The End of Mad Men: "Severance"

[BobbyBesar]

The first season intentionally laid it on a little thick, as you said, it was to shock the audience.

The other big one of those moments was Betty and Sally with the dry cleaning bags.

I consider those sometimes heavy handed elements to be meta-textual content that I don't really hold against the show in general.

[Gormongous]

Wow, I love Chris' observation about Don's lack of an arc. Don has no life, because he left it behind when he joined the army and then abandoned it when he stole his CO's identity, which makes him exceptionally good at selling other people ready-made "lives" through commercial advertising. He can commodify it, but he can't understand it, because understanding it would cheapen or destroy the "life" he's built at Sterling-Cooper.

 

Also, I had the same assumption as Jake and his girlfriend about Diana. I was sure enough that Diana was played by the same actress as Midge that I didn't bother to look up the show's IMDB listing, which is good because it put me on the same page as the characters themselves.

[Cordeos]

So many bad mustaches. That is all the commentary on the episode i can think of right now. 

 

Notes after listening to the podcast: Didn't Don drink wine with the stewardess? He also seemed to have some drinks before going to the diner, but maybe he was just tired.

Edited April 7, 2015 by Cordeos

[allenibrahim]

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?

So I really didn't expect such a weirdly harsh negative response to my first post on this forum I also don't follow Mad Men's online community very well, but I more used the theme suicide scene to prompt discussion about the show as a whole's direction. Of course Don isn't going to actually jump off a roof, but isn't it entertaining to hear why people think that will happen?

I thought the episode was quietly powerful, and the podcast was excellent as well. My email that they read at the end explains what I was trying to say in this forum much better, even if I did mix up the end of S7 part 1 and the end of S6.

[Jake]

I'm still convinced that Bobby Draper's full name is Robert Benson Draper and even Don has forgotten that.

[Argobot]

Sorry if my response came off as unnecessarily harsh. It was more a reaction to a frequent way this show gets discussed than any one particular post. As I said, Mad Men is a show that repels speculation, something that I enjoy (and perhaps am overly protective of).

 

It's interesting that you describe the opening theme as suicidal. I've never interpreted it in that way, mostly because the ending shot is of a (not dead) man's silhouette on the couch. The fall through the credits doesn't read as death but more as plummeting through excess and then ending right back where you started, which is basically Don Draper's MO in every season. Then again, I really love the episode where Lane commits suicide and there's the shot of him sitting in front of that huge window and you think for just a moment that maybe he's going to jump but the next time you see him he's hanging from his office door. It's a nice little bit of indulgence that I completely bought.

[BobbyBesar]

What is Mad Men? To me, its the most concerted exploration of existentialism in pop culture that will probably exist in my lifetime (Existentialism is kind of anathema to the American self-image).

 

I mentioned in passing earlier, but I think that the overt sexism evidenced by the McCann douche-bros was more than simply exposing behavior that was always unspoken. The "End of an Era" tagline isn't the era of Don Draper, it's the end of the era of Bert Cooper (60s become the 70s, Cooper's death, the Moon Landing). We've transitioned from an, if not genteel era, a more reserved one. The effects of the social upheavals of the 60s are coming home to roost. Previously, sexism meant simply knowing that men were better than women: you didn't NEED to say it out loud. In the new modern era, these declarations are made explicit and public. During the Cooper-60's era, there was a thin veneer of "civilized behavior" holding in all the unrest and inequality. Now, that veneer has shattered, and everything is on display. Much of the explicitly bad behavior that we saw from previous seasons was from outside of our "society", as represented by Sterling Cooper: clients like the sleazy Jaguar guy. This has always been there, but we've been shielded from it, for better or worse. 

 

I found your reaction to Ken's decision to sign on with Dow Chemical rather than retiring to become a farmer / novelist interesting. I can see where you, as creatives self-employed in a creative industry would be pushing for him to follow his dream, to choose self-fulfillment. But to me, there was no choice. Buying a farm and writing novels, these things are dreams, fantasies. It's tied up very closely with the sense of masculinity at the time. Consider how Don could not accept that he was being pushed out of the company, they company that he built. To accept defeat in this way would be a failure for Ken. His wife presented the option of using her family's money to survive in the meantime. To rely upon his wife in this way would be a failure as a provider, a failure as a man. Recall how Pete reacted when Trudy offered that they use her father's money to buy and apartment. The structural societal pressures were stacked solidly against Ken. 

 

The idea of sacrificing income and stability to chase your dream is a fairly modern one. Ken was only 1 generation out from the Great Depression. It takes a while to forget things like that.

[BobbyBesar]

I'm still convinced that Bobby Draper's full name is Robert Benson Draper and even Don has forgotten that.

Too literal. "Benson" = "Ben's Son".

 

Ben is the kindly man who pulled him out of the gutter at his lowest point and showed him the time machine that sent him back, he took the name as a tribute to the man that he considers to be his true father.

 

I know what you're thinking. Yes, Ben is Benjamin Linus from Lost (obviously).

[jenben]

Don was drinking a lot at the beginning of the episode but yeah, I don't think you see him drinking at work--hungover at the beginning, but not drinking. Didn't really notice that except in hindsight. He was so absent and mechanical in the office (and I guess in most of this episode)!

 

"Respon'stache", I LOL'd.

 

Re: the idea of Ken buying the farm with his wife's money being emasculating, I dunno about that! Historically there've been loads of writers and creatives (v. pinpoint number there) supported by their wives and/or families. I feel like Ken wouldn't have had as big a problem with it, especially if he was separated from the toxicity of that work environment and eventually achieved success with his writing. Buuuut then he got screwed over. His masculine pride always seemed more reactionary than it was preemptively defensive (Don and Pete). He was just... reacting a whole lot, and explosively, over the last season or so. :')

[Alex P]

I posted this on r/madmen but felt obligated to share it here.

