons Two and Three Roger’s place in the firm continued to slip. And in Season Four he’s gotten to the point where he can been left behind completely and he has to worry if anybody is going to remember and care about him the way he remembered and cared about Bert.

Since he has not been as good to Don as Bert was to him, he’s got cause to worry.

The power is passing to Don.  The only reason is that it hasn’t already passed is that Don has been even more self-destructive than Roger.  We’ll see tonight whether or not that has changed or is going to change in Season Five.  But we can already see that Don won’t hold it long.

Peggy is waiting.

The day will come when Don will be dependent on Peggy to remember and care.

I should say, the day will come again, since Don’s survival this season has been dependent on Peggy remembering and caring already.

The difference between the present and the future is that for the present Peggy is still dependent on Don.  She needs him to return to form.

This cycle of dependence and interdependence is entirely lacking from the Randian world view.  Once a hero, always a hero.  John Galt needs nobody, ever. 

One last thing.

After the scene in Bert’s office, we’re given several scenes in which characters who are presumably dependent on Don and Bert’s hard work are viewed sentimentally.

We see Peggy and Pete and Sal and the new girl working the switchboard at their most vulnerable.  We see them and others, including Joan and Paul and Freddie, at their most likable, and their likability has nothing to do with their productivity because, although we see them at work, we don’t see them working.  We also see them after work.  We see them being not useful to each other.  And we see that their worth to each other is not merely a matter of their usefulness to each other.

Work has brought them together.  But it isn’t what holds them together. 

What holds them together is a web of emotions the chief of which is sympathy.

This leads to a scene that’s a flashback to Don’s boyhood or, I should say, Dick Whitman’s boyhood during the Depression.

A hobo comes to the family farm asking to trade work for a meal.

What we see is young Dick learning two lessons about work that are going to twist up his life as Don Draper.

From the hobo Dick learns that while you have to work to live the things most people work for, a home, a family, stability, status, are traps.

From his father he learns that the productive man, the man who works for a home, a family, stability, and status, is the worthier man.

But he learns one more thing.  The Randian view is cruel.  Dick’s father is unsentimental about the people who depend on his hard work to the point of giving himself permission to lie and cheat.

The Randian man, the productive man, the worthier man, owes nothing to nobody.

___________________

I haven’t been able to follow Season Four in the normal fashion.  It’s been catch as catch can.  Fortunately, that Randian hero of culture criticism, Jim Wolcott, has been doing a Roarkian job of recapping the season episode by episode.

From the Paley Center for Media:  Robert Morse describes how he auditioned for the part of Bert Cooper.  Charming as all get-out.

_____________________

Related Mannion Re-run: For the love of Ayn Rand.

Mad Mannion

Ok, who told them they could start the new season of Mad Men without me?

Missed Sunday night’s episode because we were driving home from the Cape.

Anything interesting happen?

Besides our learning Don needs a little tough love?

Updated: The reason they didn’t care they were starting the new season without me is that they knew Wolcott was all set to blog about it.

For today’s active man

“Today’s active man” looks a little too much like he’s doing a screen test for the part of Count Zaroff in a remake of The Most Dangerous Game.

In the next commercial he’ll be out on his private island hunting Edie Adams and the guy who walks a mile for a Camel.

No, I’m not talking about Ernie Kovacs.  Watch the ad.

Ok, for this morning’s adventure in amateur semiotics:  It’s interesting that Dutch Masters was selling packaging as much as cigars and I’m also wondering whether there was ever a world in which a lawyer or an accountant or an insurance agent lit up a cigar in the middle of a meeting with a female client who appears to be in mourning---she’s dressed formally and all in black; she’s either a widow or a spy, but if she’s a spy then the lawyer/accountant/insurance agent would be offering her a cigarette instead of reaching for a slim-down pack of stogies for himself, wouldn’t he?

But back to Count Zaroff there by the fire in his cabin with his dog and his gun.

This probably aired in 1957 or 58 and the optics were most likely dictated more by budget and scheduling than by the artistic choices of the mad men who came up with it.  The actor’s wearing whatever was in stock that looked enough like hunting gear to get by in five seconds of screen time and the important thing would have been pockets.  The pitch is that the Slim-Down 5 Pack fits in any sized pocket, so today’s active man can carry his Dutch Masters cigars with him in his shirt and the lawyer/accountant/insurance agent can slip them into the breast pocket of his suit coat, and what more do you want out of a cigar than that it’s not broken when you reach for it when you’re out hunting or back in the office getting a client to sign on the dotted?

So maybe the makers of the ad didn’t have time to notice or care that the ideal of today’s active man they were presenting was a middle-aged militarist with no use for the company of women, family, or even other active men.

Even allowing for the way the fashions, hair styles, and habits of expression, carriage, and demeanor made people of that generation look older to our eyes---take a close look at Kovacs himself, he’s not even forty at the time, and the other night I watched an episode of Burn Notice in which the guest star was the actor who plays Harry on Mad Men and it took me half the show to recognize him because he looked at least ten years younger, which is a testament to how good the designers of Mad Men are at capturing the look of the period---“Today’s Active Man” appears to be a good decade older than I’d have thought was the target audience, men in their thirties not in their late forties or early fifties.  Did Uncle Bob smoke more cigars?

And the reason I call Uncle Bob a militarist isn’t the fetishistic way he’s handling his shotgun.  It’s that he appears to be wearing a uniform.  This is twelve years after World War II.  I suppose that’s long enough for vets to have grown nostalgic for the way they looked and felt in their combat fatigues, although as I said Uncle Bob here looks a little old.  If he served in the War it was because he was already in the Army when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.  Considering that a lot of those men, the ones who took office jobs when they came home, had exchanged one uniform for another and become the men in the gray flannel suits, it’s easy to imagine that remembering the days when they were truly active men and went to work risking life and limb without ties and with their collars open might have seemed like a dream of heaven, provided they could remember those days without also remembering the blood.

