Buckle in folks, because I'm about to pop a wheelie on the zeitgeist.
Something has been rattling around in my brain lately, inspired by the Mad Men episode Favors (aka the one where Sally catches Don en flagrante) and two articles that were written around the time when the episode aired.
The first article was this piece in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The central thesis of the piece is that Don has essentially turned into a comic book villain.
When it was published, I took issue with it. (After all, if anyone is a cartoon villain, it's Walter White. For all its greatness, Breaking Bad is an exceptionally well-produced and well-acted pulp story.)
My issue with the piece dovetails nicely with the other aforementioned article. This one appeared in Vulture and is a Q&A with Vincent Kartheiser, who plays Pete Campbell. I'll quote the relevant parts:
Well, Pete makes an ass of himself in wonderful, hilarious ways.
I’m not playing it for laughs.
I’m not playing it for laughs.
Right, that’s why it’s funny. Pete’s so serious. It makes his quiet moments, like when he’s alone with an empty box of cereal in his apartment, that much more sad. They’re more of a gut punch.I actually had no idea that people thought it was funny. Sometimes I think Matthew does not intend these things to be funny, so if I am having that as the outcome, then I would consider that a failure on my part. I will say that Matthew would re-shoot if he thought that I had given the editors something that they couldn’t manipulate into a performance worthy of what he’s trying to express. I do have faith that, if people are finding it funny, and if Matthew finds it funny, then I guess that was what his goal was.
The assiness referenced is a pratfall that Kartheiser performed as an irate Pete in an earlier episode. It was imminently gifable and seen as a piece of comic relief. In the interview, Kartheiser seems confused that the audience took it this way.
Both of these pieces touch on something that I've long took issue with in regards to Mad Men - the seeming discordance between showrunner Matthew Weiner's intentions and the audience's reaction to the material.
Now, I don't claim to be a savant when it comes to interpreting TV shows. (I initially didn't see the appeal of Breaking Bad.) But I find myself strangely simpatico with Weiner, in that the way that I perceive the characters and the direction he is taking them is largely predictive of the way the actual narrative plays out. So in some ways, my reaction to the reaction to Mad Men is personal.
I don't "get" a great many things on television, but I believe that I "get" Mad Men.
Pete has been my favorite character since season one because I've always believed that he was fundamentally different than the characters surrounding him (excepting Ken, who is the closest thing to a normal person the show has). Pete is emotional, empathetic and, comparatively, progressive. The most layered instances of male/female interaction on the show have come courtesy of Pete. (Pete and Peggy, Pete and Rory Gilmore.)
I also had trouble getting into the show because for the first half-dozen episodes, I just couldn't stand Don. I felt that he was a bad person. This belief was cemented when he tried to buy off his brother in the middle of the first season and it led to a suicide.
Because of my distaste for Don, I was always more sympathetic to Betty than the internet at large seems to be.
(I also never hated Glenn, and Weiner is on record as being confused why people find him creepy.)
It wasn't until the end of the first season that I kind of realized that I was feeling the way Weiner intended for me to feel.
Don, for all his charm and complexity, is fundamentally a selfish, small human being.
This realization has led to a lot of frustration on my end from people who tune in to Mad Men seemingly only to see Roger crack wise and Don engage in coast-to-coast swordplay.
(My friend Jordan rightly pointed out that it's these yahoos who provide the eyeballs that keep the show afloat, so I should be grateful for the braying masses.)
I imagine that my frustrations are felt, by an order of many magnitudes higher, by Weiner himself - which brings us back to the Atlantic piece.
As I said, I initially took umbrage with it, until the airing of this week's episode in which Don is basically twirling a Dick Dastardly mustache throughout the entire 42 minutes.
At this point it seems clear that Weiner has basically given up trying to give much nuance to Don and is just trying to force it into the audience's collective heads that Don is a bad person. Once again, charming and complex, but ultimately rotten.
(I wish I could remember who wrote the article (it may have been Todd Vanderwerff at TV Club), but I read recently that every relationship in Don's life, outside of with his children, is ultimately transactional. People are only good for what they can provide him. This is played out explicitly in Favors with Don's interaction with Ted and Art/Sylvia.)
