Of course, if anyone rises with “red hair” and “eats men like air”, it’s our zaftig miracle Joan Holloway. Keep an eye on this space.
A cultural catalogue * Contact: friends of dick whitman at gmail dot com
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INSIDE
BOOK CONTRIBUTORS
Alex Balk, Smoker
Carol Diehl, Art Critic
Matthew Gallaway , Novelist
Megan Lubaszka, Architect
Angela Serratore, Historian
Tim Siedell, Ad Man
Natasha Simons, Writer
Christina Perry & Derrick Gee, Designers
Dave Wilkie, Ad Man
PALS
May 11, 2012
Lady Lazarus and A Chat About Death, Part 2
“Lady Lazarus”, in Plath’s own words, is about “the agony of being reborn.” And Megan spent a good deal of the last episode attempting a career rebirth — an agony we can all vibe with. Not only did she have to contend with her own ambivalence about the situation, but with the risk of bringing her all-id husband dangerously close to an existential meltdown. The man cannot handle even tacit questioning of his liiiiiife.
I am your opus
I am your valuable
[…]
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Operating not so much as her own character but rather an agitator of the characters around her, Megan may be bringing everyone else to a frothing analysis of her motivations before burning out in a flash of phoenix-like glory like the Lady Lazarus of the poem. (The peanut crunching crowd/Shoves in to see) Notice that “wedding ring” is one of the primary material symbols that the speaker claims does not represent her. Megan is impossible to analyze, refracting attempts to do so into a million opinions on how to feel about her (in us too!), but she is an extraordinary illuminator of the people around her.
Footnote by Natasha Simons
3:41pm | 31 notes
| megan draper | peggy olson | don draper | lady lazarus | sylvia plath | mad men | natasha simons
Lady Lazarus and A Chat About Death, Part 1
With all the death talk this season (cancer scares! nurse killings! snipers!), many Mad Menites are wondering if Matt Weiner is in the mood to finally pay up and off somebody. Rumors swirled last season about Greg Harris and Roger Sterling, but this season the likely friends we have on offer are either young sad Peter or young happy Megs. Let’s consider Pete first:
Do you remember all the way back in “Pilot” where there was some scoffing discussion of a small consideration called the death wish? Don may have blown it off then, but he’s not laughing (down an elevator shaft) now: the man is facing mortality somewhat brutally at the hands of his heedless young wife. Who wasn’t laughing all the way back in 1960? Why, Pete Campbell, of course, who has always understood the morbid urges we all feel: the man and his erstwhile rifle have been hurtling down that metaphorical Freudian highway onto an oncoming car for five seasons now. And now, he’s kind of literally hurtling down that highway. With a re-introduced rifle. And he’s a bad driver!
Speaking of metaphors and psychology, this episode is named after Sylvia Plath’s famous, stunning poem “Lady Lazarus”, which in large part is about the speaker’s fractured identities making it impossible for her to liiiiiiive. Based loosely on autobiographical circumstances, the speaker details her various suicide attempts, and the struggle to reconcile her reluctant, warring body and mind with the facticity of life. Pete, who attempts to mirror Don (and is now seeking out a brown[haired] Betty of his own) while maintaining a complex and frighteningly sad inner life of his own, has to balance his multiple personalities as well in what is becoming an increasingly tenuous situation.
Note well:
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Which is clearly how Pete has begun to view his existence of coming home on the 525 train. Pete hasn’t attempted to kill himself (yet), but ever since his woeful Job-ian cry of “I have nothing”, it’s been clear he feels he’s dying a small death each time he lives a life he has begun to see only hollowness in. This was also an issue Plath wrestled with, loving her complicated and destructive husband and young children as well as seeking to free herself from it in due course.
Footnote by Natasha Simons
"There’d been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: and what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited upon her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"
—
Thomas Pyncheon, The Crying of Lot 49
What do you think Pete’s reading material means?? Consider the captive maidens (Betty, Beth, Peggy to some degree) and the women questioning that malignant magic (Megan, Joan) in your answer.
April 19, 2012
A Meditation on Mailer, Pete Campbell and The Language of Men
“His anger often derived from nothing: the set of a pair of far lips, the casual heavy thump of the serving spoon into his plate, or the resentful conviction that the cook was not serving him enough.” —Norman Mailer, “The Language of Men”
Pete Campbell presents a whole different kind of masculinity issue than does our mainstay Don. From S1E1 Pete’s been a mess of insecurities, all stemming from the essential Pete nugget that he simply doesn’t know very much about people. Wavering between the petulance of a child and the brimming over-confidence of a teenager, Pete is his own worst enemy.
