The Women, from Puberty to Grave.

Season 4, episode 9, The Beautiful Girls. 

Oh My God.

Matthew Weiner is a) in touch with his feminine side, b) had an incredible mother, c) has a phenomenal wife, or d) really appreciates women. Of course, his co-writer Dahvi Waller probably had something to do with this episode being a masterpiece.  I propose that the superior quality of Mad Men, the series in general and this episode in particular, has a lot to do with the fact that, unlike so may other television shows, seven of its nine writers are women.  I read that in this article from the Wall Street Journal so it has to be true:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574332284143366134.html
 


Did anyone catch the brilliant transition to the opening shot of the show? The familiar  opening title and credit sequence; the silhouette of what appears to be the back of Don Draper standing at the entrance of his office, the black shoes and briefcase, the office again as it falls to pieces, then shadow Don free-falls down the side of the sky-scraper, past the image of an Olympus-sized blond in a red spaghetti-strap dress, her shoulders bare, her lips and nails as red as her dress, then his falling body floats down the path of a pair of shapely thighs as another giant smiling blond looks on in the background, and suddenly shadow Don is in control, sitting in profile at his desk looking all he-man and confident. We've seen this sequence countless times, but after this episode it has a whole new meaning. All those female lips and shoulders, the thighs, and the foot that flirts with the free-falling man in Don Draper's suit, these are powerful symbols. Sex sells products, that's no mystery. But women are now making themselves matter, claiming their place in Don's life as well as in society.

Notice the opening shot of the real, live-action Don sitting in his chair in the exact same position as his two-dimensional doppelganger?  He's on the phone, telling whoever is on the other end that he wants what he wants when he wants it.

Next thing you know a woman is groaning in ecstasy off camera, and we hear a crash. The crash was Don, who knocked over a lamp. The groaning was Dr. Faye in the expert hands of Don, enjoying that orgasm our mothers could never dare talk about with us in the same house, even though they all had Masters and Johnson's book on their nightstand, or somewhere in the bedroom. Faye is a liberated woman; she has a PhD and orgasms, God bless her. No children though, but that was her choice. She couldn't possibly have it all.

Anyway, she comes, Don goes, and leaves her in his drab Waverly Place apartment with his only set of keys.

Peggy, that budding vixen, finds Mr. Right again, at PJ Clarkes of all places. But this beau has a social conscience. Civil rights and the plight of the "negro" matter to him, and he thinks Peggy is a kindred spirit. Is she or isn't she? Her firm represents known bigots, macho Bostonians who deal auto parts but refuse to employ blacks and are thus enduring an annoying civil rights boycott. Peggy was unaware of these issues because she doesn't read the Voice. But she does care, she just cares more about her career. If she could force her way in to an all boys network then surely the negroes can do the same thing, she argues. New suitor laughs that one off; sure, he says, let's have a civil rights movement for women. Hello Betty Friedan? The Feminist Mystique had been published two years earlier, in 1963, and ignited the Women's Movement, but apparently Peggy's intellectual hottie doesn't read girl stuff.

Sally Draper runs away from home, asserting herself to her father, being alternately stoic, silent, contrite, adorable, helpful (mmm, french toast with rum), charming, and heartwrenchingly honest. She hates her mother (so do I), loves her father (so do I, but for totally different reasons), and insists that he love her back. You go Sally! Even though I fear your chutzpah will ultimately get you to the exact same place as your mother – chain smoking in the suburbs. But for a few wonderful hours Sally forced her father to be, well, a father. She's as tough as her mother but not yet as cold and heartless.  The way she hugged the too-beautiful-for-words secretary broke my heart. How about that, a beautiful woman (in a menial position) who genuinely loves children?


How about Miss Blankenship? She was one of the most amusing characters ever on a drama series. Oh but I am going to miss her. Why did they have to kill her off so early in the season?  It is still early in the season, isn't it?  She was Burt Cooper's Joan back in the day. Her wit must have been sexy back then, until it morphed into lonely-old-lady cynicism. At least we know she got laid a lot in her youth. "She died like she lived, surrounded by the people she answered phones for," Roger tells Joan. Ouch. "She was born in a barn in 1898 and died in a skyscraper," Burt Cooper's says later. "She was an astronaut." Then he has the old gal's corpse respectfully carted off the swanky Frank Campbell Funeral Home on the Upper East Side (the same facility that will later prepare and display the body of Jacqui O). Burt's impromptu epitaph is, to borrow a classic ad tagline, priceless.