Weiner basically has two characters act as mouthpieces for himself in the most recent two episodes. In Favors, Sally blurts out, "You make me sick!" and in The Quality of Mercy (Sunday's episode) Peggy laments, "You're a monster."
That's about as on the nose as you can get.
I think a lot about what the central thesis of Mad Men is and, up to this point, it seems to be that you can't change who you are. Behind Don's smooth veneer, Dick Whitman is always there, threatening to run. The Roger LSD arc is probably the most concise example of this idea. Roger has what he believes to be a transformative experience, but he ultimately just returns to his old ways.
The only two characters who've shown any ability to escape this paradigm are Pete and Peggy. Peggy by taking agency and leaving for another agency (though external factors nullify that decision) and Pete by learning from his past mistakes when dealing with Bob Benson.
And the funny thing about Don being explicitly outed as a villain is the whiplash of reevaluation by viewers. In reading comments and listening to podcasts this week, there's suddenly a lot of sympathy for Betty (which should have bubbled up earlier, she's arguably been the funniest character this season) and even old creepy Glenn, who came to Sally's rescue in the worst-acted scene of the entire series.
So if we reduce all of this down, what Weiner did with the past two episodes is basically tell the audience that they've been watching Mad Men the wrong way this entire time.
I brought this up with master TV critic Alan Sepinwall on Twitter.
Some other cool folks chimed in.
The "Death of the Author" is nothing new and I believe it has some value in the world of criticism, but I feel that that value is diminished in an auteurish work like Mad Men. The show is so fundamentally Weiner's vision that to separate his intention from it entirely is to view a different show than the one that he created.
Dr. Spaceman wrote, "If the intent isn't self-evident, tough." And he'd be right, except that I think that the intent was entirely evident throughout the run of the series. People just either a) were blind to it or b) refused to accept it.
This ties in to my earlier thoughts on Community. It's my belief that the reaction to Mad Men was so flawed that Weiner had to alter the narrative to get his point across. It's another example of this weird convergence between author and audience that we exist in now.
I don't know where Weiner will take the show now that we've established our moral footing. It's possible that season seven just follows Don into the pits of hell, bearing out my thesis for the duration, or it's possible that he could invert it, and instead Don could rise from the ashes. Either way, it'll be much more interesting than this season's 13 episode exposition of Don's brokenness.
All of this talk on reception and reinterpretation brings us to the other important cultural event of the past week - the release of the latest album by pop music's anti-hero, Kanye West.
I'm fascinated by Yeezus. It's spectacularly layered and I probably haven't even listened to it enough to properly dissect it.
The whole point of the album seems to be Kanye daring us to like him. Like Weiner, he's done burying the lede.
To start with, the production is different than anything he's done before. These aren't pop songs and they aren't paeans like on 808s. They're aggressive and stripped down, except in a few meaningful moments, where he sounds like vintage Kanye.
Then there's the lyrics. They're similarly aggressive, and at times grotesque. ("Put my fist in her like a civil rights sign" from I'm In It being a good example).
Kanye seems hell-bent on telling us that he isn't a good guy.
In I'm In It, Assassin starts a verse with "I'm a badman you if know say." The word "badman" is said four times in the song. In I am a God (ft. God) he says, "Soon as they like you, make 'em unlike you," then goes on to reference iconic College Dropout Kanye aesthetics.
But while Kanye keeps telling us that he's a bad guy, he never actually says anything that would make you really believe that he's as bad as he wants us to believe that he is, and this calls back to what I said about the pointed throwbacks to his old sound.
On Sight is a great example of this. The whole track is basically Kanye disrespecting women and their men and it builds to a hook where Kanye says, "How much do I not give a fuck? Let me show you right now 'fore you give it up," over and over.
The thing is, Kanye never shows us anything, instead, the pulsing electro beats cut out and in comes this really beautiful classic Kanye choral sample that says, "He'll give us what we need, it may not be what we want."
And lyrically, that line reinforces Kanye's seeming position with this album, he feels that the public needs this, despite them probably wanting another amazing pop album like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
But musically, he's throttling back. It's almost passive aggressive. He's showing that he can do what people want, but he chooses not to, but at the same time, he's still giving it to us. He can't commit fully to the Yeezus persona.