He’s quick to lash out — recall this is not the first time he’s been in a fight at the office. He punched poor Kenny for his indelicate comments about fair Pegs back in season 1! Of course, that might have had something to do with his extreme jealousy of Ken — this comes only a few episodes after Ken gets his first story published in The Atlantic. And he’s become so used to shooting off his passive-aggressive sniping comments and being ignored that when Lane actually challenges him to a fight, he’s floored. He’s not used to being directly confronted or spoken to about much of anything, really.
Here’s Mailer again:
“He became aware again of his painful desire to please people, to discharge responsibility, to be a man. When he had been a child, tears had come into his eyes at a cross word, and he had lived in an atmosphere where his smallest accomplishment was warmly praised.”
Pete has some…issues with recognition and pride, no? He craves it desperately, and yet he’s either so unctuous or so biting that even when he does good work, people are reluctant to reward him. This man, who was so spoiled in his youth, finds that his peers don’t like him at all. When he pitifully says at the end of “Signal 30” that “This is an office. We’re supposed to be friends”, we get the sense that he actually means it. That SCDP holds the only friendships he’s ever known! This coming on the heels of Don telling Megan that the people at work are not her friends only underscores Pete’s essential misunderstanding about other people and his innate loneliness that comes from being excluded.
As decent as Pete has become at his job, he’s never gotten over his puppy love with Don Draper, the man he has been trying to get a reaction as long as he’s graced our screens. When flattery didn’t work, Pete turned to subterfuge. None of it seemed to work very well, but Pete is still giving Don the biggest steak.
“…with his heart aching he lunged toward Hobbs. He had no hope of beating him. He merely intended to fight until he was pounded unconscious, advancing the pain and bruises he would collect as collateral for his self-respect.”
“[He] began to wonder about the things which made him different. He was no longer so worried about becoming a man; he felt that to an extent he had become one. But in his heart he wondered if he would ever learn the language of men.”
So then of course, Pete does get called on his pervasive misanthropy and reflex anger toward the rest of the world. And in every glance and gesture, Pete has always tried to ape the standard masculinity: he tries to dress like Don, he blusters through work drinks living up to Roger, he commits adultery after the both of them. And yet even when he’s embraced the trappings of masculinity, he still can’t connect. He hates himself for it because it’s not what he wants, and Don hates him for it because it seems like such a poor imitation of the thing he himself does. Everything Pete does has an air of forcedness to it, because it just doesn’t come naturally to him — the language of men.
*Footnote by Natasha Simons
March 27, 2012
The French New Wave of Feelings and YeYe
Megan pulled off her coup: a hip cosmospolitan soiree that left the guests yearning to go home and have sex. But where did the foal-like Canadian get her moves from? Where did the sex-kitten, bob cut, hip swish and a peek-a-boo routine originate? Answer: France! Her whole routine was decidedly French New Wave, right down to the casually slumped, hip young crowd on the Draper’s couch.
Beginning in the late 50s with the “auteur theory”, which, not to get you all worked up, was the new and somewhat daring idea that a director was the owner, or the author, of his film. This seed blossomed into a full-fledged manifesto with a number of hot-shot young directors espousing it, including Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda, and Alain Resnais. The French New Wave was about an aloof stance against the corrupt, flimsy nature of the world. Instead of nihilism or hot-headed rebellion, the New Wavers sought truth in the romanticism of youth, beauty and art.
There’s no better film that encompasses Nouvelle Vague’s values than Godard’s 1966 masterpiece Masculin-Feminin (a film so trendy it’s STILL inspiring sensitive young artistesses to get that fabulous haircut). Masculin-Feminin works in the strong Marxist elements of the New Wave, mocking commercialism while simultaneously realizing there’s no escape from it — ATTENDANCE TO THE BEAN BALLET IS MANDATORY. In world of bullshit politics, crass commercialism, and an overall corrupt reality the one thing the kids could count on were their feelings.