So, have we covered all the meaningful stages of a woman's life, the Gail Sheehey Passages? Little girl wants daddy. Young professional woman fighting her way in and up the corporate jungle jim wants love, enlightenment,  and excitement, but is made aware of her unwitting support for unjust social corporate practices.  Joan, married to a handsome jerk of a doctor who raped her on the floor of her office before they got married then joined the Army without consulting her and is finally shipped off to Vietnam (good riddance, I say, I don't care how cute you were when you sewed up her kitchen knife wound), is alone, and cranky.  Like Dr. Faye, Joan needs to get laid. Betty, divorced and rashly remarried, is a bitter bitch. "It's not going to be okay," Sally says when a woman who could be her mother but isn't gives her the physical affection she so desperately needs. Sally is right; when it comes to her cold hard mother, it is not going to be okay.

The final shot of The Women arranging themselves in the elevator like dots on a di, equidistant and completely independent of one another, was downright theatrical. That image will remain etched in my imagination for a long, long time.

I predict that in the near future Women's Studies and History departments in colleges all over the country will be teaching Mad Men, just as Harvard is now teaching The Wire.

Reading the Between the lines of Mad Men.

There has been a lot of press about the show's historical accuracy. The New York Times has a blog devoted to the show, that's where I learned that the producers hired Westchester County's official historian to verify all the details, including the arrangement of chairs at the meetings of the Town Council of Ossining. The Wall Street Journal recently ran this piece about the stubborn perfectionism about the costume designer: /http://magazine.wsj.com/hunter/the-partnership/threads-of-the-story/.  I've read dozens of other articles, all fascinating, many just reinforcing my own theories about the subtext, literary and historical value of the series. 


One theme that fascinates me is the onset of multiculturalism in New York City. Bigotry is still rife among the characters, of course. This past week's episode centered around the Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston fight. Harry sells tickets to the closed-circuit screening of the fight, and since he got the tickets gratis his colleagues accuse him of acting like a Jew. Don Draper's delightful secretary, Miss Blankenship – one of the best additions to the show I have to say – says that if she wanted to watch two negroes fight she'd throw a dollar bill onto the sidewalk.

But in other, less obvious ways, the characters' intolerance is softening. Peter Campbell, the youngest member of the new agency Sterling Cooper Draper Price, has been cursing a lot recently. When his wife told him she was pregnant he said "Jesus Mary and Joseph." A few episodes later he responded to some  unpleasant news by saying, "Judas H Priest."  Both exclamations seemed odd coming from a character like Peter.  He's the quintessential Manhattan WASP, prep school and Dartmouth grad. In one of the earlier seasons someone mentioned that his mother was a Van Cortland... or maybe a Dykman, one of the landed 17th century Dutch families whose names are on so many uptown streets and Bronx parks. The name Campbell is Scottish, maybe Presbyterian, like George H Bush, the kinder and gentler Protestants.
 
Peter likes to think he gets the people he's selling products to. New York was, and still is, a very Catholic town; everyone curses, we all pick up our neighbors' more colorful phrases.  Pete's unguarded expressions sound like they come from a working class Catholic, not a Park Avenue WASP.  My take is the writers are showing us, bit by bit, ethnic expression by ethnic expression, the cultural hodgepodge (that a Dutch word?) that is New York City.  Peter's language, his use of the vernacular, is a  reflection of his surroundings, not of his conscious mind. If he were being guarded he never would have said it.

Peter, like his wife Trudy and so many other characters on the show, changed - or evolved or grew up - right before our eyes on the Kennedy assassination episode. Don and Roger changed then too because they were about to lose their absolute grip on absolute power. Season 4 takes place in 1965. The country is changing, and, consciously or not (though probably not), Peter is changing with it. He's making his own way, doing whatever it takes to succeed, holding his own with Roger Sterling, his overtly racist boss. In a subplot of the show's first season, a Jewish department store heiress approaches Sterling Cooper, a WASP agency, partly because she wanted WASP customers. That season took place in 1960. Little by little, with subtle and sometimes blatant story lines, the writers of this show are showing us the many ways the country was changing.  Harry Crane has slipped a few Yiddish words in this season. He's the firm's media buyer, and when he came back from a business trip to LA he used the word bupkes, Yiddish for nothing. It was a throw away line, but some of us more astute viewers (read New York Jews) picked it up. He used another Yiddish word, goniff, in a subsequent episode, referring to the media sales guys at CBS in NYC.  This change in his character's attitude and vocabulary is the writers' acknowledgement to the growing power of the media and the many Jews who work it, as well as the WASP elite's gradual acceptance of Jews in society (to an extent) and business. 

I don't think the writers have made any mistakes.  The show this season, especially with less January Jones, is just about perfect. 

Finally knows what time it is

Now we all have time enough to cry.
Except, does anyone really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?

It's time to sing My Funny Valentine, Never My Love, because, don't they know it's the end of the world? Some kind of wonderful. According to the horoscope published by a woman I know nothing about on a site called Astrology Zone (or is it Astrology Works?),  Mercury, that mercurial planet in the closest orbit to the sun, is currently in retrograde, and that's a bad thing.  It's time to wait until after Mercury resumes forward motion September 12.  That's what time it is.

But if I'm walking down the street one day and a man comes up to me and asks me what the time is that is on my watch, I'm just gonna look at my watch and tell him what it says.

There's nothing more peaceful than Central Park on a late summer night. No one here but me and the dogs, tropical storm Earl's balmy tropical breeze, and maybe the occasional serial killer.

My baby brother thinks I am deluded. Everyone thinks their killer will be a serial killer, he says.  Such narcissism. But my narcissism is its own special brand. I believe the bad guys want nothing to do with me. I am protected by an invisible force of fairly decent karma; what goes around comes around and all that.

Like Marconi and his wireless, I transmit, broadcast, emit rays of innocence, trust – or call it ignorance. I'm fine with that. Fear is not my secret. Laziness, or worse, mediocrity, now there is the albatross that grounds me. And not in the three-pronged, not-to-worry-about-those-electric-shocks kind of grounding. No, my stabilizing force is the middle of the road kind. The one that's good enough because it's better than most.

In other words, I don't have a killer, serial or otherwise.  My own worst enemy is me. Such a deceptively attractive adversary. 

 

Crumpled Things

'This is the dream of men, to straighten crumpled things.''
Colum McCann, Dancer

This beautiful quote pretty much sums up my current state of existential angst. I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time ironing things. Sheets, pillow cases, dresses get tangled in the iron's cord or twisted beneath the metal plate that I suppose is meant as a resting place for the purified water-filled pressing machine.  Mom never taught me how to press things, probably because mom never learned how to do it herself. Things in our house were always wrinkled.

Just as my life now is wrinkled. Not my face, not those bits one would expect to start folding in on themselves on a woman of a certain age. By all accounts I look just fine, younger than I once was, older than I'll be. A gnawing lack of the basics is what ails me; Virginia's essential room of one's own, the quiet corner for the typewriter stand and bowl of fleshy fruit, and a place for all my shoes and the girlie potions that press and plump the creases from my brow.

I am grateful for the German steam iron in my ex-husband's front closet. Brand name Rowenta. Piles of well-pressed 400-thread-count sheets and pillow case allow me the illusion of order. And the promise of future comfort.

This all has something to do with dancing – the liberation that graceful movement offers, another illusion, or maybe allusion? I'll take it. Then I will dance. Maybe.

Dancing alone is still dancing.

Literary Claptrap

A blogger on the Huffington Post recently published his list of the fifteen most overrated American writers. The blogger is a writer, of course, not very well known. But a  few months ago I read and reviewed his one book of fiction, a collection of short stories, for a new international literary journal. The publisher's blurb promised "eleven stories of novelistic breadth and ambition, global tensions and harmonies come alive as rarely seen in contemporary fiction."

You know what it's like when you play tennis with a strong partner, or get involved in a heated discussion with an obviously intelligent and articulate friend or dinner party guest? Well this was nothing like that. This particular writer is clearly an intelligent and learned man. I didn't even disagree with some of the smarmy criticism he spewed in his Huff Post piece. But I found his own fiction pretty much unreadable. Had I bought his book to read for pleasure I never would have got past the second story.

  

If I hadn't read 240 pages of his pretentious drivel I might be able to appreciate the irony of his essay, in which he moans about the meaninglessness of MFA programs and thier intellectual tie-in to the reviewing establishment and literary awards panels. He trashes John Ashberry and Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham and WIlliam Vollman. Jhumpa Lahiri, he says, is "determined to shun any stylistic influences besides Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant."  Junot Diaz is an uber-nerd who “desperately tries to establish his street/ghetto cred." He goes on and on, for 15 pages, making some valid points (too boring to go over here).  For the record, I do have an MFA, but am not part of what he calls the reviewing establishment.  I have admired the work of most of those on his list since they came onto the literary scene, though I was unable to meaningfully critique or analyze any of it before I started graduate school.

Very few critics have the talent to actually practice the art they criticize, and that's as it should be. It's almost a cliche to say that new media is changing the way we read and think about reading, but it's true. So I'm wondering why this guy has such a prominent place in one of the more visible outposts of the Internet. And if he can do it with multisyllabic whining and uber-intellectual insults, does it matter that he can't write a single story that didn't make me want to toss his book in the recycling bin?