Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

interesting jewish-theme triptych w/ peggy's boyfriend making the 'bracha' crack, jane sterling speaking yiddish while under influence of LSD and ginsburg telling peggy about the holocaust. weiner kinda much much better writing at more secular jewish figures than ppl like ginsburg and his father.

― Mordy, Tuesday, April 24, 2012 8:50 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

on that note, i saw three movies from three different countries/decades this weekend in which a character using the word "meshuggah" was the tip-off that they were jewish.

xp ya, he can die in vietnam all he wants, no one on the show is going to mention it.

xp part of it makes me wonder if the writers are trying to indicate that being jewish in NY was becoming easier. unlike first season where you have to be a wealthy department store heiress to be overtly jewish. a kind of 'they've been here all along' type of reveal. i haven't been following it so closely but friends who close-read the show for jewishness tell me that they've suspected that jane was assimilated for a long time (i guess her maiden name was a giveaway) but only got confirmation tnite. i do agree that the 'bracha' line was basically as superficial as such a thing could be. speaking yiddish under LSD was interesting to me bc jane is part of whole generation of american jews whose parents spoke yiddish but who only got bits and pieces of it. i don't know if she speaks fluent yiddish and has just totally repressed it in her new community, but i suspect she only knows idiomatic yiddish and maybe has some dormant unconscious memories of hearing her father speak. ginsburg thing is - like shakey mentioned - possibly true (being born in concentration camps possible but exceedingly rare - by contrast i know at least ppl who were born in DP camps). kinda hamfisted and weirdly overly dramatic, just like when his father blessed him. the whole character feels so tone deaf in some ways and then really great in others (like when he's working).

line breaks dude!

also i don't think there was any major shift in terms of "how easy is it to be jewish in NYC" in the mid 1960s.

ginsburg seems like a particularly jew-y jew.

Maybe it's less about NYC and more that very specific Madison Ave world. In the first season they mentioned that they have "one of them" or were bringing in Jewish sandwich boys or whatever into meetings. Which seems pretty strange because of the whole Edward Bernays thing, but whatdoiknow.

but ginsburg isn't anything like a jew-y jew! he's kinda like how you might make up a jew-y jew if you didn't have any exposure to one

?

he has a strong NYC jew accent, his dad even more so and uses lots of yiddish, etc.

they should have hired a consultant who had met a jew i guess

um, the show runner is jewish y'all

my nutty theory: that the 3 characters represent 3 different ways that jewish community is interacting with upper crust wasp community. jane has totally assimilated into wasp community. her jewishness only comes out under influence of LSD. you could barely know she was jewish. peggy's boyfriend lies entirely outside this community. peggy kinda goes out to him. he comes to parties but makes no efforts to belong. and then ginsburg, despite in some ways being the jewy jew, is kinda this meeting place where he is trying to fit the two together.

re ginsburg, i just wish there was more insight into his character i guess? he has a lot of noise going on - yiddish idiom, accents, blessings, holocaust - but doesn't really seem to be a very fleshed out character. esp compared to jane who summons an entire world + history for me.

we're only just now kind of learning about Ginsberg, and it feels like he's gonna have a larger role to play.

yeah, i'm curious to see what they do. what a totally weird thing tho to have him born in a camp.

you could barely know she was jewish.

i didn't know this at all before this ep. (but like i said above my recall is shit)

i think that was intentional. you'd have to be paying really close attention. (which indicates how assimilated she is.) i'm told there was something re her cousin that was kind of a hint but idr it.

to be fair we barely see anything of jane

Didn't Weiner basically say explicitly that she and her cousin were jewish and meant to be read as very assimilated?

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/matthew-weiner-closes-the-books-on-season-4-of-mad-men/

Maybe it's less about NYC and more that very specific Madison Ave world. In the first season they mentioned that they have "one of them" or were bringing in Jewish sandwich boys or whatever into meetings. Which seems pretty strange because of the whole Edward Bernays thing, but whatdoiknow.

Pretty weird that they've never mentioned Bill Bernbach.

well they've mentioned his work

given that Ginsberg was cheerfully claiming to be from Mars in this episode I don't know how much diegetic credence to lend to the idea that he was born in a concentration camp, but who knows, the dude is mysterious.

Mordy would you have been less o_O at Ginsberg Sr.'s blessing if it had been the shehechyanu and not the child's blessing?

if he had said shehechyanu and not put his hands on his head, yeah, i'd be much less o_O. i say shehechyanu sometimes.

