MAD MEN on AMC - Seasons 7(a) & & 7(b)

im not trying to debate this point with you or anything, i've just seen you bring this sort of formalist (my word) critique against the show (and other things) quite a lot. i want to understand it better.

i suppose the distinction you're getting at is that while a show set in the 60s is gonna be "about" the 60s in some meaningful sense it doesn't have to add a meta-layer of "this is about the 60s" if that makes any sense. i guess i just find that distinction hard to process!

I didn't mean to say Pete's behavior was inconsistent with his character! Only that I have been hoping he'd somehow evolved a little bit.

that 60s show

he has, he just can't be around Trudy

basically the show (for me) is at its best when it concentrates on its characters at work; in action they best reveal themselves, the times, etc. Betty Draper auditioning for a draft of Diary of a Mad Housewife is bleh.

xpost

oh know, I wasn't arguing w/ you! i was just noting that although pete's been relatively nice lately, his behavior in that scene was consistent with what me know about him more generally.

further xpostsssss

there's nothing in my critique, ryan, that I would think of as "formalist." except perhaps the idea that meaning is just one part of an artwork, not the be-all and end-all. but I guess I'm talking less about that and more about how meaning is contained and revealed and constructed.

btw ryan i should come up w/ examples to illustrate what i'm trying to get at but i worry about misremembering or misdescribing something i haven't seen for months or years. i have a bad memory for details.

i really think they just need to cut off the betty character, I guess they can't at this point but what a waste of time her subplots are.

Don't understand how anybody could think this.

ditto

Betty is one of the best characters on this show and always has been

So let it be written. So let it be done.

lol

http://itself.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/living-in-the-prequel/

One last prequel: this half-season of Mad Men will be ending just as I’m temporarily pulling up roots — and it will come to full completion during the summer when I will have finished my probationary period at Shimer and will be wrapping up the devil book and my most major Agamben translation. This is especially appropriate given that the first season premiered on my birthday, during the summer when I was writing my first book.

These are the kinds of echoes that, at a previous stage of my life, my parents might have cited as pointers to something like “God’s will.” They’ve given up on talking to me in those terms — mercifully, they don’t even tell me they’re praying for me, though I’m sure they are — and I like to think that I’ve given up on thinking in those terms as well, even unconsciously. It’s as though I’ve suspended the intentional fallacy for the story of my life: whatever meaning it has emerges contingently from the text itself. Recently Carol Levine wrote about the “literary” quality of Mad Men that keeps her coming back, even though much that she found appealling about the show has faded into the background, and it struck me that its “literary” quality is weirdly what makes it so deeply personal to me — it resonates deeply with the way I experience my own life.

not sure i can understand ppl w/ a deep personal connection to mad men

let alone mad men broadcast schedules

i find a lot of the "meaningful" stuff a lot more playful in spirit than the morning-after exegesis tends to treat it. i think those aspects of the show tend to either be mordantly funny or compassionate (thinking don hearing waves at the office in the last season, which was a overtly "meaningful" moment but it worked for me).

x-posts: i'd like examples!

im mainly interested in drawing this out of you since you are very good at pointing it out--and i think i have a reflexive taste for meaningful stuff because i find it disarming. like "oh nice they're going for it, good for them." i suppose that idiosyncratic.

we all find signposts in our lives in different ways

xp

Yeah, how long was Joan at the original Sterling Cooper before Peggy's first day (the pilot)? Long enough to already have a fully developed and comfortable relationship with Roger.

Joan predates Don at the agency, because Roger first met Don when he was buying her a fur coat in early in their affair.

another funny example is the repeated framings of peggy in don-like settings, especially her posing the "logo" last season. i thought this was funny and didnt take it as a "do you see???" kind of moment. of course we're constantly thinking about peggy in relaton to don so it wasnt treated as a revelation but more like an underlining.

I'm now thinking that there won't really be a big 'ending' to this show, it would just be the wrong way to go about it, can see things carrying on more or less business-as-usual, except that Don will probably leave the agency with Peggy in charge.

