By Jennifer Baldwin. “Somebody very important to me died … the only person in the world who really knew me.” — Don Draper
This is it. The best episode of the season. Perhaps the best episode in two seasons. Certainly the best hour of television I’ve seen in awhile. Everybody is talking about this week’s episode of Mad Men and throwing superlatives at it like so much confetti at an office New Year’s party, and who am I to disagree? It was brilliant. It was the greatest. All the praise, all the accolades, the Emmy wins, everything: if you need a reason to explain the Mad Men phenomenon, this episode is it.
Which is funny, because I was all prepared to suffer for forty-two minutes when I realized this episode was focusing on a character I’ve never really grooved to: Peggy Olson. I know that she’s a fan favorite, but her career woman ambitions, her sexual escapades, her seeming rejection of religion, her experimentation with drugs, her bohemian friends – it always struck me as nothing more than immature adolescent rebellion. And worst of all, the show seems to hold her up at times as the height of enlightenment, putting the sexist, repressed men in their places, and showing the stodgy world of middle class morality and religion that she’s not gonna play by their rules and don’t you try and make her! Woo hoo, feminism! Ugh. Peggy has a tendency to be smug, but the writers expect us to be a chorus of “You go girl!” in her favor. No thanks.
But then what does Matt Weiner do? What does this wizard of complex characterizations and masterful storytelling achieve in this week’s episode of Mad Men? I’ll tell you what: Peggy Olson is my new favorite character. I realized with mixes of horror and heartbreak and strange consolation that I am, in so many ways, Peggy Olson. Her crises and confusions this episode are mine as well at this moment in my life. Suddenly, I knew her. I knew Peggy Olson and I understood.
This is an episode about knowing, about what it means to really know someone. It’s about whether people are capable of knowing each other, deep down inside. It’s about what it means to truly understand someone, about knowing the secret yearnings and the secret pains and the secret flaws. It’s about how the people who should know us – our family, our significant others, our friends – don’t always really know us at all.
This episode hit close to home for me. I think this idea of “knowing” and being “known” is something that hits close to home for a lot of us – for anybody who has ever felt like the proverbial square peg. I think that’s why the episode is garnering such praise. Mad Men can always be counted on to deliver sharp, witty writing and strong, multi-layered themes. But this episode struck a nerve because it was about something that so many of us struggle with and worry about in our own lives: Do the people in my life, the people close to me, do they really know me? Who can I open myself up to, who will get me on a deep-down level? Is there anyone who can really know me? These are troubling questions and they’re questions that both Don and Peggy face in this episode.
And the beauty of it is, the strange, sad cosmic beauty, is that Peggy and Don answer those questions for each other, in the middle of the night, working late at the office. They don’t have to be alone — they know each other.
When Don tells Peggy that recently deceased Anna was “the only person who really knew me,” Peggy’s response is the response we all hope to hear someday: “That’s not true.” Peggy knows Don, even if she doesn’t know all the secrets and the history that Anna knew about him. What Peggy knows are the things that even a friend or a wife or a relative might not know; she knows a little bit of Don’s soul.
The suitcase is the perfect metaphor: The hard shell that no one can crack, but what’s inside? We can drop it off a building, we can have an elephant stomp it, but the casing around our inner selves won’t bust. We want someone to bust it open, to see inside us and know us, but we’re like a Samsonite – our outer shells are tough.
The obvious parallel being set up at the beginning is that Don and Peggy are like Clay and Liston. Like two pugilists trading punches, Don and Peggy go at each other over the Samsonite account and Don’s ruthless work demands. They start off fighting just like Clay and Liston, but the difference is that in the case of Don and Peggy, they both end up knocked out.
I love when Mad Men gets subjective and we enter the memory/dreamspace inside Don’s head (or is it just a drunken stupor? Does it matter?). That last ethereal vision of Anna that Don sees– a spirit or a dream or a desperate wish – is one of the most haunting images from the show. It transcends the narrative and the characters and becomes a piece of pure cinema: movement and light, human beauty in motion, glimpsed for one sustained moment before fading into nothing. And she’s holding a suitcase.
Other notes from the episode:
• I love that Joan gave Don “exactly what he needed,” by assigning Miss Blankenship as his secretary. Also: Miss Blankenship, Queen of Perversions!
• Speaking of which, Roger’s recording of his memoirs is just about the funniest thing this show has ever done. From Bert Cooper’s testicle removal, to the Blankenship revelations, to the secret of Dr. Lyle Evans, I was screaming with laughter. John Slattery’s delivery in the recording is pitch-perfect.
• Cassius Clay was – as the show mentions – by this time now calling himself Mohammad Ali. I’m always fascinated by the way Don seems to be on the wrong side of history when it comes to these famous personages. First he was a Nixon man in the 1960 election, suspicious of Kennedy’s pedigree and wealth. Now he’s all in for Liston at the fight, calling Ali/Clay out as an arrogant loudmouth who hasn’t proven himself. And he doesn’t like Joe Namath! As much as Don is a creative genius in advertising, he’s paradoxically suspicious of “The New” when it comes to stuff like politics and pop culture.
• Also interesting: Don bet on Liston, Roger bet on Clay. Hmm…
• I appreciated Peggy’s “Queen for a Day” paper crown for her birthday.
• Also: Pete said, “Pray tell.” I love Pete.
Finally, the closing credits song? “Bleecker Street” by Simon and Garfunkel.
Posted on September 9th, 2010 at 9:45am.
