Monday, April 23, 2012

Mad Men: Far Away Places

I'm not going to look it up.

I'm not going to look up whether any babies were ever born in concentration camps. That's what they want you to do. I'm not go and look up if it ever happened even though it should have been impossible. I'm not going to look anything up. I'm just going to type my response to the episode out stream of consciousness style.

What does this all add up to? Does it need to add up to anything? Is this all desperation as the makers shake everything up just to try and get a fresh start going?

The show is actually getting to the part of the 1960s that I have conscious memories of. I remember driving I-95 and stopping at Hojos. We did that trip hundreds of times between 1966 and 1971 and we'd stop at Hojos. No one ever bought the back-scratcher for kids though.

Hojos had these great gifts for parents to buy kids. There was the saltwater taffy, there were kaleidoscopes, there were sea monkeys and there was the back scratcher. The last adults got for themselves. Those were the reliable ones you could always find.

There was a time when I thought the 95 was connected to speed because that was the speed my father would drive it in the big Chrysler and Dodge cars he favoured in those days. There was a Dodge Polara was a beast of a car. It was an unassuming sedan on the outside but it could smoke and we would pass every car on the road. My father had a  way of driving in a really controlled way so that even while you were smoking along it felt slow. He'd have one hand on the top of the wheel and he moved in and out of the passing lane so smoothly. And the radio would be on and fill the car with a green glow and it all felt like a  dream.

Anyway, back to our plot. It was at this point in the 1960s that rock and roll started to run out of gas. Having tried every variation from the limited range of possibilities that rock and roll offers, producers and bands started doing weird things, strange instruments, tape effects, voice filters. I mention that because it feels to me that that is what the show tried last night.

Everything felt like a cheat. Roger and Jane try LSD and then, while they are high, say things they never otherwise would, and suddenly they are going to get divorced. Deus ex machina anyone?

Peggy tries to fire a client and then starts imitating Don. She goes to his office and drinks and then she goes to the movies and then she has casual sex. And, after all this, she turns around and calls her boyfriend and suddenly everything is okay again.

Don and Jane run away and have a fight. They get separated and then they get back together again.

Finally, Bert shows up at the office and tells Don he isn't doing enough. And he hasn't been. But that is entirely because the writers are feeling boxed in by all this domesticity. That's always been a problem with the show. It just dies when it goes domestic. It lives at the office. (That's a big part of why so many people hate Betty. She never appeared at the office. Jane was on the same dead end track.)

The show has been stuck in a rut so far this season. Are the writers signalling that they are going to try something new? Or are they just looking for a way back to the tried and true? No matter what they do, they don't know how to get there so they cheated last night.

You have to wonder sometimes whether anyone in the entertainment business has ever seen a successful marriage. Confronted about Betty, Matt Weiner said that he thought lots of people had mothers like her and that the hatred people rained on her was undeserved. But mothers weren't like that at all. They were home. You went home and your mother was there.

Sometimes she'd make you eat beans and beans were awful especially the ones that came in a can. But that was the price you paid for comfort and lots of people who grew up that era remember those beans fondly. There was also canned spaghetti which was, if anything worse than canned beans and it was always so much better when she made real spaghetti.

I know, I know, this is where everyone's feminist brain kicks in and says that it was all horrible and the mothers were all unhappy because they couldn't be at work and ... and ... and ... and. But even if things changed for the better in some ways (and for the worse in others) the fact is that world existed and mothers and fathers and kids managed to be happy in it.

I thought the most telling moment in the show last night was Don and Megan's big fight. They yell at one another, they chased one another around the apartment and then they fall in a heap. And Don tries to make up, says it was just a fight and Megan responds,
Every time we fight it just diminishes this a little bit.
And then Don confesses how scared he was of losing Megan and suddenly we are okay again. But look at that line of Megan's. People in successful marriages fight all the time. They sometimes get overheated and say and do stupid things. But then they work it out, come to some sort of resolution and move on together. The writers at Mad Men have no idea how to portray that. Perhaps they have never seen that.

But that statement of Megan's is the sort of thing that someone who doesn't know how to make it work would say. 

What hurts most is how close this show comes to getting it right. The truth was right there on the I-95. You see, back then families drove on the big interstates and other highways and it was scary and fun. You left the suburbs and drove for hours and then got somewhere just as safe at the other end. Ordinary people didn't take planes back then. You drove.

Anyway, in the middle, you saw glimpses of life. You'd pull into Hojos and you'd see other travelers and, like the waitress says, you'd see husbands fighting with wives, you'd see lonely salesmen, you'd see life's rich pageant. And you'd think about things you saw on the news.
There's a killer on the road, his brain is squirming like a toad.
Did you catch the boat on the trailer in the parking lot at Hojos? It's were Don goes when the waitress tells him Megan went out there with some guys. And Don finds her sunglasses on the ground. That was the best bit of writing in the show. The bit that had no words was the best writing in the show.

I think we're meant to think of Ted Bundy when we saw that boat. That was one of his tricks. He would unhitch a trailer and ask a passing girl to help him.  And then he chloroformed her and pushed her into his Volkswagen. I know, it's all out of time but it's what you worried about on the road. Even though it's out of time, that boat on the trailer plants the idea in our heads.

It felt like things were going a bit crazy at that point in the 1960s what with the riots, and the strange new things that people were doing and the crimes you'd see on the news. That stuff didn't actually happen in your life. It happened somewhere else but the thought that it was compassing you about was always there and you felt closest to it on the road. And your mother worried about it more than you. Anytime one of the kids was out of sight, she would panic.

And then you'd go back home.

I think that was the background message. The Heinz guy keeps asking for the sentimental memory and then he hates it when it's offered to him. That's the way the writers see this period. They think see a time when things had to change but they don't want to think too hard about why things changes.

And maybe the real fear is that if they did think about it, they might discover that things didn't have to change. For most people they didn't change. Wikipedia says:
Happy Days is an American television sitcom that originally aired from January 15, 1974, to September 24, 1984, on ABC. Created by Garry Marshall, the series presents an idealized vision of life in mid-1950s to mid-1960s America.
But it wasn't idealized for a lot of us. Happy Days was an immensely popular show because it closely resembled the lives we actually lived.

That's the wall shows like this keep running up against. The majority of people still want that world that the news and entertainment industry keeps trying to tell us is gone forever.

1 comment:

  1. As you said last week, they're writing about things they know nothing about, just what they've read. And using deus ex machinae to advance the plot, I would put the way Joan ended her marriage in that category as well. If this is as good as its going to get, its time to say good night.