It would be genuinely lame for them to throw any character out of the window in the last episode.

don't mind if Nelson Rockefeller defenestrated Betty.

they would throw a character out a window before that, and then have dealing-w/things / getting-back-to-business-n-life as a denouement prolly

also there are different kinds of meanings, at different levels of generalization or abstraction and (possibly) pretentiousness

sometimes the show works a bit too hard on these big summing-up gestures that either telegraph a very abstract meaning which we're supposed to understand as the "takeaway point" of an episode... or the gestures are just used to convey a generally impression of Meaning that the episode or show hasn't really demonstrated or earned in its details.

i find a lot of the "meaningful" stuff a lot more playful in spirit than the morning-after exegesis tends to treat it.

oh yeah, that's totally true in a lot of cases. it's why reading those exegetes makes me upset and want to give up on the show. but then i end up (grudgingly?) watching another episode of being surprised that it's not as bad as I had worried it was. this happens basically every week.

what was the episode that ended (?) with three women walking into the elevator in this very planimetric, very bombastic lingering shot? that's like the epitome of the type of thing this show does that makes me want to barf.

Don will probably leave the agency with Peggy in charge

This is how I've thought the show would end since very early on.

oh i remember that one. don looking down an empty elevator shaft might be another example of what you mean?

Lou goes out the window after Mort Walker tells him Scout's Honor sucks.

xpost

or IIRC the way the first episode of this season began and ended.

it's a fine line between the ambitiously playful (like seeing a bunch of characters intercut as they wake up and head to t he office) and bombastic/obvious (Do You See How These Characters Compare and Contrast With One Another? They Are All The Same, And Yet Different). Mad Men is quite capable of both.

there's an easy way to avoid post-show exegeses guys. fan reactions are not the shows' responsibility.

xxxxp

i think im getting what you mean. i suppose the closing shot/scene of this most recent episode is similar. there's a certain writerly indulgence to this sort of thing, "see what i did there?" making the show's own construction of meaning self-consciously part of the text in a way that actually limits or constrains our responses to it.

there's an easy way to avoid post-show exegeses guys. fan reactions are not the shows' responsibility.

xxxxp

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, May 21, 2014 3:54 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

except I explained that I feel that the show is often courting that stuff.

you seem like a smart guy but this is like the fifth time in the past few days that you seem to willfully misread (or not read) other folks' posts in order to be more easily dismissive.

just sayin.

I grimaced when Betty quoted bowdlerized women's magazine fem lot to Henry a few episodes back; it was thesis dialogue. The directors said what they wanted to with a simple long shot of Betty in her ridiculous clothes smoking on that picnic blanket.

he season after Draper married Megan taht opened with his reading Dante on the beach almsot made me hurl the remote at the TV

Megan mentioning that she'd like to spend time with Don where neither of them have commitments and the continuing Inferno refs make me worry a bit that we'll get a return to Hawaii that leads somehow to a neat 'poetic' denouement (like Don walking into the ocean, though surely not that dumb).

i think they should write a final episode as if they're really trying to wrap up the show, then never shoot or air it.

just end in medias res not just in terms of the fictional world but in terms of serial form...

Didn't what's her face give Don the Inferno

either that or it should end mobius strip-like with don walking into the same bar we see him in at the beginning of season 1 episode 1. i love that kind of shit.

maybe Weiner is portending a finale where Don, Roger, Cooper, and Ted are buried in ice, chewing on each other's heads.

can't imagine anything other than a poignant bittersweet reflection on Time and Mortality occupying the final episodes.

yup

Megan Draper thumbing wetly through Swann's Way in the tub, "Teach Your Children" blasting.

Here's the summary from AMC

Don is troubled by a letter; Peggy may seek a new future on a risky venture; Roger receives a phone call; Pete and Cutler butt heads.

no mention of Bob butting heads?

