Mad Men 409: After The Fall

It's there for the retina -- if not the mind -- to see. As the first shot of "The Beautiful Girls" comes up, an image near enough to the last shot of the credits fills the same shapes of light and dark and it is not plausible that director Michael Uppendahl staged the shot without intending this. The repeated image asks for a reexamination of the much-admired credits, which show a man walk into an office that disintegrates before he can sit. The collapse of the room sends him into a fall to the backdrop of Fifties-seeming advertisement art with a strong emphasis in the subject matter on beautiful women, or as they would have been known at the time, beautiful girls. The man's fall transitions to a shot of him in repose, right arm outstretched. And so we see Don in this episode -- in that pose, just as his destructive negligence of his children and self has been halted. Whether series auteur Matthew Weiner gave his approval or not, the director is telling us that we are moving to a new phase in the series -- what comes after the fall.

How the series begins this new phase is by moving sideways -- Don is still the central figure in this episode, but only insofar as a few, but not all, of the titular beautiful girls are involved in plots that revolve around him. Spanning the range of ages from ten to dead, Sally, Faye, Betty, and Miss Blankenship become plot devices that impact Don's life in suddenly inconvenient ways. An early episode of The West Wing, also featuring Elisabeth Moss, had "these women" as part of its title and focus, but only part. "The Beautiful Girls" suggests that women are inherently enough of a type to group them and make an episode around them; to make an episode about nothing more specific than women is in fact as well as politically objectification.

But there's no mistaking that that's how Don sees the collection of females who complicate his week in this episode. While he sees them as a nuisance to the career and affair that he wants to be having successfully and simply, he is with lies turning away the daughter who has taken a considerable risk to reach out to him. And however much Ida ruins Don's afternoon with her demise, the event certainly inconveniences her more than it does Don. Don's self-centered take on these events, along with parallel insensitivity from lesser characters such as Stan and Harry, call attention to Peggy's less-than-resounding call for civil rights for women.

The strongest of "these women" are weak in this episode: Peggy somehow has to read Abe's piece to be insulted by it, not seeing enough in the reference to Nazism (and the "I was just following orders" defense) in the title. Her efforts to instill social consciousness in the company only make her laughable. Joan, still wearing the pen around her neck that earned Joey's spite last episode, is all too easily wooed by Roger. Faye, who has stumbled into Don's life long on schooling and short on extracurriculars, feels that she has been judged for how she measures up in precisely the endeavor she has neglected, mothering.

The episode comes together in Roger's line, "If it looks like I'm going [to die], open the window. I'd rather flatten the top of a cab." This reprises the culmination of the opening credits' fall and Roger possibly chooses his words mindful of the 1947 suicide of Evelyn McHale whose suicide note lamented that she would not "make a good wife for anybody." Literal ups and downs fill the episode, from Bert Cooper's sadly superficial eulogy noting that Ida died at a higher elevation than she was born (making her, in the era of Program Gemini, an astronaut), to Sally's spill onto the floor.

Is the fall from the opening credits a deliberate topic in this episode? Stan croons with anatomical thoughts that Peggy is going to meet Joyce "Down below..." Megan consoles Sally with "I fall all the time." And the episode's final and signature moment is the closing of elevator doors on Joan, Peggy, and Faye, before they begin to descend. Certainly they are taking a slower and safer descent than Miss McHale's fall from the Empire State Building. And in all probability, with Don's life as the show's utmost focus, their gender's "Mad Men" episode in the spotlight closed along with those doors.

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"I was blind. And now I see." Miss Blankenship is referring to her cataract surgery. Don has found some Amazing Grace of his own, and perhaps it is enough to save a wretch like him. This is old Don Draper. Bruised a bit and making some risky bets (like eavesdropping and two-timing). But he's not an adulterer anymore, and he's set aside serious alcohol abuse in favor of the existential woes that used to be conveyed with a grimace and now come forth in graceful, penetrating and -- for writers Lisa Albert, Janet Leahy, and Matthew Weiner -- triumphant prose.

Don's career has made him a sprinter among wordsmiths, the mind behind clever slogans half the length of a haiku. Don's journal shows him to be gifted in introspection, at least now that saving himself has proven to be necessary and worthwhile. When we first hear the words of his monologue, it sounds like one end of a conversation with a therapist, but we see that it's just Don, alone with his brilliant mind and his newfound -- or newly revealed -- self-awareness. It's an exercise in salvation. The optimism of the last episode has been borne out, thus far: The best idea does win. At least, a much better idea than waking up badly hungover with the waitress he left his one-night-stand for, and in so doing standing up his own children. Don's arc of personal improvement is obvious at every turn -- he wins an impromptu swimming race at episode's end, and wins the battle with the usurper in his home just by showing up. As another testament to his turnaround, he is invited to more sex than he accepts, and makes his model ex-wife feel insecure upon glimpsing his new life. It's telling that he sends Miss Blankenship away with the alcohol she brought -- the amount that she expected him to consume.

While the B plot brought the series to its full potential as a fraternity movie, the A plot -- Don's plot -- was resplendent, beginning with the long corridor of the swimming lane symbolizing the difficult route ahead. We later see Don submerged like Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, in much the same state of disillusionment. But this is an improving Don Draper, who looks a lot like the Don Draper of seasons one and two, standing outside the health club, watching a market basket of 1965's people and styles go by as the Rolling Stones remind us that Don's trade tells us how white our shirts can be and that a man's not a man if he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as he.

