Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

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George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.

Monday, May 13, 2013

Mad Men 6.7: Merger and Margarine

It occurred to me, watching the superb Mad Men 6.7 tonight - right after Mr. Selfridge on Masterpiece Theater - that for people who weren't cognizant in the 1960s, watching Mad Men must be not much different than watching Mr. Selfridge, which takes place right before World War I. Two brilliant period pieces, two history shows, both about selling.

I did live through the 1960s, and that means I see the show through the very different lens of having been right there, been in that world, which makes the show's connection to real life history-changing events all the more potentially powerful, but I'll get to that in a minute or two.

The main themes in the office tonight were merger and margarine. The merger of the SCDP and CGC advertising firms means that some people will be let go - the new merged firm can't accommodate and won't need everyone. Burt Peterson, another perennial loser (in a different way than Pete), is unsurprisingly the first to go. No loss.

The product du jour - the first campaign - that the new combine tackles is Fleischmann's margarine. Peggy contributes the important nugget that margarine was invented back in the mid-1800s by Napoleon III in France, because it didn't turn rancid like butter so it could be used by the army. I didn't know this, and neither did the assembled ad thinkers around the table, but that was the last Peggy had to do with margarine. Don - late for the meeting - gets together with Ted a little later, gets him drunk, and comes up with a good campaign.

Don's late because he was in a hotel room with the doc's wife Sylvia, in what was one of the best set pieces in the series, repulsive yet instructive because it was so revealing of Don. Sylvia earlier called Don at the office to say how much she needed him - "I need you, and nothing else will do" - and this sets off Don making his fantasies real. Unfortunately, those fantasies entail Don treating Sylvia like a sex slave. He puts her through a ridiculous and demeaning series of requests that last into the next day - the doc's out of town on business - and Sylvia eventually ends it, telling Don she feels ashamed. Don, the ultimate cool when it comes to business and to sex when it goes his way, is stunned. And for the audience, it's both a relief to see Don's bad behavior over - for now - and a reminder of why Don is such a fascinating character. He has a unique mix of decency and indecency, reasons to admire and despise and pity him.

But these revelations into personal character were not the most profound moments in tonight's episode. Those come at the very end, when Pete's addled mother has some news for him early the next morning. Pete think she's crazy but we know it's true. And we soon see Megan and Don reacting to it.

As I said earlier, to have lived through a time depicted in an historical narrative gives the narrative special power, and also responsibility to get it right, as you remember it. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968 was one of the cruelest cuts of all in that decade of assassination. Not only the President but now his brother were killed, and just two months after Martin Luther King, Jr. Mad Men closed on this national tragedy tonight, and did it just right, with the news of the RFK shooting on television fading into the credits, and Friend and Lover's "Reach Out of the Darkness" playing in the background.

Friend and Lover could be a good title for Mad Men ideal but often unattained or lost relationships. For all its focus on making money, Mad Men is and always has been about something much more.