Category: 3. Jennifer Baldwin

By Jennifer Baldwin. Mad Men is not what one would call a “plot heavy” show. It’s more like a series of character studies — an exercise in atmosphere and style — and less a wham-bang, action-packed thrill ride. But every few episodes a season, Mad Men lets loose and the stuff really hits the fan. Secrets are revealed! Violence breaks out! Babies are born! Geopolitical events cause everyone to freak out!

Episode 10, “Hand and Knees,” is one of those “plot heavy” episodes. And yet, while everything seemed to go down in this one, nothing really came of it in the end (or at least, nothing yet…).

Lane got whacked with a cane by his stern father, so he’s going back to England. But the ramifications of this are still unclear. Joan, presumably, had Roger’s baby aborted (though there was debate at my viewing party over whether she went through with the procedure or not). But on the surface, Joan seems to have gone back to status quo.

In probably the biggest plot development of the episode, Lee Garner Jr. told Roger that Lucky Strike is moving to a new agency, but again the effects of this shake-up are yet to be felt, since Roger hides the news from the other SCDP partners.

Even Don’s storyline, in the end, amounted to nothing (for now).

Everyone was on their hands and knees — some literally, like Don vomiting in his bathroom or Lane after the cane-thwacking, while others only figuratively, like Roger, pleading with Lee to give SCDP one last chance with Lucky Strike — but everywhere, these characters were falling down, weakened, reduced to the level of servants and criminals. And yet, all of these “hands and knees” moments happened in private — in those secret, almost clandestine moments between intimates that no outsider is privileged to see. I think this calls back to the theme in Episode 7 — that issue of intimacy, of and what it means to know another person — only this time we’re seeing the truly dark side of things, those relationships and aspects of the characters that are too horrible to let escape beyond the confines of an apartment living room or a private booth in a restaurant.

Lane’s cruel humiliation at the hands of his father; Don’s complete breakdown at the thought of being arrested by the feds; Roger’s final failure as a business man with Lee Jr.; Joan’s face-saving lie in the abortion doctor’s office — all of these moments of humiliation are kept secret by the characters involved, none of them willing to let others know the depths of their shame and failure. In fact, when Lane reveals the secret of his relationship with Toni to his father, he’s “rewarded” with violence. By the end, in that last scene with the partners, Lane has learned to hold his tongue and keep his private vulnerabilities to himself.

Even Don is still burdened by secrets, still wearing the mask. He tells Faye the truth about his identity — she’s been granted special intimacy — but Don’s not ready to reveal himself to the world. He was on his hands and knees for most of the episode, but he’s not ready to stay there.

The theme of the episode couldn’t have been more obvious thanks to the music selection over the closing credits: an instrumental version of Lennon and McCartney’s “Do You Want to Know a Secret.” Everyone’s got secrets; everyone’s hoping they won’t get found out. But the meaning doesn’t stop there. A closer look at the lyrics reveals a more sinister tone:

Listen. Do you want to know a secret?
I promise not to tell.

There’s a slyness to this lyric, an implication that secrets will be told, it’s only a matter of time. The promise not to tell is empty. Who will be betrayed?

Closer. Let me whisper in your ear.
Say the words you long to hear.

This suggests that the words the characters long to hear are not the words they need to hear. Don hears Faye say everything will be alright, he gets reassurances from Pete that everything’s been taken care of at the Department of Defense, but are these just empty words? Can the secret go away this easily?

The episode ends with a whimper and not a bang; most secrets stay hidden. But I have a feeling these secrets won’t last more than a week or two. Nobody knows much for now, but I get the feeling things are about to explode, much like the crowds at Shea Stadium when the Beatles took the stage. After all, there are only three episodes left.

Posted on September 30th, 2010 at 6:10pm.

By Jennifer Baldwin. I’ve always felt we do our resolutions at the wrong time of the year. New Year’s Day, in the midst of bleak winter, feels too dark, too endless for making resolutions and changing our lives. In winter, we’re just trying to survive. A change in lifestyle, a plan for improvement is too much to ask when we’re barely hanging on.

But Summer – ah, summer! Summer is the time for resolutions. It’s the time for rebirth, for changing our lives. It’s the time to finally start writing that novel, the time to finally lose those last ten pounds, the time to be reborn. It’s too bountiful and warm to be anything but a rebirth. The “Summer Man” is the man who lives fully, who faces the world with confidence and verve, who changes his life for the better because he’s sick of the dark, pallid face of life’s winter.

