Good time? Bad time? ~ Don’s secretary, Allison

Yes. ~ Don

It’s the best of times and the worst of times in our tale of two revolutions:  the macro one in 1960’s America and the micro in advertising, as personified by our feisty young agency, SCDP.  New Year’s is traditionally the “out with the old, in with the new” holiday, but in this week’s episode of Mad Men, the shifts and changes pile up before the Christmas gifts are even unwrapped:  Our old friend Freddy Rumsen is back, Peggy comes up with an innovative approach for selling products, Don feels the loss of his children, Sally has a new admirer (as does Don), Peggy is a born-again virgin and then fallen woman, and Don slips to a new low while tripping over an old high.

People coming into the world, people leaving it, everything happens there. ~ Phoebe the neighboring nurse about why she loves working at a hospital

Here’s a riddle you won’t find on any psych test:  How are office Christmas parties like hospitals?  Because people take their clothes off and play doctor -- and anything and everything can happen.

SCDP’s Christmas party is all set to be a modest fete, the ever cost-conscious Lane Pryce having scaled it down to a parsimonious Anglo-American marriage of “a glass of gin and box of Velveeta,” but that’s before Lee Garner Jr., AKA the client from hell, drops into town and pushes his way into the affair. Forced to scale up to meet Lee’s fantasy of a Madison Avenue party such as he’s seen in the movies, Roger wisely puts Joan in charge of the show. And a show it turns out to be, a set piece in an episode rife with facades, secrets and deceptions.

In welcoming Freddy back, Roger immediately confesses that the agency is “Potemkinville,” slickly designed to hide the fact that they’re dangling by the thread of one sadistic client. Even Jane’s sleek decoration of Roger’s office in trendy Pop Art minimalist style seems duplicitous, reminding Freddy of an Italian hospital (an apt comparison for a place where a lot of operating goes on) and prompting Roger to worry that the all-white décor will literally make him disappear into the woodwork.  (Never fear, he’ll soon be suited up in red and all too visible.)  Happily, other staff come into clearer focus in this episode, as we once again experience Joan’s delicious mastery of any situation and Peggy’s creative strength. We also get a frisson of the still-lingering attraction between Joan and Roger when she shows up at the Christmas party in her red dress with a bow, the outfit Roger has longingly recalled her in.  (Can this be the same Joan who refused to be a bird in a gilded cage for Roger? Is she saying she might agree to be tied to him in other ways?)

Mark:  In Sweden they make love the minute they feel attracted. And it’s healthier because you can find, you know, the perfect person.  Because making love is a very important part of making a life with someone.  The most important. In Sweden anyway.

Peggy:  Where did you hear that?

Mark:  I read this article, “The Swedish Way of Love.”

Peggy:  You’re never going to get me to do anything that Swedish people do.

Peggy, who has avoided a common fate of women in that era (especially those who wanted careers) and hidden neither her intelligence nor her competence at work, continues to find personal life far more complicated. Whether because she fears emotional entanglement, a loss of independence or another pregnancy, she’s resisted her boyfriend Mark’s entreaties that she do more for him sexually than he can do for himself, and doesn’t correct him when he assumes she’s a virgin. Mark may not be the most astute at reading women, but he’s smart enough to be an early adopter of a soon-to-be-trendy argument that many men in the 60’s used to talk women into premarital (or even extramarital) sex:  The Swedes do it!  Clearly he missed the memo about Peggy being Norwegian and the great divide between the two lands. 

In the end, Peggy is swayed not by his cultural argument but simply by her wish not to spend New Year’s Eve alone, or perhaps even reverse psychologized by Freddy, who advises her to play hard-to-get if she wants him to marry her.  Despite telling Freddy she does want to get married, it seems she doesn’t want to marry Mark, but also isn’t ready to go back to the likes of Duck to satisfy herself – although from the look on her post-coital face in bed with Mark, she may have to.

We’re leaving as soon as I find you. ~ Bobby to Sally 

 At Chez Francis, a more sinister secret is unfolding as Betty’s old friend Glen reappears in the neighborhood, his mother having re-married, a development which has turned Glen into an expert on parental divorce.  Having spied Sally at the Christmas tree lot where he’s working (he’s the proud bearer of the twine to tie them up), Glen takes a shine to her.  After bluntly informing her that her parents won’t be getting back together now that her mom is doing it with someone else (“Doing what?” the naïve Sally asks), he elicits that she “hates it here.” With the grand literalness of the young, Glen assumes that the house she’s living in is the problem and after assuring her that she’ll be moving soon, he arranges to break in with a friend and vandalize the place.

