Mad Men: Sixth Season
4/6/13
In advance of its sixth season, beginning
Sunday, I’ve recently gorged myself on the fifth season of Mad Men.
At times I was enchanted. There were episodes
that seemed dreamlike and subtly, quietly nightmarish, like David Lynch, but
more subdued, or as remarked of Obama in his first debate with Romney,
Ambienesque. Only invoking dream work could explain the subtle weirdness, the
peculiar, off kilter interactions.
There were episodes that made me wonder why I was
watching what was nothing, finally, but a soap.
And there were things that seemed completely
off: riots breaking out everywhere, cities being torn apart in the late
sixties, Harlem, for example, being burned, and barely a notice a few blocks
downtown, at Sterling Cooper, on Madison Ave..
Maybe on Madison Ave. such things were, in
fact, hardly noticed.
Then there's Roger Sterling — head WASP, first
lieutenant of the agency, the guy who after a swig or four, leads his unit over
the hill, into fire — taking LSD in a trip that resembles no trip I’ve ever had
or heard about, a nominal trip, a trip because the script says so. I gather we'll
be hearing, in season 6, about how this blank trip changed him, mysteriously,
forever, yet.
As noted, it's a soap.
Speaking of drugs, there's Don Draper, the main
Mad Man, sucking down nitrous oxide at the dentist. Nitrous oxide is laughing
gas. Some people don't like it. Many (like me) do. But nobody just hallucinates,
as Draper does. The world may wobble and wiggle and you may finally if you get
enough (not likely from a dentist) pass out, right after grasping the secret
nature of things, but you never just see this guy you used to know looming
above you in a realistic portrait as Draper does.
There should be standards, such a thing as
psychedelic realism, as it were. Mad Men acts like nobody knows one high from
another, as if everybody had always just said no. Maybe Mathew Weiner
personally doesn't have a clue, or maybe he suspects we can't talk about such
things honestly, and he can, therefore, get away with anything. Maybe he knows
only, intimately, about nicotine and vodka.
But there's something else going on in this
series, episode by episode, all the more because it's latent, unannounced, but
omnipresent. It's this thing about art and advertising, and the difference,
circa that era, and ours, if any.
There's hardly a scene without an art
reproduction or original. In Roger Sterling's high on the totem pole office,
there is always what was then cutting edge art: color field; strong pulsing
black and white abstraction.
Nobody talks about it. It doesn't get a
mention. It asks its own questions. How did it get there? Who procured it? Why
was Sterling Cooper, on behalf of Madison Ave., encouraging such work? Why is
it all over the place?
These ad men and women are obsessed with
getting it right. They are driven by thoughts of money and success — bigger
offices, better apartments — to be sure, but not only by those things.
They want to get it right much as the visual
artists and writers who pass through the show want to. In both camps, there is
an appreciation for and need to find the perfect pitch.
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