Matt Zoller Seitz - Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion

Dedicated to Amy

Contents

S1 / E1
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

S1 / E2
Ladies Room

S1 / E3
Marriage of Figaro

S1 / E4
New Amsterdam

S1 / E5
5G

S1 / E6
Babylon

S1 / E7
Red in the Face

S1 / E8
The Hobo Code

S1 / E9
Shoot

S1 / E10
Long Weekend

S1 / E11
Indian Summer

S1 / E12
Nixon vs. Kennedy

S1 / E13
The Wheel

S2 / E1
For Those Who Think Young

S2 / E2
Flight 1

S2 / E3
The Benefactor

S2 / E4
Three Sundays

S2 / E5
The New Girl

S2 / E6
Maidenform

S2 / E7
The Gold Violin

S2 / E8
A Night to Remember

S2 / E9
Six Month Leave

S2 / E10
The Inheritance

S2 / E11
The Jet Set

S2 / E12
The Mountain King

S2 / E13
Meditations in an Emergency

S3 / E1
Out of Town

S3 / E2
Love Among the Ruins

S3 / E3
My Old Kentucky Home

S3 / E4
The Arrangements

S3 / E5
The Fog

S3 / E6
Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency

S3 / E7
Seven Twenty Three

S3 / E8
Souvenir

S3 / E9
Wee Small Hours

S3 / E10
The Color Blue

S3 / E11
The Gypsy and the Hobo

S3 / E12
The Grown Ups

S3 / E13
Shut the Door. Have a Seat

S4 / E1
Public Relations

S4 / E2
Christmas Comes But Once a Year

S4 / E3
The Good News

S4 / E4
The Rejected

S4 / E5
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

S4 / E6
Waldorf Stories

S4 / E7
The Suitcase

S4 / E8
The Summer Man

S4 / E9
The Beautiful Girls

S4 / E10
Hands and Knees

S4 / E11
Chinese Wall

S4 / E12
Blowing Smoke

S4 / E13
Tomorrowland

S5 / E1&2
A Little Kiss

S5 / E3
Tea Leaves

S5 / E4
Mystery Date

S5 / E5
Signal 30

S5 / E6
Far Away Places

S5 / E7
At the Codfish Ball

S5 / E8
Lady Lazarus

S5 / E9
Dark Shadows

S5 / E10
Christmas Waltz

S5 / E11
The Other Woman

S5 / E12
Commissions and Fees

S5 / E13
The Phantom

S6 / E1&2
The Doorway

S6 / E3
Collaborators

S6 / E4
To Have and to Hold

S6 / E5
The Flood

S6 / E6
For Immediate Release

S6 / E7
Man with a Plan

S6 / E8
The Crash

S6 / E9
The Better Half

S6 / E10
A Tale of Two Cities

S6 / E11
Favors

S6 / E12
The Quality of Mercy

S6 / E13
In Care Of

S7 / E1
Time Zones

S7 / E2
A Days Work

S7 / E3
Field Trip

S7 / E4
The Monolith

S7 / E5
The Runaways

S7 / E6
The Strategy

S7 / E7
Waterloo

S7 / E8
Severance

S7 / E9
New Business

S7 / E10
The Forecast

S7 / E11
Time & Life

S7 / E12
Lost Horizon

S7 / E13
The Milk and Honey Route

S7 / E14
Person to Person

Foreword

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it cant wake up.

D. H. LAWRENCE

I t has become commonplace to draw parallels between todays more ambitious television shows and the novel, or even to claim that the most artful of these showsrich with social commentary, complicated story arcs, and dense character psychologyhave supplanted the novel. Overused, the comparison has been drained of meaning, sealing over both the visual pleasures and sensory urgency that TV shows can offer and the intimacy and immersiveness of our favorite novels. When one considers Mad Men, however, the comparison feels closer. And the show itself, thick with literary allusions, certainly encourages itfrom Dante and Freud to Susann and Puzo, has a show ever shown so many characters reading? Creator Matthew Weiner himself has noted that when he first read John Cheever, he thought, This man sounds like I want to sound: beautiful and sad.

The most compelling evidence of Mad Mens literariness, however, is found not in the show itself, but in the way it has been readdissected, deconstructed, laid upon the operating table week after week by an ever-expanding army of recappers, live tweeters, conspiracy theorists, and web sleuths. While many shows inspire online frenzies of speculation and theorizing, the Mad Men canon is remarkable both in its arcane depths and its intellectual rigor. But the voice striking clear as a bell above all that glorious noise has always been the analysis offered by Matt Zoller Seitz. Like the strongest and most incisive of literary criticism, his Mad Men pieces expand our view of the show and the issues it raises. So, if a recap oeuvre can read like lit critcan make us see depths and meaning far beyond our own viewing experiencethen it seems Mad Men does in fact work, and sing, and drown us like the most captivating of novels. The ones that feel like fever dreams.

Unlike most recaps, which are transitory productions, Seitzs Mad Men pieces are telescopic, enabling us to see not just the small details we might miss but how these moments fit inor complicatethe shows larger contexts. Seitz is constantly racking focus between the episode itself and the shows recurring big themes: the nature of identity, self-knowledge, the burden of the past, identity and reinvention, character stasis and evolution. At the same time, he can narrow our gaze to a moment so subtle we may have missed it and that may make us rethink the episode, a character, even the series in total. Witness Seitz on Betty Draper in season sevens Field Trip, lighting her cigarette and putting on her sunglasses after a particularly tense encounter with her son Bobby. Its a moment that, Seitz notes, serves as a crushing dismissal of her son. But rather than using it simply as evidence of Bettys cruelty, Seitz reminds us that what Betty is doing most of all in that episode is punishing herself (by not eating, by shutting herself off from her son, by retreating from an experience she was enjoying and then judging herself for it later)an observation that is surprising and immediately feels deeply true.

For Seitz, the show can not only sustain such analysis, it demands it, bidding us not just to watch the show but to scrutinize it. Such a role suits the shows larger fixation with the slipperiness of identity, the self behind the self, and as engaged viewers we are complicit in that fixation. We must be on the lookout for deceptions and self-deceptions, Seitz writes, and the gap between how characters see themselves... and who they likely are. If we do not participate critically, we are missing at least half of what matters. Our interpretation is part of the show, enlarges it, completes it. Its a dance, a shell game, a pitch, fictions traded for fictions. And wed better have our back up and our stories straight.

Which brings us back to literary criticism. In Aspects of the Novel, his classic study of the form, E. M. Forster asserts that mystery is essential to plot, but to experience its full effect one must go beyond a what-will-happen-next mode of reading. To appreciate a mystery, he writes, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on. This observation calls to mind both