Saturday afternoon visual rhetoric: more on Mad Men (as well as a brief acknowledgment of the magnitude of my wrongness).
>> Saturday, January 30, 2010
In the first comment to my first post on Mad Men, Tom Elrod wrote:
I definitely want an update to this post once you've finished the third season. I can't really respond much to this post until then, because I don't want to spoil anything[.]
Nor do I. If you plan on watching Mad Men but haven't seen the third season finale, stop reading now.
In a fit of remarkable wrongness, I wrote:
So Peter and Peggy are not left behind because, over the course of two seasons, they learn to love and accept modernity in their hearts. They still seek Draper's approval, but they recognize that he's valuable in a way the world soon stop valuing. When the rapture comes, they know Draper won't be numbered among the chosen [...] Nor, for that matter, will Joan Holloway[.]
Had Matt Weiner decided to re-shoot "Shut the Door. Have a Seat." after having read my post in order to maximize my wrongness, he wouldn't have had his work cut out for him. This shot alone refutes much of what I wrote:

You've been ahead on a lot of things. Aeronautics. Teenagers. The Negro market. We need you to keep us looking forward. I do, anyway.
In one respect, then, my claim that Pete and Peggy belong to the future is validated; but unfortunately for me, my claim's being validated by the very person I had claimed was constitutionally incapable of recognizing its validity. My argument went awry because I failed to account for the complexity of Draper's reaction to Betty divorcing him: without the illusion of a perfect marriage to stabilize his conception of self, Donald Draper is as free to reinvent himself as Dick Whitman had been. I think. More on Draper as a character later. For now I'd like to focus on just how effective Matt Weiner's direction of "Shut the Door. Have a Seat." was.
Mad Men typically uses the angle and level of framing fairly conventionally. Consider the scene in which Betty leaves for her rendezvous with Henry Francis:





There are people out there who buy things. People like you and me and something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do and that’s very valuable.
He's telling her that being knocked up by Pete and almost dying during a delivery that left her clinically insane makes her "very valuable" to him. It is, then, an odd but strong bond he appeals to here, but one which he believed would be effective: he may not be able to assume her allegiance, but he knows he can needle her secret trauma to great effect. As it does. They're equals by the next reverse shot:






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