Tuesday, March 31, 2015

                                  MAD MEN
                         Season 7 pt 2
                                        Ep. 8

3 comments:

Greg said...

Angels and a Demon

They say you can’t go back home again. Unless you have no home. In that case you invent a home just so you’re always in control of it; therefore able to go back to it. That’s what Don was here tonight. Back home, back to Don. Back to the Alpha Male woman-bedding male like back in the day for him. He feels home again. It’s returned to Sterling Cooper. But also his version of being grounded is needing chaos. So he beds around and goes back to what he knows. That’s what you do in chaos.

My feeling at the end of the last episode we saw, with Bert Cooper performing, was about Bert (through Don’s head given Rachel ended up not being real here too) acting in the sense of A Christmas Carol with the Ghost of Christmas Future: this is your warning, given the song Bert was singing about life.

I thought Rachel is kind of a warning here too. And he had even another warning/angel in the waitress. And remember Sylvia, the Doctor’s wife and her and Dante’s Inferno about Hell etc? I think they’re all angles for him, and they’re trying but he’s not letting himself succeed. Dr. Faye a few seasons ago as well.

The waitress, angel, how here tonight? You ask. She tells him about death and trying to make sense. He has never been able to make sense of anything of his own self. Sylvia used to say the same types of things to him. But he found his angel Sylvia through a sexual relationship. And now again with the waitress. He found somewhat of the same thing with Dr. Faye through a sexual relationship he confided, i.e. went to confession, in pillow talk with her. His sex is generally meaningless yet sometimes meaning comes to him through it. Again tonight. Like many people who fight their own self, he can’t see it but those outside of him are trying for him.

You can only become an angel through first dying. Cooper one episode ago, now Rachel. Just her death itself, no final words of wisdom from her, just her death itself and it’s occurring in the midst of his seeking his usual (bad and incorrect idea of) grounding is angel enough. Sometimes an angel can speak without words. The waitress had the words and Rachel had the warning to him like Cooper did; get yourself straight about what’s important with regards to others and then you’ll get straight yourself.

Greg said...

The carousel spins with no grounding, and always ends up where it began. Don was begun in, and because of, chaos. That’s all he knows.

So he’s back, the carousel has gone around. He’s back to the good old Sterling Cooper days. Bedding around, the Alpha Male of the office. That’s his grounding. But his grounding is chaos. Hence why he’s one walking ball of conflict. Everyone ghoes back to what they know. We all know this already about Don, so the question is; is it just too late for him? As in, is this what we’re watching… not the climax but the denouement actually?

Has the conclusion already been reached by virtue of the beginning episode telling us he had a choice through Cooper’s address to him last episode and where in the offseason did Don go? Right back. Right back to chaos. Right back to Alpha Don Sterling Cooper.

After all the re-incarnations of the agency, we’re back at the beginning… a carousel. We open with season 1 Don back at the beginning like the odl days with the girl. He didn’t go forward did he. He spun around to right back where the carousel began. Don tells Rachel’s sister. I got divorced. Then married again, Then divorced again.

A child and the carousel is about the joy of life just being meaningless. Doesn’t work that way in adulthood. Don spins back around to romping around, but then he imagines Rachel in all that. He wants meaning in his meaninglessness. The waitress at the end speaks of the idea of finding meaning in death.

Who has held the most meaning to Don? Anna. Dead. Rachel could have but he squandered that. Dead. His own mother died having him. What’s that mean to him. From day 1 life is just dead for him. And that carousel continues too.

This series, this literary world, is all about contradiction, and an utmost contradiction is that the idea of the meaning of life is that life is just meaningless. Don has never had any reason to believe there’s any meaning. So he drinks and beds around. Yet, it’s sometimes in those bedding moments you find the contradiction of the angel and the whore. There seem to be angels who are reaching out to him in the language and environment he understands. And you see those moments like tonight with the Rachel thing where he seems to get it… but he’s had those moments before. Will he finally get it? How many chances will he get? Whatever or whoever is around him.. they’re trying. But they’re not the carousel, they’re not endless.

Even Kenny even spoke of… the life not lived… eerily in a hint of a confession booth. Kenny inside a booth giving wisdom and Don outside the booth.

The carousel. Don starts this episode back to his 1960 self, in … 1972 I think? (Nixon removing the troops)?

He could have risen through his vision of Cooper. He could rise with his Rachel vision. Sylvia. Faye. And now the waitress. They’re trying but unlike a carousel, they’re gonna stop.

On a side note I felt, when Don says I think I know you to the waitress it’s not what it looks like. I think it’s about something in him that he knows she’s an angel, without his outer self knowing it, if that makes sense. The whole my name is Don and she does it is too cliché and MM wouldn’t do that. It gave me that angel feeling like shes sent to see him, and sex is how they have to get through to him, but it’s not about sex. It’s about reaching him that way because he’s so walled up. Sex is how you break him down in order to get to him to save him.

Remember when Don in the office saw Anna ghostly walk in, and later on there was the phone call? Rachel tonight.

Greg said...

Don’s holding of Rachel… similar to when Don saw Anna walk in the office ghostly and smile…. And he knew?