From the beginning of Mad Men's current "1963" season, one obvious event loomed large over the proceedings; it could hardly be termed "foreshadowing" when Roger Sterling's over-pampered daughter obliviously announced her wedding date in the first episode, timed to be exactly the day after the Kennedy Assassination. Once that piece was in place, the only question was how many episodes it would take to get there.
This past Sunday answered that question, and the answer was what Mad Men basically is: a frustrating combination of stylistic brilliance, heavy handed literalism, and sledgehammer subtlety. The power, promise, and problem of Mad Men lies in its historicity - that reliving the sixties will provide some sort of interesting insights into how we got here, what it was then, or what we can learn differently. But for all its good looks and snappy presentation, Mad Men gets caught, repeatedly, in a cycle of stunning obviousness: we kind of know what happened, we kind of know why it happened... and Mad Men is all too happy, too often to settle for little more. And perhaps it's no surprise that when Mad Men delivers on that "kind of" expectation... it gets lauded for reminding us of what we already think we know.
For an episode that consisted, too often, of people standing around and, well, watching television, "The Grown Ups" managed, in small moments, to underplay the moment effectively enough, but in total, the episode was little more than competent, and less than overwhelming. The end of an era, apparently, is more fizzle than pop.
The episode worked, I suspect, best if one came to it, as I happened to, without expectations; having not seen the previous couple of episodes (which, as it turned out, meant little to the soap opera slowness of its plotting), I didn't realize in the opening bits of business that what was coming was, indeed, right upon us. Only when Sterling's daughter made clear the wedding day was now did I mutter "uh oh," but by then it was pretty apparent, with workers gathered around the office TV and work basically stopped. The "where were you when" aspect of the episode was quite possibly its weakest... meant, I suspect, to evoke our contemporaneous sensation of 9/11... but that's not what it was, then, and the relevance was kind of lost (certainly, it lacked the kind of sudden urgency that a nearby disaster would evoke). The sense of drama - which hinged, basically, on re-feeling the sense of suddenness of Kennedy's death - was undercut by the familiarity; we've been there, we did this. A lot. What's left to say? As it turned out... not so much, in the literal silences that punctuated so much of the larger story.
Perhaps the most canny decision was in deciding which live TV moments to replay: having the death first covered in the live NBC version of events (where John Chancellor, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were struggling to make sense of it all) was a reminder that Walter Cronkite wasn't our only national voice of What Happened (and a nice nod to just how many careers were solidified in that moment). What couldn't be conveyed, though, was the sense of "live event journalism" that was unfolding in that moment, almost for the first time; we're too used, in our 24 hour news times, to the ever present announcers, the replaying of the same pictures, the anchors struggling, in hour ten, for something new to say. A lot of it, then, was staring at the box, waiting for something to happen. And mostly... nothing did. Which, really, could be the point.
Mad Men suffers, greatly, from a real diffidence to its linearity; because it is married to a notion that our personal histories relate, in an unyielding certainty, to our historical events, it falls, unthinkingly, I'm convinced, into "and then this happened" plotting and storytelling. There's no way but forward, no scene to follow but, literally, what happened next, and no result but drama born out of nothing but circumstance. And too often the result is... circumstantial. We got here because... well, there's nowhere else to go.
That hamhandedness in plotting was all too apparent in the night's big set pieces - the Sterling wedding unfolded in every grisly aspect one would expect... which made its nightmarishness kind of a dud. It was awful... but you knew it would be, and it was awful, by turns, in the ways that these things basically are: empty room, unhappy guests, the usual family tensions... all scrupulously laid out, all tidily unfolded and then neatly wrapped up for the next train wreck moment... when history next repeats itself.
The deeper problem with Mad Men - which rarely gets examined - is that our lives do not comport, so neatly, to the history around us. Our lives are, of course, touched by larger events in the world around us... but they are our lives, and our personal dramas, because they operate on our own time. Our emotional upheavals, angry nights, cold grey dawns, do not neatly coincide with world history, and it's a damaging falsehood to suggest they do. The least convincing, silliest moment was tying the collapse of the Draper home to the larger events of the Kennedy drama; it felt every bit as unearned and forced as it could, and underscored what makes Don and Betty and the lies they tell themselves such fiction. Their story is just not big enough to counter the weight of the world around them. It's small and unfortunate (it's not even, really, especially sad) and suffers, as WASP dramas do, from the held in, interlaized approach to emotion. They are ciphers, and their every move is, at base, false and overthought. It's what makes Don Draper such a perfect, frustrating central emblem for what Mad Men is: unreal, largely made up, trying very hard to be just what we, as a culture, say we expect a man to be. And failing... because we can't exist in an entriely made up world.
Which is why, I think, the episode's real power exists elsewhere: in Sterling's late night call to Joan, where two old souls reconnect, if only briefly. Or the way Peggy and Don can connect in the moment when they return to what they can control - their work - in the face of chaos around them. When Mad Men tries less to capture everyone's story, and more to tell the stories that actually drive it (which, come to think of it, really do come down to the same elements as any sixties-era soap), the magic is almost there, fleeting... but still struggling to find a reason for being. In part, I think, that's because we know, really, how this story ends... because we're already here, living it.
In the end, what continues to annoy me most in Mad Men is the point it is trying to make... a point it does a damn fine job of never reaching, and rarely approaching with any kind of clarity. Because it presents us the "world of then" with an ironic knowingness that these things can't last, it seems determined to explain why thngs were the way they were, and why they had to change... but at the same time, it can't help but embrace the very things it rages against. A different, braver, more experimental series might juxtapose this imagined past with a view to present day Sterling Cooperica that really shows how time changes us all. Instead, what's unfolding is The Secret Storm... with some help from the news division.
Mad Men's fundamental self satisfaction, combined with its self loathing, ultimately illuminates very little, offers few real joys... but in its hazy, amber glow is the past as we'd like, right now, to see it: grim, empty, bad for the wrong reasons. That's not, really, good enough, and it's, well, kind of a small canvas on which to work. There's so much we're not seeing... and what we're not seeing remains the thing that fascinates me... because that's, really, how we got here... and why the past matters, still. It's not the story we know well enough to retell, over and over... it's the story we still don't know well enough to really explore. I'd feel better about Mad Men, its stylish storytelling and sudsy melodrama (I knew those Clorox commecials were telling me something!), if I thought, for one moment, that it was even looking for more of what we don't know, and less of what we do. Instead, I think, it's looking for its own Zapruder film: the thing we already know, that we can look at frame by frame and hope it tells us something more. It can't... and what we know too well is that it won't. Tune in, tomorrow.
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