GIRL, YOU'LL BE A WOMAN SOON: I wake up this morning and am no crazier about last night's penultimate Mad Men episode of the season than I was when it finished. It all seemed a bit too ... dramatic? forced? soap operatic?
Yet this feels like an odd complaint to lodge at a show whose first season saw an interoffice pregnancy (with a married father and a mother in denial), a man stealing the identity of his dead Korean War colleague, and, yes, a man hanging himself after Don Draper asked him to take some financial benefit and leave his life. So the drama has always been there, with the audience asked to accept radical character gestures from the beginning.
Yet this time, especially with the one-two punch of Joan's situation last week, it all felt like a bit much. Yes, I liked the little touches -- Sally wearing the boots for her date which her father wouldn't let her wear at the Codfish Ball, Don getting his Don Mojo back at last so he can sell more napalm, Betty showing humanity when Sally came home, Lane not even getting his suicide right the first time.
But on the whole, I'm feeling disappointed by this season, which seems to have substitute stunts (Roger's on LSD! Let's contrive to prostitute Joan! Zou bisou bisou!) for more nuanced character work. Peggy has moved on (for now -- no mention of her this week?), Lane has passed on, and Sally is growing up ... and everyone else is more or less themselves, Roger's LSD enlightenment having worn off, and less of the outside world creeping in (civil rights movement, culture of violence) as we once thought it might be. Things are happening, but the show doesn't feel as tight as it once was. Maybe Matthew Weiner has already told 90% of the story he wanted to tell, and we're stalling until the ending?
I cannot agree. I think this season was about Don trying harder and still failing. Don finds a woman who is just about perfect, and so he quits cheating and really tries, but he is so messed up that he keeps messing up (cheating in his dreams; being an asshole while awake). He basically leaves Peggy alone because she's all grown up, but he can't help botching the farewell. He does the best that he can for Layne -- and please, don't anybody say that Don didn't have to fire Layne, because he absolutely and unquestionably had to fire Layne -- and Layne commits suicide as a result. The suicide was in no way Don's fault, but you know he is going to blame himself for it, especially with what happened to his brother. I thought it was pretty powerful. And all the Layne stuff, I thought, was also pretty powerful. Only the Betty stuff, both character and actress-wise, rang false for me.
ReplyDeleteThe Don/Lane scene was the hardest thing for me to look at - I felt SO much sympathy for Lane and could see him breaking right there, but at the same time knew that Don was 100% doing exactly what had to be done - in fact, was being as gracious and lenient as it was responsible for him to be.
ReplyDelete<span>That being said, any episode with this much Creepy Glen screentime automatically loses a letter grade from me.
ReplyDeleteThere is a tiny twisted part of me that thought of Lane's first attempt as fodder for a new Jaguar slogan: "Live fast. Die young. Leave a beautiful corpse. Just not in our car."</span>
(And I really thought with the asphyxiation failing, Lane would kill himself still in the car, by driving off a bridge, sitting on a train track, pulling into an oncoming semi, something.)
Is Don failing? He's messing up his marriage in little bits, by not telling Megan about Sally's arrival, by being so angry about her potential move to Boston, but work-wise he's doing fine (and knew when to defer to Ginsburg on creative), so how much of an asshole is he being?
ReplyDeleteAnd how did he botch the Peggy farewell? He accepted it.
I'm not talking about work; I'm talking about his effort to fix the broken part of himself, the part that is ugly and cruel to other people. And if you think that farewell to Peggy went well -- "forget for a moment that I am responsible for everything good that has ever happened to you" -- I hope you never get a chance to fire me.
ReplyDeleteAll three of those things still would have required him to get the car started.
ReplyDeleteWell, yeah, he did say that. And then he stopped saying it once it was clear she wasn't negotiating. Wouldn't the Old Don have explicitly brought up her pregnancy?
ReplyDeleteI had my tense messed up a little there - I meant from the moment I saw the car, I thought that would 100% for sure be the method of his death, by any of the means mentioned above. It's a mark of how little I trust the writers this season not to go for the obvious that I was surprised they didn't still find a way to have him die in the car.
ReplyDeleteApparently, I am all about the "100%" today - twice in one comments thread - yeesh.
ReplyDeleteI had a longer comment here that I managed to delete. Without attempting to capture it completely, suffice it to say that after that ugly gratuitous comment Isaac quoted and the ensuing possessive and weird clinginess with the prolonged kiss of Peggy's hand, Don should not have been thinking to himself, "Nailed it!"
ReplyDeleteI was actually anticipating that Creepy Glen would do something (wasn't sure what) WAY more creepy, but perhaps he has grown out of his creepiness. We'll see, I guess, if he can manage to avoid stalking Megan.