This happens again at the end of what I believe to be the defining song on the album, New Slaves.
At first blush, it sounds like a very angry indictment of racism in the US, but if you listen to the lyrics, it's trite and almost toothless. It's the Akeelah and the Bee of black rage - carefully packaged to make you feel bad about racism, but not bad enough to actually do anything and certainly not bad enough to reflect on your own actions. It's confronting racism at arm's length.
Then, after Kanye finishes his rant with, "I'm about to air shit out, I'm about to tear shit down, what the fuck y'all gon' say now?" he apologizes again, this time blessing us with that gorgeous Frank Ocean segment.
Repeatedly, Kanye gets right up to the line and then pulls back and gives us what he knows we want - be it chipmunk soul or PBR&B or Justin Vernon.
And once Kanye, like Weiner, established that (at least for this record) he's a bad guy, he invites us to reevaluate his older work from this new paradigm.
On Sight has reference to both Monster and Stronger.
In the first verse, he says, "A monster 'bout to come alive again," and the song concludes with, "I need right now, uh oh, I need right now."
Allow me to quote Mr. West himself, in reference to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (this comes from the great NYT piece by John Caramincia):
“Dark Fantasy” was my long, backhanded apology. You know how people give a backhanded compliment? It was a backhanded apology. It was like, all these raps, all these sonic acrobatics. I was like: “Let me show you guys what I can do, and please accept me back. You want to have me on your shelves.”
So I think what Kanye is saying, in referencing two of his biggest hits (from MBDTF and Graduation respectively) is that he's essentially been playing us so far. When you listen to monster, the lyrics are braggadocios and aggressive, but not evil. With On Sight, Kanye is attempting to set the record straight. We may perceive him to be this brilliant pop artist who makes songs we all like, but in reality he's an actual monster.
West again:
It’s always going to be 80 percent, at least, what I want to give, and 20 percent fulfilling a perception. If you walk into an old man’s house, they’re not giving nothing. They’re at 100 percent exactly what they want to do. I would hear stories about Steve Jobs and feel like he was at 100 percent exactly what he wanted to do, but I’m sure even a Steve Jobs has compromised. Even a Rick Owens has compromised. You know, even a Kanye West has compromised. Sometimes you don’t even know when you’re being compromised till after the fact, and that’s what you regret.
This dynamic crops up again on Hold My Liquor.
Chief Keef says, "You say you know me my nigga/But you really just know the old me." Which seems to be a reference to Heartless where Kanye says, "I did some things but that's the old me."
Keef's line is a subversion of the line from Heartless. On that track, Kanye is apologetic, but on Hold My Liquor, he's confessional.
So tracking back to my thoughts on reinterpretation, I think with Yeezus, Kanye is inviting us to reinterpret his work with GOOD Music. Up until Kanye "popped a wheelie on the zeitgeist" with Yeezus he and the GOOD collective were seen as the saviors of pop music. They created this insane collaboration of talent that produced several of the best songs of the past few years and everyone expected that Yeezus would be a continuation of that. Instead we get this dark, half-apologetic, half-shameless record.
Unlike Weiner, however, I don't think it fundamentally changes the way we think about GOOD. As much as Kanye may want us to look for subtext in those records, I'm not certain that it exists.
Yeezus ends with the track Bound 2 which is just vintage Kanye. Productionwise, it sounds like it could have come from College Dropout.
Bound 2 is everything that Yeezus isn't. It's hopeful, lush, and loving.
So why did Kanye end his opus with this track? I think there's a lot of significance in the title. "Bound" could be a reference to how Kanye feels about his persona as the savior of pop music, it could be a reference to him being "bound to fall in love," it could be any number of things. "2" is equally significant. It references the two people in a relationship, it references being bound to a partner, and it could again be a reference to him being bound to his persona.
So what is Kanye trying to say with this album? Is he Yeezus? The angry, dismissive monster from the first nine tracks? Or is he Kanye West from Bound 2 and his earlier albums?
The best guess that I can hazard is that it's either a resignation - he's bound to be Kanye even though inside he's Yeezus, or it could be a rebirth - an admission that Yeezus lurks inside of him, but ultimately he is Kanye West, whomever that may be.
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