Jake

The End of Mad Men: "Severance"

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Oh man, can't wait for this podcast to get rolling! A lot of talk has come out over the last few years RE: how Mad Men will end. Do any of you believe the "Don will jump out a window like in the theme" theory? I don't, but I'd like to hear where people think all the major characters are going as the 1960s come to an end.

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One of the many things I like about Mad Men is how antithetical its writing is to playing the "How Will This All End?" game. It's not like other critically-acclaimed television that creates the idea of building towards some grand finale (shows like Lost, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, etc), it's much more content to just let the slow-burn of its characters' lives unfold over several seasons. That's why I suspect it will have a satisfying ending because unlike other TV shows that implicitly or explicitly promise a conclusion that they ultimately fail to deliver on, Mad Men is promising nothing but more of what we've seen for seven seasons. The specifics of where the characters end up after the finale is the least important part of that.

 

Matthew Weiner is one of my favorite interview subjects, because he is constantly baffled by the speculation and theories that surround Mad Men. I love his response to the overly literal way that the finale of Season 7 Part 1 was interpreted:

I'm not going to pass judgment on people who have never had the experience of seeing something that's not there or who want to define the language of the show. That is the language of the show. Don has an emotional moment realizing that he's lost Bert. This is bigger than what they just did selling their company. That's what that's about. It's not for everybody, it never is. It's got a long history in the show and it's not always drug-induced or anything. That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind. I think what you're feeling is Don's emotional loss and hopefully something bittersweet.

 

http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/matthew-weiner-interview-mad-men-mid-season-7-finale-joan-hates-don-bert-cooper-dance.html

 

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It's going to be really weird seeing an SCDPCGC owned by McCan/Ericson. Here are my predictions/speculations:

  • I think this first episdoe is going to jump forward a substantial chunk of time. All of the early reviews/precaps have mentioned that they were barred from saying what year the episode takes place in.
  • I think things are only going to get worse for Ted. We left him in a really sad place at the end of the last half season. 
  • I think Megan and Don will continue with their split, but I think Megan's life in California will still heavily feature in the show somehow. (Despite what Weiner has said about characters getting fired being like characters getting wacked)
  • I would be totally shocked if anything romantic happens between Don and Peggy or if anyone actually ends up jumping out that window. 

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I honestly don't understand people who think that somebody has to jump off a building by the end of the series. It simply makes no sense to me, to the extent that I wonder if we've been watching the same show.

Don has been metaphorically falling for literally the entirety of the show, and Weiner clearly delights in undermining TV tropes and audience expectations. There's just no reason it would happen.

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The closest we'll ever get to that is Don looking down the empty elevator shaft last year. Even that shot and moment surprised the heck out of me.

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Just finished here on the east coast, but I'll avoid spoilers until everybody's had a chance.

Overall, it had a lot of heavy lifting to do to situate us back into the new status quo, so there wasn't anything spectacular, but there was lots of good stuff nonetheless.

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I have nothing smart to say about the episode, but I have two quick stupid things:

 

  • I will never not love a scene where Ray Wise gets excited about Pop Tarts.
  • A passing reference to John Dos Passos makes me feel like the MA thesis I wrote is slightly less irrelevant. 

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This episode really drove home the sadness of a wasted life. Ken's subplot was a literal representation of this, which is why I did not find his return as the new Dow ad man triumphant. (Go buy that farm and write your book Ken! What are you doing?) Don trying and failing to reconnect with Rachael fits the theme as well, since we're clearly meant to think of her as one of his great loves and potentially a woman that he could have actually been happy with. I really loved how the waitress/Rachael reinforced that point when she told Don that maybe he's always been dreaming about Rachael. It really got to the loss that Don is feeling and perhaps has always felt w/r/t his relationship with Rachel. Maybe now Don will stop wasting time at casting calls and actually try to do something with his life.

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Spoilers: everybody is still unhappy.

 

Actual spoilers:

One thing I think is fantastic is that Weiner clearly enjoys trolling his audience by speaking to them directly with meta-commentary. The beginning of S7E1 had Freddy Rumsen talking directly to the camera, telling us that we were about to see something amazing.

 

This season opens with Don being Maximum Don Draper: not the conflicted an well realized character that we've been introduced to over the last decade, but the straw-man view that probably dominates the perspective of people who don't watch the show: drinking, wearing suits, being sexist, banging stewardesses. It's the version of the character that people imagined in their heads but that Don never actually was. It only really existed in the lackluster copycat shows (Pan Am, Playboy Club, etc).

 

Weiner has self-consciously indicated that this is the "end of an era", but we really saw the end last season, with the moon landing and Bert's death. So, I suspect that everything that we see will actually be shades of things to come, not things that have already passed. The sexist McCann idiots felt more 80's than 60's to me, and Ray Wise reminded us about the upcoming importance of "Plastics."

