Why try to choose between a werewolf and a vampire when you can just pick . . . ALL OF THEM, Y'ALL

Saw “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” recently and definitely have some thoughts.  First of all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that all boyfriends are either vampire boyfriends or werewolf boyfriends.  Some dudes might think that this maxim is facile, reducing bros in all of their wondrous complexity into mere binary objects.  To those dudes I say, welcome to life, white dudes.  Nobody cares about your complicated inner lives.  All anybody cares about is the inner life of the teenage girl, because it is the key to capitalist glory in These Troubling Economic Times.  Gross but true–our weird service economy depends on making everybody as insecure as teenage girls, so as to entice them into buying a bunch of crap they don’t need for their heads and bodies.  This is actually all Reagan’s fault, but that’s another topic (he’s a total werewolf boyfriend, in case you were wondering.)

Anyway, vampire boyfriends vs. werewolf boyfriends.  This dichotomy is so true I probably don’t even need to explain it, but here is an attempt.  Men attempt to mold their cool Masculine Identities around whatever crap they think will make them the most powerful.  If dudes are weak, they try to get smart and/or pick up lots of technical skills.  If dudes are strong, they try to get even stronger and more powerful, and also try to pick up lots of technical skills.  The technical skills are for when you have to make conversation with other dudes and you need a topic.  Dudes are important networking contacts for other dudes, because they may know women.

Vampire boyfriends are often neeerds who look like little girls in the face. This is why they are so obsessed with coolness.

Vampire boyfriends are often dudes who think they are smart.  Maybe they are smart nerds or smart Republicans or smart alts or smart/creepy poker-playing middle managers–it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that these guys get off on control.  Their self-esteem is predicated upon mastery, and they get really pumped about having mastery of various things.  Since the universe is full of an semi-infinite amount of things, these dudes are understandably somewhat insecure, for most of them know that they cannot truly master everything.  Still, they care a lot about being better than other people, and that is an important fact to file away about these types.  Vampires are essentially reactive–even though they seem like they are all c0ol and powerful, they actually cannot function without the blood of lowly humans.  Vampires also only seem cool in comparison to humans–they’re really n0t very cool at all, if you compare them to sweet monsters like centaurs and Mothras.  Y0ur vampire boyfriend is only powerful in contexts where somebody gives a shit about his mastery.

Werewolf boyfriends, on the other hand, are wild and crazy guys.  These are the guys that show up at your window at two in the morning with a bunch of azaleas that they broke off the bush right outside said window, after which they proceed pick a fights with your neighbors and knock over things, under the (mistaken) assumption that this behavior is cool and romantic and Percy Bysshe Shelley-like.  These guys enjoy gambling, drinking, and ruining things.  They are full of spontaneity (i.e., weird emotions and trouble.)  You should not allow your werewolf boyfriend to drive a car or talk to your landlord.

You can tell Percy Bysshe Shelley is a werewolf boyfriend because he's flaunting some waxed chesticles.

Ultimately, neither werewolf boyfriends nor vampire boyfriends can be trusted.  Vampire boyfriends will take all your stuff, and werewolf boyfriends will break all your stuff.  In “New Moon,” Bella vacillates between freaking out because her vampire boyfriend is negging her all the time, and freaking out because her werewolf boyfriend is hanging out with sketchpads and running around in the rain all the time.  In the end, she chooses her vampire boyfriend, mostly because he threatens to kill himself if she doesn’t pay attention to him and do what he tells her to do.  This is a classic vampire boyfriend gambit.  Her werewolf boyfriend can only counter by threatening to withdraw his friendship, which isn’t a particularly equal counter-weight (werewolf boyfriends are not good at bargaining, because they are dumb.)  What we can take away from this saga is this:

Don’t hang out with werewolves.  Don’t hang out with vampires.  You should have been listening to your friend Anna Kendrick, who made fun of you so awesomely when you were mooning around over Edward and talking to weird motorcycle dudes.  Now Anna Kendrick is starring in movies that will probably be Oscar-nominated opposite George Clooney, while you’re stuck at some dumb Pope festival with a bunch of olds plus Dakota Fanning!  Bad move, y’all.

Better than you.

At the end of the day, if your friends tell you that you are acting crazy, you should probably listen to them instead of jumping off a cliff.  Just sayin’.

I was excited to hear that Biagio Biondolillo’s tour homecoming show was going to be in downtown Bellingham at Temple Bar because:

1. I know and love the employees at Temple Bar.

2. It’s the most comfortable bar in Bellingham and has some of the best food and drinks.

3. It’s is less than a block’s stroll from my house.

4. And, most importantly, Biagio’ s music is intimate and warm; perfectly suited for a venue such as this.

When the day of the show finally came, it was Sunday and it was cold.  As I entered the bar and found my way to the second room where the show was taking place, I was struck by all of the familiar faces illuminated by radiant and ubiquitous candlelight.  The place was completely packed.  As I was trying to find a place to sit, I was momentarily paralyzed in semi-satori; overcome with the realization that summer was over and far away, that fall had arrived in orange and brown, and that I could already see winter creeping up with a dagger in it’s teeth.  It was as if I was suddenly aware that the speed of time is FAST and, little tugs of longing for the past aside, I couldn’t help but feel okay with it.  Snapping back into focus, I sat down on the floor in front, leaned back against a booth, and watched as Biagio tuned his guitar while Kat and Anna warmed up their strings (fiddle and ‘cello, respectively).

After small amounts of banter and welcoming, they began to play. All of the chatter from tertiary conversations immediately died down and everyone’s attention was focused on the three kids in front who were picking, plucking, bowing, and strumming the strings of their instruments like old masters while crooning in impassioned harmony.  It was obvious that weeks of tour, playing with each other day after day, had greatly improved the cohesiveness and communication of their performance.  Mainly playing from Biagio’s new CD, Alone On This Here and Now (Corridor Records), themes of hard work and love, lost and found, consistently found their evocation.  The pauses between songs were peppered with tour stories of leaking brake lines, lost debit cards, drunken beach singing, pop-tart crumbs, and the #1 Motel 6 in the country (apparently in Roseburg, Oregon).

Biagio is a mechanic, by trade, and works at Gundie’s Automotive Recyclers.  His songs sometimes employ metaphors about tools and engines and this has led some reviewers to label it as sort of a music for the working class.  He’s often described as a combination of Bruce Springsteen and Elliot Smith.  I think his sometimes subtle, sometimes blazing, but always precise finger-picking style has a lot more in common with John Fahey, Elizabeth Cotten, or Leo Kottke.  While his sometimes playful, sometimes somber, and always sharp lyricism is more akin to Basho, Billy Collins, or Edna St. Vincent Millay than to Elliot Smith.  Now, I don’t think Biagio minds being called The Boss and it is music for the working class, but it’s more complicated than that.  Yes, his songs speak about labor, love, and loss, but they speak more about the arduous and agonizing internal struggle to be a respectable, honest, and genuinely good person, while soberly realizing that this is not a battle easily won.  He articulates this struggle clearly, coherently, and without guile.  And I suppose that while this is is what makes him disarming and easy to relate to, it’s also probably what gives rise to the Springsteen analogies.

The set went on and I was ecstatic when they played some old favorites of mine like “Dirty Old Toolbox” and the completely derailing “Goddamn Radiator” (both of which, I believe, were originally All Creatures Of Good Heart* songs).  Biagio kept emphasizing how happy they were to be home and how lucky we all are to live in such an incredible community.  As I looked around at the faces of my friends, almost monochromatic, but golden in the flickering light, I couldn’t help agreeing with him.  When the encore came it was like absolution and everyone seemed enraptured by the lightning speed and howling climax of “Lone Wolf.”

Then it was over.  I stepped out into the cold, feeling edified, with a single thought on my mind, “I hope temple bar keeps having shows.”

*All Creatures Of Good Heart, you should start playing music again.

Full disclosure: Biagio Biondolillo is a friend and is also the brother of Mar.

Mom Party, Y'all!

“Amy” is a harrowing story of co-dependency and denial.  It’s also a Harlequin SuperRomance!  The titular Amy, one of three sisters (each of whom Harlequin, in its infinite wisdom, deemed worthy of their own SuperRomances), is a crazy, child-like rich hippie living in classy South Florida.   She’s pretty much obsessed with family unity, to the point of constantly lying to and pressuring her family members into interacting despite their well-founded desire to see as little of each other as possible.  She’s in her early thirties, so this is part of why it’s so weird that she is always trying to engineer family reunions and reconciliations.  She’s most adept, however, at lying to herself – about other people’s feelings, her own feelings, actual facts, etc.  Part of the reason that “Amy” is a frustrating read is that, although her initial efforts at breaching people’s boundaries are sensibly rebuffed, she eventually wins people over to her bizarre world view.  As a result, by the end of the novel, you feel quite fearful about the future of Amy’s family and friends, since it’s obvious that their encouragement of her strange fantasies will result in further machinations on her part.

To begin at the beginning: Amy’s weirdo parents, the unrealistically-named Helene and Merrick, decide upon Helene’s instigation to pretend that they are having marital difficulties, in order to draw their family together (!).  Amy’s sisters, also in their thirties, are pursuing their lives in other parts of the country, and the family is not particularly close.  Helene, from whom Amy obviously inherited her craziness, wants to reconcile the girls to celebrate her and Merrick’s golden anniversary.  She thinks the best way to do this is for her and Merrick to pretend to be getting a divorce.  Then, to her mind,  everybody will freak out and come together.  Merrick thinks it’s a dumb idea, for good reasons, but she tricks him into agreement by saying it will be an “acting challenge.”  Apparently Merrick, on top of being a superrich mogul with a “trim physique” and a “silver mustache” that he likes to “dab” with “linen napkins,” is also an actor, although “he hadn’t acted in forty years or more – not since he’d turned his back on the early days of TV.”  Also, I should probably point out here that Peg Sutherland takes great care to describe Merrick and Helene as being totally hot, even though they are in their seventies.  I feel this is egregious over-writing – must Merrick, on top of being fabulously rich and famous and in love with his wife, also embody Platonic ideals of attractiveness?  This story would have been improved by 35% by making him fat.  Think it through and you’ll agree.

Anyway, Merrick and Helene embark upon their plot, acting as if they are estranged, which – weirdly – actually causes them to become estranged.  Is this a commentary on the thin line between art and life, or a mere plot device designed to give Amy something to freak out about?  Either way, this contrived premise, while not wholly devoid of dramatic potential, is utterly unexploited by Sutherland.  I could see this working in a screw-ball comedy, but Amy is not a comedy; rather, it is an unwittingly dark look into personalities damaged by a romantic obsession with nuclear family norms.

Amy becomes consumed with the rift between her parents.  Her co-worker Grace advises her to back off, but to no avail:

“‘Give it up, Amy.  Nobody appointed you to fix everybody’s life, you know.”

“That shows how little you know.  Check my wallet and you’ll find my license to fix anything that’s not working, right next to my library card.”"

Note: Amy is an egomaniac.  Later:

“‘Besides,” she said, resuming their earlier conversation, “it’s not like I’m interfering with strangers.  This is Mom and Dad I’m talking about.”

“Everybody has a tiff from time to time, Amy.  It’s not the end of the world.”

“But they’re acting so weird.”

“That’s a family trait, isn’t it?”  [Note: Does Grace hate Amy?  If so, cool.]

“Not funny, Grace.  You should have seen Mom when I ran into her at the Green Market the other day.  She was fluttering.  The way she does when she’s upset.  You know, her hands, her lips, even her eyelashes.  Like a trapped bird who won’t give up the search for the way out.  All she would say was that it would blow over.”  [Note: this imagery is unexpectedly poignant.  Perhaps Helene is coming to the realization that her marriage is a hellish trap.]

They keep talking, mostly about the terrifying revelation that Merrick chose to take a walk alone (italics both mine and Amy’s.)  Apparently, choosing to walk alone is a sure sign that your marriage is pretty much over.

Now, you may have noticed that I’m half-way through this review and I’ve yet to mention Amy’s love interest, Jon Costas.  That is because he is pretty much tangential to the central romance – which is between Amy and her family.  Don’t believe me?  Jon is Amy’s sister Lisa’s ex-husband.  Sutherland tries to spin Amy’s attraction to him as something that predates Jon’s marriage to Lisa, and vice-versa; however, given the evidence at our disposal, it’s not hard to suspect that Amy pursues Jon because and simply because she wants to be closer to her sister.  It’s pretty sick.

In other incest news, another central relationship in this novel is between Jon and his niece Kieran.  Jon has come home to help out his family because Kieran’s father Nick has abandoned her.  Jon and Kieran dance a strange pas de deux – the sort that can only emerge between a lovely teenage girl and her sexy, remote uncle.  See, Kieran is a rebellious teen – she dreads her hair, has a nose ring, and enjoys surfing the Internet.  Sutherland’s attempts to describe Kieran’s Interneting constitute the only enjoyable parts of this novel.  Kieran doesn’t email people, she sends messages to their electronic mailboxes. Whilst Interneting, Kieran makes a nefarious felon Internet gentlemen friend, the hilariously sketchy Hardball, who travels across the country to see her.  He squats in a hovel down by the ocean; quotes Thoreau, and tries to pressure her into smoking pot.  He seems pretty cool, but it is heavily implied that he plans to hook Kieran on the dope and get her into white slavery.  Clearly, Sutherland overestimates the Internet.

