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.

This episode, “The Arrangements,” was so good that in preparation for writing this I sat down with my DVR and fast-forwarded through the episode and marked down every scene. There were 25 separate scenes, which I would venture to say is roughly average for a typical episode of Mad Men (not counting particularly special episodes like last week’s musical hour … although now that I think about it, last week moved at a zippy pace, even with the weed and the lesson in vintage American mixology). At about two minutes per scene, that’s a fast clip.

Yet there’s almost a musical quality to how the show leaps from plot to plot. It helps, I think, that this episode had a central, unsubtle foundation: the gap between generations. A couple weeks ago, I wrote that I enjoyed “Love Among the Ruins” because it felt like an endlessly digressive tangent-tour, kind of like a Virginia Woolf novella with a perspective that shifts between several well-formed characters doing meaningless things. This episode felt completely different. It wouldn’t surprise me if, at the writers’ table, the first thing said about this episode was: “Let’s do one about parents.” So Grampa Hofstadt tries to connect with his grandchildren and his favorite child; so Peggy wants to leave Brooklyn and move to Manhattan, even though she and we know that she’s been a Manhattan girl for years now; so Horace the Jai Alai Emperor wants to use Daddy’s money to stuff his success in Daddy’s face. The only thing which didn’t have anything to do with parents was the plotline about Sal the Commercial Director, but if the show were that mathematical we’d just go and blog about Law & Order.

I think that Mad Men gets away with being so explicitly thematic because it feels like every plotline — hell, every scene — comes at parenthood from a very different perspective. Horace is a ludicrous character; look at the mad optimism in his multimedia plan to bring his sport into the public consciousness, a sport so ludicrous that Don “Captain America” Draper can’t play it. Yet his father isn’t much better — a respectable-looking man who sounds like a remorseful nuclear scientist, he absolves himself of any blame for his son’s entitled insanity, deciding that the only way Horace-baby will learn is by failing miserably.

Don doesn’t like this — he may not know exactly what good parenting is, but he knows bad parenting when he sees it. That’s why he extends the Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card to Horace over dinner and drinks. That’s also why he sternly intervenes when Grampa Hofstadt pulls out his war mementos and shows Bobby exactly where he got the German through the head.

Listen, there was obviously something wrong with this scene. I know logically that kids shouldn’t wear the helmets of dead Prussians on their head, much less helmets with bullet holes in them. I also know that adults shouldn’t let pre-teens drive a car, and that there’s something seriously wrong with a grandfather telling a grandchild that her grandmother worked with a little bald man “who wasn’t a threat” before the war. But the problematic thing about Gene Hofstadt is that, despite all the times we thought he was going to turn out to be a racist, an abuser of children, an incestuous pedophile, or a dementia-ridden wreck, the more the episode went along and I found myself … I don’t know if “admiring” is the right word, but the man deserved respect.

Because Gene connected with his granddaughter in a way her disinterested parents never have. It may just be the weird paradoxical balance that makes the old connect with the young (Sally’s response to Gene’s “He wasn’t a threat”: “That’s good”), but Gene talked to Sally like she was a person; or, at the very least, talked to her like she was something to admire. Sure, it’s weird when he says that Sally was more like his wife than his daughter was like his wife, but to Gene, that’s a compliment. His wife worked before the war, after all. Betty was a model, a job which barely even existed when Gene was young. (I tend to forget that Betty was a model, but I think that speaks volumes about her role in the show; she’s got a history in advertising, just like Don. They even met on the job.) He told Sally that she was smart. Betty tells Sally to go watch television.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that the great fear in watching Mad Men is seeing a generation we admire — the Don Draper/Joan Holloway generation — fade away into hippies and bourgeois activists, into a nation filled with people like Midge the Beatnik Artist and Jeffrey Graves, Princeton ‘55. But this episode suggests something even freakier: that tough men like Gene Hofstadt (quick on his feet to empty the hooch if he hears the cops five counties away), or people who believe in church and family (like the elder Olsons), or people whose business model doesn’t involve movies starring an athlete are dying away or died away years ago, in the birth throes of post-Eisenhower modernity.

After all, when you get right down to it, wasn’t Gene Hofstadt right all along about Don Draper? The way that he leered at his son-in-law while passing out his Prussian memorabilia made me wonder if the whole little scene wasn’t for Don more than Bobby (who, now that Sally is a slightly real character, is officially the least important Draper on the show, after little embryonic No-Name Draper in Betty’s belly and the burnt corpse that’s presumably buried in a grave marked Dick Whitman). Gene was an asshole, but he did fight in a war. Is Don a better person because he doesn’t think kids should hear about violence?

This episode was full of mesmerizing moments and dialogue so rich it should have a money bin. Sal’s impromptu performance of his Bye Bye Birdie clone was so rapturously gay, and the steadily dawning sense of confused horror on his wife’s face so priceless, that it almost seemed as if the show were inventing every homosexual cliche for the very first time. I’ve said before that some of the relationships are like literalized versions of iconic plotlines from classic cinema, and there’s something about Sal’s relationship with his wife that reminds me of the chummy, non-romantic chemistry of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. It’s a lot like how Gene Hofstadt seems like every fear of Grumpy Old Men incarnate, except that at the end of his days the only power he has left is making sure his daughter gets the folder filled with funeral arrangements, a folder he knows she’ll only open when he’s dead.

Also, Eric, I found the perfect gift for you for the season finale. I think it’d make a great gym shirt. Take a look and let me know what you think: