Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler Recap Mad Men Season 7 Episode 8

Dearest A,

            OK, let’s get our bearings. The more things stay the same, the more they change – on the surface at least. Peggy Lee sings “Is That All There Is?” while Peggy Olsen’s midriff expands; hem lines are going up and these boots were made for walking; the tension between Peggy and Joan gets more intense; the transformation of Ken Cosgrove from nice guy with level head to one-eyed sourpuss continues apace; and the guys usher in the dawn of the worst decade of male fashion with ugly mustaches – Roger’s white stache in the Rollie Fingers mode; even worse, perhaps, Ted’s big brown concession to the Zeitgeist.  

The trio of oversexed McCann ad men who can’t get enough of Joan’s panties, hose, and bra: did we (men) really behave that crudely back then? (Don’t answer.) And if, onomastically, Harry Crane echoes Hart Crane, and Dick Whitman evokes Walt, and Michael Ginsberg recalls Allen, then meek John Mathis in the flesh, who reports to Peggy and matches her up with his brother-in-law, will disappoint all of us who made out to Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are” and “It’s Not for Me to Say” in suburban cellars prepping for the high school prom in 1966. I have never before used the word onomastically in a sentence.

Things have changed on the Semitism front at least. The dark-haired waitress waiting on Don, Roger, and three female accomplices in a diner – the waitress named Di – reminds our boy of Rachel Katz, nee Menken, and the first of the last episodes of “Mad Men” go right back to episode one of season one when the heiress of Menken’s department stores gets treated rudely by Don and company in the then-judenrein firm of Sterling and Cooper. In a dream Rachel is one of the models auditioning for the chinchilla ad that the agency is planning. In the most memorable dialogue of the week, she tells Don “I’m supposed to tell you you missed your flight” and he replies with the over-sincerity of a commercial: “Rachel, you’re not just smooth, you’re Wilkinson smooth.” 

Rachel Menken has died of leukemia. It happened just a week ago. Don is stunned; he pays a shiva visit to Rachel’s sister Barbara, who needs not explain what this seven-day period of mourning entails. Don knows. He has, he says, lived in New York for a long time. Barbara’s husband: “We need one more for a minyan.” Don: “I’ll be glad to help.” Barbara: “He can’t. He’s not Jewish.” The men doven while he stands in the vestibule looking on. You think of the Jews we have met since Nixon and Kennedy faced off in series one: Jane Siegel, who marries Roger; Jane’s pint-sized cousin, butt of jokes, mocked incessantly by Roger until he deftly aims a punch at Roger’s solar plexus; Abe who loves Peggy; Ginsberg, crazy as a loon but right up there with Don and Peggy in the copywriting department; foul-mouthed comedian Jimmy Barrett and his wife, Bobbie. Don has slept with Bobbie, he has slept with Rachel, and it could be that the antidote to anti-Semitism is good sex. As Ava Gardner put it, when accounting for why she and Sinatra fought constantly yet played their romance through to its end, “If a man’s good in the feathers, you can forgive a lot.”

Meanwhile, Don remains the Lothario de ses jours, shtupping the waitress in an alley and topping a midnight visitor on a wine-stained carpet. In the immortal words of every TV critic in America, Does he know who he is? Will he ever find out? And how will it end? Will he jump? Will he fall? The last two questions reveal too literal a reading of the opening credits and should be disregarded. To the first two questions: Sure. He’s the guy who radiates confidence when he sells you a Mercedes. “The best – or nothing.”

Love,

D.

Dear David,

 You are right to open the discussion saying Let’s Get Our Bearings. I needed that! I feel like I’ve been hibernating in a badly ventilated cave. It’s bad for my health to go too long without our favorite TV series. As Mad Men scholar Brian Tucker was quick to remind me, when I puddingheadedly remarked that this final-season opener, with its quick jumps between a multitude of story lines, felt very all over the place, so in media res…..this final season was broken into two parts by the network, and was originally intended to be one long farewell season of fourteen or so episodes, rather than two installments of seven episodes with an intervening intermission of more than a year. So I need to get my head right and get up to SPEED.

 

As many thumbs up as I can muster in agreement with your observation about the utter hideousness of mustaches of the period. Oh, horrid ornaments of facial hair, marring the visages of two perfectly good-looking male characters! I gasped when I saw Roger re-enter the Edward Hopper-esque coffee shop from the john. Good god, he’s turned into a catfish! Or has pigeon wings glued to his upper lip! It’s impossible to look at him or Ted now without laughing.

 

