This! Is! Mad Men! – The Rejected
[This! Is! Mad Men! recaps the newest developments of Don Draper and his ragtag group of cohorts. In the spirit of the show, it will often be sexist and drunk. Apologies ahead of time.]
This week, I decided to do something a little bit different. While watching the fourth episode of Mad Men‘s fourth season, I took notes. I didn’t edit for style or content or any of those other components of writing that make it interesting. Somewhere between stream-of-consciousness and live-blogging, I now present my notes for The Rejected.
0 Minutes In – Viewer discretion warning about brief nudity — excellent! Maybe Joanie? Oh Gods, a (mad) man can only hope!
Well, they’re chatting on the phone with Lee Garner Jr. of Lucky Strike. If there’s any justice in the world, they’ll be able to send that guy packing sometime soon. I seek vengeance for Salvatore!
Hey, Pete Campbell, stop whining. You heard Roger, you’re a damn partner now. Man up and tell you father-in-law that Clearasil just ain’t winning this conflict of interest.
Don Draper’s Tips for Getting of the Phone
#129 — Claim that a fire has broken out. It’s a ridiculous lie, but if entire chunks of your life are rooted in deception, you’ll pull it off with ease.
8 Minutes In — Harold makes hilarious Honeymooners reference.
Ok, so it’s Joyce from LIFE Magazine’s collection of rejected photos that contain nudity. Not exactly what I was hoping for, but a step in the right direction. Mayhaps we’re a season away from LSD-soaked hippie-orgies. ::fingers crossed::
Pete’s at a bar, trying to deliver the bad news to his father-in-law…Oh SNAP! Tom’s thwarted his attempt, countering with news that Campbell’s finally knocked up Trudy. Pete happily declares, “I’m going to be a father!” He looks like a kid on Christmas. Which would be really endearing, if he hadn’t already fathered a child with a Peggy Olsen; a child he now knows about and has no desire in finding and/or raising himself (or even coming clean about).
Is Pete Campbell spiraling down the same deceptive road as Donnie Draper — only acknowledging the more favorable aspects of his life? Yeah, the more I think about it the more I view Pete and Don as complementary components, reciprocals of one another.
Don has the façade of a charmer but is emotionally crippled and incapable of coming to terms with unfortunate truths. Pete is more overtly snarky and cutthroat but capable of intense emotional support. What a tangled web!
Dr. Faye Miller is running a focus group with the secretaries of SCDP. Faye is yet another character who operates under false pretenses; she takes off her wedding ring simply so that the other girls identify with her and she pretends not to have a nametag so she can appear to have been overlooked (as are the secretaries). Is anyone on Mad Men exactly as they appear? Probably not. But then again, is anyone in the real world exactly as they appear?
“You’re a different human being to everybody you meet.” (Chuck Palahniuk, Rant)
Ok, I guess not.
Interesting note: Freddy Rumsen laughs at the precarious situation of SCDP being financially dependent on a focus group consisting of twenty-two year old girls. Don, however, scoffs and says that his finances are not tied up in this. Does Draper still have enough money on the side to hit the road if life gets too sticky? We’ll see.
//first commercial break//
Uh-oh…Allison thinks it might be worse when men actually notice them…Draper’s sweating it out on the other side of that two-way mirror. Yeah, dude, maybe next time you shouldn’t bang your secretary. Just a thought.
And Allison has left the building! Too much crying and complaining about men by another girl has struck a chord with Allison. Peggy feels bad and makes a move to comfort the sullen secretary…But Allison tries to suggest that Peggy has smelt Don’s butt the same way she has. Well, Olsen doesn’t stand for that and basically tells her to fugg off.
I can’t blame Peggy, though. She seems to be fully resolute in her desire to be successfully in spite of men, not because of them.
//second commercial break//
All right, Campbell and Cosgrove are out to lunch with Harold. After Harold leaves, Kenny Cosgrove calls out his former co-worker. “You didn’t call me an All-American idiot who fell into everything?” Campbell denies everything at first, but then apologizes and offers a mea culpa.
Cosgrove clues the viewer in to what has been going in advertising outside of SCDP — apparently everyone would rather still be under Draper. It’s interesting to that those who didn’t get to grab at the SCDP life preserver are wishing they had. Maybe we’ll see Kinsey? He’ll probably be hopped up on goofballs and typing a science fiction novella.
Goddamn, I miss Kinsey’s beard.
