We Are All Close Readers Now: On Season Five

I wanted to be the 45,931th person to blog each episode of Mad Men this season, but it was not to be. I could try to be noble and say David Simon's arguments got to me instead of, you know, life.  Just as a counterpoint to Simon, though, I think it's kind of awesome that so many people spend so much time dissecting them, from acting and costuming to character motivations to each period reference. Sure, there are more important things we should be doing, but when is there not? When I was a kid there were lots of earnest pieces by the serious concerned types about how TV was making everyone "passive." Now these serious (semi-serious?) people say that TV is brilliant art and it's the interactive 2.0 stuff that's killing us, what with how we're all "distracted" instead of "absorbed."  I've spent more than my share of time around my English department comrades lamenting how hard it is to get people to close read, or how students resist analysis by saying "they didn't really think that much about it." But of course people love to "close read" as soon as there's something they're invested in, and no one is saying Weiner doesn't think this shit through. 

And so, at this belated hour with two of thirteen episodes to go, ten ways of looking at season five:

1) Over at slate, John Swansburg asks the big question: Is it possible Don is actually becoming something like a better person?  Weiner of course comes from The Sopranos, where the whole arc was about Tony setting out half-heartedly to see if he could be redeemed, when it was actually clear all along that he couldn't. As with Tony, we forgive Don too much because of his charms, but of course we're operating in a very different moral universe here (no matter what that stupid fantasy murder scene thought it was trying to do), one where redemption would seem to be more possible. The real obstacle seems to be the narrative one: this is a serious show, so it has to be a tragedy, right?

I remember reading Crime and Punishment way back and being struck by how Raskolnikov kept falling back into justifying his actions after he'd seemed to have a breakthrough. The Sopranos used the long form to capture this even more acutely. We think we have epiphanies, we think someone's "life can change in an instant," as the melodramas would have it, but more likely the change is just another thought we had about ourselves. Don sunk low in the fourth season, and seems to be crawling back up, but who knows. It's not just that these multi-season shows can have characters ebb and flow over years instead of having the one arc Christopher Moltisanti thought he should have, it's that we get the feeling we're dipping into lives that continue off-stage, a whole texture of experiences that are as much like the formless unfolding of lives - or history - than the constructed lives of tragic personalities.

Of course the tragedy could be that he becomes a better person too late: one of those men who becomes such a devoted husband/father the second time around, in part because the first set can never forgive him. I loved Ken's line about Don and Megan's cool whip act, how it's a twist on the normal schtick because "they actually like each other." Our girl from Montreal isn't at all the Betty 2.0 she seemed to be last season. That would be a very take-this-to-the-seventies outcome, but it feels pretty unsatisfying. 

2) I'm struck again and again by how, with all its bang up research, the thing that really makes the period detail work is that it's a little "off." And as with The Sopranos, the dialogue is also a bit off - a little over the top, a little too metaphoric. It fills in what would be outside the dialogue in a story, punching it up to where it feels real instead of being realistic in a mimetic sense. This shit isn't easy to do. Likewise the reference points are not inaccurate, just not the trajectories or reference points you're expecting. Even the Beatles thing hit at this - the unexpected choice, the last song off the album, after an episode of fake-Beatles. Being interested in the period I've seen enough films and documentaries that hit the exact same notes to realize how important this is. It's the sixties as lived before people knew what "the sixties" were.

3) Hey, do you remember when the woman who played Daphne on Frasier was pregnant and instead of writing the pregnancy into the character or trying to disguise it they put her in a fat suit? Yeah. Fat suits and fake chins need to die. I had a problem with the Peggy stuff in the first season but there you could at least make a case for it. There's no excuse for such a perfectionist show to have something so visually unconvincing, as if we don't know what non-thin bodies look like and will just accept the signifier. Find something reasonable to do with Betty Draper or let her go.

4) Speaking of pregnancies, what happened to little Kevin? Yes, yes, Joan's mom is at home, and yes there was no attachment parenting in 1966 but she seems awfully unencumbered.  Mad Men has done a great job with Sally, but Bobby, Gene and Kevin all seem to follow the pattern of existing as plot points. Obviously there are practical reasons for this but it would be nice to see a little of how these little ones affect the texture of these everyday lives.

