One of the things that grabs Ladies of a Certain Age about Mad Men is the authenticity of the seriously fraught gender dynamic of the era.
Take Peggy for instance, through each season we watch her get squeezed between her two desires to be liked by men and respected by them. Given the setting, it seems she can only pick one.
Well, here’s a fantastic post by art critic Carol Diehl about the sexuality of the era, featuring appearances by Brigitte Bardot, Ann Margret and Mad Men:
“Last night, after the turkey, we watched two films from 1963-64 back-to-back: Brigitte Bardot in Jean Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” and “VivaLas Vegas” with Elvis and Ann-Margret. To my male friends it was high camp, but for me, watching them produced flashbacks of what it was like to grow up in that era: wanting men, wanting them to like you, wanting them to want you, but at the same time having to fend them off on a daily basis, the frustration of having your strengths ignored while being valued for your sexual potential…”
One of the things Don actually admits to, under extreme interrogation by Bobby and extreme alcohol intake, is he likes the movie La Notte! Well, what a svelte cineaste Don is. Notte was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Story of a Love Affair, Blow-Up), it stars a personal favorite actor, and Draper-esque prototype, the above pictured Marcello Mastroianni.
Have you ever read James Joyce’s The Dead? Imagine that, but way more Italian. There’s a focus on memory and the resurgence of the past, on intangible relationships, on wandering through life like sleepwalkers, half alive, half dead. (But keeping with the Italian thing, there’s also some DANCING.) It’s about a man and his wife who engage in flirtations and affairs until the end, when she wakes up one morning and tells him she doesn’t love him anymore. Hmmmmm.
There’s a big party scene where Giovanni, the husband, socializes and gladhands while his wife lingers on the edges of things, there as a trophy, lonely in a crowd of people. The similarity should strike you pretty quickly if you recall Don and Betty at the Kentucky Derby party. It doesn’t end there. Giovanni is a restrained man-child, someone who has everything he could want but can’t manage to connect to the happiness those trappings ostensibly entail. His indecisiveness, his recklessness, and his creative frustration (he is a writer) remind us of our own leading man.
P.S.! As a film history side note, are you interested in why Don loves foreign film so much? Well, I’ll tell you! The educated consumer, middle class, with tendencies toward art, totally gave up on American cinema around the 50s and into the 60s. In short, this is because American 50’s cinema sucked. Badly. It was all gimmicks and wide screen and teenage idols like James Dean romping around — not serious enough for a man of Don’s taste. This is when imports took off, and in particular, Italian cinema boomed. The neo-realist movement, referred to by some as “male weepies”, really got an American audience interested. The French Nouvelle Vague and the British working class “Kitchen Sink” movement was also right around this time, and provided a foreign escape route from the American chaff of the day.
This is Grace Kelly. The antithesis to Ava Gardner and the same archetypal beauty of Mrs. Betty Draper.
What’s the story on Mrs. Kelly?
Well! There are many delicious parallels. Just look-wise, her and Birdie have a lot of the same things going on. Demure, delicate, the suggestion of high class. Kelly was from money and while attending a fancy Pennsylvania academy, Ravenhill, she did some modeling with her sisters and appeared in amateur plays.
Kelly went to the same dramatic arts school as Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. She had a relatively short and glorious stint in Hollywood: 6 years. Her regal-ness was best exploited under director Alfred Hitchcock. She starred in Rear Windowand To Catch a Thief. The New Yorker applauded her virginal beauty and ‘quiet confidence’ . She cinched an Oscar for Country Girl in 1954.
Then she literally became a princess: Kelly married Prince Rainer of Monacc in 1956. Her official tittle became Her Serene Highness, the Princess of Monaco and she spent the second half of her life throwing charity balls and giving out awards to dignitaries and starlets.
She died in a car crash in 1982 on the streets of Monaco while driving her daughter to their country house.
“Gable succeeded on-screen because of the promise of force behind the smile—that’s what made the smile knowing… He was like Jack Dempsey in a tuxedo…. Joan Crawford said [being near him made her have] “twinges of sexual urge beyond belief.”
- David Thomson, film historian, understander of sexual charisma, smart guy.