Particularly when last season's episode "Seven Twenty Three" showed Don as perhaps the first member of his generation to be knocked down -- literally -- by a member of antiwar counterculture, we knew that the series has always had the option of a larger historical metaphor, with Don symbolizing the end of Eisenhower America as it slides into decay with the changing times, as season upon season slowly undoes him. But Don came apart quickly and has soon been -- for the most part -- put back together. He's on the rise precisely as the war in Vietnam begins to hold a combat role for U.S. troops. Don may yet see worse than he has seen, but his arc will not rise and fall precisely with historical trends that we already know.

Broadly speaking, "control" underlies all of the episode's interactions, but that is such a general concept that it is either unintended, or is a throwaway. It is true that Peggy and Joan both try to get control of Joey and Stan, and when Peggy succeeds, Joan diminishes her victory as a way of finding the control that she has lost in her home life as well as in her marriage. To chastise the boyish men of the writing staff, she uses the threat of the war as a form of control -- and destruction -- at which they can't and don't laugh. But this is nakedly a compensation for the loss of control that she feels, worried even that her husband has to come in proximity to ammunition at boot camp and leave her without a confidante. In a still more peripheral plots, there was the battle between the vending machine and everyone who tried to use it.

But these parallels are weak and beside the point. Perhaps the meticulously-constructed parallel plots that have appeared in previous episodes this season were beside the point, or a kind of stunt. (In this episode, the most obviously parallel scenes are Don's two steamy cab rides with blondes.) Perhaps Don's rise from the abyss is itself the story arc of a self-help book or an after-school special. But the readings in the journal, and how the accompanying imagery is filmed by director Phil Abraham, delivers the depth and impact of this episode. There is Don, in bed alone, the way he has always wanted to be: Comfortable, rolling to the cool spots, feeling like a skydiver. When he says it so clearly -- and beautifully -- it isn't so hard to see who is Don Draper. Significantly, Don does not derive any particular empowerment in this episode from further openness with Peggy. What bridges the two episodes is that Don has found a voice with which to speak his feelings -- something that Joan also says she needs. We perhaps best understand Don Draper when we see that he prefers to direct his openness to one and the same person who is his bed partner -- nobody else at all.

Batman and Robin 14

With bazookas, poison makeup, drug addiction, slaves, and a crowbar, so begins a three-sided war. The hallucinatory, nightmarish, David Lynch-inspired quality of Batman and Robin #14 is as intense and disorienting as anywhere else in Grant Morrison's sixteen-issue "first season" of the title. It is a carnival of death, debasement, victimization, and not infrequently, of comedy. Nearly nothing goes well for the heroes, at least not on-panel.

The three-headed nature of the struggle means attacks come from every direction. Robin beats, and is beaten by, the Joker, who uses the devices from the utility belt against the police. Dick and Jim Gordon are swarmed by Dollotrons. The Joker blackmails Dick into working with him. Doctor Hurt is caught off-guard by a chemical attack by the Joker at the same time that Batman swoops in, once again forced to fight a swarm of enemies who are dangerous due to sheer numbers. Then an enslaved Jim Gordon hits Dick from behind, showing the total control that Pyg's contagious addiction exerts on its victims. Finally, the Joker plans to use Damian as a weapon against Hurt.

That's a lot of action -- none of it terribly unexpected, at least given the preview that showed the Joker's escape in progress. The story is rich, however, in themes and tone, with a few lines carrying particularly important implications for where the story is going.

The horse/knight theme I mentioned earlier has crept out of the artwork and into the dialogue. The first image in the story is the horsehead in the Wayne Manor library, seen when Alfred goes either to check on Dick or to perform some other important chore in the Batcave. The final words of the issue are the title of #15 -- "The Knight, Death, and The Devil", with the words cleverly laid over the characters they represent: Dick, the Joker, and Doctor Hurt. In between, we see Hurt yell to his adversary, in a chess metaphor, that his knights have been beaten. But who is the audience for that line -- Dick or the Joker? Given that Dick is a knight, the Joker may be the one Hurt is addressing, even though his mouth is close to Dick's ear. It remains unclear if the horsehead on the mantle is a mere symbol or has some real power. Alfred may be looking at it as he passes by. Soon enough, it will be a silent witness to Hurt's gunshot aimed at Dick.

Hurt is getting a lot of practice for that shot. He fires at a pumpkin for no clear purpose early on, and later, we cut to a shot of him holding the smoking gun as a series of watermelons have received similar shootings. This is an intensely odd display of Hurt's behavior, seemingly for no purpose other than to enjoy in anticipation the shooting of Dick Grayson. He's chosen fruits that are roughly the size and shape of a head. That he seems to expect to undertake that specific manner of execution suggests some sort of ritualistic significance, either to fulfill some mystic requirement or because he will derive pleasure from it. It is a divergence from the otherwise stolid behavior we've seen him conduct as he goes about his business, and together with the wearing of the old bat-cowl and hitting Alfred with the champagne bottle, tells us more about Hurt's personality than all of his evil hand-wringing.

