Home is Where?

A cross-posting: please go check out Invisible Culture, which is hosting a blog on Season Five of Mad Men in relation to their latest issue, which has a number of articles on the show (including one on Frank O’Hara, a topic near and dear to my heart). The good people at Invisible Culture have asked [...]

Power, Politics, and Negotiating Allegiances

In my last post on Mad Men, I ended with a series of questions: “Who will best be able to negotiate the liminal, the in-between? And where will allegiances lie as things become better defined? When we put this in its historical context of 1966 and 1967, which when this season seems set, big things [...]

Neither This nor That/Both This and That

Liminal (adj.) – on the margins or the threshold; neither this nor that or both this and that. The first episode of Mad Men, “A Little Kiss,” this year had many elements of the liminal that I haven’t seen many people speaking about, but which I found vital to the structure of the episode. (The [...]

Inside the Mind of Don Draper

The use of a voiceover to articulate Don Draper’s thoughts in “The Summer Man,” the eighth of the fourth season of Mad Men, was an important stylistic moment in the history of the show.  In my memory, it was the first time that the show had presented Don’s thinking in an explicit way, as exposition, [...]

Understanding Loss and What Work Does: Don Draper, Peggy Olson, and Their Bond

Near the end of last season’s final episode of Mad Men, Don Draper says to Peggy Olson, explaining how advertising ultimately operates as a complex confluence of nostalgia and wish fulfillment, and explaining why she should join him in his new firm, “Because there are people out there who buy things, people like you and [...]

Mad Men and Male Anxiety

What, pray tell, was the deal with the phallic references in last week’s episode of Mad Men? Let’s go over just some of them.  The name of the bar that Don and Roger and Joan head to after winning a Clio?  The Pen and Pencil. We had Stan Rizzo throwing pencils up into the ceiling [...]

On the Beginning of Mad Men, Season 4

1.  I love Sally.  I love her blunt honesty at Thanksgiving dinner and I love her response to her mother’s force-feeding.  In real life she’d end up as crazy as a loon, but who knows what will happen on this show?  During last season I predicted she’d lose it at some point and do some [...]

Questions, Probably to Remain Unanswered

As we head into the last episode of the third season of Mad Men, a few things I’m curious about: Will we hear any more of Sal this season (or any other season)?  He was a central element of the first episode of the season – will he return for the last? Now that Joan’s [...]

The Loaded Gun in the Drapers’ Parlor

One of the recurring elements of Mad Men this year is the increased attention paid to Sally, the Drapers’ daughter.  In this past Sunday’s episode, Sally’s brother, Bobby, caught Sally kissing a boy and teased her about it.  Sally reacted with immediate fury, chasing her brother, catching him, and immediately smacking him around.  As one [...]

That Wasn’t a Dingo Who Stole That Baby

Two things that I noticed about last night’s Mad Men that I haven’t really seen anyone mention yet. Where is Dennis’s baby?  Let’s go back to that same scene when Don goes to the hospital to visit Betty and Gene.  At the beginning of the scene in the hallway, Don is walking along, carrying a [...]