And of course that’s one of the pop psychological truisms about that generation of men, that they were able to repress and compartmentalize their memories of the war to the point that when it came time send their sons off to what should have struck them as an unspeakable and purposeless and immoral parody of what they’d gone through they not only did it stoically if not gladly but when those sons came home broken and angry they offered them no sympathy.  And they weren’t much more empathetic with their daughters, remaining emotionally detached, at best, remote for the most part, and cold and uninterested too often, mentally alone in the hunting cabins in their heads with the doors locked against intrusions by demanding women of all ages.

This was one of the original themes of Mad Men.

Don Draper is a veteran of the Korean War but that’s only so that the character can be in his early thirties in the early 1960s.  In all other respects he’s a pop psych classic World War II veteran as husband and father.   Of course, he has other issues and his main reason for not wanting to be reminded of his experiences in his war is that the defining moment of his life was the moment when another man died so he could be reborn. 

Draper has compartmentalized and repressed so many of his memories, and along with them all attendant feelings, that none of his life seems real to him.

It shouldn’t matter that he created that life on the basis of a lie.  Self-reinvention is as American as apple pie.

Dick Whitman’s reinvention of himself as something other and better than an orphaned farm boy began when he ran away from home to join the Army.  The mortar round that killed the real Don Draper just speeded up the process.  You can argue that, thanks to the GI Bill, a great chunk of that generation, the World War II vets and their younger brothers who served during the Korean War and the early part of the Cold War, reinvented themselves at the same time as Draper and just as drastically, although without resorting to the name change and the total estrangement from their pasts.

So the once and never to be future Dick Whitman shouldn’t have to feel that his life as Don Draper is such a total fraud that he can’t commit to it.

He feels that way---he is that way, uncommitted to being Don Draper---because he can’t feel the other way.  What he feels is an absence of feeling.  He can’t feel the reality of his life as Don Draper so it’s no wonder he “feels” free to leave that life behind any time he wishes and, often, when he doesn’t wish it---he regularly drifts away from it into another sort of life despite his best intentions.  He’s not emotionally anchored anywhere.  His escapes from Betty and the kids and from Sterling Cooper are no more real to him than the life or lives he’s escaping.

This is a way of saying Don lives as if in a dream.  To him the world exists not outside himself but only inside his head.  That’s what makes him like the World War II veterans of pop psychology and pop cultural iconography.  They are so cut off from their real lives of family and work that they might as well be living in dreams.  They are at home only in the solitude of the hunting cabins inside their heads.

And this, my friends, is called riffing on a theme.  It’s not meant to be an analysis of that ad because I don’t have a clue as to what the people who came up with it more than fifty years ago were thinking and seeing at the time.  “Today’s Active Man” appears to me to be wearing a uniform and because of the period it’s from I automatically think of World War II and I’m off to the races.

But I’m not sure that people back then would have seen what he’s wearing as a uniform.  The Mannion guys and I have been watching Ken Burns’ The War and one thing I’ve noticed is that in the film clips and photographs of American soldiers and Marines when they’re not in combat or on parade is that they look to be barely in uniform.

America did not have much of a military tradition when we entered the War.  The standing Army was astonishingly small.  (I’ll do the google search for the actual numbers later, unless one of you want to do it for me.)  We had to put a million troops in the field overnight and had to equip and outfit them as best we could with what was available and it would have made sense and been most efficient to just adapt whatever was on hand that could do the job.  In the case of combat uniforms that would have meant using the patterns and features of standard work clothes.  After all, what was a solider doing but manual labor? 

Looking at black and white photographs or films of soldiers without their helmets, ammunition belts, and field packs, you might find it hard to differentiate them from pictures and films of factory hands or construction workers until you picked out the faces of the women in the latter.

Combat fatigues were standard work shirts and work pants dyed olive drab.

Even the way pants were tucked into boots was the same for soldiers and civilians.  Combat boots were only work boots with black and brown polish, which is why they were worse than useless for long marches, winter fighting, and jungle warfare.

These days combat fatigues aren’t even called combat fatigues.  They are called ACUs.  Army Combat Uniforms and they are undeniably uniforms.  Never mind the camo.  Soliders in ACUs have distinctly different silhouettes than any civilians.  Up through the Vietnam era, soldiers wore their clothes like everybody else.  Now nobody wears clothes like a solider except to look like a soldier.  And up through the Vietman era it didn’t take much in the way of personal modification to make their uniforms not uniform, which infuriated Patton and which I can’t help suspecting was part of the reason for the redesigns in the 1980s that have resulted in a look that to my eyes, trained by old war movies, is more reminiscent of Rommel’s Afrika Korps than Patton’s Third Army even when his troops were dressed according to his regulations.   The idea was to have an army of professional warriors who looked like professional warriors and not like carpenters and spot welders and definitely not like hippie college kids.

In other words, I’m looking at the guy in the ad from the wrong one of two possible points of view.  I see a guy dressed up as if he thinks he’s in a war movie, but maybe I ought to be seeing a guy who when he was younger could have been in one of those photographs and films in the War, wearing a uniform that wasn’t much of a uniform.  Adopting that point of view might bring me closer to the view of people watching the ad when it aired at the time.  They might very well have not noticed anything about the way he’s dressed except that he’s not wearing a suit and tie and focused instead on the fireplace, dogs, and log cabin walls. 

I see a guy who if he was around today would be volunteering to patrol the Mexican border of Arizona but they saw a guy who was conspicuously not in an office.

I’d have thought that in 1957 “Today’s Active Man” would have been actively playing tennis or golf or taking his family to the beach or otherwise actively engaged doing something that put him in the company of a pretty youngish actress model who might be a wife, a daughter, a girlfriend, or just a pal.  But market research might have shown that men who were active in that way didn’t smoke cigars.  (Jack Kennedy was four years away from being President.)  I’m too focused on the gun and the dogs and absence of human company, male or female, when all Dutch Masters wanted my grandfathers---who were both around 50 in 1957---to see was the absence of bosses, customers, and paperwork, not to mention lawn mowers, broken washing machines, and cars whose engines were making funny noises.

Oh, and pockets.

