Tag: Mad Men

Sixty Hours I’ll Never Recover

Published on by D. G. Hart406 Comments

But at least no naked actresses.

That is the general reaction in the Hart household to the completion of Mad Men, a tv series perhaps a tad better than Breaking Bad, but miles behind — wait for it — The Wire. (The atmospherics of Mad Men inch the series just barely ahead of Breaking Bad.) I had to go through 90 episodes to see Don practicing transcendental meditation, Peggy finding love, Joan being torn between love and career, Roger finding love appropriate to his age, and Pete landing in Witchita? Yes, it was uncomfortable to see Betty get sick, but not so much that you see a different side of her.

The morning after I read Louis Menand (who is emerging as someone worthy of a man-crush) on Charles Duhigg’s book, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life. Menand can’t quite understand why self-help books for business people sell. They are so obvious:

There is not much to disagree with here, and that is one of the intriguing things about the genre this book belongs to. Not dozens or hundreds but thousands of titles like “Smarter Faster Better” are published every year, and they account for a disproportionate percentage of total book sales. Yet they mainly reiterate common sense.

Does anybody think it’s unwise to be lean, nimble, and innovative? Who needs a book to know that rote behavior and fear of uncertainty are not going to take us very far? It’s not startling to learn that organizations that nurture a “culture of commitment” are more productive than organizations that don’t, or that setting ambitious objectives can jump-start innovation. “People who know how to self-motivate, according to studies, earn more money than their peers, report higher levels of happiness, and say they are more satisfied with their families, jobs, and lives.” I can believe that. “Determined and focused people . . . often have higher paying jobs.” I won’t argue. “An instinct for decisiveness is great—until it’s not.” An impregnable assertion.

In an uncanny way, Menand also explains the logic of Mad Men:

If you owned an advertising agency fifty years ago, on the other hand, you wouldn’t care how much pig iron your workers could carry in an hour. You would want your account executives to have winning personalities, to be able to bond easily with other people, to be likable. You would want them to have manners tailored to attract the patronage and retain the loyalty of your customers. Their task would be to persuade, not to push. You would therefore want them to be able to conceal, maybe even from themselves, the manipulative and possibly mercenary nature of their relationship with clients, and to transform a business transaction into a friendly quid pro quo. You would reward the most successful account executives with lavish expense accounts.

The series never goes beyond this (except when Don is being Don).

Why You Shouldn't Trust Website Rankings Now!

Published on by D. G. Hart41 Comments

The missus and I are struggling to finish Mad Men. We are almost through with Season Six. A couple nights ago I asked if she agreed with my sense that Mad Men is superior to Breaking Bad only because of the atmospherics — 1960s urban American business culture with all the elegance that used to mark the professions. She did. Today, after a few more episodes, I asked if Breaking Bad was superior to Mad Men because it did not manipulate sex and flashbacks to make up for characters without any interest. She agreed again.

I’m on a roll.

But I am almost to the breaking point with Mad Men after Don Draper’s personification of Marlin Brando in Last Tango in Paris. Draper seems even less of a real character than Walter White. His appeal apparently is his sexual performance but since the writers don’t seem to be interested in dialogue (and they can’t show even simulated sex on AMC), we have to assume that Draper has no need for Viagra, penicillin, or words that actually woo his conquests (even though he’s supposed to be quite the wordsmith with his advertising firm’s clients). The only depth we receive for Don or his times are flashbacks to his boyhood — as if growing up for part of his youth in a bordello explains his insatiable desire (as if my fundamentalist parents could not have come up with that story line) — and scenes from broadcast news telecasts about the Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. My peers in radio-tv-film at Temple University could have written a better script.

