A Pause in the Madness

[SPOILERS AHEAD!]

As you may know, the fifth season of the AMC series Mad Men has ended on one of those summarizing, meditative melodies often played on these programs. I sighed with mild relief, as I do at the end of every episode.

I resisted Mad Men at first, not adding it to our Netflix cue until 2009. First, I thought it might be one of those hip fashionista things, all pretty surfaces, nothing underneath.

Also, there’s the fact that it’s on AMC (Just “Another Movie Channel: We Know You Don’t Really Care About Movies, You Just Want Them As Background Noise While You Vacuum”; All-week Dirty Harry festivals? Yikes . . . .)

I also feared Mad Men might be one of those static, domestic melodramas I’ve haven’t been a fan of since my Eugene O’Neill days in college. I mostly prefer my stories adventurous, outward looking and risk taking, where mortal violent danger shadows every corner. If I didn’t see KGB agents infiltrating Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce or George Smiley or Don Vito Corleone walking through the door with avuncular but sinister smiles, I doubted l would stick with it.

But stuck with it I have, through all five seasons, hot, cold, and lukewarm. Of all the cable series I’ve watched during this unmistakably golden age of television series, it’s the show about which I have the most mixed feelings. I only go “Wow!” from time to time. Sometimes I fidget and check the DVD clock.

But I’ve still been wrong in most of my attitudes. Mad Men is a much more interesting show than I expected. It’s commitment to its art is unshakeable and admirable. Most of the criticism I read—especially the astute comments on Slate’s TV Club—focuses on its lustrous polish and shine, sharp, nuanced performances, tart characterizations, interior set design, costumes, the undercurrents of its weaving plots and the window it opens on its era.

Because many of its viewers are young (unlike me), the show’s noble antecedents are often missed (though they’re not by the show’s creators, as the excellent DVD extras show). Mad Men, for all the fuss about its “radicalism” is a throwback to the early “golden” days of television, of high-minded dramas like The Defenders, Naked City, and East Side/West Side. Sober-minded and as realistic as possible, these dramas were themselves rooted in the serious live theatre of that era.

Many of the same issues which Mad Men dramatizes were dramatized on these shows: both Naked City and The Defenders dealt with themes like abortion, drug addiction, class, and even race and gender, though censorship often forced them to be very circumspect. Both shows delivered stark, powerful episodes on capital punishment, an issue still much with us.

The old shows, however, never gleamed with wit, as Mad Men does generously. In those days, comedy and drama were as strictly segregated as the genders and races were. Earnestness and realism was all.

Sometimes Mad Men stumbles in its sense of time and place fails when it goes outdoors. I lived in Westchester County up the Hudson River from Don Draper and Co. at the exact same time, and let me tell ya, I had no idea New York State was as arid and dusty as Southern California, where the series is filmed in its entirety. Oh well, can’t do everything. . . .

The exterior city scenes fare worse. A scene where Joan Harris and Roger Sterling are mugged and later get it on—I think that’s how it happens--looks like it was filmed hurriedly on a hollow, hastily built soundstage. If you want what 1960s New York truly looked like, I strongly recommend a DVD of Naked City.

Mad Men often goes down a little dry with me. After five seasons, some of the characters remain weirdly static—Pete Campbell will forever remain TV’s favorite punching bag: I’d take a crosstown bus to watch someone bend his nose. I find it incredible that, after two heart attacks, Roger Sterling, SCDP’s resident Peter Pan, is still alive, smoking like a chimney, drinking like a fish and, at the end of this season, dropping acid (twice!).

Since I’m not a big fan of domestic drama, whenever we ride the commuter train home with these folks, my eyes flicker at the clock. Betty Smith (nee Draper) will forever remain an empty dress, as will Trudy Campbell. Kiernan Shipka as Sally Draper is wonderful—and, if truth be known, I rather identify with her--but Sally seems less relevant to the show as time goes on. Nor do I care whether Don’s marriage to Megan works out, though I guess it won’t. (Don’s previous “secret” marriage was clumsily handled from the start. I never it found it credible.)

Still, what really keeps me watching most of all is Jon Hamm as Don Draper. From the first, I found Hamm to be a real star and Don Draper a beautifully conceived and compelling character, a creative, brilliant man both caddish and sensitive, insightful and obtuse, swinging between the poles of ruthlessness and anguish. I find tremendous mismatch between his inner soul and outer world fascinating. So many of his actions are well intentioned, but he still finds himself on the jerk end of the stick and deserving it.

