MAD LOVE: Terry Gilliam and the Incredible Exploding, Imploding, Cinematic Inevitable

“To be deemed to be OK, to be part of the culture, that's the kiss of death. When I'm pushing against something it helps me define what I believe. I've always been led to see what's beyond, what's round the corner. The world tries to say that this is what it is, and don't go any further, because out there are monsters. But I want to see what they are.”  -Terry Gilliam

It all started with the dwarves.  It often does.  Back yonder, in the days when we had to play rock paper scissors each night to see who would light their clothes on fire to provide light and heat, we also managed to have a luxury or two…although not always at the same time.  And one of said luxuries was a grand and imperious invention that would serve as the John the Baptist for the coming televisual revolution.  And it was dubbed Home…Box…Office.  And it was good.  The first day.

And the Lord said “Let there be films (one day, they’ll just call them ‘content’) for this raging imperious prophet of the airwaves!  But let’s not go too overboard with how many, okay?”  And so the demigods of the budding universe they called “cable” worked their dark arts and procured that divinely mandated limited number of films, just enough so that their latent audience of television fiends would offer forth their hard earned shekels for the monthly privilege of indulging their visual cortexes (thus fulfilling the prophetic advice of Isaiah 67:24, which reads “Hook thy brothers first with a meagre and free taste, for then shall they chase the dragon with great ardour.”)

And so, in these murky and mysterious times, did Home…Box…Office…acquire the rights to show a film about a young and imaginative boy, his awful television addict parents, the pure embodiment of evil…and a troop of thieving dwarves, who had stolen the MAP TO THE UNIVERSE (the one that showed all the secret time portals) from the Supreme Being (God, litigious soul that he can be, refused to license his nom de plume to such an endeavor.)  A film directed by an American ex-pat who’d gained some modicum of fame from being an animator for a British gang of comedy thugs.  And for being The American in this gaggle of Brits.

And so it was that my life was irrevocably changed.

I remember watching Time Bandits in pieces when it debuted on HBO.  And quite frankly, I had very little clue of what it was all about at first.  It just seemed a bit strange.  And British.  Very British.  But it focused on the adventures of a kid!  And when you’re a kid…well, I hope you know that feeling.  And the supporting players were smaller than the kid!  Do you realize how gratifying it is when you’re a child to find humans who are shorter than you, especially when they’re adults? 

Time Bandits seemed to play on a pretty regular rotation back yonder, and my dad was a committed enough cinema junkie that he often left HBO on in the background.  So slowly, I saw more and more of this madcap flick.  And I started to see more of it from the beginning.  Like many formative experiences, it dug deep into my developing brain.  And like many formative experiences, I didn’t fully understand its impact until years later. 

Over the years, I would periodically catch Time Bandits when it would briefly reappear on one cable channel or another, and even though I’d enjoyed it as a child, I relegated it to a hazy and fond memory.  It wasn’t even until the mid-‘90s that I knew who Terry Gilliam was.  But boy, when I finally put it all together, there was no going back.

When I discuss my favorite filmmakers with friends, there are easy names the roll right off my tongue: Scorsese, Lynch, Altman, Romero, etc.   At this point, I think that I can access these directors so readily because I own so many of their films, which is a nice visual mnemonic to use.  But give me a minute or two and Terry Gilliam always comes to the forefront.  I’ve probably seen other directors’ films more times.  I’ve definitely devoted more writing and reading to the other ones.  I taught an entire class on Scorsese.  But when it comes to emotional and philosophical connections with film (and art, for that matter), Gilliam is probably the director for whom I share the greatest affection and admiration.

Some of you in the audience who know me well will now commence with a resounding “No shit!”  And yeah, I’ll own up to the similarities that Terry and I have.  Primarily an anti-authoritarian streak a county wide.  And the distinct inability to keep our mouths shut when a little reticence would greatly help (which oftentimes is also confused or overlapped with that most dreaded of descriptors: a big mouth.)

And those qualities are equally charming and damning when it comes to Gilliam’s career…and probably my own.  But my admiration for him lies much more in his still-unyielding desire to be a dreamer.  And not just a head in the clouds dreamer (Brazil is a fairly acerbic critique of where that mindset can lead you).  For Terry Gilliam, dreaming is all about the activation of the imagination, the use of it as a language, a tool, a transportation device to another world, a time machine, a way to better understand yourself and ourselves.  It’s imagination embodied in the intricate production design of his films, some of which is never recognized by 90% of the audience (The Hamster Factor, as the 12 Monkeys making-of documentary of the same name dubs it.)  It’s a relentless romantic heart beating underneath the cynical mechanics of the world (as in the enchanting Grand Central Station fantasy waltz in The Fisher King.)  It’s touching the outer atmosphere of sanity, and then questioning whether the real sanity starts past that barrier.

