MAD MEN on AMC - Season 6

The Monkees probably should have turned up even earlier: their backstory would make them Don's or any Madison Avenue guy's dream band. (Not a criticism, I'm a fan.)

Pete Campbell: My mother can go to Hell! Ted Chaough can fly her there.

Surely you laughed at this? Or his line about her brushing her teeth? Classics both.

i love that line so much

The scene where Pete and Peggy were cringing at thoughts of his mother having sex was funny, yes. Now and again he makes me laugh. I don't like him at all when he's shrill and argumentative.

How about tapdancing Ken?

I grew to love Ken more, you see him a lot less in recent seasons and I hope he gets some more scenes at the end.

They really missed an opportunity to get tapdancing Ken in a dance-off with Ray Wise/Leland Palmer (his father-in-law, actually). That might be the single strangest scene in the whole series thus far.

Took another look at the season-ending last couple of minutes before putting it away. Truly beautiful: Roger & Joan's son in the fedora, the short scene between Peggy and Stan ("This is where everything is," the shot that duplicates the iconic graphic), and "Both Sides Now" starting up immediately when Don says "This is where I grew up." And the look he and Sally exchange, and the little black kid on the porch. The inconsistency of Season 6 aside, I don't know if there's been a better two minutes in the whole series.

Ordered 7A today.

season 6 had some amazing stuff in it, after the lull (IMO) of 5. 7(a) is a cracker.

I'm in the middle of rewatching 6 now, really digging it. And remembering some of the giant bummers to come.

last scene of S7A is a killer.

Is 7a on Netflix yet? Might want to revisit before 7b. We rewatched s1-4 last Summerin a zombie state after our baby was born, and it was wonderful.

Not yet, dammit. From what I've heard, it's set to show up on Netflix the same week that 7b starts up. Which means, for us, yet another season we won't be able to watch in realtime since we won't catch up.

Good day to mention a line that's stayed in my mind the past few days, Roger from the MLK episode: "Man knew how to talk. I don't know why, but I thought that would save him. I thought it would solve the whole thing." The line seems dismissive at first, but--allowing that maybe I've giving the benefit of the doubt my favourite character on the show; I can't remember offhand how he is when it comes to race elsewhere--I don't think so. He says it completely unfiltered, with resignation but also with a lot of admiration, I think. He's an advertising guy to his core, and knowing how to talk is how you solve problems. He would like for "the whole thing" to be solved.

Um roger in blackface bro

That was pre-acid Roger.

Totally forgot about that--that was so hard to watch. But I'll hold to the idea that he doesn't mean what he says dismissively...I can't reconcile the two.

I dont think its dismissive but it is... blithe i guess? Roger is p blithe about everything.

I think Roger meant it too but there's way more than the blackface performance.
The way he jokes about the reception room being full of black people. I'm sure he made a joke about Dawn. Obviously his very strong prejudice against the Japanese.

But even after all that he's still one of the most likable characters.

One of the funny things about pre-acid roger is that he's essentially identical to post-acid roger (which becomes really clear in s7a)

Roger is one of those people who would probably like for everything to be 'solved' but hasn't ever for a second wondered if he himself might be part of the problem.

Haha yes

I remembered his vitriol with the Honda contingent on the way home (mixed up with the war, though hateful regardless). Frederik describes Roger well. In any event, his reaction to MLK's assassination was true to his character, and (I think, anyway) oddly bittersweet.

So.... a question about the finale. In that scene where Don Draper hugs the lonely man who feels invisible, why does he relate to that man's particular pain? Draper of course is the obvious opposite of invisible: handsome, charismatic, successful. So why did that man of all people strike a chord? It can't just be "Don Draper feels lonely inside, too," can it?

it's an expression of gratitude for the man providing Draper with a hole that he can fill w advertising

It can't just be "Don Draper feels lonely inside, too," can it?

A big part of it, as basic as that may be. It worked for Citizen Kane.

Don Draper might not be, but Dick Whitman is definitely invisible. Even when people look straight at him, they don't know he's there.

How much does Dick Whitman really differ from Don Draper? Seems like the personality is coherent.

Though if the wounds stem from his past, and his neglected upbringing, it would make sense that struck a chord. It just seemed like his concerns were much more immediate than that

Hadn't made the Citizen Kane comparison but wow there really is a lot of it there

I think I said something to this effect up-thread, but it seemed to me that Don saw the lonely guy as the living embodiment of the audience for his advertisements. He feels an intense empathy towards this audience, and (I think) we're meant to think of the lyrics of the Coke ad ("I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony" etc) as what Don wants to communicate to the world, to people like the lonely guy.

Oh, this isn't the last mad men thread.

Huh. When I rewatch the show I'll have to see if that's true. I always assumed the show was a little cynical, because advertising is kind of an insincere thing, but I guess it's true Draper always tried to find the underlying emotion behind each campaign/message.