_____________________

Tricky to read ads out of the context of the times in which they were made.  Tricky to read them within that context too.  For instance, I’m not even going to try to figure out what either Kovacs or Dutch Masters thought they were doing with this one:

________________

I came across both of these because I watched Our Man in Havana last night and I wanted to post a clip of Kovacs in that.  Casting him as the corrupt and vicious Cuban police captain known as the Red Vulture struck me as inspired until I remembered how often Kovacs the absurdist, iconoclastic comedian appeared in movies playing establishmentarian authority figures straight.  Still, he was great choice for Captain Segura.

How hero-worshipping Rob Petrie ruined my life

Was watching some old episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show late last night and realized a sad truth.

Rob Petrie ruined my life.

Actually, coveting his life ruined my life. The show was a pernicious influence on me.  Convinced me it was possible to live conflicting lives.  Bohemain by day, suburbanite by night and weekend.

Rob Petrie's a writer and a homeowner, husband, and dad.  He spends his working days in New York City collaborating with other artistic types, then comes home to his tract house in New Rochelle to mow the lawn, go to PTA meetings, and play bridge with the neighbors.

He divides himself more completely than Don Draper on Mad Men.

Rob’s happier leading his double life than Draper is, of course.  Rob has advantages Don doesn’t.

For one thing, Rob’s coworkers are actually creative and very good at their jobs.

For another, Rob comes home to a hot ex-dancer wife who is clearly crazy about him.

But serving two masters never works out well in real life.

You can’t serve both Art and Scott lawn care products.

On the other hand, it seems to have worked for Carl Reiner the show’s creator who based it on his own life.

So maybe the problem was with me. Having a mortgage isn’t the problem.  It's not having had the talent.

Or the courage.

Or the luck.

Still a great show.

Watched a terrific episode in which Alan Brady browbeats Rob into punching up a Broadway play Alan’s starring in.  Rob has to do the work in secret because Alan doesn’t want to offend the play’s author, Tennessee Williams.

Ok.  It’s not actually Tennessee Williams.  It’s a Tennessee Williams-esque playwright named Harper Worthington Yates.

Played by Strother Martin of all people, looking more dapper, plumper, less degenerate than you remember him from Cool Hand Luke.

Maybe it’s not Williams but a composite or somebody who was famous at the time but whose work and reputation have faded in the collective memory.

Funnier if you think of him as Williams though.

Of course, it’s television, in the 60s, so you have to picture a Tennessee Williams who doesn’t drink, keeps his hair combed and his tie tied, and focuses his affections on his dog, Mister Ben, rather than on rough trade.

But…Southerner, courtly, thin mustache, prolific writer, Pulitzer Prize winner.  Gay.

The episode includes two obviously gay characters.

Well, obvious to adults at least.  I doubt I caught it when I was I was a little kid watching the show in syndication on days when I was home sick from school.

The characters’ gayness is not treated as the joke.  There are only two gay jokes and neither one is primarily a gay joke.  The first is part of the set-up to a joke about people who worship their pets.

The Tennessee William character explains his devotion to Mister Ben by telling Alan that the dog is all he has left since “I lost Blossom.”

And Alan responds, slightly incredulously, suddenly thinking he has to revamp his whole impression of the playwright, “I didn’t know you were married.”

The playwright gives him a startled look as though he can’t believe Alan’s that obtuse.  “Blossom was Mister Ben’s wife.”

The other joke is a follow-up to Rob’s run in with the costume designer for the play.  Buck Brown.  That’s his name.  Which I guess is a gay joke in itself.  But it’s a throwaway.  Alan has called Rob out to Connecticut where the play is having a try-out but to keep the secret Alan introduces Rob to the director as his tailor Vito.  The director happens to be having an argument with Buck Brown over one of Brown’s designs and he asks “Vito” for his professional opinion.  Rob takes the director’s side, which brings Brown storming into Alan's dressing room to confront the nobody who’s dared to criticize a Buck Brown original!

Brown is more flamboyant that Harper Worthington Yates.

Yates might---might---have been passed off as a soft-spoken, excessively well-mannered, slightly fussy, sexually diffident straight man.

There’s no mistaking Buck Brown.

But his flamboyance isn’t a signifier of his homosexuality.  It’s the angry song of his art and his artistic pride.  This is the award-winning costume designer for seventeen Broadway shows, an artist who will bedeck a leading lady with apricot bows and then defend his design choice fiercely against the casual, middlebrow judgment of an ordinary men’s tailor named Vito.

The joke in the scene isn’t a gay man throwing a hissy fit.  Buck Brown’s tirade is far from that anyway.  The joke is on Rob, a show biz professional in his own right, for his being unable to stick up for himself because of the ridiculous position Alan’s put him in and having to stand there, stammering an apology, as a fellow pro berates him and dismisses him as a philistine.

Later, though, back in New Rochelle, after he’s mentioned that a man named Buck Brown essentially beat him up, verbally, Laura says, “Buck Brown the cowboy star?” and Rob says grumpily, “Hardly.”  Which is a sissy joke but turned on its head, because Rob isn’t expressing contempt for Brown, he’s letting out his anger at Alan for putting him on the spot like that where he was more or less in the traditional sissy’s predicament of having to submit to bullying and he’s confessing his self-loathing for having submitted.

Rob thinks he should have stood up for himself.  To Alan, not to Brown.

The Dick Van Dyke show was a very enlightened and sophisticated and even subversive show for its time and context, on a number of issues.  That’s another way it’s an argument against Mad Men.  Through the lives of Rob and Laura it shows the great social changes of the the 1960s arising out of the lives of the Northeastern creative middle class, which is of course the very class Mad Men posits the 60s were necessary to destroy.

But the 60s wiped out Rob and Laura and left us with a more stylish but simultaneously more self-indulgent and more conservative class of Dons and Bettys with careers.

That’s another post.

What was the point of this post again?

Oh yeah.  Rob Petrie ruined my life.

Him and his damn briefcase.

In that episod, as Rob is about to head off to Connecticut, he piles all the drafts of the script he’s been working on into his briefcase.