Terry Gilliam’s films have the capacity to affect me like no others.  To this day, Time Bandits reminds me of the power and value of imagination in a consumer-driven world.  At times, Brazil depresses me to no end, but its cold beauty and laughter in the face of doom are awe-inspiring.  The Fisher King always reassures me that yeah, romance is a little insane, but, as Nietzsche once said, “There is always some madness in love.  But there is also always some reason in madness.”  I think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of the most underrated films of the ‘90s, a hilarious, hallucinatory, troubling voyage through the end of the American Dream.  And even though I’ve seen it at least ten times, the climax to 12 Monkeys completely tears me up each time.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be going through Terry Gilliam’s filmography in (mostly) chronological order, delving into each film in essays that…well, I’m not sure what form they’ll take.  But that should be part of the fun.  I’ll probably be sticking to his solo directorial efforts, although maybe I’ll break down and write about Holy Grail and his short film for Meaning of Life.  I’ll definitely be writing about Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha, which might be the definitive Gilliam film (even though he’s just the star.)  And we’ll see where it goes.  Because sometimes, you have to strike out into life without a definite plan to figure anything out.

Several years ago, a now-former student asked me for my life philosophy in five words for a class project she was working on.  I told her “Always be skeptical.  Always dream.”  I’d like to think that Terry Gilliam would agree with me.   

MAD MEN Ep. 86: "Severance"

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 21^st 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 42^nd 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.                        

MAD MEN Ep. 13: "The Wheel"

(S           P           O           I           L           E           R           S)

In which it’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.  And in which it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.

“ ‘Verona,’ Kathy said, and then they talked about Verona, the things they would see and do, and soon the fog was all around them and inside them and they were swallowed up and gone.  Not a footprint, not a single clue.  All woods and water.  A place where one plus one always came to zero.”    Tim O’Brien/In the Lake of the Woods

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning-------

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

                          Nick Carraway/The Great Gatsby

It’s one of the signature scenes in the history of Mad Men.  It serves as an emotional climax for Don Draper’s character arc in the first season, a moment of catharsis for a deeply troubled man.

But in the end, for all of its haunting power, it’s still a sales pitch.  And in this famous scene, in which Don unfurls his brilliant renaming of the Carousel slide projector, the Kodak reps aren’t the only ones being sold a dream.

“They said ‘someday you'll find all who love are blind’
When your heart's on fire,
You must realize, smoke gets in your eyes”

As Don walks around the Kodak village three times and then sets it on fire (to borrow a line from Freddie Rumsen in “The Hobo Code”), we sees smoke wafting across the slides that he’s showing, the ones depicting a gradual recession into his family’s past (ending on his wedding day, and then a shot from what appears to be his courtship of Betty.)  It lends a sense of atmosphere and melancholy to the scene, the fog of the past rolling in to envelop those in the room.  It’s also a callback to the title of the pilot episode, whose first shot features the back of Don’s head, setting up this enigma that the audience will soon try to solve.  “The Wheel” ends with us seeing Don straight on, from the front, no distractions or obfuscations.  No smoke.  And with the arc of the season coming full circle (around and around, and back home again), we see the smooth man of mystery for what he really is: lost. And alone.

The brilliance of the Kodak sales pitch scene is the brilliance of Mad Men in capsule form.  Throughout this season, we’ve seen Don careen in all directions, searching for the fulfillment that always seems to be just out of his reach.  His placement in the grand archetypical tradition of the wayward seeker tugs at our heartstrings, because if only he could….And when he finally seems to come to his senses, when he realizes the value of the family he’s slowly abandoned (including the brother he rejected, whose suicide he finally learns about early in the episode), when for one final time he speaks to his inner self through an extroverted business action, all in a gorgeously shot scene that puts a capper on the traditional hero’s journey, well…

But as authentic as the scene’s emotions are, they’re also colored by reality.  All season long, Don has saved the day with pitches drawn from his own psychological turmoil.  All season long, he’s pulled the rabbit out of the hat again and again.  And just like those previous moments of glory, he’s pitching himself hard in the Kodak meeting.  Tapping into his own sense of nostalgia for a more idyllic family life, he’s like Jay Gatsby yearning to recover that part of himself that had gone into loving the object of his desire.  But just as Gatsby became lost in his dream of the vanished past, so too does Don become enraptured by his own patter.  And when the prodigal son finally returns home, his fantasy of an excited family greeting him can only last for a second.  The reality is an empty house, and a legacy of pain that can’t be erased by an advertisement.