So what truth will Don Draper finally chose? That’s what I keep asking. The life of the artistic soul, or the life of easy comfort promised by modern capitalism. By the end of this season, he seems compromised and settling in to the safe life as a Mad Man, acting more and more like a bully as his soul dries to a pile of sand. But don’t think that’s that: with two seasons left and that yawning, unrepaired elevator, the turn of his soul remains unsettled.

[BIG SPOILER HERE!]

Now, about that elevator (which I’ve been obsessing about).

Death was snooping around SCDP all of season 5. After Don almost fell down the elevator shaft in episode 8, it became clear that, in true Chekovian fashion, someone was going take that worst first step.

I quickly laid bets on Lane Pryce, SDCP’s CFO and the show’s most decent, doom-haunted, and conscience-stricken soul. I imagined Lane at the end of an exhausting day, his bedeviled mind awhirl, blindly taking the wrong door.

I turned out to be half-right. I was wrong about his actual exit Lane [joke], but my suggestion on Slate that someone would get the shaft this season was actually met with one of those absurd bursts of indignation endemic on the Internet: How could I be so lame as to suggest that that the writers would be so CHEAP as to employ Chekovian foreshadowing tactics!

Never mind that all good dramatists everywhere, including me, have used foreshadowing since Sophocles. Without it, your TV drama, play, movie, novel, becomes nothing but disconnected balls of mud thrown arbitrarily against the wall. Whether it’s the pistol on the mantel or a yawning elevator, those “cheap stunts” weave together your drama, themes, and character into a whole.

Remember that Peggy Olson almost stepped into the maw herself as she left SDCP for the last time. That it didn’t happen this season does not mean it will not happen in the seasons remaining. Believe me, unless we see Don Draper call maintenance (like he should have; yet another sign of his often glib sensibility), you can count that someone will take the Big Sleep Express to the first floor. The only questions are who and when? (Hell, they might even hold that elevator until the very last shot.)

No, that howling beast still lurks; that and the never-ending, unfolding dilemmas of Don Draper. And so, I’ll keep watching.

(re-edited 6/17/12)
 

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

2011: A Few Favorite Things

 Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point, Christmas Eve: The best damn thing I saw all year . . . even better than Breaking Bad

In my fifty-seven years, I’ve never known one without turbulence. There have always been wars and suffering, great and small; revolutions and reactions; famines and plagues; violence and assorted crimes. Every year has been—in the idealistic sense—bad, though some stand out historically: 1963, 1968, 1980, 2001. “History is just one damn thing after another,” Henry Ford is supposed to have said. You can take that in one of three ways: as an expression of dismissal, frustration, or resignation.

(Already, 2012 has shown a cruel face. Many of My Great Plans have gone awry, as I tripped over a cunning nasty flu that wrapped me up like a damp, moldy wool sweater as I leapt from the gate; hence the late date for this. Perhaps John Cusack and the Mayans [that new hip-hop group I’ve heard about, on Wikipedia I guess] are right! The World will end in 2012!)

Still every year has its virtues, pleasures and joys, and 2011 was no exception, as I’ll try to demonstrate.

ASLEEP UNDER THE PAGES

Once again, as an unpaid book critic, I liked most of what I read in 2012, and what I didn’t like was put quietly aside.

My favorite book of last year, hands down, was Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift (read my review here). I also encountered great joy in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon,  a passionate tribute to the epic energy and imagination of genre fiction (or, in this case, classic comics).

As time goes by, I find myself turning away from horror and mystery fiction to wander the foggy alleys of espionage. It was a very good year for this dense, challenging, and slippery genre. I got a tremendous charge out of Alan Furst’s Red Gold (someday, I’ll catch up with the rest, don’t worry). My annual visit to the oeuvre of Eric Ambler also led me down the atmospheric Balkan byways of Judgment on Deltchev. My year in spy novels was topped by John le Carré’s The Honorable Schoolboy, the second in his Karla trilogy.

Further down the list, but still worthwhile, were Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers and Kate Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog, two of the more ambitious genre novels of the year. I also laughed heartily at Matt Stewart’s engaging only-in-San-Francisco-farce, The French Revolution.

