In Which It Was The Best of Times For The Astral Projection That Is Don Draper

ML's Life in Advertising

When appraised by trained scientists Molly Lambert (ML to her staff, Marly Guthrie to folk fans, Lambo to people who don't know her brother) was determined to be composed of 22 percent Pete Campbell, 51 percent Dick Whitman (I cannot call him by his fake name) and 17 percent Bethany Van Nuys. It is a verifiable fact (I think this was established after some Caltech bong rips) that we are all at least 12 percent Bethany Van Nuys and some of us are over 80 percent Bethany Van Nuys. This is getting off topic, but the record for most Bethany Van Nuys was recently set by our own Will Hubbard. In the immortal and alcohol soaked words of Lucille Bluth, isn't it fun to talk this way?

Although some suggested a book version of Molly's informed journaling/cultural critique of Matthew Weiner's ideas about how to treat his employees, how could the print medium capture a mind spinning through a dream world of the past and readjusting it according to her own life struggles? Enjoy the season so far:

Get Your Own Damn Coffee

Don, finally ready to be emasculated, goes over to Peggy's place and gives her a weird sort of condescending lecture about how he wants her to come because he views her as part of himself? Basically it's still all about Don. Then he claims they both understand personal trauma because la la la secret baby/identity. Don tells Peggy that even if she negs him a third time, he will spend the rest of his life trying to get back in her work-pants. Notice how the women were wearing pants this episode? Subtle.

A Very Draper Christmas

A Don Draper with no swag is a Don Draper that's a hell of a lot easier to root for. Desperation is never a good look, but "divorced loser Don" is certainly more relatable than "absurdly suave Don." Who among us hasn't passive aggressively done something incredibly hurtful to somebody we didn't really mean to hook up with?

California Dreams

Don's side trip to California is also the return of Deus Ex Machin-Anna Draper, a character whose lack of interior function belies a severe bone cancer eating her polio riddled fictional bones from the inside. Seriously, what is the deal with Anna Draper? Why does she pimp out Don/Dick to her stupid proto-hippie niece so hard? What exactly does she get out of being so selflessly mothering to Don? A shitty paint job?

Did You Get Pears?

Peggy's cool downtown party was perfect. I swear I went to that party last weekend. The guy with the bear head turned out to be a bear. Telling a lesbian that your boyfriend rents your vagina is the kind of flirty neg cool art dykes live for.

Sally Masturbates to the Man from U.N.C.L.E. And Is Later Incepted

There is no change without acknowledgement. Maybe even Don is ready to admit that the "old" Don Draper, which was Dick Whitman's conception of a sort of ideal man, kind of fucking sucks. Since that life phase is over anyway, why not let go of it completely so that a better more zen Don Draper might emerge? It's like Inception.

A Heaping Bowl of Life Cereal

There's an old saw about telling smart girls they're hot and hot girls they're smart, but the real point Peggy was making was that women getting compartmentalized into those categories, which are always enforced by the likes of Douchebag Art Director Guy, has absolutely nothing to do with what they are really like as human beings. Unfortunately it seemed like Peggy's attempt to demonstrate that the Madonna/whore construct is a falsehood/duality didn't exactly go over/make a dent in that guy's thick skull beyond giving him a confused and unattended to erection. Let's just say that sometimes it's hard to have arguments about serious things with total idiots.

Don & Peggy: A One Act

I think the theme of this season especially, as Don mentioned, is the line between brilliance and stupidity and how it is very often just chance that makes some people into life's winners and others into losers. I've got excuses for everything on Mad Men, except for the ghost of Anna Draper, and the line about leaving the door open (groan). I hope Peggy's doofusy fiancé is gone to the Bobbi Barrett character consignment pile.

Draper Starts a Journal

The gender wars, like the wars on terror and drugs, are endless but also imaginary. For the current battles in the gender wars, you needed to tune over to MTV, where Kanye West and Taylor Swift were greco-roman oil wrestling for control of America's heart at the VMAs. Based purely on taste metrics, Kanye won. And like Peggy Olson in tonight's episode, Taylor just made herself look like a humorless bitch by comparison.

Miss Blankenship's Empire

The only dude who handled his shit in the face of crisis was Pete Campbell. Somehow that little fucker remains the most feminist minded of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce frat pack, if only by default, and he is a rapist! Is Mad Men going to gradually indoctrinate the straight men who idolize it with feminism? Don't mind if they do!

You can read all of This Recording's Mad Men content here.