Last week I identified with Peggy, but this week I’m with Don. It’s a writer thing. Whenever we scribes feel down or adrift, whenever life is careening out of control, we turn to the one thing that always feels right:  we write. Don’s got his notebook open, his thoughts spilling out in an epic free-write of soul-baring confessionals and existential poetry. It is through this act of writing that Don regains control of his life. It’s not just a diary or a journal for writing, “Here’s what I did today …” – it’s a way to say, “Here’s what I thought today, here’s what I fear today, here’s what I want today, and everyday, and always.” It’s a way that we writers give our lives meaning. By journaling, by solidifying our thoughts and feelings in written words, we can find a path out of the darkness. In “The Summer Man,” it seems Don is beginning to find his way out of that darkness.

He swims, he cuts back on the drinking, he gets his mojo back with the ladies. My prediction from a few weeks ago came true (sorta): Don and Faye hooked up (sorta). They had a date, the romantic sparks were flying, but unfortunately for my prognostications, they didn’t actually sleep together because Mad Men – even when it’s predictable – is never predictable. It was Don who put the kibosh on having sex with Faye. Color me surprised, but this is the new Don, the journal writing Don, the summer man Don. The Don who wants to be there for his youngest son’s birthday party. Little baby Gene shares a lot in common with Don. They were both conceived “in desperation,” their homes broken by infidelity and upheaval. But for much of last season and the beginning of this season, it seemed like Gene was more Betty’s child than Don’s. He seemed an afterthought to Don.

Things seem to change with this episode, though. Now Don yearns for his son. He seems ready to be there for baby Gene in a way that his own father was not for him. He risks the wrath of Betty to be there at the birthday party. And to Betty’s credit, she’s perfectly civil.

It’s interesting that this episode is called “The Summer Man,” when so much time is spent with the ladies of Mad Men. I could write a billion things about modern feminism and the behavior of both Joan and Peggy in reaction to Joey The Freelancer’s disgusting bullying. Suffice to say, this episode just goes to show how subtle, even-handed, and ultimately un-PC Mad Men really is when it comes to cultural politics. Peggy is the “new woman,” a trailblazer for modern feminism (even if she doesn’t know it yet). She asserts herself like a man, fires Joey, and in the biting words of Joan, confirms to the men in the office that she’s “a humorless bitch.” I’ll admit it; I fist-pumped when Peggy fired Joey. He was an ass.

But Joan is older than Peggy, and her approach is not that of the new feminism. Joan’s approach is the “old school” method of using feminine wiles to get ahead in a man’s world. Joan would have gotten the same result (no more Joey), but she would have done it in the subtler way of the female – using persuasion, discretion, and yeah, okay, a little bit of sex appeal. The show doesn’t say one approach is better than the other, but give it credit for taking the wind out of Peggy’s sails and showing that women were being assertive and getting what they wanted (through uniquely feminine means) long before the “humorless bitch” brigade of modern radical feminism came on the scene. Continue reading Mad Men Season Four: Episode 8, “The Summer Man,” and Episode 9, “The Beautiful Girls”

By Jennifer Baldwin. “Somebody very important to me died … the only person in the world who really knew me.” — Don Draper

This is it. The best episode of the season. Perhaps the best episode in two seasons. Certainly the best hour of television I’ve seen in awhile. Everybody is talking about this week’s episode of Mad Men and throwing superlatives at it like so much confetti at an office New Year’s party, and who am I to disagree? It was brilliant. It was the greatest. All the praise, all the accolades, the Emmy wins, everything: if you need a reason to explain the Mad Men phenomenon, this episode is it.

Which is funny, because I was all prepared to suffer for forty-two minutes when I realized this episode was focusing on a character I’ve never really grooved to: Peggy Olson. I know that she’s a fan favorite, but her career woman ambitions, her sexual escapades, her seeming rejection of religion, her experimentation with drugs, her bohemian friends – it always struck me as nothing more than immature adolescent rebellion. And worst of all, the show seems to hold her up at times as the height of enlightenment, putting the sexist, repressed men in their places, and showing the stodgy world of middle class morality and religion that she’s not gonna play by their rules and don’t you try and make her! Woo hoo, feminism! Ugh. Peggy has a tendency to be smug, but the writers expect us to be a chorus of “You go girl!” in her favor. No thanks.

