"I went to a place to eat. It said 'breakfast at any time.' So I ordered french toast during the Renaissance". --Steven Wright ... If you are a devotee of time travel, check out this song...

Friday, September 7, 2007

Mad Men 8: Weed, Twist, Hobo, Excellent

AMC's Mad Men was firing on all cylinders tonight, in a powerful Episode 8 which furthered and deepened the story of at least three sets of characters:

Peggy and Pete start off with a morning quickie in the office. Pete of course feels a little guilty about this - he has a quintessential late 1950s mix of starched morality and male entitlement - and later disapproves of Peggy dancing the Twist. Peggy is not happy about that, but just about everything else is going her way, including even getting a little patronizing admiration from Don and the guys about her excellent ad idea for the lipstick campaign - which Don brilliantly maneuvers the client into loving.

Don gets a $2500 bonus - a lot of money, obviously, in those days, in which a brand new book sells for a couple of bucks. He wants to use it to take Midge to Paris, gets stoned on weed with Midge and the beatniks instead, and in the process we see one of the best sequences in the entire series so far: Don as a boy in the 1930s, his family getting a visit from a sage hobo played by Paul Schultze (heroic death as Ryan Chappelle on 24, lasagna Father Phil on The Sopranos), and Don seeing what a mean-spirited man his father is.... Meanwhile, back in 1960, I don't think Midge and Don have much of a future.

And Salvatore (well played by Bryan Batt) finally gets a little more screen time, in a sensitive, strong scene in which he turns down an opportunity for a tryst with man. This scene, I thought, had Salvatore acting right in key for the temper of the times.

But other 1960s elements were a tiny bit forced - like "the medium is the message" line in Episode 6. True, the Twist was around then, but would the ad crowd really have been dancing it in such numbers? The Cha-cha, absolutely, the Twist ... I don't know...

And there's something slightly, temporally off in Don and Midge and company getting stoned. First, some of Midge's friends look more like hippies than beatniks - but hippies were at least five years in the future. And I'm not convinced that Don would have smoked weed - tobacco and weed were and are, after all, two very different things.

But the stoned scene did give us a chance to see more of Don's boyhood family, and I'll just mention one other good thing that struck me about that: did the hobo look a little like Don's younger brother, or was that just my imagination?...

In subsequent episodes: I'd like to learn about Harry Crane - who looks just like Isaac Asimov did back then!



20-minute interview with Rich Sommer (Harry Crane) at Light On Light Through

See also reviews of other episodes: Mad Men Debuts on AMC: Cigarettes and Nixon Coming ... Mad Men 2: Smoke and Television ... Mad Men 3: Hot 1960 Kiss ... Mad Men 4 and 5: Double Mad Men ... Mad Men 6: The Medium Is the Message! ... Mad Men 7: Revenge of the Mollusk ... Mad Man 9: Betty Grace Kelly ... Mad men 10: Life, Death, and Politics ... Mad Men 11: Heat! ... Mad Men 12: Admirable Don ... Mad Men 13: Double-Endings, Lascaux, and Holes









6-minute podcast review of Mad Men






The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

11 comments:

Capcom said...

You're right, he does look like Asimov! Good comments on the show, and I found just about the same things to be curious about it as you mentioned.

The morning quicky really gave me the creeps. I am confused as to what the heart of Peggy's character is supposed to be. At first we are shown that she thinks that the people and hijinks in the office are strange. I took that to mean strange morally. I guess that I was wrong, as Peggy seems to have been as eager to jump right onto the sexual bandwagon as everyone else in the office.

The excitement over The Twist playing confused me as well. I could see them screaming about Fabian or someone like that maybe, but the Twist?

The Beatnik era was in a kind of transition period at that time, so I can pretty much accept Midge and her friends as they are. Between the black tights and turtles neck bongo era, and the hippie grubby era, there was a bohemian trend that was inspired by European influences and also I think by a Frida Kahlo-ish Mexican peasant style.

I thought that Salvatore's exit from table after the proposition was the epitome of class. It seems (so far) as if personal dignity is very important to his character.

You're right, Don's boyhood story is getting very interesting. I did not understand much of the Christianity comments by his parents, they seemed a bit contradictory and downright ridiculous overall.

It looks as if we are going to have a Mad Men bookclub, the way Lost fans have the Lost bookclub. So far we have Exodus, The Best Of Everything, and Atlas Shrugged. :-)

I really enjoy your recaps!

Paul Levinson said...

Hey, thanks, glad you're enjoying Infinite Regress!