The Ads of Mad Men

It's Just Nice To Be Close To The Ones You Love

"Remember When" - Gucci Mane ft. Ray J (mp3)

"Weirdo" - Gucci Mane (mp3)

"Trap Talk" - Gucci Mane (mp3)

In Which I Would Have My Secretary Do It But She's Dead

I Hate It There!

by MOLLY LAMBERT 

Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy? - bell hooks

Why indeed bell hooks! The most radical thing you can do as a man is renounce sexism, in all its many insidious forms, so why do so many people avoid thinking about it by claiming they are "not political" (as Peggy did early on this episode)? Is it the misguided belief that feminism will take food out of men's mouths and jobs out of their hands? Civil rights for all will just make everyone's lives better and easier. 

Sally Draper went all Alice In The Cities on Don. She hopped off the train from Ossining with a dream and her divorce and daddy issues, little hobo in training that she is. What's scarier to a man than his son turning out like he did? His daughter turning out that way! Nobody's good with tantrums. They're like Brooklyn tornadoes.

Don's reaction was to force every woman in sight into a care-taking position. Dr. Faye called him on his bullshit, and everyone in the audience cheered. Don Draper is slowly learning the lesson every alpha male must learn: It's not emasculation if you like it!

When you fuck up, and we all fuck up, the best thing you can do is cut the bullshit and just say you're sorry and mean it. And then, you know, try not to do it again. Some people never learn this lesson. Lindsay Lohan still has not learned this lesson, and she is on her ninety thousandth attempt, and all her go-rounds are in the public eye.

There are actual ways to stop your life from becoming Groundhog Day. Recognize and pay attention to your specific issues and problems and neuroses, whatever they may be for you. Addressing them can be painful, but emotional pain will not kill you, and it will also be fruitful. Ignoring them, or trying to, will make things infinitely worse.

I fully predicted Miss Blankenship being this season's tractor accident (tracctident). Before she kicked the bucket she also explicitly referred to Don and Peggy's S&M dynamic, which I called out in my recap of "The Suitcase." Ms. Blankenship also pointed out that Dr. Faye breezes past her because she's pushy, and Don likes pushy. 

The problem with Betty is that aside from being really beautiful, she has no sense of humor and isn't very smart or interesting. It takes some people a lifetime to realize that superficial attraction is just part of a varied spectrum of kinds of attractiveness. There's mental compatibility, which can be entirely platonic. Then there are blends of both kinds of attraction, with the obvious ideal being equally high levels of both.

Don and Dr. Faye seem highly compatible on both fronts. Although Don still seems likely to dive-bomb the relationship by sleeping with Megan the secretary (if tonight was foreshadowing), because Mad Men doesn't want us to have nice things and Don is probably still too much of a McNulty not to do something stupid and short-sighted.

One thing Kanye West and Taylor Swift have in common in their unfailing belief that chicks just want to get married. Lots of people really still think that! It is easy to forget how not very far we have come! We still put unmarried women on the covers of tabloids to shame them for being single, as if it is something to shame them about! You know what is way lamer than being single? Being in a bad/boring relationship.

Man that guy Abe goofing on Peggy sure was lame, wasn't he? Maybe they set him up as a counterpart to Joey to demonstrate how all the new cool guys just have new strategies for being misogynistic and dismissive of girls. Peggy's shift from being impressed that the guy thought she was cool and smart to being disgusted that he insisted on trying to prove he was cooler and smarter than her was relatable.

The main teaching of feminism is to just actually listen to what women are saying. Don't base anything on your preconceived ideas of what "women" are like. Women are human beings, no more sympathetic or moral than anyone else. It's a case by case basis. Peggy got the most radicalized this episode, with Don a close second.

Peggy is radicalized twice, after she pitches Harry Belafonte to the boys and realizes she is complicit. Then when she makes the inevitable connection between the black civil rights movement and the burgeoning women's movement that Abe describes facetiously, the women's movement being borne partially out of the sexism and disenfranchisement of female civil rights pioneers by the male leadership.

Finding out that counterculture movements can be just as sexist as the establishment (if not even more sexist, since they should theoretically be more liberal) is one of the ways women find out that as long as they accept the status quo, they're always going to be treated and judged differently than men in otherwise identical situations. 

Don Draper is learning that you can't just cowboy up in every situation. Roger Sterling (for all his constant macho talk) more or less hid behind Joan when they got held up. Roger is turning into an old man, and his life is becoming a Philip Roth novel. There was so much slapstick in this episode. There has been tons of slapstick this season.