Much like many a movement, though the origins of the French New Wave were grounded in theory and a lot of intelligent philosophizing, what ended up leaking through to the mainstream culture was all visual. The aesthetic of the French New Wave was very firmly mod, with Twiggy-like haircuts, tons of cat-eye eyeliner, and A-line dresses. And there were plenty of nonsense songs like the one we heard Our Lady of the Uncomfortable Role-Play sing last night. And that’s how you get, as just one example, the Ye-Ye Girls.
Ye-Ye, spawned in part from the Beatles’ “She loves you yeah yeah yeah”, is a pop-rock genre defined by its staccato bass line, go-go tempo, minimalist, and unfussy female sound. What each Ye-Ye song had was a smoldering but seemingly unobtainable sex kitten cooing the do-do-da-da sounds. The female lead of Masculin Feminin was an aspiring Ye-Ye Girl, as was the real life actress Chantal Goya.
“Zou Bisou Bisou” was a Ye-Ye classic and, as we know, very catchy — all the boys of SCDP had it stuck in their heads all weekend.
Footnote by Natasha Simons
December 20, 2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Mad Men Playlist:
Sukiyaki — Kyu Sakamato
In “Flight 1”, Don totally negs this Japanese lady in the restaurant after he has to break it off with Mohawk Airlines (this is the episode where Pete’s dad dies in the AA crash). She’s into him, and usually when Don suffers a work setback, he likes to make it up in personal lady time, but he says “Not tonight” and bravely soldiers on.
Anyways, this song “Sukiyaki” is what’s delightfully playing over this exchange. The original title of the song translates to “I look up when I walk”, which the singer does so his tears won’t fall.
Making the whole thing just that more Weiner-loves-his-details-esque? Sakamato died in a plane crash.
• footnote - by Natasha Simons
December 14, 2009
“Bras are for men. Women want to see themselves the way men see them.” — Paul Kinsey
Looks like Maidenform went ahead and took Paul’s campaign! After all, it wasn’t doing much good wasting away in Playtex’s archives. The (real) 1960s ad on left bears a striking resemblance to the Jackie/Marilyn dynamic theme from the episode “Maidenform”.
Paul’s brilliant campaign resulted in a bit of a downer for Pegs — she realized she’s not a Jackie or a Marilyn. Someone meanly snickers she’s more of a Gertrude Stein, and Don compares her to Irene Dunne, but really what the girl is, is Katharine Hepburn. You know?
The Jackie/Marilyn (Madonna/whore) dichotomy has been around for much longer than the two women. I don’t know how Paul came up with such a thing (it’s Paul for God’s sake) but it plays very deeply into a part of the female psyche that has struggled with these two perceptions ever since we began talking about sex openly.
• footnote - by Natasha Simons
You can see why ad execs for Playtex might have gotten a bit nervous at Maidenform’s vibrant ad campaign, but, much like in the Mad Men episode “Maidenform”, they continued (and continue to this day!) making ads that emphasized the fit and make, rather than any sort of fancy show.
Just take a look at this gallery of 1960s ads from Maidenform/Playtex. It’s not hard to see that yes, definitely — Maidenform played into a much sexier ad slant. Check out the girl’s parted lips in the third pic! Playtex stuck to a much more informational stance, with women who were rather prim and proper, even with the not wearing many clothes thing.
• footnote - by Natasha Simons
December 12, 2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Mad Men Playlist:
Get cultural! Way back in season one, the episode “Marriage of Figaro” is named after the Mozart opera, natch. The comedic opera, subtitled “Day of Madness”, isn’t hugely supportive of marriage, aptly enough for our burgeoning Pete and Don characters.
This aria, played during Sally’s birthday party (you know, the one where Don peaces out on his fam and comes back with a dog?), is called “Voi Che Sapete”, and it plays during the second act of Mozart’s opera, sung by a young pageboy falling in love.
The lyrics, translated, go:
You who know what love is,
Ladies, see if I have it in my heart.
I’ll tell you what I’m feeling,
It’s new for me, and I understand nothing.
I have a feeling, full of desire,
Which is by turns delightful and miserable.I freeze and then feel my soul go up in flames,
Then in a moment I turn to ice.
I’m searching for affection outside of myself,
I don’t know how to hold it, nor even what it is!
I sigh and lament without wanting to,
I twitter and tremble without knowing why,
I find peace neither night nor day,
But still I rather enjoy languishing this way.
You who know what love is,
Ladies, see if I have it in my heart.
P.S. Matthew Weiner loves this aria! He also used it in an episode of The Sopranos.
• footnote - by Natasha Simons
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