Weekend Quotation

Draper? Who knows anything about that guy? No one’s ever lifted that rock. He could be Batman for all we know.

—Harry Crane, The Marriage of Figaro

On the DVD commentary at this point, Jon Hamm says “I’m not Batman.” Ha!

 

Marriage of Rachel

Roberta said it first: Don loves Rachel.

Until my DVDs came, I had only seen Marriage of Figaro once—the only episode of Mad Men for which that was true. I didn’t start saving them right away, and around the time they were rebroadcast, I was in the midst of switching from Tivo (rocks) to Io DVR (sucks) and screwed up the recording. It’s an amazing and important episode, and I’d only seen it once. So I rewatched it right away, pausing only to write up everything and watch an extra feature.

Anyway.

In the early part of the season, I wondered if Don wasn’t seriously, even suicidally, depressed.

 

Joan takes marriage seriously

In Babylon, when Roger tells her that before meeting her he was ready to leave his wife, she play-slaps him. But the intention of the slap was, Don’t you ever talk about leaving your wife.

And in Marriage of Figaro, she says that Lady Chatterly’s Lover is “another testimony to how most people think marriage is a joke.”

by rkl

 

Foreshadowing

The same episode where Harry says of Don “That guy could be Batman for all we know,” is the episode where Don runs into someone on the train who calls him “Dick Whitman.”

Beautiful.

It’s hard to watch well-written television. Catch the subtext, foreshadowing, and motifs. Honestly, having this blog helps me do the thinking I need to do to fully appreciate the genius and subtlety of the show. Oh my gods I sounded like I was giving Matt Weiner a blowjob, didn’t I? But it’s just that good.

 

Freeze frame–some of my thoughts as S1 unfolded

(Or, A Blog is Born.)

Hi.

So, I’m a little uncomfortable with this, because it may be crossing over into narcissistic. But I was over in TV Squad. TV Squad’s Bob Sassone has been a fan of and written about Mad Men since the beginning, and I used to follow his write-ups and comment. The show finally has its own category on the site, and Bob is now a reader of ours as well. (And watch for an interview over there with Rich Sommer in a few weeks. We’ll let you know.)

The thing about Basket of Kisses, as you basketcases know, is that we started it after Season One had aired. Pretty much, right after. The first post was basically Peggy? WTF??? only with a better title.

(Actually, pretty funny. I just glanced over at that first post so I could put in the hyperlink, and I absolutely ask the spelled out version of WTF. I am very freaking consistent.)

Okay so my point, and I will make one, and it in fact ties in with my being consistent… it turns out that looking at my profile page in TV Squad, I can (and now, so can you) view all my comments in one place. So, kind of mini-write-ups/reactions to S1 in progress.

 

Don Draper is not a womanizer

I was watching Long Weekend tonight, and taking extensive notes. I’ll have more to say later on. But for now, I was noticing this. That Don is not a womanizer.

People all over the Internet are angry at Don for cheating on Betty. And yeah, Don’s a cheater. An adulterer. These are bad things and we can be mad at Don. But he’s not a skirt-chaser. He’s not, to put it plainly, Roger Sterling. (And I have some thoughts about Roger I’ll also be fleshing out—no pun intended—in the near future.)

In Long Weekend, Roger says he wants to use Don “as bait.” He knows the way to go is to pick up two young women and end up with one. This isn’t new; he’s after the same thing in Red In the Face, and only wrangles an invitation to dinner when his plan fails.

Roger is a womanizer. He wants warm, lovely flesh. He wants a young woman to remind him of youth. He wants beauty and soft skin and lips like strawberries in milk. Don wants something different.

When Don says he wants to go home he means it. He doesn’t want to be with Roger, with twenty year-olds on their laps. He’s a bad husband, but he believes in the salvation of being a husband and having a family. And it’s when that salvation doesn’t pan out that he goes for Midge, and then for Rachel. He tells Rachel in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes that he doesn’t believe in love, but he’s deeply romantic; he believes each of these women might save him.

 

Why I love Television Without Pity

From their writeup of Marriage of Figaro:

Rachel, however, is unimpressed, saying her store already has personal shopping and designer collections, which makes her wonder if they were so focused on her competitors that they forgot to visit her store. Pete: “I’ve been away on my honeymoon.” I quoted that directly because I was afraid that if I’d merely told you that Pete used his honeymoon as an excuse here, you wouldn’t have believed me.