5) Also speaking of pregnancies, is that memory out of Peggy's life for good? Narratively speaking it seems so. I want her to triumph as much as anyone (which is to say, a lot), but it doesn't seem likely that she would have put this behind her in any meaningful way - as far as we can tell she only discussed it honestly with Don once, in "The Suitcase," and even then somewhat obliquely. And from what we know, adoptions of this period proved highly traumatic in the long run.

6) How great that the least angsty of the bunch, Ken, continues his run as the show's one true artist? And too bad for Paul that wishing don't make it so. Like Pete, no one likes him, but unlike Pete, he's not an asshole, just kind of foolish. If he'd kept his mouth shut in his early romance with Joan she could have broke it to him gently and helped him find out he had a talent for gardening or some such and maybe they would have moved to the country together . . . 

7) "Signal 30" and "The Other Woman" were to me the strongest so far. "Signal 30" is a perfect short story - what Cheever or Updike would have written with the benefit of feminist insight. And putting them together, it's striking how much Joan's situation owes to this little worm. Pete's another example of the zig-zag in the long-form approach to storytelling: for a while it seemed like he and Trudy were actually the best-matched couple on the show, but like Pete and, like one suspects, Trudy before too long, we had another thing coming.

8) Speaking of which, Trudy seems the perfect candidate to get radicalized. I'm afraid the show won't totally go there in later seasons out of the misplaced fear of being too explicitly political, but for all the talk about how it would be ahistorical for people on the show to speak from contemporary values, there's a point at which ignoring radicalism will become the real ahistorical path. Joan's too caught up in the games she's learned to play - the feminist insight about femininity as role playing wouldn't be a shock to her at all. Peggy's too invested in her ambition, and Betty's just too Betty. But Trudy is still young, she's obviously well-educated and nobody's fool, and watch out if she finds out just a fraction of what the man she's hitched her star to has been up to. 

9) Speaking of radicalism and the ahistorical, there had really really really better be some payoff with Dawn in the next few episodes.  Seriously, I don't care how realistic you want to make the period's racism, there were, you know, still actual African Americans who have personalities and stories. Start telling them, like, way before yesterday.

10) Is it time for the Mad Men death/suicide pool?  Pete was the early and perhaps too obvious choice, Roger would have made more sense a while back, and Joan - well, can't bear to think about that. My money's on Lane.  

Dance, Little Monkey

So, there was a little kerfuffle recently about David Simon saying that it's silly that people spend so much time and effort doing episode-by-episode analyses of shows that are meant to have long arcs. Actually and not surprisingly, he was saying something much more important and interesting, about what happens when you actually try to say something through a cultural medium. Anytime someone talks about political art, there's lots of hand-wringing about how it can't be "preachy" or "simplistic" or a "pamphlet" and it has to do more than "preach to the choir." Well, here's someone who made a brilliant and genuinely radical piece of art that, even if it got less viewers than Jersey Shore or what have you, became a force in at least a segment of mainstream culture, and among a lot of media/cultural type people who we might think have some sway over how we talk about things. But as Simon notes, what becomes of that? You get a sports reporter asking a fanboy question of a certain fan who happens to be the most powerful person on the planet:

And yes, I understand that the reason for that interview – the precondition under which Obama participated, no doubt – was that it was a discussion of sports.  So, okay, no one needs to bring up a TV drama with the President of the United States for any sensible reason.  And yet at the end, Simmons chose to invoke The Wire.

If he were a hectoring asshole, an argumentative scold, a fucking killjoy, he might realize that he has The Man right there, and that he is at the end of the day acting as, well, a journalist.  So if anything is to be said about that show, well, here is a rare chance to break some ground.  He might swallow hard, seize the moment and say something along the lines of, “Mr. President.  I know you’ve said you’re a fan of The Wire.  Well, one of that show’s basic critiques is that the drug war is amoral.   More Americans are now in prison than ever before, and the percentage of violent offenders in prison is lower than ever.  We are now the jailingest society in the world, incarcerating more of each other than even totalitarian states.  How can we go on supporting this?”

Balls out like that.  Truth to power,  brah.  Get some.

Instead, to use a sportswriting cliché, Simmons choked, throwing up an ugly brick at the buzzer: “Who’s the best character in The Wire?”