Don't overestimate the Internet!

As you may have guessed, things inevitably resolve themselves.  Kieran transfers her infatuation from Hardball to Jon; Amy’s parents fall in love with her all over again, etc.  There’s also a really boring real-estate plot which finds its conclusion as well.  There’s very little hot sex, but there is a town hall meeting described in loving detail.

I hated Amy.  Do not read this book, except for the Internet parts.

Grade: D

FGFGFG MAM MuVEEE ei SEen iut uiy WWWWILL NEVR GUESS EUIT!!!!

(This is the second entry in a new feature where I review things I’ve recently rented, regardless of their actual release date, because I don’t care about timeliness or America or the future of cinema or whatever.  Today’s review is by guest columnist GOTH MINISTER.)

I HabE SEEN A MUveeeeeeee.  It is quite a movie it is aabout BEACHES and LADI BEACHES SASS and DANGROUS MIXUPS.  YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE HOW EXCITING THIS MOVIE IS JEEZELUM CRAWDAD.  (It gut me so pumped I CAN”T BLIEVE IT!!!!!!  I LOVE GOLDREN HAIR AND I LOVE A DANCE AND ON MY DVD IT HAD AN OPTION CALLED ‘SINGALAAONG’ THAT I CHOSE AND THEN I COULD SIIINGGGGG ALLLLLONNGGG AND IT WAS MY WISH HOW DID THEY KNOW MY WISH I LOVE ALL DAVD PRODUCERS INVOLEVED WITH THIS PORDU CTION>:::::) [that was an emotican that desvribes mee mood3e.)

OK, LOOK< THIS IS A VRY VRY FEINE FILM.  THE FIST THING THST HAPPENS IS THIS:

CONVERYING IDEAS TO MEENS

A GIRL CONVERYS THE IDES TO SOME MEN OF GOING TO AN ISLE>  THe ISLE IS MAGIC AND ONLY GOOD THINGS AHPPEN THERE NEVER ETHNICS>  YOUWOULDN” T NOT KNOEW THEY HAVE ETHINCS THERE THIS IS HOW GOOD AN ISLE IT IS.  HERE ARE SOME OTHER THIngS THAT HAPPEN:

HVING A TABLEAU

YEAH THAT’S RIGHT M-EFFERS THEY HAVE TABELEUAS THERE.  hAVING tABELUAaS IS MY FAVORITE THING IT MAKE SA ME FEEL LIKE SO IT MAKE S ME FEEL RILLY GOOD!!!  SEE HOW GOOD i FEeL:

THIS GOOD

thIS si how GOOD A tableau MAKES ME FEEL.  ALL I HAVE EVER WANTED TO DO IS BE IN OVERALLS, BEING A LADY, HAVING A LADY THOGUHT AND HAVING ANOTHER LADY INSTANTLY UNDERTSANT IT AND THEN POSINGS WITH MENS THAT ARE BENEVLOENT.  I LOVE A MBENEVELOVENT MAN NOT FOR LOVE BUT JUST FOR A FRIEND THAT I CAN BE AROUND.  I LOVE MERILLL STREET AND i THINK it is cooL HOW SHE GETS WHAT SHE WANTS, OK??  ok!  necT THING PLS (o by the qay though check out the sly trickses that happy kitten is habing he is as happy as fergie as wilde as the sunn):

having dances!!!!

THIS WAS A GREAT PART OF THE MOVIE IT WAS WHEN MERIL WAS SUPRISED BY DANCING SHE COULDNT BLEIVE SHE WAS DANCIN BUT SHE COULDNT SOTP IT BECAUSE THE BEAT AND THE BEAT GOT HER FRIENDS TOO THE RTROLL GOLBIN AND THE LADY FROM A PLANT THEY WERE LADIES HAVING BEATS AS WELL I LVOE THE PACING OF THIS FILM IT WAS RELENTLESS WHICH IS WHAT I LVIE FOR WHAT I LIKE I AINT A MINISTER FOR NOTHING  BRO AND AS FOR BDING RELENTLESS WELL MY SON NICK CABE KNOWS ABOUT THAT BECASE HE DOES SO MANY ALBUMS THAT ARE SAD AND SO MANY THAT ARE ANBGY BECAUSE HE UNDERSTNAT THAT EXCITEMENT IS NEEDED, OK AND THAT IS HWY HE IS A GOTH BE UCARSE HE HAS A FINERGE ON THE PULSE ONE IN THE PINK AND TWO ON THE PUBLSE AS WE SAY AND LAGUH AND SHOTO ON HEROIN OK NOT HEROIN WHAT WE REALLY DO IS LAGUHT AT TINY DUCKS AND PITY THEM EXCEPT IT HURTS MY HEART SO THAT THEY LAUGS ARE NOT REAL.  I NEED HELP CHEERING AND THEN AL OF A SUD MAMMBE MAI CAME AND HELPED ME YESSSSSSSSSS.  AND NOW I KNOW I WILL HAVE DANCES AND I ACAN HAVE DANCES!!

POUR DUC YU HEART HURT ME WHAT ARE YOU TRYIN TO SAY? I HAVE EARS TO HEAR AND A brian THAT IS OPEN

now I AHBV to BE HONEST ABOUT ANother part of THIS MOVIE.  I  T SI A SAD PART.

LEANING AGINST A ROCK

THIS PART IS CALLIED LEANING AGINST A ROCK AND IT IS A PRAT WHERE MERY DOESN’T KNOW HOW SHE FEELS, OK, AND SHE IS ARFRAID OF HER FEELINGS, OK, WHICH I RELATE TO.  AND THAT NICE MAN IS JUST TRYING TO HELP AND KILL SOVIETS BECAUTST ITS HIS JOB BEUT SHE CAN’T SEE HOW PERECT IT ALL IS, AS BEAUTIFUL AS A GREEK DIAMOND IN A BABY MOUTH ON THE SIDE OF THE OCEAN.  SO THERE IS LEANING AGINST A ROCK AND THERE IS QUESTIONS.  LUCKLIY THERE IS ALSO THIS:

having IDEANS

LIFE CANNOT EVER BE THAT BAD IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS TO HAVE IDEANS WITH.  YOU HAVE A TOWEL AND A CHAIR AND A COFFEE TABLE AND A BAG ON THE COFFEE TABLE, AND OH YEAH WHAT ELSE OH YES WHAT YOU HAVE ARE FRIENDS, DMANIT, FRIENDS THAT CAN HELP A LIFE TIME, FRIEND S THAT HAVE WINE AND LISPS AND SPECIAL TIMES AND TIME HEALS BUT FRIENDS ARE DOCTORXSZ.  DOCTORESDF.  ALTHOGUH THAT HOBBIT SHOULD ALSO PUT SHOES ON AND ALSO I HATE TO HAVE WET HAIR AROUND MY FIRENDS.  BUT OTHER WISE MARYANNN AND I ARE THE SAME.  EVEN DOWN TO THAT BEUTIFUL WALL.

HAVING DOUBTS

ALAS THO ANOTHER SAD PART COMES THAT IS CALLED HAVING DOUBTS.  MAN IS IT A BUMMER AND I THINK THE WERE WOLVE IS SAD AS WELL AS THE FAIR YOUNG LDAY.  SHE REMINDS ME OF SHIRLEY TMEPLE, WHO IS ACES IN MY BOOKE.  YES, FRIENDS, THERE ARE DOUBTS UNFORTUNATLEY AND THE MIAS CAN[T HELP!  EVEN THO THEY ARE MAGNIQFIQUE!

WALKING MIAS

THEY WA,K OVER TO SAVE THE DAY BUT THEY DON’T HAVE ENOUGH POWERES!! I KNOW I WAS SHCOKED TOO!  i THOUGHT THEY WOULD HAVE ENOUGH poweRS FOR SURE.  AT THIS POINT I FELT DOWNCATS.  I LOOKED AT THE PURSES ALL MY PURSE BUT IT DIDN’T HELP.  I PAWSED THE MOVIE (PUN ABOUT CATTENS! ) AND THEN I TOUCHED ALL MY HAPPY OBJET D’ART BUT IT WAS NOT HAPPY ENUFF!  THEN I LISTEND TO SO MUCH LEONARD COHEN AND SO MUCH JOY DIVISION AND TRIED TO MAKE MY ENVIRO MATCH MY DARK MOODES BUT IT COUNLDT, NOTHING COULD FIX IT.  AND I CRIED AND ANTONY AND HIS JOHNSON KISSED MY MOTUH IN MY MIND BUT EVEN THAT WAS NO GOOD DARN IT. NOTHING COULD FIX IT NOT EVEN THIS:

PURE SPONTEANTOUS FUN THAT PROVES FUN HAS SNO AGE, NO TIME SUCKERS FUN IS A TIME MACHINE FUN DOESN'T KOWTOW TO PHYSICS

THINGS WERE NOT COMING UP GOTH MINISTER, THATS FER DARN TOOTIN.  FINALLY I SAW THE FOLLOWING AND IT GAVE ME A STRENGTH:

NOBBLE!!!!!!

LUK AT THAT G-D YAHWAH-FORSAKEN LITTLE BRAVCE MAN!  HE IS BEING EMASCULATEDC BUT HE KEEPS GOING.  POOR THING HE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW HE IS GETTING TAKEN ADBVENATGE OF HBUT HE GOES HE KEEPS GOING AND FOR THIS I LOVED HIM AND FOR THIS I HAD THE STRENGTH TO FINISH THE MOVIE.  AND I’M GLAD I DID!  THis is WHY!

ANOTHER TABLEUA~

OH YESSS.  IT TURNSZ OUT THSAT DOUBTS CAN BE OVERCOME AND I DIDN”T NEED TO GET DOWN AND DESPONDENT, wanding like a CLOUD, beCUAD GUESS WHAT IT”S ALL OK!1  AND THERE ARE MROE DANCES AND MORE LOVE THAN THE WORLD KNOWS AWHST TO DO WITH.  THE KINDGON OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU< AS WELL AS ISLES>  GO TAKE DOWN THE DAY YOU CSN DO WHATEVER YOU WQANT EVEN TABLEAUS IF YOU ARE STRONG!  I CAN”T BELIEVE I LEARNED A LESSON BUT I DID>  ANd I AM GRATEFLL!!!!

WE CAN DO IT! HISTORY IS NOT OVER< ITS JUST BEGINNING!

I have a confession to make.  It’s pretty embarrassing.  Some of my more “intellectual” friends may have figured it out already.  There’s only so many times you can pretend to get a Wong Kar Wai reference, after all.  Alright, I’ll quit filibustering and just say it:

I’m not interested in movies anymore.

I’M NOT INTERESTED IN MOVIES ANYMORE.  THE COMEDIES ARE LAZY AND THE “GOOD” DRAMAS ARE PREACHY AND THE FOREIGN MOVIES ARE DEPRESSING AND SO ARE MOST OF THE DOCUMENTARIES.  PROBABLY THE LAST “GOOD” MOVIE I SAW WAS FREAKING “SYRIANA” AND THAT WAS LIKE FIFTY YEARS AGO AND I THOUGHT IT WAS “VEGGIE TALES” FOR LIBERALS.  I’M NOT A REAL INTELLECTUAL AND I SHOULD BE PURGED IN THE UPCOMING CULTURAL REVOLUTION.  I DON’T LIKE NPR EITHER.

