This episode acts as a vessel for the characters, the audience, and the writers to reflect upon the last 6 seasons. They have time to reflect upon the various paths they've taken and choices they have made over the years, while still reaffirming their current existence. While thinking about this episode, I realized that this might be my favorite episode of Mad Men. Thematically, it is such a beautifully woven story around a thread that seems so sporadic and sprawling at first and even second viewing. It places many characters a point of limbo, where they're aware of their past and can start to think about what it is they exactly want from the rest of their life.
I’ll start with Ken, as his plot and musings helped me unpack the rest of the cast’s journey through this episode. We find out Ken’s life right now isn’t at its best, despite Mad Men constantly parading Ken’s successes at home. After getting in a bad fight with his wife surrounding soul-crashing-yet-satisfying career vs follow-your-creative-dream hobbies, Ken offered the easiest out by being fired from the firm. In any typical sitcom, Ken would go home sulking to his wife, be depressed, then get inspired to do his hobby and finally show up the old corporate losers that fired him.
Instead, Ken clues the audience in to today’s theme: “dad retires, wife says give up the soulcrushing job and write that novel….I think I was going to do it, and the very next day I’m fired, can you believe that? That’s not a coincidence, that’s a sign. The life not lived….It’s great,” and chuckles as if in pain. But Ken has yet to officially join the rest of the cast on this show. He’s reached his crossroads, his ‘California’. They fight with it alone, in weird places like a phone booth, the hot sun of California, or the mental hospital with your newborn baby. “Now I have to find a way to drag myself through those doors,” he says to a bewildered Don. Ken’s struggle, like many of the characters on this show’s struggle, is singular, insular and ultimately not sharable with his friends, coworkers, and wives. They struggle with who they are and who they want to be, but Ken’s benefit is being able to see the struggle and explain it before having to make the choice between the two. He knows the consequences of his actions, and is in full control when he makes his final decision.
Don is fucking whoever he wants. He’s got multiple girls waiting on him. Heck, he’s basically screwing at work. Don and the casting girl are nearly deed-performing in the first three minutes of the episode, yet his pals end up being in the room the whole time. He can get anyone into his bed, but Don can no longer shut his past out of the bedroom. Perhaps like the peripheral eye floaters, his previous lays keep returning into his life. Megan’s earring pops up when he’s about to go to town on a stewardess, he vaguely recognizes the waitress while he’s got arm candy to go with his party suit, and he dreams of Rachel instead of the other casting girls. And yet this episode focuses on Rachel, fittingly, the first girl we know who escaped his grasp. Grasping to the Jewish princess, he uses Topaz as a way to see her again perhaps believing that with his new swagger he could get back in her good graces.
Yet there’s a problem, Rachel dies the next day. When he reaches her wake, he speaks candidly with Rachel's sister as if they've been friends for a long time before spotting her children. "I just wanted to know what her life was like," he says, yet is firmly rebuked: 'She lived the life she wanted to live....she had everything’. His conversation with the sister broken up with Don’s lengthy stares at the events, frequently suffused with pained longing. But he doesn’t know exactly what he is longing for.
Don listens to Nixon’s speech regarding a threat from Cambodia. Not surprisingly, this applies to Don’s current mental state. One could view this in many different ways: Dick Whitman’s obsession with the figure of Don Draper is a ‘vietnam war, where Rachel acts like the growing threat in Cambodia; since ‘Don Draper’ the figure is equated with Vietnam, he’s beginning to realize completely that this figure is bullshit, it’s empty…as is mirrored in his ghastly expression at the funeral; perhaps SC/McCann is Vietnam, a Borg-like entity designed to stamp out the spiritual innocence of its dedicated employees…since all seem to have lost something for all their career successes, and those it casts away might result in the same fate (Ken(?), Ginsburg, Duck Phillips).
Don, still trying to determine what is so wrong, seeks out the waitress one more time. He tells her his weird déjà vu with Rachel and his dream. She responds detached, ‘When people die, everything gets mixed up…..You just want to make sense of it,but you can’t”. Don can now talk about the whorehouse toaster or fuck whatever bimbo he wants, yet he cannot have a significant conversation with anyone he knows. He can say everything about his life, but he can never actually explain himself to anyone who he really is…because he doesn’t even know. Is he just the sexual symbol that he always wanted to be. And what came at the expense of that? Was it Rachel who died, Betty who divorced and remarried, or Megan who whisked him away like foam off a beer? He was the one who was left; his essence is now just a pointed dick, ready to be used, abused, and then abandoned at the end of the night. Pretty soon that lonely man huddled over and stuck in thought, that man thinks that maybe he might turn out to be exactly what that waitress first saw him as: a lonely man who thinks about his non-wife Rachel and has to pay for sex from a waitress that looks kind of like her. <- not really sure I believe all of this. Just went with the typing…
Peggy remembers, even if it's just for one night, what it's like to have fun. She's shocked when he and be in love. Peggy is shocked when her date finds her choice to enter the workplace, yet is moved when she hears her coworkers fond words of her. When comparing lifestyles with her new pal, she realizes that she’s a completely work-defined person. The twinkle of the ‘other self’ emerges: hell, I’m successful enough that I can just go do wherever I want whenever I want. Thrust back into society, no passport, romantic spot = gunshot. She’s reminded of her first year as a secretary, how being in love destroys her chances at a career (there’s no way a second baby would help her career). She returns to the obsessive, driven personality that got her escalated out of the secretarial staff to a level of creative prowess, if not equals to Don's, that is capable of reaching the same heights as his.
But Stan questions her quick reversal. Yes, she could still go to Paris, but it's counter to who she's really been these past years. Who is she actually when she's reached success? Is it the girl who goes to Paris, or is she the girl who gave up her offspring for her career?
Joan, a woman who utilized her sex appeal to gain a set at the company’s dinner table, then her brains to domineer the sectorial staff, and finally give up her body to finally actually get a piece of the pie. Cut to a few years later and she’s a millionaire who no longer has to get new coats from her date (who happens to be a married man). She can buy whatever goddamn thing she wants, yet wherever she goes she’s still known as the girl who worked there, as if ‘does she really have enough to afford all these cloths?’ In fact, despite her ridiculous wealth and power within her company, she still has to navigate the same sexist leers and overt sexual advances as before. While she’s still disgusted by these people and could fend away many jabs by dressing differently, she’s not willing to change the person who got her to her current status. Her beauty is a strength, and it’s also what got her a million bucks.
Hell, even Pete joins the fray: He quite figure out how his old wonderful Californian life slipped away from him. Ted Chaw joins in too: “there are three girls in everyone’s life,” and obviously he’s searching for the third.
Don’t even get me started on the first scene. They direct each other as if physical contact is happening. And then he drops a cigarette in the cup. The music voiceover acts as the thematic method of the episode. The two continue. A woman speaks candidly and a bit like improve as she recounts a memory of her youth: ‘I remember when I was a little girl, our house caught on fire. I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face as he gathered me up in his arms and raced to the burning building out on the pavement. And I stood there in my pajamas and watched the whole world go up in flames. And when it was all over I said, was that all there is to a fire?’ And as if the show answers: Ted Chaw, Pete & Co turn out to be in the scene. Not only does the songs’ ‘genre’ of self-reflection mirror each character, it also the thematic content as well. The lyrics are about disappointment with what they’ve become once reflecting upon their youth.