There is, however, plenty of that. In describing Pyg, Hurt tells us once again, that he enjoys corruption for its own sake. He describes with "might makes right" a vision of Gotham that matches the vision Lane has in Batman #666, with Lane "praying for a world where the strong are free to exploit and abuse the weak". Speaking to criminals, he celebrates crime, and plans to act on his contempt for the incorruptible, describing it with Hitler's term for a "new order" much as Lane, the Devil's messiah -- at least in his own mind -- dreamt of his version of a "better world". His vision is well underway, with the Mayor, who was shown to be working for Hurt in Morrison's Batman run, in attendance along with criminals and the media.

Other details in this issue point to #666. We see Batman fighting Dollotrons and Professor Pyg hanging upside down in a human inverted crucifix. Hurt's ceremony takes place in Crime Alley, which is apparently the scene of one Batman's death in #666, "the crossroads" where Damian chooses to deal with the Devil. The promised interaction between this story and the potential future of #666 is drawing near, and it is likely that the places where the details don't match (e.g., Damian is now ten, but fourteen when he makes the deal in #666) are to be considered dust swept under the carpet. This probably isn't a dress rehearsal for the real meeting between Damian and the Devil four years from now, but the in-continuity version of those events with, probably, a different outcome when it comes to whether or not Damian agrees to deal.

The ceremony itself, with Jim Gordon as a hostage, resembles the classic Joker story "Dreadful Birthday, Dear Joker!" from Batman #321. But this time the Joker is, if not a hero, an enemy of the villain. Senator Vine, whom Hurt seems earnestly to try to protect, gets Jokerized by a "golden domino" in a reference to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one of many references to children's literature in the run to date. Vine's earlier concern that Hurt told him that he would keep the Senator "outta harm's way" echoes the lines Black Glove members spoke when things went sour for them in Batman, R.I.P. Meanwhile, that Hurt uses drug addiction to flip Jim Gordon to his side is reminiscent of the very first page of Morrison's run, with a Jokerized Commissioner Gordon falling through the air, and also makes good on Lane's information in Batman #674 that Doctor Hurt makes slaves of good men. And for Jim Gordon, in an act of betrayal that at once suggests Odysseus and the sirens and Jezebel's betrayal in RIP, to succumb shows that virtually no man is too good to escape his grasp.

We get almost total assurance from Hurt's quest for the casket -- and chagrin that opening it will destroy the contents -- that Hurt is, basically, the same entity we saw as old Doctor Thomas Wayne in ROBW #4, and he uses now as then, the line "in the end". Back then, he wanted it to provide him with true immortality -- the mere centuries of life prolongation that Doctor Hurt has already enjoyed may be something short of eternal life. We know from Alan Wayne's estimate of OTW's appearance that Hurt has aged in appearance since c. 1880, so he may be aging at some reduced rate, but still on a path to die eventually. The key point is that his continued quest for the casket is a very important piece of information about Hurt's nature. While it had been surmised earlier that Hurt may have achieved immortality and true devilish nature between the events of ROBW #4 and RIP, the fact that he has the same goal now as then -- along with his aging -- suggests that he is not so very different, experience aside, than he was 130 years ago. It may explain why he exclaimed "Not like this!" at the time of the helicopter crash -- not that the crash itself would kill him, but that it might keep him from finding the casket and thus doom him to an eventual death of old age, or when his Manfred-like deal with the devil ran due.

Meanwhile, as much as those implications make Hurt seem more like an evil man with a dose of immortality than the Devil himself, Pyg bestows the devilish label of a "goat" in Gotham upon Hurt, suggesting Baphomet, a character associated with Satan. Pyg's rants reinforce that he was broken, like an animal in the experiments of Harry Harlow, to become a more perfect servant to Doctor Hurt, as part of a larger pattern (along with Flamingo and the three replacement Batmen from the GCPD experiment) to enslave good men to do evil. Pyg, eager for a PCP fix and to destroy reason, rambles on about his captivity, mentioning the rats in "Rockville" as a possible turn of the fictional asylum Rockland referenced in Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl".

Meanwhile, the choice of Crime Alley as Hurt's chosen location resonates with the Wayne Murder itself, an event whose centrality to the Batman mythos cannot be overstated. Clearly Hurt knows about this event. Quite likely, he ordered it. But with Bruce Wayne absent, it hints at a larger agenda for Hurt to stage an event here, the same location where the event/fantasy that opened B&R #13 took place.

While Hurt goes about his plan, the Joker plans to strike at Hurt, even though the Joker is convinced that he cannot stop the dominoes from falling. The mystery of why dominoes were name-checked by Hurt and used by the Joker continues, although it seems that the Joker is using dominoes to mock Hurt, for whom dominoes seems to have some other role, larger than the plague already sweeping Gotham, which shouldn't bother the Joker all that much, save that he doesn't get to carry it out, since it is similar to his own vision of mass casualties. The Joker's first casualty in this story is Damian, who falls prey to toxins on the Joker's eyelids and/or fingernails, and has his turn interrogating the Joker go terribly sour. Damian ends the issue upside down, much like Pyg, but with his arms at his sides, with an ironic smile painted onto the tape across his mouth. At issue's end, the Joker plans to use Damian as a weapon against Hurt. Clearly, Robin will not resist that idea, although the Joker will have to distance himself from the freed Damian. Later, the Joker uses toxins to attack Hurt's audience, using popcorn (the "catering" he referred to in his call with Dick) as the delivery vehicle.