Sorry to shout but this is a pretty embarrassing confession.  Proof:  sometimes I tell people I will go see “good” movies with them and then I say I am too busy to go and then I just watch “Top Chef” or something.  I am a liar and it is because I feel guilty for not loving cinema anymore.  I look at ads for Aldomovar movies and am haunted by the specters of my film professors but I don’t rent them anyway.  I am worried that I might be fatally shallow.  The only justification for this that I can figure out is the following:

TV is better than movies.  As a medium, it has the potential to tell longer, richer stories about an ever-expanding universe.  It has the time to spare for smaller stories and moments; to explore experience on a more intimate level; to lay down theses and build upon them in a way that is impossible within a 180-minute format.  Characters become more open-ended; events have time to gain momentum; tiny gestures are invested with greater portent.  This is a fancy way of saying that I like to see what happens next, and most movies have no “next”–they’re over when they’re over.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

Also, I do think movies have gotten dumber.  Most dramas or documentaries are so political, even when they’re not overtly political.  I have no objection to works having a political quality; the problem is that I’m not interested in hearing what I already know.  Example:  I haven’t seen “An Inconvenient Truth.”  I don’t feel the need to.  The reason why is that I already know the environment is effed and that we have to change the way we consume things.  I make an active effort to reduce my carbon footprint, to the point that it sometimes encumbers me.  I try to educate people about the environment and the ways that they can reduce their consumerism, to the point that they find me annoying and pedantic.  This Sunday, I’m going to blow a bunch of time uglying up my windows in an attempt at weather-proofing in order to reduce our heat expenditures.  The point is, I’m exactly the target audience for “An Inconvenient Truth,” which is why I’m exactly the wrong type of person to watch it.  I feel like movies like “An Inconvenient Truth” are designed for people who would never, ever go see them.  It seems like the producers of these movies think that conspicuous consumers and other jerks are going to find out about them and go see them and then be all “Whoa!!!  I never realized that driving an SUV was a bad idea!  I’ll never do it again!  Racism is bad, you say?  I’ll get right on that!”  This is not what happens.  Instead, smug Baby Boomers (people not incredibly different from the filmmakers and producers of these films) go out and pay good money to have their opinions confirmed.  I do not think this is a viable use of time, energy, or cash.  So no, I don’t want to go see anything about Rwanda or repressed housewives or dying birds, because I am already a cheerleader for all these individuals, and also I can learn about them by–and stop me if this sounds crazy–READING.  Reading journalism, reading a book, reading my RSS feed.  I can read ACTUAL FACTS about ACTUAL SITUATIONS done by people who have done some ACTUAL RESEARCH.  I don’t need George Clooney to be all, “My God–what about the Africans?” in order to understand that all is not well in Africa.  I don’t need Harvey Weinstein to pay for Cate Blanchett to have fake sweat sprayed on her so she can pretend to labor in a gulag or whatever.  I like to think I’m smart enough to figure out that GULAGS ARE BAD without the expenditure of MILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND THE USE OF KEY LIGHTS AND BEST BOYS AND CGI, Y’ALL.  Plus supporting reading is even more alt than supporting “cinema,” SO THERE.

Anyway, that is why I kind of hate most dramas and documentaries.  I also hate horror movies because I think they desensitize people to violence (this is worthy of an essay by itself, because I know there are great reasons to disagree with me, but I spit upon those reasons!  I am intellectually irresponsible!)  I hate all the comedies that come out because I hate sad ladies and helpless men and don’t care what happens to them;  I hope they all go to hell.  Yes!  I want Jennifer Aniston and Seth Rogen to GET JOBS and I want the producers of comedies to MAKE JOBS by hiring actual writers and editors and directors to work on comedies, instead of releasing single-shot opuses consisting of a camera pointed at a crying lady “magazine lady” and Owen Wilson playing with his hands and a dog taking a whiz on a snotty child actor.  That is not a movie, sirs!

Yeah, touch that curtain. Oh yeah.

What else do I hate about movies?  I hate how producers think that people will think it is “acting” when Julianne Moore acts REAL REPRESSED ABOUT SOMETHING AND THEN TOUCHES SOMETHING INCONSEQUENTIAL.  I hate how producers think that people will think it is “cool” when somebody crashes open a door and then there is a cut to somebody getting into a car and then there is a cut back to people striding through the door triumphantly to a music cue!  This is only “cool” if the people are men who are too fierce to be tender towards each other but then they display a tiny bit of tenderness in the face of danger (and even then it is not that cool!)

For all the reasons that I hate movies[1], I loved “The Fog.”  Because Mad Men is a serialized drama, it can take the time to do episodes like “The Fog”; episodes which do not particularly advance the plot and yet are entertaining precisely because of this.  The meat of “The Fog” concerned itself with the experience of giving birth in the early ’60s.  “The Fog” focused on Betty’s point of view, replicating the feel of the hospital (and of the drugs she had been given) via direction that evoked both David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick.  It was a perfectly titled episode, since a thick cloud of foreboding hung over every moment.  Watching it the first time, I felt enormously tense–I kept expecting the baby to die, or Betty to die, or some manner of REDRUM to infiltrate the proceedings.  The pacing was kept exquisitely slow, which exacerbated this tension.  It felt like one of those dreams when you are trying to run from an unseen danger but can’t move.

Speaking of dreams, I thought the dream sequences were fantastic.  The scene where Betty is wandering her neighborhood strongly reminded me of both Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. Everybody always calls Betty a Hitchcock Blonde, and while the comparison is apt, tonight I realized she could also be a Lynch heroine.  Actually, we should just go ahead and admit that there is such a creature as “the Lynch Blonde.”  Think Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer, or Laura Dern as Blue Velvet’s Sandy Williams and Wild at Heart’s Lula Fortune, or Patricia Arquette as Alice Wakefield[2] in Lost Highway, or Naomi Watts as Betty Elms in Mulholland Drive. The Lynch Blonde is a mass of contradictions–perversely naive, powered by sweetly deranged single-mindedness, by turns cravenly ambitious and charmingly childish, vain yet refreshingly unselfconscious when you least expect it, an object of obsession and yet curiously isolated.

Naomi Watts as Betty Elms

These characteristics don’t apply equally to all Lynch Blondes, of course; they don’t all equally apply to Betty either.  And yet there is a kinship there.  The Lynch Blonde is the descendant of the Hitchcock Blonde, in that they are both objects of erotic fixation, animas come blazing to life.  But the Hitchcock Blonde is colder, more remote, more inscrutable than the Lynch Blonde.  I’d like to claim that the Lynch Blonde is the Hitchcock Blonde deconstructed–after all, what was Twin Peaks but a deconstruction of the Hitchcock Blonde, a quest to unravel the humanity behind the platinum facade, a mystery about the feminine mystique?–but I’m not sure that the theory would hold up against the whole Lynch canon.  I do feel safe in saying that the Hitchcock Blonde and the Lynch Blonde carry similar symbolic burdens in both directors’ work.  I used the term “anima” above and I meant it.  The anima is a Jungian concept.  Jung thought that all men have, within their subconscious, a feminine inner personality (the anima), while women have a subconscious masculine inner personality (the animus.)  Jung’s vision of the subconscious was not all that different from the sitcom Herman’s Head; he saw the individual as being composed of a number of personalities and forces, some of which are in conflict, and not all of which are apparent to the conscious mind of the average person.  The anima or animus represents not only a person’s hidden feminine or masculine qualities; it also represents how a person sees the opposite gender.  Thus, all men have within them a vision of ultimate Woman, which contains everything they truly think about what Womanhood represents (and how they feel about their own feminine qualities.)  This is also how the animus works for women (although Jung believed the operation of the animus to be more complex than that of the anima.)  The anima is one of a man’s most powerful subconscious figures–appearing often in his dreams, haunting his relationships and creative works.  People often find those who resemble their anima or animus irresistible; they may even fall in love with them.  Jung believed that, in order for people to become psychologically healthy, the anima or animus must become fully integrated with the psyche as a whole.

Grace Kelly, Ur-Hitchcock Blonde

What does this have to do with Mad Men?  Everything!  Anima development is a process that occurs throughout one’s lifetime.  It is closely linked to one’s artistic inspirations and works–think of muses.  Thus, anima representations litter the history of human endeavor, appearing especially in visual mediums.  Jung personified the stages of anima development into four women: Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia.  Eve is incredibly beautiful but ultimately unattainable, a creature of malevolence who is also rather powerless.  In other words, Eve is the lowest anima conception–she is the anima of the kind of guy who thinks all women are “dumb bitches” whom he nonetheless would like to “break a piece off of” or “hit [that].”  The Eve cliche permeates pop culture–think of all the beautiful mean blonde cheerleaders, or Cameron Diaz in “Eyes Wide Shut,” or Regina George in “Mean Girls” or ANY MOVIE EVER[3].

Kim Novak

The next phase is Helen.  Helen has skills but is still a faithless bitch.  Helen is a lot like Season 2’s Bobbie Barrett, who Don admired and despised in equal measures.  Helen is basically Woman as Ball-buster, and is anima to the recently dumped or the recently dumped of spirit (those guys who go on and on about mean ex-girlfriends who dumped them six years ago.)

The third phase is Mary.  Mary is the vision of Woman as totally pure; she’s inspired by the Virgin Mary.  Have you seen the film “There’s Something About Mary?”  That will tell you everything about Mary that you need to know.  Mary is the anima of Promise Keepers.  Don vacillates between seeing Betty as Eve and Mary; a lot of dudes do this to ladies they are married to.  Welcome to the Virgin/Whore complex!

Final phase is Sophia.  “Sophia” is Greek for wisdom.  A dude with a Sophia anima sees women as actual human beings and individuals, instead of projecting his concepts of Woman onto her.  In lousy romantic comedies, Sophia is often represented by the mousy best friend who looks hot when she takes her glasses off.  The hero is overjoyed, because he gets to date a female whose personality he actually relates to, rather than a mean hot popular girl with no interests (which is how the mousy girl’s romantic rival is usually portrayed.)  Don’s lovers in Season 1, Rachael Menken and Midge Daniels, were Sophia figures for him.

Laura Dern isn't as big a face twin as Grace Kelly and Kim Novak and Betty Draper and Betty Elms and the Sweet Valley High Twins and Heather Locklear and all the other anima representations. But isn't she still kinda twinsy? And isn't this all a little creepy? Doesn't it make you believe that the Collective Unconscious has a very specific anima ideal that everybody is tapping into weirdly? Or do you think it's just the media? Or Lynch making fun of Hitchcock?

Obviously, though, these figures and stages are not entirely clean-cut.  Animas are as individual as the men they belong to, and may blend multiple stages together.  But it is interesting, when watching movies or TV, to see how often female characters fit neatly into the four stereotypes.

Face Twin

Lynch’s Blondes and Hitchcock’s Blondes are odd because they don’t fit exactly into the Eve, Helen, Mary, or Sophia categories.  They obviously operate as animas, since the way in which they figure in most of these masters’ films is highly suggestive, and yet they defy easy analysis.  Heather Locklear was an anima figure for Aaron Spelling, since he used her in series after series, but it’s not hard to figure out what she meant to him.  She was simply his Ultimate Blonde, and he knew that as such, she would keep viewers turning in, since she was probably a lot of people’s Ultimate Blonde (Wayne and Garth certainly thought so.)  But Hitchcock and Lynch didn’t hire their blondes simply because they were pretty.

The Woman Who Invented California

We must pause here and perhaps redundantly reiterate that the blondness of these blondes is important, since–for better or for worse–the blonde does represent the masculine sexual ideal.  I expect that a survey of animas, were such a thing possible, would yield rather Scandinavian results.  Visual geniuses like Hitchcock and Lynch know exactly what they are doing when they place an iconic blonde in the frame: they are, in a sense, stopping the entire movie.  For a moment, you’re not thinking about the plot or the characters or anything else–you’re just gawking at Grace Kelly or Patricia Arquette (or January Jones.)  If these women weren’t part of your anima conception before, they are now, and these filmmakers exploit that in order to draw you more intimately into their worlds.  Vertigo isn’t about a man who falls in love with a lady and tries to figure out her identity–it’s about the stuggle of a man to confront himself.  Twin Peaks wasn’t about the murder of Laura Palmer–it’s about the insanity of Leland Palmer.

Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer

Hitchcock’s Blondes ultimately are a bit more shallow than Lynch’s.  Hitchcock nods towards his blondes’ struggles to transcend their objectification (notably in Vertigo), but his true playground is the masculine psyche.  Lynch is more interested in the female character.  After all, Betty Elms in Mulholland Drive has an anima of her own.  Additionally, it could be claimed that Lynch satirizes the blonde-as-anima in his ongoing quest to satirize and complicate the weirdness of the American psyche.  Lynch’s great gift is to make the ordinary and banal seem unfamiliar and sinister.  In the process, he makes us question our subconscious assumptions–the foundations of our very worldviews.  He doesn’t hesitate to use the iconic blonde in order to manipulate us, but he makes us very uncomfortable that we are so susceptible to this manipulation.

Betty Draper is both a Lynch and a Hitchcock Blonde.  Hitchcock Blondes possess the primal aspect of the Eve, in that they are so beautiful, desirable, and unattainable; yet they also tend to be strong and pure of heart, after the manner of a Mary.  I would not call them Sophias, in that they are so psychologically freighted (in terms of how others see them) and emotionally closeted.  Lynch Blondes are not Sophias either–they are shadowy creatures running amuck through Lynch’s subconscious underworlds.  But none of Lynch’s characters are real people, really–rather, they’re all inhabitants of a capacious David’s Head.  Many viewers write off Betty as an Eve type–a beautiful, icy bitch.  But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again–she’s an Ibsen heroine (her people are, after all Nordic.)  Don himself sees her as merely an Eve, which is why he finds her so boring.  She’s important to him because she’s a sexual ideal, and his possession of her signals his dominance to other men[4].  Yes, he has had some anima-like experiences of her, such as when he is in California and keeps thinking he sees her in the crowd; likewise when he sleeps with the jet-set girl whose voice is so close to Betty’s.  And he also idealizes what he fondly thinks of as her motherly qualities–his speech to her in Season 1, Episode 9 (the bird-shooting episode) is indicative of this: “I would’ve given anything to have a mother like you. Beautiful and kind, filled with love. Like an angel.”

