Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

no offense to all concerned but i gotta remember not to check this thread until a new episode comes out.

I hope Joan's ex-husband shows up later in a pine box

YES I SAID IT :)

― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl),

the gif above makes me think he's gonna die in an airplane accident coming back from Vietnam.

lol, you think romance novels are maligned bc they're wholly and successfully 'for women'? i'm not speaking for all women, but i know a few who would consider that some condescending bullshit.

i'm not sure. i'm speculating more than making an argument. i do notice that the soap opera and the romance novel are similar fictional forms in certain respects. similar in theme and subject, and similar in audience. they're also similar in how comprehensively ignored they are by critics. there isn't a comparable, male-identified fictional approach that's so completely dismissed.

do u think sandra brown is more critically maligned than marilyn robinson because she's more truly speaking to the experience of women???

also "there isn't a comparable, male-identified fictional approach that's so completely dismissed."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Zenescope1.jpg

do u think sandra brown is more critically maligned than marilyn robinson because she's more truly speaking to the experience of women???

that's not at all what i'm saying. i'm saying that i sometimes think that romance novels and soap operas are so comprehensively dismissed because they appeal almost exclusively to women, and perhaps because their area of concern is so tightly focused on simplified and/or idealized depictions of romantic relationships to the exclusion of all else.

comic books have a huge and "respectable" critical establishment attached to them. people take them very seriously. not at all comparable to soaps and harlequin romance novels in that regard.

actually, i studied amatory fiction shortly in grad school

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517J-jqXPOL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

it could be that you're no aware of any critical discourse around romance novels + soap operas. which is okay. but you speak with such authority!

not* aware

comic books have a huge and "respectable" critical establishment attached to them

uh

(also the industry is dying cuz no one buys comics fwiw)

it could be that you're no aware of any critical discourse around romance novels + soap operas. which is okay. but you speak with such authority!

perhaps in academia (everything has some sort of academic discourse around it, goes w/out saying), but you point me at an even semi-popular publication like the comics journal that deals with romance novels or soap operas, and i'll eat my hat.

comic books have a huge and "respectable" critical establishment attached to them

health of the genre is beside the point, there's a lot of intelligent and serious criticism of current comics out there, written by both men and women. comics are part of mainstream pop, are often made into popular films.

the comics journal is the lone publication of critical discourse around comics and it is not semi-popular and never was, it's barely stayed afloat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_Opera_Digest ?

contenderizer, i don't know if there's a point to this or not so i'm just going to make one up for you.

"i compared mad men to soap operas bc i suspect soap operas are unfairly maligned* and i'm trying to demonstrate how things that are derided in soap operas are found in abundance in mad men."

"what ppl often deride in soap operas are poor acting performances and sloppy writing, not stories focusing on relationships which are found in many genres, not just soap operas."

i guess then we could say, idk, "i think citing 'poor acting performances' and 'sloppy writing' in soap operas are actually unfair critiques of particular traditions of acting + writing that appeal predominately to women and should be evaluated on their own terms, not by comparison to other genres."

and then i could say, "well, ppl generally praise the acting and writing of mad men. if what distinguishes soap operas from other non-marginalized media is the unfairly maligned acting + writing, presumably that means mad men is not a soap opera."

and then idk, we find something more productive to do

*tho i don't watch them myself and have not started an ilx thread about them

the comics journal is the lone publication of critical discourse around comics and it is not semi-popular and never was, it's barely stayed afloat

it's not lone, it's just the most prominent voice of its kind. and the fact that it's a nice product is neither here nor there. there is no comparable critical discourse and serious-taking that accompanies soap operas and romance novels.

nice = niche

"what ppl often deride in soap operas are poor acting performances and sloppy writing, not stories focusing on relationships which are found in many genres, not just soap operas."

i guess then we could say, idk, "i think citing 'poor acting performances' and 'sloppy writing' in soap operas are actually unfair critiques of particular traditions of acting + writing that appeal predominately to women and should be evaluated on their own terms, not by comparison to other genres."

and then i could say, "well, ppl generally praise the acting and writing of mad men. if what distinguishes soap operas from other non-marginalized media is the unfairly maligned acting + writing, presumably that means mad men is not a soap opera."

i agree that mad men and other contemporary episodic dramas have distinguished themselves from traditional soap operas in many ways - i touched on that a few posts back

^ weekly, prime-time dramas, i mean

... ok, u win. i'm out. have fun.

contendo is winnar

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Breaking_Away_(TV_series),_cast.jpg

^almost redeems the whole exchange

I'm reminded of that interview that Miley Cyrus and Nicholas Sparks did in a bookstore when their not-successful film The Last Song was coming out. The interviewer, or maybe it was Miley, made a comment about Sparks writes great melodrama, and Sparks got angry and said, "I do NOT write melodrama. I write DRAMA." He then went on to pick up an early Hemingway and say "THIS is what I write."

lol, wish i'd seen that

actually maybe he was talking about he's a "Fiction" writer and not a "Romance" writer. I can't remember. He did slag off Blood Meridian and said McCarthy couldn't write - or something to that effect. lolz a plenty.