If there is a single line in the issue that packs more meaning than it seems to, it is Alfred telling Dick that he has prepared the mansion and the cave as Dick had requested. This has enormous implications. Whatever those preparations are, it means that Dick expects the confrontation to move from Crime Alley to Wayne Manor and even down into the Batcave. As we saw in the flash-forward last time, he is of course right. When he hisses to Hurt "You don't get it do you? You're finished." Dick is speaking of those preparations. That line, in reduced lettering that suggests a whisper, is Alfred telling us that Dick, for all his affinity for timing is going to end this scheme with no more help from Bruce Wayne than in having taught his friend that victory lies in the preparation.

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As has been the case all season, the episode has a single theme driving the beat, and this time it was toughness. The client case, Samsonite, featured the only luggage of the day that strove for durability. The current event de jour was the Ali-Liston fight that marked the coronation of the then-23-year-old boxer, known for his toughness in taking punches, though in this fight, he won early by giving one. The distinction between giving a punch and taking one is useful to consider in the episode's main plots involving Don and Peggy. From the pitched football commercial and the bad news that both Don and Peggy suffer to the state of Don's and Duck's respective livers, the protagonists in the episode take punches instead of giving them. That holds true when Don throws a punch and fails to connect. But he takes punches very well episode-long, and is likely in a far better situation by the end than at the beginning. Because in cultivating Peggy as a confidante, Don has done himself the first favor we've seen in a long time. He may even have hit bottom and rebounded towards a happier future, although this is far from certain.

The counterpoint of toughness, (male) weakness, was inevitably on display. Peggy's uncompelling beau, Mark, fasting without his upwardly-mobile woman to the ironically-chosen tune of La donna è mobile, was in both senses of the word pitiful in turning the shame of being stood up into a noncommittal breakup. Don wept openly in front of Peggy and bemoaned his life in ways beyond the day's signature tragedy. The alcoholics' vulnerability was a token of amusement for Roger, just as Roger's unintended exposure in the form of the found audiotape was a token of amusement for Don and Peggy. The loss of male power was most literally brought to bear in the form of Bert Cooper's unnecessary orchiectomy, a revelation that explains the previously obscure reference from two episodes ago to "Lyle Evans, M.D." that Roger made when explaining to Cooper the eternal animosity he felt regarding the Japanese race. The weakness of the weaker man was also on overt display in the two lost fistfights of the episode: Ali's knockout of Sonny Liston (still rumored to be a fix with Liston having taken, allegedly, an intentional dive) and Don's laying out by Duck (likely fixed more by alcohol than by Duck's war experience).

The point of this episode's theme was not to show several men (and articles of luggage) swapping physical injuries. It is to peel back the characters, primarily that of Don Draper, to reveal their inner core. We didn't see or care to see if Don ended up with physical bruises. We saw instead the evidence of the deeper injuries -- the best answer yet to "Who is Don Draper?" Injured by the loss of his sole confidante Anna (a loss whose impact on himself he notes; the tragedy in terms of Anna herself, he omits), Don hurriedly replaces her with Peggy. This is a turn of events so beneficial to Don that we might surmise that he forced her into the late night of work precisely to help bring about that end. It is noteworthy that of all of Don's many secrets, only a small number of them are still withheld from Peggy by the end of this: Principally, the occupation of his mother; and, the great ruse of switching identities with the first Don Draper (and the latter fact, remember, is already known to half the partners at the firm). It would be a comparatively small matter now for Don to complete the act of coming clean and make Peggy every bit the insider that Anna was. She's a good choice: smart enough to understand him; moreover, he already knows one of her secrets -- the what, but not the who of her pregnancy. Moreover, we see Peggy suffer in the face of numerous gibes, from Trudy, her mother, and Mark, that she is not as young and pretty as a woman in search of a husband could be.

Running the "toughness" angle between the different subplots gets to the core decision facing Don. He sees the boxing matchup as a same battle between approaches to manliness. He hates "Clay" not because he is threatened by African-American masculinity, as Peggy's father was by Nat King Cole's. He hates him because "He's got a big mouth. 'I'm the greatest.' Not if you have to say it. Liston just goes about his business. Works methodically." Liston, as Don encapsulates him, is what Don chose to be in the interview that began this season -- the interview that didn't work because the firm needed Don to be a visible star. The interview that ended the season premiere had Don selling himself like Ali. But this was a put-on. Don still hates having a big mouth to the point that he hides himself, destructively, from the contact that he obviously needs. He opened up a bit to Faye last week, and much more so to Peggy this time.

It's a tribute to the high quality of the series that this episode can offer, spread across Don and Peggy's several conversations, possibly the most open discussion of the creative process that we've seen, and that that seems like the sidebar to the real interest -- what is going on with this particular bunch of fictional characters. And that it matters less that we see the great adman and adwoman trying to find the right pitch for a product than that we see Don working on a more important item: himself, the self that has been edited and tweaked countless times to arrive at this obviously inadequate, all-too-often drunken man on the verge of collapse.

Roger deftly makes fun of the Alcoholics Anonymous members in comments to Don, who sorely needs that advice. Don may chuckle at Roger's comments, but just going about one's business of vomiting in the work bathroom is losing, not winning. Duck shows us, in a collapse that plays out in seconds over a phone call (and later over Roger's carpet), how much a man with his -- and Don's -- problem with alcohol can disintegrate when he tries to be tougher than his problems. Duck shows us a man who is in his professional and social life like Liston laid out before Ali. Don was on the way there last episode, and he's on the path to this outcome midway through this one.