Was surprised (not surprised at all) that they mentioned Braniff Airlines a few weeks back but didn't mention Mary Wells. x-posts

wait how were you surprised and yet not surprised at all

Because there's no reason that the show shouldn't have brought her up some context before seeing as she was a huge deal, but I wasn't surprised because Mad Men has a terrible track record with admitting that there were a fair number of incredibly successful female copywriters/executives at the time and that Peggy isn't unique or even slightly a trailblazer?

lol i know i was kidding wit u

Also I might start my own thread on this or something because I know it's annoying to everyone and I really don't want a repeat of the previous Mad Men thread's clusterfuck, but the entire way they've treated Dawn's storyline has been so downright bizarre that I'm not sure what they're even going for. A black secretary at a company like SCDP wouldn't have been that unusual in 1960 much less 1966. I'm not sure what the point is, since she doesn't even have her own story (and apparently never will because she doesn't want to be a copywriter), she's just a character to watch Roger/Peggy/etc. be racist towards. And it wouldn't be anachronistic to do a black copywriter at this point, so Weiner's hands aren't tied or anything in terms of finally offering up a character of color with a single moment of development on the show. Why did they even bother with this given that she's apparently not going to be a character whose perspective we ever see? It just seems like some cheap "times are changing" window dressing to me (on the same level as Mad Men's usual thing with using black people as props at parties to signify a level of progressiveness) and I find it gross. I mean, I could be wrong and she could suddenly become a fleshed out character, but so far the show definitely is working far harder to develop Ginsberg than Dawn.

i agree with what you say. i wonder whether the lack of a substantive black character is part of weiner's seeming compulsion to not follow predictable TV-series tropes (in this case, introducing a minority character late in a series)--obviously it's misguided if the case.

although having a major black character would in some sense make the show "about race" in a way that one can argue it is not at this point, in any great measure anyway. maybe you just have a bunch of white writers too scared to introduce a major black character and "get it wrong." which would be telling in its own way.

A black secretary at a company like SCDP wouldn't have been that unusual in 1960 much less 1966.

this is absolutely true. a LOT of (black) friends' parents and grandparents were secretaries in white-owned and largely white-operated firms. it was actually a major way black families could become upwardly mobile in the middle of the century.

i don't know if this pattern holds all over the country, but it's certainly true in major northern cities.

that would be a fun thread xposts

i don't mind having that discussion here. got to do _something_ in between sundays.

i say have at it right here

seems like the tension is between Matt Weiner as the p. much undisputed Author of the series as a whole being interested in and capable of telling stories about a set of things that apparently doesn't include black folks and the importance of advocating for diverse viewpoints in the pop culture we as a society create and consume

it'd be nice if MW turned out to have an angle on race/black folks other than erasure/omission and tokenization

I don't see his use of race or black folks as tokenization.

Tokenization would require more interest than he seems to have.

this might have been optimistic for the season ahead, but Mad Men and Race

His figures might be disputed (Melissa would know) but I think it's always important to remember how this is a show about an insular place that is incredibly slow in adapting to anything, whether it be cultural or personal. I'd like to see Dawn developed (although I imagine that would be tricky), but her face after Peggy says "but you're not a nurse" was one of the best moments of the season for me.

I'll probably be disappointed if the race issue doesn't develop more though, if only because the first scene was so much about it and that tends to establish the theme for the season.

Don Draper sitting there with the Ad Age reporter v.o. "Who is Don Draper?" a pretty great moment for the show last season. Except for it being "on the nose" I guess

I think the insularity of SCDP would be easier to swallow if the show would occasionally acknowledge the world outside its walls. Peggy still seems to think she's the only female copywriter in New York, as does everyone around her. Caroline Robinson was already three years into being a copywriter at JWT while the show is acting like hiring Dawn would have been a big deal. There's no way that these characters wouldn't know these things already.

And I have issues galore with that Slate article. But that would take a little time for me to detangle and I'm drifting off. x-post

I don't know. the world around them seems to pop up as background extras in parties so

I'm pretty sure Dawn will develop as a character. there are, thankfully, more ways her character could develop that her wanting to be a copywriter (which would be ridiculous, frankly, since two of don's previous secretaries have had this as a development point) but her character development would only make sense as a result of contact/conflict/empathy or whatever with other members of the office and she's had limited contact with anyone, other than peggy, so far which this seems realistic.

There's no reason the show couldn't follow her home the way it has Ginsberg.

true but it was that that seemed unusual coming so early on.

I agree Dawn hasn't had much to do so far but I don't think the fact that she's working there is considered that weird to anyone at SCDP except dinosaurs like Roger.

The camera following Ginsberg home felt really jarring at the time, they totally fumbled that IMO.

(It's also a show that has tended to introduce characters, even major ones like Laine and Megan, very slowly. Not saying they'll definitely develop Dawn's character but they could well do so).

Truly boggled that ppl are complaining about not enough development of Ginsburg and Dawn something like two episodes after they were introduced

Also I don't see how it's obvious in any way that Dawn isn't going to have a larger role, they are always promoting characters out of the background, do I even have to mention Megan

That doesn't make for a great social justice outrage Guardian article though.