Once again, college life interferes with my ability to make love in this club to the likes of Don, Peggy, and Betty. I’m doubling up on the last two episodes of the show, which were very different in both style and content. I’ll say up front I wasn’t a huge fan of either in the way I was of “Guy Walks into…” My sense of this season is that the show spent its first episodes shocking us into the 1960s before settling back into the temporal Mad Men norm. Problem is, I kind of like all the shocks. The word “shock” also belies the thoughtfulness and ambiguity of those episodes in which Guy’s foot is buzzed away or Roger dons blackface. In fact, I found the last two episodes the most heavy-handed of this season. It may be that we’re hitting the middle of the season and that Weiner is preparing us for the big splash at the end (it’s August for the homo sapiens at Sterling Cooper, and Margaret’s wedding is only three months away!), but I for the first time feel that my time is being wasted on things I already know with plot lines that titillate but don’t go anywhere. All that said, let’s look more specifically at these episodes.
Seven Twenty Three
Seven Twenty Three, to me, was misread by a significant portion of the audience by virtue of its placement after “Guy Walks into…” Much of the analysis/comments I have read focuses on Don’s getting smacked by a teenage Draft evader in a seeming search for a follow up to the mangling of Guy’s foot. In this episode, I don’t think what happens is so important as why and when it happens. Another example of this is Peggy and Duck, the worst pairing since B.Aff and J.Lo. Everyone was up in arms about Peggy! sleeping! with Duck!, but I’m more interested in Peggy sleeping with someone older, not necessarily the context of her job offer or the fact that it’s a mallard. Peggy, on the cusp of another defining moment for her and womankind, turns to sex to validate this new version of herself. She is testing the waters to see not only if the world can perceive her in this new role but also if she can handle it: after Don has berated her and reminded her that she is a dispensable former secretary, she needs some proof of her worth and her maturity and finds it in her orgasm and the ability to make a man orgasm (the latter is much easier, but hey God is a man what can you expect).
All of these OMFG moments have a very short shelf life on the show, or so we presume: the hippies are never going to come up again (and they certainly lack the depth of the Californians from “The Jet Set” last season); I’m predicting, or maybe just hoping, that Peggy and Duck will never be mentioned again; and, from “Souvenir,” many are predicting that Henry Francis is done for, as his interaction with Betty was the other new development “Seven Twenty Three.” The opening montage of Betty, Don, and Peggy lying supine, prone, and on the side respectively suggests that each has been knocked out or swept off her feet by these departures from the norm. Perhaps Weiner is intending to use these plot points to highlight the shift from last season. Change has always been a theme of the show, but, where last season treated it from a historical perspective, this season looks ahead and brings the impending social changes closer to reality with situations such as these. I trust that Weiner does have a reason behind his “one use only” storylines, but it feels a little repetitive. While these moments generate interest for the next episode, inevitably the next episode fails to address what happened the week before: after Joan’s husband doesn’t get his promotion and Joan leaves Sterling Coop, Joan gets a week off; after Peggy sleeps with Duck, she gets a week off. As the show alternates between ensemble episodes and character studies, this model seems to make sense, but I prefer the interaction of the entire cast to cerebral examinations of the individual characters (one of my problems with this week’s “Souvenir”).
Despite these greater shortcomings, I thought the eclipse metaphor of this episode was not sufficiently appreciated in the face of these plot elements. Its relevance to the episode was twofold: first, we saw one agenda obscure another for each of the characters, not unlike the moon eclipsing the light of the sun; second, each character’s delusion about his personal strength and needs. For Don, his desire to remain untethered is surpassed by his commitment to his family (see his flashback to his own inept father, his relationship with Connie, the teacher’s rebuff of his advances, his strong reaction to Roger’s invasion of his home life). Simultaneously, his perception of his own mystery and freedom is broken by the teacher’s rejecting his come on and the hippies’ taking advantage of him. Also, Ms. Farrell is so that girl from the Twix commercial about blogging and needing a moment. Mad Men is taking over your TV…
For Betty, her desire/need to make a home out of Ossining (redecorating the living room, joining the Junior League) is overtaken by her desire to be desired and to adventure beyond the constraints of her family with Henry Francis. We see even more of this in “Souvenir” with the trip to Rome. Betty can’t decide whether she wants to be powerful or to be rescued, ultimately succumbing to the latter and buying the garish fainting couch in my favorite gesture of the episode. That couch itself is like the eclipse, interrupting the beauty of the living room and the soul of her home.