Don is working out the problem of his life all episode long. He's unintentionally speaking of himself when he says, earlier in the long night, "I'm not so sure about it. I mean, every time we get into this, we abandon the toughness element. Maybe there's something to the elephant." The strong, solitary figure, silently trying to resist all that's outside -- Don is the elephant. And as the night wears down, and Don's weaknesses are exposed, he draws more and more strength from turning to Peggy, eventually giving up everything and placing his head in her lap, not as a sexual overture, but out of need for comfort.

If there is hope for Don Draper it is that as he considers holding onto toughness, in the ad and in himself, that he says "The best idea always wins and you know it when you see it and then it happens." After turning to Peggy, he is the Don Draper of Season One again, mystically fresh, with the winning idea. Whatever their clasped hands mean, Don has gotten closer to the best idea about what he needs to be when Peggy asks, about his door, "Open or closed?" and he answers, about a new self who has a confidante by his side, "Open."

Mad Men 406

Peggy recalls the announcement of Don's nomination for a Clio. Don let everybody pat him on the back even though, Peggy reveals, she came up with the idea. And, she tells Stan, Don thought that she was clapping for him. Stan asks her, "Who claps for themselves?"

In this episode, Don, certainly. Also Roger, Peggy, Pete, Ken Cosgrove, Harry, Ned Elliott, Ted Shaw, Danny, the supposed Major General Alvin, and Harry Crane. And, Stan, let it be noted, you yourself. Like most episodes this season, "Waldorf Stories" has a single theme running through each of several subplots and this time it is the desire for and overreaching for credit and acclaim. Three flashbacks simultaneously develop this theme with regard to Roger while also helping to answer the season's central question, "Who is Don Draper?" The flashbacks also mythologize the show's untold backstory, showing us how Don insinuated himself into Sterling Cooper in the days when Roger's hair had some pigment, Joan was the woman on his arm, and Don didn't know how to color coordinate.

We've seen Don bask in the glow of acclaim before. In last season's "The Color Blue", his face told it all when he was recognized for excellence at Sterling Cooper's fortieth anniversary celebration. But only his face. This time, when Don is given recognition but doesn't have Betty on his arm as a stabilizing influence, (and she herself as an ego-sating trophy), the event brings out every worst instinct he has, leading to a horrific all-weekend drinking binge wrapped around two one-night stands who met one another. In this episode's past as well as present-day narration, "Who is Don Draper?" is most easily answered in terms of ambition and a craving to be "a very important man at a very important agency". Past-tense Don wanted to be like Roger. And as the episode also told us pointedly, "Be careful what you wish for, because you'll get it."

The flashbacks show us that Don is much the same man now that he was then, a man whose very syntax works, despite his brilliance, in limited patterns. He tells Roger, "I don't think that's how it goes" and tells Danny, "That's not how it goes." He pitches his ill-advised bid to meet with Life Cereal's executives while drunk by saying "What do you say we put a cherry on this thing?" Later, his pass at Faye begins with "What do you say we get outta here and really celebrate?" And in a pattern larger than mere words and phrases, Don has wished to become like Roger and by now, to an extent that is almost hard to watch, it turns out that he has.

Don and Roger are both successful, but can't be told that enough. The self-defeating nature of such a strong desire for positive reinforcement is put on display many times. Beyond the desire to actually do good work (what Don tells Faye matters, though he's nowhere near actually possessing that mindset), these men and others like them desire the explicit recognition for it to the point of requesting it, and manipulating events to help keep it for themselves to the exclusion of others' success, not to mention to the exclusion of the truth. Roger defines himself to Joan as a man deserving of credit for finding men like Don. But what the flashbacks show us is that Roger didn't evaluate Don's talent; he did everything possible to reject Don and ended up unable to recall hiring Don while drunk; it is a fact either that Roger made such an offer or that Don recognized when Roger was drunk enough that Don could fabricate the story of Roger having hired him without the lie being caught. Certainly the ad men's usual lies increase in frequency when alcohol is mixed in. Don's mid-bender lies to Betty, Doris, and Peggy pale in comparison to his taking the credit for an ad campaign that Peggy thought of. That is, if her memory is accurate, and she's not imagining a larger role for herself in the Glo Coat ad, something that is suggested when she admits that Don came up, at least, with the cowboy concept for the ad.

Peggy doesn't have to worry about suffering the harmful effects of receiving too much acclaim. Any that she deserves for the Glo Coat ad has been directed entirely to Don, and if there were any acclaim left over, Roger would want it. She takes heaps of disrespect from Don and everyone ranging from Stan to Miss Blankenship. And she's not only putting the sexist pig Stan in his place when she uses her bare body to arouse and tease him; she's also getting an ego boost thanks to her body when her career is determined to deny her credit for her mind. Indeed, fact that women could only get recognition for their sexuality is highlighted by the fact that the one woman from the firm who is invited to the awards ceremony is not Peggy, who worked on the prize-winning account, but Joan. In an interaction that we cut in too late to witness, Joan entertains the advance of some unseen ad man, to which Pete says, "That was not a business proposition" and Joan replies, "Catch more flies with honey." Joan may just have received enough positive recognition in her lifetime that she actually cares more about the business ramifications of such an interaction than one more opportunity to have her ego stroked.

