Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980. Madonna is like Nero; she marks the turning point.

–Joni Mitchell

I think Joni’s probably right about some stuff here; that’s why I’m starting my discussion of Glee’s Madonna episode with a quote from a totally amazing interview that ran two days after it aired. I don’t know that it’s really popular or interesting to say, but something did change around 1980. I wasn’t there, so I don’t exactly know how people felt at Woodstock, but you get the sense that people still really felt like things could change. Things were changing, and there was nowhere to go but up: our institutions would all be remade. Then what really happened is basically every progressive movement and piece of culture either got forgotten or it got co-opted.

I’m not trying to be all boo-hoo death of the 60s here. I can’t really imagine what endless potential could have felt like because I grew up in a world where it was already foreclosed.

Madonna’s a good avatar of a lot of this stuff because of what she’s stood for. She’s a master appropriator, the face of “post-feminism,” and she’s kind of the perfect postmodern pop star in that no one really talks about her talent at singing: it’s all about her persona. (Not to say that she hasn’t produced some amazing music, but that tends to get submerged in the Madonna narrative. She reinvents herself, she makes smart choices, she positions herself.) More importantly, Madonna was one of the first people to basically say that she was going to work the system. She couldn’t sell out, because she’d already bought in. When the Beatles were in a Nike commercial, it was controversial, it was Yoko tarnishing their legacy. When Madonna was a in Pepsi commercial, it was cross-promotion. (Pepsi wound up pulling her ad after two airings because the video for the same song included burning crucifixes, but Madonna was cool with it. She did what she wanted and she got paid.)

That’s why — more than the gay icon thing, which is admittedly a huge part of all of the above, since camp is one of the most powerful weapons we have against the corporate monoculture when it’s deployed right, though you have to be careful, because it’s not immune from being packaged and sold to us — Glee devoted a whole episode to “the power of Madonna” this week. The way they frame Madonna — as an unproblematic feminist icon and force for equality — puts Glee pretty firmly in the pop as liberation camp. Not that there aren’t political positives to the whole hour. A group of seven dudes harmonizing on “What It Feels Like For A Girl” — and realizing that they are kind of responsible in little ways for making the women in their lives feel a bit smaller — is a pretty inspiring and progressive scene to have on TV. Plus the part where America was all really psyched to watch a 50-year-old lesbian reenact the “Vogue” video. Even having a real conversation about how disempowered girls feel seems crazy-progressive these days. Hearing Quinn tell Mr. Schue that women make 70 cents on the dollar, and the implied sense that there’s nothing we can do is heartbreaking.

I want to point out that I really do love Glee since I will be saying some pretty cynical things about it. I think it’s really well done. It’s a musical about high school. And feelings. Its title is even a feeling. It’s also awfully dark and cynical. At its best you get the sense that living in a small town in Middle America is really shitty and singing pop music in glee club is all these people have.

The fact that they sing already-existing pop music is the best part of the show. For me, this makes it really so much about how much we shape our emotional lives to the prepackaged content made available by “the music industry.” It feels more “real” than something like “Fame” where they mostly sang originals because we’ve all probably done the exact same thing. What teenage girl hasn’t sung something like “Take a Bow” into a hairbrush after a breakup?

They do manage to wrench some strongly felt emotion out of stuff like this:

Avril Lavigne has never been so poignant.

But, some people complain, the musical numbers don’t always feel right. Even the New York Times, on what’s maybe Glee’s most awkward scene.

With that, he tears into “(You’re) Having My Baby,” the maudlin 1974 Paul Anka love dollop, saying the words he wasn’t able to without a melody.

In the “Glee” universe, which revolves around the show choir from William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio, music is a curative, a perfect problem solver. It’s not a job or an obligation or a drag in any way, even when the subject matter is heavy, music is only joy. Finn’s plan ultimately backfires — Quinn’s father, infuriated, throws her out of the house — but by the end of the episode his outburst of song has paid dividends. The couple is together, in love and, for the moment, healed.

But still, that song: lumpy, unsteady, cringe-worthy. “Glee” may love music, but often it abuses it, with performances wholly lacking grit. In each episode a handful of songs receive similar treatment: antiseptically elated, heavily doctored recordings, with no line between the truly affecting and the genuinely off-putting.

It’s not just that the songs are pre-recorded and lipsynched, unless you want to raise that complaint at virtually every movie musical shot in the last 80 years. It’s not just the autotune, though that probably doesn’t help. It’s the subtle disconnect between the “feelings” expressed in “You’re Having My Baby,” and the complex emotions of the actual situation.

This happens to Finn a lot, actually. Possibly because he’s so dumb. Just last week, Mr. Schue gets him to buck up by singing the Doors. It wasn’t really that the song expressed his feelings — it’s more that his feelings get changed by the song. The song is like a magical incantation that changes his feelings at least temporarily. I will at some point quote someone other than Adorno on my blog, but I think he has a totally germane point here, which is essentially that rather than expressing some thing we inherently feel, pop culture introduces us to things that we should be feeling: “The dream industry does not so much fabricate the dreams of the consumers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people.”¹

The short version of my point is that Glee is a postmodern musical. Instead of having original songs meant to be perfectly integrated expressions of the characters’ innermost feelings, the characters try (and often fail) to express their feelings using the packaged emotions available to them in pop music. Pop music even drives what they should be feeling, like with Finn, or with the way Madonna’s strong take-charge sexual ethos convinced Rachel and Emma both that they should be ready. Madonna has a positive effect too: Sue learns to love herself by reeanacting the “Vogue” video, and Kurt and Mercedes decide to step outside glee club and be the stars they are in probably the most joyous performance of the night, “Four Minutes.” So, I don’t want to be all-negative about how pop music makes us feel, because it’s really not. As much as it sells us stuff, including itself, pop music also brings us together and it can and does speak to real things we’re feeling.

