Plasma Pool

This essay is part of “Point-Hyperpoint: Mad Men,” a rollicking series of posts devoted to discussing AMC’s drama series. Spoilers abound. To read the entire series, please visit this page. To see all of Plasma Pool’s “Point-Hyperpoint” discussions, please click here.

Remember when Fight Club came out and everyone started their own fight club? Two of my high school friends once told me how they watched the movie almost by accident — I think The World Is Not Enough was sold out, so they bought tickets for Pokemon: The Movie and snuck in to what they assumed was a Brad Pitt action film — and were so taken by David Fincher’s brilliant seriocomic deconstruction of contemporary masculinity that they instantly went home to a basement and started wailing on each other.

This is the kind of paradox you trade in when you try to make a film, a TV show, a book, or whatever about how a debaucherous, decadent, gleefully immoral, addictive, power-hungry lifestyle can be bad for you. Stanley Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange so disturbingly perfect a first-person portrait of anarchic amorality that the movie actually gets worse when the murdering, raping, pillaging protagonist becomes a decent member of society (the director inverted this arc in The Shining, which starts out as a bloodless and boring story of a former alcoholic and his bland family, but then becomes a happy-times axe-comedy about a relapsed alcoholic trying to murder his annoying wife and Culkin-precocious kid). I can’t think of any other great TV show in the modern age which makes doing bad things looks so fantastic — except maybe for Sex and the City, another epic zeitgeist comedy-drama about New Yorkers who constantly fuck up their lives while dressed perfectly.

I bring up Sex and the City because of your point about women’s role in the “Mad Men” universe. Because I think that I disagree with you, or at least with the general cultural response to the females in Mad Men as nobly suffering beauties with Marilyn Monroe curves who put contemporary women to shame with their natural bodies and proud grace. Joan Holloway might have curves, but she’s still an office hottie who sleeps with her married boss, who hides her real age and offers all kinds of unrequested advice to less attractive women like Peggy, the sum total of that advice being “Act more like me.” Betty, meanwhile, is a creature of such ravishing grace, of such complete royal poise, that she even makes terrible drunk disheveled sad fury look like a Renaissance painting.

There’s a sense of toxic beauty at work in Mad Men, all the more so in Season 2, which, you might remember, began with a doctor sternly warning Don that he shouldn’t drink and smoke so much. MTV recently tried to bury an awful yet fascinating documentary about Paris Hilton — it debuted on a Tuesday and is now only playing at two in the morning, insane for a network that replays The Hills and Real World: Cancun fifty times a day. You can tell that the documentary was conceived at a time when Paris Hilton was still on magazine covers, and that the network didn’t really know what to do with it now that the zeitgeist has turned, but the doc still makes for fascinating viewing — not because it really shows any deeper side of Paris Hilton, but because it shows her struggling with what she dimly perceives as some missing depth in her own personality.

It makes me think of Betty, who, having kicked her husband out of her house, spends two days wandering around her house in a cocktail dress, then gets back at Don by becoming Don for a night. And it makes me think of Joan crying in her ex-lover’s office about the death of Marilyn Monroe. People today can idealize Marilyn Monroe for her curves, but it’s not like every woman in the 50s looked like Marilyn Monroe, and it’s not like being Marilyn Monroe was a barrel full of laughs, anyway.

Of course, then there’s Peggy, who’s nominally a more positive, even contemporary figure: a woman in the workplace who’s there to do work, who’s not afraid to run with the boys, who treats men (even Don Draper) like equals. But I don’t think Peggy is really an “admirable” character. After all, she sleeps with a married man. On Sex and the City, there was a storyline where Carrie slept with a married man, and although the show could empathize with her, you were always aware that she was doing something wrong: Carrie suffered from feelings of extreme guilt and her friends all told her that what she was doing was wrong.

But Peggy? She has sex with Pete, once before his marriage and once after his marriage one morning in his locked office, and there’s no sense of shame or regret. Far from it, in fact — there’s the strong sense that the whole transgression of it is a huge turn-on for both of them. And though it’s impossible to say this early in a series that could feasibly run for many more seasons, it’s beginning to seem like their relationship could form some kind of bizarro inversion of the Drapers. The Drapers are together in every way, except that they truly don’t seem to know anything about each other. Peggy and Pete are separated in every way, but on those rare occasions when they’re brought together, away from the prying eyes of the world, they seem to have a complete understanding of each other.

Or that’s what we’re meant to think. Then again, maybe Peggy just has a problem with falling for the wrong men — remember her brief, Carmela-style flirtation with the priest? The point is that I don’t think that women like watching Mad Men because its portrayal of women is somehow less debased and more three-dimensional than in contemporary culture. I think it’s because “Mad Men” is one of the first shows ever where women’s struggles are not remotely admirable in any way, where the female characters are allowed to be exactly as awful, to themselves and to each other, as the men. (Battlestar Galactica did something similar, but its portrayal of gender relations played out against a semi-abstract 9/11 sci-fi spacescape, so one could be forgiven for missing it.)

This is why I think the best single moment in the show’s run so far was the end of “Shoot,” when Betty starts firing a BB gun at her neighbor’s pigeons. You could look at this moment in a number of ways: Betty as Guardian Protector of her children and anything that threatens them; Betty seeking some kind of assertive authoritative power in the very tiny part of the world that belongs to her; Betty, completely bored (note the shot of the ticking clock) and trying to find something to do before she takes the rugrats to the community center. I prefer to think of it as an utterly meaningless act by a person who’s becoming steadily aware of the weird emptiness of her life. It’s almost sociopathic — could a BB gun even hurt a pigeon? Is she even trying to aim at them? It’s the mark of a great show when characters can perform actions that are confusing even to them (hence John from Cincinnati, where essentially nothing has meaning beyond the fact that it’s happening).