Hey kids! So that spiel I gave you on Monday about blogging about this show elsewhere? Forget I said that. Bygones. Here is a slightly (re)edited version of the post I wrote for them — I feel compelled to reblog it here since I reference it a few times in my first Mad Men post from Monday. From now on, all Mad Men posts go here. It’s all Mad Men all the time. MAD MEN. (That’s bad SEO. Apologies.)
One more thing! In both of these posts I neglected to mention how absolutely wonderful Alexa Alemanni is as Alison. AMC has a lovely Q&A with her online, where she talks about shooting “Christmas Comes But Once a Year.” Check it out.)
Anyway. Enjoy.
It would seem as though Don Draper’s dalliance with a prostitute in last week’s episode, as out of character as it felt for him (or rather as an indication of how low the man has sunk over the past 11 months), was a sign of things to come in this episode. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is forced to throw a Christmas party that they can’t afford to placate Lee Garner, Jr., whose business represents over half of their cash flow. Don has sex with his secretary and then dismisses her with $100.
Up until last season, Allison was one of many Sterling Cooper secretaries who occasionally got a line or was part of the background in a scene — she’s also the secretary that Ken Cosgrove tackles so he can look at her underwear in “Nixon vs. Kennedy” (a real life office game called “Scuttle”) — but she eventually becomes Don’s secretary; in fact, the secretary he’s always wanted, someone who wanted that job and nothing more. Peggy had higher aspirations, Lois was a disaster, Jane was only interested in finding a man. Allison is efficient, intuitive, smart, she understands Don’s needs and knows how to meet them. I was pleased last week to see that she came with him to SCDP, where, it would seem she has slightly more access to the cypher that is Don Draper. She reads Sally’s Santa letter to Don, visibly moved by the ending (“I want you to be here, but I know that you can’t be”), and this implies a touch of the personal that enhances their professional relationship.
But then Don crosses the line and drunkenly puts the moves on Allison, and you can see her thought process in initially hesitating — is this a good idea, he’s my boss, will he fire me if I refuse him, is this just going to be one of those things — and I think you can also see pity in her face. The morning after I can’t tell whether she thinks something has started between them — her apparent eagerness to close the door to his office, her guarded hello — or whether she’s willing and ready to chalk this up to a drunken hookup that won’t happen again. It’s clear that she’s waiting for him to define what happened, but I don’t think she’s ready for him to completely bungle the morning after talk — all he needed to say was “I let things get out of hand” or something similar but he’s not at all capable of owning responsibility for what happened — and then hand her the bonus he’d mentioned earlier. Given what transpired between them, he might as well have left the money on the counter as he did with the prostitute last week. (To add insult to injury, it’s not even a check, but two $50 bills.)
I’m sure many companies this year had holiday parties similar to what was originally planned at SCDP — “a glass of gin and a box of Velveeta” — a measure of tightening their budget and limiting indulgences. And that all gets tossed aside after Lee Garner, Jr., demands to be invited to the party. SCDP is now put in a similar situation to Allison — Lucky Strike is essentially their boss, and if they don’t put out they’ll lose him as a client. Is all business prostitution? Furthermore, I think Lee Garner, Jr., knows exactly how much power he holds over the company, and he clearly relishes abusing that power. We saw that before, last season, when he came on to Sal and then demanded Sal be fired after Sal did not return his advances. His bullying Roger into putting on the Santa suit and having everyone sit on his lap had sexual undertones for me because of that history. For a man like Lee Garner, Jr., all power is sexual. Even though the Christmas party spectacle is entirely in keeping with SCDP’s mission of keeping up the appearance of being more successful than they really are, it was still too sad to watch the SCDP employees pretend to have fun, given how raucous and bacchanialian they’ve been in the past (again, “Nixon vs. Kennedy” provides clear contrast). As though they’re simply going through the motions. Don and Roger’s German-accented quips the next day reaffirm how it felt: as though SCDP is an occupied country, lorded over by a tobacco dictator.
As timely and appropriate as it may be for Christmas 1964, I thought the discussion of Medicare, Civil Rights and socialism was a bit forced, though I did think it was interesting that Bert Cooper and Dr. Atherton (head of that consumer research firm working for SCDP — and I thought it was a nice bit of consistency that he’s mentioned in the previous episode as the guy who thought the lack of conference table was deliberate) believe that these acts create a slippery slope that will lead directly to banning personal property, and interesting that Atherton, leader of this innovative method of marketing, believes that consumers are children who need to be steered clear of socialist tendencies — through advertising, of course! — and is therefore as out of touch and unprepared for the country’s evolution as the senior members of SCDP. Never mind how similar their tirade against social change sounds similar to today’s anti-government rants — as misinformed and misdirected then as now.
It was funny to me, then, that within this show it was this group, Dr. Faye Miller in particular, who came up with the “carefree gal in white pants” as the symbol for feminine hygiene products — Peggy’s small head shake at that clearly means “you have no idea what young women want or who they even are” — even though this is the image that has persisted in advertising tampons and pads for decades. I think it all boils down to Miller’s axiom: “what I want vs. what’s expected of me.” The way such advertising works on us is not that we want to BE that carefree gal, it’s that our minds readily process her as a symbol rather than an ideal, and this is why it’s persisted for so long — moreover, it’s a symbol less about confidence and independence and more about concealment and hiding away, something everyone at SCDP knows on a deeply personal level. In turn, this helps explain why Freddy’s approach to the Ponds campaign is hopelessly out of date — he’s looking at the real, rather than the symbolic.
Still, I remember the show being a little more subtle about bringing history in — Carla listening to the news about the four girls killed in Birmingham, Sally’s interest in Medgar Evers’ death mentioned only in passing, or having characters directly involved in major events (Paul Kinsey going down to Mississippi, for example). I hope that future episodes do a little more than simply having a couple characters mutter something about Civil Rights.
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