Ending with “Like a Prayer” makes perfect sense. Though I’ve always maintained that it’s a song about blow jobs (“When you call my name it’s like a little prayer/ down on my knees, I wanna take you there/ In the midnight hour, I can feel your power”), I am willing to consider that it probably has other meanings. The “there” where she wants to take you, where your voice can take her: it’s wherever you want it to be. There is an obvious sexual meaning, but the juxtaposition of the sex with the gospel choir gives the whole thing a sense of a kind of religious ecstasy. On Glee, where religion when it’s mentioned at all is just another form of hypocrisy (the celibacy club, Quinn’s parents who throw her pregnant ass out in a very un-Christ-like manner), letting the choir sing is as close as we get to the sense of community and of touching the numinous that everyone can get. It’s kind of an invocation to pop. For a few minutes, it really seems like we can get there. Does it really matter that the song was first heard in a Pepsi commercial?

I really don’t have an answer to that question. If I did, I would have culture pretty much solved. At its best, like it was this week, Glee makes a strong case that pop’s ability to shape our feelings is full of positive potential: potential to make us more empathetic, stronger, more beautiful, more free. But it also ultimately limits what we can feel: as much as Madonna’s message is equality and strength, it really still does emphasize a certain kind of sexualized “strong woman” who’s okay with the system as long as she gets paid. (Like she did. This week.) This wouldn’t be a problem if there were non-commercial versions of female strength and sexuality available to us — or even if the market allowed for more alternative versions of what that could look like — but that’s not the world we live in. So celebrating the times when something progressive or even subversive breaks through the net is often the best we can do.

So I watch American Idol. For me, it is partly about fun, not going to lie. It’s also partly about getting a lot of stuff about America, and also for reminding me, a Canadian, that America is a whole other country. I tend to think I “get” American culture because Canadian pop culture is so suffused with American products and American forms, but then I watch American Idol and I remember that the red states are real places where people live and love and are loved, not just Daily Show punchlines. It’s easy to forget that America isn’t just like a bigger Canada in a lot of really deep important ways.

But I just couldn’t handle Rolling Stones night last week.

It’s weird that of all the serious artists who’ve had their music karaoke’d on Idol — the Beatles, MJ, Leonard Cohen, Marvin Gaye, Dolly Parton — it’s the Rolling Stones that I just couldn’t hear covered. I actually thought Rolling Stones night would be good for Idol, since they write great blues-rock songs, and the vocals rely as much on personality as ability. I am not even that big a Stones fan — I like their music, but I would not ever list them as my favourite band. I think it’s because my dad does. I grew up listening to this music. I know the songs automatically; they’re part of my musical landscape, and a piece of my vocabulary of what rock n roll is. I can’t tell you what album every song is from, but I know the words and the melodies instinctively. This was the soundtrack of my childhood to the point that every now and then I’m shocked by the goodness of these songs, just because I heard them so much growing up that they are just there. It’s in my bones.

I started losing it when Andrew — who did that great version of “Straight Up” early in the season — sang “Gimme Shelter.” I don’t know how you can sing “War, children, it’s just a shot away” without conveying that you understand any of those words, but he manages. I wondered why I watch this show again.

Then pageant teen Katie came out and sang “Wild Horses,” which she interpreted as being about her dream of being on American Idol. Then I remembered that this show is produced by people who think the Susan Boyle version of “Wild Horses” was a good idea.

But here’s where I experienced a break. My AI feelings went from kind of amused affection and a fun investment to detached hate in five minutes. Tim Urban, coming up with “Under My Thumb”. Oh no he is not! Yes, yes he is. He is singing a totally earnest reggae guitarbro Jason Mraz “The Mellow Show” version of “Under My Thumb”, the nadir of rock misogyny.

Well, you can watch:

I don’t remember the last time I was just quivering with “what” at the TV. Everyone was like “Hey, it’s a fun song.” But it’s not a fun song, it’s a jam, sure, but it’s not a fun song. The only way to do that song nowadays is to go the Tina Turner feminist détournement route. In the posted clip, you can see the judges’ reactions. Obviously this kid is too stupid to understand what’s wrong with the words he was singing; but I kept waiting for everyone else to just kind of stare at him open-mouthed and then for Ellen to be like “Hey bud, maybe if you don’t want to alienate people as a potential ’sensitive’ pop musician, you shouldn’t sing songs about how you’ve ground your lady’s independence down so now she just does as she’s told?”

How is it not beyond the pale to go on TV in front of millions of women and sing “It’s down to me/ the way she talks when she’s spoken to”?

Ugh, I know this a post about how American Idol is really shallow and isn’t about art. Also, did you know that many of the lyrics to Rolling Stones songs are in fact somewhat sexist? I am blowing the lid off pop culture right here on my internet blog.

I have been on this intellectual trajectory where I’m all about analysis over evaluation; but maybe to the point where I felt weird about making distinctions and everything blurred into this sort of bland field where everything is “interesting” but nothing rocks my world (except Lady Gaga). Maybe this is part of why I’ve been posting less: I feel like everything’s kind of dissolved into pop culture soup.

Eventually you fall into this murk where like, Hannah Montana is just “interesting” even though it’s seriously the worst TV show ever made. And the worst part is, I haven’t even been writing all that much! Thinking everything is interesting is, at a certain point, not all that interesting at all. It is just as snobby in its own way as just straight-up hating Hannah Montana; it’s hard to do without being condescending or pretending disinterest that you just can’t have if you want to actually do any kind of cultural criticism.