Beautiful and filled with love. Like an angel.

In retrospect, this speech is hilarious.  Betty is anything but an angel.  She’s an extremely frustrated woman who has barely begun to find out who she really is.  She hates her kids.  That episode was fantastic because it showed the gap between how Don sees Betty (and how Betty wants to see herself) and who she really is.  Recall also that this is the episode where she gets compared to Grace Kelly and asked to resume her former career as a model, and is only too happy to do so.  Betty is awesome because all she wants to do is be an anima–for what else is a model but the distillation of a million fantasies?  She wants nothing more than to never see who she really is, perhaps because she fears that that person is nothing special.  Don married her at an earlier stage of his anima process, but has since outgrown her (or thinks he has.)  He’s moved on to Sophia types (Bobbie was a Helen regression), and left her to her own devices.  These include acting like a total homeless, but nobody notices because she’s just so darn attractive.  Increasingly lonely and isolated, treated as symbol instead of individual, she’s going slightly crazy.  Her pregnancy has made her into a pure Mary anima, a vessel, which only angers her further.

“The Fog” deftly illustrated Betty’s growing break with reality.  While parts of this break were drug-exacerbated (who didn’t shudder at the phrase “twilight sleep?” Or all the weird “The Shining” moments with her father and mother and Medgar Evers?), much of her alienation stems from the disconnect between her inner reality and the way in which the world perceives her.  The world is trying to gaslight her (and she’s trying to gaslight herself) into thinking her life is awesome.  It’s anything but, and her consistent negativity, while galling, seems to be an attempt to reconcile this.  In a way, Betty still lives in a “twilight sleep,” but she is starting to wake up.  Someday, somebody is actually going to fall in love with Betty–the real Betty, not the projected anima vision she so easily embodies–and shit is going to get BURNED DOWN and Don will cry and I will laugh and laugh and laugh.

What does your anima or animus look like?

Another virgin-whore complex

[2] BTW, if that is a reference to the twins’ hot blonde mom Alice Wakefield from the “Sweet Valley High” series then the world is more beautiful than it has any right to be.

[3] And yes, Betty seems to be an Eve figure, at least upon first glance.  More on this later.

[4] And women.  I wonder how many women find Don that much more attractive when they see Betty?  I wonder if their desire to sleep with him stems from a desire to “prove” they are batting in Betty’s league?  It will be interesting to see if the show ever explores this.

Somebody talked to Bobby! It's a miracle!

This episode was all about unwanted gifts.  Gift-giving is often the most horrible thing in the world, because it is so psychologically fraught.  The things you choose to give people reveal a lot about what you actually think about them, and that is stressful as heck.  Also stressful as heck is trying to figure out the right way to receive a gift, because if you don’t give the giver the right reaction they are often PSYCHOLOGICALLY DESTROYED.  Much of the gift-giving tonight was occurring between parents and children (or people with parent-child type relationships.)  Parent gifts are even more stressful than regular gifts–they are pretty much the worst.  Parents like to think they are giving you what you need, but often they are just giving you what you need to become the person they think you should be.  This is usually tied into their own weird issues.  Think of how weird men are always giving their sons footballs when they are little babies.   This gift makes no sense because little babies are shitty athletes; it’s completely pointless.  So why do weird dads do this?  Are they trying to be funny by making fun of their little babies’ athletic and cognitive abilities?   Why not give the baby something he really wants, like a stale soggy Cheerio that’s been lurking under the couch for three weeks?   Because weird dads (by which I mean all dads) like to project their weird fantasies of who they wish they were onto their unsuspecting children.  The little babies don’t care because little babies are less sentient than most cats.  But by the time a kid hits five, he’s probably started to smell a rat.  By the time a kid hits eighteen, his whole personality has been warped around his parents’ frustrations and desires and unspoken weirdnesses.  All of a sudden he starts having panic attacks every time he hears the word Madden or sees a freshly mown lawn, and he has no idea why.

That's how you do mise en scene, motherflowers.

Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and her mom (Myra Turley) played this game tonight.  I was actually totally on Peggy’s mom’s side.  A lot of Internet talkers thought that Peggy’s mom sucked because of her guiltings and talk of rape and whatnot.  I saw it as a deserved lashing out – Peggy’s mom may have needed a TV, but that’s not why Peggy gave her one.  Peggy really does think her mom is dumb enough to get bribed out of noticing that Peggy is rejecting her entire lifestyle and values[1].  And her mom was right that Peggy is going to get raped–not literally, probably, but figuratively.  Peggy is all about embracing the bourgeois Manhattan lifestyle wholeheartedly, and she’s not putting enough energy into trying to really understand it.  She thinks that Don (Jon Hamm) and Joan (Christina Hendricks) really do have everything.  If she looked at them critically, she’d realize that they’re totally miserable, but she’s bought into their value system whole-hog.  This naivete, which almost reads as willful blindness, is leaving her very vulnerable.  Look at the roommate excursion.  She replaced her ad with Joan’s, not stopping to think that Joan’s ad is going to attract someone with whom she’ll never be able to get along[2].  This was borne out in the person of Karen (Carla Gallo) who has bad roommate scrawled all over her (probably in red lipstick.)  Karen would never rape Peggy, but what about one of Karen’s rejected or drunk suitors?  What about the fact that Karen[3] seems less than reliable, and might stick it to Peggy financially?  Just because Peggy’s mom started using the TV doesn’t mean that she was appeased or that Peggy was right – it just means Peggy’s mom is thrifty, unwilling to let the gift go to waste.  It just proves that Peggy is her mother’s daughter–they’re both practical to the point of being mercenary.  I bet Mrs. Olsen will still feel stupid whenever she looks at it.

Bonding!

Another parent-child pairing of interest was Betty (January Jones) and Gene (Ryan Cutrona.)  I really enjoyed Gene’s description of how his estate will be disposed of.  It was perfectly pitched to Betty’s sensibilities and concerns–it proves he really knows her well.  Of course Betty would want to know, above all, where her mother’s coats would be going.  But Betty was not receptive having this particular conversation.  It would be easy to decide that this is because she is a giant narcissist sociopath with no empathy for others.  Certainly there’s evidence to suggest this.  But it’s hard not to have compassion for Betty here: she’s pinned down to her life in Ossining like a moth under glass.  Her pregnancy damns her to continue the marriage she wanted to end indefinitely.  Furthermore, her pregnancy has destroyed (at least temporarily) the one thing she likes about herself and her life: her immaculate appearance.  The stunning Mrs. Draper doesn’t lack for beautiful clothes or the opportunity to show them off.  Gene’s Scarlett O’Hara reference was extremely apt.  Like Scarlett, Betty is fueled solely by others’ envy.  But distorted by pregnancy and saddled with a sick parent, her life hardly looks aspirational.  Her reluctance to discuss Gene’s will is directly related to dwell on just how bounded her life has become.  Bleak as that life looks, her position is understandable.  The other consideration here is how important Gene has become to the Draper household.  He seems to be taking on a large share of the child care and household duties—playing with the kids and transporting them to school and lessons, doing the grocery shopping.  In just a few weeks, Gene’s become a better partner to Betty in managing the Draper’s family life than Don ever has been.  Perhaps Betty is afraid to discuss Gene’s passing because she’s afraid to think about how much harder her life will be once he’s gone.  There will be nobody[4] to pick up the slack in a household made even more complicated by the addition of a new baby.

Not quite ruined.

So Gene’s gift, while entirely correct for the situation, couldn’t have come at a worse time.  By discussing his arrangements with Betty, rather than with Don, Gene was treating her like an equal, like an adult (something Betty is always asking for.)  In addition to everything else, he was giving her the gift of his respect.  But she didn’t want his respect, she wanted his pity.  He can’t help but despise her for that, and she knows it.  Gene’s attempt to give her a final gift only underscored how incapable of connection they really are.

Not so Sally (Kiernan Shipka) and Gene!  Gene gives Sally everything Betty wants—to be treated like a child, to be kept blissfully ignorant of life’s uglier facts, to be spoiled, petted, and plied with treats.  Betty’s devouring of Sally’s peach at the end of the episode was a nice touch—she doesn’t want the adult gifts Gene is offering her, she wants to steal what he tried to give to Sally.  But Gene is able to talk more frankly to Sally as well.  His relationship with her shows an instinct to course-correct.  Sensing that he was mistaken to cosset Betty as much as he did, he pushes Sally to become independent—teaching her to drive, encouraging her to believe in herself.  He showers her with the gifts he wishes he could have given Betty, and they fall on fertile ground.  His gifts to Bobby (Jared Gilmore) are a little odder, consisting as they do of a dead man’s hat and an activated fruit allergy.  Betty seems to project her frustrations with Don onto Bobby; maybe Gene does too.  Bobby has to accept peaches because Sally likes them.  Maybe this is an allegory for how Gene thinks Don should prioritize Betty’s happiness more often?  Hard to say.  The hat, of course, is a metaphor for the whole Don Draper/Dick Whitman thing (Dick picked up a dead man’s hat and became Don), but Gene can hardly know that.  Perhaps he just hopes that Bobby will be a man after his own heart, rather than Don’s.

The marble faun.

On the Sterling Cooper front, we had still more parent-child pairings.  The Patio commercial, in its own way, is one of these.  The Diet Coke people want an exact clone[5] of the “Bye Bye Birdie” scene, so in a sense the ad is a child of the film.   The client-firm relationship is also somewhat parental, as the client is the authority figure whom the team must please.  In this case, Sal (Bryan Batt) gave the client exactly the gift they had asked for, but somehow it was wrong.  I haven’t been able to tease out the meaning of this.  Some viewers have suggested that the commercial didn’t work because it was directed by a gay man.  I hate this hypothesis.  Perhaps it didn’t work because there was no divine spark of creation to the commercial—it wasn’t the true child of inspiration; rather, it was just a copy.  At any rate, it bears pondering.

At least their clothes are doing it.

Speaking of Sal, Kitty (Sarah Drew)  tries to give him the gift of her own sweet self, but she’s barking up the wrong tree.  Most hetero-sexual men would be happy to take that particular gift, wrapped as it was in filmy green lingerie, but Sal was exactly the wrong recipient.  His rejection of the gift, as with all the rejections in this episode, revealed a fatal flaw in the relationship between giver and recipient.

Sal and Don, however, continue to get on like gangbusters.  Don seems to have decided to adopt Sal, and Sal’s nothing loathe.  But when he tries to reciprocate in kind by being there for Don in his family crisis, Don cuts him dead (just like he does to everybody he’s close to!)  I guess that means he’s really a part of the Draper family, then.  Don also tries to adopt poor dumb Ho-Ho (Aaron Stanford), giving him the only good advice he’s ever gotten in his life.  But Ho-Ho wants to be treated like a grown-up, and to him this means being treated like an authority figure, rather than being dealt with truthfully.  It was worth it to see Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) shit a brick.  Ho-Ho and his father have the most obvious disappointed parent-sad child relationship.  Ho-Ho just wants to give the world (and his dad) the gift nobody has ever wanted—a totally sweet jai alai team.  Ho-Ho’s dad just wants Ho-Ho to destroy himself so that he’ll come back as a completely different person.  It will be interesting to see how this plot develops, although I think we all know the result: HARDCORE PSYCHOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION.

Which brings me to my alternate Mad Men title of the week: Sweet Mise en Scene and Hardcore Psychological Destruction. Can’t wait for next week’s episode: Anomie and Really Beautiful Transoms.

[2] Their scene also had a parent-child dynamic.  Joan is Peggy’s mentor on business, life, and men, although Peggy doesn’t like to admit it.  But Joan gave her exactly the wrong advice.  It was advice for somebody Joan wishes she still was, rather than for who Peggy really is.

[3] The Peggy and Karen situation oddly reminds me of The Bell Jar. Remember when the Sylvia Plath stand-in (“Olivia Slath” or whatever her name was) is rooming with the Southern party girl who puts on millions of coats of mascara?  And they go on some weird double date and “Olivia Slath” cannot handle it because everybody is too tacky and the situations they are in are too bourgeois and she just wants to go home and navel-gaze in the bath so she does and then something bad happens to the roommate “offscreen” and she tries to come back into the apartment but she’s locked out and drunk and pitiful and “Olivia Slath” won’t get up out of the bath and unlock the door because it might break the delicate bubble of her depression and her depression is too wonderful for her to threaten so she leaves the roommate out in the hall?  There are 3 points to make about that event (which I have imperfectly remembered.)  1.  Could totally see Peggy and Karen enacting this.  2.  I bet that shit really happened.  3.  Sylvia Plath is kind of brave for including that in the novel, but also still kind of a monster.

[4] Carla (Deborah Lacey) seems to be MIA—perhaps she quit after The Affair of the Five Bucks.