ReplyDeleteIt didn't feel too over-the-top or melodramatic to me. I guess my barometer for those things is: "Do I think the character would actually do this?" Last week, I had trouble accepting that Joan would actually prostitute herself (and that the male partners would all agree that she should). But this week, while seeing Lane kill himself was painful, it felt like where his story was inevitably going. He could have just asked the partners for the money he needed (and I didn't realize until last night that he had the tax problem because of the funds he liquidated to put into the firm), but he had too much pride. And so he had too much pride to tell his wife what had happened, or to go back to England in shame. Not to mention that we've seen his horrible relationship with his father and he and his wife haven't always been on strong ground. I can see Lane thinking he had no other option. And taking a small amount of satisfaction in the fact that his partners - not his wife - was going to find him.
ReplyDeleteI liked it better than you did, but could have gona all year without seeing the shot of the bloodie panties. That seemed superflous.
ReplyDeleteWell, we're always telling writers, "SHOW, don't TELL."
ReplyDeleteNon-revelatory but pleasant and interesting exit interview with Jared Harris:
ReplyDeletehttp://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/jared-harris-of-mad-men-discusses-sundays-episode/
Bingo. As much as I'm sure every single person watching was thinking (as I was) that there had to be a way to keep Lane, there wasn't. Yes, we all understand everything about why he did it, but that doesn't excuse it, and Don was absolutely right. And it still killed me.
ReplyDeleteI had forgotten about that whole weird thing with the woman in the photograph in the wallet from the season opener. In retrospect, another sign of his being rejected.
ReplyDeleteI need to put a mention in here about Don chasing Megan around their apartment like he wanted to kill her or beat her to a pulp. That happened this season. I think it ought to be classified at failing at his marriage at least a little bit because i cannot imagine that being classified as succeeding at marriage.
ReplyDeleteEven scarier: Don's speech to Dow was basically a serious, borderline psychotic, version of LANE's joke comment "Where's my other half?" from last season's "The Chrysanthemum & The Sword" when they were discussing that Honda had 50% of the market in motorcycles.
ReplyDelete--bd
My problem is not with Lane committing suicide if faced with having to go back to England in shame, but with Lane ever engaging in embezzlement. Prior to him forging the check, I don't think that we'd ever seen him engaging in any work-related misbehavior. Yes, he'd flirted with leaving his wife and taking up with a Playboy bunny, but from his perspective, he was separated from his wife. While there are a lot of avenues that he would not have taken to deal with his tax debt (bank loan that would have admitted his failures to his family, loan from his father, etc.), I tend to think that he would have gone to Don. He had a rapport with Don, and I don't see any reason that he would have thought that Don would refuse to help him, or at a minimum, that Don would act to make his situation worse.
ReplyDeleteSo, while the suicide itself doesn't strike me as inconsistent with a character the way that Joan's prostituting herself last week did, the triggering action of embezzling the funds definitely does. And I expect better, more consistent characterization from Mad Men.
I think Layne loved America because it wasn't England- where he grew up/lived in a terribly abusive, opressive environment. America promised everything and he bought into it- I truly think he reached a point where he felt that entitlement that can come from feeling like you are owed the "American Dream." So the check forging was the end of the slide down that slippery slope. He found out that no matter what, you still have to pay the piper.
ReplyDeleteSo tragic.
I think we have conveniently forgotten Joan's "early years..." no, she was never an actual prostitute but she sure never had any problem taking gifts and favors from men to advance herself. She's no saint. And I don't think the SCDP partners forgot it either- that's why the leap was so easy to make. She hadn't come that far. And when the carrot is so very tempting, especially to a woman in Joan's situation, desperation takes over. I don't think anyone's behavior was out of character.
ReplyDeleteAdding... I re-watched it today. Harry Crane is such a creeper- when they look over the wall into Layne's office, he lingers forEVER. Pete and Ken look, are grossed out, and climb down stat. Harry stays up there way too long. yuck.
ReplyDeleteWhen I watched the episode, I agreed that Lane opting for embezzlement rather than asking for help felt like plausibility stretch.
ReplyDeleteThinking back now, though, I think we have seen Lane engage in work-related misbehavior. His key act in the entire series prior to hanging himself was screwing over his employer (PPL?) for his own profit when he fired Roger, Don and co. He also sexually harrassed Joan by forcing a kiss on her after his fight with Pete. He was not exactly a model employee.
Further, he seemed to believe that it would only be 13 days before he'd have a bonus and be able to pay back the money, so I can imagine he convinced himself it was some kind of embezzlement lite (all the benefits of real embezzlement, with only half the moral qualms) [NOTE to my employers: I do not believe there is such a think as embezzlement lite. I believe all embezzelement is bad embezzlement, and should be punished to the greatest extent permissable under the law.]