AHHHH! I’m horribly behind schedule! It’s Sunday morning, and I still have two shows to watch (Revenge and Awake – I’m behind on my single title shows, apparently), and I still have to do my review. So, here’s the deal. I’m going to talk about my favorite show of the week, give grades for everything I watched, and that’s about it. Cool? Cool, cool, cool.
My opinions after the jump.
Mad Men
A few years ago, a book came out called Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. Following a trend these days in literature, it consisted of a series of stories, disparate in nature, all connected by a singular day, in this case, the day when Philippe Petit walked the tightrope between the Twin Towers. I bring this book up because as I was watching this week’s episode of Mad Men, “Far Away Places.” I was reminded of the book. Both of are of a similar nostalgic era; both use the same structure, and both have a sense of quiet melancholy that pervades each story.
In fact, the whole of this episode pays homage to literature in ways that most other TV shows wouldn’t dare. While watching, there are elements of not only McCann, but Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Christopher Isherwood, and Richard Yates. There are also other media thrown in too. The image of Don alone at the Howard Johnson’s is something straight out of Edward Hopper, and the drug sequence of Sterling reminded me uncannily of Buffy‘s excellent dream episode, “Restless.” All of this combines to make this episode so much more than slot in a television season. It’s visual art; it’s television at its best.
At its core, this episode was about each character, Don, Peggy, and Roger, coming to a revelation about themselves. For one day, each becomes “alone in the truth” as the Timothy Leary figure put it. Peggy realizes that she needs people around her, that she can’t be a lone wolf in the way that she thinks Don is. Roger becomes aware that it is better for both him and Jane to end their marriage, rather than continuing on as the married martyr which he has been for the past several episodes. And Don begins to understand that he needs to separate his life from his work, his marriage from his job. It’s something that he’s struggled with since the beginning of the show, but it’s never been so present. He, like Peggy and Roger, reaches a point in the road where he has to make a decision. And watching all three characters come to this crossroads is wonderful to watch.
The episode starts with Peggy getting ready for work. She’s slightly frantic, looking for a candy box once given to her by Don, and, distracted, she alienates her boyfriend. She then goes to work, finds her charm (“Thank God, I couldn’t take one more omen of doom“), and goes into the Heinz pitch without Don by her side. Here, things fail. The Heinz guy doesn’t like the pitch, and instead of listening and pleasing the customer, Peggy decides to tell it like it is. In other words, she decides to act like Don, who in the past, has gotten away with angrily telling the customer what they really want. However, hampered by her sex and the era’s perception of that sex, she’s taken as a petulant girl, not a knowledgeable business person. Heinz asks to take her off the campaign, and she’s left with the rest of the afternoon free, where she goes to the movies and, strangely enough, gives a stranger a hand job. At first I was a little baffled by the inclusion of this, but I think it’s a way for Peggy to reclaim a little bit of power, the power that she feels she lost during the Heinz pitch. At the very least, it’s a chance for her to escape her own life, to be someone else for a little while, and she’s takes that chance before returning to the office where she is jolted back reality by Ginsberg’s tale of his own childhood. Here, in a scene that seems straight out of Kurt Vonnegut, Ginsberg claims he is from Mars, but really the truth is much more unbelievable than fiction: He was born in a concentration camp and brought to New York as a young child. Sobered by this revelation, Peggy goes home and calls her boyfriend. It seems that she has given up trying to be someone else, trying to be Don, trying to be the kind of woman she really is not. All that attempt has done is left her lonely and dirty; now she just needs someone to be with her. The last shot of her sitting in the dark on the phone is filled with sadness. This is what the day has left her. Like Ginsberg said of himself, she’s a martian and she has yet to find anybody quite like her.
Cut back to the beginning of the day. At first, I’ll admit, I didn’t realize that we were traveling back in time for Roger’s story. I thought it was the next day, but that didn’t detract from the story that followed. Roger, rejected by Don over a vacation trip to Plattsburg, goes to a dinner party with Jane’s friends where both he and Jane partake in LCD. (Of Roger’s trip, I think an entire article could be written, parsing each vision, each hallucination. I don’t want to do that, but I will say that the use of sound was brilliant, from the orchestra in the vodka bottle to Roger’s disembodied voice talking over the scenes to the sound of the cigarette shrinking.) While on the drug, Roger and Jane finally open up to each other. Stripped of their inhibitions, they both realize that they have just been waiting for the other person to admit that their marriage is over, that they would be happier apart, that they are only making each other miserable. Together, they lie on the floor and come to the truth and seem to be happy about it. They share one final moment of unity. Then in the morning,
And then we’re back the beginning, Don deciding to pull Megan out of the Heinz pitch so that they can go on vacation. It starts out with good intentions, friendly conversation in the car, but soon, as they arrive at the Howard Johnsons, things go pear-shaped. Everything Don and Megan say to each other is misinterpreted. Megan not liking sherbet must mean that she’s trying to embarrass Don. Don having an idea while at the diner must mean that he can do work, but Megan can’t. This leads Megan to get angry, and Don to storm off, driving away without his wife. Quickly he decides to head back, but by the time he returns, Megan is gone. In the ensuing hours, Don waits for her, wondering where she is, worrying that something awful has happened. He calls everyone he knows, but he can’t find her. Finally, he drives back to New York, only to find Megan already in their apartment. Outraged that she didn’t call to tell him that she’s okay, Don chases Megan around the apartment (I hated Don a little for this); then they collapse on the floor, both defeated and broken. As Megan says, every time they fight, it breaks things a little bit more. In stark contrast to Roger and Jane, Megan and Don can’t say what they are feeling, and so they are left with things unspoken, their melancholy unresolved. The next day, they go into work, and life goes on. It’s a new day, for real this time, to go through the fight all over again.
The brilliance of this episode lies in the subtlety. All three stories are lined with tiny little moments that add up to a beautiful whole. Peggy falling asleep on Don’s couch, the thing we have seen Don do episode after episode; Ginsberg telling his story, all shot in reflection in the window so that we never see his actual face; Roger staring in the mirror, seeing Don’s reflection instead of the doctor’s; the shot of Don using the pay phone, orange HoJo roof in the background, which we saw earlier in the episode, but which, the second time, has very different meaning; the image of Don and Megan lying on the ground, mirroring the same image of Jane and Roger. For all these moments, the show is able to find beauty in sadness, significance in normality. And it all flows together to create one magnificent piece of art.
As the episode goes on, the pacing becomes faster, the sense of doom stronger, the desperation more pronounced. It finally culminates with Don going into work the next day, to be given a lecture by Burt Cooper, the voice of reason, the linking thread in each story (for Peggy, he’s there to wonder why she’s going to the movies; for Roger, he’s on the dollar bill as a founding father figure). Burt tells Don that he needs to wake up, he needs to come back to himself and engage in the world again. He can’t be on a love vacation any longer. And so Don sits down on the table, in an exquisite shot with back to the audience, and watches the world that he now must jump back into.
As the viewer, we wonder if he can.
Grade: A
Up Next: Best of the Rest (well, actually, all the rest)
Mary the TV Maven 