A real briefcase.  Leather covered.  Hard.  Brass-trimmed. With locks that snap.

Do any writers carry briefcases like that anymore?

Jeezus.  Do they even have any papers to put in them?

A present day Rob Petrie, summoned by her boss to Connecticut, would stuff her netbook into a backpack.

If she’d even think of actually going to Connecticut.  She and her Alan Brady could deal with the rewrites over the internet, with her emailing her drafts to his Blackberry.

Who needs a briefcase?

I still want one though.

Which is the problem.

Rob’s briefcase is symbolic.

That’s a lawyer’s or an insurance man’s briefcase.

In those days a writer would have carried a soft-leather attache.  The battered one he’d been given as a gift for his high school graduation.  If he carried anything.  He’d have been more likely to just roll up his pages and stuff them in his jacket pocket.

The briefcase was a signifier.  It was there to reassure the audience that despite his spending his day among television stars, Pulitzer Prize winning playwrights, flamboyant costume designers, and other writers, not to mention beautiful actresses bedecked in apricot bows, that Rob was still a regular guy.  Just like the folks at home.  Another nine to fiver with a wife and a kid and a mortgage and a lawn to mow and boring, uncreative neighbors who were dentists and dentists’ wives and members of the PTA for whom a night of bridge was the highlight of the week.

But I hadn’t studied deconstructionism when I was eight.  I probably didn’t know who Tennessee Williams was, let alone Jacques Lacan.  In fact, when I did become aware of Tennessee Williams I probably thought he was like Harper Taylor Yates.

I learned a lot about real life from The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Too much.

I took it all literally.

Like that briefcase.

I learned the wrong lesson from that.

It convinced me that it was possible to own a briefcase like that, and all the middle-class accoutrements, and encumberances, that it symbolized, and still hope to be a writer and spend my working days in the company of other writers and beautiful actresses with or without apricot bows.

You know what, though?  I got a birthday coming up next month?  Maybe I could ask for a briefcase.

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All the mad men and all the mad women need an extra order of cream

Season 3 Finale of Mad Men this Sunday night, and here’s a sneak preview:

Milk Men - A Mad Men Parody

Atom.com: Funny Videos | Spoofs | TV & Movie Spoofs

Whoops.  Sorry about that.  Oh well.  At least there were no spoilers.

The best thing in this is the Milk Man’s Draperesque speech about milk being bottled innocence, although that one actresses’ Peggy-isms are hilariously dead-on too.

Are any of these actors old enough to remember real milk men?  Once, when the sixteen year old was five, we were in the Dairy Pavilion at the New York State Fair and I tried to explain to him what a milk man was and what he did.  “Your nana used to put a note out at night in the milk box and very early in the morning the milk man would come in his truck and leave whatever nana ordered.”

His response was, “You’re joking with me, Dad.”

Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny made more sense to him.  Of course he had proof they existed.

When did the last milk men deliver their last quarts of buttermilk?

Back to the milk as bottled innocence speech.  That was perfect, but it reminded me of that episode of Naked City I wrote about a few weeks back.

David Janssen’s character, the proto-Don Draper, delivers a speech to his mad men that could be written straight into an episode of Mad Men without the slightest edit:

Gentlemen, Sparrow Farm Products spent six and a half million dollars this year on an advertising campaign we designed for them.  That campaign did not say tractors are great, it said Sparrow Tractors are great.  The farmer buys a tractor and gets up in the seat.  He doesn’t know whether that tractor’s going to be good or bad but he does know that Sparrow Tractors are good.  He knows it because we sold him.  We told told him.  So let’s reassure him.  Let’s make it very clear to him he’s sitting on a Sparrow Tractor.

I wonder if the writers of Mad Men have been cribbing.

Doesn’t make any more sense than the things Draper tells his staff, but David Janssen gives it an authoritative edginess that makes you believe his guys are going to snap to in a way Draper’s won’t because they’re going to waste time trying to figure out what the heck it all means.  Janssen’s speech comes across as an instructive order.  Hamm’s speeches have a opiate haze about them, as if they were zen koans delivered by a master who is completely but not necessarily blissfully stoned.

That’s not a criticism.  It’s an illustration of the different ways the two shows see the time period.  On Naked City, a product of the time, the early 1960s is a period of energy, dash, and forward momentum.  Characters who can’t keep up or who get too far ahead or who are otherwise out of synch get into trouble, which is sometimes comic, more often tragic, but not inevitable or inescapable or irreparable.  On Mad Men escaping the time is the desired end, but that escape is practically out of the questions and most of the characters don’t even know they need to.  They’re trapped in their era as if in a giant bottle of mineral oil in which they swim in extreme slow motion with the object of simply not sinking.

The only way out is if someone breaks the bottle from outside.

Which is sort of what happened last week, isn’t it?

Big thanks to Greg Mitchell for the video.

Mad Men prototypes in the Naked City

Watched an episode of Naked City last night that had Detective Adam Flint investigating a breakin and murder at an ad agency.  It’s a small but elite agency with a few select clients who pay big bucks to have the mad man who started the outfit put his special genius to work for them.  This mad man, Carl Ashland (played by the original Fugitive and the great Harry Orwell, David Janssen), is a relatively young man at the top of his game who runs the creative and business sides of his agency almost single-handedly.  Ashland takes a liking to Flint.  He sees in him a version of himself, a smart, ambitious, working class kid with an intellectual and creative bent that has taken him farther, faster than someone from their background might have expected of himself, but taken him to a place where he’s alone and lonely---Ashland is too streetwise, too hard-edged for the company of the button-down Ivy League types who work for him, Flint is too thoughtful, too intellectually refined for a cop.  That’s how Ashland figures it, at any rate.  He thinks Flint is wasting his brains and talents and offers him a job that would more than double his salary right away, triple it in a couple of years.

Now, considering I started watching Naked City because I wanted to see how the world of Mad Men, New York City in the early 1960s, saw itself, it’s not surprising that this episode had me looking for comparisons between the two depictions of the advertising business, made nearly 50 years apart.