Don moves back to his childhood home, cleans up the ol' house of ill repute, and puts his shingle out front:
DICK WHITMAN
ADVERTISING

amateurist: thanks for humoring me. i suppose im agnostic on this question as to art in general and whether it applies to this show in particular. but i dont have much faith in my own aesthetic sensibilities. i tend to like stuff that goes for the Idea because that's where im most comfortable responding to it.

xposts

or it could end self-reflexively with the camera backing up and all the crew are revealed and then they take a bow and the camera keeps tracking back and finally you're in the studio parking lot and the shot holds on the generic-looking stucco building for 90 seconds as the real soundscape of passing cars and wind in the trees buzzes faintly.

except I explained that I feel that the show is often courting that stuff.

yeah I get it it just seems like a weird way to frame your unhappiness with what's on screen. I don't see why the audience has to factor into it at all. If you feel the show is being too heavy-handed or explicit that would be sufficient imo.

There are probably trillions of think-pieces titled in defence of Betty Draper/Francis floating around the net.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/mad-men-season-7-field-trip
This one's pretty good. In particular,

One of the main defenses of any abhorrent character, whether in Game of Thrones, True Detective, or All in the Family, is that they’re a “product of their times.” This argument is usually wielded as a means of recuperating misogynistic, racist, and/or homophobic men: of course he sexually assaulted/manipulated/destroyed that woman; that’s how men operated then! To some extent, I actually buy this argument: there’s no “outside” of ideology, even in fictional television, and all men must wallow in the moral imperatives set forth by their narratives.

What strikes me, then, is how seldom this defense is used to exonerate unlikable women. Their actions are just as circumscribed by the ideologies that inform their cultures, but instead of explaining why they are the way they are, we call them bitches and shrews, harpies and sluts.

Which is precisely why I think it’s so critical to defend Betty: she is absolutely a product of pre-feminist sensibilities. All of horribleness, all of the judging — it’s all her sad, broken way of flailing against the quiet yet overwhelming disappointment of her life. She’s immature; she lacks introspection — but it’s difficult to blame her when the one attempt at gaining it culminated in a man looking down her shirt and reporting her confessions directly to her husband.

If being a bad actress allows January Jones to put across Betty's stunted sense of embittered self and frustrated, emotional immaturity so well, then more power to her.

The brand of unpredictable batshit she brings to proceedings is essential. She embodies a festering, almost neurotic ennui that I and find fascinating.

but it’s difficult to blame her when the one attempt at gaining it culminated in a man looking down her shirt and reporting her confessions directly to her husband.

I forget what this is in reference to

So do I but I'm running with vague memories of her shrink breaking his oath.

except I explained that I feel that the show is often courting that stuff.

yeah I get it it just seems like a weird way to frame your unhappiness with what's on screen. I don't see why the audience has to factor into it at all. If you feel the show is being too heavy-handed or explicit that would be sufficient imo.

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, May 21, 2014 4:46 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but it's all part of the context in which the show is made. you don't think that critics' approval is important to matt weiner et al?

I don't know if it is or not and more importantly I have no way of knowing, so it doesn't concern me.

i dunno, art develops in a context. you probably wouldn't have, for example, film criticism as it is w/o antonioni in the 60s, but you wouldn't have antonioni in the 60s unless a certain mode of criticism hadn't developed. there's a dynamic there.

i haven't looked into matt weiner's eyes and seen his soul, but i think it stands to reason that among other things the writers of Mad Men are responding to the way their show has been discussed/written about over the years. but even if they weren't specifically responding to writing about Mad Men, they are still making a TV show having been familiar w/ the way films and TV etc. have been discussed/written about. they can probably also safely assume they are reaching an audience that is largely familiar with certain strains of cultural criticism as well, certain methods of interpreting art and so forth.

i mean these guys (the big-name show runners of quality TV) clearly are concerned with how their shows and understood and perceived, and are clearly in part responding to that -- it's explicit in their interviews, etc.