36 Minutes In — Allison’s confronting Don about their tryst. She wants to leave the agency, thinking it would be best, but needs a recommendation. Don tells her to write her own and he’ll sign off on it. Allison geeks out and throws a desk ornament at Don, smashing a wall-mounted frame in the process. As she storms out she declares, “I don’t say this easily, but you are not a good person.”
Nail on the head, Allison. Don Draper is so wrapped up in his own shit that he can’t even offer this girl his own words about her worth as an employee. What she was really looking for was validation, some notion that Don valued her for more than just her vagina.
Now Peggy’s being invited to some kooky party by Joyce – who I now strongly suspect of being lesbianic. Is that an adverbial form of lesbian? Not sure.
Peggy’s secretary comments that Joyce seems pretentious; Peggy agrees, but smilingly. I think Peggy admires anyone who is willing to go against the grain, even if it’s not entirely for its own sake. Although putting up a front of being different is kind of bogus, most people put up a front of fitting in.
//third commercial break//
Pete Campbell’s entering his front door, greeting his in-laws and smooching his gorgeous baby-mama. Shit’s cordial for about two seconds before Campbell is making demands of his father-in-law. I was really hoping that he’d try to keep things completely smooth with Trudy’s pop, but he’s making a complete business move.
Tom asks which products Pete wants. His response? “I want all of it.”
“You sonofabitch.” These are the first ill-words Tom has spoken of his son-in-law in the entire series. Previously, Pete Campbell bent over backwards to make sure that his wife’s family was not disturbed, either by his personal life or his business. But now it seems that he’s using the fact that he’s producing an heir to strong-arm his father-in-law. Ugh.
Peggy’s at the party now, which is in an old warehouse or something (Joyce claims it was once a sweatshop). There’s artsy peeps all over the joint, maybe the kids that were post-beatnik pre-hippie? I’m not sure.
Joyce and Peggy smoke some pot and Joyce tries to kiss Peggy. She’s cool about it, laughs it off and explains that she has a boyfriend. When Joyce informs Peggy that her boyfriend doesn’t own her vagina, she retorts, “No, but he’s renting it.” What a card!
Draper’s at his apartment and spend two minutes trying to typewrite an apology to Allison. He gets a sentence and a half in, realizes what a phony he is, and tosses it out. C’mon, man, do the right thing for once!
Peggy’s introduced to a couple of artsy buttheads. The more buttsy of the two scoffs at the very notion of working in advertising. The lets go off (a police raid) and Peggy hides in a closet with the less buttsy one — surprise, surprise, they smooch! Luckily, Joyce the LIFE Magazine Quasi-Lesbian opens the door and Peggy is out before she does anything too silly (like get pregnant again).
Seriously, where is Colin Hanks when you need him? I think if he would’ve given up the cloth, he and Peggy could’ve been a great couple. Oh, those were the days.
//fourth commercial break//
Don’s back in the office and he’s got an old hag of a secretary now. Ms. Blankenship? She’s got a terrible voice and it’s hilarious.
Looks like Campbell/Pryce/Sterling/Cooper are going to take Campbell’s father-in-law and his boss out to lunch. Are they going to pull this shit off?
Peggy and Joey have a conversation about Malcolm X being shot last Sunday. A secretary comes in with a card for Trudy Campbell. Joey signs — Peggy doesn’t. Instead, she goes directly to Pete and congratulates him on the pregnancy.
Of course, she immediately goes to her office to slam her head on a desk. This is pretty fugged up. Out there, somewhere in the world, is a baby that was produced by Peggy and Pete. But because of their different socioeconomic stations, Peggy gave the baby away. Now, Pete has his perfect purebred baby on the way and it’s supposed to be all smiles.
But it isn’t. And Pete knows that it isn’t all smiles.
Don meets with Faye Miller basically just to tell her that he isn’t going to put any stock into her research.
As Peggy leaves the office to eat lunch with Joyce and her bohemian friends, she passes by Pete, his father-in-law, and the entire upper-echelon. The two make eye contact and it’s a terribly emotional moment. They both know that there was a flicker of genuine, authentic passion between them. But they will never unite again, as the social structure won’t allow it. Even at her best (becoming a copywriting and earning some solid cash), she’s still viewed as being fundamentally less-than.
The episode ends with Don entering his apartment. On his way in, he passes and old woman and old man in the hallway. He sees the two of them, together in life, and realizes that has no family. He has nothing. He is a man trying to rebuild his life, and not for the first time.
Except now he doesn’t have the benefit of crafting a new persona. He can’t start with a clean slate. He can’t do anything he wants to anymore.
Don Draper has to sift through the wreckage and find something worth salvaging.