Sea green seemed to be this episode's color theme. The stewardess who Don beds on the floor has a sea green mini dress on (is it her flight uniform?) and rapidly reveals a lovely diaphanous sea green panty and bra set. The waitresses in the coffee shop featured in this episode wear sea green uniforms with white caps and aprons. Peggy is clad in a flattering sea green cocktail dress with color coordinated jacket for her date with underling Mathis’ brother in law. When they go back to her apartment after the date has turned from awkward to hot, there is a metallic sea green typewriter visible on Peggy’s desk as they make out and talk about zipping off to Paris. Though I read that technically the gem can come in many colors, maybe all the sea green in this episode is TOPAZ, a jewel I’m most familiar with being aqua or blue green, and of course that is the brand name of the pantyhose whose on account Joan and Peggy are made to suffer so ignominiously.  (More on that in a second.) To conclude the costume commentary: the three babes Roger and Don are shoehorned into the coffee shop booth with (after some swank affair that has the men sporting tuxes) are arrayed in evening frocks, long and short, that are dead ringers for gowns my barbie doll had when I was a tot. That really took me back, making me relive muscle memory of stuffing that barbie doll’s hard little plastic body into those glamorous tiny dresses whose life-size versions I thought would be a big part of my future as an adult woman. Au contraire. I have never worn an evening gown or evening gloves in my life. The era for that ended, at least in my milieu and tax bracket, long before I hit adulthood. It was all about blue jeans and peasant blouses and loose granny dresses by the time I got old enough to put my dolls in a drawer and to be more concerned with my own outfits than Barbie’s. I love that the waitress is reading John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy, that weighty paperback crammed into her apron pocket.

 

I think we’re in 1969. It’s “The End of an Era” we’re told in Mad Men print ads and on billboards, both because the show (sob!!!!) is coming to an end, and also, I think, because the sixties are drawing to a close. I conclude this, because:

1. That’s the year Peggy Lee had a hit with “Is That All There Is?” the wry, doleful, existential ballad of ultimate underwhel-ment that bookends this episode

2. That’s also the year that President Richard Nixon announced on TV that there would be a substantial drawdown of American troops from the war in Vietnam. We see and hear Don watching such an announcement in a super brief scene towards the end of the show (though there were many such announcements in the run up to the end of the war, so this date is hard to pinpoint.)

 

The scene in which Peggy and Joan try to get the trio of McCann Erikson male creeps to agree to OK a deal in which Marshall Fields Dept. store lends its elevating name to Topaz panty hose is indeed chilling. Those guys torture them, clearly showing off for each other and competing to be named winner of the Lowlife Misogynist Slime award (except the poor guy on the end who has no lines!). The interchange between Peggy and Joan in the elevator immediately following is maybe my favorite scene in the episode. Trapped literally and metaphorically in a tiny claustrophobic space, the two begin decompressing from their harassment in a way that starts off sounding like commiseration, but quickly degenerates. Peggy, continuing her understandable and common but misbegotten conflation of longing to be taken seriously and having to take on the oppressor’s mind set, ends up telling Joan that she is partly responsible for the harassment because “you can’t dress the way you do” and not expect to incite this kind of behavior from men in a professional setting, or out in the world. They end up attacking each other, yet also paradoxically giving each other permission to bust a move that may or may not be to each woman’s benefit. When Joan retaliates, telling Peggy that of course Peggy doesn’t dress the way she (Joan) does, because (by implication) Peggy is more Plain Jane than Bombshell--Peggy doesn’t have the looks to carry off the stunning, figure-hugging clothes Joan wears, Peggy is devastated. Later, she reverses her decision not to allow herself to be set up on a blind date by Mathis, almost to prove Joan wrong, to challenge the idea that she’s unattractive, or that she isn’t as attractive as Joan. When Peggy insults Joan back, saying, “You’re filthy rich, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” (because Joan, unlike Peggy, is now a partner in the firm) Joan thinks about it hard. When one of the McCann Erikson creeps calls later in the day, she tells her secretary to say she’s unavailable, in a meeting. Then she flees work and indulges in a high end shopping spree: evening dresses, shoes, boots, the works. (More wardrobe designs straight out of my old barbie doll’s cardboard closet. Sigh.)

 

Ken is also tortured, by Roger and another jerk from McCann Erikson. (Does anyone decent work at McCann Erikson or is the firm’s roll call just wall-to-wall assholes?) The duo team up to fire Ken in a vicious way, seeming to want to cause maximum pain, and relishing it, making jokes. They add insult to injury, letting Ken know that his severance package is tied to his “gift wrapping” (Ken’s term, later) his accounts for Pete to take over. Yet at the end of the show, Ken takes a very tasty revenge. His retiring father in law has made him head of advertising at huge Dow Chemical, enabling him to tell Roger and Peter: “I’m going to be your client, and I hate to tell you but I’m very hard to please.” Which elicits an expected expletive from Pete. Would that Peggy and Joan could get some of their own back too, sticking it to their sadistic sexist abusers!

 

Don’s Don Juan antics are important in this episode, as in so many. We get two contrasting amorous scenes. Drunk, wine spilling and therefore carpet ruining sex with the cute stewardess in his lavish apartment. Quick, up against the wall sex in a dark  alley with the waitress who reminds him of his dead love Rachel. Rachel who he has prophetically just dreamed of, and then learned she is recently dead. Rachel whose wake he briefly appears at before being triply snubbed (for not being Jewish, for being out of touch with her, and for being a cad towards her when she was alive) and then unceremoniously handed his hat. He ends up haunting the coffee shop, talking to his waitress about Rachel in very, spacey abstract terms. She’s a little sympathetic, but eventually tells him, “That [i.e., sex] isn’t going to happen again. Next time you come in, bring a date. I just work here.” The most eligible almost bachelor in 1969 Manhattan, shunned by his old love’s sister at her memorial, rejected by the coffee shop waitress, ends this episode looking ever handsome but bewildered, and forlorn. Cue Peggy Lee.

 

Another episode tonight! Can’t wait to read your reaction!

 

love,

 

Amy