(S P O I L E R S)
In
which I wish I was going somewhere.
June 15th and 16th,
1960: on these consecutive days, two now-classic films that would profoundly
shape the culture’s view of femininity made their New York premieres. The film which made its bow on the 16th
was, at the time, viewed as a quick, cheap, somewhat dirty picture from a
director renowned for his expertly controlled, richly designed thrillers
(including his hit political/romantic thriller from the year before.) But critics of this new film forgot the
darkness that often lay beneath the gloss.
In fact, two films before, the director had crafted a gorgeous
Technicolor romance that doubled as a melancholic examination of male desire
and obsession, featuring a classic leading man plunging into his own tortured
psyche to fashion his lover into the image of a dead woman. On the surface, the director’s new film was
much more of a slick shock machine. But
the story it told, of one woman rebelling against a male chauvinist order, who
then meets a man emasculated by a controlling woman, only to fall victim to him
on the brink of her redemption, offered a perverse, complex study of female
sexuality. Critics might’ve railed
against Psycho because of the
then-graphic violence, but maybe the real reason the film got under their skins
was because of what it had to say about being a woman in 1960.
Early on in “Long Weekend”, Roger mentions Psycho to Joan as
he tries to woo her into a Labor Day weekend with him while Mona and Margaret
are away. But the film that he attempts
to compare it to, the one that Joan has on her mind, the one that debuted one
day before Psycho is Billy Wilder’s The
Apartment. Throughout Mad Men’s run, Matt Weiner has listed
many cultural touchstones as influences on the look and tone of the show. The current MOMA series of its filmic
influences includes, among others, Hitchcock’s two pre-Psycho films (Vertigo and
North by Northwest.) But it also prominently features The Apartment, which Weiner has spoken
about at length over the past seven plus years.
If you haven’t seen The Apartment….well, go watch it. It’s on Netflix. And yeah, it’s pretty awesome. Wilder’s films are always expertly crafted
mixtures of humor and sadness, filmic love letters dipped in acid (although
with Sunset Boulevard, and especially
with the brutal Ace in the Hole, the
acid was front and center.) In The Apartment, Jack Lemmon’s low level
insurance agency office drone gets caught up in the comic zaniness when he
agrees to lend his apartment to his lecherous boss (Fred MacMurray, returning
to Wilder’s dark playground after his memorable turn in Double Indemnity) so that he can carry out his love affairs in private. The plot thickens when it turns out that the
sassy, female elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) whom Lemmon secretly pines
for is his boss’s new mistress. (Man, no
one knew how to bring out the sliminess in Fred MacMurray like Wilder….and I
say this knowing that a decent chunk of you reading this probably have no clue
who Fred MacMurray is….c’mon people, that’s what the internet is for!)
The whole thing is a great satire
of the corporate culture that was beginning to subsume American life (the
famous image above, of a seemingly endless progression of office desks, tells
the whole story), while also serving as a tender romance and a stinging proto-feminist
commentary. MacLaine believes MacMurray’s
patter about how she’s different, how she’ll be the one he leaves his wife
for. But her ultimate realization that
she’s just another disposable lust object is crushing; it’s a bitter rebuke of
the patriarchal machine of the day, and how it chewed up and spit out women.
Mad
Men
has often used cultural references of the era as subtle commentaries on plot
and character arcs, but “Long Weekend” explicitly uses The Apartment as the backbone for several of its major threads, as
women strive for acceptance in the rarified male order, only to be kicked back
down the social ladder or treated as fantasy objects. Following her tryst with Pete in “The Hobo
Code”, Peggy is still torn over the mixed signals that he keeps sending
her. When she firmly confronts him over
this during a heated exchange, it’s a deeply vulnerable moment for her. She also gets off one of the best lines of
the first season when she responds to Pete’s stern admonition that he’s married
with “Yes I know. And I heard all about
how confusing that can be. Maybe you
need me to lay on your couch to clear that up for you again.” (Pete’s response of “That’s some imagination
you’ve got” continues that philosophical thread from “Marriage of Figaro”,
while also again foreshadowing Don’s advice to Peggy in Season 2’s “The New
Girl”) Pete’s class/legacy-centric
conflict may eat away at him, but he’s still not fully aware of how much power
he has over Peggy, how destructive he can be on so many levels (although that
will change greatly as time passes.)
But Joan is the obvious Shirley
MacLaine stand-in here, her long-standing affair with Roger the basis for much
of her frustration (ironic, considering how “Babylon” established her seeming
dominance of their power relationship.)
When her roommate Carol reveals that her insensitive boss fired her for
his own oversight, Joan seizes the chance for a moment of feminist unity by
ignoring Roger’s advances and taking her out for a night of bachelor
hunting. But even Joan’s attempt to take
control of sexual politics is doomed.
The schlubs that she and Carol bring home may prove that the girls are
calling the shots, but these are still the same losers who leer over women like
Joan every day (I’ve always found their selection of men here a bit confusing,
as Joan has proven that she can do much better…unless this is her version of
going slumming.) And when Carol
confesses that she’s long been in love with Joan (“Just think of me as boy” she
says, a sad attempt at co-opting the male order), that she followed her from
college in the hopes that she’d notice her someday, Joan’s awkward attempt to
diffuse the situation brings her more in line with her perception of Roger than
she’d like; Carol is left to be kicked back down her own ladder of aspiration,
relegated to sleeping with one of their unctuous suitors. Joan ultimately fares no better; her final
shot in the episode is one final callback to The Apartment, as she’s visually relegated to being Bert Cooper’s
elevator operator.