So, yeah, the depressing news is that you can make a radical and brilliant work of art that gets some play, and make it entertaining  enough that it's not dismissed as yet another dreary liberal preachy thing, and people get so entertained they say, hey, chill out, it's just entertainment. Yeah, you were a reporter, but that just makes your entertainment nice and real. Neat little trick, that:  

Arguments about the taste of the bread or the look of the circuses go on forever, because, hey, Omar is cool and Bunk is funny as hell and isn’t it great when Clay Davis says the word shit.   Yes, it is nice to know that people were entertained.  It’s not that anyone begrudges an audience its pleasure; we wrote the cool stuff and the funny stuff and we enjoyed it, too.   But four years after The Wire is off the air, are we wrong for admitting aloud to other hopes and purposes for the finished work?

Probably some of my non-English major friends would say, well, yeah, that's the way things go, and that's why serious people should stick to serious straightforward journalism and activism. But it's not like earnest journalism doesn't just as often cause people to say, oh yes, and turn the page - they may not be entertained the way they were with The Wire, but it is similarly pleasure and not a spur to action that motivates them. Right now I'm sitting here typing this with my gorgeous almost-three month old on my lap, and listing to NPR, to reviews of books I won't have time to read and outrages I won't effectively combat (though I might toss off a rant about how NPR gets them wrong.)  And there is a reason "art" - however you look at it - creates the sense it might "break through" where the earnest and straightforward fails. Mike Daisey may have given creative non-fiction a bad name, but there's a reason so many people were drawn to his piece. And obviously there's lots of reasons why David Simon started writing books and making TV instead of being a full-time daily reporter.

I'd be curious how many cops or politicians watched The Wire, and whether it impacted their thinking. Closer to home, it made me think about my own profession, teaching somewhat differently. I'd like to think that if nothing else, it's some kind of counter-programming to the relentlessly pro-lock 'em up drumbeat of just about every other cop or lawyer show on TV. It's not impossible to imagine it spurring some people into action, and having a kind of cumulative effect with other forces pushing towards a more open debate and change. 

On the other hand, I read somewhere recently that The Good Wife had been called "the new Wire." Here's a show basically about a bunch of rich lawyers and their rich lawyer problems of every once in a while having guilt about letting people off, because on lawyer shows it's defense attorneys who are supposed to feel bad about themselves, never the prosecutors. It's enough to make one imagine Simon pulling a full-on McLuhan. In any case, the man knows a thing or two about pushing a form, and it's a treat to see blog writing that pushes outside the normal point and click.

Small Moments in Gendered Parenting Advice

It's the little things: from a list of "unnatural" barriers to healthy sleeping patterns, from Marc Weissbluth, MD:

- Mothers have to work outside the house, miss playing with their baby, and keep their baby up too late at night.

- Fathers or mothers have a long commute and return home from work late, want to play with their baby, and keep their baby up too late at night.

I'm sure it's very reassuring to all working fathers out there that they can't actually miss their babies like moms do, they just want to play with them, and that this can't just happen after a regular day at the office, or even a twelve hour day, but only if the have a long commute. I guess if Betty hadn't bought that damn house in Ossining, and lived in that swank Megan-pad with the kids, he would have been the perfect father!

Not-That-Much-Shorter Jonathan Franzen

"No major American novelist has led a more privileged life than Wharton did." Exhibit A: she had a secretary type her shit! Silly girl? Doesn't she know that's what wives are for? Unless you're Kerouac and write shit that types itself! And not only that, Wharton was a rich white lady who shared the prejudices of rich white ladies of her time! Unlike every other writer in the American canon who are all perfectly non-racist, non-snobby humanitarians, and migrant workers to boot! But wait, perhaps we could consider that a ladynovelist born in 1862 might have faced some kind of struggle? What could that possibly be? Something that rhymes with -ism and starts with s? No, silly, it's that she was uggo! But she was an uggo and made a bad marriage - which has never happened to a beautiful woman, ever! Marilyn Monroe and Betty Draper married their perfect men and lived happily ever after: true fact! And then she had a passionate affair in her forties, but eww, gross. But sadly, unlike migrant workers, who of course dominate the American canon, so much do Americans "sympathize" with them, no one likes or sympathizes with uggos! Uggo ladies, that is. I mean, duh. Uggo for a male novelist just lends poignancy to the novelist/protagonist's desire for young and non-uggo ladies, who are of course metaphors for life, death, and being seventeen. Nevertheless, definitelynotalady novelist Jonathan Franzen has taken the time to write a few pages about her best novels, and decided that she overcame being a stuck up uggo richlady by writing well about some beautiful but damned ladies. Which was a great way of getting narrative revenge on the beauties! I guess uggo men write so they can fuck beautiful women, and uggo women so they can stick it to them more metaphorically.