The minor characters in the episode provide a veritable tidal wave of moments when they, too, crave their moment in the sun. Lane responds to Harry's Red Skelton story, "I surmise due to the usual nature of your stories that that's someone of note." Danny, whose name is not coincidentally like Don's, puts famous ads by other people in his portfolio. The "general" calls attention to his quilt of decorations. The first of Don's two conquests won an award for a jingle that is the Star Spangled Banner.

Inflating one's self is only one approach to ego. Downplaying others is a path to the same result. While Don has taken the credit for Peggy's work, and to her chagrin is in the process of doing so with Danny.
Astonishing given the later revelations, Don early on tells Peggy, "You finish something, you find out that everyone loves it right around the time that it feels like someone else did it." He means that it feels like someone else, in the abstract, did it even as she knows that she actually did! And she's not above cutting others down when the time comes. When Peggy needs to get back at Stan, she says, with an anatomical second meaning referring to his earlier arousal, "I only changed one small thing".

While Don and Roger are busy illustrating "Pride cometh before the fall", the moment priming Greek tragedy in the episode is when they witness and respond to the public self-humiliation of Duck Phillips, the duplicitous former colleague who sold the company from under them and bedded Peggy in hotel rooms. Duck, a relapsed alcoholic, attempts, but badly, to heckle the presenter at the Clios. Roger and Don laugh at Duck's drunken attempt to capture the spotlight. In the same weekend, they'll both hit resounding lows helped by the mixture of alcohol and ego. The only consolation for Don and Roger is that they go on to do so before smaller audiences.

Batman 702

It's hard to read Batman #702 and be aware that it is, on a factual level, a sort of "clip show", composed more than half of scenes, art, and almost-exact dialogue from previous issues. It shows things we've already seen tied together, mainly, with transitions that are not surprising given what we know. And yet, it raises an extraordinary number of extraordinary questions. Grant Morrison's intertwined "second season" of Batman has five issues to go in Return of Bruce Wayne and Batman & Robin, and this issue seems to hint at momentous reveals for the events in those stories. Though much of this issue sketches out an easy-to-understand pattern, one sees in more than one place a hole in things.

Batman, R.I.P.'s final issue, Batman #681, had a first person narration by Batman himself, illustrated in the style of notebook excerpts. As we read these, we knew that Batman at least survived the threat to his life which was still playing out in the graphical presentation of the story. But that narration left more than one enigma, including the terms under which Batman composed it. By the time Last Rites showed that Batman recovered from RIP at least momentarily, it offered a possible explanation for when Batman performed that narration -- he might have done it during the brief respite between RIP and Final Crisis. But for one anomaly: He says "And so I write this final entry in the Black Casebook". Accepting at that moment that he survived RIP, we don't know of any reason why he would believe in its aftermath that there would be no more for him to record in the Black Casebook. Because he was near death? Because he could no longer be Batman? Because after an encounter with Doctor Hurt there was nothing left to consider mysterious? We still don't know. But it is suggestive that the narration in Batman #681 and #701-702 is all part of one message that is recorded in audio format (and not written) and is composed in a cave at the beginning of time, where Darkseid's Omega trap first sends him. Certainly the narration in #701-702 comes about like that, spoken into a utility-belt recorder while the Omega amnesia rapidly spreads over Bruce, leaving him the nearly-mute cipher he is when ROBW begins. What we learn in this issue is what Bruce knows just before the amnesia kicks in. He's losing his brilliant mind just after appearing in the past. Like the protagonist of "Flowers for Algernon", he knows this, which is why the last line of #701 is "Think fast, Batman..."

An overarching idea in #702 is that the New Gods and their artifacts are platonic in nature -- the essence of things rather than things themselves. There is the idea of horseness and then there are particular horses. You could kill every horse that's alive but the idea of horses would still exist. Morrison portrays the New Gods not as superpowered aliens but as ideas that happen to interact with the real world. As Morrison said in an interview before Final Crisis began, "We discover that all the previous experiences of the New Gods have kind of been projections into the DC Universe, and we’ve never seen the real thing until now." Darkseid, the bullet that kills Orion, and other things are more the idea of stuff rather than stuff itself. The bullet is the archetype of all bullets. Darkseid is the archetype of all terrible beings that have plagued men. And as in Morrison's Superman Beyond and Final Crisis, he writes a story about story. Zillo Valla's line from Superman Beyond #2, "I found a better story; one created to be unstoppable, indestructible! The story of a child rocketed to Earth from a doomed planet..." is reprised when Batman says in #702 that he has "a New Myth of my own. A myth where Ultimate Evil turns its gaze on humanity and humanity gazes right back and says 'Gotcha'." Just as the first line is a synopsis of Superman's origin from Action #1, the second is a synopsis of Batman's; in particular the gazing right back speaks of the origin as told in Batman #47, when young Bruce's "accusing eyes" turn on Joe Chill and terrify Ultimate Evil itself. The Wayne murder, depicted on four different pages, is very much a topic of #702 when it says that the bullets that killed them are mere examples of the idea of bulletness. As Batman says in Final Crisis #6, "A gun and a bullet, Darkseid. It was your idea." At the time, it seemed that Batman was speaking only of Orion's death, but in #702, he's speaking of every such death -- Orion's, his parents, and all others. Granny Goodness' attack is "like Joker venom. Fear Gas. Doctor Hurt's smile. All at once." It is the prototype from which examples are made.