[5] Lotta clones tonight—Peggy’s mom and sister, the ad, the Ann-Margret clone.  If you want to get weird, the character that Lois prank-calls Peggy in works at a tannery, i.e. she works with skins, something that these characters like to pull over their real selves.

"Don't you just love a good cotillion?""I'm going to poop in your trunk later."

Does anybody really enjoy parties?  No – let me rephrase that – does anybody really enjoy the beginning and middle of parties?[1] The start of a party is always awkward, filled with obligatory introductions and desperate foraging for small talk.  After you’ve settled in, there’s the necessity of “mixing” – of making sure that you talks to all the appropriate people, as well as the lonely people, and of course the new people – in short, of making sure that you talk to everybody except the people you actually want to talk to, which are usually the people you came with.  It’s worse than working, because at least at work you don’t have to pretend to be enjoying yourself.  That’s why work parties are so uneasy – they take the usual social labor endemic to parties and multiply it by injecting actual fiscal anxiety into the situation.  We all have to perform, both in our social spheres and on the job, but it can be harrowing to try to cobble together your professional and public personas into a living, breathing, reacting creature who doesn’t drink too much or say the wrong thing or eat too much or give away too much information to that bitch Donna from sales.

This episode was all about parties – work parties, specifically.  It was a great device, because we got to see all our favorite repressives and dipsomaniacs engaged in deceptively casual situations that were actually totally fucking intense. Unlike the players, we knew exactly why everything was totally fucking intense, which gave their performances (social and otherwise) extra resonance.  Let’s rate those performances, shall we?

The fact is that your job at work parties is to appear to be having an AWESOME TIME while also being TOTALLY APPROPRIATE and also NOT A ROBOT but instead a RELATABLE, PROMOTABLE PERSON.  That’s why Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) is so comfortable at work parties (in fact, he’s probably more comfortable at work parties than in any other situation.)  All he does all day is pretend to be an AWESOME, APPROPRIATE PERSON MADE OF FLESH AND BLOOD, NOT FEMO AND LUCITE AND DARKE MAGICKE, YOU JERKS.  Part of what makes him so weird is that most people are just trying to get through their day, so they don’t understand why he’s always going up to them and saying things like “YOU THINK I’M A REAL BOY, RIGHT?” and “HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF COFFEE?”  But at a work party, all anybody is doing is going around saying things like that, things like “SALES HUH WEIRD!” and “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU ATE A BIRD THE OTHER DAY I ATE A BIRD ONCE BUT AT A DIFFERENT TIME AND LOCATION.”  This is because most people are bad at talking to people they don’t know, except if they want something like a good or service or those papers on their desk by 9 AM sharp. But Pete is great at it because it is his whole life, because he doesn’t know anybody and no one knows him and all he does all day is take middle-aged men to weird restaurants.  At Roger (John Slattery) and Jane’s (Peyton List) party, everybody was playing on Pete’s turf (for once.)

TOTALLY NORMAL PERSON

Normal people hate socializing, because it’s so uncomfortable: it involves very advanced lying skills.  Socializing is inherently political.  It’s all about forming new alliances, intelligently handling enemies, reinforcing old alliances, negotiating truces, dodging mine fields, and so on – all while pretending that you have no idea that you are doing that, or that other people are doing that, or that you know that they know you are doing that, and also that this is all rilly, rilly fun.  Work socializing is double-fun, because it conflates the battle for community status with the battle for professional status.  At work parties, most people are pretty paralyzed, because their heads are exploding from the cognitive dissonance between what they are pretending to do (chill out at a picnic!) and what they are supposed to do (jockey for position.)  Thus, work parties tend to live and die on the strength of the Office Extrovert.

In normal work situations, like when you are trying to get something done, the Office Extrovert is annoying – he’s always running around making bad jokes that you have to try to laugh at, or making meetings awkward because he can’t read a room, or trying to “show you something.”  But the Office Extrovert’s inability to understand other people, which makes him so awful at work, is a godsend to the work party.  He can’t tell that people are way more uncomfortable than usual.  He’s tricked, by the trappings of the occasion, into thinking that everybody is having an awesome time.  (It also helps that he is usually having an awesome time.  Extroverts tend to be self-centered, and to project their feelings onto others, thus: if he is having an awesome time, everybody else must be too.)  And so the Office Extrovert becomes the life of the party – people laugh at his jokes, however bad, because at least they break the ice; they listen raptly to his long stories, grateful that, for a while at least, they don’t have to come up with anything to say.  For one night only, the Office Extrovert is exactly the man he thinks he is: suave, socially adept, and witty.

One of the banes of successful socializing is self-consciousness.  Like most extroverts, Pete has no insight into his own feelings and personality, which is why he loves to socialize.  Most normal people are not comfortable with lying precisely because it makes them feel self-conscious; therefore parties, with their high levels of ritualistic pretence, make them feel awkward.  Look at Harry Crane (Rich Sommer.)  He’s much more normal of a guy than Pete; he’s probably better liked; he’s certainly more affable.  Yet at Roger and Jane’s party, Harry performs far less successfully than Pete.  This is because Harry’s just not OK with goal-oriented socializing (and his wife Jennifer’s (Laura Regan) prodding doesn’t help.)  Harry’s self-consciousness keeps him on the fringes of the fete, even though in real life he’s fairly popular.

Fairly popular.

Yes, tonight was FULL OF WIN for ol’ Pete.  He got to make a dance!  He got to say HAI GUISE and people said it back!  Trudy (Alison Brie) likes to say HAI GUISE and make dances as well, because she no has a fetus so all she does is practice saying HAI GUISE and play Social Smartz with Pete.  Betty (January Jones) and Trudy got along real well because they are both pretty ladies who enjoy calm, attractive environments, as well as ignorance of the fact that their husbands are crazy liars.  Jennifer was sad because her husband was not a crazy liar!  And so was said husband!  But they should appreciate the fact that their lives/personalities are actually quite normal.  The cumulative effect of this incident was to point out an irony about the sixties, which is part of Mad Men’s Indian name, “A Child’s Treasury of Ironies About the Sixties!”

And there was another irony hiding behind the above irony!  This irony was about Don Draper (Jon Hamm), of course.  See, Don Draper is even better at socializing than Pete.  This is because the other ingredient of being good at socializing, besides a lack of self-consciousness, is being very self-conscious.  You must be self-conscious as well as other-conscious when socializing, because in order to get people to like and respect you, you have to understand what their personalities are and what the stakes of the situation are and also how you are coming across and how your persona can help or hinder you in achieving your social goals.  You have to know how to act and you have to understand that you are performing.  You have to understand your audience.  This is a paradox, and also a Jedi trick – you have to simultaneously totally understand the artificial nature of interactions while not letting the fact that you are being artificial bother you because you are totally ignoring the implications of this artificiality even as you are wielding it.

Pete actually understands this, he’s just missing part of the equation.  He understands this because he is trying to be Don Draper, because everybody is trying to be Don Draper.  He apes everything that Don does, understanding why Don does it, but the part he is missing is that he doesn’t know that it sucks.  People like Don because he does and says all the right things, but also because they sense that he is still human and actually hates it.  Pete, on the other hand, has no idea that socializing sucks.  He loves it, which paradoxically makes him a giant douche.

Paradoxical douchery.

Pete is both very good and very bad at socializing.  Nobody likes him but he is the master of awkward interactions.  Nobody wants to go out with a beer with Pete, but on the other hand, they also know he is very useful, because you can foist your weird aunt on him and he will talk about curtains with her for like ten hours and never even know that it is horrible and boring.  In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and as Harry can tell you, Pete Campbell was the king of this particular work party.

Except that everybody’s true love is Don Draper (including me!)  Why?  Mostly because Don spent this episode ruling.  The best thing was when he jumped over the bar instead of using the door.  This is because Don is a rake!  He delighted the flip out of that old rich man, whom the Internet suspects was supposed to be Conrad Hilton.  He did it by being good at being a bartender and drinking poor-quality drinks with him and telling charming poop stories.  In other words, instead of making a queerbait dance, Don acted like a human.  He said he hated parties, like all good-hearted people, even as he ruled at being at a party. Don knows the funnest thing to do at a party, at least during the middle part, is to sneak off and be separate from the party with somebody else and complain about the party together and get wasted.  Then people miss you and wonder if you are off being cooler than them and the answer is yes and your stock goes up.  Also by sneaking off you are anticipating the best part of the party, which is the end part when you are drunk and making fun of everybody else and saying witticisms.  It’s mean because you are leaving all the workhorse socializing to Peter the Sturdy Burro, but it’s fun because there are no consequences for that.

Betty had a good time at the party because wives feared her, and she had a nice dress, and she saw a racism, and a man petted her.  These are some of her favorite things.  Betty is probably good at socializing; I’m not sure yet.  She doesn’t have any friends, but most people don’t think she’s weird; they just think she is a pretty and strange lady, or possibly a pony.  She knows appearances are important, but I am not sure if she knows why or how or even that she thinks that they are.   She likes going places because all the men say oh look a lady pony and all the women say oh hai woah you caught a Draper.  That is her job and she has many costumes for it.  She liked Trudy because they are the same except Trudy is not as good and doesn’t own a Draper.  (I mean, Trudy is not as good as her in Betty’s eyes.  I think Trudy is cool because she is passionate and good at managing Pete, but Betty doesn’t know about that.)  And she liked leaving the house because she hates her children.  Betty is a very David Lynch-type person and often in her mind she is whispering the word “appropriate” over and over again in order to avoid hearing her own thoughts.  She does not like to drop in to see what condition her condition is in.

Politeness!

Roger’s performance of “My Old Kentucky Home” was interesting in contrast to everybody else’s performances.  Roger’s favorite thing in the world is to be totally inappropriate all the time.  He seems to have a perverse drive to make situations as uncomfortable as mortally possible, probably because he finds uncomfortable people entertaining.   The purpose of Roger’s performance, unlike everybody else’s performances, was not to charm others and consolidate his social status.  Rather, it was one part dare, one part hubris, and one part whimsy.  It was his party, and he could wear blackface if he wanted to.  The “joke” of the blackface, for Roger, probably lay in the fact that he was the most powerful person there.  It was funny to him to pretend to be poor and powerless, because he is the opposite of poor and powerless, because he is the opposite of poor and powerless.  And, in a weird way, by aping the mannerisms of someone “lowly,” he was not only making fun of poor black slaves but also of everybody else at the party.  Everybody else has to pretend to be awesome, but Roger has nothing to lose, so he can act weak or weird or however he pleases.  In a certain sense, he was flaunting his power over his guests – they have to wear “rich cultured whiteface,” but he gets to run around in blackface.  The tittering guests are enslaved to convention[2], but Roger believes himself above the rules – perhaps because men like him made the rules.

Yet there was a certain insecurity to the party – the ostentatious flaunting of wealth, the gusto with which Roger kissed Jane after the performance, tarring her with face paint.  Something felt a little bit Gatsby.  Roger’s little display after Jane drunkenly accosted Don revealed definite insecurity.  I don’t think he was jealous of Jane going after Don; it seemed more that he was desperate for Don to go after Jane, to validate, in some odd way, his choosing her.  He needs to believe that Don is jealous of him – and, indeed, that everybody is jealous of him – because, on some level, he doesn’t really believe in his own choice.  He needs external evidence that he is free and wildly happy, perhaps because he doesn’t feel authentically free and truly happy.  Don brutally disabused him of his illusions of being envied.  We haven’t seen any repercussions from this yet, but that doesn’t mean that it was an insignificant gesture.  If Roger didn’t already hate Don a little, he definitely does now.  I wonder what Roger would make of Dick Whitman?

The Totally Discreet Charm of the Petit-Bourgeoisie

Our second work party was at Ye Olde Harris Homestead, and man was it middle-class -  charades!  Pillow sittin’!  Emily Post!  Dip!  Vacuuming!  There were so many keenly-observed details of time and place – most of which I probably didn’t get, actually, but I got enough that the entire thing felt painful even before the guests arrived.  The anxiety over seating was . . . grandmotherly.  Everybody knows that the key to a good party is nonchalance.  The Harris’ bickering and fretting made the party felt doomed before it started.  If Roger and Jane’s party seemed like something out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Harris party was pure Sinclair Lewis.

As a couple, Joan (Christina Hendricks) and Greg (Sam Page) seem to be pursuing an aggressively upwardly mobile life strategy.  They’re not aiming to be upper class, like Roger and Jane or Pete and Trudy; rather, they’re trying to become the Drapers.  Joan hitched her wagon to Greg because, let’s face it, she’s not getting any younger, and a handsome young doctor is her best chance for solid middle-class bliss.  We haven’t been as clear on why Greg wanted Joan (besides the fact that she’s a stone fox), but tonight tossed us some tantalizing hints.  Their preparations for their dinner party – cleaning, fussing over place cards – revealed that they at least share the same social ambitions.  That’s a poweful bond – just ask Pete and Trudy, or Don and Betty.  Additionally, it appears that they’re living in Joan’s comfortably appointed apartment, and subsisting largely on Joan’s salary.  Greg may not like that Joan works, but he’s obviously not afraid to eat of the fruits of her labor.