For Peggy, her desire to angle herself pragmatically in the workplace is eclipsed by her need to feel wanted by the Manhattan world she’s breaking into. On the one end is Don, who says no to her, and on the other end Duck, who says yes; in between the two is Pete, who is the most important of the three but is not acknowledged as such. I don’t think Peggy has the same delusions about herself as Betty or Don do, but that may remain to be seen this coming week. Her tryst with Duck went off almost like her first one night stand with the college boy, to suggest that Peggy knows what she’s doing.
The eclipse metaphor served as a strong enigmatic force in the episode, one that seemed to be forgotten between the artifice of the fragmented timeline and the drama of acid and sex and water reservoirs. I treat this episode in particular more as a piece of art than as a traditional Mad Men narrative, a choice that is simultaneously fitting and not for this season that has lacked a good through line so far.
Souvenir
Everyone was excited about how pretty Betty looked when she went to Rome, but I thought she looked more like she belonged with the drag queens on a particularly progressive episode of Law and Order: SVU. This episode was all about Betty’s fantasy, and that kind of stylized luxury matches her fantasies of opulence and spontaneity (that fainting couch is straight out of a period piece). What’s interesting is that Don is normally not attractive to women of excess like Betty: Ms Farrell and that rando from season 1 bear no resemblance to this Roman Betty, and neither does Bobbie on a deeper level. The Roman Holiday is implicitly from Betty’s perspective, as she is the fluent Italian speaker (you make it look so easy, Betty!) and the woman escaping from both her infidelity and the doldrums of suburbia. Betty’s effortless beauty and felicity in Rome reverts to a dream deferred back home, as she sports the Italian modernist dress with a frown on her face.
Sourpuss
For Pete, his vacation experience is the opposite: we see the concerted effort of his seduction of the German au pair while his wife is away, and she puts all the pieces back together with her return. While Betty’s fantasy relationship comes easily in Rome and falls apart within the four walls of her very 50s home, Pete’s fantasy relationship doesn’t come easily in either sense of the verb because it’s…rape. His first exchange with Gertrude at the incinerator is excruciatingly awkward and characteristically Pete, as she is bewildered because of her bad English and his immature logic. Pete seeks to fashion himself as the hero by fixing her dress, but his attempt at chivalry only materializes because of Joan’s new job at Bonwit Teller. Although it becomes clear to us that his prince charming act is one-sided, as Gertrude alludes to her German boyfriend, Pete thinks he is entitled to his happy ending and forces himself on the unsuspecting (or maybe suspecting) foreigner. Just as Betty tells Don of her unhappiness and he responds with a promise of more vacation, Trudie tries to forget Pete’s indiscretion and he responds with a command that she take no more vacations. Trudie is more than willing to take care of Pete like the child they can’t have or adopt, but Don can’t meet Betty’s desires in the same way. Weiner seems to be highlighting the gender divide with these two. At the same time, however, we can also see that satisfaction is anything but guaranteed and romance anything but simple and pure.
Take, for example, Sally’s first kiss in this episode. Her chicken-like peck leads to a moment of repulsive violence against Bobby, as Sally looks huge and menacing while pinning her little brother. Betty and Don are rough in bed too, and it goes without saying that Pete likes to pin people down in the same way Sally does. Sally uses violence to defend her love and protect its innocence against Bobby, who mocks institutions of love and marriage with his “K-I-S-S-I-N-G” song. The adults, alternatively, are masochists. Pete and Betty childishly perceive withholding and force as sexual, desperate for a challenge in their love lives as it is lacking in their daily lives. When Betty tells Sally that a first kiss “is where you go from being a stranger to knowing someone,” the forcefulness of her sexual relationship with Don, and Pete’s with anyone, represents an attempt to know him more, to replicate that first moment of unmatched closeness. For Betty, the first kiss also refers to Henry Francis, whom she kisses early on in the episode. The interaction with Henry has all the tenderness and romance we have been taught to desire and expect in love, making it all the more unnatural for Betty. It reminds her of how dissatisfying and contrived her life as a housewife has become but also of the inviability of an affair. Betty and Pete are bound to their spouses, who know them without even having to kiss them, but continue to test the reach of the leash.
Sometimes I wonder what the value and point of connecting two characters like Betty and Pete is. Their universes are so different that to expose us to their similar psyches invites inappropriate comparisons. These comparative character studies are so frequent, too, that it seems like all the characters are somehow the same. I’m probably sounding like that really dumb kid in your sophomore English class right now, but I’m really just missing the genuine contrast that only Mad Men banter can offer. Or maybe all this talk of one’s first kiss is making me cringe.
