Sunday, May 17, 2015

The universe is indifferent


Late spring 2007. The buzz was about The Sopranos, one of the greatest shows in television history, ending. Would Tony Soprano finally bring on his own destruction? Would there be redemption?

It sounds archaic now, but I belonged to this AOL chat group dedicated to discussing The Sopranos, to analyzing the hidden clues, meanings and symbols. One of the group leaders was an English teacher at some community college, I think, in California. Her user name was Greenlight – after The Great Gatsby, I surmised. Real name was Jill. (Nobody ever knew my real name.)

“There’s this new show coming out that’s supposed to be really good,” she wrote. “Mad Men about ad executives in the early ‘60s.” 

I was skeptical. Did I really trust television to get a period drama right the way a well crafted movie would, say George Lucas’s American Graffiti or Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused?

What was a TV period drama for me? Not like I was watching Upstairs Downstairs when I was a kid. It was Pinky Tuscadaro wearing bell bottoms on Happy Days. Not exactly Eisenhower-era authenticity. Even my beloved That ‘70s Show looked less and less like the ‘70s as the sitcom wore on.
I had to check this new show out.

                              "One for the Road" -- Frank Sinatra


Now it’s the end. You binge watch all seasons and the wild ride is like an acid trip. The cars, fashions, architecture and music have all been historically accurate, but they have unraveled so gradually you barely notice. Like life, like people, they have changed so gradually over the seasons you’ve barely noticed.

I couldn’t take the show seriously if it was blighted by anachronisms, but it’s the unraveling of characters, more than the culture their stories coincide with, that has kept me hypnotized by the story. We see all the characters struggle with demons, but no one more than Sterling Cooper ad agency Creative Director Don Draper.

The house where you live

Over the episodes, the plot unfolds like a book. We find out the man isn’t who he says he is. His character is the closest television has ever come to a Jay Gatsby – someone who escapes a poor background, assumes a new identity in a place where nobody knows him and achieves the American Dream.

He thinks he can obliterate the past as if it never existed. But does anyone honestly believe we can do that? Can we live forever in denial? Never feeling conflicted and without peace? Can we erase all the shame, guilt, pain and scars of our lives? Completely change the story?

People do it every day. Or try, at least.



Maybe you’ll cruise by for awhile. Don has the perfect job, a beautiful wife, adoring children and a nice house. “We have it all,” a neighbor tells him in an early episode. “Yep, this is it,” Don answers, an undertone of dissatisfaction in his voice.

One of my favorite moments in Mad Men is when he’s in bed with his lover (extramarital), Rachel Menken, and reveals that his mother was a prostitute who died giving birth to him. His wife and kids know nothing about his early life.

I love the way prostitution is a recurring theme in Mad Men, how it parallels the advertising business. Selling out one’s creativity, the beatniks – later hippies on the show might say. But Don doesn't buy into that view. I guess I’m most fascinated by the unique philosophy of life Don brings to his job.

You are the product. You feeling something. That’s what sells. Not them. Not sex. They can’t do what we do, and they hate us for it.

Advertising is based one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay.

(That quote was from the first episode, set in 1960 when Don and Roger Sterling are nearing their pinnacle. Think of this quote and think of the scene from the recent episode, “Time and Life,” set in 1970. Both men are washed up. They’re in a hotel bar, drunk, and Roger, pretty much Don’s father figure, kisses him on the cheek and says, “You’re okay.”)

Don Draper is the most existential character in television history, and I love it. He’s this guy who dropped out of high school, stole a dead man’s life, went to night school at city college (Pete Campbell went to Princeton) and he reads book’s like Dante’s Inferno.

hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie, there is no system, the universe is indifferent.

We’re flawed because we want so much more. We’re ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had.

People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.

I love the complications of this character. He was raised in a whorehouse by a woman who never let him forget who his mother really was. He was verbally, emotionally and physically abused. Is it not completely correct that writer Matthew Weiner made Don a guy who cheats on his wives? Of course he does. You don’t come out of a background like that without problems. It goes with the whole idea of a man who has secrets and lives a double life. Yet, he has this moral code – loyalty to clients, respect and compassion for people others ridicule, propriety when other guys are talking crudely around women, manners.

As you can probably tell it’s the writing that most intrigues me. Of course that’s the kind of thing that’s going to give a guy like me a hard-on; what do you expect. Mad Men is one of the key works marking the TV Renaissance.  When I was a kid I’d watch The Brady Bunch or My Three Sons and lie to myself about it being real life because I wished it was, but Weiner – he cut his teeth writing for The Sopranos – has given us the truth. To say he has influenced me would be an understatement.

I’m going to go outside and play with my kids now. I don’t use time wisely and I’m afraid of being a failure as a father. I haven’t even probed the other Mad Men aspects – that lovable rougue
 Roger Sterling (don’t we all need a friend like him), Salvotore’s closeted life; Peggy Olson and the glass ceiling; birth, death and suicide; tripping on acid... 

I could write some other damn thing later, but maybe this is all that there is.


                                          California" -- Joni Mitchell

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