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Friday, April 3, 2015

A Conversation Comes to a Close

StarGazer

        I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something. Those two lines opened “Time Zones”, the first episode of the seventh and final season of AMC’s complex, game-changing Mad Men. They also, in a way, summed up the show as a whole.  Demanding the kind of constant, painfully close scrutiny from viewers that made it a boon to TV critics everywhere, Mad Men was a series of beginnings – blossoming relationships, unstable mergers, forever-shifting identities, history itself all hurtling toward a terrifying yet exciting unknown – but it realized what its characters tried so hard to deny: that every birth and rebirth must be accompanied by a death. In the season four finale, Dr. Faye Miller, the latest woman to be deserted by Jon Hamm’s womanizing Don Draper, told the ad man extraordinaire that he only likes the beginnings of things. That quote rang with such truth not because Don is selfish and noncommittal, though he’s undeniably a bit of both, but because he knows that facing the end means confronting his end, becoming face-to-face with his own mortality. He fears that inevitable moment of loss and the lack of control he has over it, just as he’s afraid of change, of moving on and getting left behind, so he runs away.

        Much will be written about Mad Men between now and when that final shot, whatever it is, fades from our TV screens. People will ruminate over what it means for prestige cable shows, antiheroes and the so-called Golden Age of Television, and the vast majority of it will likely be more thorough, more precise, more insightful than this piece. I don’t say that to be self-deprecating or (just) because I don’t have the highest self-esteem, but rather, because there’s been so much fantastic writing about this show scattered across the Internet, on sites like A.V. Club, Salon, Tom + Lorenzo and just about anywhere else you can find TV criticism, that I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t urge you to check these recaps and analyses out.

        I can’t say I’ve been watching Mad Men from the beginning. In fact, the first episode I ever saw was the season three premiere, “Out of Town”, and considering that I had only the vaguest awareness of who the characters were and what was happening plot-wise, this was unsurprisingly a bad idea. Though I’d heard and read nothing but endless praise for the show, a stately period drama about the world of advertising didn’t exactly sound like compelling entertainment to me at the time. I couldn’t imagine not finding it stiff, slow and overly dense, and my first uninformed attempt to dive in confirmed these initial expectations firmly enough that I didn’t give it another chance until around at least two years later. Seeing that the 17-month hiatus between seasons four and five would give me plenty of time to fully catch up, I started watching in the fall of 2011, which I remember because it was my first semester of college. This time, I got hooked instantly.

        Perfectly titled “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, the pilot exhibited many of the show’s best qualities from the beginning: the subtle wit and self-awareness of its writing; the prickly characters we would learn to both love and hate; the deliberate way it used its production design, cinematography and lighting to establish setting, mood and theme. While I obviously already knew that Don had a family when I finally watched that episode, the reveal of Betty and their children still worked as a means of telling audiences that not everything was as it appeared, that beneath the ad-glossy surface of class and glamour lay a universe of greed, deceit, ambiguity and dark secrets.




        It’s a testament to the complexity of Matthew Weiner’s and co.’s vision that I find it so difficult to write about their show. Aside from an eventually-abandoned piece defending the sixth season, whose brilliance I still stand by, I haven’t attempted to dissect the many layers, symbols and nuances present in each episode and season, too daunted by the task and worried that I would miss key elements. How can I possibly capture everything this show was and meant in only a couple thousand words? Although there are other shows that are perhaps dearer to my heart (namely, Lost and Fringe), I don’t think anything has come as close to flawless as Mad Men.

        A sign of just how young the medium is, no one has yet developed a vocabulary that could be used to describe quality television without comparing it to other forms of entertainment. Mad Men had the sensual lyricism of poetry and the grandeur of cinema, each episode unfolding with the brevity and satisfying completeness of a great short story. Strongly suggesting what Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby might’ve been like if it took place in the 1960s, it also boasted the thematic richness most frequently associated with literary novels. Yet it never tried to be anything other than a TV show and likely would not have worked if told through a different medium. Taking advantage of TV’s visual component to highlight details and symbols that might’ve come across as heavy-handed in a purely written format, it delved into its characters and world with a depth that would’ve been impossible in a film’s short running time. The structural demands of TV – from the iconic opening credits and the necessary breaks for commercials to the memorable and slyly, purposefully infuriating preview segments – helped shape story arcs, each season break representing both a literal time jump and a crucial period of transition in the characters’ lives.

        More than anything else, Mad Men was impeccably crafted and unapologetically confident. Every costume designed by the immensely talented Janie Bryant, every mannerism or change in facial expression by an actor, every line of dialogue and camera shot felt loaded with purpose, puzzle pieces that, taken together, added up to a more dynamic and meaningful whole.

        Take, for example, the episode called “The Monolith”, which features a number of homages to 2001: A Space Odyssey and other Stanley Kubrick movies. On another show, it would’ve been easy to dismiss these as random winks to film buffs or pretentious efforts to give the episode a sheen of importance, but the frequent references actually play a vital role, emphasizing the seventh season’s ongoing focus on technology and outer space and echoing the characters’ growing paranoia and anxiety of the unknown. Like the show as a whole, “The Monolith” was preoccupied with mortality and the ways in which the past haunts the future, even as the latter inevitably supplants the former. Using the firm’s acquisition of a new IBM computer as a catalyst, the episode pushes various characters to confront the possibility of their own obsolescence. Yet for an episode that was even more preoccupied with death than usual and that largely retains 2001’s coldly existential perspective, “The Monolith” ends on an upbeat note. After spending a day wallowing in self-pity, Don receives some advice from ex-alcoholic Freddy Rumsen, a surprising source, sobers up and returns to work with a renewed sense of purpose. In Mad Men, people cling to what they know because it’s certain, definable and, therefore, controllable. However, “The Monolith” suggested that change, the ability to adapt is also what separates humans from machines, which, for all their efficiency and intelligence, have no capacity for mystery or surprise. Machines look up at the stars and see a number where we see beauty, life, God, the promise of infinity.