Yes, I'm a month or so late on this and many others did a good job of taking him down. (This is probably the best.) Since I became a mom, not only do I fail to sleep when my baby sleeps, or leave the dishes until whenever, I can't give up my habit of trying to read every New Yorker straight through and in order, no matter how much farther I fall behind. Some ladynovelist probably has something interesting to say about what this says about my clinging to an illusion of control over my life, and my refusal to avoid reading things that will annoy me, but she's probably the kind of ladynovelist whose books are on Oprah, and so it probably wouldn't be interesting to the Great American Novelists who write about much more Universal Themes like suburban adultery.

Mad Madness: Predictions Editions

Lots of predictions! But first a rant and a prediction that's really a wish:

I've written before about the show's treatment of Carla and show runner Matt Weiner's "that's the way it was" defense of the lack of black folks on the show. He's said something similar a couple of place leading up to the new season. I agree that there's something powerful in letting your heros be on the wrong side of history, showing how racism and indifference to Civil Rights pervaded the culture, not just some easy villains. But this must be cold comfort for black actresses and actors when so many "prestige" projects are "period." I remember reading something back when Shakespeare in Love was up against Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture saying, isn't it interesting that we find these settings so "profound," the ones where blacks don't exist, so excluding them is just historical accuracy? (Obviously there were blacks in WWII, but not in the same units with whites, so you get a totally white film if I'm remembering correctly.) But given the parameters, just because a culture marginalizes someone doesn't mean you have to. Weiner doesn't want to let us off the hook by creating a parallel sixties where African-Americans are welcomed into advertising. Fine. But since when is the show actually about advertising? Isn't it really supposed to be about outsiders? A number of people have pointed out that the very first episode begins with a conversation between Don and a black waiter, with Don asking if he would ever change his brand of cigarettes. Shilling stuff is who Don is; being on the other end of the sell is who the rest of us are, especially outsiders. It's a promise that the treatment of race on the show has yet to fulfill. So my prediction that's actually a wish would be for a full episode that's all about what happens to Carla after Betty fires her. We could see her own family, and how they react. Perhaps she has a teenage son or daughter who has been politicized. We could see Carla look for a new job, interact with her family, friends and neighbors, and catch sideways glimpses, Mad Men style, of what she's actually thought about the Drapers all these years, perhaps revealing a secret of theirs along the way that we're left to figure out.

And bring back Paul and Sheila while you're at it.

Onto the predictions:

- At the start of the new season, Don is still married to Megan, but things are already bad. Fixing his Clio was all well and good, but once things go bad such shoring up starts to look desperate. We seem first flirting with a new (blond, now that the wife is brunette) mistresses or love interest; that he's still married is a reveal the way his marriage was in the first episode.

- Betty will play a very minor role throughout the season. At some point she tries to make a play to get back into Don's good graces and bed: his marriage makes him more attractive to her, along of course with the trials of being Mrs. Henry Francis. Talk about being on the wrong side of history: the guy's a Rockefeller Republican.

- At the same time we'll get to see more of Sally. How wonderful an actress has Kiernan Shipka turned out to be? We'll mostly see her with Don and Megan. She'll start to turn on Megan, but we'll also continue to see just how profoundly she hates Betty.

- An obvious one, but nonetheless: Roger threatens to expose that he's the father of Joan's baby (already born as the season begins), but then kicks it. (If this weren't already an obvious prediction, given the end of his story arc, after Mrs. Blankenship died in episode 9 last season, Roger said he didn't want to die in the office.) Expect some awkward toasts and references to Sterling's Gold and the very welcome return of Mona and Margaret.

- Shortly thereafter, doctor rapist kicks it in Vietnam, but through some stupid drunken accident rather than in combat. Joan is quietly and discretely relieved, and with good reason: being a single mom is better for Joan's work life than being a married mom would have been.

- Peggy continues to kill it for the ungrateful boys of SCDP, and necessity forces them to let her go beyond panty hose into some of the big stuff they reach for to replace Lucky Strikes: booze, cars, maybe even an airline. But her job keeps causing problems with her an Abe. This is more of a dilemma for her now than before, as Vietnam and Joyce have likely furthered her politicization, but it's still no choice: she'll choose the job.

- Burt Cooper comes back, with or without his testicles.

