Warning: If you do not like slow plotting, regardless of fantastic character development and dialogue, you will not like this show. I, for instance, am not a fan of dick jokes and treating women like a punchline, so I don't watch TWO AND A HALF MEN. No judgements. To each their own. But if you like well-scripted film or television, and you are not watching MAD MEN, just skip on over to Netflix and start streaming the first three seasons to catch up. It is currently in Season 5. Last night's episode (4, "Mystery Date") might be this season's "The Suitcase." While "The Suitcase" episode was a risky drawn out sequence of just two actors going deep into Don's identity crisis, "Mystery Date" was an incredible commentary on feminist rhetoric, more pointedly, rape in the cultural conscience. And when "rape" is being thrown around by actresses comparing it to being stalked by paparazzi or a song that was composed for her movie being used in the current Oscar winner, it's about time someone try to put it back into its appropriate context. Just about every character had something to say about female sexuality and power last night. It was incredibly insightful and was written -- wait for it -- by two men, Matthew Weiner and Victor Levin. What really intrigues me about MAD MEN's writing is that it is wonderfully complex, authentic, and intentional. Everyone talks about the "attention to detail," but that usually refers to the set design, costume, make-up and language choices. Which makes for great visuals and fun brain-teasers, and I do enjoy those elements, trusting that someone at MM is verifying all of those nuances. But from a development stand-point, the arc of the characters and the psychological depths that the writers plumb, are probably the most intense on TV. (Film isn't even allowed to go there any more, unless you're talking foreign film or some down-and-dirty indie.) This is what episodic television can do. Which brings me back to "Mystery Date." If you didn't see it yet, don't read any further if you don't want to be spoiled. (Though with MM, it's not exactly Spoiler Alert viewing.)
The clever angle that the writers decided to use was to intersect the 1966 rape, torture, and murder of eight nursing students in Chicago with a popular board game of the time, Mystery Date. If your female fear of rape isn't tingling yet, you're probably a man. Just about every character plays out the psychosexual victimization of women. Early in the episode, the new copywriter, Ginso, is appalled at the pictures from the Chicago crime scene while his counterparts seem titillated by them. It is stressed that the ninth girl got out alive by hiding under the bed. Later, Ginso dry-runs an idea for Don for a pantyhose account which devolves into a pitch idea featuring that comely lass Cinderella and her missing shoe. Too cliche, says Don which prompts those other female icons Snow White and Sleeping Beauty to peek up for a minute before being deemed "narcoleptic." Are you seeing the parallel yet? If not, let's skip right ahead to the actual pitch to the pantyhose honchos where Ginso -- earlier, so offended by his co-workers salacious gawking -- pitches an extraordinarily dark and disturbing Cinderella scenario in which Cindy is running from a shady male character down a dark, cobblestone street, only to be caught...and grateful that her pursuer is the prince! Oh, thank god, I thought you were a rapist! The honchos love it, of course. Need I mention that everyone in the room is a man during this presentation? Men, getting wrong for... well, forever. Just in case, you think that every woman wants it, let's flip to all our female characters for a counterpoint, shall we?
First up, poor little Sally Draper who is calling her father to save her from her wicked step-grandmama! How perfect was that set up?! Did you notice that they played up the Gothic mansion bit, too? Don, of course, tells her that it's not his weekend and to suck it up. Sally's Daddy Issue just grows by leaps and bounds every week, doesn't it? Sally, who is in the prime of her sexual development and wants to be treated like an adult while whining like a child, wants to know about the murder. Step-grandmama refuses to talk about it. But little Sally fishes out the newspaper from the garbage and reads it under the covers that night like the horror story it is....then freaks the hell out! Who can blame her? Especially when Mystery Date is being sold to little girls just Sally's age to socialize them to open the door to any guy bearing flowers. Knock, Knock. Who's there? Could be prince charming...could be a rapist. How lucky do you feel? Sally wearing frilly, blue, baby doll pjs creeps out to step-grandmama who is sitting around reading a romance novel while keeping a butcher knife on the couch next to her (BTW: HA! Brilliant!). Step-grandmama makes the bad decision to tell Sally about the case in the most awful, gossipy way possible. Then...gives her half a sleeping pill. Sleeping Beauty, indeed.
Peggy, in the meantime, gets less money from Roger for working all weekend then Harry did just to switch an office. (IE, Peggy's time is less valuable than Harry's ego.) Then Peggy finds Dawn, Don's African-American secretary, sleeping in Don's office (Dawn, don't sleep on that couch. There's a lot of DNA in that couch). Dawn is afraid to go home to Harlem after dark since there's been all sorts of riots and every woman in the U.S. is currently terrified of Cinderella's shadowy male pursuer. Peggy takes Dawn back to her apartment in a show of sisterhood where Peggy is all mentor'y and asks Dawn if she acts too much like a man, and they both agree that if you're a woman in a man's world, it's best not to be too girly-girly...because then they will have to pursue you, have sex with you, strangle you and then stuff you under their bed. Or not. I don't know. I'm not Don. Anywho, Peggy then takes our feminist fairy tale script one step further and goes deep into the feminist schism. White women never understand why black women don't join the feminist front lines. After all, we're all after the same things, right? Equality! Liberty! Men are the enemy, not your sisters! Until, of course, Peggy remembers she has $410 in her purse and her repressed racism comes rearing its ugly, little head. You see, black women cannot be Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. The cultural mythology (based in reality) of African-American women have always been about slavery, rape, and otherness. Try to pantyhose peddle that to women. Even though Peggy tries to cover her prejudice, Dawn's sees Peggy's pause and all Peggy's comradettes-in-arms goes right into the garbage with the beer bottles.
And if all that feminist theory went right over your head, let's go to the one character who has been both raped and saved: Joan. Our darling Joanie Holloway is married to an upstanding, military surgeon who gets saluted in restaurants...and who we all remember raped her right there on the floor of the office. After hubby took off for Vietnam, Joan and Roger get their flirt back on, and after they are robbed on a dark street by a shadowy man, Joan allows Roger her defender to take her right there on a street corner...impregnating her in the process. If Sally is our innocent Sleeping Beauty, Joan is our Cinderella after her shoe has been returned. Neither one of these scenarios is working out well, is it?
And if our women are terrified of the Cinderella myth, and the men are selling it, our darling protagonist, womanizer Don Draper, is hallucinating the male psychosexual conflict for us. He's got a gorgeous, young wife who is coming to grips with Don's sexual past and on-going sexual appetite. Don, for his part, seems to be battling the flu. In his fevered dream, he is confronted by his libido in the form of a former paramour who keeps insisting that Megan has not changed Don. At first, Don resists. Then Don gives in. Then Don, angry at his own inability to keep it in his pants, must kill the object of his sexual desire, trying desperately to hide it before Megan sees it, but -- like all nightmare scenarios -- can't quite hide it all the way.
Even though MW and Co. had eighteen months to develop this particular season, the sheer construction of this episode alone would take most writers months to nail down especially with this level subtlety. So kudos to the writing staff. But a bigger curtsy to Matthew Weiner who either took feminist theory or just absorbed it at Wesleyan. Very few writers can write women as authentically as he can, and even fewer would take on rape as a topical theme for an episode. Writing is hard, but when it's this good, it doesn't look it.