Weird that he has this enormous empathy toward the world, but hardly ever acts on it (beyond superficial ways).

? He acts on it all the time!

I think I said something to this effect up-thread, but it seemed to me that Don saw the lonely guy as the living embodiment of the audience for his advertisements. He feels an intense empathy towards this audience, and (I think) we're meant to think of the lyrics of the Coke ad ("I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony" etc) as what Don wants to communicate to the world, to people like the lonely guy.

agree with this reading, with the added caveat that don immediately cashes out his empathy in the service of pushing corporate sugar water, right? don's final epiphany is perfect because it exposes--appropriately in Esalen of all places, itself the perfect synthesis of capitalism and religion--that advertising is his religion, his only real means of connecting to other people.

the historical significant of the ad aside, coke is also the perfect product because of the extreme gap between the vacuousness of the product and the queasy messianism of its advertising. (you could even argue that the pure emptiness of the product, the fact that it signifies precisely nothing, is what allows and motivates this advertising strategy.)

That's a harsh read. Do you think it was really meant as a condemnation of Draper on that scale?

Obviously he does emphasize with people. But almost all of his gestures involve opening up his wallet. He seems lost when he can't buy his way out of a situation.

Stems from his childhood poverty

The other thing is that advertising is Don Drapers job, and Matthew Weiner seems in awe of people who are good at their jobs. It's what Freddy Rumsen says as well when Don is most down in the dumps: Do the work. Don's job is fraudulent and empty, but he finds fulfillment in being good at it, and while that might seem horrible to us, I don't think Weiner agrees.

Yeah I think Weiner is probably far more ambivalent about advertising than much of his audience. Which is good really, imagine how much less interesting a show it would be if it was purely a condemnation of the industry.

but he finds fulfillment in being good at it

he does? i thought the whole final two seasons were just him giving up at his job and not even trying anymore. if anything his job is most of what defined him and without that, he's just some guy crying on a hippie's shoulder

And then he rediscovers that fulfillment in the finale.

Thought the show struck a perfect balance in its attitude towards advertising--far from golden-age deification, but recognizing that, as with any job, good work is good work. Agree that relentless condemnation would have been a drag.

That's a harsh read. Do you think it was really meant as a condemnation of Draper on that scale?

just to clarify, i don't think Weiner (as his post-finale interviews made clear) would be on board 100% with my reading. but i do think the contradictions of Don's character as expressed in the finale are consciously present throughout the series--i think any viewer who stuck with the whole run of the show would agree that the spark of empathy in Don (which was continually denied or misdirected) is what kept him from becoming a despicably self-involved and monotonously self-destructive character. I also think Pete repeats this dynamic in a more comic register. It's very Sopranos in the sense that the better angels of the characters are usually defeated, or in the more hopeful cases a kind of equilibrium is achieved with the good and the bad.

You see Pete as emphatic, too? Most of his plots that I remember involve him trying not to be awful, and usually falling very short. But I do love what they did with that character. He's the closest thing the show had to a villain in the beginning, and they turn him into one of its most sympathetic characters without really redeeming him at all. (Maybe that's just plotting, though: after the first season the plots rarely put him at odds with any of the main characters the way they did at first).

i thought the whole final two seasons were just him giving up at his job and not even trying anymore.

yeah but i don't think that made him happy, thus the show's climax

don draper went in search of himself, found nothing he liked, returned to the thing that made sense on some level

Joan: "Can we continue with the billings?"
Meredith: "Yes."
Joan: "Where were we?"
Meredith: "'Meredith, why don't you step out?'"
Joan: "Well?"
Meredith: "Oh."

<3

Two characters I love who only show up intermittently but were around for pretty much the show's entire run: Mona, Roger's wife, and his secretary Caroline. IMDB has Mona listed for 13 episodes from 2007-2014 (one more than Bob Benson, two fewer than Rachel Menken, Freddie Rumsen, Jane Sterling, Jim Cutler, and Carla); Caroline has fewer seasons (2010-2015) but more episodes, 20 (exactly the same as three other prominent secretaries, Alison, Meredith, and Hildy--weird). Something I completely missed until I started looking at credits: Teyonah Parris, who played Dawn, played the lead character in Chi-Raq.

Mona + Caroline are both wonderful

Mona strikes me as a version of two of '66/'67's iconic female movie characters, Elizabeth Taylor in Virginia Woolf and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. But she feels more real to me.

The Roger-Peggy interplay in Season 7A's final two episodes (too lazy to switch threads) is phenomenal: dancing to "My Way," Don handing over the Burger Chef presentation to Peggy, Peggy's presentation. It's nice, after so much debauchery and instances of letting everyone in his life down, to see Don recapture some of his stature from the first couple of seasons (not that he wasn't philandering around then, but there was something a lot more solid there). Peggy bringing her neighbor's boy into her presentation is such a Don touch.