But then what does Matt Weiner do? What does this wizard of complex characterizations and masterful storytelling achieve in this week’s episode of Mad Men? I’ll tell you what: Peggy Olson is my new favorite character. I realized with mixes of horror and heartbreak and strange consolation that I am, in so many ways, Peggy Olson. Her crises and confusions this episode are mine as well at this moment in my life. Suddenly, I knew her. I knew Peggy Olson and I understood.

This is an episode about knowing, about what it means to really know someone. It’s about whether people are capable of knowing each other, deep down inside. It’s about what it means to truly understand someone, about knowing the secret yearnings and the secret pains and the secret flaws. It’s about how the people who should know us – our family, our significant others, our friends – don’t always really know us at all.

This episode hit close to home for me. I think this idea of “knowing” and being “known” is something that hits close to home for a lot of us – for anybody who has ever felt like the proverbial square peg. I think that’s why the episode is garnering such praise. Mad Men can always be counted on to deliver sharp, witty writing and strong, multi-layered themes. But this episode struck a nerve because it was about something that so many of us struggle with and worry about in our own lives: Do the people in my life, the people close to me, do they really know me? Who can I open myself up to, who will get me on a deep-down level? Is there anyone who can really know me? These are troubling questions and they’re questions that both Don and Peggy face in this episode.

And the beauty of it is, the strange, sad cosmic beauty, is that Peggy and Don answer those questions for each other, in the middle of the night, working late at the office. They don’t have to be alone — they know each other.

When Don tells Peggy that recently deceased Anna was “the only person who really knew me,” Peggy’s response is the response we all hope to hear someday: “That’s not true.” Peggy knows Don, even if she doesn’t know all the secrets and the history that Anna knew about him. What Peggy knows are the things that even a friend or a wife or a relative might not know; she knows a little bit of Don’s soul.

The suitcase is the perfect metaphor: The hard shell that no one can crack, but what’s inside? We can drop it off a building, we can have an elephant stomp it, but the casing around our inner selves won’t bust. We want someone to bust it open, to see inside us and know us, but we’re like a Samsonite – our outer shells are tough.

The obvious parallel being set up at the beginning is that Don and Peggy are like Clay and Liston. Like two pugilists trading punches, Don and Peggy go at each other over the Samsonite account and Don’s ruthless work demands. They start off fighting just like Clay and Liston, but the difference is that in the case of Don and Peggy, they both end up knocked out.

I love when Mad Men gets subjective and we enter the memory/dreamspace inside Don’s head (or is it just a drunken stupor? Does it matter?). That last ethereal vision of Anna that Don sees– a spirit or a dream or a desperate wish – is one of the most haunting images from the show. It transcends the narrative and the characters and becomes a piece of pure cinema:  movement and light, human beauty in motion, glimpsed for one sustained moment before fading into nothing. And she’s holding a suitcase.

Other notes from the episode:

• I love that Joan gave Don “exactly what he needed,” by assigning Miss Blankenship as his secretary. Also: Miss Blankenship, Queen of Perversions!

• Speaking of which, Roger’s recording of his memoirs is just about the funniest thing this show has ever done. From Bert Cooper’s testicle removal, to the Blankenship revelations, to the secret of Dr. Lyle Evans, I was screaming with laughter. John Slattery’s delivery in the recording is pitch-perfect.

• Cassius Clay was – as the show mentions – by this time now calling himself Mohammad Ali. I’m always fascinated by the way Don seems to be on the wrong side of history when it comes to these famous personages. First he was a Nixon man in the 1960 election, suspicious of Kennedy’s pedigree and wealth. Now he’s all in for Liston at the fight, calling Ali/Clay out as an arrogant loudmouth who hasn’t proven himself. And he doesn’t like Joe Namath! As much as Don is a creative genius in advertising, he’s paradoxically suspicious of “The New” when it comes to stuff like politics and pop culture.

• Also interesting: Don bet on Liston, Roger bet on Clay. Hmm…

• I appreciated Peggy’s “Queen for a Day” paper crown for her birthday.

• Also: Pete said, “Pray tell.” I love Pete.

Finally, the closing credits song? “Bleecker Street” by Simon and Garfunkel.

Posted on September 9th, 2010 at 9:45am.

By Jennifer Baldwin. After two blessed Betty-free weeks, the former Mrs. Draper returns in this week’s episode. And wouldn’t you know it, this episode gave us Betty at her worst (the vindictive, Sally-smacking, “I’ll cut your fingers off!” mother from hell) and at her most sympathetic (Betty in the therapist’s office).

