Sunday, April 14, 2013

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 6




Mad Men Episode Season 5 Episode Six
This is the LSD episode. I mean, to call it anything else would be doing a disservice to the rather wonderful portion of the episode that takes place in the head of Roger Sterling after partaking of some LSD courtesy of Timothy Leary. It is in this addled state, damn near Homer Simpson style, that Roger finally is able to admit that he no longer loves his beautiful young wife, or never really loved her at all.  Roger has other “insights” that Don points out are not entirely LSD inspired, like the fact that other people, even when they are in the same room with you, can very often be miles away in their mind. In fact, the scene reminds of the essay by Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books, in which she recounts the few times that she has experienced, “joy,” one being on a London dance floor under the influence of something. The trip, for Roger, turns out to be an awakening of sorts. His wife says, “I thought you married the younger woman because I got old. Now I realize it’s because you got old.” After his evening, Roger splits with his wife, and starts to try and become an actual cog in the business of SCDP again.

Of course, I’ve no earthly clue what it is like to trip on LSD. Maybe the episode gave a terrible representation. Maybe it’s like seeing the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz. Nor am I particularly familiar with the Timothy Leary side of things. Apparently these people were trying to expand their minds, and not in the drug addled sense that we see it repeated now.

Meanwhile, Peggy embarks on one last attempt at the Heinz pitch by trying to shove it down the throat of the customer, which results in her removal from the campaign. Peggy, apparently shooting off down the Pete and Don track allows the frustration of the failed pitch to carry her through a tail spin of a day. She has a classic Don outing, starting with drinks, leaving work early, going to a movie, spending some qt with a random guy in the movie theater. The strange part is though Peggy’s day bears a strong resemblance to Don’s, it’s the initial failure which sets her apart. Peggy has witness Don occasionally shoving an ad campaign down a customer’s throat, rather successfully. It is this move, witnessed firsthand that she seeks to emulate when shouting at the customer. And  yet, lest we forget that Peggy is the only real female copywriter, her aggressiveness makes the customer, clearly uncomfortable. He hasn’t wanted a woman working on his job from the beginning, and so whether the campaign was every good or not is almost immaterial; he was always going to be dissatisfied. Peggy’s strange day is also symbolic or representative of the strange dark parts that lie beneath many of these characters. It is Peggy, generally sweet Peggy, who had sex with Pete in the first season on a whim and got pregnant after the act. Peggy is more of a binge drinker in this sense, someone who occasionally goes off the rails but does so rather spectacularly.

The last piece of the episode is the continued evolution of the relationship between Megan and Don. He takes her away on a trip, leaving work early and upsetting her in the process. The sad part about the episode is how in love Don is with, Megan, how he keeps smiling through her obvious discomfort, so certain that everything is going to be wonderful because he loves her. This episode may have marked the end of the honeymoon, and I’ll be interested to see what comes next. Megan starts a fight in the restaurant at their hotel, shoving a whole bowl of ice cream down her mouth as if she were a child, which, in some ways, she is. It is her impetuous and spontaneous nature that attracts Don so deeply, and yet, this is the first episode where the rougher edges of that personality come into play.

Like any newly married couple, the first real fight always turns out to be a doozy, a betrayal of the love that you’ve created, when you suddenly realize the walls are made of glass rather than stone. Many of life’s dream narratives are shattered, but they seem to happen slowly, whereas that first real fight arrives in an instant. Don winds up driving away from Megan, and she hitches a ride back to their place without him knowing. Don spends the night waiting for her, calls her parents, does everything he can think of to find her, wondering if she is dead, before finally driving home. On that drive, compliments to the writer, he remembers the drive back from Disney World he’d taken with Megan a year or so earlier, the two of them in the fresh bloom of love, a knowing smile passing between the two of them as the kids sleep in the back of the car. This novelistic move is so damn good that I just want to point it out again. It’s rare that television is able to achieve that sort of juxtaposition with such grace.

Don eventually tracks down Megan at the house, after wildly chasing after her. And, panting on the floor, she tells him that every fight diminishes what they have, which is both true and indicative of their difference in ages and perceptions. They leave for work the next morning, reunited, appearing as strong as ever, and yet the fissures of problems to come are now lying just beneath the surface. The largest of which is pointed out in the final scene by a rarely lucid Burt Cooper. Cooper, sitting in the board room by himself tells Don that it is time to leave his love vacation. And you can see Don being defensive as it is simultaneously dawning on him that he isn’t doing a particularly good job running his department. If Don had any hope of remaining above the fray it seems obvious that work could no longer be his god, he’d have to take his pleasures elsewhere. It is the single minded competitiveness that makes him so successful in advertising that also drives his personal life off the cliff. It was good knowing good Don while it lasted.

And let's link one last time to me and my little man, taking a nice picture together before we did some amazing couch dancing to this tune. 




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