The party also showed us that Joan is far more socially adept than Greg.  The guests certainly seemed more impressed with her than with him.  At one point, the chief resident’s wife even comments that the fact that Greg nabbed Joan gives her more confidence in him(!)  In the short span of the dinner party, Joan seemed to find out more about Greg, his position at the hospital, and the life she’s married into than she learned from the span of their entire relationship.  Joan’s excellent at dissembling, so her chagrin was not obvious to the guests, but it was clear that she was taken aback.  Greg’s future is not bright.  He was definitely depending upon the party (and Joan) to help advance his career, but even Joan’s not charming enough to compensate for his apparent incompetence.  A successful party and a clever wife can help someone like Harry Crane, whose work performance is solid, but it can’t spackle over serious performance problems like Greg’s.

Good bargain.

The writers doled out hint after hint that Greg’s job is in jeopardy, letting the tension mount throughout the evening.  Christina Hendricks was excellent at subtly conveying to us how Joan’s gradual realization of how little she really knows her husband, the tiny fissures that appeared in her gracious hostess persona as it dawned upon her that she’s made a bad bargain.  Her tolerance of Greg (and I don’t think we’ve seen half of what she’s suffered) has been dependent upon the premise that he is a catch and that she was lucky to nab him.  She’s been able to hold her head high in the office (and in her altercation with Jane) because she believed in him, in their future together.  She’d thought that she’d caught a Draper, and that his temper was a small price to pay.  Instead she’s married to a weak incompetent, a liar.

Greg deliberately misled her about the real purpose of the party and his position at work.  Her lack of information about his true status put her at a definite social disadvantage.  If she weren’t so quick on her feet, she would have been caught flatfooted by the revelations made by Greg’s colleagues and their wives – the long years during which he will make nothing; the wait before they will be able to afford to have children (a wait that Joan, at her age, can ill afford); the improbability of Greg’s promotion.  This is very important information – it means that Joan will probably have to keep working for a long time, it means that the lifestyle that he’s promised her will be impossible for many years, it means that everything that Joan has told her colleagues about her future is a lie, at least right now.  That’s probably the unkindest cut – pride is more important to Joan than anything, and it appears that hers is about to take a fall.  She’s been telling everyone at Sterling Cooper for months that she’ll be leaving soon to have babies, just as soon as Greg’s promotion comes through.  Now she’ll have to eat her words.  She’ll have to face questions from Peggy, her rival; Roger, the love of her life; Paul, the boyfriend who talked about her; all the catty office girls, who’d like nothing more than to see her brought low.  On the heels of her confrontation with Mrs. Roger Sterling, this must be a bitter pill.

And, of course, just when Joan’s at her most devastated, Greg asks her to provide a diversion.  Greg, who lied to her, who didn’t trust or respect her enough to treat her like a partner, asks her to distract from his mistakes, to layer another performance over the performance she’s been struggling through all evening.  It was an enormously tense moment, the final humiliation.  The fact that Joan plays the accordion indicative of what is probably a working-class background.  Daughters in working-class households were taught to play accordion because their families couldn’t afford pianos.  Playing the accordion, therefore, causes Joan pain, because it reveals her true antecedents – origins that she’s spent her whole life trying to escape.

Actually, they're all Ibsen heroines.

In the next episode, “The Arrangements,” Joan makes fun of Peggy’s advertisement for a roommate by saying that it “reads like the stage directions from an Ibsen play.”  Yet it’s Joan who is the true Ibsen heroine.  Ibsen’s female protagonists were trapped by Victorian values in lives that they found profoundly dissatisfactory.  Hedda Gabler is an especially instructive example: Hedda, a voraciously ambitious woman, marries a man she doesn’t love, but who has good career prospects.  She discovers that his future is not as promising as she thought, due to a professional rival.  Her ambition drives her to destroy the lives of the rival and his wife, but her perfidy is discovered, and she ends the play by killing herself.  A Doll’s House is also interesting to examine – its heroine, Nora, is married to a man who does not respect her.  She pretends to be helpless for his benefit, as he finds it attractive, even as she secretly supports him as a secretary.  Her husband Torvald is soon due for a promotion, which she looks forward to as it will allow her to quit her job.  However, a colleague of Torvald’s starts blackmailing her regarding her job, and her fear of Torvald finding out about it almost drives her to suicide.  When Torvald does find out the truth, he berates her, which eventually motivates her to leave him.

Given the similarities between Ibsen’s work and Joan’s situation, I don’t think this reference was a coincidence (especially since the whole “performing after dinner” motif was so Victorian in the first place.)  Ibsen was highly concerned with the hypocrisy of Victorian marriage, of traditional male and female roles.  The Victorian marriage model didn’t die with them – it persisted through the decades, through Joan’s time and to our own.  Hopefully Joan will be an Ibsen heroine in the mold of Nora, rather than of Hedda[3].

Our final work party was supposed to be more “work,” than “party,” but who could resist the opportunity to get stoned with Orson Welles, Tom Cruise, and Baby Steve Buscemi?  Not Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss)!  I enjoyed the opportunity to spend more time with Smitty (Patrick Cavanaugh.)  Like Paul (Michael Gladis), he’s not nearly as big a hipster as he’d like to think he is (that honor goes to out-n-proud Kurt.

Look at this fucking hipster.

This is evidenced by the fact that, despite their super-keen sweaters, neither ad man is able to score without calling upon Risky Business-era Tom Cruise, ak.a. Jeffrey (Miles Fisher), Paul’s college roommate.  If either Paul or Smitty were true beatniks, they’d have called up their local tea dealer.

This work party was the most casual, despite it taking place at Sterling Cooper.  Resentful of working on a Saturday while the power players frolic at Roger’s garden party, the rank and file rebel by smoking trees.  Peggy “Or You Could Just Become a Robot” Olson tries to get them to focus before herself succumbing.  Although the atmosphere was generally light, there was still some jockeying for position – Peggy smoking to impress the boys; Jeffrey calling Paul’s pedigree and singing talents into question; Olive chastising Peggy; the reeling off of college credentials; the aforementioned hipster competition between Smitty and Paul.  But the stakes were different than those at the other parties, making for some interesting dynamics.  Not everybody was playing the same game, and in these tensions we could read the cultural clashes incipient to this time in American history.

Baby Steve Buscemi

Smitty is a little bit younger and a little bit cooler than Paul.  Paul puts on Beatnik airs, and while Smitty also affects some of these, he’s also in touch with more modern currents.  He’s totally comfortable with his work partner Kurt’s homosexuality (and he’s aware that there are a lot of gay people in advertising); he listens to hipper music; and he’s at ease with himself in a way that Paul just isn’t.   Even more importantly, unlike the other guys at the office, he’s not so threatened by Peggy’s intelligence and cool demeanor that he doesn’t notice that she is an ADORABLE ROBOT MURDERER.  (Yes, Pete noticed that Peggy was cute, but he doesn’t really appreciate her finer points.  Smitty likes her because she is both ravenously ambitious and rabidly naive.)   Paul might read Ginsberg and Marx, but in his heart of hearts he still wants to be Don Draper.  He pretends to be too good for Sterling Cooper because he’s afraid he’s not good enough for it (and he may be right.)  Successful novelist Ken feels no need to broadcast his artistic inclinations at work because he’s a successful novelist; Paul needs his hipster pose because without it, he’s Harry without the glasses (and the competence.)  Paul doesn’t seem to have noticed that he is a middle-class guy working at an ad agency; he seems to think he’s storming around with Burroughs and Kerouac and Corso, fomenting revolution.  He calls Jeffrey not so much because he’s desperate to smoke pot as because he’s desperate to be seen smoking pot.  If he can’t go to the garden party (and he wanted to, make to mistake), then he has to appear like he never wanted to go in the first place.  If he can’t yell O HAI SALES then he must yell O BOI CONTER CULKURE.  He’s playing the same game as everybody at the garden party, he just doesn’t know it.  The other kids at the party, Jeffrey and Smitty and Peggy, are working from entirely different sets of assumptions.  Paul’s value system shines through like a white bra through a macrame sweater, and everyone sees it but him.  Smitty would have probably been more impressed if Paul had eschewed pot altogether (especially since Jeffrey was no Neal Cassady.)

College

Speaking of Jeffrey, his tales of Young Paul certainly threw Current Paul’s pretensions into high relief.  You can take the boy out of Jersey, but you can’t take the Jersey out of the boy.  Paul’s vaguely British inflections seem all the more ridiculous now.  I wonder what his Princeton days were really like?  Certainly, he wasn’t a cocksman, especially if he was in the Princeton equivalent of Glee Club.  (By the by, the actor who played Jeffrey went to Harvard, where (of course) he sang with the Harvard Krokodiloes, a big-deal a cappella group.  How many times do I have to say it – YOU CAN’T UNDERESTIMATE HOW INSANE MATTHEW WEINER IS.  HE IS INSANE, YA’LL.  “Get me a dude who looks like Tom Cruise and has an amazing Ivy League Glee Club background.”  “I don’t know, Matt .  . . “  “DO IT.”  “Okay, well there’s this guy who was cloned from Tom Cruise’s DNA, except taller, with a touch of Christian Bale for a nice Bret Easton Ellis touch -”  “What school did he go to?”  “Harvard.”  “NOT GOOD ENOUGH.”  “I don’t know if we can get a Princeton Tom Cruise – ” “FUCKIN’ FINE.  BUT I’VE GOT MY EYE ON YOU.”)

Yes, Paul will always be a scholarship boy, unlike progressive ninja Peggy, who went to secretarial school in Brooklyn but who will cut a bitch, high if she has to. Jeffrey and Smitty couldn’t get enough of it, probably because they’d both like nothing more than to be househusbands – Jeffrey because he’s lazy, Smitty because that’s how he rolls.  I liked Jeffrey – he reminded me of a young Roger Sterling.  He had the same louche disregard for convention, too – he may be a drug dealer, but he’s a blueblood drug dealer, dammit.  You don’t need to play by the rules if your dad invented them.  Smitty is trying to be from the future, so he’s not afraid to say he went to a state school.  His pass at Peggy was adorable, especially since all it accomplished was to activate her Copy Writin’  subroutine.  Smitty was trying to pull an party escape on her, but Peggy was too autistic to notice.   Instead he had to lie around with Jeffrey and Paul and be all end of the party.  The end of the party is the best part, because everyone is wasted and comfortable and wants to be there, but it’s also boring, because everybody is wasted.  And Jeffrey and Paul just don’t get Smitty, man – Jeffrey is too nihilistic and Paul is too bourgeois.  Smitty wanted to go on the roof and talk about folk singers and smoke so many cigarettes and have dreams and talk about how everybody’s so phony and how he’s kind of a terrific liar, I mean he lies all the time for no goddamn reason, and Peggy would look into his eyes and play checkers with him and he’d let her keep all her kings in the back row.  But Peggy had to go keep Olive down, and cared not for his liquid eyes.  I’m going to be really sad if we don’t get more of this plot.

Girl Sheriff Captain

Pegs, Girl Sheriff Captain, was even more charming than Don in this episode.  She wanted to smoke pot, and so she did it!, with no nonsense.  Olive wanted to remand her, but she couldn’t; instead she got a face full of stroking.  Pegs is even more insane than Pete; she’s totally post-convention.  Not only does she not recognize how normals act -  she doesn’t care.  She has Goals.  She does not need Olive, nor writing partners.  She will write the entire campaign herself, as soon as she gets a glass of water!  The women of America need not fear that they will never break through the glass ceiling – Peggy will quirk her little fist at it,  and it shall shatter.  Olive was trying to remind Peggy of the rules, not because she was trying to punish her, but because she was trying to protect her.  But, quoth Peggy, I recognize no rules, and no order, because they were invented to keep down me and mine.  Olive didn’t understand and got scared, but Peggy was all, no, anarchy’s cool, I’m going to be the Queen of the Thunderdome.  After watching everybody else get the crap kicked out of them by the demands of conventional society, it was nice to be reminded that caring about said demands is indeed a choice.

And at the Draper manse, The Affair of the Five Bucks reminded us that social occasions and workplaces aren’t the only areas where we have to dissemble – home life can require heapum white lies.  Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka) has been committing little acts of theft and vandalism throughout the series.  Obviously, these crimes are a cry for attention.  But while we’ve seen her punished for some of these acts, we’ve never seen Don and Betty actually comprehend their meaning.  Often, Sally isn’t even caught, as Don and Betty pay their children less attention than some people pay their dogs.  When she is caught, she gets a slap on the wrist, and then it’s over.  Her theft of Gene’s money was a test, and I think that he passed it.  He noticed what she had done, but he did not withdraw love or approval from her for it – instead, it seemed to inspire him to pay even more attention to her.  This was the one example of white lies working out well – Sally pretended that she wasn’t a thief, Gene pretended that he didn’t know it, and the two actually became closer as a result.  Some pretenses are actually useful.

