Last night’s episode of Mad Men, “The Rejected,” was directed by John Slattery (Roger Sterling), and a damn fine episode it was, too. It’s splendid (or rather, SWELLIGANT) on its own, but is also masterfully linked to events that happen all the way back in Season 1.
The focus group for Ponds, for example, begs to be compared to the one for Belle Jolie lipstick (“Babylon,” the 6th episode of Season 1). It’s there that Peggy first distinguishes herself, calling the wastebasket full of Kleenex blotters a “basket of kisses,” where the junior executives ogle and judge the secretaries from behind the two-way mirror, where the secretaries themselves squeal with joy at the thought of trying new lipsticks, and where Alison (yes, Alison) is perplexed by the survey questions put to her by the severe woman in charge of research.
The Ponds group turns into a group therapy session. While they are still being observed by men (and Peggy), there’s no leering, no voyeuristic delight taken in watching them. This is all business. And there’s no joy here at all. The women seem extremely reluctant to talk about their beauty regimen at first, as though they’re not supposed to have one — and really, almost all advertising for beauty products even today sends the message that women aren’t supposed to look as though they WORK at their appearance. (“Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline,” anyone?) And just when it seems as though they’re ready to start spilling and sharing their secrets, the meeting turns to despair. It ultimately doesn’t matter what we do to make ourselves beautiful, these women say — it’s neither appreciated nor noticed. And both Freddy and Faye misinterpret this outpouring of frustration as indicative of these women’s desire for marriage. While it may be true that they do want to get married, and it may be true that a woman’s worth on the marriage market is by and large her appearance, the callous way this vulnerability is parleyed into an advertising pitch is as stark as Pete’s father-in-law’s valuing a baby girl at half what a baby boy would be worth. (You think of your own daughter like that, Tom?)
But Alison sees things differently, and it’s clear that she’s still feeling Don’s rejection, and she runs out of the room crying after remarking, “It’s worse when they DO notice.” And in the subsequent scene between Alison and Peggy, it felt as though Peggy were channeling Joan in telling Alison to get over it. And I get where Peggy’s indignation comes from, as I’m sure she’s dealt with other people/co-workers believing that she was sleeping with Don at one point, and her harshness is completely in character — Peggy has never been all that sensitive to the needs or feelings of others.
And really, I think Alison was over it, for the most part, and what upset her wasn’t that she and Don were never going to turn their one night stand into an affair, but that he refused to explicitly recognize what happened between them and how it necessarily affected their working relationship. I mean, even Pete had the decency to talk to Peggy as soon as he got back from his honeymoon, to tell her that he was married now and nothing more could happen between them. (Of course, Pete goes back on this and treats Peggy pretty horribly afterward, but still.) Alison feels used (and she was used) and is looking for some sort of indication from Don that he SEES her. But when he responds to her request (well, more of a demand) for a letter of recommendation with “Put whatever you want into a letter and I’ll sign it” — I think this was and may still be fairly standard practice, to sign whatever letter an employee writes for him/herself — but of course to Alison it comes across as Don being unwilling or unable to say ANYTHING about her, to NOTICE her at all. And that’s sad. More sad than Don being unable or unwilling to describe what exactly his life is like right now — and I’m going with unwilling. Though his attempt at an apology letter to Alison was a step in the right direction, I think. I hope.
Joan, at least, seems to have Alison’s back in some way — putting Bert Cooper’s old secretary Mrs. Blankenship on Don’s desk is meant to be seen as a sort of punishment. Am I alone in hearing “Mrs. Blankenship” and immediately thinking “Mrs. Landingham“? Unfortunately it seems as though the former isn’t as competent as the latter, although “Dr. Miller is here to see you. It’s a SHE” was hysterical.