And what is Batman going to do about them? Another moment from the past is when Jim Gordon says to him, "Look at you, all beat up to hell. Why did you have to choose an enemy that's as old as time and bigger than all of us, Batman?" And he answers, "Same reason you did, Jim. I figured I could take him." Like the platonic essence of bullet, this line simultaneously applies to many situations at once. Jim Gordon is referring to the sort of corruption he can see between the mayor and the police in Batman #665. But he sees it as something bigger than one mayor or a handful of conspirators. In time, the line took on a meaning regarding Doctor Hurt, and in its superlatives and the use of "hell", his identity as the Devil.

#702 seems to suggest that Darkseid is the bigger villain than Doctor Hurt, that Darkseid had a causal role in creating Hurt. Bruce, knowing that Hurt has called himself "the hole in things" (the title of #701), decides that Darkseid's fall "made the hole in things". This suggests a literal cause-and-effect relationship, and that Hurt is therefore secondary to Darkseid. I'm not sure that this suggestion is going to prove important to the larger story. The hierarchy of ultimate evils is tangled. In Final Crisis, Darkseid's crimes precipitate the arrival of Mandrakk, but the Monitors had been planning an evil coup when Darkseid's plan was at its inception.

And the "hole in things" seems to have the Evil Gods' number. Batman remarks, of his escape from the Evil Factory, that the Evil Gods hadn't prepared for any of what was then happening, that the best laid plan of Darkseid was also prone to the Hole in Things. Nothing's perfect. Batman finds gods and aliens hard to prepare for. And they, him.

And so, his counterattack becomes an archetype, too. Humanity (not superheroes, a point of contrast all throughout #701-702) gazes back at Ultimate Evil and says "gotcha". Bruce swinging his black-gloved fist at Doctor Hurt in the helicopter. Cowboy Bruce doing the same to Doctor Thomas Wayne in ROBW #4. A new story, a better story. Or, if you'd like, a very old one, Beowulf. Humanity has a representative who will stare down evil gods and strike fear into devils and never give up and never, ultimately, lose. By giving him Ultimate Evil to face on a platonic battlefield, Darkseid makes a colossal error, allowing Batman into a world of "ultimate stakes" where he can alter the myth of evil and give birth to himself. As Morrison said in an interview, "Batman himself is finally standing there to complete that big mythical circle and to have the image of Batman up against the actual personification of evil." The showdown in FC #6 creates what Batman #679 calls "a miracle in Crime Alley". Retroactively, of course.

The time travel itself is not such a complex part of the story. Darkseid sends Bruce back to 9,000 B.C., with regular jumps to other times (circa 1645, 1718, 1880, and 1980, respectively), but always near the vicinity of the cave. Bruce records his message in a brief interlude before ROBW #1 and this message is found by Rip Hunter and brought to the JLA. This takes place at some point in time after the events of Batman and Robin #12, sending Rip, Booster Gold, Hal Jordan, and Superman on a rescue mission that begins before Batman and Robin #13. Bruce's path goes on as illustrated in ROBW.

But this wonderfully ornate story has two other levels of complexity. One, in known references to earlier stories in the Morrison Batman era. We see his memory of the discovery of the well that connects to the Batcave and his imagined funeral from Batman #673 as well as the funeral from Neil Gaiman's Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader? There are logical and thematic connections from Final Crisis, ROBW, Last Rites, and Batman #665.

But the more intriguing references are those which are left dangling without clear resolution. The missing portrait is a clear reference to the Old Thomas Wayne character mentioned in B&R #10 and seen in ROBW #4, and if we merely find out that he is the basis of Doctor Hurt, then it only confirms what has been coming into focus in recent issues. But the issue also has a stunning visual pointer in the depiction of the gates of a "Willowwood Asylum" which is a very obscure pointer to World's Finest #223 and the 1974 story of a pre-Crisis "lost brother" of Bruce's named Thomas Wayne, Jr. This brother was the subject of a brain trauma during childhood that left him mentally unstable, so he was therefore incarcerated in Willowwood Sanitarium. Why is Morrison showing us a pointer to that story?

Many fan-detectives have guessed that Doctor Hurt might be Thomas Wayne, Jr. The Bronze Age stories of Bob Haney have not been acknowledged by Morrison until this time (nor indeed, were much acknowledged by other DC writers at the time). Hurt has already declared himself to be a "dark twin". Could Morrison be opening the door to Thomas Wayne, Jr. being in continuity again, and if so, could he, rather than Old Thomas Wayne, be the body of Doctor Hurt? The answer to the second question is almost certainly "no." Thomas Wayne, Jr. was only three years older than Bruce, whereas Doctor Hurt was an adult in 1978, clearly too old to be the son of Thomas and Martha. The Devil in this story goes far back into the past, and if Morrison were to bring back Thomas Wayne, Jr., this would be quite separate from the origins of Doctor Hurt. The pages showing Willowwood remark on time being pliable, so this may be from a timeline that did stay with us, but only winked in and out of existence as Darkseid turned the Ancestor Box to craft a trap for Batman.

And that brings us to the issue's final chain of suggestive associations. The Ancestor Box (like "Rock of Ages'" Grandmother Box, taken to the platonic, inductive step of generality) has a many-tentacled thing creeping from and about it. Perhaps the hyper-adapter creates the hyperfauna seen in ROBW #2. It is likely that of which Jack Valor cannot speak and that which Alan Wayne calls "sickening." But almost certainly, a box with bells is the same one that is associated with the casket that has become the McGuffin of ROBW and B&R. This is not a great surprise. Somehow, Bruce gets to the end of time, and somehow he stops Green Lantern and Superman in their tracks; a Mother Box is a likely tool for accomplishing these things. It is interesting, though, that something pertaining to the New Gods would also supply "The bells of Barbatos". Whatever blocked the radio transmissions of Dick and uses eclipses as portals for Bruce's jumps, it seems to tie all of the larger story's demons and devils together into one myth, one mythology, and one central hero. Batman #702 is a grand telling of that myth.

