Mad Men Episode 5: Interesting Angles

[Note: We’ll be blogging weekly following the evening’s Mad Men episode.]

There is so much to digest from last night’s episode, including multiple dream sequences. Indeed, when Betty comes home from the hospital after giving birth (the boy, Gene Scott, was born on June 21, 1963, the kid’s birth certificate shows, for those of you wondering how long you’ll have to wait for the series to deal with the assassination of JFK) she tells her neighbor the entire stay in the hospital was a blur. I’ll let others delve into the meaning of The Sopranos-like dream sequences.

Instead we’ll concentrate on the use of the camera in last night’s episode. The camera has played an important role in previous Mad Men episodes. Recall how we never really see Don ogling Sally’s teacher, Miss Farrell (Abigail Spencer), during the Maypole dance in a previous episode. Instead the camera put us in Don’s eyeballs, we were transported along as he watched the young teacher.

Not coincidentally, last evening’s episode had quite a bit to do with said teacher and the camera again played a major role in the episode.

A few examples where the camera was critical:

1. The scene directly after Peggy Olson appeals to Don for a raise, or rather equal pay with her male colleagues, whom she feels, correctly, do the same work as she does, sometimes not as well as she. The scene, at about the 41-minute mark, has Don driving his wife home from the hospital. With the sound of Peggy’s voice fresh in our head telling Don “they don’t pay me much around here,” and later “I want what you have,” the camera pulls back and we get a wide view of Don’s home and his car. The wide view might the best look we have of the exterior of the impressive and extremely large Draper home. While we’ve seen Don’s Cadillac in season 2, last night the car looks enormous, contrasting Peggy’s woes with public transport that she mentioned in last week’s episode.

Of course, we can’t let one of the series’ recurring themes go past without comment. When Peggy in that scene with Don tells him she wants what he has, his reaction is “Really?” Double meaning here, I think. Don’s amazed that a woman wants what he, a man, has. And, two, Don’s incredulous that someone thinks he has an enviable existence. The man is in somewhat of a crisis, right? Why would anyone envy him? Also notice that Don tells Peggy she’ll be all right. In a scene with his little daughter Sally a few minutes later, he tells Sally the same thing.

2. The scene in the elevator with Peter Campbell and Hollis, the black elevator operator. Notice how the camera shows the two of them initially, standing side by side, perhaps showing that Hollis is every bit the man Pete is. Still, the divide between them is underlined by the camera shot, showing them, well, divided.

The conversation between them about what sort of television Hollis owns underlines this theme. Pete asks Hollis if he thinks he’s a bigot. Hollis is too diplomatic to answer, but his silence is telling. (Pete, of course, removes all doubt with the two anti-Semitic remarks he makes with Duck Phillips’ about Duck’s new employer, Grey, which hires Jews, including the jab when Duck urges Pete to join him and Peggy for a “nosh.” Pete’s retort: only 2 months at Grey and you’re asking me for a nosh? Pete says with disdain.

3. The camera is pivotal during several scenes in the hospital. First, when Betty is being wheeled to her room she looks back for Don and sees him. A second later he’s vanished. This obviously relates to Betty’s lack of trust in her husband. Indeed, when she’s under a sedative later, she asks her nurse if she’s seen Don. “Have you seen him? Have you been with him?” And later she says he’s never where you think he’s going to be.

The next hospital scene where the camera is critical is when Don is arriving, with flowers, to visit Betty and he sees his solarium buddy Dennis coming the other way. Dennis, pushing his wife in a wheelchair, half smiles at Don but then says nothing. A closer inspection of the scene reveals that Dennis’ wife, although her face largely is obscured, is not holding a baby. Did Dennis’ baby, which we heard was a breech, make it?

(The above shot of Dennis and is wife is just one instance last night of an image moving by too quickly for most viewers to take it all in on the first go round. Another example of this was the fast look at the birth certificate of baby Gene Scott Draper, which, as we said above, was born on June 21, 1963. A third example where freeze frame is invaluable is when Pete is showing the execs from Admiral television a newspaper, urging them to put dollars into magazines, television and newspapers (yes, the irony of pushing newspapers for advertising in our current climate is thick indeed). Again, use your freeze frame on that newspaper and you’ll see its headline—Freedom Walk Goes on in Dixie— emphasizes one of the main themes of last night’s episode, the rise of blacks. As Lane the Brit says to Roger Sterling and Bert Cooper after they “flog” Pete for urging Admiral TV to advertise to blacks, “something is definitely going on” in this country of yours and perhaps it would be good business to capitalize on the emergence of “Negroes.”)