        Mad Men both covered and came at a very specific time in history. The 1960s gave the show the opportunity to explore one of the most tumultuous eras in American history, when the civil rights and burgeoning feminist movements, waves of anti-authoritarian discontent, and violence both at home and abroad threatened to disrupt the quiet, postwar status quo of white, patriarchal power and conformity. Frequently touching on historical events in passing rather than devoting significant amounts of time to them, this more elliptical approach made it more notable whenever there was a direct reference, whether to the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations or to the Apollo 11 moon landing.

        However, more importantly, the show avoided two potential traps that await any period piece: the ease with which a narrative can frame its version of history as universal, and the temptation to look back on the past with either nostalgia or smugness. Although this doesn’t wholly excuse all of its problematic aspects, Mad Men has always been honest about and committed to being a portrayal of a specific group of people – that is, upper/middle-class white people. It didn’t try to cover the entire decade from every angle and touchstone moment or pretend that viewpoint, which has long been treated as the default perspective through which we see history, was the right or only one. Matthew Weiner has even explicitly said the show is about whiteness, providing useful context for how it dealt with issues like race and making episodes like season seven’s “A Day’s Work” particularly fascinating. Like most good historical fiction, Mad Men used the past to comment on and question the present, asking not only how we got here, but also how much has really changed. With its elegant fashion and music sense and lavish attention to period detail, the show wasn’t entirely absent of nostalgia, but for the most part, it set up that longing as a contrast to the uglier reality simmering underneath, whether by depicting the dangers women like Peggy and Joan faced when navigating a sexist society or by slowly unveiling the broken tyrant lurking behind Don’s oh-so-cool exterior. It offered up a utopia only to deconstruct it and reveal that it was an illusion all along. Though the show premiered in 2007 and therefore could hardly have anticipated the future, its commentary on the myth of the American Dream and the fragility of existing power structures felt especially relevant in the aftermath of the 2008 stock market crash and the Great Recession.

        In case it seems like the show was all heady social issues and technical handicraft, rest assured, it was actually a joy to watch. Mad Men’s greatest secret might be that it could regularly be off-the-walls hysterical. Between Roger Sterling’s caustic put-downs, Peggy hanging up on an unwanted call, pirate Ken Cosgrove, a memorably delivered greeting from Pete Campbell and many other bits of hilarity, I laughed out loud at this show more than I have at many comedies.  One of the few shows that I think regularly did meta well, mostly because it never distracted from the text itself, Mad Men had a healthy sense of humor that prevented it from descending into dreary solemnity.

        Yet what fueled the show more than anything else was its denial of easy pleasure, both to the characters and the audience. That’s not to say that there weren’t instances of sincere happiness or triumph, but those moments were either hard-won or countered by something more tragic, bittersweet or sobering, reminders that such thrills are temporary and all-too-often come at a price. If that sounds too cynical, then consider that Don only got a shot at redemption because he went through a personal hell first, and would the scene in “The Strategy” where he and Peggy slow dance to Sinatra’s “My Way” be nearly as poignant if they didn’t have a history littered with conflict, doubts and, at times, outright rivalry? It’s that contradiction, the way their antagonism and tenderness toward each other coexisted, that made their relationship one for the ages.

And in that moment, my heart exploded with emotions

        The Mad Men finale will mark the end of what’s been called the Third Golden Age of TV. Starting with The Sopranos, this period of shows was characterized by a fascination with masculinity and troubled antiheroes living in morally hazy universes. It included The Wire, Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire, but it seems appropriate for Mad Men to get a final say. While it occupies some of the same ideological territory as those other shows, Mad Men stands out in the current TV landscape because it captivated, shocked, and awed without having the luxury of using violence and sudden, mass deaths  to shake things up. That’s not to say it never had any violence or deaths (see: the lawnmower incident, Lane Pryce), but writers couldn’t use it as a consistent crutch, and sensational episodes were frequently overshadowed by more quietly dramatic moments. Instead, it relied on meticulous production design, writing that sings off the screen, consistently sure-handed direction, and an absolutely phenomenal cast of actors (who have not garnered a single Emmy win for their roles here). It turned communication through silences and meaningful glances into an art form and resulted in a singular portrait of privilege and power, of a country in transition and of people scrambling to simultaneously define, maintain and remake their individual and collective identity.

        More than anything else, I fell in love with its characters, from the imperial, ruthlessly competent Joan, John Slattery’s boozy Roger and Kiernan Shipka’s willful yet perceptive Sally Draper to the weaselly, self-loathing Pete and January Jones as suburban ice queen Betty, who I’ll passionately defend to the (likely) bitter end. Even Harry Crane had his charm, in a love-to-hate-him sort of way. I’ll be sad to see them go. Of course, this isn’t to say that dark, male antihero shows will disappear from TV forever, or that there won’t be other great ones, but different, perhaps more diverse stories beckon; as Don and co. are slowly discovering, nothing lasts forever. In time, we will likely circle back around to this show and others like it, return to a place we ache to go again, but for now, this is the end of an era, and it’s time to say goodbye. Pay attention, one last time.


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