So Trudy is pregnant. Excellent. Interesting that this development had less to do with Pete and Trudy than it did Pete and Peggy. The scenes between those two always kill me, and last night’s episode was no exception. Peggy standing in the doorway to Pete’s office, offering congratulations, the long pause between them, and the lingering look between them at the end of the episode, with the closed glass door of the office separating them, Pete standing with the older businessmen and Peggy going off to lunch with the Youth Culture, that almost imperceptible nod and smile Pete gives Peggy and her smile in response — I love these two, and I love that they’ve managed to get to a place where they will never be romantically entangled again but will always be connected to each other and have that level of unspoken understanding (I also LOVED that they both deal with stress by banging their heads against something, be it column or desk [in fact loved the way Slattery directed so much action around the column in Pete's office]) — it’s bittersweet, and also strangely comforting.
Peggy had a number of outstanding moments in this episode. From peeping over the wall between her office and Don’s to telling new friend Joyce that her boyfriend may not own her vagina “but he rents it,” her non-reaction reaction to Joyce’s come-on, her telling the Warhol knock-offs that she’s Catholic, there was a lot to like about Peggy here. Almost enough to forgive her cruelty to Alison.
Finally, I was wondering when we’d see Ken Cosgrove again (Aaron Staton’s name has been in the main credit sequence all season), and it was clear to me at the lunch he has with Pete and Harry that Ken’s looking for a way in at SCDP. Or maybe he’s just looking wistfully in the windows of the place that rejected him (one of the many rejections touched upon in this episode). It always seemed as though Roger and Don went to Pete in the first place for the same reason Bert Cooper talks Don out of firing Pete way back in the early part of Season 1: because Pete’s family name is their ticket to the bigger clients. And while Ken Cosgrove may have been the better employee (Lane explains choosing him over Pete as Head of Accounts because Ken makes clients feel as though they haven’t any needs), Pete definitely comes into his own in this episode, by leveraging SCDP’s rejection of Clearasil into landing all the rest of the Vicks Empire. That was a great scene, where Pete tells his father-in-law that he wants all that business. Tom has always used the Clearasil business as a dangling carrot to get Pete to toe the family line, and now that Trudy is pregnant, Tom has nothing more to demand, really. Now Pete has the power. And he uses it. Tom calls Pete a “son of a bitch” and Pete shrugs it off, as if to say, “Yeah. So what?”
Besides, after Tom promised $1,000 if Trudy has a boy and $500 if it’s a girl, I wanted him to go down hard. Asshat.
Random observations:
* Don’s “Oh my God, there’s a FIRE” ploy to get off the phone with Lee Garner, Jr. was funny. That conversation was also historically accurate — Congress passed new restrictions on cigarette advertising in 1965, though I don’t know whether it was early ’65. In five more years, cigarettes won’t be allowed to be advertised on TV.
* Harry kills me with the Yiddish, this week muttering something about the “gonifs at CBS” (Gonif = crook).
* Freddy’s munching on Wise potato chips during the focus group. So long, Utz.
* So Joan’s office doubles as the observation room for focus group meetings. No wonder she looked put out as she gathered the women around the conference table.
* Speaking of, I totally missed the fact that SCDP has a conference table now, and actually did so by the second episode. I was sort of hoping they’d have the open discussion thing going for a little longer.
* It’s a small moment, I think, at the loft party, but I really liked it when Peggy comments that she likes the experimental film they’re watching because it’s rhythmic. It’s like, she may work in advertising and may be a little uptight and everything, but she sees things that go unnoticed by other people.
* David Kellogg — in joke?
* Thematic line of the episode: “You can’t tell how people are going to behave based on how they have behaved.”
* Fantastic line of the episode (aside from “No, but he’s renting it”): “Another Campbell. That’s just what the world needs.”
* Fantastic moment of the episode: “Did you get pears? Did you get pears? Did you get pears?” “We’ll discuss it inside.” — You think Don plays it close to the vest? This woman doesn’t even share PRODUCE information outside her apartment. Actually, I’m not quite sure what to make of that ending. I get it sort of abstractly, but am having a hard time putting it into words. Something about marriage and growing old together and Don looks sober for once and the addition of this elderly couple means the apartment building isn’t just inhabited by lonely single people . . . something.
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