What Happens to Academics on Leave

You have a dream that you meet a friend and he's headed for a conference with important people having important discussions and you say you're not going but you will wander through the book fair, and then you are doing just that, and the book fair is infinite and gleaming like the Dubai airport in your recurring dream, but before you look at a single book you run into another friend, who tells you she's just been talking to a certain important author who, unlike other authors you've written about, plays a definite role in your unconscious. She tells you that this author has had good things to say about a book about him that you're supposed to be reviewing. (This part is true - you're supposed to be reviewing this book, and you partly want to make this deadline and partly want to take some symbolic stand by not working on your leave and/or by being to enraptured with your baby to be able to.) But the part about him liking it rings false for all the obvious reasons. You ask your friend how it was she was talking to this certain important author, and she says, well, we were eating scrambled eggs. Of course they were. Then you hear some whimpering and it takes you a few minutes to realize it's not coming from the book fair but from your actual baby in his crib at the foot of his bed, yanking you back into the world Inception-style. You go to get a glass of water and are momentarily thankful that the world does not miss you.

More Vanity and More Despair

So, this is what I've been up to. Of course, there's an infinite amount to say about this, all of which is far too much and too overwhelming and too wonderful to give shape to just now. So for now I'm writing about easier things. Sadly, motherhood has not insulated me from the freak show that is the Republican primary, but distaste is a lot easier than love. Hence, Callista Gingrich.

During the 2008 election, I was reading Curtis Sittenfeld's novel American Wife, which revolves around a fictionalized version of Laura Bush. It was an odd thing to be reading at the height of Obama mania. At the end, there's a "twist": she didn't vote for him. On some level because she didn't want to be First Lady, but also because in her sensible librarian way she thinks the other guy is more qualified. When she thinks about all the decisions the Bush-like character has made, she tells the reader, hey, I just married him, you all elected him. It's a funny moment. It's also one that from a certain point of view could be seen as a kind of liberal fantasy, with all the flaws therein, an extension of the old knock against Pauline Kael not knowing anyone who voted for Nixon: the liberal feminist novelist can't imagine anyone who would vote for Bush, not even his wife. But Sittenfeld can't really explain why she married him either, except suggesting his sexual prowess from some scenes I'm still trying to get out of my head and which prevent me from recommending the novel to anyone in good conscience.

Another funny moment comes when the Laura character describes the low point of being first lady: the book she writes under the "pen name" of the first pet. It's a little unfair since as far as my google-fu can tell, she's penned only her memoirs and a children's book. Her mother-in-law, on the other hand, is the author of "Millie's Book as dictated to Barbara Bush," while Hillary Clinton has Dear Socks, Dear Buddy Kids' Letters to First Pets to her credit along with Living History and It Takes a Village. It is of course beyond unfair to think this all says anything about these women; I'd wager that none of these were their ideas and that they spent no more than a few hours on them, and even if this weren't the case, so what?

Still, I'll cop to a curious fascination with the literary output of First Ladies and those who aspire to be First Ladies, which is how I ended up with a copy of Callista Gingrich's Sweet Land of Liberty, a romp through American History with Ellis the elephant, on my shelf. I started thinking about Callista after reading this brilliant profile by the always-brilliant Ariel Levy. I remember talking about it when I was in the hospital and a friend was flipping through the then-new issue. When I got to it a few weeks later, I thought, have I already read this? No, that was the profile she did of Cindy McCain the last time around. You have to hand it to these women: god knows it takes a lot of something to do what they do on the campaign trail: as Levy notes, they have to gaze adoringly while listening to the same stump speech over and over.

In Wild Man Blues, Barbara Kopple's documentary about Woody Allen touring Europe with his jazz band, we see Soon Yi taking care of his laundry and keeping the outside world at bay. It's a bit of a shock, given everything, to see her acting as a sort of mother figure to him. You get the same feeling reading about the third Mrs. Gingrich. When Sean Hannity poses and unwelcome question, she "raised her eyebrows slightly and replied in the implacable tone of a kindergarten teacher scolding a six-year-old." The sentiment seems to extend to her husband: "The woman is always the grown up," her husband is quoted as saying. "No matter what." No matter how much younger she is, presumably. It's been said lots of times before, but it's always stunning to hear this stuff from the traditional values crowd. Not that we feminist man-hating types never roll our eyes at stereotypical Peter Pan stuff, but we almost always have the good taste not to do it in public about men we supposedly love, let alone ones we're holding up as great leaders.