Official Sex Person

This episode worked for me upon the first viewing.  Some critics felt that it was a bit disjointed, but – when looked at in the context of the other four episodes of this season, as part of a quartet – I think it sounds all the right notes.  It’s a little odd, and the scene breaks feel somewhat lurching, but I think this is intentional.  The main motif of the episode is the straddling of worlds, and I think the viewer is meant to feel discombobulated.  The title, “Love Among the Ruins,” is one of those classic juxtapositions, and the episode hammered home over and over again the message that the characters are on uncertain ground, moving from one world to another.  At times this was almost grating – Ann-Margret’s “Bye Bye Birdie” was certainly startling – but this ominous banality, in contrast to the episode’s more meditative moments, definitely created a sense of doom, which seems to be the major theme of Season 3.

The major narrative drive of Season 3 comes not so much from the characters as from the audience.  We know that a cultural revolution is coming, and this gives meaning and thematic resonance to seemingly disconnected narrative threads – Grandpa Gene moving in with the Drapers; Peggy’s quest for independence; Sal’s struggles with his sexuality; the British invasion of Sterling Cooper; Don’s mission to become, finally, the family man he only appears to be; Roger’s marital and family conflicts; even the workplace rivalry between Pete and Ken.  As other critics have noted, the audience’s knowledge of the revolution to come makes us look at the characters not simply as players in a period drama, trapped in a vacuum-sealed reality as foreign to our own as the moon, but rather almost as contemporaries.  We wonder how they will survive in the coming world, one much closer to our own.  Some, like Peggy, will benefit from the transition; others, like Roger and Joan, seem due to be cut down by the scythe of history.  Roger and Joan are masters of ‘50’s social custom, but their social skills and graces will have no place in the social order to come.  We worry that they are too much creatures of their time to adapt.  Other characters, like Don and Pete, are question marks, showing both progressive and regressive tendencies.  How will Pete, for instance, weather the facial hair revolution?  Will Don be able to trade in his suits and ties for Nehru jackets?  What about the kids?

What were the motifs of this episode?  Ruins, of course; love, of course.  Replicas and imitation.  There were probably more, but these were the ones that reached out and shook me.  Browning’s poem, “Love Among the Ruins,” is about a hill where once a proud city stood.  The princes of the city were powerful; they fought and struggled; they warred and spent.  Now the hill is bare, populated only by sheep and ruins.  A girl waits for the narrator there; they are in love.  Their love, according to the narrator, is far more important than the city that once stood, the civilization that fell.  Although this poem was written in 1855, it has a peculiarly Baby-Boomer-esque perspective.  Like Browning, the Boomers are Romantics – they prize emotion over intellect, youth over history, the individual above the group, the pastoral over the industrial, freedom over loyalty.  In other words, the poem epitomizes the coming conflict between the hippies and the old guard.  While the Boomer revolution did result in tremendous civil rights gains, it also resulted in a certain loss of gentility, and (arguably) of morality.  Young love is glorious; it also tends to be hugely narcissistic.  Mad Men’s attitude to the cultural revolution seems to be enjoyably complicated – it celebrates the coming freedom (especially through characters like Peggy) while simultaneously mourning its cost (through characters like Roger, for whom the writers reveal a definite fondness.)  It chronicles regrettable social restrictions by showing the struggles of characters like Sal and Joan, while critiquing the naivety of the freedom fighters through its satirical portrayal of hipsters like Paul, whose liberal values are at least 60% affectation.

Not hipsters

Mad Men’s extraordinarily conflicted attitude toward change found fertile ground in the Penn Station plot.  We the audience know that the destruction of Penn Station will come to be seen as an international tragedy, and that it will spark the creation of the Landmark Commission.  Yet we resent hipster Paul for dissenting against the project (in front of the client!) and we yearn for Don to recapture the account.  We love Don’s patented Don Draper moment of the evening: “Let’s also say that change is neither good or bad. It simply is. It can be greeted with terror or joy. A tantrum that says, ‘I want it the way it was’ or a dance that says, ‘Look, it’s something new,” and we bristle when London cancels the account.

Don’s evocation of California in this pitch was especially interesting.  As we all know, “California” is code for “gigantic hippies.”  Don describes California as “new,” “clean,” “young,” and “full of hope.”  As symbolized by his stroking of the grass during the May Pole dance, Don is already half in love with aspects of the cultural revolution.  And his survivor mentality is encapsulated in his framing of the destruction of the station as something that people can’t change, no matter how much they protest.  Don is very fatalistic; he sees change as inevitable, and he seeks to adapt himself to it.   Again, though, this is a very strange mentality – Don doesn’t love change because he is a revolutionary who seeks to change society; he loves change because he feels trapped by society, and so he welcomes any shift.  His attitude is essentially passive.  He will enjoy the cultural revolution because he is determined to enjoy whatever comes his way – it’s part of his philosophy – but in many ways he will be unable to really understand what motivates the revolutionaries, which is the refusal to change themselves, to conform, to say yes.  This misunderstanding may prove fatal.  Don thinks he is on the side of youth.  He thinks that demolishing Penn Station will help New York to reject decay, to become the shining city on the hill again.  Yet he is making exactly the wrong choice, aligning himself with agents of the old guard – businessmen who care more for profit than for beauty.  London’s choice to reject the account is also ominous – it will seemingly cost Sterling Cooper millions of dollars.  Our sympathies are once again with Don – we are angered that London is so shortsighted.  London is so reactionary as to cast Don as prescient.  But it may be that London is right for all the wrong reasons.  Mad Men is expert at creating these layers – at playing with audience expectations, pitting lines of speculation against each other.  This is what makes this “boring, slow” show so fascinating.  It’s a Greek tragedy, wherein everyone’s fate is created by their fatal flaws.  Our foreknowledge of future events lends the show enormous tension – we worry not only about how the characters will survive themselves, but about how they will survive the times.

Doomed!

Penn Station (and by extension, New York itself) wasn’t the only ruin on hand tonight – we also had the fight over Gene’s house; the wedding; Roger and Mona’s marriage; and, arguably, a number of bodies – Gene’s, Betty’s, Roger’s, and Peggy’s.  There are even references to redecorating the Draper’s home and to the Draper family going antique shopping (mercifully, these fascinating developments were kept off screen.)  Gene’s house is one that seems to have outlived its purpose: Gene is no longer capable of living on his own.  Therefore, the sheep (Betty’s brother William and his wife Judy) want to move in.  Betty, who no one could ever accuse of not being hugely reactionary, is of course against this – as we’ve seen again and again, she clings stubbornly to her childhood, and she views her parent’s home as almost a shrine to her mother’s memory.  (By the way, I wish there had been some mention – or consideration – of what would happen to the Hofstadt’s housekeeper (and Betty’s de facto mother figure) Viola.  She seemed a very important part of the Hofstadt family, and I wish they had explained what had happened to her.  Then again, perhaps this is symptomatic of the casual racism and passivity natural to Betty’s character.)  William and Judy’s instinct to take over the house, while a little venal, isn’t unreasonable.  But in Betty’s eyes, it’s akin to a barbarian invasion – the ancestral home will be ruined.  Don’s sensitivity to Betty’s feelings on this cause him to insist that Gene move in and the house remain untouched.  Yet isn’t that consigning the house to becoming a true ruin – a place where no one lives, a place that has outlived its purpose?  Betty and Don see the preservation of the house in its original state as an act of love, but in doing so they show no love for their relatives – William and Judy and their small family.  In throwing their loyalty to the dead and almost-dead, they destroy the possibility of future family unity.  Don’s insistence that William and Judy leave the car behind seemed especially cruel – and I bet that this slight won’t be soon forgotten.

"What does that old saddlebag want?"

Roger’s daughter Margaret’s wedding is set for the day after the JFK assassination – love among the ruins indeed!  But the second ruin haunting this occasion is Roger and Mona’s failed marriage.  While Roger’s attempts to negotiate his “blended family” are rather modern, the roots of the situation are not – Roger’s marriage to Jane was an attempt at recapturing his youth, at denying his own mortality.  Here, as with the Penn Station situation, the pursuit of the new is actually regressive, rather than progressive.  Roger is not attempting to become a new man; he’s trying to become the man he used to be.  He isn’t cool; he’s embarrassing.  His willful blindness to the awkwardness created by his marriage to a girl the same age as his daughter has an interesting parallel in Gene’s second marriage.  Like Gene, who is pretending that he doesn’t know that Gloria has left him, Roger also puts up a blithe front, insisting that everything is okay even as his family pointedly informs him that no, it is not.  Roger is so busy pretending that his new marriage is wonderful and he is supremely happy that he hasn’t noticed that he actually is quite unhappy.  His scene with Mona had a nice wistfulness, even a sexual tension, that I hadn’t noticed before between them.  Upon being informed that Mona has a date to the wedding, he snaps “Who?”  “Bruce Pike,” Mona replies.  Roger: “What’s that old saddlebag want?”

Roger may have rejected Mona, but he prefers that she remain untouched, a house that no one lives in.  His short moment with Joan was sad as well – “Goodnight, Mrs. Harris.”  Roger probably knows that the more mature move would have been to marry Joan, rather than Jane.  Her continued presence in the office is most likely another reminder of his cowardice.  Roger has no one left, except for Jane – his family holds him in contempt, as does Don, his closest friend.  He seems increasingly irrelevant at Sterling Cooper, as Don wasn’t afraid to remind him at the Madison Square Garden meeting.  But Roger’s fatal flaw seems to be stubbornness – he refuses to see how badly he’s erred.  The more he is confronted with evidence of his mistake, the more tightly he clings to it (and the bottle.)  What makes this all the more painful is that Roger is probably the smartest person in the office – wittier than Don, more flexible than Bert Cooper.  How else would he get off all those brilliant one-liners?  Unfortunately, he seems unwilling to apply that intelligence to anything but those one-liners, redefining fiddling while Rome burns.

Sensing doom yet? Us too!

Finally, we had all of the ruined bodies.  Gene’s mind and body are betraying him; Betty is betraying hers (and her unborn child’s); Roger is killing himself with drink; and Peggy refuses to risk hers again.  The Drapers and the Hofstadts must balance their love for Gene against his illness, making difficult decisions about his future.  Betty resents her pregnancy so much that she is starving her child.  Does she hate her pregnancy because it forced her to reconcile with Don?  Does she hate her pregnancy because it detracts from her beauty?  Betty seems even more insane than usual, in denial of her father’s condition and of the realities of motherhood.  Contrasting Betty’s condition to Gene’s throws her into an even harsher light – she sees her body as “ruined” because she is pregnant, even as her father stands before her as an example of what a ruined body really means.  Roger’s dedication to giving himself another heart attack indicates how little he really loves his wife, friends, or family.  Peggy’s body is not ruined, per se, but she is a “ruined” girl – i.e., no longer virginal.  She’s finally decided to explore what, exactly, this ruined state really means, with (thank God) someone other than Pete Campbell.   Because Peggy has already had sex, and given birth, she’s already experienced the worst that can happen to a “promiscuous” girl.  Because she has nothing to lose, she’s free to have as much premarital sex as she desires.  But she also refuses to compromise this freedom, asking her partner if he has a “Trojan,” and then refusing to have intercourse upon his denial, opting for “other things” instead.  It’s easy to see the use of the term “Trojan” as canny product placement or a symptom of Peggy’s ad exec instincts or both.  However, it’s also interesting to look at it in light of the continuing Roman motif of Season 3.   When looked at in the context of the various Greco-Roman references strewn through the season (Paul’s mention that the greatest Roman ruins are in Greece and Spain, because Rome pulled all its greatest buildings down, the use of Gibbons’ “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” in the next episodes), the term “Trojan” becomes positively loaded.  As we know, the Trojan horse the strategy that allowed the Greeks to enter heavily-protected Troy.  After besieging Troy for ten years, the Greeks built an enormous wooden horse and hid their warriors inside it.  Then they pretended to sail away.  The Trojans pulled the horse inside the walls of their city as a prize.  After the Trojans went to bed, the Greeks crawled out of the horse and let the Greek army in.  The Greek army then totally destroyed the city.  A “Trojan horse” refers to any trick that an enemy uses to enter a heavily guarded fortress.

