“If you don’t like what they’re saying about you, change the conversation.”
By Jennifer Baldwin. When you’re blowing smoke, you’re lying, B.S.-ing, kissing ass. We blow smoke all the time – at work, in our relationships, in our families. In advertising, you’ve got to blow smoke in people’s eyes in order to get them to buy the product. In the business world, when it comes to your clients, you almost have to blow a little smoke to keep everybody happy. Blowing smoke implies a certain kind of magic, like a magician’s trick, where everyone knows they’re being lied to, but they let it go because they’re enjoying the spell. The problem is, you can’t blow too much smoke, or everybody wises up and the spell is broken.
You have to blow a little smoke when you’re a kid too. In this episode, Sally’s blowing smoke, both at her mother and at her psychiatrist, Dr. Edna. She’s found a way to get them off her back, to make them think she’s a good little girl again. I’m still not sure if Sally is sincere with Dr. Edna, or if she’s just learned how to play the game, but she’s definitely trying to put smoke in her mother’s eyes.
Midge, our favorite beatnik chick, has returned – and she’s blowing smoke as well. Midge just “happens” to run into Don at his office building and invites him over to her place to meet her husband and “maybe” buy a painting. Her story works for a little while; she gets Don to her apartment. But after her heroin-addicted husband spills the beans, Don realizes he’s been had. Midge and her husband are just a couple of junkies who need money to get high. He helps Midge out, but not after realizing he’s got smoke in his eyes.
Of course, Don’s trying to blow some smoke too. With SCDP falling down around him, he’s got to schmooze and placate and woo any client he can in order to keep his agency afloat. But Don’s no account man; he’s creative. He doesn’t understand the “business man” approach to things, the financial side that guys like Lane have hardwired into their bespeckled DNA. He goes after Heinz Beans, Vinegars, and Sauces way too hard; he’s got the whiff of desperation about him. His kind of magic doesn’t work in a restaurant business meeting. He’s creative, he doesn’t know how to handle accounts. Don’s blowing too much smoke at potential clients and where there’s smoke, so the client thinks, there’s fire.
Dr. Atherton’s meeting with Phillip Morris might seem like the solution, until, once again, Don realizes (much like in the situation with Midge) he’s been snookered. The Phillip Morris people were just blowing smoke, just using SCDP as a way to get a better deal with another agency.
Atherton says that SCDP — and Don specifically — are best at working with a cigarette company. “You’re a certain kind of girl and tobacco is your ideal boyfriend.” This is what people have been saying about Don and his agency. SCDP has been all about “blowing smoke” – blowing smoke at the public for years to get them to buy Lucky Strike cigarettes. Sterling, Cooper, and the rest of them have been “addicted” to the smoke of cigarette money for too long.
But Don’s sick of desperately kissing ass with potential clients like the guy from Heinz; he’s sick of letting other companies like Phillip Morris B.S. him. He’s sick of being that “certain kind of girl” who’s made for tobacco. He’s done with smoke. His new strategy is to be the agency that sees clearly, that shoots straight, that “stands for something.” It’s a way of “changing the conversation,” as Peggy suggests. He’s rebranding the agency. His New York Times full-page ad is a gamble, a creative risk. It’s that perfect kind of advertising B.S. that doesn’t feel like B.S. because it has the whiff — not of desperation — but of confession, of truth.
Not that Don’s suddenly turned crusader against the health ills of cigarette smoking. But he has turned against the “addiction” of being hitched to a tobacco company. It’s no coincidence that he meditates on Midge’s “Number Four” painting before penning his open letter to the public. Midge can’t stop using heroin as Don suggests; it’s got too strong a hold. Don realizes that fear has got too strong a hold on his company – fear that they’re a cigarette agency that might not land another cigarette account.
But as Don realizes, they’re afraid because they’re addicted to the security and the money that a cigarette company can bring. The honesty behind the ad, the thing that makes it so powerful and so dangerous, is that it’s Don’s confession that he’s not going to play scared anymore.
Of course, it’s a stunt, as Peggy slyly, jokingly points out. But it has the potential to work because it’s too reckless and fearless to feel like a “stunt.” It’s too foolhardy to seem like a trick or a lie. It’s just another ad, but instead of blowing smoke in people’s eyes, it’s blowing the smoke away. Don is the master of reinvention. SCDP doesn’t have to change their name or start over. They just have to change the conversation.
Some other quick thoughts:
• Betty needs so much help! Poor woman. She has major trust issues (who can blame her?) and it’s in an episode like this, even as she’s being a witch to Sally, that I feel sympathy for her. I hope Dr. Edna can help her. I actually think Betty could be a pretty cool chick and a good mom if she could just work through all her myriad of issues.
• Don showed quite the charitable heart this episode, what with giving Midge all the money in his wallet and paying Pete’s share of the money to keep the company afloat.
• Bert Cooper’s departure cracked me up: “Get my shoes!” Then, shoes in hand, he bids farewell to the baffled underlings.
• Jared Harris’s delivery of that line about making sure fired employees don’t steal any staplers or tape dispensers – “They do disappear” – was perfect. I love his performance on this show.
• Also, in Lane Pryce news, apparently a swift whack of Father’s cane works wonders for reuniting a man with his wife and son. Farewell to the Playboy Bunny, it seems.
• And finally, Mad Men continues its streak of showing hippies and counter-culturals in a bad light. First season, it was Midge’s pretentious beatnik loser friends getting put in their place by Don. Last season, it was the hitchhiking draft dodger who clunked Don over the head and robbed him. This season, it’s Midge and her playwright hubby as con artist junkies who guilt Don into giving them money. Maybe that’s why Joyce and Abe and the rest of Peggy’s BoHo friends feel so false as characters – they’re not con artists or drugged-out junkie losers!
This week’s Closing Credits Song: “Trust in Me” by the divine Etta James
Only one more episode left, and of course, the Mad Men promos manage to reveal nothing whatsoever!
Posted on October 15th, 2010 at 9:16pm.