I still stand by the idea that analysis is more important than evaluation, and I still don’t think our experiences of “high art” and “low art” are all that different. My experiences of lots of “bad” stuff isn’t really all that different in terms of reactions or pleasure — I still don’t know for sure if The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans was good or bad, but I sure loved it, and I loved it not all that different a way that I loved, say, Hiroshima, Mon Amour. I’ve always felt like this is kind of an “enlightened” point of view, a sense of being “above” discussions of “quality”; not because it can’t be measured, but more because there are more interesting things to talk about. This is somewhat true, but at the same time — some things are better than other things. I want to get good things back. I want to be able to care about those things more than other things. You don’t need to be a snob to do that.

If I was going to have a threesome with a movie star, I would probably want to do it to this white girl cover of this hip hop song.

Whatever You Like – Anya Marina

Oh, Mad Men! What a happy, satisfying, the-gang’s-all-back-together kind of an episode! I love how Trudy shows up with sandwiches for everyone, and there’s this warm familial sense that we’re all in this together etc etc. It was almost like watching a different show! Except for the part where Don of all people, who apparently has no self-awareness at all, or was just really angry and upset because his life was falling apart, I guess, called Betty a whore.

Is it weird that I feel weird about that? I have been thinking a lot about how people watch Mad Men lately, and I keep coming back to being surprised that a show like Mad Men — slow-moving, full of unlikable characters (the only exception being maybe Joan, and even then she is still kind of a bitch) whose unlikability you’re constantly being confronted with, about social issues and politics — is as popular and beloved as it is. I know people generally like things that are awesome, and if Mad Men is challenging it’s also compelling and funny and emotionally absorbing, but it still consistently surprises me that some people seem to love it despite apparently not having any idea what’s going on. (I.e. I don’t think the producers meant us to read Don molesting Bobbie Barrett as even a little bit of a proud moment, and I still read forum comments like “Woo! Don’s got his mojo back!” after that episode aired. Then I stopped reading forums about Mad Men.)

So, I watched, I laughed, I totally cheered “Joan!” along with everyone else in the room when Roger said “Let me make a call.” It was seriously satisfying to see Don tell Roger how much he meant to him, tell Pete how actually prescient he is, tell Peggy how much he values and understands her talent, to see Harry get the credit he deserves; but at the same time I feel weirdly guilty about it. I’m supposed to get this feeling from, like, Buffy, the show where love saves the world, not Mad Men, the show about how love is just something guys like Don invented to sell stockings. It’s not that I expect Mad Men to be real, even, it’s more like I expect it not to satisfy my cheeseball desires. I expect to be carefully constructed to totally break my heart. I know NY Mag thinks that it “somehow didn’t feel like some ridiculous holodeck of phony caper-ness,” ¹ but I still feel kind of wrong about it. The whole gang just working out of this one hotel room, starting everything anew in some kind of Utopian American Dream blank slate thing — it just seems so much like they were trying to throw me a bone. It feels nefarious; it’s the kind of happy capitalist ending that makes me want to go all Frankfurt school on the whole thing.

Why can’t I just let TV make people happy? I am not usually this weird grad school person who is suspicious of entertainment products that give people good feelings!

I still have a lot to digest before I do a real post about this season, but I’m excited I can finally read all the posts in my feed reader I have been saving up. If you’re not already reading it, I recommend the consistently rewarding Footnotes of Mad Men, both on the Awl and on Tumblr, which is going to be a book I will buy! It does a lot of work making connections and unpacking a lot of the historical context.

Also, Rachel pointed out this Pandagon post on Facebook, and it is probably the best thing I have read about Betty maybe ever:

The conservative reaction to the Draper marriage shows exactly how effective that storyline is in making its point. A lot of liberals, I’ve found, are bored with Betty for another reason entirely. They can’t understand why she doesn’t just pick up and leave already, if she’s so unhappy. We’re on the other side of it—so feminist that it’s hard to wrap our minds around the psychology of someone who isn’t. But conservatives flip the fuck out, get defensive and start scapegoating January Jones, going so far as to argue that her dull affect is evidence that she can’t act, when in fact it’s evidence that the actress is being fearless in her portrayal of someone whose entire personality has been flattened out by boredom. That isn’t easy for an actress, you know. Most actresses have an urge to be sparkling and charming in every role they play, even those that don’t call for it. It’s because Hollywood is run by men, and you can get a lot farther being eye-catching and charming and making men think that they want to be around you. That Jones, who is very beautiful, is willing to be off-putting onscreen is brave. That she spends a lot of time onscreen making you wish she was far away is the fucking point. She’s supposed to make you uncomfortable.

Betty’s always one of the most controversial characters because she’s so unpleasant to be around, and that’s because she is so, so mired in this world that’s almost completely foreign to viewers now. One of the most persistent critiques you read of Mad Men from people who don’t like it (who are pretty few and far between) is that it constantly reminds you you’re in the 1960s and that takes you out of the story. This is pretty obviously the point of the show, and Betty’s Exhibit A in this argument because as much as you feel for her (or not, as the case so frequently seems to be), it is really hard to put yourself in her place or to understand her. It’s frustrating because she’s speaking English and living in a pretty similar world to the one we are now, but she doesn’t really give you any points of common ground. Betty’s the one who makes it the most clear that the past is emotionally incomprehensible; we can see cave paintings and we can read what they represent, but we can’t really ever know what they meant to people.

Episode 7: “Red in the Face”

I think these two images pretty much sum things up.

