Mad Men recap: season seven, episode six – The Strategy
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Version 0 of 1. Spoiler alert: This blog is for those who are watching season seven of Mad Men. Don't read on if you haven't seen episode six. Catch-up with Zoe Williams' episode five recap You picked tonight for your date? I know your debutante manoeuvres Pete's fresh confidence is showing in his hamster cheeks. He is improbably desired by a woman who counts the square feet of every room she's in so of course he has to be toxic to Trudy, resorting to all the familiar, blood-boiling assumptions of the olden days (culminating in the fact that she is a mother, so should not be necking in cars). The men in this series have always, at their most unreasonable, had a cartoonish aspect – as if the picture you're seeing isn't the man himself, but him as a projection of his adult child: part memory, part resentment refracted through the mother, part folklore, part the smugness of changed times. So Pete, self-righteously brushing imaginary dust off himself in Trudy's kitchen while his girlfriend goes to see Oh! Calcutta on her own, is really Tammy's figment. I can imagine her in her cups, in college, in the 80s: "And you'll never guess what my dad did then …" Back in the office, Pete "persuades" Peggy to let Don do the presentation; bouncing around, calling out the truisms of his worldview like a patriarchy auctioneer. There's something funny about Pete; every time he becomes nearly unbearable, he brings himself back from the brink with some tragic frailty. "Peggy", says Pete, "in my mind, will still speak, but as the mother. A change of tone … Don will give authority, you will give emotion." Peggy replies: "I have authority. Don has emotion" I love this bit of dialogue, even though I think it anachronistic – the devilment of sexism is that, in an era when people will say it out loud, you're never ready with an answer; by the time you have your answer, they've found some other way to say it. Everybody has a sad and watchful air. Joan has totally lost her buoyancy. I was a bit disappointed in that old trope of her refusing Bob, because she still believes in The One. It seemed obvious coming from her, but it was credible all the same. Megan is definitely going to leave Don; her neediness now replaced by a benign coolness. Don has realised, but it is so against the laws of nature for a woman to leave him because she no longer loves him – rather than, say, because she loves him too much, which is how we all managed to spin Betty's departure – that it's as if he's noticed it's raining frogs. He definitely isn't going to look like the nutter who mentions it before anybody else does. 'What do you have to worry about?' 'That I never did anything. And that I don't have anyone' So Peggy and Don finally have an honest conversation, and it ends in a dance that is way too slow for a real dance; in real life they would have lost all momentum and simply fallen over. I always thought Peggy's hostility to Don was overbaked: on paper, she had a thousand reasons to resent him, but there was so much human mulch between them. All it took was for both of them to have a simultaneous crisis of confidence, some unspecified amount of dark brown alcohol, and a deadline for them to rediscover the fact that two truly insightful human beings can never hate one another in a lasting way. It's hard to know whether to despair or rejoice that Peggy takes this quiet moment of solace and immediately turns it into an advert: what if there was a place where there was no TV and you could break bread and, whoever you were with, that was family? And so it comes to pass: the three of them, Peggy, Don and Pete, breaking buns together in an echo of Peggy's tragic Catholicism, understanding one another at some cellular level, in surrounds that Peggy claims to love because they're clean and well-lit. Is it heartwarming that they have each other? Or is it proof that, really, none of them have anyone? |