A Mad Mad Mad Mad World

I have to get my hands on the latest Rolling Stone - it's a Mad Men issue! So many lovely pictures; these are my favourites (and, plus Roger Sterling, my 4 favourite characters).







Less beauty-worshipfully, more academically, The House Next Door has a brilliant weekly critique of Mad Men; it's an integral part of my MM ritual to read their write-ups after watching the show. Here is this week's one and it is really great analysis. (Although sometimes when I say "really great analysis" it means "things I was too dumb to see for myself" and damn it, am I kicking myself for not realising that the model in the fur coat ad in Don's shop was Betty, and that's how they met. Argh, I swear I spotted that subconsciously.) What a tight episode it was, too, everything tied in together so beautifully.

An excerpt - "The use of repetition draws attention to the ways in which various iterations of the same thing can differ, and poses the question of what makes them distinct. Why is Don repeating Danny’s line different than when Danny originally pitched it? The episode draws on the way ideas often work: we can hear or say something insignificant, and for some reason it sticks in our minds only to be repeated, seemingly at random, later. It’s often meaningless and uninformative to look at the origins of ideas because so often they’re simply banal thoughts that for whatever reason took on meaning in a new context. Likewise, the origin of Don’s job at Sterling Cooper tells us nothing about his future role in the firm. It wasn’t a natural arc or a logical progression; it was simply a matter of chance (and a dumb mistake) that put Don into a new situation.

Don Draper the fur coat salesman likely could never have pitched an idea that would have earned Roger’s attention, yet Don Draper the advertising lion can drunkenly repeat a talentless kid’s idea and be praised for it. He’s the same person, yet his actions take on a new significance. And as Don dissolves into a vacuum of success and alcoholism, his actions take on another significance. Mad Men seems to suggest that characters and ideas don’t so much fundamentally change, rather it’s that iterations of the same things take on new signification in different contexts .

Even SCDP itself is an iteration of Sterling Cooper, something that the writers outright acknowledge with the return of Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton). Personnel wise, this new firm now looks just a little more like the old one than it already did. Wary of having his old rival back in the fold, Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) is eager to assert his dominance by telling Ken that “things have changed.” Ken smiles smugly and replies, “I say nothing’s changed.” For the most part they’re both right—SCDP is merely a repetition of the same thing in a different circumstance.

This reading suggests a view of personal and historical development quite at odds with the view of the 1960s as a paradigm-shifting era of transformation that commentators often read into Mad Men. People largely remain the same, yet even subtle or seemingly superficial changes in circumstance can radically alter the significance of their actions. This view is consistent with the relativism with which Mad Men often approaches truth and morality. It’s an idea well expressed in a show this meticulously situated historically: circumstance is everything."

The dread that I have of the show's eventual end is tempered somewhat by the fact that I can go back and watch each episode multiple times and uncover, slowly, all those layers of meaning.