But Don isn’t the only character in this episode that ends up adrift in the sea of life.  In a staple of the Mad Men universe, the greatest victories are often tempered by a creeping sense of defeat.  Witness the culmination of Peggy’s season-long transformation.  Flush with her newfound (albeit limited) prestige, she gets to join Ken in the casting session for the Relax-A-Cizor radio campaign.  And then comes a scene that stands out as one of the more uncomfortable, sad, and powerful moments in this season.  As Peggy tries to coach the gorgeous Annie in her line reading, a cutthroat edge that we’ve only seen glimpses of emerges in her.  The end result is the formerly timid secretary destroying a fragile woman in a manner that Don at his worst would be proud of. 

It’s such a complex scene, as Peggy tries to establish some level of control by picking a traditionally beautiful candidate who will instill confidence in the consumer, only for Ken to remind her that the prettiest girls have the lowest self-esteem.  Listen to her instructions to Annie, filled as they are with images of regaining lost luster and youth, a sentiment which the much heavier Peggy is surely feeling at the moment (“Maybe you put on a few pounds, but then you got the Relax-A-Cizor and you’re back to being you, right now.”).  But also listen to the edge in Elisabeth Moss’s voice, as resentment for Annie’s looks drenches her words in acid (it’s a reminder of the Belle Jolie scene from “Babylon”, in which she gazed in mild horror at how readily the rest of the office pool dove into being manipulated into such stereotypically girly behavior.)  The student has learned well; just like in the best of Don’s pitches, Peggy has used a work assignment to deal with her own interior doubts.  But also just like Don, her budding killer advertising instincts can’t completely plumb the depths of those doubts.

Not that it matters in the short term, as by episode’s end she’s promoted to junior copywriter on the new Clearasil campaign (partly because Don begins to see her as his protégé, but also partly so he can emasculate Pete once more).  But defeat comes calling for victory once again, as an hour later she learns of her pregnancy (one of the major reveals of the season, even though in retrospect, it plays a bit like a traditional television cliffhanger.)  And here is the final moment of transformation, the decision that will haunt Peggy for years to come, as in a heartbreaking maternity ward scene, she refuses to hold her newborn child.  The double whammy of her promotion (“Is this really happening?” she asks Don) with the shock of carrying Pete’s child (“No, no that’s not possible.”) creates the signature trauma of her life, her very own Dick Whitman moment.  The almost mythological, fate-governed timing that allowed Pete to impregnate her literally on the night after she received the birth control pill prescription is too much cosmic weight for her to handle.  And like that scared young man who ran from the trauma of his old life into the safety of another man’s life, Peggy too will choose to survive by (as the modern buzzword parlance would put it) moving forward. 

And there’s Betty, the neglected queen of Ossining, sharing a touching scene with Glen, the only person in her world with whom she can be honest.  Glen’s first appearance in Season 1 is played for oddball laughs, but his attempts to console Betty (“I don’t know.  I wish I was older.”) offers a stark, dramatic portrait of these two lost souls: a young boy mature beyond his years and an adult woman stuck in a state of emotional immaturity.  When Francine tells her about Carlton’s affair, it finally motivates her to dig into at least one part of Don’s private life: the phone bill.  It’s through her discovery of his calls to Dr. Wayne (a worse betrayal, in some ways, than an affair) that she finally chooses to strike back at him through the information she doles out in her therapy sessions.  And it’s only the beginning of the split that will grow even wider come Season 2.

“A work of art is a confession.”

-Albert Camus

And so it is.  And so it goes.  Don Draper creates ad campaigns that are touching and beautiful, but which are also hidden confessions of his own insecurities (a method that will finally, devastatingly cave in his world in Season 6).  Matt Weiner creates a wildly popular television show that reflects his own experience growing up as a Jewish outsider in the rarified air of the West Coast.

J.D. Salinger recalls his own experiences with the artificiality of the adult world, and particularly the East Coast elite, through the words of a frustrated, isolated teenage boy.  Sylvia Plath confesses her descent into the abyss through a thinly veiled version of herself.  F. Scott Fitzgerald excavates his feelings of alienation, of being trapped between the worlds of the mega-rich and the destitute poor, of falling prey to the destructive power of affluence through a friendship between two men, one a disillusioned observer, the other an unashamed romantic destroyed by his dreams.  Tim O’Brien uses the nightmares of his Vietnam service, the phantasmagoric visions that keep him awake at night, to craft a story about a man who loses himself in his inner house of mirrors, of a wife who loses herself in trying to beat the odds, of a country that loses itself in the fog of history.  Raymond Carver confesses a life of alcoholism and self-destruction through the words of middle class characters struggling to overcome their setting and themselves.  Chuck Klosterman uses a rock and roll death site road trip to confess the pain and confusion of his romantic life.