Aryan superman Ken Cosgrove said something that seemed to imply he understood duality (that one can be both professional and an amateur simultaneously) and rejected dichotomy, but then he more or less told Peggy to shut the fuck up and let the men handle it. Ken Cosgrove and Peggy might be my OTP, but I could be projecting.

Last week Mad Men crossed universes with The Sopranos when we found out Dr. Faye is a gangster's daughter. This week it crossed universes with The Wire to show the gritty unbelly of New York City: CRIME! Who else really believed Roger and Joan might never fuck again? You got me this time, Weiner! That zipper sound cue was LOL!

Boardwalk Empire even hired Omar and they still couldn't effectively incept The Wire, because all coolness is instantly melted by ragtime, or because the show was just kind of an empty suit in general. Scorsese made it look beautiful, but (unlike Mad Men) the characters were all more or less exactly who they appeared to be. I hope it improves?

Also sorry HBO but Boardwalk Empire had hella shades of Newsies. I'd be happy to buried in that awesome Atlantic City boardwalk set yall built though. What a beautiful art installation that is. I hear it cost eighteen million dollars. Somebody tell me where it is and how to get there. When I go, I'm taking everything interesting with me.

Every man having an inner mechanic is useful for analyzing how patriarchy functions. Don and Ken Cosgrove implied that they inherently know how to fix anything since they are real men. Then Don spent the whole episode attempting to get every woman in the office to fix things for him with both Sally and the former Miss Blankenship, effectively demonstrating that he doesn't know how to do a goddamn thing.

The only dude who handled his shit in the face of crisis was Pete Campbell. Somehow that little fucker remains the most feminist minded of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce frat pack, if only by default, and he is a rapist! Is Mad Men going to gradually indoctrinate the straight men who idolize it with feminism? Don't mind if they do!

Hey if in 2010 Ron Artest can make it acceptable for pro athletes to talk about mental health issues, and 50 Cent can post cheesecake pictures for his gay fans, who's to say we can't keep widening the boundaries of masculinity to include all the non-normative iterations of it that actually exist? Even heterosexual men can be queer as long as they are willing to examine their masculinity and think critically about what it means.

Matthew Weiner can't resist a terrible gag for the martini. The whole "executive secretaries are astronauts" motif was hammered on the head a bit too literally for my taste with that closing shot. That said, I applaud Mad Men for taking risks like the blackout time lapse, so I can't be too angry with it for continuing to take risks and occasionally failing at things like Don's voiceover last week, because that is the hazard/payoff of risks. If it gave us what we want all the time it wouldn't be as great.

Not that my viewing party didn't cheer at the screen when Don decided not to write in his gournal this week. So he did know that it was terrible? Is it going to figure into the season's plot at all, à la Dick Whitman's box of secrets? Was Sally bluffing about not knowing it was rum and she was just trying to get Don blackout drunk so she could live in his apartment foreverrrrrr? Can you really even blame her? She's a boss!

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls and twitters. You can find last week's Mad Men review here.

"A Man Needs A Maid" - Neil Young (mp3)

"Sign of Love" - Neil Young (mp3)

"Love and War" - Neil Young (mp3)

"Peaceful Valley Boulevard" - Neil Young (mp3)

In Which They Spent The Whole Budget On One Rolling Stones Song

The Candy Machine

by MOLLY LAMBERT

"I looked up at the Barbizon and thought about all the women in there, one in every room, touching themselves to sleep." - Carrie Bradshaw

No just kidding that was Don Draper writing in his gournal, but way to make Carrie Bradshaw seem like a clever wordsmith by comparison! Monologues are hard. Look, I was a (Prezler award winning) playwright, I get it. But that's no excuse. Especially when there is the built in defensive mechanism against criticism of Don Draper telling us immediately that he's never written down his thoughts before. Sorry, still no.

Matthew Weiner is probably drunk on CLIOs and money from whatever company is funding those horrible meta ad-campaigns that run in the middle commercial break. If this was an attempt to stretch out on the bed creatively, like a sky-diver on some white satin sheets, or whatever dumb metaphor it was Don used, well, uh, splat.

I mean, coming off last week's triumph there was no chance of topping it, but for some reason Don deciding to get his swag back had more dramatic heft than actually getting it. Not that it wasn't super satisfying to see Don with swag again. It was just tentative swag. Bambi on the ice swag. The swag of a man going on dinner-dates with blonde teenage-dreams who still has to see his ex-wife and her daddy-husband.

