Category: 3. Jennifer Baldwin

By Jennifer Baldwin. Who are the rejected? The Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce secretaries, crying in their focus group because they can’t find husbands? Peggy, who feels irrevocably rejected by Pete after finding out that he and Trudy are going to have a child? Pete’s father-in-law, whose Clearasil account is rejected for the more lucrative Ponds Cold Cream account? Allison, Don’s secretary, who has been rejected by Don after their one night stand a couple of episodes ago?

Perhaps “the rejected” is something else, something a little less concrete but nonetheless essential. According to Dr. Faye Miller: “It turns out the hypothesis was rejected.”

And what is that hypothesis? Basically, Don’s hypothesis is that women will use Ponds cold cream on their faces in order to pamper themselves and satisfy their own desires as part of a beauty ritual. But unfortunately for Don, that’s just not how the women in the focus group responded.

“I’d recommend a strategy that links Ponds cold cream to matrimony,” Dr. Faye continues. Turns out Freddy Rumsen was right after all:  most women just want to get married and a cold cream campaign based around that will work.

The conversation between Don and Faye that follows may be the best summation of the culture wars to ever appear in a basic cable one-hour drama:

Don: “Hello 1925. I’m not going to do that. So, what are we going to tell the client?”

Faye: “I can’t change the truth.”

Don: “How do you know that’s the truth? A new idea is something they don’t know yet so of course it’s not going to come up as an option. Put my campaign on TV for a year then hold your group again and maybe it’ll show up.”

Faye: “I tried everything. I said ‘routine.’ I tried ‘ritual.’ All they care about is a husband. You were there, I’ll show you the transcripts.”

Don: “You can’t tell how people are going to behave based on how they have behaved.”

Don’s anger in this scene, of course, stems from his underlying guilt about what he has done to Allison.

But look closely at the conversation going on here: Faye is arguing that the truth is immutable, that these women want the traditional thing, but Don is arguing that people can change — if they are sold such change through advertising, media, and TV. And that, in a nutshell, is the culture war: The struggle to change human patterns of behavior through media and other channels. But the question remains: who is right, Don or Faye?

Other things of note this episode:

I loved that last look of angsty goodness between Peggy and Pete as she goes off with her new bohemian artist friends and Pete shakes hands with all the suits in the office. With news that Trudy is going to have a baby, it seems the Peggy/Pete relationship hopes are at last dashed. I loved that bittersweet look of regret between them at the end of the episode, but I can’t say I’m too broken up. I’ve always been Team Trudy.

Peggy continues her transformation into Don Jr. This time she’s hanging out with a bunch of hipster artists, just as Don did with girlfriend Midge and her friends in Season One, and just like Don, she doesn’t hesitate to deflate their bohemian posturing:

Hipster Artist: “Why would I ever do that [work in advertising]?”

Peggy: “So you could get paid [duh]. To practice your art.”

Peggy likes the hipsters, but she’s not about to throw off her professional ambitions any time soon.

Second episode in a row with no Betty. Can’t say I mind. Betty’s character was destroyed for me in Season Three.

And finally, I have to confess, I have no idea what that little scene with the elderly couple and the peaches was supposed to be about. Don certainly observed them with studied intensity, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out the point of it.

And even though she wasn’t the focus of the episode, here’s a picture of Joan. Because Christina Hendricks rocks:

Posted on August 18th, 2010 at 9:36am.

By Jennifer Baldwin. One of the things I love about Mad Men is the tone of the show. It’s dispassionate, restrained, observant. In its first season, the show had a tendency to get a little condescending towards the era, but thankfully, show runner Matthew Weiner has managed to pull back on this tendency and just let the era “be” — he doesn’t flinch from showing the faults of these characters and their society, but he also doesn’t preach at us about how horrible these people and their world were. He just lets the world of the show play out, and it’s up to us how we judge things. Compared to other shows and movies set in the 1960s, Mad Men is one of the least preachy.

The increasingly detached, observant tone of Mad Men is what helps make it so fascinating, both as drama and as social commentary. This third episode of Season Four is no exception. The characters and their choices are given to us with very little commentary or editorializing from the writers and it’s up to us, the audience, to decide how we feel about them.

At its most basic, Mad Men is a character study. People who’ve tried just watching one episode here or there find they can’t get into the show, but that’s because it’s hard to jump in midstream when you’re watching the lives of fully developed people unfold before your eyes. It takes time to get to know someone, and the characters of Mad Men — the life blood of the show — are as multi-faceted and complex as fictional characters get. It takes time to get to know them.

This week’s episode, in fact, made me feel something I never thought I’d feel for a character I never thought I would like: Greg, Joan’s husband (a character I had previously nicknamed “Doctor McRapist Jerkface”). But somehow, just as they did with Pete over the course of the first couple of seasons, the Mad Men writers have made Dr. Greg sympathetic. When he bandages Joan’s finger after she cuts herself in the kitchen — the way he calms her down, comforts her, takes charge — it was endearing. Suddenly, a character that I couldn’t wait to leave for Vietnam so he could get killed was a character I kinda, sorta, unbelievably cared about. It was a moment that made me realize that Joan married him not just for the stability and because he was a good-looking doctor, but because he has a heart, that she saw something good in him, even though he had committed a despicable act against her (the rape scene from Season Two). It’s the kind of character moment that Mad Men excels at:  a seemingly “bad” character doing a good thing.

Of course, that’s the whole appeal of a character like Don Draper; a character we’re fascinated by and care about, even as he does some pretty bad things. This week’s episode gave us the two sides of Don: the caring, sensitive, wounded Dick Whitman and the swinging, boozy, divorcee businessman Don Draper. When he visits Anna Draper in California and finds out she has terminal cancer (and that she hasn’t been told about it), we witness his heart breaking before our eyes.

But then Don returns to New York, takes recently-left-by-his-wife Lane Pryce under his wing, and the two go out for a night of drinking, excess, and eventually, prostitutes. Don echoes the line from last week — about the conflict between doing what we want versus doing what’s expected of us — and he encourages Lane to do what he wants and not what’s expected of him. Lane sleeps with the prostitute that Don has gotten for him; he’s chosen self over duty. Lane won’t be jetting off to England any time soon to try to repair his marriage.

And so, another thread in the fabric of a stable society is thereby cut. “Don Draper” seems to be winning out over “Dick Whitman” this season. And he’s bringing characters like Lane Pryce with him. It remains to be seen whether these two will find any lasting happiness on the path they have chosen. Welcome to 1965.

One final thought: Don and Lane really should have gone to see The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, one of my favorite films, instead of Godzilla vs. The Thing (or Gamera, or whatever Japanese monster movie that was). At least they didn’t go see It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Posted on August 11th, 2010 at 12:20pm.