Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

um manic

I just remembered that Don's brother also hanged himself after Don tried to wash his hands of him.

Sepinwall pointed out the similarities of Don's physical reaction:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/images.hitfix.com/assets/1400/mad-men-don-hanging.jpg

pretty weird that on sky in the uk they had a jaguar ad on the first break.

ha, glen comes across to me as just a normal maybe slightly dumb socially awkward outcast teenager, any sagacity in anything he said would be purely incidental.

Glen seems normal now. The "creepy" tag is just a holdover from when he was charming Betty back in Ossining.

Give it a week, let's see if he's creepin on Megan..

Does anyone really think the selling point of Don Draper was ever "he has the best ideas"?

he's randy-an

well he was, dunno if he really is now

he still bones on the reg, just with one person in a fit of rage

Wouldn't the Randian thing be, Don's the job creator, Peggy, et al, are just feeding off the juices of his awesome job creation opportunities (ie. Dow).

Didn't they both survive the bombardment, and then Dick lit a cigarette that caused an explosion that killed the Real Don Draper? Or did I just imagine that?

(...)

i think you're thinking of a cartoon.

Hah, I've never made the connection before but the whole storyline kind of owes a debt to

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS6GTp0GT5w6gBJS-aN5eQieXeD95ZpaR89qTKiMAhckNBaBfWJ

o ya. series finale starring dick whitman AS armin tamzarian.

this randian discussion is really a red herring.

RED

shit, blew my cover.

glen is weiner's son, right? he is good and effective in the part but I can't tell if his stilted line reading is meant to be part of the character or just, you know, really bad acting.

also lol moustache

wonder if that's makeup or if MW told his child he had to cultivate a puberty 'stache for a month

haa oh god

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/don-draper-libertarianisms-favorite-ad-man/2012/06/06/gJQAplXoIV_blog.html

right wing think tankers play dress up

The free-marketeers at the dinner saw themselves as the natural compatriots of Don Draper—the “debonair, hard-driving, sometimes ruthless” ad man, in the words of Loren Smith, the federal judge who MC-ed the program in a “Guys and Dolls”-style fedora and gray pinstriped suit. But it’s not clear whether Draper himself would have agreed.

they've kind of missed the point i think

The advertisements of Draper’s 1960s “were offering the good life, products that allowed us to be healthier, wealthier,”

you know, like Lucky Strike cigarettes and napalm

tbf the shittiness of the jaguar did prolong lane's life for a short period.

(i re-watched this episode, the first time around i was feeling a vague nausea throughout cuz i thought lane was for it, this time it was even worse cuz i KNEW he was. also jared harris was brilliant.)

Harris needs an Emmy for this one, or Signal 30:

No way, that Emmy is Giancarlo Esposito's.

oscillating between twenty different emotions trying to find the one that will WORK in the firing scene was amazing.

that piece goole posted to is off the charts O_o

kind of on a reagan-likes-springsteen wavelength isn't it

it just reeks of entitlement... like people are beholden to buying products NO MATTER WHAT.

tbf the shittiness of the jaguar did prolong lane's life for a short period.

A college professor of mine had a 1968 XKE, and told me about how he once defiantly stormed out of a faculty meeting only for his Jag to hilariously not start. As soon as Lane connected the hose I thought, yep, not gonna start.

Plus, didn't Roger have some line about how they never start in the previous episode?

that's been the whole pitch! like a beautiful woman (and just as unreliable).

haha, yeah. "It comes with a toolkit the size of a typewriter!"

don teaching glen to drive - in addition to being adorable, obv - reminded me of when we first met glen, at sally's bday party. he showed up with a newly widowed helen bishop, who then got hit on by some neighborhood guy creepily offering his services as an occasional faux-father figure for glen.

sally's woman troubles -> her needing a mother figure, ie betty, sort of parallels glen getting picked on in boarding school and feeling existential anguish -> but it's all okay when don teaches him to drive and has some good father-son time.

Plus, didn't Roger have some line about how they never start in the previous episode?

that was Cooper. "They're lemons! They never start."

I never knew about old Jaguars and the reputation for not starting until I watched an episode of Top Gear a few months ago where they paid tribute to the original XKE.

didn't someone straight-up call it a "shitty car" in this last episode?

High-Five to Amy Sherman-Palladino

Considering race in the show ("'Roots' for White People"):

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2012/06/6007279/very-white-poetry-mad-men

meh

my biggest take-away from that article is that every NY film blogger hangs out together.

go 'round to Uhlich's for Mad Men, then hit up the Grassroots Tavern afterwards

doesn't work geographically

“I'd say that there are things about the '60s [“Mad Men” creator] Matthew Weiner's interested in, and that none of them involve race; he's much smarter and more attuned to gender dynamics,” he wrote in an email. “But then he's like OH SHIT WHAT ABOUT RACE RELATIONS. Results: a token secretary character, as Kevin mentioned, There's a scene where she spends the night at Peggy's apartment and Peggy looks down and her purse is on the coffee table and she's obviously thinking, ‘Should I snatch this and take it to my bedroom or can I trust her and leave it here?’ She does the latter, so good for Peggy, but this is a moment demonstrating, once again, that she's one of the show's most forward-thinking characters.

this completely misunderstands the situation. its the fact that she hesitated at all that makes her 'backwards', not the fact that she doesn't take the most-offensive possible action that makes her 'forward-thinking'

i guess its up for debate how much hes effective in doing this, but race is supposed to be something that is never thought about by its main characters, that its supposed to be treating them as 'white' in their very disregard/disinterest in the problems of people of color

Still, if this is the best the show can do, it'd be better just to admit they don't care.

i guess we can argue abt whether or not its doing this effectively, but i read its intentions to be much more along the lines of a whit stillman movies where it's observing privileged whiteness AS privileged whiteness, which would mean rendering people of color invisible (of course peggy never befriends dawn beyond one rather awkward attempt) because thats exactly what its cast WOULD do

so, i guess i kind of wish if he was to critique it he'd acknowledge that this was at some level a part of its goal & explain why he thinks it doesn't live up to that, but maybe he doesn't think thats its goal? idk

i had similar critiques early on w/r/t what they say about sal, where there was a contemporary condescension as if we're past this now, but i think the show rapidly transformed out of that once surreal stuff started happening, but maybe i just got caught up in the drama of it

“That's my biggest complaint about ‘Mad Men,’ that at worst it seems to be looking back from an enlightened time rather than yet another messy, unclassifiable moment in human history.”

i think this is true, and continues to be true

article doesn't mention Carla at all lol

or Kinsey's g/f