Mad Men Roundtable: Season 3, “Love Among the Ruins”

So, it turns out that Roger Sterling got married in between seasons.  I was kind of looking forward to seeing that.  You just know that didn’t go smoothly.  And while I don’t think we’ve heard anything definitively, but it looks as if Joan was also married during the break.  Why can’t you just let us see a wedding, Mad Men?  Sure, I don’t think anybody’s really pulling for these unions, but it would have been nice to see.

Don’s been pretty cold to Roger all season, and even Roger’s starting to notice.  Whatever’s wrong between these two, Don’s really committed to being a jerk.  You know how you can tell when a relationship’s falling apart, because either one or both parties will not put any effort whatsoever into being even cordial?  Being pleasant and being unpleasant take the exact same amount of effort, but they just choose to be unpleasant over and over again.  I tend to think that Don’s upset about Roger’s role in the sale of Sterling Cooper.  For one thing, and I’ll get into this later, but the new status quo emasculates Don, which is not something he’s equipped to handle.  And what may be the bigger sticking point for him is the way he found out about the buyout, immediately upon his return from California.  Remember how happy he was in California, going back to being Dick Whitman again and not having to lie and hide and fight every day?  I think he returned home with a new view of himself, maybe the idea that he could once again choose his path.  Unfortunately, he was immediately thrown into the thick of things, and he was forced to be Don Draper again.  Roger killed Dick Whitman for the second time.

On the subject of Roger and the merger, don’t you just love how Roger is openly contemptuous of Lane Pryce?  He gets in some good digs, most of which are pretty funny.  It seems to me that Lane is in a pretty good position – his actual level or power is undefined enough that he makes everybody uncomfortable, but he also gets to attribute any unpopular decisions to “London”.  Logically, he must have some authority – this is before e-mail and fax, so the boys across the Atlantic are running things on the other side of the International Date Line – the time difference doesn’t allow for much of a real-time response.  I think he’s making a lot of these decisions on his own and passing the buck.  Also, he’s the bad guy from Fringe, so I will never trust him, ever.

In fact, it was the “London” decision to drop Madison Square Garden (Seems somebody wasn’t thinking about all those future Wrestlemania events…  As a side note, it turns out that at some point, I programmed “Wrestlemania” into my spell check.)  that set Don off.  If Bert Cooper had decided to drop that account, Don would have walked into his office, told him why he was wrong, and won him over.  When shadowy figures in a distant city drop the account, Don has no recourse.  He hates not being able to get his say, and the new corporate structure of Sterling Cooper will make that a regular occurrence.  I think that’s what exacerbated the situation at home – after losing a fight that he would have won a year ago, he goes after Betty’s brother the way he would have lit into Pete Campbell.  He can’t fight London, but he can sure as hell bully Betty’s brother into submission.

We haven’t really seen much of Don’s interaction with Betty’s father, so it’s surprising that he would insist on taking him in.  Did Don really need a win that badly, that he’d take on that burden as a byproduct of the chance to verbally shred Betty’s brother.  (And how great was that?  “Your father’s going to live with us.  You’re going to pay for it, and you’re going to leave your car here.  Get on the bus, bro.”  That guy is lucky Don let him keep his clothing, frankly.)  And again, Don might be trying to recapture some of what he’s lost.  He can’t have a relationship with his own father, since obviously he’s dead but also he was a horrible person.  Betty’s dad is as close as he’s going to get to a father figure at this point.  I don’t know that Don needs parental guidance, but as a guy who hasn’t seen his father in a decade, I do know that you’ll try to fill that void whether you need it or not.  It’s a relationship that changes in a fairly significant way as you come into your own as a person, and if you don’t get to see the second phase of that relationship, it feels somehow incomplete.  I’m probably reading way too much of myself into this, but that’s how it came off to me.

And we see that Betty’s dad apparently suffers from Alzheimer’s, as his late night Prohibition antics would indicate.  This is something that Matthew Weiner explored at length on The Sopranos with Uncle Junior, so I’m already preparing to have my heart broken.  It stands to reason that a writer so obsessed with questions of identity would gravitate toward a disease that literally robs it sufferers of theirs.  (One day, I will write about Mad Men without referencing The Sopranos.  Today is not that day.)

Peggy was the standout this week, and Myndi’s right – Elisabeth Moss can do no wrong.  There’s something a little scary to me about her need to mirror the strong personalities around her.  She took a page from Don Draper last season, and she’s actively emulating Joan now.  After she fought so hard to be included by the men last season, now she’s upset that they don’t view her as a woman anymore.  (Line of the week:  “What do you care?  You’re not fat anymore.”  Ha!  God bless you, Harry Crane.)  I wonder if Peggy used to have dreams of performing – at least, that’s what her musical number in front of the mirror made me think.  She watches Ann Margaret and sees the life that she wanted standing in sharp contrast to the life that she worked so hard to make.  This episode is very much about people confronting the discrepancies between their ideal and actual lives.  Still, Peggy went to that bar to be more like Joan, and even stole her line – she’s just layered in emulations of others.  Heck, I think that’s why she said that her boss was a “jerk”.  She generally likes Don, but people complain about their bosses in social situations, so that’s what Peggy does.  Sometimes it’s like Peggy just learned about being human from a guidebook, and is doing her best to fake it.  It was a nice touch that she thought about protection – clearly she learned a lesson.  Also, that’s not a complication that would slow down Don Draper during a hook-up.  Even better, after all of that, what’s the first account she talks to Don about?  Pampers!  Reality loves to taunt Peggy.

Finally, in the last scene we get Don and Betty at a May Day celebration for Sally’s class.  Don checks out the teacher, which is not unusual for him, but it’s the way he looked at her while he reached out to put his hand in the grass that really made the scene seem significant.  And I think this comes back to my earlier idea that Don came back from California unsure of whether or not he was going to be Don Draper or Dick Whitman.  The teacher, she’s the sort of woman that would be perfect for Dick Whitman.  He watched the simple pleasure she was taking in being outdoors in beautiful weather, and he wanted to feel that pleasure too.  That was Dick Whitman reaching for the grass.

Don (not Draper)

Hey, Mr. Weiner and the rest of the writing staff! What gives? Every week you hit me with a two-by-four right between the eyes with symbolism, layered story lines, and deep meaning behind nearly every word. Ah, heck, maybe I try way too hard to read something in everything. But all you gave me this week was the fact Roger’s daughter’s wedding is the day after President Kennedy is assassinated – so there’s that. And was that it? Or is there something else?

Let me start with my favorite part. During the opening, which was the opening credits of the 1963 cinematic musical version of Bye Bye Birdie, we see everyone enjoying it. Kenny and Harry because Anne Margaret is, well, hot. And Salvatore because he loves musicals. And when they stop the film and bring up the lights in the conference room, Salvatore says, “I saw Susan Watson do it on Broadway, and she was great …but she didn’t have that.” Um, Sal, baby …that ain’t exactly keeping it under wraps.

The episode, at first glance, could have been plucked out of any season and inserted anywhere within the show’s run. At least that’s what I thought at first, but upon a second glance, “Love Among the Ruins” just might be an episode that changes the game for the entire season, and possibly the series. Stay with me here.

Was Bye Bye Birdie and its lyrics the story? There seemed to be more than a few characters dealing with things changing and saying “bye bye” to the way it was.