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

except it's in advertising.

Not everyone's lifelong dream is to be a message board curmudgeon.

does less harm.

Does less of everything.

i was an ad agency peon for 8 years, where's my show?

was Willy Loman ever invoked directly in any of the 90+ episodes?

i was an ad agency peon for 8 years, where's my show?

2015 American Politics Thread: The 114th Congress Is in the House!

i dont think the show has ever tried to hide that the inherent engine of advertising is corrupt despite stating that artistry and craft can be involved in its creation, i mean much of season 6 is focused around creating an ad campaign for a chevy sedan that was a notorious lemon (the vega iirc) and choosing that car as the product was v deliberate

Does less of everything.

The Zen of Morbs

i was an ad agency peon for 8 years, where's my show?

― the increasing costive borborygmi (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, May 19, 2015 10:23 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its funny u shd ask cause ive been working on this script

i dont think the show has ever tried to hide that the inherent engine of advertising is corrupt despite stating that artistry and craft can be involved in its creation, i mean much of season 6 is focused around creating an ad campaign for a chevy sedan that was a notorious lemon (the vega iirc) and choosing that car as the product was v deliberate

and Lucky Strike and Coke.

Jaguar

i haven't read all of the theorizing about the end itt but it didn't even occur to me that don would have created the "hilltop" coke ad when i watched it, if only because this show has always been very diligent about keeping major cultural moments on the periphery of the drama. to turn don's breakdown and recovery into some alternate-reality origin story for a famous soda commercial feels like cheap fan service to me. and it well may be! who knows. but i appreciate the ambiguity of the ending so i can at least pretend otherwise.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/watch-the-documentary-that-explains-why-don-draper-ended-up-meditating-in-california-in-the-mad-men-finale-20150518

like, don draper isn't forrest gump, you know? we don't have to retcon him into history!

Don Draper wasn't turned into a hippy, hippy ideals were assimilated and commodified by Don Draper.

If only he'd had this epiphany 4 years prior when listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows," he could've spared many people a lot of grief.

tbf hippie ideals were too unformed and positive to escape eventual commodification

and the Jeremy Davies "punk rock car" ad? which bombed, on the merits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLhfxI8T2cU

tbf nothing can escape commodification

true enough

lol oh davies, you and your junkie skulk

tbf nothing can escape commodification

― lag∞n

I'm sort of left with that being one of the major points of the series.

People in advertising really can have a bizarre life outlook after a while. A friend in the industry realized the amount of cognizant dissonance when her firm was working for a large national banking/loan company that was as culpable for the home mortgage crisis as any other bank, maybe even moreso. They weren't the helpful, life-enabling savings and loan institution their advertisement made them out to be, nor were they the one-note profiteers of the nightly news. For her, they had to be both.

as a person in a variation of that line of work i can confirm it definitely sucks for those reasons sometimes bordering on frequently & you deal with a lot of gray-area shit but fuck, i got rent and loans to pay

If the show had been set in the '70s and ended up around '79, it all would have pointed towards Heinz's "Anticipation" commercial.

Not the Mean Joe Greene Coke ad?

In that context it was a deeply cynical finale in the guise of a sugared ending

tbf nothing can escape commodification

― lag∞n

I'm sort of left with that being one of the major points of the series.

I agree with both of these.

To me the ending was the previous season's ending on a larger scale - instead of coopting the family meal with Burger Chef, they've coopted the search for the self as it were.

Watching the Coke ad made me infuriatingly angry. Then the jingle got stuck in my head for 7 hours.

people under 40-45, had you never seen the Coke ad before?

i was familiar with it as being legendary also feel like they reran it or remade it in the 90s

I've seen. Also heard the song a million times. And as lagoon says they've remade it a few times.

I've seen/heard it a million times.

Yeah i heard it a million times. Did the remake it? That sounds familiar..

Pretty sure I heard it first on Negativland's "Dispepsi".

This one had a much bigger impact on me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ThA2zlnm6g

It ran on TV for about five years straight. We sang the de-Coked version in school and thought we were very funny singing '...and furni-SHIT with love' with special emphasis.

We used to sing it in school too, so it had legs into the early 90s anyway.

but you sang about "love" rather than "Coke," right?

(and snow-white turtle doves, no subtext there eh)

I'm sure they ran it sometimes on British telly when I was a kid in the 80s. Certainly very familiar.

people under 40-45, had you never seen the Coke ad before?

― the increasing costive borborygmi (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, May 19, 2015 5:47 PM (1 hour ago)

I remember Oasis having a big hit with that song on their first album. Seriously though, I was aware of it before that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUoVQ-kB7DQ

In a way I kind of like the ad's optimism and naivety. Ads nowadays feature characters that are all judgey and cynical hyper-consumers.

Except for the dumb blonde guy in the Sonic ads.

Well there often has to be a dumb person there asking obvious questions to act as audience surrogate and also someone the audience can look down on.

I think I remember being surprised at learning that song was a coke jingle. But I have no idea how I would have heard it in Denmark, in what version.

i learned about it from a smash mouth song

i've still never seen it but eventually miscellaneous references accrued the density of an actual experience

I think I may have seen remake with the candles before seeing the original. (Plus I had "The New Seekers Live at Royal Albert Hall" as a kid and knew the song from there)

did the finale remind anybody else of /inherent vice/?

Someone at work asked me about the ending, someone who watched the first season, a few episodes from the next, then stopped. After giving her the most minimal 45-second summary possible of what she'd missed of Don's story--divorce, remarriage, divorce again, ups and downs at work, ongoing identity crisis, Ken dancing, now estranged from everything, job included, embraces fridge guy--I played the final scene for her, curious as to how she'd interpret it. Without a second's hesitation, she said that Don had had a flash of inspiration and went back and created the Coke ad. Which doesn't mean anything, I just thought it was interesting that someone who wasn't nearly as immersed in the show as some of us are would immediately come to that conclusion.

Before putting all this aside, I rewatched the first episode last night. Pretty great, with lots of fascinating connections to where it all ends up.

Yes re:inherent vice

Xp

i do think that if don didn't make that exact coke ad then i imagine he made a different coke ad plagiarizing the sad stranger's refrigerator dream. "you're a can of coca cola. you're in the fridge, and when the people open the door, they see you and smile and reach for you and you feel their love"

Hm, Don also pretended to be giving away a fridge full of Miller beer just two weeks ago

Probably Leonard was inside that fridge, which is the real reason the husband chased Don away--he didn't want this sad-sack of a man living inside his house in a fridge. It's all starting to come together.

I am the secret man who lives in your fridge