I’ve always been sympathetic to Betty when she’s in these therapy scenes. In the first season, her vulnerability with the (duplicitous) psychiatrist was heartbreaking; it was Betty at her most likable and human. Whenever she gets talking on the therapist’s couch, Betty often reveals more about herself than she knows — there’s a very wounded and messed up human being in there beneath the cold, aloof, shrewish surface. This is Betty at her most honest (even if she’s unaware of the honesty bleeding through her pretense) and as a result, it’s hard to hate her in these scenes. Perhaps that’s why I was so anti-Betty last season — we were only given the surface pretense and the outward coldness and very little of the inner, human Betty.

Well, we get human Betty again this week — after a long absence. In a meeting with a child psychiatrist (for Sally), Betty unknowingly starts having a therapy session with the shrink herself. This makes sense, of course, since Betty has been much more of a “child” than the other adult characters on the show (recall her twisted, sometimes tender, but ultimately creepy relationship with young Glenn Bishop). Betty doesn’t really reveal much outwardly, but the little pauses, the half sentences, the tone of her voice and her demeanor all show just how much pain Betty is in — and how much she’s trying to suppress and disguise it. Eeesh. Betty is so screwed up.

However, Betty does make a good point, re: Don. Why did Don plan a date when he knew he’d have the kids? Of course, Don reveals later to Faye in the break room that he doesn’t see his kids enough and he doesn’t know what to do with them when he does. He feels relief when he brings them back to Betty – but then afterward, he misses them. Eeesh. Don is so screwed up.

This episode had weird shifts in tone, from strange and disturbing (the Betty/Sally storyline) to comical and bouncy (all the stuff with Don and Miss Blankenship and the caper involving a rival agency and the Honda account). An uneven episode, and probably the season’s weakest overall (also: the first episode this season to not be written or co-written by Matthew Weiner).

Which is not to say it doesn’t have some spectacular moments. The trick Don and Co. pull on rival agency CGC is pure delight — accompanied by the kind of swinging mid-60s music that makes it all seem like a Tony Curtis comedy. And everything involving Roger’s WWII service and his continued animosity toward the Japanese is precisely the thing that makes historical drama fascinating. It’s a peek inside the mind of a WWII vet, twenty years after the war. It’s hard for us to imagine now — that lingering hostility towards our WWII enemies — but Roger’s words and actions show how hard it was for some men to forget. Plus it gives us another perfect scene between Roger and Joan. Forget Peggy and Pete, and Don and Betty — Roger and Joan are my all-time favorite pairing.

Other points and observations:

On the weekly Pete front, I must say, Pete’s vocabulary always amuses. Vincent Kartheiser rolls out lines like “A Deerfield chum of mine” as if he’s been saying it his whole life. Also: “Christ on a cracker!” Seriously, where does he get this stuff?! And Pete speaks for many of us when he asks: “Who the hell is Dr. Lyle Evans?” (Is the line a red herring?).

I might be in the minority opinion, but I find the never-ending vaudeville comedy routine between Don and his new secretary, Miss Blankenship, to be a hoot. Yes, it’s rather low comedy, but it’s added a bit of levity to a show that sometimes takes itself too seriously.

Also good for some comedy gold: The Japanese, their translator, and one Joan Holloway Harris.

Honda Honcho (in Japanese, while staring at Joan’s breasts): “How does she not fall over?”
Joan (to the translator, noticing the Japanese staring eyes): “They’re not very subtle are they?”
Translator: “No.”

Bethany — who looks like Virginia Mayo — makes a reappearance this week. Also, who knew Benihana was around in the 60s? Apparently I need to bone up on my cultural knowledge!

Continuing Cultural Reference Watch: “A Margaret Dumont-sized disaster” (note that she died just about the time this episode took place); Man from U.N.C.L.E.; and of course, the title of the episode: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

It’s interesting how the Japanese this season are playing the role the British played last season. Culture clash and the growing influence of Asian culture on American culture: business and entertainment, Honda and Godzilla.

Also of note: I was indeed right — Dr. Faye was wearing a wedding ring. But … she’s not married! It’s basically a “keep away” sign for all the wolves. Of course, now that Don knows the ring is a fake, how long before he and Faye are “doing it,” as Sally would say? I predict it happens in two weeks.

Finally, the closing credits song was “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” as sung by Doris Day. “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” of course, is from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song, made into a film in 1961, and starring James Shigeta and Miyoshi Umeki. Both Japanese.

Posted on August 26th, 2010 at 10:05am.