I expected to find points of difference to use against Mad Men, which no matter how good it can be is never very good at portraying the Mad Men and Mad Women at work and in its thematic need to show the worst of the the time period often reduces its characters to the equivalent of stock figures from Sunday School lessons for 21st Century adult liberals.

But I found similarities.

Some striking similarities.

Probably too many.

It was late.

Gave me a new respect for Mad Men though.

Start with this.  Carl Ashland’s agency has a Pete Campbell.

Guy named Phil Seaver.

Phil’s a baby-faced seeming smoothie, an obvious product of his good schooling, a more refined and sensitive character than his boss, whom he both admires and despises.  In one short scene he and Ashland act out a scene Pete and Don Draper repeat in practically every encounter.  Phil has pushed back against one of Ashland’s ideas and offered one of his own, but Ashland shoots him down in a way that simultaneously humiliates Phil and praises him.  Don does this to Pete regularly, calling attention to Pete’s weaknesses at the same time he identifies a strength.  Both Draper and Ashland slap their man down with the same message, “You can do better, I expect better, and it’s your own fault that you don’t produce better and keep undercutting yourself with me.” 

“What do you want me to fight you for, Carl?” Phil says.  “Did you ever let me win an argument?'”

Carl replies in words and tones Don could use with Pete, “Phil, if you fought a little harder because you really wanted to win more than you wanted to complain about how often I beat you, you might come out ahead of me once in a while,” leaving Phil feeling the way Pete is often left feeling, infuriated more at himself than at his dismissive boss, trapped by his own insecurities, self-doubt, and self-loathing, while at the same time admiring his boss and rival for putting him in his place.  As Pete often does, Phil seems relieved to have been smacked back into his natural role as a beta male by the alpha male.

And Ashland’s agency has a Joan Holloway, Miss Chain.  She’s the Juno-esque office manager, tall, voluptuous, subtly flirtatious, aware that an important part of her job is to be ambulatory decor but with the purpose of keeping clients and underlings off-balance and distracted so that she can manipulate them the ways her boss wants them manipulated because the other, more important part of her job is to run the place. 

Joan and Miss Chain are the chief petty officers, the master sergeants, to Draper and Ashland’s captains.  At Sterling Cooper, Don Draper and Joan Holloway often seem---seemed.  Thanks to an unfortunate plot development that’d better be rectified soon, Joan, the now Mrs Dr Harris, no longer works at Sterling Cooper.---to be a team of two playing against the entire rest of the firm.  They respect each other and rely on each other without needing to be confidantes or friends.  In this episode of Naked City---and again it happens in just one short scene---we see Ashland focus on Miss Chain as soon as she enters the room with a directness and energy that he hasn’t bothered to give to his creative team, and it’s obvious it’s because he knows that whatever Miss Chain has to tell him is only and exactly what he needs to hear at the moment.  She’s his eyes and ears, he trusts her to do exactly what he’d do if he had the time to run the office himself, and he knows she will not waste his time.  If she’s bringing him a problem, it’s because it’s a problem only he can solve.

But the most striking similarities were between Carl Ashland and Don Draper.  In fact, Ashland struck me as the proto-Draper, and not just because of their dark-haired handsomeness, coolness and detachment, and sexy way with a cigarette.  First, though, the differences.

Ashland is not a closet hedonist.  He’s the opposite, practically monastic in his habits of self-denial and self-discipline.  He doesn’t just live to work.  He is his work.  People are what they do, and he is unsparing in his judgments and his expectations, of others, of himself.  That’s one of the qualities in common with himself he sees in Adam Flint.  Don Draper uses his work as a disguise and an excuse.  He rewards himself for his success at the office with his double life, and he assumes, correctly (at least within his universe), that everybody else is doing the same.  Nobody in the Mad Men universe is who they appear to be.  In Carl Ashland and Adam Flint’s world people are precisely that and whatever they say or think to the contrary is self-delusion.  As far as Draper’s concerned, the lives we appear to lead in public are lies or at least clever illusions.  To Ashland and Flint, lies happen in private and it’s the personal that is illusionary. 

But while Ashland’s ruthlessly realistic and a hard-headed materialist and Draper’s a dreamer and an idealist, they are both solitary, self-contained, secretive men, nations of one, but lonely nations of one always on the lookout to let someone else inside their borders even while they guard those borders fiercely.   Ashland’s single secret is noble.  Don’s secrets are  many and, to put it kindly, less than admirable.  But the outward effect is the same for both men.  Neither can let anyone else get close.  Surrounded by people who admire and like them, who even love them, they have to keep to themselves.   Their coolness, their ironic detachment, their seeming indifference to other people and their opinions are for both the source of their charisma and attractiveness, but they are defensive qualities and their apparent independence is actually only an unassuageable  loneliness.

In the end, Flint turns down Ashland’s job offer, rebuffing Ashland’s attempt to break out of his own self-imposed self-confinement.  Ashland’s reaction is to retreat immediately into work.  He shuts down the conversation by grabbing the phone and calling for someone to bring him an important file, apparently dismissing Flint from his thoughts as well as from his office and forgetting about him immediately as if he’d never been worth Ashland’s time or more than polite attention.  Flint leaves, hurt and baffled, but the camera doesn’t follow him out the door.  It stays with Ashland, sitting alone at his desk.  In the final shot he is turning toward the window behind him and in effect turning his back on the camera, on us the audience, on the office, on the agency he created, on all human company and sympathy, retreating into himself, and to my eyes beginning to assume the Draper-esque pose that opens every episode of Mad Men.

In my New York City, the cops wink at you and mean it.

Think she’s in the cast of Wicked?

Yes, her face is green.  My guess is she’s the understudy for Elphaba’s understudy killing time before the Wednesday matinee.  She already knows she’s not going on, again, so she’s volunteered to make the coffee and newspaper run, and why bother rushing with the cold cream if you’re just dashing out for a couple of minutes.  But then why aren’t her hands green?

