In
which it’s a sign of the life not lived.
(C’mon now, you didn’t think that
you’d be rid of my personal Mad Men
odyssey/vision quest this easily did you?
So yeah, hot on the heels of my award-winning Season 1 literary hoedown,
I’ve decided to jump ahead ten years and chronicle the final seven episodes of
the show as they air. There’ll be a few
changes, of course. Probably far less
teaching anecdotes, although who knows what connections might pop up. I don’t have DVR…yeah, I know….get with the
21st century and all….so if I intend to post each new essay the day
after its episode airs, I might be a bit limited in terms of granular
specifics. Although if something
warrants enough attention, I could always wait and use the on demand version of
the episode. And I’m currently
rewatching Season 3 as well, so pardon me if some confusion sets in. Anyway, you get the point. Some of these essays will involve a bit more
of me flying blind. But I hope you dig
them anyway.)
Some of the most indelible moments
in the history of Mad Men are those which
are seemingly the most un-Mad Men like. For a show that trades in glossy realism, it’s
those moments in which a sense of the uncanny creeps around the edges, in which
a profound sense of chaos and fluidity lurks underneath the cool logic of ’60s
New York…those are the snapshots out of time that really take up residence
underneath your skin. It’s a tack that
Matt Weiner borrowed from his old stomping grounds at The Sopranos, which often took the conceit to episode-swallowing
dreamscape lengths. And it’s why “Severance”,
the first of the final seven episodes of the show, has stuck with me since last
night.
The later seasons of Mad Men remind me very much of the deep
run of The Sopranos. In their early going, both shows establish
fairly solid chains of causality, gradually crafting plot threads that pay off
in some way or another (or at least leave the audience hanging.) It’s a fairly standard method for a new show,
a way to immerse viewers in the world without too much confusion (David Simon famously
disagreed, as witnessed in his “throw ‘em in the deep end and make ‘em swim”
approach to plotting in Season 1 of The
Wire.) But as time marches on, the
narrative flow in both shows becomes much more diffuse. Motivations are more muddled, and the payoffs
often come without a clear setup provided to the viewer. In The
Sopranos, this chaotic element reflected the free-ranging uncertainty of a
mobster’s life, as death might lay wait around any corner. The chaos and sense of the uncanny that
haunts later seasons of Mad Men can
be directly connected to the cultural tumult of the ‘60s, as previously
sacrosanct ideologies and logical structures began to fray and crumble. But on a philosophical level, each show also
breaks things apart as a reflection of its main character’s journey into the
self, and all the dark and unpredictable corners that reside within.
“Severance” is a prime example of
this sense of a collapsing center, especially in its narrative thrust. The events of the episode seem to be slightly
disjointed, as we’re thrown into a world almost a year removed from the events
of “Waterloo”, and presented with plot threads that seem to be more a series of
happenings than a tightly constructed assemblage of scenes working together to
set up the last hours of this fictional world.
Don and Roger are both back to hanging and banging with models. The moment of growth, revelation, and
sacrifice that Roger experienced after Bert Cooper’s death seems to have
passed, as he gladly plays the hatchet man in following the McCann Erickson
directive to fire Ken Cosgrove (as payback for his abandonment of McCann for
SCDP long after the PPL purchase.) Ted,
such an integral character to the past few seasons, is now relegated to a few
minor bits of business (although, granted, he did want to scale back his
involvement with the biz at the end of “Waterloo.”)
And even amidst the jump cut
logic of the narrative, it all seems like business as usual. But there again is that creeping sense that
it’s not. The title of the episode might
directly refer to the offer given to Ken upon his firing (and his father-in-law’s
retirement), but so many of the characters in this April 1970 world are coming
to an end of some sort or another. Take
Joan, whose rise to partner status has finally given her the wealth, security,
and power (especially in the wake of the McCann buyout) that she’s yearned for
all these years. And yet, when she and
Peggy meet with three McCann reps to discuss financial support for Topaz
pantyhose, they’re literally treated as pieces of meat (a mirroring of the
Wilkinson Fur casting call that opens the episode, in which the line between
genuine seduction, advertising, objectification, fantasy, and about a hundred
other different things is blurred.) It’s
a shocking display of overt misogyny; Joan has always garnered her share of flirtations
from men in the office, but the nasty directness of these three schlubs lacks
any of the vintage bawdiness that the show has so often playfully critiqued.
In the early days of the show,
Joan’s power came from how skillfully she manipulated the sexist instincts of
the men around her, even if she inflated the heft of some of that power for her
own survival. But ten years on, she’s in
her early 40’s, and clearly growing tired of her sex symbol status (and still
dealing with the emotional scars of being raped by her one-time fiancée, and
sleeping with a Jaguar executive to secure the account and her partnership.) In a telling (and perhaps long-coming) reversal,
Peggy is the one who rebukes her laments about the male gaze by telling her
that “You can’t dress the way you do.”
In 1960, it was Joan breaking Peggy in to the Sterling Cooper culture by
advising her to play up her sexuality, but now the pupil has turned on the
teacher. Christina Hendricks’s
hyper-sexualized physique has always been an icon of the show’s gender
politics, but as the narrative cycle draws to a close, it’s become as much of a
trap as Don’s carefully maintained cool.
And speaking of our brooding
anti-hero, despite his ascendance back to the throne of Creative Director and
partner, he’s experiencing his own series of severances. His marriage to Megan, which slowly dissolved
over the previous season and a half, is in the midst of its official
divorce. And when an attempt to
reconnect with Rachel Menken nee Katz unexpectedly results in his learning of
her death from Leukemia the week before, it’s a shattering moment for Don. In my essay for Season 1’s “Nixon vs. Kennedy”,
I noted the tragedy of Rachel reducing her affair with Don to nothing more than
a fling, as even back then it was obvious that a deeper spiritual connection
existed between these star-crossed lovers.