i think it's interesting to point out the fact that soap-opera-like dramas have recently become widely popular by managing to distance themselves from the scoffed-at genre without giving up its essential character and appeal.

yes. I think it's interesting to look at the ways they distance themselves from shows like Dallas and Dynasty.

in EL comics srs critical discourse there's only TCJ and IJOCA, and you excluded academia, so that counts out IJOCA, and TCJ got fkn CANCELLED three years ago*, so you are talking out of your windflappy arse wrt "huge". if you're not, then cite your other examples

*Groth's bookstore reboot last year was a success, but that could be largely bcz Amazon were selling it at 30% of cover. anyway bringing it back as a once-a-year publication puts it on the level of an academic journal, and certainly goes against "huge."

The new website edition is great, of course, but it's literally comicscomics.blogspot.com with a CMS

i dunno, students read the Maus books as literature in college classes; Dan Clowes' stuff is being shown at a local art museum.

hate to break it to you but college classes are academia

and "a local art museum"* is not "huge" on a global scale

and neither of those are critical culture.

*(the Parille/Buenaventura is coming out on ACA, which puts it on exactly the same footing as the Hignite/Crane Xaime joint from 2010 [which I picked up remaindered in an uni bookshop last week, lol])

how are academia and an art museum not part of "critical culture"?

anyway, comics vs. romance novels isn't a fair comparison, as "comics" is a medium, and "romance novel" is only a genre.

exactly, and the web is littered with serious, smart and informed comics crit/appreciation. we've even got a board for comics here. publishers like fantagraphics and D&Q exist to satisfy the demand for literate, artistically sophisticated comics. graphic novels get coverage in the new york times sunday books section. movies of all sorts are regularly based on comics and are taken as seriously as films of any other sort. the importance of superheroes as 20th century icons and the "brilliance" of writers like grant morrison and alan moore are often mentioned in the mainstream press. comic books have an increasingly respectable place in the pop discourse - even as comics publishers struggle to survive in the digital age.

none of this is really true of romance novels and soap operas, especially if we define these things narrowly as harlequin-style novels and daytime soaps. outside their own fandom, they're ignored to the extent that they aren't derided. it seems to be generally assumed that they're worthless, but it's hard to say, because there's so little mainstream criticism devoted to them as they currently exist. they're invisible culture, generally regarded as worthless and disposable junk just as comics were up until the late 20th century.

anyway, comics vs. romance novels isn't a fair comparison, as "comics" is a medium, and "romance novel" is only a genre.

otm, good point. i was accepting the comparison for argument's sake, since mordy brought it up a while back. even if we adjust the frame to take "superhero comics" as an equivalent to romance novels and daytime soaps, i think the former are treated with a great deal more respect than the latter in the pop-critical discourse.

lol, my previous post beginning w/ "exactly..." was a response to sarahell:

i dunno, students read the Maus books as literature in college classes; Dan Clowes' stuff is being shown at a local art museum.

are the Twilight books considered romance novels?

my instinct is to say "no", that they're generally viewed as young adult fantasy novels ("for girls"), but they're clearly a hybrid of that and the romance novel.

haha, i'm just pulling a you and playing devil's advocate!

lol, i think this discussion is horribly annoying to everyone who isn't me anyway

i'm not annoyed by it, but maybe we should get back to Joan airplane gifs

well your continued discussion of the critical legitimacy of comics is horribly annoying to most ppl

you seem to be easily annoyed, call all destroyer

lol when was the last time we even interacted, sarahell?

i think it was on the knoxville thread where you said some perfectly decent other ilxor was the worst poster ever and you were annoyed. it was about a year ago, though!

lol

it was the max doing coke with Bugs Bunny day!

well your continued discussion of the critical legitimacy of comics is horribly annoying to most ppl

― call all destroyer, Thursday, May 24, 2012 7:58 PM (6 minutes ago)

the voice of the (most) people

Wow what on earth are you guys talking about

soaps, supes, etc

seems kinda off topic

it got that way, yah

remember season 1 harry, who, upon cheating on his marriage for the first time, did (what i interpreted as) all the 'right things,' ie demonstrating seemingly sincere remorse and waiting patiently and humbly to be let back home? what happened to that guy? when exactly did harry become so... lecherous?

paul's line about no one liking him was amazing. story wise there wasn't a lot to his arc that demanded he specifically be brought back; the whole hare krishna thing could technically have been done with any "former sterling cooper employee x, now down on his luck." but there were echoes of his old pathos and ill concealed desperation to be well regarded that made the whole thing more meaningful.

i've always understood it to be a meta joke that don and joan haven't ever hooked up because it would be too obvious? and i'm fine with them dancing around that, as they did in this episode, but i really don't want to see an actual romantic arc between them...

also i can't tell what they're building up to with don and megan. but i like that megan is making don consider how he wants to balance his life, whereas previously if, for example, he became frustrated with his home life, he would throw all his eggs in the career basket and wait for that to fulfill him. (and that sort of behavior, of course, is betty's m.o.)