So, this is a pretty gross metaphor – the Trojan horse is the Trojan condom; the penis is the Greek army, the sperm are individual Greek warriors, Peggy’s uterus is Troy, etc.   But the Peggy plot line of this episode was all about the war of the sexes.  And Peggy understands (as do Betty and Joan) that pregnancy is  the ultimate trap – once you are pregnant, you must submit to your husband, or else risk being alone and helpless.  Pregnancy, in this era, ends the war of the sexes, and Peggy is determined not to be defeated.  She is already battling her colleagues at work; even her greatest ally Don is sometimes against her.  Peggy can’t truly “make love,” or else she risks her city being overtaken and ruined (yes, that’s a little bald, but so is the metaphor.)  This leaves her more than a little lonely.  I saw her imitations of Joan and Ann-Margret as coming from this, at least in part – she’s imitating other women to try to understand what it’s like to be them.  She’s wondering if these attractive women that men long to be with aren’t, in their own way, as lonely as she is.  I think she’s also noticed that these women are very powerful, albeit in a way that she finds somewhat reprehensible.  Peggy is often overtly adversarial with men, but women like Joan and Ann-Margret wield power over men by pretending to submit to them.  Part of what makes our Peggy so lovable is her naked hunger for power.   Far from taking Don’s advice to “leave some tools in her toolbox,” Peggy has decided to add to her weapons.  If she has to act like a sex kitten to win, she’ll do it.

(An aside – the “joke” that Peggy steals from Joan was about the subway – “It’s so crowded in here, I feel like I’m on the subway,” says Joan, to a crowd of admirers.  One man says, “I never see girls like you on the subway,” or some such.  Joan replies, “Oh, my husband doesn’t let me ride the subway.”  So – why doesn’t he let her ride the subway?  Is he afraid of her getting raped? When he rapes her, it’s not a violation, but if someone else does, she’s ruined?  I saw this throwaway line as an interesting comment on the continuing war of the sexes theme.)

I'm going to murder you.

I suppose I should discuss “Bye Bye Birdie” now (in case it isn’t obvious, I’ve been working my way up to it.)  As mentioned above, it was a jarring way to start the episode.  “Bye Bye Birdie” is the story of a pop idol going off to war.  Ann-Margret plays a teenager who worships said pop idol, Conrad Birdie.  Her rendition of the song actually has several meanings – yes, she’s wishing him well as he goes off to war(!), but she’s also saying goodbye to her childish infatuation with him, rejecting him in favor of her hometown boyfriend.  In other words, she’s saying goodbye to childhood.  An additional layer is that the play from which the film was derived was based on the real life drafting of Elvis Presley.  As we know, Elvis was the king of ‘50’s pop; by the mid-sixties, however, he had been pushed aside in favor of the Beatles.  While Elvis did stage a comeback in ’68, it was as Vegas Elvis.  His record sales were good, but he was hardly a symbol of youthful rebellion.  So here we have yet another symbol for the ascension of’60’s youth culture and the decline of the ‘50’s.  We can also see this as a reference to Betty – Don’s nickname for her is Birdie, and she is positioned, through the ill health of her parent and her coming motherhood, to have adulthood thrust upon her in a more emphatic way than ever before.  She must say goodbye to childhood and embrace adulthood, otherwise she will put her family at risk.  However, she couldn’t be more disinterested in this.  She wants the facsimile of respectable suburban family life, not the reality.

I miss old Bobby.

Replicas, facsimiles, fakes, and imitations are some of Mad Men’s favorite tropes, and this episode was no exception.  In addition to Conrad Birdie (an imitation of Elvis), we had the proposed Patio commercial, which is supposed to be a frame-by-frame remake of the “Bye Bye Birdie” number.  Patio, or Diet Coke, is itself an imitation of real Coke, made with fake sugar.  Peggy pretends to be Joan and Ann-Margret (and Don Draper, kinda); the Pryces and Drapers pretend to get along; and the Drapers pose with Gene for a happy family photo*.

What do fakes have to do with ruins, love, and hippies?  In a nutshell, hippies hate insincerity of all kinds, because they think it impedes love.  Because of this, they’ll destroy an entire civilization.  Some of what they’ll destroy will be valuable; some of it will be worthless, even harmful.  Love may be better than materialism, but a focus on emotion over accomplishments can lead to narcissism.  For hippies, love takes place only among the ruins of society – it can’t be part of any larger structure or else it becomes fake.  This world built by Holden Caulfields isn’t nearly as good as it was supposed to be – man cannot live on diet-coke idealism alone.

*My favorite fake of the episode, however, has to be the Pete look-a-like that Peggy picks up in the bar.  Brilliant casting, and a pretty pathetic character note.

Smooth criminals

After an interminable wait, Mad Men is back.  And, despite the rather frothy media campaign leading up to the premiere, our favorite clothing poem is darker than ever.  (Yes, I did just call Mad Men a “clothing poem”, for the excellent reason that this show is, at least partially, a long, epic poem about clothes.)  Darling whore-son Don Draper can’t stop thinking about his whore-soness, partially because that warm-hearted, salt-of-the-earth Betty Draper is about nine months along.  We open with an odd series of imagined flashbacks.  Don is scalding milk for a restless Betty in the middle of the night.  As he stands alone in the dark kitchen, he sees the circumstances of his birth play out, projected onto the empty rooms around him.  It’s a surreal effect, and one that didn’t work for some viewers and critics – supposedly it was too maudlin, too heavy-handed.  I liked it, I think because it reminded me of the kind of jitters you get when you’re up in the middle of the night – you think about your future, and your past, and you project terrible things upon them, and generally feel sort of doomed and creeped out: Look how old I am already, I can’t believe this is how I’ve ended up, and it’s just a smooth sail toward death from here on out.

As noted by basically everybody, this season of Mad Men is all about change – our characters are aging, the culture is evolving, and everybody is going to need new tools in order to survive.  So, I think it’s appropriate that Don is freaking out and having self-induced flashbacks and trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.  ALSO: Don has no idea of who he is.  For someone as skilled at manipulation as he is, he’s tremendously unselfaware.  It’s about time he started mooning around and actually thinking about who he really is.  I saw these scenes as Don telling the story of himself to himself.  Think of how Don does his pitches – he finds an angle and then he tells you the story of what the product is, how it’s meaningful.   I think that for once Don is applying his imagination to himself, trying to piece together who he really is so that he can figure out where he’s going.  I saw the goofy, somewhat heavy-handed and theatrical tone of these scenes as symptomatic of that – we’re not seeing Mad Men’s vision of the origins of Dick Whitman, we’re seeing Don Draper’s.  And Don Draper is a trafficker in clichés – he takes banal and overused images and invests them with new energy and wit via his deep passion for transformation, for transcendence.  Don Draper is in love with transcendence, which is another way of saying that he is in love with change.  So he is trying to change himself by trying to visualize his origins differently.  I feel like these 3 am visions were merely part of a series, visions he’s been trying on for months, ever since Betty let him come back home.  I think he is trying to really become a father, to really be a part of his family, and for him this means figuring out who his family really was.  You could accuse me of reading too much into this, but – as proved by Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s interviews – there’s no such thing as reading too much into Mad Men.  The smallest details are carefully thought through, which means that they bear contemplation.

It’s a struggle for Don to really become part of his family again – to give up his glamorous secret life.  What he’s left with is a bitter, rather shallow wife; two children he hardly knows; and a home he’s heretofore barely lived in.  We’ve rarely seen Don performing mundane tasks, as we do in these opening shots – his home has rather been a staging area for him, a place for him to play to role of Don Draper for business associates and neighbors.  It’s melancholy to see Don Draper, Man of Intrigue, rumpled and puttering around the kitchen.  It’s a harbinger of old age; of mundanity; of the quiet desperation of our own lives.

Most viewers want Mad Men (and indeed, most television) to operate as an escape from their own prosaic lives.  The ad campaigns leading up to the premiere promised this – watch Mad Men, they implied, and you too will be, for a brief shining moment, handsome, debonair, immaculate, and fabulous.  Many viewers were disappointed with this premiere – they wanted zazz, they wanted pop.  What they got was a middle-aged man mulling over his past; another one in the throes of sexual frustration.  Yes, Don had his sexual adventure, but it was curiously empty, despite the pneumaticness of the stewardess in question.  They complained that Don is getting maudlin, Don’s sexual adventures are getting boring, we wanted more Joan, why is she married, why didn’t Sal get to do it.

I contend that we didn’t get the Mad Men we wanted, but we did get the Mad Men we needed.  In the end, this is not really a show about how glamorous the past was.  Yes, they have their fun showing everybody smoking and drinking and so on, but we also have to pay for it – we see Roger suffer his heart attack; we see Joan get raped; we see the squalid, mother-occupied walk-up of the beautiful bra model that Pete fucks.  Nobody gets away with anything, least of all Don Draper.  We’ve started with a dodgy vision of the past because none of these characters can really visualize the future.  They’re unreliable narrators – Don most of all.

The moments between Don and Sal were lovely.  Don needs a male friend – he doesn’t really have any, especially since Roger’s botched seduction of Betty – and it will be interesting to see if their relationship develops.  For that matter, Sal is rather friendless as well.  I could tell, somehow, by the look in the bellhop’s eyes when they entered the elevator, that he was into Sal.  Kudos to that young man.  He seemed ready to grapple with the future with both hands, and his strength was enough for the both of them.  I think they did make hay while the sun shone, as evidenced by Sal’s late entry to the meeting the next morning.  Sal could never visualize what life will be like for gay men twenty years from now – never mind today.  But Don’s advice, as expressed through his London Fog campaign, may prove to serve Sal well.  In a weird way, Don might be Sal’s ideal mentor in gaining a valid sex-life.

Joan’s spirit seems broken, as evidenced by her acquiescing to Moneypenny’s request for his own office.  I took this as a sign that marriage is very much not agreeing with her.  The old Joan would never had taken guff from somebody who, after all, is just another secretary.  But the old Joan was not a sustainable Joan – she needs to become somebody new, especially since her youth is fleeing her.  Much as we may yearn for Joan to be a vixen, for Don to be a Don Juan, for Sal to come out of the closet, for Pete to get over himself, and for Roger not to keel over again and die, that’s just not the way it works.  Few of us can transcend our circumstances, our fatal flaws.  The ad campaign for this season of Mad Men should have been Mad Men: You Just Can’t Win or Mad Men: A Show About Mortality and Limitations.  Perhaps then viewers could have gotten over their initial disappointment and enjoyed what was there – the wonderful tenseness between Joan and Peggy on their commute; Betty’s snippish edicts; “budding lesbian” Sally’s refreshing honesty (despite that parentage!); that London fog metaphor (it was never really fog!); et al.

See you next week for Mad Men Season 3 Episode II: Existential Bugaloo.

*The most elegant example of this being, of course, the planning of Roger’s daughter’s wedding for the day after Kennedy gets assassinated.

(This is the first entry in a new feature where I review things I’ve recently rented, regardless of their actual release date, because I don’t care about timeliness or America or the future of cinema or whatever.  Welcome!)

Stepbrothers

Directed by: Adam McKay

Written by: Adam McKay, Will Ferrell

Produced by: (among others, but he’s the important one) Judd Apatow

Starring: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Jenkins, Adam Scott, Kathryn Hahn

Release date: July 2008

Step Brothers is better than it has any right to be.  It’s lazy; it coasts on the charm of its amazing cast; there’s no plot to speak of; the direction is journeyman-like and self-indulgent.  Yet I can honestly say that I’m pretty sure that this critical and commercial failure is actually funnier than the over-adored Pineapple Express.

One reason for this is that, line by line, Stepbrothers is a funnier movie.  While Pineapple’s James Franco and Danny McBride were pretty quotable, one often had the sense that that film’s best lines were actually being improvised by those two gifted actors.  Maybe that’s just called “acting,” but, given the improvisational nature of most Apatow ventures, it’s not an entirely unrealistic assumption.  In Pineapple Express, Franco and McBride are the only consistently funny characters; in Step Brothers, everybody is, for which I finger GOOD WRITING as the culprit.

But who are these characters?  It’s pretty simple – Step Brothers’ plot is gossamer-thin.  It’s basically The Parent Trap, except with 40-ish homeschool nerds (Reilly and Farrell) in the Hayley Mills role.  Steenburgen and Jenkins play the parents, Scott plays the brother, and Kathryn Hahn plays his wife/Reilly’s love interest.

This simplicity is the film’s strength – it allows Reilly, Farrell, and the other actors to riff.  Reilly and Farrell are both very good here – childlike, reactive, and possessive of a definite chemistry.  Their relationship follows rom-com-like conventions – they meet and loathe each other at first sight; gradually win each other over; fall out of love, and then . . . well, let’s just say there’s a happy ending.

The real revelation here, however, is Adam Scott as Farrell’s obnoxious brother Derek.  Scott stars on the Starz series Party Down – a very funny, very improvised show about caterers, on which he plays the straight man.  I’d thought he was the series’ weak link – and surrounded by heavy hitters like Jane Lynch, Ken Marino, and Lizzy Caplan, who can blame me? – but it turns out that Scott is a deliciously funny character actor.  On Party Down, he has to play the straight center around which the action swirls, but in Stepbrothers, he’s allowed to douche about to his heart’s content, and he’s awesome at it!  His opening scene, forcing his family through an a capella rendition of “Sweet Child of Mine,” is freshly, wrenchingly funny.  My boyfriend and I gasped after it, wondering what, exactly, we had just seen.

What’s my point?  Step Brothers is awesome.  It’s not an ambitious movie, but it more than meets its quota.  Extremely rentable.

Grade: B+