Through six subsequent seasons, Don has tried and failed to match that
connection to a fellow outsider, but there’s been nothing to match the searing
emotions he felt when with her. When he
visits her wake and sees her young children, it’s a knockout blow to his
psyche, almost equaling the breakdown he experienced in Season 1 when he tried
to convince her to run away with him to a new life.
And here’s where that world just
beyond our view. lurking around the edges, really comes into play. As Ken says when telling Don about the
seeming coincidence of his firing directly following his father-in-law’s
retirement and his wife’s pleading with him to finally return to his writing
career, it’s “a sign of the life not lived.”
Regret has always played a major role in Mad Men, but at the end of its cycle we see characters seemingly at
the peak of their professional lives looking back on what could’ve been. As Ken briefs him on the accounts that he’ll
assume, Pete laments his time in California, how it seemed like a perfect
reinvention of his frustrated existence (which stemmed, in part, from his
doomed romance with Beth in Season 6.)
Peggy laments the life she sacrificed for advancement in the ad world by
spontaneously asking blind date Stevie to fly to Paris with her, but by the
next morning she’s regretting that decision as a drunken folly, an alternate
life to be discarded (it’s notable that she delayed their trip because of a
lost passport, which she finds in her desk at SCP.)
And the life that Don might’ve
had with Rachel, the one that he’s shoved into the back of his consciousness
all of these years, the one that clearly haunts him to this day. Early in the episode, he dreams that she’s
the next model auditioning for the Wilkinson campaign (Maggie Siff makes a surprise
cameo). Dreamworld Ted says to him “this
is another girl”, and even as this Rachel tells Don that “you’ve missed your
flight”, all he can muster in return is “You’re not just smooth, you’re
Wilkinson smooth.” When Ted morphs into
Pete (who tells him “Back to work”) it shocks Don awake, and when he eventually
learns of her death, he’s convinced that his dream somehow prefigured it. And fearful that, as his dream was warning,
he convinced himself that Rachel was just another in a long line of conquests,
when she was really something so much more.
Which introduces the most
enigmatic plot point of “Severance”: the mysterious waitress, played by
Elizabeth Reaser. When Don first meets
her at the diner, during his afterhours meal with Roger and the models, he’s
struck by a nagging sense of familiarity; it’s that tugging at the boundaries
of consciousness, previously symbolized in mostly flashbacks, dreams, and
hallucinations, that eats away at him in his more private moments. But his reaction to the waitress is like that
of someone seeing a ghost, or some of their existential concerns from the dream
world taking physical form. His return
to see her a second time results in the two of them copulating in the alley
behind the diner, while a third visit (in search of some enlightenment after
Rachel’s death) entails her warning Don to bring a date the next time.
Ted might not have a lot to do in
this episode, but one of his seemingly throwaway lines has stuck with me: “There
are three women in every man’s life.” He
says it in an attempt to avoid picking one fur model from the final three. But it might be the key to Don’s meetings
with the waitress, and to his life. You
could say that he’s had three true loves in Betty, Rachel, and Megan (the wife,
the mistress, and the dream.) His three
visits to the waitress can be seen to symbolize the three standard stages of
his romantic life: fascination, lust, and rejection. (And much like the other
women who truly fascinate Don, the waitress is both a brunette and an outsider.) In The
Sopranos, David Chase showed a fascination with the number three
(especially in how 3am is supposed to be the hour of ghosts), so maybe Matt
Weiner is picking up that thread as well (there are also three McCann reps to
sexually harass Joan and Peggy.) Or
maybe I’m overthinking all of this.
The other symbolic significance
of the waitress might be in her reading of John Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel, one third
of his famed U.S.A. Trilogy. That metafictional triptych uses the impact
of World War I to offer a pointed critique of capitalism, offering up
characters whose financial success only lead to dehumanization. (Note: I’ve never read any Dos Passos, so my
knowledge of all of this is somewhat limited to some rudimentary research.) It’s somewhat of an obvious signifier (Roger
pointedly references her book during their first meeting), but it also lends a
sense of the uncanny to her presence in this episode, one which has yet to be
explained. Don clearly sees her (just as
he’s seen previous outsider women, just as many of us see complete strangers)
as an outlet for his emotions. And when
she tells him that “when people die, everything gets mixed up” and that “maybe
you dreamed about her (Rachel) all the time”, she takes on a shamanistic
importance for him. She’s the profundity
that can be found in the mundane, or maybe, much like Don himself, someone hiding
behind more easily stereotyped veneer.
Her presence is a glimpse for Don, out of the corner of his eye, of
something he’s been ignoring for a long time.
In the end, just as so many times
before, Don is left alone and shaken, sitting in the diner to contemplate his
existence, to the strains of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” (which also
opens the episode as an ironic counterpoint to the erotic stylings of the
Wilkinson fur auditions.) As that lyric
opines “I’m in no hurry for the final disappointment.” But maybe the most instructive line of the
episode comes from Ken’s wife, who when trying to convince him to return to
writing (although he ultimately even rejects that life not lived to become Dow
Chemical’s Head of Advertising) says his book should be “something sad and
sweet, for all those people who don’t have the guts to follow their dream.” In the end, we’re left with Don once again in
a state of deep melancholy, his sadness tempering the sweet smell of his success,
his dreams of another life so far away.
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