MAD MEN on AMC - Season 6

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.

The actress who plays Mona, Talia Balsam, is John Slattery's wife in real life.

Had no idea. Just looked her up, and it's even more interesting than that: Martin's daughter (suspected that might be true), also George Clooney's ex-wife.

and dick van patten's niece!

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/grub/2017/03/13/13-heinz-mad-men-ads-all.nocrop.w710.h2147483647.jpg

http://www.grubstreet.com/2017/03/heinz-don-draper-mad-men-ad.html?mid=facebook_nymag

Saw Bombshell today. Both Duck Phillips and Lou Avery are in it...it's almost like they raided Mad Men when they were casting for creeps.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BnZ66wCCAAAtigB.jpg

"You know who else they laughed at?"
"You?"

one of my fave exchanges from the show

Forgot about Woke Pete

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwviZz4wQ4s

Kartheiser is grossly underrated as an actor I think

what kind of monster watches dramas with motion smoothing on

Harry, probably.