Mad Men 405

The Chrysanthemum and The Sword, Ruth Benedict's 1946 study on the culture of Japan, rests on the central premise that Japanese culture exerts influence on the individual through the threat of shame. In contrast, many Western subcultures such as Roman Catholicism rely on guilt as a comparable motivational force. The distinction comes down to whether or not one must be caught to feel punished. Shame as a motivating force is an apt lens to hold up to Don Draper, who is avidly immoral when certain of not being caught but is consumed with the fear of having his secrets found out. Whether or not that book or this idea offer accurate insight regarding Japan, the distinction between guilt and shame is the central principle for the episode as a whole.

In the episode's central non-business subplot, the idea of guilt and shame are at the forefront of Sally's two peccadilloes. When Sally cuts her hair in an obvious bid for attention, everybody's care is for the shame it might bring upon them: The sitter's reaction is "Your dad is going to kill me... Do you understand I'm in worse trouble than you are?" Don's reaction is that when Betty finds out that he will be "in a river of shit" and he presents Sally with a hat covering her hair, to stall the revelation a moment longer. Finally, in a darkly comic circuit of mutual shame, Betty believes that Sally's misbehavior is for the purpose of publicly punishing Betty herself for the divorce.

Later, when Sally is caught masturbating, Betty's reaction is a spotlight on her hypocrisy: She tells Sally that this is not to be done privately or publicly, but later tells the psychiatrist that it's something she herself did and still does ("mostly outgrew it"). Shame becomes an endlessly rising canon: the resort to psychiatry itself is something that Betty has hidden from Henry, and that Don wants to keep from the world, asking the dense Miss Blankenship, "Lower your voice, please."

Don has always been a reliable source of hidden truths. Early in the episode, a crushing blow to him is contained in a brief interaction with Miss Blankenship: A call to California has gotten no answer. Cultural references ranging from "Help Me, Rhonda" to Selma, Alabama place this episode in March 1965. Months after Don's visit with the real Mrs. Draper, she is likely succumbing to cancer, and Don no longer has anyone with whom this many losses can be acknowledged.

In fact, given the supposed overarching distinction between Japan and the West, the only person in the episode who comes across as a firm representative of the West is Roger Sterling. Though he's utterly isolated for putting a stubborn war grudge ahead of business interests, the principle driving him is all internal: "I made a pledge to a lot of men you'll never meet not to do business with them." He may as well be abstaining from sin in order to please the heavenly saints -- Roger absorbs heaps of shame upon himself to stand by that principle, with xenophobia that is as reprehensible as it is brilliantly executed, with barbs covering unconditional surrender, the atomic bombings, and seppuku.

Maybe because of the particular subculture of advertising, "where the truth lies", anybody driven more by guilt than shame should likely have found an exit long ago. Don, putting his much-lauded brain to use by reading the episode's eponymous work of nonfiction (he channels George C. Scott's Patton: "Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!"), devises a stratagem to destroy his personal adversary Ted Shaw, depending on Don's ability to make the Japanese executives lose face in his meeting with them. Don, who could just as well be speaking of himself when he quotes "A man is shamed by being openly ridiculed and rejected. It requires an audience." correctly understands that the Honda executives can be controlled with shame, and so he launches a plan involving a fake commercial, and he manages to manipulate his nemesis into providing the stimulus for that shame. We should not be surprised if Peggy later cites Don's scheme after he criticized her for staging a fight over smoked ham in the season opener. If all of the racial stereotypes advanced by the episode were true, it is hard to imagine that the translator could bring himself to tell his bosses "You did not honor your own rules." This capped a masterful deceit to drain both cash and honor from Shaw's ad agency, set to the caper jazz from Season Three's finale.

To be successful, drama relies upon character development and not just character. The surprising twist in this episode may be that Don is growing rather that spiraling towards a fall. His "Japanese" outlook is eminently on display when he expresses amazement that a trapeze artist would confess to Dr. Faye Miller a key truth about his relationship with his father. "He said that?" Don asks with characteristic distaste for such personal revelation, especially where one's father is concerned. "Why does everybody need to talk about everything?" But the more he talks with Faye, the more he starts to open up. Soon he's talking about his divorce, his kids, Sally's problems -- just the sort of things one would expect Don to hide. The great mystery laid down by this episode is: Why does Don open up to Faye? Is it that he sees another shallow Betty in the all-too-similarly-named Bethany? As he loses Anna Draper, is he looking for someone to share the truth with? Does he see in the PhD with the fake wedding ring, which she ironically removed as a facade within a facade last episode, someone who lives as he does, with three-level lies? Or maybe he's not developing at all, and thinks that opening up might be a way to win another battle in his never-ending war for sexual liaisons with every attractive woman around him. Thus far in the series, Don's simple self-serving motives have yet to be trumped, and could just as well have been the subject when Joan asked "Not very subtle, are they?" and the translator ogled her signature physique while answering, "No, they are not."