The Chip and Dip

Pete & his Gun

That and when Pete walks up to Don and Roger, asking “Did I miss anything?” and Roger tells him he didn’t, and he’s all “Goodnight, Paul.” The camera stays with him and Don as they walk out, since we know what Pete’s reaction will be. It’s a nice smirky bit that leads into the whole Don-and-Roger rivalry bit which isn’t really my favourite. I like that Mad Men isn’t afraid of bodily functions — and I think this puking will be kind of echoed by Betty’s later puking in Don’s new Caddy — but it’s not my favourite. This episode is all manliness sweepstakes, so of course Don wins, but Pete is actually way more interesting while he’s losing. As is Peggy’s reaction to the whole thing, which I still find strange. Was it somehow a hint to the pregnancy thing? She does go straight to the snack cart after.

Episode 8: “The Hobo Code”

So this is the one with the flashbacks to Don’s youth (via Don getting stoned at Midge’s house: “I feel like Dorothy. Everything just turned to colour.”) where he learns through the Hobo Code that his father is a bad man. Uh, he might already know that though. The first time through, it obviously provides amazing insight into the Secrets of Don, but this stuff, especially since Don’s mystery past turns out to be such a red herring later on, is kind of boring. The Adam story plays well on rewatch — because it ties into other stuff about Don and his family — but the whole thing is that Don Draper is kind of this ultimate postmodern subject. He got dealt a terrible hand, but then he grabbed on to the first chance he could to shed his old self and become a shiny new self. The seams show every now and then, but I’m totally getting ahead of myself. Thouh this is the episode that Bertram Cooper tells Don to read Atlas Shrugged.

The part of the episode that only gets better with age is the stuff with Pete and Peggy. It starts with the sound of Pete’s shoes echoing on the shiny floor of the Sterling Cooper lobby; Peggy catches the elevator with him; they start talking in the office, before anyone else is there. Then they bone on Pete’s office couch and he pulls her ponytail. The janitor hears them, but it’s okay, because in the 1960s, black people didn’t really exist.

After all the unspoken tension between them, it’s kind of refreshing to see them getting to act out the things they were wishing for. I love the way Peggy smiles a little when someone comments on her torn shirt: “I’ll have to start keeping a spare.” It’s great, because it’s not really a girlish thing; when you think someone keeping a spare shirt at the office, you think of Don and his drawer from the first episode. She doesn’t see herself as one of the girls, she sees herself as one of the men. It takes her awhile to make other people see that, though.

I did love that Don goes to bat for Peggy’s work in the meeting. Don’s speech is worth reproducing because it is insane:

You’re a non-believer. Why should we waste time on Kabuki? [...] Listen, I’m not here to tell you about Jesus. You already know about Jesus. Either he lives in your heart, or he doesn’t. Every woman wants choices, but in the end, none wants to be one of a hundred in a box. She’s unique. She makes the choices and she’s choosing him. She wants to tell the world “he’s mine.”

He follows up Ken’s compliment with the following, also worth remembering for when ew get to Bobbie Barrett: “Ken, you will realize in your personal life that at some point, seduction is over and force is being requested.”

It is probably a good time to point out that Don realizes Midge is in love with her douchebag beatnik friend after he sees them through a camera; he saw his life through a camera in “Marriage of Figaro,” and didn’t like what he saw, and cameras will be important again in “The Wheel.”

The great, great scene in the episode is the party at PJ Clark’s, of course. Everyone’s having a great time doing the twist or whatever, and Peggy dances over to Pete, all smiley and bright and confident. “Dance with me,” she says. “I don’t like you this way,” Pete says, ie, he doesn’t like her happy and confident and successful. You see her realize this, realize the way Pete sees her, the way he wants a Peggy who’ll look up to him, not a Peggy who’s busting through glass ceilings. She rejoins the throng, wiping a tear away as she dances. HEART-BREAKING.

Episode 9: “Shoot”

So “Shoot” is mostly about Betty’s issues with her sense of herself totally being wrapped up in being beautiful. McCann-Ericsson is trying to woo Don from Sterling Cooper, and offers Betty a job modeling in their Coke ads. It works because January Jones really does look so much like Grace Kelly.

Betty’s nostalgia for her time modeling in Italy makes a lot of sense: on the one hand it goes right in with her sense of self-worth being tied up in ornament, because at this point her beauty actually had some utility, and on the other it was also something that was all hers, probably the most freedom she ever had. (Remember how she told her therapist that her mother disapproved, despite the fact that she’d spent Betty’s whole life telling her beauty is her job.)

My favourite Pete bit, as the boys are sitting around, speculating on what kinds of offers Don’s getting from McCann. “I hear he makes 30,” someone says. “He’s not ten times better than me,” Pete scoffs. Everyone is noticeably quiet for a second.

But mostly, let’s get back to how crazy Betty is. Here is an example: little Sally comes in crying because their neighbour with the pigeons threatened to shoot their dog. After she leaves, Betty turns to Don: “Did you see those big tears? I really want to get a picture of her crying one day.”

Though we knew Betty had issues with beauty and normal human feelings before, but this was the moment where you kind of have to go, oh — “I really want to get a picture of her crying one day”? Her daughter. Crying. Picture. Betty is crazy!

Don decides to stay at Sterling Cooper when it becomes clear that this thing that Betty is really excited about and makes her feel special is really just a ploy to get him to come sell TWA with them. And Don is actually a little grossed out about that, because, and I think we’re realizing this for basically the first time, he really does care about her. This is definitely the first time you see him treat her with tenderness, not just as a possession. Don’t get me wrong, it’s obvious Betty’s both a prop and another job to Don, but it’s tangled up with actual caring about her and also with the sense that he’s not as close to her as she wants because he’s “different” and has to always be an outsider.