Heh.

 

Don Loves Rachel

It’s all there in their first ‘date’ in Smoke Gets In Your Eyes… She is 28 and has never been married because she’s never been in love. Don laughs this off because in his view, there’s no such thing as love.

And though I believe he has love for Betty, it’s never been that kind of love. So in the ongoing question of why did Don marry Betty,  I really don’t think he saw it as selling out or settling. It is not even a matter of believing in love. Don knows. KNOWS. that this is all that love and marriage are. That other kind of love does not exist… it was invented by Mad Men and, ironically, by Hallmark. (It’s ironic because Midge is a freelance artist for the likes of Hallmark. And there it is, again, in the pilot… she tells Don that they have just invented Grandmother’s Day.)

You know, we keep talking in here about love. Does Pete love Peggy, does Don love Betty. Here’s one… does Joan love Roger? Does Roger love Mona? I think we all struggle because, let’s face it, who the fuck knows what ‘love’ is?

But I do think (and I am once again reminded of the opening credits) that Don has taken a deep fall for Rachel. And for the sake of argument, let’s call that love.

 

10 Things I Love About Marriage of Figaro

This post, via its title, is dedicated to the memory of Heath Ledger.

Let me say this. It was this episode that solidified my love for this show. I’d been watching the previews, all the behind-the-scenes stuff, for quite awhile, and was excited about the prospect of this show. And I definitely liked the first two episodes, but the jury was out. The whole thing could rely on clichés and stereotypes and time travel references like Don’t remark about ’some kind of magical machine that just makes copies’ in the pilot. Marriage of Figaro showed me that I didn’t have a clue as to what to expect. That this show felt like nothing I’d ever experienced before, that it wasn’t fucking around, that it was on its own ride, and yeah, I was along for it.

1. I love Rachel’s reaction to the chicken. While she herself resembles some kind of bizarre Gertrude McFuzz in that hat.

2. I love Rachel’s response to finding out Don is married. There are some who take issue with the fact that she jumped from one kiss to committed relationship, but I think she had it right; there was nothing casual about their connection.

 

Don at the Train: The Answer that isn’t an Answer

So, last week I was speculating about Don at the train station in Marriage of Figaro. Was he suicidal? Was he thinking about running away again—was the train “escape” to him?

So on Saturday, there’s Matt Weiner, and of all the zillion questions I want to ask, well, that seems like the best one. After Roberta finished her question, I took the mike and that’s what I asked.

She has the digital recorder, so I’m paraphrasing, but here’s what he said:

Trains are profoundly important for Don. He got on a train as Dick Whitman, got off as Don Draper, leaving “his” corpse behind. In a very real way, the train is where Don Draper came from. So when he was lost, confused, bereft, and didn’t know where to go, he went to where he came from, where he began. The train.

Then Weiner talked about the CGI image of the train reflected on Don, and how beautiful it was, and how important, and how pleased he was to see it.

But the thing I came away with was that (a) I was right about the importance of trains as a symbol, and that felt validating, and (b) that Weiner’s response was more psychological, more nuanced, and less of an answer.

I love that. I was looking for “an answer.” As in “it meant this.” It meant suicidal. It meant running away. But no, it didn’t mean anything so specific, so packagable. Don sat there not knowing why he sat there. He sat there hoping an answer for why he was sitting there would emerge.

I hate movies and TV shows that are too answery. It was all a dream. She was really his sister. Ray Charles had a drug problem because of his brother’s death. Howard Hughes had OCD because his mother made him spell c-h-o-l-e-r-a. Movies and TV are full of “because,” but real life just isn’t.

Sometimes I’m on a date and someone will ask me why my marriage ended. And I want to ask, ‘Did your marriage end because of a “why”? Does any marriage end that simply?’

There’s an answer to Don’s past—he was Dick Whitman, “whoreson,” and he switched dog tags with his dead CO. But there also isn’t an answer. He’s a lost and fearful person who doesn’t understand why his happy life doesn’t feel happy, why he’s given his wife everything but her hands go numb, why he sits at the train and can’t make himself go home. And answers don’t come in neat little packages just before the last commercial break. Not on our show.