But Glen (whose new crush on the age-appropriate Sally is somehow even creepier than the obsession he had with Betty) seems to have overestimated the phlegmatic Henry, who worries about getting a Christmas tree that will “hit the ceiling” but seems never to do so himself, and who calmly and immediately decides that kids must have done the nasty work that has struck fear into his wife. You’d think he’d register some anger or disgust, but it’s obviously going to take more than breaking a few eggs to crack Henry’s composure – at least when it comes to someone trashing what is still after all Don’s house. (And there’s always Glo-Coat for that floor anyway.)

Everybody leaves the moment you have to clean up. ~ Phoebe

You’ll have to change it from convalescent hospital to Roman orgy.  ~ Roger instructing Joan on the Christmas party

In the set piece of the episode, the Christmas party intended for an agency on life support is orchestrated by Joan into a masterpiece of deception, with all hands on deck playing the part of happy carefree employees at a successful ad agency.  From the food in gleaming silver chafing dishes to the select bottles of wine to the party games, the sure hand of Joan guides the play just as she heads the conga line – all to deceive and please key client Lee Garner Jr. of the Lucky Strike tobacco company.

We already know that Garner is a sexual harasser and general scumbag, but in this episode we learn that this closeted gay man is an open sadist. Aware of the power he holds over the entire agency, he gleefully puts them through their paces, forcing Roger to play the office Santa, including posing with each of his employees on his knee so Lee can try out the Polaroid camera they’ve given him – a gift which he’d at first seemed touched by, recalling how it felt as a child to get something for Christmas you’d really wanted. But it seems what he really wants is to see other people squirm and suffer for his enjoyment.  While Freddy has earlier said he feels like the Tin Man, it’s Lee who’s a tin-pot dictator lacking any evidence of a heart. 

Man the battle stations. And don’t forget: it’s a party. ~ Joan

It’s been too long. ~ Roger

No, just long enough. ~ Freddy  

In the midst of all this deceit comes an honest man, “Ready Freddy” Rumsen, who is no longer living up to his surname, and who proudly announces that he has been sober for 16 months. Always honest to a fault, Freddy lets slip to Peggy that the client he’s brought with him (from Pond’s) is a fellow AA member who he has to dash off to rescue after Roger tempts him into a major slip, before giving her (at least initially) unsolicited and unwanted advice about how to get a guy to marry her.  In both his personal feedback and his work, Freddy's hopelessly old-fashioned (and not the kind Don likes to drink) which Peggy points out to him after becoming frustrated by his retro suggestions for stars to sell cold cream as well as his promotion of the dead-on-arrival “the choice of professionals” as a good slogan to sell a beauty product.

I feel like I’m getting sucked into that thing.

~ Freddy about Pop Art painting in Roger’s office

Even Freddy engages in self-deception, still seeing himself as the leader, and not grasping that he now works for Peggy, rather than vice versa, and as a freelancer at that. Giving her orders, ignoring her ideas and taking her chair, he ignores all hints that time has moved on, and that the agency as well as the world has changed while he was away getting sober and working at the more conservative J. Walter Thompson agency.  He wants to sell cold cream as a way for older women to look better – a thinly veiled reflection of his own need to pass as competent and survive in middle age – while Peggy (based on her personal experience of the product) sees the opportunity to market it as a way for women to pamper themselves. 

The shift from selling based on fear to selling based on pleasure was a key turning point in advertising that reflected wider societal changes driving people’s behavior. We’re a few years away from the Summer of Love, but Playboy has been around for years, the Beatles have arrived, the Pill is available, the economy is booming and conspicuous consumption is well underway, only to accelerate like a Ferrari in the decades to come. From a contemporary perspective, when $4 coffee drinks are considered a necessity and designer goods are purchased even by people of modest income, it’s hard to recall how radical a notion the scriptwriters have placed into Peggy’s mouth. The idea that people, especially women, might do something purely for pleasure was an attack on hundreds of years of Puritanical culture that would consider even having such thoughts (much less acting on them) unquestionably sinful.  As media (including advertising) began to replace both church and state as arbiters of human behavior, “if it feels good, do it” would shift from a radical concept held only by those far outside society to a commonplace sentiment of American life.