Meanwhile, the viewing public is clueless:

Rottentomatoes
The Wire 100%
Breaking Bad 99%
Mad Men 97%
Foyle’s War 100%

IMBD
The Wire 9.4
Breaking Bad 9.6
Mad Men 8.7
Foyle’s War 8.4

Amazon
The Wire 4.5
Breaking Bad 5
Mad Men 4.5
Foyle’s War 5

Old Life
The Wire A
Breaking Bad C-
Mad Men F
Foyle’s War A-

As If I (all about me) Needed Another Excuse to See "A Serious Man" Again

Published on by D. G. Hart20 Comments

With the recent start of Mad Men’s fifth season, the critics have been piling praise high and deep for a show that as much as I watch leaves me cold. The reviewer for Terry Gros’ Fresh Air gassed on about the show’s finely textured characters. Puh-leeze. This seemed like a desperate attempt by a university professor with a radio gig to find a way on to the invitation-list for one of Hollywood’s upcoming galas. Mad Men is entirely lacking, in my not so humble estimation, in character development and the other factor that develops characters — dialogue. So I see Don Draper brood over which babe he is going to bed next. So Don has a complicated past and multiple identities. I wouldn’t want to have a meal with him (especially if I cross dressed). In comparison I’d be all over a meal or pint with Jimmy, Bunk, Bunnie, or Carcetti — from The Wire. I’d like to add Omar to the list, but I’m doubting a fellow on that side of the law would want to dine with this egg-headed honkie. Nor do I imagine that in real life such a social outing would be safe.

What Mad Men does have is atmosphere. And for us baby-boomers who were too young and too fundamentalist to know about the world of advertising and New York City life in the fast lane, Mad Men evokes an era and a world that is heavy on eye-candy. It allows us to see the world our parents did everything to prevent us from seeing.

But you can’t get by only on atmosphere, which is why the Coen Brothers are gems in the world of not-so-Indie cinema. They do atmosphere incredibly well. Just see Miller’s Crossing (their homage to the gangster genre) or Barton Fink (their homage to post-modernism). But in addition to atmosphere, the Coens add humor, irony (several helpings), and the Montaignian twist of things not being what they seem.

This is a long winded way of recommending a recent post by Noah Millman, a guy trained in economics who used to blog at the American Scene and now does so regularly for the American Conservative. Millman is the first to write (at least the first I’ve read) about the opening scene in A Serious Man and make sense of it, a movie that, by the way, captures the mood of an era and I suspect does well with Jewish-American life in the land of Lake Wobegone. Millman also supplies a reading of the movie based on Job which makes complete sense and completely missed me — perhaps because my biblical w-w is defective or because I spent too much time in the movie trying to figure out the opening scene. Here’s part of Millman writes about the Coens’ modern-day Job (he compares it to Tree of Life):

“The Tree of Life” is a snapshot of the moment when Job hears the voice out of the whirlwind. Jack has “kept it together” for years, decades, but for whatever reason today the defenses have broken down, and he is face to face with questions he has buried since he was a young man. (As the festival musaf liturgy says: “in the face of our sins were we exiled from our land,” which I take to mean: now, conscious of our exile, unable to make expiation through the Temple, we cannot escape a confrontation with our sins.) And he – we – see God’s answer: look at the dinosaurs! I made them, they lived, and thrived, and then I took them all away, and you never even knew them. And somehow Jack sees: yes, You will take them all, You will take us all, to where I do not know, but if I remember that, perhaps I can accept that taking my brother was just . . . taking back what was Yours. And I can make that a gift to you.

“A Serious Man” stops just before this point. The whirlwind comes – and the movie stops. This seems like an ending that endorses Larry’s moral confusion – even the whirlwind doesn’t mean anything – but, notwithstanding the Coen brothers’ evident lack of interest in piety, I question that. The filmmakers’ anger at Larry, at the smallness both of his seriousness and of his sins, and, by extension, at the entire middle-class insular Jewish culture in which they were reared, burns forth from the screen. The whirlwind doesn’t speak – the idea that the “wonders of creation” constitute some kind of answer to Larry (or Job) is simply mocked. But they did not make this movie arbitrarily. They made it for a reason. This perspective, this anger, is itself a version of God’s answer out of the whirlwind, and a meaningful one, as surely as Malick’s film is, and the Coen brothers, in abusing poor Larry so mercilessly, are playing the part of God in the story. They want to shake him out of who he is, into something, well, more like what they are, what Larry’s son, presumably, grew up to be.

I may disagree with Millman about the Coens’ “anger” or attempt to play God — I am not sure they are all that firm in their convictions. But it is the best reading of the film I’ve seen and invites another viewing — which will further predispose me with the Season Five version of Don Draper.