You can see this in the way he talks to Betty when she tells him she doesn’t want to work anymore. “I would’ve given anything to have a mother like you. Beautiful and kind, filled with love. Like an angel.” This tribute to her maternal gentleness prompts Betty to have a David Lynch moment, as we hear soft old-fashioned ironic pop music and Betty pulls out a BB gun and starts shooting at that asshole’s pigeons.

No one fucks with Betty Draper.

In more general blog housekeeping notes, I do want to point out that my tumblr actually still gets regular updates, though most of them are just pictures of stuff I like. so like, lots of Gossip Girl and Mad Men, and occasional clips of Anderson Cooper being adorable.

Anyway, recaps/thoughts:

Episode 4: “New Amsterdam”

This is mostly a “Pete” episode, which is always a bit of a challenge to me as a viewer since Pete’s such an unlikable but really well-drawn and well-acted character. Most of the talk about the great acting on the show focuses on the sexier or more relatable characters, but I think Vincent Kartheiser’s work throughout the show has been great. Pete’s such a shit, and Kartheiser plays him so unshrinkingly. This is also the first episode where you start to feel kind of bad for Pete, since he wants so badly to actually be considered on his own merits, but it’s not clear that he actually has any (yet), and his name is getting him through life more than he’d like. (Though it later turns out that Pete is actually a bit more perceptive about the future than, say, Don or Roger – like the Kennedy stuff, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

The main threads of the story are about Pete trying to buy an apartment Trudy wants and at the same time working on entertaining a client from Bethlehem Steel who’s in New York to approve a campaign. Neither of these things really goes his way – his parents won’t help him with the apartment, and Don’s mad at him for not pre-selling the client on the work they’d already done. Pete and Trudy wind up getting the apartment through her parents’ largesse. The contrast between the jovial restaurant meal shared with Trudy’s parents and Pete’s cold meeting with his folks in their house, furniture already covered for their switchover to the summer house – his mother in a Christmas sweater because that’s all that wasn’t packed – is a nice contrast between Trudy’s family life and Pete’s. Meanwhile, while basically playing pimp to Mr. Bethlehem Steel (which, now that I think about it, I realize is pretty much his job, which, ew, and also, his dad has a point), Pete pitches his slogan idea that Bethlehem likes better than Don’s concept. It’s sort of sweet for Pete after his fight with Don (where he says something like “I have ideas, you know” and Don replies with “Sterling Cooper has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich!”) The only other salient point about this fight is that it’s clear that even Pete thinks the idea that he’s “good with people” is absurd. But of course, after the whole meeting debacle, Don very quietly tells him to put all his belongings in a cardboard box, and Sal tells him “You picked the wrong time to buy an apartment!”

But then! We get a first meeting with Bert Cooper, who is always the voice of harsh realities in an already cynical world. “Don’t fool yourself, there’s a Pete Campbell at every agency,” he explains, to get the entrées into the society clubs and so forth, and this makes Pete impossible to fire. Don obviously hates this, but Roger keeps the power in that relationship where it’s supposed to be by telling Pete that Don’s the one who saved his job. I like Cooper a lot as a character – I love all the quiet bits with his Japanese affectations (I don’t think anyone’s ever talked about the taking shoes off before you go to his office, but it’s such a great, telling little business you see every time we wind up there); and I love all the little Ayn Rand bits and stuff. Robert Morse’s work – beyond the novelty of having Mr. How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying on the show – brings so, so much to the show.

The episode closes with Pete and Trudy meeting the co-op board (or whatever the 1960 equivalent is) for their new building. “Wait until I tell my husband there’s a Dykeman in the building,” the woman says excitedly. Pete looks out on the city his family used to own as “Manhattan” plays: “We’ll take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too…”

Pete’s sort of an odd one in the show’s universe. In a way, he’s tied to the past, in that he’s obviously gotten lots of privilege from coming from the “old guard,” but he’s also one of the “kids,” and he’s often the most savvy (often in depressing ways) about the future.

This is an unsettling episode, because it’s also the one where Betty meets little Glenn Bishop. This is one strain of Mad Men that I totally still don’t get. I do understand that part of it is that Glenn’s response to her is one of uncomplicated (though slightly creepy) admiration, and Betty needs that, but seriously? A lock of her hair? I just…don’t get it. There’s a weird huskiness in her voice when she sends him up to bed after that makes me really uncomfortable and sad.

Episode 5: “5G”

So, “5G” means two things – it’s Adam Whitman’s apartment number and it’s also the sum total amount of money that Don uses to buy the disappearance of his little brother.

This is actually not my favourite episode in general, but it has some wonderful moments, and it’s obviously a major advancement of the plot, as it gives us some major information about Don’s past, which still seems like it’s going to be a big deal when you’re watching this. And it is, in terms of us finding out What Don’s Deal Is, but not actually in terms of how it affects his life. The more I think about it, the more I think all the secrecy is as much about Don needing to have a secret life as about anyone in his life caring about Don’s past. Roger’s interested, because he’s his friend, and he’s always pushing for details; Betty’s interested, because she wants to know her husband. But other than that, no one really gives a crap where he grew up besides Don.

I love that Midge calls Don’s office and gives her name as Bix Beiderbecke and Don has no idea who that is.

The part of this episode that I actually love is the part where Ken publishes a short story in the Atlantic Monthly and Roger compliments it like this: “The story itself was not much to my liking, but I think it showed an uncanny understanding of what most people like.” And everyone else in the agency – failed artists with novels or screenplays in their desk drawers – completely loses it. Especially Pete, who gets Trudy to try to sell his short story to an old boyfriend who’s in publishing. Key detail to remember for future episodes: Pete’s story is about hunting. (Trudy: “I don’t understand why the bear is talking.”)