In a nutshell, it all comes down to what I want vs. what’s expected of me. ~ Fay Miller to Don

Such insights are broached by a consulting company that Bert has brought in to coach his staff on consumer psychology.  The “Motivation Research Group” is run by Bert’s old friend Geoff, who thinks that Medicare is the first step towards full-on socialism  - a not unusual belief among conservatives in that era (one voiced by Ronald Reagan in a famous commercial, in fact) but feels like a rare instance of Mad Men going M*A*S*H and slipping in pointed commentary on our own time through the lens of the past. But the Group also boasts the more progressive views of one Fay Miller.  Done up to closely resemble that famous pop psychologist of the time, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Fay wryly sends up her own reputation as the groundbreaker who figured out the best way to sell feminine hygiene products was by showing women dressed all in white. Despite that, she doesn’t whitewash the truth for Don, who evades the pencil and paper psych test she asks the staff to take after he finds out that it asks such questions as, "How would you describe your father?” and “Who makes the decisions in your household?” 

In this and the later scene in which Don talks to Fay in his office at the Christmas party, the writing feels too bald, given it’s not exactly news that Don doesn’t believe in headshrinking or even self-awareness.  Having him sneer, “I just don’t see how knowing about my childhood will help me sell floor wax,” feels like paint-by-numbers dialogue, as does Fay’s rejoinder that his Glo-Coat commercial is “about someone’s childhood.” (Although Don is right -- he was able to channel his undigested feelings into a successful commercial rather than go through all that unpleasant self-examination.)  After brushing off his flirtation (always Don’s go-to move to recover his manhood when it feels threatened), she finishes by nailing him with the fact that statistics say he’ll almost certainly be remarried within a year – a prognosis that Don treats with a shocked look befitting news of terminal cancer.

I’m sorry. I always forget -- nobody wants to think they’re a type.

~ Fay to Don

We’re tightening our belts. ~ Don, unironically ironic 

So how is Don coping with all this work stress and familial separation while maintaining his long-held denial about the impact of his past? Why by drinking himself to death, of course. He would do well to pay attention to what Freddy tells Peggy about the risks of playing an assigned role:  “It’s been my experience that when they give you that Santa suit, there’s already a bottle in the pocket.”

The suit of a 1960’s mad man also comes pre-loaded, and it clearly takes enormous strength to resist reaching for that bottle. Always a serious drinker, Don is now a committed alcoholic, consuming mass quantities whenever he can, and regularly coming home so drunk that his neighbor, the nurse Phoebe, comments that he always grunts when he opens his door.  He’s too far gone to notice that she also compares him to her own drunk of a father while helping him undress, too drunk to exercise his usual discretion and not sleep with his secretary after the office Christmas party, too drunk to even notice that Roger is trying to help Freddy stay sober by declining a drink at the office – and when Roger is the one acting soberly, you know you really have a problem. 

Except that Don doesn’t know it, and is unaware that his own staff (who in the past were nearly worshipful) now talk about him like a child who has to be taken care of and even deem him “pathetic.” For a man who disdains the couch, he’s been logging a lot of time on them, whether sleeping off a hangover in his office or passing out on the one in his apartment.  He may not go the fully Freddy and wet himself, but it seems certain that some humiliation or disaster awaits Don before he realizes that he’s destroying his life.

In the meantime, having made good on his promise to his secretary, Allison, that “you will be getting a bonus even if I have to see to it myself” (although perhaps not in the way he originally intended), he tries to gloss over his lapse of judgment by refusing to talk about it directly (gee, how unusual for Don), instead coyly apologizing “for taking advantage of (her) kindness on too many occasions” and thanking her in a trite card for all her “hard work” (ahem), while ignoring the crest-fallen look that his evasion and rejection brings to her hopeful face.

This is the office and that’s life, and this is good and that’s life.

~ Roger to Joan, on their past

The wheel has indeed turned when it’s Roger who is sounding as wise as a Zen master and it’s Don who’s the drunken fool thoughtlessly sleeping with women he should leave alone. Christmas may come but once a year, and perhaps Roger’s maturity and insight may only visit that often as well, but for the moment, it seems the designated driver at the agency is the white haired guy, the one who could swallow his pride and hold his temper to play the fool for the client they desperately need, and who could flirt with and appreciate an old love while acknowledging the reality of their changed circumstances. In last season’s “The Grown-Ups,” Roger told his daughter and son-in-law that the world was looking to their generation.  In the evolving question of who will survive the radical social changes that are unfolding, the money has always been on the younger Don, while Roger has seemed hopelessly stuck in the past, a sexist drunken relic.  But I think he may yet surprise us, becoming that white-haired but hip guy who doesn’t embarrass himself with love beads or tie-dye, but instead finds a deeper meaning in the freedoms that begin to open up before him. 

He’s a helluva sport. ~ Lee about Roger