Holiday quotation

Roger Sterling: You know what? I am very comfortable with my mind. Thoughts clean and unclean, loving and… the opposite of that. But I am not a woman. And I think it behooves any man to toss all female troubles into the hands of a stranger.

–Ladies Room

 

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

 

HA! HA! HA!

Hilarious. This was sent to me from Joe Bua of I am a TV Junkie, who is my life partner (well, maybe in some other life). He keeps up with Mad Men and with us as well as anyone.

Just read it. It’s perfect as is. No need for me to chime in.

Well, okay. Except to say that I keep finding errors in all these articles. I left a comment on one of them. I can’t remember which ones say what, because there have been so many. One called Pete ‘Paul’ about sixteen times and, as funny as that is, especially for those that remember Sterling’s line in Red in the Face, this wasn’t meant to be funny; it was an article from a country who was just discovering the show and was only a review of the pilot. Another article said that the DVD release date was July 7th, when it’s the 1st. And that’s a big blunder.

I do remember Remember WENN, and most people don’t. It seems like AMC is starting a new chapter with Mad Men and Breaking Bad, so I never feel compelled to make that correction.

Point is, they clearly need the direction of the know-it-alls.

And that, my friends, concludes this week’s episode of No Need For Me to Chime In.

the end by rkl.

 

 

Roger Sterling: “What else is there?”

Roger Sterling is like a walking sense of entitlement. He was more or less born into his job. His name, as he says in Red in the Face, is on the building, and he even acknowledges that makes him feel entitled. He thinks he can and should have any woman just for the taking, so that he is disgusting with the twins in Long Weekend (suggesting incest is A Bad Thing) and angry at Don for being more attractive in the bar in Red in the Face. How dare anyone usurp his entitlement?

He’s also really insecure, maybe because he hasn’t actually earned anything. He wants to restrict Joan; keep her in a birdcage, and that feels like both: entitlement and insecurity. Right of ownership combined with fear of losing her.

The most telling thing of all is the dialogue with Don in Shoot; Don considers the McCann-Erickson offer, Roger says he’d be afraid of failure. Don is not afraid. Don says he might leave advertising, Roger says “What else is there?” Don runs away, true, but he also runs forward; he remakes himself. And Roger can’t do that, he can only hang back. And diddle women to persuade himself he isn’t full of fear. Roger is a guy who doesn’t know what else there is.

 

EW.com is Mad Men Mad!

(Tip of the hat for ProgGrrl, who saw it first.) EW.com has a full five pages of Mad Men coverage, including five hot pictures (the cover, a posed backyard shot that I find kind of annoying because it’s so posey, 2 of the ones that we were all scoopy with, and one from the same series, with Betty in that plaid dress, that I hadn’t seen before).

There’s juicy stuff here. Sterling Cooper is working on an airline campaign when a deadly plane crash out of Idlewild (the original name of Kennedy Airport), throws them into a panic. Based on the description, the date appears to be March 1, 1962.

Apparently, we’re not done with the secret identity storyline:

”Here’s the issue: Don Draper’s doing great. Dick Whitman, not so,” Weiner explains. ”And we shouldn’t stop worrying about Don being discovered. His wife doesn’t know. Will she find out? Does it matter? There’s also this whole chunk of his life that we don’t know about.”

 

How about a little Sunday Rogerism?

From Red in the Face:

One minute you’re drinking in a bar and they come and tell you your kid’s been born, the next thing you know they’re heading off to college.

 

Roger Sterling’s father

There’s a discussion going on at the IMDb Mad Men board about the name Sterling Cooper. Shouldn’t it be Cooper Sterling, Asks one person, since Cooper is the senior partner? Yes, says another, except that Roger Sterling’s father is the original Sterling and founded the company with Bert Cooper. And yes, says a third person, that’s right, it was founded by Sterling’s father.

Gzung?

I’d never noticed this on the show (although apparently Roberta had). The AMC site has nothing official about this. Their character sketches don’t give any back story that isn’t culled directly from aired episodes, and doesn’t say anything about this. The AMC Mad Men blog (not as good as ours) refers to this idea as a “conspiracy theory.” (Which, excuse me? Is obnoxious and stupid. There’s nothing conspiratorial about wondering about the founding of Sterling Cooper.)

Anyway, the “conspiracy theorist” remarks that Cooper has a framed picture of a young Roger with a man who is presumably Roger’s father. Roberta pointed out to me that Cooper calls Roger “Peanut,” and looks at that picture and says something like “You were so cute back then.”

It’s a whole new area of character exploration and back story that Season 2 might get into; the founding of Sterling Cooper and the influence of Roger’s father. I wonder if they plan on getting more explicit in that direction. It explains a lot about Roger (which I’ll get into in the near future).

Thoughts?

 

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.

 

More of that nearly invisible poetry

What a lovely and interesting thread I found woven through Long Weekend.

Roger to Mirabelle: Look at your skin, it’s translucent.

Don to Rachel: He’s gray and weak. His skin looks like paper.

Moments later, Don: Sit with me. Rachel: Why? Don: Because I feel like you’re looking right through me over there.

So now I wonder if that was the theme of this episode; seeing through to the truth. Underbellies exposed. You know what’s on the other side of all that crap, Roger? A heart attack. You know why your roommate is your roommate, Joan? Dooyah?

There is one moment in this episode where we catch a shine of reality that has been previously unexplored. In the scene where Roger tries to get Joan to spend time with him, and they talk about the movie the Apartment, Joan pipes in with, The way those men treated that poor girl; handing her around like a tray of canapés. She tried to commit suicide. That is the first, perhaps only in the whole first season, indication that Joan is less than content with her lifestyle. Maybe a little lonely, maybe a little angry, maybe a little not proud.

 

Ok, it’s the WRITERS who should be Red in the Face

“I like redheads. Their mouths are like a drop of strawberry jam in a glass of milk.”

Forgive me, MM writers. I love you all.

But this episode, about which I have so much more to say, seems to have a big fat continuity issue.

Thursday #1
It is the end of the workday. Roger speaks to his wife about the weekend plans. He is then told by Bertram Cooper that the Nixon boys are coming in at the end of the week. Joan has a bag packed and is taking a train with her roommate Carol for a weekend away. No mention that she is taking a Friday off, but okay so far.

How do I know it’s Thursday? Don says to Peggy, trying to make sure she’s not working too late, “Just because tomorrow’s Friday, doesn’t mean I expect to be pulling your head off the keys in the morning”. (God, that line is a mouthful!)

That night, it’s drinks for Don and Roger, and then the disastrous dinner at the Draper’s.

Thursday #2
The next morning, Roger offers Don a bottle and an apology. At lunch Pete exchanges a chip-and-dip for a 22-caliber rifle.