I read many short stories this year in breaks between novels. The best were from Peter Straub’s ambitious two volume collection American Fantastic Tales where I re-visited such classics as “The God of Dark Laughter” by Michael Chabon; “The Events at Poroth Farm” by T.E.D. Klein; “Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber; and Mr. Straub’s own “A Short Guide to the City,” a novella I never tire of. The best new discovery in this collection was “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio,” by Tennessee Williams, a writer who, I gather, went on to greater things after this story appeared in Weird Tales.

Unfortunately, as an actual book-writer, I cannot read everything that tempts my inner eye. Most of my reading is taken up with research for my work-in-progress, Butchertown; therefore, my shelf is narrow and sometimes dry, based on pragmatic considerations of research, rather than the pursuit of adventure. Still, two books I found worth reading were Last Call by Daniel Okrent (a major source for the PBS series Prohibition) and California: A State of Change a beautiful coffee table volume by Laura Cunningham, a book I hated to set aside . . . but just wait until you start writing your own books and you’ll get what I mean, bub.

Southern Colorado . . . Makes the set for Star Wars look like a ten-cent Republic Serial

THE MINI-SERIES: KING OF ALL POPULAR ART

Maybe the most compelling work of narrative visual art—better than most movies—I experienced last year was AMC’s stunning, mind-swallowing, and terrifying mini-series Breaking Bad.

For those who stand wisely outside the echo chamber, BreakingBad is the blackest of black comedies. It tells the story of Walter White, a middle-class high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico whose world is crumbling beneath him: choking on debt, with a new baby on the way, Walter also discovers he hosts a virulent lung cancer and will die soon.

What’s a desperate member of the sinking American middle class to do to protect his beloved family, to provide for their uncertain future? Why, turn to meth dealing, of course! Breaking Mad manages to convince us that a man—or at least this one—might try anything, if desperate enough. Especially in these times.

Ever since The Sopranos, the cable mini-series has grown to become our dominant narrative art form, achieving heights of artistry that movies find harder to achieve nowadays.

Breaking Bad may be the mini-series’ apotheosis. Like the best of them, the show combines the capacious room, rich detail, and moral intricacy of the novel with the bracing thoughtful visuals of great movies. Watching this show—a classic tale of good intentions gone ghastly—is an exhilarating and terrifying ride full of jarring and hilarious plots twists, pungent, rich characterizations, great performances, and abundant moral sense. (A word of advice: watch it—and other mini-series—on DVD. The absence of commercials intensifies the experience.)

We’ve also enjoyed catching up on AMC’s Mad Men, an elegantly visual drama about the lives and fortunes of Madison Avenue ad executives in 1960s New York. I started out in the same neighborhood and the same economic class, so I appreciate its careful attention to detail (though practically all of it is filmed in L.A.).

Mad Men hearkens back to serious 1960s black-and-white TV dramas such as Naked City, East Side West Side andThe Defenders. Its proud literacy is to its credit. It’s also an often lacerating domestic drama, a genre I admit often makes me squirm for an episode of The Untouchables.

Also many of its characterizations seem static—how many episodes do we need to learn that Pete Campbell is a brown-nosing asshole? Whatever happened to Roger Sterling’s heart problems anyway? In the first season, he had two heart attacks. Three seasons later, he’s still smoking like a boiler, drinking like a shark and skipping around like Stephen Colbert. The guy who plays him (John Slattery) is excellent, but I swear, any second now, he's gonna fall like a tree.

Finally, Betty Draper (now Betty Francis), once she’s out from under her husband’s shadow, becomes the willowy cipher I expected her of being: not half as interesting a character as either Peggy Olson or Joan Harris. January Jones as Betty may be a good actress, so blame the writers for that one.

Speaking of Mrs. Draper’s husband, though, what really keeps us captivated is Jon Hamm as Don Draper. Hamm, the handsomest male star since Cary Grant and Sean Connery, is also a terrific performer here. He makes Draper into a basically good, artistic man who’s selling his soul and living a great lie and grappling with the consequences of the lie and the actual truth behind the it and the often terrible choices it leads—womanizing is just the start—to live in a privileged style he’s become much too accustomed to, one that is truly not his.

Even when the plotting goes off the rails, Hamm delivers a great performance. It’s a pleasure to watch the waves of torment and confusion rise, fall and roll through that handsome face. I keep watching to answer one question: “What’s this man going to with his life?”

That may be reason enough.

Now, though my chest still feels wrapped in tarnished copper, it's time to charge on into 2012.  Let’s see . . .  anybody know where can I download music videos of John Cusack and the Mayans? I’ll check Wikipedia. They’re always right.

(Edited 1/13/12)

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.