 

Thematically, the end of season 7 was almost entirely about family: it was Don realizing that the reason that SC&P was important to him not just because he built it, but because what he built was a surrogate family. That's why Don was willing to sacrifice everything to get back in. He finally knew what he was getting back in to. When Don says he's going to stop Cutler from breaking up the company, Joan snaps that he's saving his own skin. But Don isn't hurting for either money _or_ for work. The only thing that SC&P has that he can't get elsewhere is his family.

 

Cooper's posthumous dance routine ("the best things in life are free") is simply Don internalizing this fact. His first instinct when learning he was out was to ensure that the Burger Chef business was Peggy's business, and consoling Roger, and deflecting with humor (Is Bert still dead?). It isn't until that moment that he has a moment to breathe and start his own grieving process (as we saw during the early seasons Ayn Rand conversations, Cooper was a father figure to him as well).

 

The most interesting aspect of this that I had trouble understanding was Don's secretary, Meredith (the one with the mind of a child). In this episode, Meredith is, suddenly, competent at her job. She's attracted to Don, but their relationship is more mother-child than potential lovers. When she deters him from eating candy ("Don't eat that. You're so trim!"), it's as much a reflection of her appreciation for his body as a fussing mother worried after his weight. Meredith has figured out that Don needs somebody to take care of him. Though he rebuffs her sexually, she has figured out a way to take care of him regardless. (His relationship with her now reminds me a bit of Sterling's with his own lifer-secretary, Caroline.) Everybody at SC&P is family. Not just Roger, Peggy and Pete, but Meredith, Dawn, Mathis, and Rizzo. It's not enough to retain his team, he has to keep _everyone_ together.

 

Most of what we see of other characters is them just reminding us that nothing has changed. Don has internalized some of Dick, but his duality remains (there's some continued visual coding with his back-alley prostitute having dark hair vs the fleet of blondes that he brings to his bed - Don continues to divide socially acceptable and unacceptable relationships). Peggy and Joan still get only fleeting satisfaction from money and work, while facing a crushing lack of respect in the workplace. Ken continues to be unable to commit fully to the life that he has adopted, but is likewise unable to give it up. Ted appears to be divorced (or unhappily married and in possession of a Manhattan crash pad, as Pete once had). and if not "happy" then at least sufficiently self-medicating with women and liquor.

 

Re: Rachel, as far I can tell, Don's work family is not a real family.

 

Also, if, like me, you're wondering who the diner waitress was. but can't place it: she's the vampire Mom from Twilight. Haha, you saw Twilight.

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This episode really drove home the sadness of a wasted life. Ken's subplot was a literal representation of this, which is why I did not find his return as the new Dow ad man triumphant. (Go buy that farm and write your book Ken! What are you doing?)

 

Yeah, this really bummed me out. I literally just asked "WHY?" at the end of the scene in which Ken tells Pete and Roger that they're screwed. How could that possibly be better than just taking the severance as a bonus on his way to having a life that even he seems to believe would be more fulfilling?

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Maybe now Don will stop wasting time at casting calls and actually try to do something with his life.

 

It seems like the show has been presenting Don with a series of potential catalysts for change for the last several years. I always end up thinking "maybe this is the thing that will do it," but Don tends to continue to act like Don throughout. With the end approaching, I'm tempted to think that this is the time it will actually move him to action, but I don't know if I believe it. Weiner (and all of the other creative forces at work in the show) seems most interest in upsetting people's expectation for change, maybe even up to the very end.

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Don has already changed significantly throughout the series. It's just a long slow process, with many opportunities to backslide and fall into old habits. There are times when it's easy for him to do the "right" thing. Taking the McCann deal at the end of last season was both selfish (he got what he wanted) and selfless (Cutler: "It's a lot of money"). It was both easy (doubling down on what he's done before is very much Don's M.O.) and hard (sacrificing the freedom and self-determination that he had spent basically his whole life pursuing.)

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For a show that trades off 60s nostalgia, Mad Men weirdly benefits from a lot of 90s nostalgia. Many of the side characters are from popular 90s and early 2000s TV shows and their appearance always leads to excited reactions online. It's kind of funny to witness.

 

Was anyone else disappointed that they skipped right ahead to 1970. I kind of wanted to see the show deal with the Manson murders during the summer of 69, but maybe Matthew Weiner was so tired of the Megan Draper is Sharon Tate conspiracy theories that he wanted to skip right on by it.

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One thing about the mid-season finale that's been sticking on me: Cutler (and everybody else) seems to assume that with Harry Crane's impending partnership. Don's ouster would be a fait accompli. Basically, that he would vote with Cutler, because Cutler pushed to make him a partner. But I don't necessarily buy that Harry would have voted to remove Don. We've seen him trying to connect with Don multiple times (most recently at Megan's party in LA), and in the previous episode, Roger noted "Say what you will about Harry Crane, he's loyal." I'm not sure that loyalty to Cutler would trump his loyalty to Don.

 

It doesn't really matter, of course. And I could certainly understand why Don would not want to put his fate in Harry's hands. But I thought that was a bit strange.