Another strange scene in the hospital occurs in Betty’s room, right after her second dream sequence (the one with her mother and her father mopping up blood). Betty wants to name the baby Gene, after her father, whom she just saw in her dream. Don, of course, says that they don’t have to think about that right now. But if you’ll notice in that scene when Don kisses his wife while both are in her hospital bed the camera pulls back, and we see the kiss on the left side of the screen and a mirror in Betty’s room on the right side of the screen. In that mirror we can see only Betty’s head, Don, again is out of the picture.

Don’s Bonding Scenes: The scene with Don and Dennis the prison guard that occurs in the solarium was as good as the one 2 episodes ago involving Don and Connie (some feel it was Conrad Hilton) in an empty bar in Roger Sterling’s country club. We learn a bit about Don (he doesn’t spend enough time with his son “throwing the ball around” and he can relate to the common man, since he sprang from modest roots. Dennis takes quite a liking to him, telling Don that Don “is an honest man,” he’s an expert on such things, he says. The irony of that statement considering Don isn’t even Don is obvious. So is irony a moment later, when Dennis uses Don as his confessor, telling him that his baby gives him a chance to make “a fresh start.” He vows to Don that he’ll be a better man, a better husband because of the baby, his first. Don, er, Dick, knows a thing or two about making fresh starts, as he made one after he saw Don Draper die in a foxhole during the Korean War.

Notes: Several Old Testament quotes in the episode. Lane the Brit, discussing the trend toward the more visible concern with blacks in America, mentions to Roger and Bert that “I am a stranger in a strange land” but something is happening. Another biblical quote comes from Duck, as he tells Pete and Peggy that he wants to take them “to the promised land.” (Is this more of the Grey influence wearing off on Duck?) – Have to wonder if the writers were paying homage to Fred Gwynne’s Herman Munster last night. Recall that Duck, to covertly speak with Pete, tells the Sterling Cooper switchboard that he’s Pete’s Uncle Herman. Fans of The Munsters will recall that Marilyn in” that series always referred to Gwynne’s character as her Uncle Herman. In the lunch with Duck, Pete and Peggy, the latter mentions that she likes Duck’s “turtleneck.” Recall that Herman Munster’s attire included a short turtleneck, very similar to what Duck was sporting last evening. – Was the elevator operator Hollis kidding or serious when he told Pete Campbell that “every job has its ups and downs”? – The subtext of the racial divide is all over this episode, as we mentioned above. Other subtle hints: Little Sally Draper, her teacher tells us, was asking a lot of questions about Medgar Evers’ death. Also note that in the hospital solarium as Don and Dennis are first meeting, a television in room is playing a news report that discusses people singing “We Shall Overcome.” Also notice the language Francine uses when referring to Betty’s African American housekeeper. “I think you’re crazy to let her go…” Sounds more like slavery than a business relationship, doesn’t it?— Anyone else feel the scene where Don, Bobby and Sally are waving up at Betty in the hospital room, with church bells tolling in the background, seemed a bit strange? Don seemed to be waving in slow motion, didn’t he? – It appears obvious what will happen between Don and Sally’s teacher. It was probably obvious a few episodes back, when, as we said above, Don couldn’t take his eyes off her (ironically, the actress playing the teacher, Abigail Spencer, starred in a short-lived Lifetime series called Angela’s Eyes On a personal note, I met Abigail at the Ritz Carlton gym during a summer television critics session and I had the exact same problem that Don did, she is breathtakingly beautiful and was very pleasant in conversation). So that plot line likely will play itself out. What was interesting about last night’s scene in the classroom was that all the math examples on the chalk board were long division problems. Long division, like the divide between Don and Betty? Like the divide between whites and blacks in America in 1963? – Speaking of guest actors from last night, did you notice Yeardley Smith (aka the voice of Lisa Simpson) as the nurse tending to the solarium? — Let’s keep with tradition and make our final comment be about the ending music. It’s the music that earlier in the episode accompanied Betty’s first dream sequence. At the end of the episode, though, with the baby crying it’s Betty’s job to tend to the kid. This is her reality, as opposed to her dream. Meanwhile Don, who’s been far more domestic and attentive to her than usual in this episode—he kisses her in the hospital bed, he offers to fix dinner for the kids and his wife when she comes from the hospital—doesn’t move a muscle when the baby gets up; Don sleeps soundly.