 

 

PS- Haven't listened yet, but I'm so jazzed that you guys are doing this.

[allenibrahim]

Wow, I didn't even think that the theme could be interpreted as anything other than a suicide, considering everything that surrounded Lane/the show's obsession with death/passing over to other sides. But I really, really like Sarah's idea that the theme visuals represent characters going through this colossal shift, and landing right back where they started. That's the show in a nutshell, imo. Breaking Bad was about people changing, and Mad Men, to me, is about people trying and failing to change.

Peggy and Joan slid back into gender and workplace discussions, Don has gone through so much that he's pretty much a parody of what he is seen as by so much of the real world (boozy, womanizing douche), and Ken is holding onto dreams of being a writer, but letting them go to work again.

If anything, I want to see where this theory takes Betty before the end of the show. I know she gets a lot of flak, but I find her so fascinating.

[BobbyBesar]

So, does nobody go to the front page ever, or is everybody too polite to mention that "Severence" is spelled wrong?

 

Also, I never really read the opening theme as suicidal at all. I just took it as being sort of unmoored in the social and political upheaval of the era. After all, he doesn't jump, the world simply collapses around him.

[Chris]

So, does nobody go to the front page ever, or is everybody too polite to mention that "Severence" is spelled wrong?

Oh barf, thanks. It's spelled correctly in the MP3 metadata, on Soundcloud, etc., but not on the Thumbs site. Fixed.

[Jake]

A word I always spell incorrectly and then notice and fix, unless I rewrite it 5 times in 5 different places.

[sclpls]

I'm like at least a season behind with Mad Men, but I'm honestly okay with them skipping over more of the current events of the time because although there are some instances of it working out deftly (I remember the way the Kennedy assassination was handled was the first moment when the show sort of clicked for me) most of the time it feels kind of pointless and not really serving any purpose other than to remind the audience what the time period. Which is fine to a certain extent, but I'm not looking for the show to keep hitting those beats over and over again. 

 

edit: was looking at the wrong page. This was in response to Argobot's question about whether people were disappointed about the jump to 1970.

[sclpls]

So I really didn't expect such a weirdly harsh negative response to my first post on this forum I also don't follow Mad Men's online community very well, but I more used the theme suicide scene to prompt discussion about the show as a whole's direction. Of course Don isn't going to actually jump off a roof, but isn't it entertaining to hear why people think that will happen?

I thought the episode was quietly powerful, and the podcast was excellent as well. My email that they read at the end explains what I was trying to say in this forum much better, even if I did mix up the end of S7 part 1 and the end of S6.

 

There's also that moment from (season 4 I believe? The seasons kind of blur in my head though so I could be way off here) when Don comes up with that ad for that hotel in Hawaii, and everyone but him sees it as suicidal imagery. So the show has definitely done some stuff to play around with the idea of Don as suicidal. I don't really see it as a literal thing, but it is definitely there metaphorically to sort of highlight that Don is full of these self-destructive impulses.

[Woodfella]

That's in 6 I think.

[Mangela Lansbury]

I only just listened to the cast, and I have to disagree with the position that the weird, overtly sexist scene with Peggy and Joan was just there for shock value and out of place. It definitely serves a thematic purpose. These two women have been fighting to be taken seriously the entire show. Joan got sexist remarks all the time in her office as Personnel Manager, and she was in the position to cut off the offender and tell them to go and continue on their day because fuck you that's not okay. Now that she's in a higher position with more responsibility -- something she really wanted and sacrificed and fought for -- she can't do that. She has to sit there and smile through it and just deal with the sexism, so it gets out of control. What she fought for ultimately isn't what she wanted. And Peggy is jealous of that kind of attention, if not that particular expression of it, despite her successful career, so she goes on to try and find it. It serves a definite thematic purpose, and while it was kind of uncomfortable to watch and easy to write off as over the top, I think it was a necessary and fitting expression of how little control Joan has now that she ostensibly has more power, and how Peggy is unsatisfied with her work/private life balance.

I don't know if I'm expressing everything I want to here, and I only watched the show last night after catching up (I purposely didn't watch the first half of the season, then somehow the second half started without me having seen it because I'm terrible), so I'll probably revisit this after thinking about it a bit more. But my gut reaction is that it was a good scene that y'all were just too harsh on.

[Chris]

I only just listened to the cast, and I have to disagree with the position that the weird, overtly sexist scene with Peggy and Joan was just there for shock value and out of place. It definitely serves a thematic purpose. These two women have been fighting to be taken seriously the entire show. Joan got sexist remarks all the time in her office as Personnel Manager, and she was in the position to cut off the offender and tell them to go and continue on their day because fuck you that's not okay. Now that she's in a higher position with more responsibility -- something she really wanted and sacrificed and fought for -- she can't do that. She has to sit there and smile through it and just deal with the sexism, so it gets out of control. What she fought for ultimately isn't what she wanted. And Peggy is jealous of that kind of attention, if not that particular expression of it, despite her successful career, so she goes on to try and find it. It serves a definite thematic purpose, and while it was kind of uncomfortable to watch and easy to write off as over the top, I think it was a necessary and fitting expression of how little control Joan has now that she ostensibly has more power, and how Peggy is unsatisfied with her work/private life balance.

I don't know if I'm expressing everything I want to here, and I only watched the show last night after catching up (I purposely didn't watch the first half of the season, then somehow the second half started without me having seen it because I'm terrible), so I'll probably revisit this after thinking about it a bit more. But my gut reaction is that it was a good scene that y'all were just too harsh on.

I agree with you. I understand Sean and Jake's reaction but personally I didn't feel quite the same way.