A work of art is a confession.

I create a Sophomore English curriculum tailored (inadvertently or not) to a confession of my life.  Of a young man for whom The Catcher in the Rye illuminated the falsity that awaited him in the adult world.  Of that same young man who followed Jay Gatsby’s idealized visions of romance to his own detriment.  Of that young man several years later, who finally realized the self-destructive nature of Gatsby’s journey.  Of that same young man several more years later, who realized that the Tom Buchanans of the world really do get to call the shots, and then run from the damage in their wake.  Of an adult who looked at his own working class upbringing and wanted to share that world with a group of young people who might find it a foreign oddity.  Of an adult who wanted those same young people to realize that it’s sometimes only through enduring the most grueling, soul-baring struggles that we can emerge as stronger, wiser, kinder, and better.

A work of art is a confession.

“But I thought it was like someone reaching through the stone and right to us”  -Harry Crane

My history with Mad Men is my history with life.  You grow up as a hyper-intelligent, sensitive soul.  You realize that too much of life enjoys crushing sensitive people.  You build a defense system galvanized with sarcasm.  You occasionally let down those defenses, but still get burned far too often.  You strengthen that defense system, mold it into an armor of icy cool.  You will not get hurt, because you’ve removed the concept of hurt from the equation.

I teach a trimester of English that encapsulates most of my preoccupations: the past, the seductive allure of melancholia, the latent cruelty of humanity, the need to come to terms with who you are.  I lead a group of young people through a season of a period television drama that says more about our modern lives than many shows set in the present.  I empathize with a character who is trapped in the effortless cool that he’s constructed.

I write a series of essays in which I revisit this world.

A work of art is a confession.

When I started these Mad Men essays, a great deal of my motivation laid in jumpstarting my long dormant writing life, with a deadline (the final seven episodes) to move me along.  And in following that old axiom: write what you know.  But I also knew that like those cave painting handprints that Harry describes in “The Wheel”, the story I would tell, the story I lived, would invariably come reaching out of the past for me.

And I didn’t know how locking hands with that past would affect me.

But in reconnecting with that past, I’ve also been able to appreciate it.  To gain a greater understanding of who I was, of who I am.  To hold onto all the mental snapshots that I captured during those years.

To make it all part of my landscape.

It’s been a time machine, moving backwards and forwards.  Taking me back to that place.  But also taking me back to where I am now.    

For one last time in Season One, the loose ends:

*I owe a great deal of gratitude to Natasha Vargas-Cooper, whose excellent book Mad Men: Unbuttoned served as such an invaluable guide for me, both in my teaching and real life.  It’s a breezy, informative catalog of the cultural reference points for the first three seasons of the show.  If you ever want to know who Draper Daniels was, or why the VW Bug campaign was so influential, it’s a great place to start.

*Matt Weiner recently told an amusing story about the shooting of the touching bank parking lot scene between Betty and Glen.  Turns out the rosy cheeks on Marten Weiner were authentic: that winter scene was actually shot on a 100 plus degree day, and the poor kid was sweating to death inside the car.

*Weiner has also noted how the original plan for this episode was to end on the scene of Don happily reunited with his family.  In part, this was because AMC didn't renew the show until after all 13 Season 1 episodes were in the can, so there was the distinct possibility that these stories would end after one go around.  But motivated by the possibility of a one and done show, Weiner wisely decided that the happy ending wouldn't be honest, and thus chose to end the season with the site of Don, alone in his house, perched at the precipice of despair.

*”Did you know that there’s a surge in adolescence right now?” (Trudy’s father Tom to Pete, offering him the Clearasil account.  That line will lead directly into the “For Those Who Think Young”, the first episode of Season 2, and one that deals with the emerging youth market and its role in Sterling Cooper’s future.

*Thanks to all of you who have been reading these essays.  If you’re new to the show, I hope that they’ve been at least somewhat illuminating.  If you’re a Mad Men veteran, maybe they made you think about something you hadn’t considered before.  If you’re one of my former students, I hope I provided a good laugh or two.

*And finally, I’ll end with this: this isn’t the last you’ve heard of Mad Men and me.