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I sent this into the cast as well, but I really was curious to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

 

I thought this episode showed a great, and troubling, range of Don dealing with the loss of several women from his life. In the first scene in the diner, when Don is telling a story to three women and Roger, he carefully makes sure to call his childhood home a boarding house, not a whorehouse, effectively avoiding having to speak about those women. Later on at his apartment, Don is with a new woman who spills red wine on the carpet. This is the exact spot where Don "murdered" another woman from his past in a fever dream (Madchen Amick from Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks Rewatch). As Don covers the wine stain and they begin to get intimate, she finds an earring of Megan's under the bed, which Don speaks ostensibly lightly of and throws away. And finally, looming largest over the episode is Rachel Katz/Menken. 

He learns of her death from his secretary, he attends her funeral and tries to find understanding with her sister, then goes to make sense of a dream about Rachel with one of the waitresses at the diner.

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For a show that trades off 60s nostalgia, Mad Men weirdly benefits from a lot of 90s nostalgia. Many of the side characters are from popular 90s and early 2000s TV shows and their appearance always leads to excited reactions online. It's kind of funny to witness.

I wonder how conscious that is on the part of the people who are making the show. The decision to trade in '90s actors seems too meta for this series.

 

Was anyone else disappointed that they skipped right ahead to 1970. I kind of wanted to see the show deal with the Manson murders during the summer of 69, but maybe Matthew Weiner was so tired of the Megan Draper is Sharon Tate conspiracy theories that he wanted to skip right on by it.

Likewise this. There's no way Weiner would insert a time jump to shut up fan theories, right? That goes against everything that is ever said about how he runs the show.

(I don't follow any fan responses to this show... or any show really, other than what I happen to hear on Twitter, so I have no real sense of the REAL relationship between fandom/online commentary and Mad Men, but my assumption has long been that this show is far more disconnected from its fan chatter than most are?)

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There's definitely a patina of death surrounding Don. He spends large sections of the episode talking to memories of women in his life, and Katz's death brings up echoes of his first wife, Anna. All of the diner scenes have a dreamlike aura to them, as well. When they're wearing the tuxedos in the initial scene, it's actually kind of hard to visually place them in the 70's. It almost carried more of a 50's vibe, aside from Roger's mustache.

The closing scene had some seriously stilted dialog and almost felt like a Twin Peaks scene. I had to rewatch it because the writing took such a weird turn, or rather the woman's delivery made the language seem strange somehow. Almost oracular. Unnerving, to say the least.

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Likewise this. There's no way Weiner would insert a time jump to shut up fan theories, right? That goes against everything that is ever said about how he runs the show.

(I don't follow any fan responses to this show... or any show really, other than what I happen to hear on Twitter, so I have no real sense of the REAL relationship between fandom/online commentary and Mad Men, but my assumption has long been that this show is far more disconnected from its fan chatter than most are?) 

Mad Men is certainly not the worst example of the Internet overanalyzing a TV show, but it still frequently happens.

 

http://www.vulture.com/2013/05/who-is-mad-mens-bob-benson.html

http://www.hitfix.com/the-fien-print/mad-men-boss-weighs-in-on-sharon-tate-db-cooper-theories

 

The Sharon Tate/Megan comparisons got so bad that Weiner had to directly address them. It's kind of a distressing result of a post-Lost (maybe even post-Twin Peaks) world where audiences are convinced that there's meaning in everything and completely misinterpret very obvious narrative ques in favor of outrageous speculation. It's why I can't stand the conversation around the identity of the jumping man in Mad Men's opening credits. What show are you watching where you think that is in any way relevant to what's happening on screen? 

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Don trying and failing to reconnect with Rachael fits the theme as well, since we're clearly meant to think of her as one of his great loves and potentially a woman that he could have actually been happy with. I really loved how the waitress/Rachael reinforced that point when she told Don that maybe he's always been dreaming about Rachael. It really got to the loss that Don is feeling and perhaps has always felt w/r/t his relationship with Rachel.

 

I thought of the "maybe you've always dreamed of her" bit as interesting in that way, but also because it reveals how little we actually know about Don's inner life, despite him being the nominal protagonist of the show. We're given glimpses of his dreams and fantasies, which we assume are meaningful, but we don't really have any idea what Don is doing, because he's still a deeply dishonest person to himself, to others, and to the audience. Maybe he was always dreaming of Rachel and we're only shown it now because it fits into a narrative about Don that he wants to believe. I don't know.

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Jake talking about how the show can sometimes try and shock the audience by showing what life was like back then reminded me of the first ever episode, because it is never as bad as it is then.

When Joan shows Peggy her typewriter she says

"don't worry they said they made it simple enough for a woman to use"

And Peggy says "Oh boy* I sure hope so."

*may have imagined the oh boy.

Then you've got that shot of everyone smoking and coughing in the meeting. Okay guys we are in the sixties, we get it.

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