I have a picture of Asimov on the back of a first edition of The Naked Sun - published in 1955 - in which he looks even more like Harry! I'm going to scan it in, and post here next week.

I think the key to understanding Peggy is that she has the soul of a post-1960s woman, still in the shell of a 1950s woman - so she's right on the cusp, and often behaves in ways that surprise us...
(unlike Joan, who is delightfully and comfortably 1960)...

Capcom said...

You're right about standing on the hairy edge of the changing times. But if a character/person really believed in a certain morality, and went along with the crowd -- as it was said back then, because it was the "in" thing to do -- then they risk losing their self esteem, honor, etc, due to not being true to themselves. There were a lot of people doing that back then as well, just because they felt that they had to sometimes. Can't wait to see how they flesh out Peggy's actual beliefs and intentions, and whether or not she is just trying to be Joan Jr.

The new age of sexuality wasn't all that great for women in the 60s. If a girl/woman really wanted to retain a more narrow path idealogically, she was often ostracized for doing so, which is illustrated in how they make fun of how prim Peggy seems. And what did "liberation" gain us? When I retired from "the old boys club" last year, my female coworkers and I were still doing more work than our male coworkers and only making 2/3 of their salary. Oh well. :-)

sue'sblogs said...

The twist was introduced in 1960, when I was in kindergarten. Chubby Checker's "Let's do the Twist" was the song it was danced to. And EVERYBODY danced to it. In 1961, he reprised it with "Let's Twist Again (Like we Did Last Summer)". We had twist parties in kindergarten and first grade. By 1963, it was actually pretty much over. So it is an anachronism on the tv show. This business about a black white radio divide is overhyped; everyone, black and white, was listening to people like Chubby Checker.

LA said...

I loved the exploration of Sal's sexuality. My dad was a first generation Italian, born in 1921 and so probably about Sal's age in 1960. Dad's family was the typical machismo patriarcy. There's zero doubt in my mind that my dad or any one of his brothers would have put any homosexual feelings aside, married a woman, and silently suffered as it appears Sal has chosen to do (w/Lois on switchboard?).

As it is, one of my first cousins is a gay man, an artist, and was out in his 20s in the 1970s. Needless to say, it didn't sit well in the family; my grandfather used to mock him mercilessly, and his brothers tried to "beat the gay out of him." He's been estranged from the family for many, many years.

I loved Don's back story and the "hobo code." The final shot of the words "Donald Draper" on the door... the 1960s version of marking the man... "a dishonest man lives here."

Capcom said...

Wow, interesting point about the door marker LA. I totally missed that and wondered what it was supposed to mean.

Anonymous said...

Just wanted to quickly say I enjoy reading your blog! I read it every week.

And I'm glad to know there's someone else out there who hasn't forgotten about Harry. It seems every week his lines keep getting shorter and shorter.. And if I may say so, I think the guy's pretty handsome!


Anyway keep up the great recaps!
-L

Anonymous said...

Just keeps getting better every week. I was amazed at the scene with Miles Davis/Gil Evans playing in the "beat house," even 50 years later or so it sounded groundbreaking, making 1960 feel like the edge instead of nostalgia. Only a little disappointed with the obvious hippie vs corporate debate that followed.

Paul Levinson said...

Good points Susan, la, capcom, anon, and mike...

I think 1960 was indeed on the edge ... you see this in Scorsese's No Direction Home, his superb Dylan movie...

Glad to see you all in Infinite Regress...

Anonymous said...

oh yes they all would have been running to the dance floor to do the Twist in 1960.

Sorry to say I wasn't in kindergarten, but I can assure you there was plenty of twistin goin on that year. And Ad Men were the hippest of all at the time.

Paul Levinson said...

Well, Jake, let's see ... The Twist made #1 on Billboard on September 19, 1960. The season on Mad Men is clearly the summer (Nixon & Kennedy have the nomination, Don and Betty are talking going on vacation). The Twist, before it really broke big and permeated most of the culture, was a teenage phenomenon (I was 13 in 1960, and remember that pretty clearly).

So, while it is certainly technically possible that The Twist could have been played in that club, and our characters all jumped up to dance to it, I think it is unlikely.

Like "the medium is the message" and the IBM selectric, which also technically existed in 1960, The Twist in Mad Men in that scene is an example of taking something that existed in that year, not that well known in the general culture, and putting it into the Mad Men story since the year matches.

Doesn't spoil my enjoyment of the show - it's a great series - but it is a slight distortion of cultural history.

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