Capital New York

“I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and they’ve changed my gun, and everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”
– Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

‘Mad Men,’ in a dark wood | by Starlee Kine | Capital New York

Another kind of “for white people” work is much easier to grasp. It conveys up front the notion that white people are a breed apart, morally, spiritually, intellectually. “Birth of a Nation,” “Gone with the Wind,” and “The Searchers,” yeah, sure, but also the first scene of the first episode of HBO’s “The Wire,” a moment that seemed so condescending to me that I could go no further with the series that virtually every white writer I know loves to pieces.

The opening of the series is a murder-scene conversation between a young hood-rat witness and a sage, world-weary white detective about the death of a lowlife named Snotboogie:

MCNULTY watches as the body, now bagged, is hauled into the back of the MORGUE WAGON.

MCNULTY: I got to ask you. If every time Snotboogie would grab the money and run away, why’d you even let him in the game?

WITNESS: What?

MCNULTY: If Snotboogie always stole the money, why’d you let him play?

WITNESS: You got to. This America, man.

The WITNESS looks away, oblivious to the poetry of it. MCNULTY turns around, takes in the scope of the tragedy that is Baltimore.

Yes, of course, the Witness wouldn’t grasp the poetry of his own words. Of course, this is McNulty’s moment to sigh deeply at the “tragedy that is Baltimore.” This America, man.

“Mad Men” doesn’t condescend in that way, but I still find it hard to relate to. Money and status seem to be on the line in nearly every encounter. That’s why one character, a formerly slim, icy and glamorous blond who has become plump and was rechristened by “Mad Men” fans on the internet as Fat Betty, is a tragicomic figure in this show’s universe.

The direction and music seemed designed to convey that nothing is sadder than being overweight and shoved to the margins of the rat race. Betty is living through the aftermath of a divorce and a cancer scare, sure, but the fact that she can’t suffer these misfortunes in style, like Jackie O strutting down Madison Avenue, compounds the tragedy. It made me think of John Cassavetes’ brutal kiss-off to middle-aged Gena Rowlands in “Opening Night”: “You’re not a woman to me anymore.” Fat Betty is the flipside of chubby, lonely but bubbly Queen Latifah staring down the abyss in the comedy Last Holiday.

Steven Boone on the very white poetry of “Mad Men”

If we’re going to keep running with the Superman thing, which the show seems fine with doing, Don Draper’s kryptonite is his mother issues, specifically the ones involving the prostitute who made him an orphan by dying in childbirth (I found it interesting that the brothel madam from last week resembled the type of woman who Fat Betty is supposed to be turning into) and the stepmother who threw that fact in his face, the same way Megan does at Howard Johnson. Later, in a flashback, Sally wants to know if there’s a way back to vacation world. Roger wants his youth back, Ginsberg wants to be back with his people on their home planet, but Don just wants Megan, who makes him feel the closest sensation to being a child himself than he ever has. The thought of her abandoning him brings him to his knees. He may just want to hold her hand but his hulking frame is in danger of squeezing the very life out of her.

Superman Don gets a whiff of Kryptonite as ‘Mad Men’ trips out | by Starlee Kine | Capital New York

Starlee Kine of This American Life is recapping Mad Men through the eyes of the women on the show for Capital New York:

The show’s female characters seem now to have arrived at the forefront of the action at the same time as they did in the course of American history. There were so many different types of women interweaving through that office last night that it wouldn’t have been presumptuous of Fellini to have demanded a posthumous consulting credit. Even when they weren’t on screen, they were being talked about. Everyone is interested in hiring a girl, upending a girl, giving their soul over to a girl. And interwoven throughout comes the desperate, muddled searching, the quest to find new categories to place them all in.

Stunning, behind-the-scenes photos on the set of Mad Men.

New art by Alexandra Citrin.