Voiceovers are almost always the worst idea/laziest shortcut to describing a character's inner life. Just look at all the bad cuts of Blade Runner. And if those swimming pool scenes were supposed to be allusions to The Graduate, I'm sorry, I just can't. In general when it comes to The Graduate, I just can't. Overrated! (sorry Buck Henry)

If you want to hear my monologue about how The Graduate sucks, but could have made sense if it had starred Elliott Gould, and how Carnal Knowledge is Mike Nichols' real masterpiece, I'll be giving free seminars on my back porch every evening.

If Betty Draper is Grace Kelly, then Dr. Faye is Tippi Hedren. Don eavesdropping on Faye's phone call was LOL and so was realizing Don thought cool girls were as impenetrable as people think he is. Finding out that even really cool people are as fucked up and vulnerable as everyone else is perhaps THE revelation of adulthood.

Finding out that Dr. Faye is a mobster's daughter, and her assessment of Don as "another two-bit gangster" had some charm. Not enough to cover for that awful Aesop's Fables conversation. Hey writers, stop using wikipedia so damn much! I know you are learning interesting trivia all the time and you want to share it with the world, but hold back! Or be more subtle! I struggle with this every day of my life!

Natasha V.C. (who writes the great MM recaps at The Awl) and I were talking about last week's episode and decided that Joan's five seconds onscreen and the revelation that Miss Blankenship was a "hellcat" were meant to demonstrate Joan's potential dead-end future at a desk in front of Don's office. Joan has steered herself into a corner.

Joey calling Joan "the madam of a Shanghai whorehouse," not to mention "mom" was the stickpin in her current struggles, which also involve her husband trying to recapture their date-rapey honeymoon period by smooshing her while she cries. Joan's husband actually kind of reminds me of Ronnie from Jersey Shore, only hot. Joan is smart, but crippled by pride. We were all hoping she'd ask Lane for a raise or advice.

Harry trying to talk Joey into guesting on Mad Men's primetime soap forebearer Peyton Place to me seemed like an expression of the way we expect handsome successful alphas to live dream lives, the pressure Don is currently veering to escape. Bethenny Van Nuys may not be the smartest cookie, but she had a point about Don's inability to get close to anyone. Don has a point too though, that the prospect of somebody turning the firehose of their full attention directly on you can be terrifying.

The gender wars, like the wars on terror and drugs, are endless but also imaginary. For the current battles in the gender wars, you needed to tune over to MTV, where Kanye West and Taylor Swift were greco-roman oil wrestling for control of America's heart at the VMAs. Based purely on taste metrics, Kanye won. And like Peggy Olson in tonight's episode, Taylor just made herself look like a humorless bitch by comparison.

Taylor's new song was so terrible, I really wish Lady Gaga had stuffed a steak in it. Camille Paglia really needs to stuff a steak in it too. She's been trolling longer than I've been blogging. Joan and Peggy's terse elevator conversation banged home the real point: you can't win. You're fucked if you do and you're fucked if you don't.

If you accept "boys will be boys" as an excuse and you get to be in the boys' club, you then have to bite your tongue all the time as well as accept that you'll never be a "real" member, like non-Italians in the mafia who never get made. If however you call people out on crossing the line, you risk being branded as a "wet blanket" or way worse.

The line is very subtle and like pornography hard to define but instantly recognizable on sight. I can make rape and abortion jokes all day (and sometimes do) but if a joke is racist (which is different that "about race) or legitimately hateful I get offended and kind of genuinely horrified. Why did they describe Lane fucking Joan doggy style in a bowler hat but then Joey drew her blowing him? Those are two different things!

It's good that they're taking a pass at humanizing Betty Draper. I liked her tonight. The idea that people are capable of real change within themselves is very optimistic for a show that has been branded as relentlessly negative. But hey, the sixties were optimistic in a world that has been pretty much relentlessly negative since.

Now that Don's opening up about his feelings it's only a matter of time before Betty is marching in the streets for feminism. Don still needs a few more slaps in the face about his virgin/whore complex. Making a woman congratulate you for withdrawing sexually because you like and respect her too much is an Inception level neg.

In conclusion, Don Draper's diary sucks, but the face he makes while getting a blowjob remains super hilarious and awesome. This was probably the worst episode of the season, but it was still okay and I didn't care that much because it's my birthday!

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls and twitters.

"Chicago Train" - The Besnard Lakes (mp3)

"Glass Painter" - The Besnard Lakes (mp3)

"Albatross" - The Besnard Lakes (mp3)