But this is New York.  There could be a couple dozen reasons for the green make-up, including personal taste.  She might be playing a Martian in a TV commercial, she might be testing a new product, she might be making a political statement, or she might just think she looks good in in shamrock green.  She might think she is a shamrock.

There are eight million stories in the naked city and having the fun of figuring out what hers and the other 7,999,999 are is one of the reasons I like to go there.

Three weeks ago, when I wrote about getting cursed out by the furious woman who thought I was taking her picture, Dr Intueri left a comment pointing out that I had accidentally stumbled out of this world into that angry woman’s universe.  “Not a fun place,” observed the doctor, who’s hung up her shingle in the city and added that she hoped that I’d enjoyed my visit to her new hometown despite the encounter.

But here’s the thing.

I enjoyed the visit even more because of it.

She wouldn’t have believed me, if she’d stopped cursing at me long enough to listen, but I wanted to thank that woman for being such a character and giving me a story to tell.  I don’t feel as though I’ve been in New York unless I come home with at least one story, and I usually do.  Hers was a good one.  But if she hadn’t happened to be there when I took the picture of the bar sign, I’d have come home with another story, probably one about the gang of Russian waiters outside the Old Homestead Steakhouse who loudly but cheerfully tried to bully me into coming in there for lunch and who I think would have carried me kicking in screaming into their restaurant, sat me down at a table, and force-fed me a porterhouse if I’d stopped within arm’s reach to take my picture of the plastic bull over the doorway.

This is something I should go back and put in that post.  It’s something I wanted to tell that woman.

This is what I wrote:

It began to sink in.  Don't know why I was so slow on the uptake.  She thought I was taking a picture of her, although God knows why she thought only a pervert would want her photograph.  I gave her a good look for the first time.  She was moderately attractive, I guess, in a somewhat worn around the edges kind of way.  Have to take into account that she wasn't at her best with her face twisted up with anger and hatred like that.  But once I realized what she was objecting to I got angry.  The nerve of her thinking I was a pervert.  The nerve of her thinking I was taking I was taking her picture when all I was doing was taking a picture of a wooden sign.  And the nerve of her thinking that if I was sneaking around Manhattan snapping photographs of strange women for my perverted pleasures she was someone I'd want a picture of!  Lady, I wanted to say, today I saw a young blonde who was as beautiful as a model, who might even have been a model, made more beautiful by her being six months pregnant.  I saw a waitress at an outdoor cafe who looked like a young Marissa Tomei.  I saw a goddess of a woman from India over six feet tall, all legs, in gauzy white blouse unbuttoned down to her chest and up to her diaphragm.  I saw countless other women far more beautiful than you and if I was tempted to take any pictures of strange women for my perverted pleasures I'd have taken every one of theirs twenty times before I even looked twice at you!  But I didn't take their pictures!  I took pictures like this one of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe instead!

What kind of pervert goes around taking pictures of churches?

I should have added that it wouldn’t just have been pictures of prettier women I’d have taken before I took hers.  I’d have taken the pictures of men too, and not necessarily pretty men.  I’d have taken a picture of the Russian waiters.  (Actually, I did.  It didn’t come out.  Way too bright.  Had the camera on the wrong setting.)  I’d have taken a picture of another waiter, a very young, very short, very bushily moustached Pakistani in a black vest and a very long, very white apron strolling in the shade on Greenwich Avenue and the picture of the tall, handsome Iranian businessman talking on his cell as he stood in the middle of traffic on Houston, the long cord of his earbud dangling out of his suit pants pocket all the way down to his ankle.  I’d have taken their pictures for the same reason I’d have taken the pictures of the pretty young women, if I was faster and braver with my camera---because what I was doing was taking pictures of New York City, and to me New York City is a city of characters with stories to tell.  In my opinion, the best TV show about New York isn’t Naked City or Mad Men or even Seinfeld or Law and Order, the original, before Jerry Orbach left.  The best show as far as I’m concerned, because it portrays the New York City I fell in love with, is Barney Miller.  To me, New York City is a comedy.

If I’d noticed that woman and decided I to take her picture, it’d have been because I’d decided she had a story I wanted to know, like the green-faced (maybe) actress and the news vendor in the picture up top.

My pictures are notes to help me remember those stories, which is why I don’t need to take pictures.

All this is a long way to go for this: I’m sorry I couldn’t go to the Clinton Global Initiative today, but if I could have made it, it would only have been for the closing session to hear Hillary Clinton speak.  I’d have been in and out and spent the whole time there in the press pen in hotel ballroom, where I probably wouldn’t have found any New York stories to bring home.  But who knows?

Wednesday, I walked up to the Sheraton from Grand Central, which is a hike of what, four blocks up and ten blocks over?  But although I passed story after story, including the green-faced actress’s, it wasn’t until I got to the last block that I found the story I really wanted to tell.

No picture to go with it, but like I said.  I don’t need the pictures.

I was walking up alongside the hotel on West 52nd and came upon a cop looking bored in that extremely bored but still alert way cops manage.  She was youngish, probably no more than thirty, on the small side even for a lady cop, Hispanic, round-faced, pretty but I didn’t notice that until she did something.

She was leaning with her back against the hotel wall which was papered over with a faded mural, her thumbs tucked in her gunbelt, staring at nothing and everything, including, it turned out, me.  Our eyes met.

“Good morning, officer,” I said brightly.  And this is what she did in response.  She winked.

She smiled too.  Actually, more than smiled.  She beamed.  But it was over just like that.  Smile. Wink. Done.  She went right back to staring at nothing and everything, looking bored in the cop way.

That’s my New York City.

Mad Mannionites to the rescue of Sterling Cooper

Third episode of Season Three of Mad Men tonight on AMC at 10 Eastern.  Once again, James Wolcott will be live-blogging tonight's episode at Vanity Fair's Little Gold Man Bistro.  (Last week's entry is here.)  Having caught up with the first two episodes, Tom Watson declares Don Draper the Anti-JFK.

Meanwhile, our story continues as Burt Cooper's right-hand gal Cassandra catches up with Don Draper having another liquid lunch.