NOBODY liked Namath back then. I’m with Don. The guy to be was Unitas.
Thank you for that insight, Powder!
Yeah, I thought that might have been the case. Thanks, Powder.
Namath was the sort of handsome, brash upstart (sorta like Mohammad Ali, heh) and I guess that bothered a lot of old schoolers.
But for young people at the time… I know my mom still goes on and on about how she had a crush on Joe Namath back in the day! 😀
Peggy is Clay/Ali and Don is Liston…and she represents the future, while Don is the past…and the suitcase is the perfect metaphor for Don, and the key to opening is alcohol liberally applied.
Liston was a helluva fighter. Highly underrated.
I love the offhanded comment they included without it being overtly racist when Miss, Blankeship’s said “If I wanted to see two negro’s fight, I would throw a dollar out of the window of my apartment.”
I’ll confess, Jack, I LOLed at that line.
I did too. I was drinking some milk right at that moment and I almost choked to death trying not to do the cliche hollywood laugh and spit your drink out over everything. It just came out of nowhere and the way she delivered it was Classic!
At first I thought her character was annoying when she became Don’s secretary and wondered why they did that. I also thought Don would get rid of her right away because she really seemed to annoy him with her seemingly lax secretarial skills. But now that we know about her freaky sexual history back in the day with Roger, I completely understand after Don said that Joan gave him exactly what he needed. And after this last episode with that classic line, I will now be looking forward to seeing her next scenes. But from now on, I’ll make sure not to be drinking anything.
I can’t pretend to read all the Mad Men commentary out there, but yours has the best quality, consistently, that I’ve read. And it’s wonderful to read the rare conservative who likes the show. Most think it’s an attack on pre-hippy norms, or that it’s “a soap opera with hats.”
I haven’t disliked Peggy Olson the way you have, although I was getting worried that her job this season WAS to do stick her tongue out at the smug men and be smug herself. One thing I like about her ambition and rise is that she’s not a hero. It would be entertaining to watch a heroic business-pioneer woman break down barriers, but I’m a bit of a milquetoast myself, and I like seeing someone like Peggy try to follow a heroic path. She’s not a genius, she is sometimes silly, foolish, shy, and egotistical, and her rise is easier to empathize with than a Ayn Rand creation’s.
Regarding the episode being about “what it means to really know someone,” Matthew Weiner said the following on “Charlie Rose” July 28, ’08: “I really wanted to concentrate on the fact that, in a very literal way, it’s very hard to know another person. The way that they appear to you when you see them is one thing. Then when you get to know them, it’s another thing. Then what you really think about them — and it’s all about how YOU’RE perceived. This sounds like a very abstract, intellectual idea, but for drama, it’s amazing, because there are so many layers to a human being.” (http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9192 starting at 9:00) He’s also said somewhere else that one part of the show is how hard it is to be a human being.
I also take this aspect very personally. (One nice film about this is “Lost in Translation.”) Peggy and Don do know each other, better than very many people do. Yet, what they don’t know about each other would fill volumes.
Peggy says of Mark, “He doesn’t know me.” Well, he hasn’t had time, and she’s been lying to him (at least about being a virgin [and therefore about many other things]).
I also liked seeing Anna visit. That’s an old piece of folklore, that the dead spend an hour or two looking in on their loved ones, and it didn’t bother me as it did some other viewers.
Wonderful comments, John, thank you! And I’m flattered and humbled that you find my Mad Men commentary worthwhile. Many thanks. 🙂
Fascinating comments from Weiner! I will definitely check out the whole thing (thanks for the link). I think Mad Men is actually a pretty conservative show, in that it rejects the idea of the perfectibility of man (in other words, the leftist/progressive idea that if only we fixed the system, then everybody would be happy and good). These characters want to be better — to find their happiness — but the business of being human is not as simple as wanting to be better. The problem isn’t the system or society or The Man — it is ourselves. The show is an argument for the reality of original sin.
Excellent reference to Lost in Translation, one of my favorite films!
That line from Peggy about Mark — that was pretty much the moment when I realized, “I am Peggy Olson.” Yes, he hasn’t been dating her for long (and yes, she did lie to him), but I think that’s the point. This deep-down type of knowledge isn’t something that can be “learned” the way one might learn a subject in school. It’s not an information type of knowledge. It’s much more akin to a spiritual knowledge, a knowledge of emotion, and I’m not sure Mark would ever really know Peggy. This is why Betty’s learning of the truth about Don’s identity didn’t bring any sort of renewed connection between them. Yes, she gained knowledge about his past and true identity, but that knowledge didn’t lead to any deeper, spiritual knowledge of Don as a human being.
I do believe that humans need the right system, of government or of management, for happiness to be easier.
Betty may not do it consciously, but give her credit – she married a sexual fantasy, and once it became impossible to impose that fantasy on Don, she found a new one with great speed and efficiency.
Looking forward to Monday. (I don’t pay for TV, so I have to wait to watch it Monday on Amazon.)
Thanks again!
P.S. If I go to your bio page here ( https://www.libertasfilmmagazine.com/about/jennifer-baldwin/ ) and try to click “See a full list of Jenni Baldwin’s posts here.”, I get a 404 error. But if I change the URL myself from “jenni_baldwin” to “jennifer_baldwin”, it works.
I’ll get that fixed, John – thanks for the heads-up.
It’s not fixed yet – and has Ms Baldwin stopped watching Mad Men? She hasn’t tackled the last two episodes!
She tackles both of them later today.
Zoinks! Thanks John for catching that! 🙂