Don and Peggy: ”They are the arsenic in each other’s cookie.”
Another brilliant review.
The Word Mistress Won’t Be In The Ad
Joan Holloway
Harrisis built like a B-52. That’s the aircraft famous for carrying up to 70,000 pounds of weapons, or as Joan would say: Tuesday. Her gliding through the office like some magnificent ship was anything but Roger’s bête noire; that is so 1960! Aerospace is the new industry and I don’t know why we’re talking about cars. Jaguar actually had kind of a bad year in 1966; it sold itself to the British Motor Company and was forced to trash its Le Mans supercar, the XJ13, because Ford built a bigger engine. Ford! Even in the automotive arms race of the sixties, that was a blow.Either something is slightly ahistorical about SCDP’s Jaguar chase, or SCDP is so desperate for cred it’s accidentally ahead of its time. As late as 1970 the infamous Tragos Bonnange Wiesendanger & Ajroldi pamphlet groused about European clients being a second priority for American agencies. That Maguire-like manifesto created TBWA, essentially built to service said European clients without American interference; by 1973 it would be a top-three shop. But like I said: Jaguar in 1966 weren’t exactly buyers at the trade deadline. Their product was still a handshake agreement between smoke and mirrors and if there is a better definition of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, I have not heard it.
“It’s prostitution”, Joan insists. “It’s business at a very high level” Pete insists. Both of them are right. The man from Jaguar is named Herb, of all awful things, and he definitely doesn’t like Sade. The Prostitution Of Joan is just one element of the single sexy-ugliest episode of Mad Men; it was the Harvey Keitel of episodes, the James Woods, the Anjelica Huston. So much grotesque behavior, even by non-characters like Joan’s mom who reduced the grisly treatment of black people in America to a status update (“they’re used to being told what to do”) while somehow never moving from beneath the invisible dryer that follows her around, everywhere; and yet Joan cupping Don’s jawline like a peach muffin was one of the most prayerful images the show has produced. Roger didn’t blink before fitting Joan for a silver platter; Lane is so eager to join the Tea Party he’d slit her throat for a brass nickel; and Pete—well, Pete’s hairline is higher on one side than the other, like most men’s. Only he is a sleazy sidewinder who can’t go any lower.
Don attains beast mode by throwing actual money at Peggy like she is an actual bitch. Then he acts like Megan would be desperately unfaithful to him by going essentially on tour for three months, at what, the fictional Schubert Theatre in New Haven with Eve Harrington? At Last, Something Beautiful You Can Truly Own was Ginsberg’s idea, but it’s not like Draper never thought of it. He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? We begin by coveting what we see every day. Hannibal Lecter was a hell of a copywriter.
Although: seeing Don Draper pitch is one of television’s great pleasures which has, heretofore this season, been denied us. He’s no writer, he’s a talker; in 2012 he would bang out 25,000 words about slasher films while bending the first rule of copywriting, write like you talk, until it breaks into a million little pieces. But without a blog he’s gold. “If they weren’t just a little out of our reach, would we love them like we do,” he says, rhetorically. It’s so unclear which he’s talking about, women or cars, that the whole chronology of advertising just turns right into the skid. You can tell the first Super Bowl is only a month away.
The shot of all the partners walking into Jaguar was so funny and perfect, like Chinese thugs going to a hostage transfer. Freddy Rumsen, the Mike Barnicle of MadAve, can’t tell if Peggy is ambitious or if she just likes to complain. Freddy Rumsen has always read Peggy like a fucking manila folder, ever since she first saw the benefit, not the feature. Peggy deserves to leave; she’s already been at SCDP for as long as Emanuele Pirella stayed at Young & Rubicam. And Emanuele Pirella was the Italian David Ogilvy. I’m glad I got in a Ted
ShawChaough reference two recaps ago, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of him as he turns into Matt Gilardi.I don’t know if Ted Chaough is actually a tool or if that was Don Draper writing a political ad. Still, how do you move on from working for the American animus? Peggy and Don built the biggest bond on the show because she perfectly transcended the mother-waitress bridge. Don’s affection for her is impossibly paternalistic and yet there were these gulfs of tenderness reached between them, whether she was blinding him with all the earnestness or bailing him out of jail or wrangling some problem he got himself into on the spot. They are the arsenic in each other’s cookie. They’re fucked for life about each other, but Don is the only one who knows it. This means he both wins and loses. Peggy doesn’t know yet the extent to which Don will be like Jesus in those shitty peyote-paintings of operating rooms with Jesus guiding the surgeon’s hand (LET ME GET IN THERE BRO). That’s no reflection on her future work, I’m sure it will be exemplary.
Don’s bid for screen grab of the week was not letting go of Peggy’s hand after he kissed it. Peggy’s was pausing by the bank of elevators one last time and realizing she’s going up, not down. For once, and for now.