The other part that I like a lot is Peggy freaking out when Betty shows up for the family photo and Peggy doesn’t know where Don is. In my notes, I described this as “cutesville,” and the exchange between her and Joan, where she confesses to Joan that he gets calls from this woman, and then realizes she should never have told Joan. “I’m the worst secretary in the world.”

The end of the episode is the bit where Don shows up at Adam’s apartment with a mysterious briefcase (which the shot emphasizes as he heads over there). There’s an element of sinisterness in the whole exchange as Don tells his brother that his life “moves in one direction: foreward.” But his voice softens as he tells him to make his own life, and you can read a tiny bit of hesitation and vulnerability in his voice – which, again, is a first glimpse, for someone who sets himself up as tough and modern as Don. Don’s not going to kill Adam, of course, at least not with a weapon. He does, in a way, it turns out, kill him with money. But we don’t know that yet.

Episode 6: “Babylon”

“Babylon” is epic. It’s still one of my favourite episodes, so funny and fast and heartbreaking and beautiful. I think it, along with “The Wheel,” holds many of the keys to the whole show.

So there are all these threads that start on Mother’s Day. We get a montage of a very un-commercial-like breakfast being prepared – orange juice concentrate being glopped in a pitcher, cigarettes being put out, etc, before Don falls on his back and has a flashback to young Don meeting his brother for the first time. There’s a fantastic shot where the camera pans from young Don, looking back at the stairs, to old Don. I love this moment, because it has the past and the present looking at each other, which is a really great metaphor for, you know, what is going on with the whole show.

Key Don quote that will come back to get him later, re: Betty’s inability to get over her mom’s death: “Mourning is just extended self-pity.”

So Don’s work challenge that brings up confusing thematic issues related to his personal life this week is selling Isreali tourism! So he calls Rachel, who busts him on calling her because she’s the only Jewish person he knows.

“A country. For ‘those people’ as you call us. Well, it seems very important.” “Why aren’t you there?” “My life is here… I’ll visit, but I don’t have to live there. It just, has to be. For me it’s more of an idea than a place.” “Utopia.” “Maybe. They taught us at Barnard about that word, ‘utopia’. The Greeks had two meaning for it: ‘eu-topos’, meaning the good place, and ‘u-topos’ meaning the place that cannot be.”

There are a bunch of different meanings in that distinction, some of them diegetic, some of them non-, and they all kind of layer on top of each other: personal, political, romantic (capital and small r), nostalgic.

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there! “Babylon” also has the beginning of Peggy’s ascendancy as copywriter and total advertising killer. There’s the whole scene, with the “brainstorming,” where the rest of the “girls” are all giggling and trying on lipstick and Joan is playing her role, being on display on the looked-at side of the two-way mirror, while the boys are on the other side, playing their roles, and doing the looking. She knows Roger’s there, she knows they’re all watching, she knows exactly what’s going on. The difference between her and Peggy is, Peggy knows too, but she’s not going to participate. She doesn’t want to be just another colour in a box. She’s not being calculating when she tells Freddy that, she’s not a “dog playing the piano,” she’s just not an idiot and by not pretending to be one, lucks into someone noticing. (As we see next season, this was the easy part.)

When Joan tells Peggy the news, she asks if she should go thank “them”: “No need. They wanted me to tell you. They were very specific about it. Well, you know what they say. The medium is the message.”

The next time we see Joan, Roger is giving her a depressingly symbolic caged bird. We switch back to Don, fending off accusations of being a sell-out, by Midge’s lame friend Roy: “How do you sleep at night?” “On a bed of money.” This isn’t true, Don doesn’t sell lies because he’s cynical, he sells them because he wants them to be true, but Don would never say that, because he doesn’t even know it himself probably.

The show closes with a good example of the cheap TV device of drawing parallels through musical montage – as “By The Waters of Babylon,” a folk song written especially for the show plays, we see Rachel thinking of Don (and maybe of Zion), we see Betty putting lipstick on Sally, we see Don’s eyes misting at the song for reasons we can only guess a, and we close on Joan and Roger leaving the hotel separately, a long shot emphasizing their distance. The music cuts out and we’re left with desolate car noises.

Anyway, that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped watching. I’ve watched and watched and watched. I took Frank O’Hara’s collected poems out of the library after they used Meditations on an Emergency. But I’ve kind of never really felt equal to writing about it – I just have so much to say about it, and I think it says so much for itself.

But I’m rewatching it, and this time I will write out my thoughts more. I will, in all posts, be talking about stuff that’s happened up until the end of Season 2, so if you haven’t been watching the show, my posts will not be a very good primer. You should watch the show though, it’s a good show. (In Canada you can watch every thing for free at the ctv website; I do not know if there is any streaming version available to US audiences?)

Or, if you like rewatches that are about fun, not serious art shows being grad schooled to death when they are basically already doing all the stuff grad schooling usually does, like gender analysis and Making Points About America, and you are in America where the website works for you Tara is doing a 90210 rewatch at her work that is funny.

Anyway…

EPISODE 1: “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”

This is the first episode of the show, where we see Don Draper talk to a waiter, have sex with a lady, insult another lady whose business he was supposed to be trying to win, and ingeniously save the Lucky Strike account at the last minute. We also meet Peggy Olsen, “the new girl,” who gets sexually harassed by Pete Campbell, who has his bachelor party that night, and shows up drunk at her house. Rather than turn him away, Peggy makes the genius move of boning him in her tiny Brooklyn apartment. It will take her some time to realize that the birth control pill doesn’t kick in the day you start taking it. My favourite scene, of which there are many possibilities, is Don and Rachel having a drink. Don gives her all his posturing “I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there is none” speech, and Rachel doesn’t buy it for a second. Her observation: “it must be hard, being a man, too.” My second favourite is Joan’s advice to Peggy. I always remember how she tells her to really evaluate her features, and be honest, but I always forget how she prefaces that advice by telling her to do it naked with a bag over her head. She makes it sound so stern and sensible, but it’s such a horrifying Also, I want to reproduce Don’s big speech about what advertising does: “Advertising is based one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? It’s the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance, that whatever you’re doing, is okay. You are okay.” I want to think about the need for reassurance, and why Don understands it as a human need.

EPISODE 2: “Ladies Room”

This episode doesn’t just focus on the ladies, but it does have key scenes in the ladies room at the beginning – Betty’s hands going numb putting on lipstick, our first real chance to find out anything about her, and the end, with Peggy, who straightens her scarf and silently seems to promise herself to not be one of those women crying in the washroom. It is also week one of Betty’s therapy, in other words, week one of Don calling her therapist to find out what she said, which would be so illegal now. The first two episodes are, I think, what people think of when they talk about Mad Men as just reinforcing this kind of “look at how terrible things used to be” kind of complacency – but if Matt Weiner had wanted to make a show that was about how awful 1950s Eisenhower America was, he probably wouldn’t have mentioned the Nixon-Kennedy election in the first episode. There are other hints, of course, that things are going to change, particularly in Peggy. After sleeping with Pete in week one, Peggy spends the whole rest of the episode fending off the advances of the various office lotharios – including Ken and, actually slightly more convincingly, Paul, who talks to her like she’s a real person. The scene where we learn what Peggy’s really about (though I had no idea how much this was showing us the first time around) – is when she complains to Joan about the constant sexual harassment. “You’re the new girl, and you’re not much, so you might as well enjoy it while you can,” Joan says, thinking she’s being mean, but Peggy takes it as assurance that this will go away. She slips into the bathroom, standing at the mirror where they’d seen someone crying earlier on – you think you know what’s going to happen, but then she sees another woman crying and she steels herself and straightens her scarf. Elizabeth Moss communicates so much with that one look.

EPISODE 3: “Marriage of Figaro”

Aaah, so much happens here. I think, based on the images I used in my “Mad Men is my new favourite show” post, that this was the moment that I went from liking the show to loving it. The first half of the episode focuses on Don, with his broken cufflink, going to see Rachel Menken’s store, the one he’s supposed to be advertising. She gives him new cufflinks and shows him the roof, where her only childhood friends the guard dogs are kept. In light of later revelations, I find it interesting that Don is moved to kiss Rachel when he finds out she didn’t have a mom. He relates to her outsiderness; she mentions her sense that he seems to know what it’s like to be on the outside in Episode 1; it’s clear here (and from what we know about Don now), that this is what so moves Don about Rachel. The second half of the episode is little Sally Draper’s birthday party. Don walks around filming his gross neighbours – who slap other people’s children, hit on divorcees when their wives are in the next room, and tell gross sexist jokes while the ladies are present – watching his life through the camera’s lens. The scene cuts between a full soundtrack of party noises to just the opera score (I’m pretty sure it’s from The Marriage of Figaro, but I’m not good on opera) and the sound of Don’s movie camera running. I want to remember this sequence of Don filming the suburban neighbourhood party he’s desperate to get away from when I get to “The Wheel.” Don drinks some more (we see him drink a lot this week) and watches the kids play the most depressing house ever (“You dented the car!” “I like sleeping on the couch!”) before he mercifully gets a reprieve to go pick up some cake. But he can’t bear to go back, so he just drives off and sits under a bridge, reappearing after the guests have gone, after being served some Sara Lee from the freezer of Helen Bishop, divorcee and obviously the smartest person at the party, including Don. He shows up, tellingly, with a dog for his daughter, which I never connected to Rachel’s comments about “sometimes a dog is all a girl needs” until now. Duh. This episode doesn’t start on Don though, it opens with the image of the famous Volkswagen “Lemon” ad, which he’s sneering at when someone recognizes him as “Dick Whitman.” It’s an early hint of the way things are going to be with the show – the first two episodes mostly seem to set up how things are right at that moment, but this is the first inkling that the Sterling Cooper way is not going to last forever. Also, that Don Draper thinks everything is a construction because he is a construction.

However, it’s not like this season of Gossip Girl didn’t have much to love. The part where Serena turned kind of bitchy for about two seconds after her and Dan’s first break-up, because it’s nice to see girl grow some backbone (also on display in the later on with the whole trying to get the money back after she helped her boyfriend scam everyone at her building out of cash and then even in the finale with the whole attempt to end the vicious reign of Gossip Girl). Chuck and Vanessa boning, even though that never really went anywhere. The whole Age of Innocence episode, which was so meta that it basically all but explained the entire artistic programme of the show, except if they were being really explicit they would have talked about new technologies and how much they’re revising the whole idea of privacy. Jenny’s runaway fashion career with a crazy teen model was wonderful, because it was a storyline in a television show (ostensibly*) aimed at teen girls that was about a really talented teen girl who put on a really awesome guerilla fashion show, and tried to start a business, but was stymied by realities like her business partner being a totally crazy and her dad being totally lame. Also, virtually anything with Blair. Because she is awesome, but also because she spends the whole season figuring out how to she wants her life to be. She tries on a committee here and a van der Bilt family wedding there, but you know, Blair’s no socialite. She’s not a Jackie O, she’s a Hillary. (I love that Serena meant that as a compliment.)