When Carol reluctantly agrees to
those advances, she blankly says that she’ll do “whatever you want.” It’s a line echoed later in the episode by
twin sister Eleanor, when she tries to seduce Don by telling him “Tell me what
to do, and I’ll do it.” In this world,
women are fully aware of their objectification, and cling to it in the hopes of
greater dreams. Eleanor and Mirabelle
are literally love partners selected from the casting pool, Don and Roger’s reaction
to a day of rejection (by Dr. Scholl’s and Joan, respectively.) Less assertive women in tow, Roger sets out
to reestablish his manhood, first by trying to get the twins to make out, then
by turning Mirabelle’s admission of her equestrian background against her by
literally riding her back into the office (that was a moment always guaranteed
to unnerve the students when we watched this episode in class.) Even the line of seduction that he drops on
Mirabelle (“You have such beautiful skin.
My God, I just wanna eat it. I
want to suck your blood, like Dracula.”) frames her exclusively as an object of
complete submission.
The presence of the twin sisters
also mirrors two more sets of dopplegangers in “Long Weekend”. Sterling Cooper’s courting of the Nixon
campaign has been a subplot running through the first season, but now that the
election is at hand, this plot thread comes more to the front. It’s been subtle so far, but the comparisons
between Don and Pete, and Nixon and Kennedy have been there all along. In this episode, Don finally explicitly vocalizes
them. In response to the stark
difference between the two candidates’ television campaigns (Kennedy’s ads a
brilliant montage of visuals, Nixon’s entry a single shot of his dour
lecturing), Don lauds Nixon’s Midwest hardscrabble background, saying “I see
Kennedy, I see a silver spoon. I see
Nixon…I see myself.” Of course, Dick
Whitman would sympathize with the farmboy with deep seated mother issues, who
also happens to be a paranoid control freak.
And he obviously sees Pete as the silver spoon-sucking JFK. The irony, of course, is that Don is as much
JFK as anyone, his square-jawed good looks and hyper-confidence as much of his
appeal as anything, his secret life mirroring the severe medical problems, love
affairs, and mob ties that Kennedy also hid.
And Pete may have the pedigreed background, but he’s as much of a
schemer and weasel as Nixon would prove to be.
The other set of twins is, of
course, Don and Roger. I discussed this
at length in the essay for “Red in the Face”, but Janie Bryant makes things
crystal clear in this episode, with the two men dressed in almost identical
grey suits to match the nearly matching dressed on Eleanor and Mirabelle. And it’s because of this most explicit
confirmation of Don and Roger’s connection that Roger’s heart attack hits Don
so hard. Like Betty with Helen Bishop,
Don sees Roger’s fall as a stark reminder of his own mortality, and a potential
preview of what lies ahead for him. With
death literally staring him in the face, his only recourse is to run to Rachel
Menken for relief.
And it’s here that we get one of
our first extended glimpses of Dick Whitman in full, stripped of his Don Draper
suit, emotionally naked. It’s clear by
now that Rachel realizes what a sensitive souls rests within Don, but she’s
still taken aback by his utter panic.
When Don chokes back tears as he begs Rachel “This is it. This is all there is and I feel like it’s
slipping through my fingers like a handful of sand. This is it.
This is all there is.” everything comes full circle. After
all, this is the same guy who peddled studied nihilism to Rachel in the climax
of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” when he said:
“You're born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch
of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts, but I never forget...
I'm living like there's no tomorrow, 'cause there isn't one.”
The apocalypse has finally
arrived. Yet when it proves to be personal,
not social, Don is devastated. His
admission to Rachel of his wildly dysfunctional family background is a major
moment for the character. But as we’ll
see in the last three episodes of the season, confession doesn’t always equal
absolution.
A few odds and ends to finish:
*This episode has some of the
best one liners of the season. A few of
them include:
-Peggy’s
aforementioned slam of Pete.
-“Do
you like Ukranian food?” (Paul, bringing back the line he tried on Peggy,
trying to seduce one of the casting call models. Is Paul Kinsey the only human on earth who
uses this line?)
-“Oh
my. Everything he says means something
else too.” (Mirabelle, about Roger)
-And
some great additions to the Roger Sterling Comedy Hall of Fame, including:
~”If
Freddie Rumsen’s mind works like I think it does-slow and obvious…”
~”When
God closes a door, he opens a dress.”
~”I’d
like to get to the bottom…why yes, I would like to see those” (Faking
conversation with Joan)
*At the beginning of the episode,
we once again see Betty’s cattier side, as she derides her father’s girlfriend
Gloria as a vulture, who’s late husband was a failure. It’s becoming clear by the point that the
Hofstadt bloodline has much in common with the Dyckman legacy, and that the
privilege Betty grew up in is a greater part of her character than was
initially apparent.
*Matt Weiner’s time in the Sopranos writer’s room shines through a
bit in the aftermath of Roger’s heart attack.
It’s an emotionally powerful moment of self-realization for Roger, but
much like Tony Soprano’s episodes of insights, it proves to be fleeting. By midway through Season 2, Roger is dumping
Mona for 20 year-old secretary Jane.
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