She joins him for a quick drink, but tells him that there's another big shake-up at Sterling Cooper and he needs to get back there if he wants to save his job.  Don rushes back to the office where he finds new boss Dave S has taken the reins firmly in hand.

Dave tells Don he's keeping him on---for now.  But he's bringing in some fresh talent and Don's going to have his work cut out for him if he's going to keep up with the new guy, the dashing and dapper Mike Morgan!

Little do any of them know, however, that behind the scenes Amanda Marcotte is quietly planning her take over of the firm by rallying the major clients, including Utz and London Fog, to her department.

Join us for next week's episode, literally, by MadMenizing yourself and sending me the results.

Mad Mannionites work out their psycho-dramas in anticipation of tonight's episode of Mad Men

Programming note:  James Wolcott will be live-blogging tonight's episode of Mad Men for Vanity Fair starting at 10 PM Eastern.

When last we left the Draper home in Ossining, the Linkmeister had just stopped by to catch a ride with Don to the train station, surprising Betty with the news that Don isn't on a business trip to Pittsburgh as she thought:

After Link leaves, Betty's "friend" Simone arrives.  Simone, according to neighborhood gossip passed along to me by the reader who invented her is "an independently wealthy protofeminist who meets Betty at the grocery store.  She vacillates between feeling motherly concern for Betty and wanting to smack her.  She copes with her ambivalence by giving Betty a copy of 'The Feminine Mystique' and taking her to a Loretta Lynn concert."

And where is Don this morning?  Wrapping up a night on the town with a surfing, world-traveling bon vivant and writer pal named Sean Paul.

Meanwhile, at Sterling Cooper, Don's continued absences along with Roger's distraction by his new young bride, Burt Cooper's slide into a giddy second childhood, Duck's drinking, and the new British partners' inability to transcend stereotype, is causing more headaches for Creative Director Tom Watson, who is trying to hold the place together all on his own.  In his exhaustion, Tom hallucinates Don's coming back to work to save the day.

More to come.  Add your own pscyhodramatics to the plot by Madmenizing yourself.  Send me the results for next week's installment.  And don't forget to tune in to tonight's episode of Mad Men, at 10 PM Eastern, 9 Central.

All the mad men and all the mad women can't tell a joke to save their lives

The first episode of the new season of Mad Men struck comedic gold, every situation a laugh riot straight out of the best bedroom farce and classic satire.  The fire alarm interrupting Don's and Sal's trysts in the hotel, Pete and Ken in the elevator, each thinking the other is congratulating him on the promotion, Sally Draper finding the stewardess's wings in Don's pocket and asking if he'd brought them back for her---these were scenes worthy of Feydeau, Wilde, and Shaw.

Too bad none of them were played for laughs.

But this has always been one of the most maddening things about Mad Men.  It's a comedy with all the jokes removed.

Last Sunday's episode, Out of Town, is a perfect illustration.  Except for the opening, Don Draper's bizarre vision of "Dick Whitman's" birth, the whole episode could have and should have been funny.  It wasn't just that drained of humor the situations I listed were flat and lifeless.  They were also without point or purpose.  More than that, though, they were without sense.  Played as they were, as naturalistic drama, they came across as mere constructions for construction's sake, there simply to give the actors things to do and say.   But a character like Shelly the Stewie only makes sense as trouble for the philandering male lead in a farce.  The point of her being there is to give us reason to laugh at the man who's foolish enough to pursue her.  She doesn't exist as a character except in the act of causing laughter for us and embarrassment for the man.  Any line of dialog she's given that isn't a variation of "Coffee, tea, or me?" reveals her not as a person but as a fantasy, and a not particularly imaginative fantasy at that. Take away her jokes and what you have left is a pretty actress acting her heart out to bring a stick to life. 

Written and played as comedy, the point of Don's outrageous lies about his top secret work for the government and Shelly's falling for it would be that Don was talking himself into trouble, again.  The joke would be on him.  In Out of Town, the "joke" is on Shelly.  She's not a stock company dumb blonde bringing out the worst in Don.  She's a fool made more foolish by her own lust.  When, as she's doing her little striptease at Don's command, she tells him that people often ask her if she's done any modeling, she comes across as pathetically vain and insecure.  This is actually something that Shelly has in common with Don's wife Betty.  Betty spends a lot of time trying to convince herself that she is beautiful and attractive.  It's likely that her idea of foreplay with Don includes some form of a demand that Don reassure her that she is both.  Given that the actress playing Shelly resembles January Jones, who stars as Betty, this could have been a moment when Don realizes that he's in the process of seducing his own wife by proxy and that it's Betty he really wants at the moment.  But the situation won't allow that.  This is farce not drama, and the fire alarm is going to go off.

The farcical basis of the scene prevents any realistic drama from playing itself out.  But without the laughs, there isn't actually any farce.  So what's the point?  Don's a jerk?  I think we know that by now.

Of course the real point is for Don to find out about Sal.  But that could have been taken care of without the scene between Don and Shelley being shown. 

And of course Sal's scene with the bellhop was farcical too and should also have been played for laughs.

There was more in the episode that should have been funny because the situations and the characters derived from farce and satire.  The two new Brits at Sterling Cooper, the totally humorless and unflappable Lane Pryce and the fussy male secretary John Hooker, are comic types, caricatures, but only if played as such.  Played as if they're well-rounded characters, they're just stereotypes, cartoons.  Burt Peterson's temper tantrum after being fired could have been a deleted scene from Office Space.  And even the minor, throwaway scene at London Fog, where the father and son team who run the company don't serve any purpose except as representatives of themselves, could have gotten laughs by doing something Dickens did all the time---find the humor in people just being themselves.

Played straight, as drama, Burt's tantrum looked like bad acting and the scene at London Fog looked like, well, pretty much likefour actors sitting at a table staring at each other while they all try to remember what line comes next.

But this is SOP on Mad Men.  Go back through your memories of the first two seasons and think of all the bizarre, lifeless, seemingly pointless moments and then try to imagine them with jokes.  Suddenly they make sense, don't they?

Well, most of them.  Mad Men also has a habit of being deliberately opaque.  What Jim Wolcott said about Sunday's episode can be said about almost every episode:

...these and other mysteries will go unsolved for several episodes, when more minor mysteries will be introduced, which will also go unsolved.

But Mad Men is one of the most relentlessly and deliberately humorless shows in the history of television drama.  It goes beyond erasing the jokes from situations that have no reason for being except as platforms for telling jokes.  None of the characters on the show has the ability to be funny or witty, which is very strange considering that most of them are supposed to be very smart and creative types working in a field in which humor is a highly prized commodity.  (It's also weird that none of them are the least bit musically inclined either, considering that jingles were the favorite advertising tool of the period.)  I get that Sterling Cooper is meant to be a bit old-fashioned and stodgy.  But I don't get that they've been able to hire only old-fashioned and stodgy employees.  It makes sense that Harry doesn't ever get off a good joke.  He's scared that he's out of his league and he may be right partly because he doesn't have a sense of humor.  But Ken and Paul ought to know how to deliver a good line.  All they ever do, though, is trade "barbs."

Sal often seems to be witty, and he can be droll, acerbic, sarcastic, and ironic, but it's all tone.  Very few of his "jokes" and witty retorts are actually funny.  What they really are are announcements that he's gay.  Everything "funny" he says can be rewritten as this:

"I'm a deeply closeted homosexual with a very different sensibility than everybody else in this room that I am compelled to express from time to time, but if you'll pretend you didn't hear me say that I'll pretend that I didn't say it and we'll all laugh and go on if it's just another case of Sal being Sal."

Now, as it happens, the same sorts of situations and characters that aren't at all funny on Mad Men were routinely played for laughs in the movies and TV shows of the time.  The Apartment, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Sex and the Single Girl, the Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedies, the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movie Day made without Rock Hudson, The Thrill of It All, Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys, quite a few episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show and even Bewitched satirized much of what Mad Men attempts to criticize and expose.

To the extent that Mad Men is about the period in which it's set---and I think that that can be over-emphasized; Mad Men is more about its characters' reactions to that period than about the period itself---its themes are obvious and unoriginal to the point of banality.  Well, what do you know, before gay and women's liberation, before the sexual revolution, back in those days when men were men and women wore girdles, people were unhappy and life was hard for women and gays and black people!  I don't mind this as a given.  But it's annoying when it's pushed as if the writers seem to think these things never occurred to me before.  And, I think, one of the ways they push this is by taking things that ought to be funny and removing every trace of humor.

Mad Men has always been at odds with itself.  Theme and style work against each other, with style having the advantage, because this is TV and the show is a feast for the eyes, and the writers having to insist that we shouldn't be fooled by the pretty clothes and classy decor.  "Nobody enjoyed any of it," is the subtextual refrain.  "Nobody had any fun.  They didn't drink highballs and martinis for a pleasurable buzz and to loosen up and have fun.  They drank to anaesthetize themselves.  They didn't dress that way to look good.  They dressed up to disguise their real selves.  The nice houses, the modern offices, the cool, shadowy bars were stage sets on which they acted out scripts they didn't write for themselves instead of real places where they lived out authentic and meaningful lives.  So don't get the idea that anything you're looking at was a good thing.  And above all, don't treat it as a joke.  Whatever you do, don't laugh."

As I've said before, Mad Men has a very literary sensibility.  Individual episodes are more like short stories than they are like episodes on other, more ordinary TV shows.  But part of this literary sensibility is a habit of writing as a method of literary critique.  I suspect that much of the comedy that isn't treated comically is a response to the comedy in the films and TV shows of the period.

It's as if the writers can't resist telling us over and over again that we were wrong to laugh at Rock and Doris because of what was really going on at the time.

As if those movies weren't actually telling us what was really going on at the time under the cover of "just" being funny.

As if the writers of Mad Men missed the whole joke behind Tony Randall's characters or think we have.

Nevermind that we can't watch those movies now without being aware of the irony in the fact that Randall was straight and it was Rock Hudson who was gay.

 

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Quick post script added Sunday night:  From some things said in the comments here and elsewhere, I have a feeling that I didn't make my point clear.  I'm not criticizing the actors for not making their scenes funny.  I'm criticizing the writers and directors for putting them in comic situations and then giving them nothing funny to say or do and having them play every scene tristezza.  A little scherzando now and then is all I'm asking.  It's not up to actors to make things funny by clowning around.  Comedy needs to be played straight.  Characters in comedies don't know they're in comedies. Comedy is a matter of timing, tone, touch, and pacing, and Mad Men is generally directed at the pace of a high mass during Lent back before Vatican Two.

I'm not saying Mad Men isn't good because it's not funny.  I'm saying I think it could be better if Matthew Weiner and company trusted that their audience would know that these are sad stories even when we're laughing.

Mad Mannionites continue to leave their mark on the Sixties

One hour to the Season 3 premiere of Mad Men.  Mad Mannionites get ready.

Since Freddy Rumsen got fired, Falstaff is the only one at Sterling Cooper who likes his job.  Maybe because he's the only one there who's in on the joke.  Look at that wink.

Claire Helene has too much on her mind as she makes her way to Don's office to give another big sales pitch.

But Don's not there.  He's at a cocktail lounge where Neely has caught his always wandering eye.

Meanwhile, back in Ossining, Betty pours her heart out to Victoria.

Victoria has offers a personal reminiscence by way of an intro to tonight's Season 3 premiere, in which she explains the allure of the show, the allure of the period, and the pink glasses she gave to her Madmanized self.

Stay tuned for more Mad Mannionites.  Coming up next weekend, domestic strife and feminist conscious raising as Linkmeister's avatar meets Simone's.

Mad Mannionites at work, at home, and at play

At Sterling Cooper, Judith takes command of the meeting.

Back in Ossining, Thrupence gets ready for a lazy Saturday at home.

But Keith Ulrich has big plans for the evening.

More below.  Madmenize yourself and tune into the first episode of Season 3 of Mad Men tonight.