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.

Jesus, Pregnancy! I watched last night’s episode with my girlfriend, so I can vouch for at least one female that last night’s presentation of the miracle of childbirth was easily the most disturbing in TV history. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s the most disturbing portrayal of childbirth that didn’t involve any apparent medical difficulty whatsoever; you realized that the whole hellish routine (signing papers during contractions, last-minute substitute doctors, liberally administered drug cocktails) was all normal. Business as usual here on pregnancy row! The baby is breach! More demerol! We tend to focus more on the deeper universal thematic and narrative aspects of the show, but this was one of those episodes which could have functioned purely as a social-anthro docudrama. Hospitals today look like hotels in Hawaii by comparison.

As long as you’ve opened the Sopranos box, there was one thing about this dream sequence which I thought was notable. I always loved it when Sopranos went the dream sequence route, but with the exception of the showstopping Annette Bening half hour, the dreams usually existed as intriguing but ultimately too-on-the-nose plot revelators. David Chase, in describing the “talking fish” sequence from the end of season 2, had a pretty straightforward explanation. He knew that he wanted Tony to kill Big Pussy, but he didn’t want it to be something simple like Tony accidentally discovering Pussy wearing a wire. The dream sequence was a way to keep things interesting.

Here, though, Betty’s pair of dreams – squashing the pretty caterpillar, and hanging out with her dead parents and zombie-Medgar – seemed legitimately nonsensical. Part of this dream seems to come from an upper-level Felliniesque school, where dreams have a deeper meaning pointing toward a narrative revelation – this episode was the first time that the burgeoning national question of race came to the forefront – but another part of this dream seemed almost purposefully opaque, in the style of surrealist master Luis Bunuel. Why does Betty squash the caterpillar? Why did she fire that gun at the birds? There’s a deep, weird reservoir of repressed violence in this woman.

There’s an awesome Mad Men blog (I think you may have mentioned it in an earlier post) called Mad Men Power Rankings, which rates each episode as a list of the ten most powerful characters. It’s hilariously appropriate, particularly given this season’s Brit-influenced culture of one-upmanship. So far this season, Don Draper has always been on top. I tend to agree, but watching the episode last night, I started wondering if Don is actually as powerful as we (and Peggy) think he is.

From one perspective, this season Don is more powerful than ever. In the first episode, he was said to be the Face of Sterling Cooper. He’s had relations with a hot stewardess and emotionally seduced a hot teacher purely via eye contact. He has enough juice to walk in late to an accounts meeting and then leave two seconds later.

But. Is it me, or is there something eerily passive about Don this season? The stewardess seduced him. The teacher is the one making advances. He couldn’t convince Ho-Ho to give up Jai Alai (and then he broke the ant farm – I know that means something, and it can’t be good.) He purposefully avoided any confrontation with the father-in-law he hated, and then allowed his wife to keep that father-in-law’s phantom kicking around the house (in the same room, even) by giving his name to the latest Draper (asterisk Whitman) child. About the only people Don feels comfortable talking to are people he doesn’t know – yet again, in this episode, he told something to a complete stranger (the teacher) that he’d never even tell his family. If Mad Men were a comic book universe, Don Draper would be the Silver Surfer, a ludicrously powerful androgynous demi-god who constantly stumbles on intergalactic crises and seems cursed to only make things worse, nigh-omniscient, always alone.

Don’s passivity may be some greater metaphor for the times — the beginning of the end of the white male Republican company man’s sociopolitical domination. And it hints at something strange and complex about Don’s relationship to the 60s. In many ways, Don Draper seems to anticipate the cultural counterrevolution of the late 60s – he’s chill with his homosexual buddy, intrigued by foreign films, sexually rapacious, openly existential. But in some ways, he’s the most square guy on the show. It’s Betty, his wife, who seems most likely to emerge out of the chrysalis in the late 60s; who could become a Woodstock groupie, or more likely, one of those gorgeous true American girls who stopped cutting their hair and started blowing up buildings. You get the sense that she just wants to hurt something beautiful. Like mother, like daughter.

Last point. After four episodes, it’s an intriguing narrative development; after five, I’m calling it a motif. In this season so far, each episode has focused closely on a guest starring character, who briefly appears but in that brief time has a revealing conversation with Don. In the first episode, it was the stewardess; in the second, the brother-in-law; in the third, the old man behind the bar; in the fourth, Ho-Ho; and now, in this episode, and perhaps most eye-poppingly, it was the prison guard, who almost seemed like Don Draper’s Dick Whitman Id come to life. I’ll have more to say about this if this continues in future episodes (mindful of “this season is all about Don vs. Gene” syndrome; analyzing TV is HARD, dude!)