• Split screen photo grab by the fantastic Bohemea
Here’s a wonderful scene where Marilyn Monroe learns about what they do to the ponies by a poor farm hand. It’s from the Misfits, which the dogfood lady and Burt Cooper blamed for the bad press on dog chow.
It was written by Arthur Miller (after he split from MM) starred Monty Clift and was Clark Gable’s last, most grizzled role. It’s not a great movie — making titans the screen of the seem like ordinary western folk is tough business, even for John Huston. But it’s a fascinating cultural landmark for bringing all those talents (rising and fading) together.
David Thomson, my favorite authority on the matter, says this of the picture:
“It follows one of director John’s Huston’s subjects: horses. In turn, the best stuff of the picture involves the actors trying to rope and tame wild horses on silvery flats outside of Reno. Huston, at least, could look at a horse and see just the wild four-footed miracle. Yet somehow this aching movie is driven to see the horses as symbols of lost purity in America.”
American purity dislikes being dragged into the dog bowl.
Ah, Rome. A perfect place for Betty and Don to rekindle the romance — who needs Paris, anyway? Betty, in complete control of herself and Don for once, effortlessly breezes through the place and captures the hearts of several men, including her husband’s. For that purpose, she gets dressed up at the Hilton’s beauty parlor, in an outfit aesthetically similar to one of the greatest Italian films of all time, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
In the film, Anita Ekberg plays a Swedish (but basically an American representation) movie star, Sylvia, who sweeps into Rome and carries away several men. Her most famous scene? The one of her jumping into the Trevi Fountain. Framing Betty against a fountain calls the image to mind immediately. Both outfits both play with black and white and involve similar makeup; the difference is that while Sylvia is unadorned and effortlessly beautiful, Betty’s creation is one of direct manipulation, with many baroque effects (the hair bow, the necklace). While Sylvia is unaware of the effect she has on her own strong-jawed man (Marcello Mastroianni), Betty couldn’t be more conscious of Don’s reaction to her flirtations.
The character of Sylvia is intended by Fellini to represent a modern American intrusion into the ancient city of Rome, which is trying desperately to play catch up. Whereas she has more of an effect on Rome than it does on her, we see by the end of “Souvenir” that the opposite is true for Betty.
RESOLVED: Betty’s Euro look was based on Brigette Bardot: the 26 year old ‘sex siren’ of France. Here’s my favorite work from the Bardot cannon. The movie — by Godard, set in Italy, released in 1963 — is not only super slick but it also spawned, I believe, the greatest trailer of all time. I’ve been aching to link to this.
Coincidentally, perhaps not, it could also read like the shot list from last night’s episode.
You simply must hit play then say it all day: EE-TAL-EE!
Joan’s songC’est Magnifique is from the Cole Porter musical ‘Can-Can’. It’s the story of a sassy burlesque theater owner whose business is about to get shut down by a priggish judge who rules the high leg kick-split dance obscene.
But the soul of the show is the cancan itself, a dance whose surging sexual energy comes to dominate everything else on stage. Watching the leggy dancers … take such open pleasure in their female capacity appears to be a treat for both sexes.
(thanks to Natasha S. for tracking down the song!)
Metropolis is a classic example of the film aesthetic of German Expressionism. The movement, characterized by jutting angles, a machinized world, a helpless public and domineering structures, makes Pete’s parallel an apt one. The buildings in Metropolis, inhabited by the rich, tower above the proletariat who are overshadowed both literally and figuratively by the authoritarial shapes. Peggy and her Brooklyn paramour referencing a world inhabited by robots later on in the episode only serve to underline this seemingly throwaway reference.
Given that Don even says to the new developers that dissent to their new project would just be a formality, Weiner seems to suggest that the new Penn Station is an idea drawn up by the rich and imposed on a public unable to fight back.
![“Gable succeeded on-screen because of the promise of force behind the smile—that’s what made the smile knowing… He was like Jack Dempsey in a tuxedo…. Joan Crawford said [being near him made her have] “twinges of sexual urge beyond belief.”
- David Thomson, film historian, understander of sexual charisma, smart guy.
• Split screen photo grab by the fantastic Bohemea](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/madmenfootnotes/231510500/1/tumblr_ksiny56JSd1qzlum5)