I think as critics and educated viewers and students of postmodernism, we get caught up in like “themes” and interpreting and noticing clever parallels and self-conscious winks at the audience (especially on a show like Gossip Girl). But at its core, this is a show about figuring out how to live your life – how to figure out which privileges to profit from and which ones to disown, how to literally exist in the world and be a self that you can live with. I don’t think this is fundamental to all stories, but it is definitely fundamental to televised serial melodramas.

The actual finale was pretty great for me as a fan – the best bit was how they put Blair in a 1920s dress for that striptease scene with Chuck, which was a great callback to Victrola, when she first took off the headband for him. I also like how they did the same “One week later” bit as last year, and that it turns out Gossip Girl lives in all of us, like Santa.

Getting back to point one though, I did read some complaints about the anticlimactic secret revelations at Nate’s grad party, where Blair’s boning Uncle Jack, and Chuck’s boning Vanessa, and Dan’s boning the English teacher, and Jenny’s brief, chaste toplessness, were all kind of just dropped in the air and then didn’t have any effect on the story at all. I sympathize with those people, because from the perspective of storytelling these things are half from left field and half examples of things they set up but never really did anything with (too many secrets!), but from the Gossip Girl perspective it’s amazing because it really underscores the show’s pattern from the beginning. The pattern is this, and I’m not going to give any examples because this is just me saying obvious stuff about the entire show: there are secrets. Someone is scared the secret will get out, because then Bad Things will happen. The secret gets out! Oh no! Everyone is mad and there is crazy drama for about five minutes and then whatever the secret was ceases to be a big deal. The finale just accelerated all the crazy drama so that it almost completely skipped it – but the fact of secrets and the keeping of secrets and most importantly, the way secrets completely lose their power when they stop being secrets is still at GG’s heart. It’s about how to live in the world, but the world it lives in is a world of constant surveillance, of constant, uncontrolled publicness, which is something new. Gossip Girl is about what happens when you totally cede privacy. What happens seems to be, it’s kind of freeing, apparently. You can try to fight it, like Serena suddenly decided to do – or you can just shrug it off. It goes with the territory, and Gossip Girl’s argument appears to be the loss of privacy that “Gossip Girl” (which stands for, like, the internet and social media and celebrity culture and everything else) makes you live through is worth it.

This is really where Dan is important. Before he actually met Serena, Dan was pretty content to be anonymous. But really, it’s like his life didn’t even start until Gossip Girl noticed him. You could certainly paint this kind of thing as negative message to be sending to teen girls, but is it really? Being scared of either what people will say or your concept of yourself as an outsider seems like a really stupid reason to avoid doing things that will make you happy, like dating a rich, beautiful girl or trying to have a successful life at the profession of your choosing.

I don’t really have a better conclusion than that, other than to point you to Foucault.

You know I love you!

*Though I think they court the Gawker-reading media nerd audience that watches sort of earnestly (because the show is actually good) but sort of ironically (because it is Gossip Girl) just as hard.

How fitting is it that Jenny’s whole downfall/uprising is all scored to cover songs? Last week she was dancing in her bra to “How Soon Is Now” (by T.a.t.u, awesomely) — and this week she was like, wearing a crazy hat and distributing polaroids with her phone number to society folks to “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.”

Obviously I love all the Blue States Lose-ness of Agnes and gross RISD dude. It’s another kind of new celebrity being brought into the Gossip Girl fold, coexisting with the Tinsley Mortimers. Did you know Cory Kennedy was on 90210 early on? I am a little bit worried about little J, looking like an Avril Lavigne video with her shapeless sweater and all her eyeliner and her little suitcase. I’ve gotta say, I would probably run away too if my Dad totally tried to get me arrested in a misguided attempt to make me hit rock bottom.

I love that even Lily was like, uh, no Rufus. Rufus and Dan kept acting like this brilliant publicity stunt was like THE WORST MISTAKE JENNY COULD EVER MAKE, but you guys? She was on Page 6! All that was bad that happened was that some boring society gala was less boring! Even Lily was kind of awkwardly jamming to the tunes. Seriously, she took a risk, but it totally paid off.

It does kind of make sense in the weird way that nothing on this show makes sense, in that it’s all about the price you are willing to pay for your “success.” Rufus didn’t want to pay the price of his “personal integrity” to be more than a forgotten ’90s band; Lily kind of did sell herself out for a bunch of trust funds. She’s paying for that now, but she’s got galas being thrown for her and Rufus’s daughter just ran away and Dan led with “I finished my story” at breakfast. Jenny’s talent and chances are being contrasted with Rufus’s own choices — she’s making the hard choices he never could.

Of course, next week we’ll see her burning down a model home with her skeezy friends, and then she’ll apologize to everyone and be chastised or whatever.

In Blair related news, the Blair story was kind of meh. Leighton killed it, and the whole thing fit with the new sensitive Blair we saw last week, and I liked the kind of “sweet” moment where Chuck says he didn’t fuck a teenager in the back of his limo out of sentiment for her. I guess after last week’s big culmination of their whole love as a series of dramatic games storyline (not for nothing did This Recording’s Molly Lambert bust out Baudrillard there), we needed to give Blair and Chuck a rest.

And, Serena? Run away! Aaron is totally charming and switches between being really cute and kind of hideous in an entirely Westwickian way, but he is terrible! He was like, “I could tell you who that chick was in my apartment, or I could pretend that you’re just looking for reasons not to date me.” Uh, it is not looking for reasons not to date someone so much as ignoring clear warning signs. Seriously Guattari & Deloser is nothing but trouble.