1.
The other night, four of us sat around the table in an airy, sparse loft apartment in the Marais: J — my non-marital male partner of 10 years; S — Paris resident and J’s oldest friend, for whom he stood as best man when she married a woman 20 years ago; M — S’s current non-marital partner (male); and me. M speaks not a word of English, only French and a bit of Arabic, but is gregarious no matter the company; S speaks accented English and French (native language = Taiwanese); J speaks and understands only English; I speak English and decent French, some infantile Korean. S and J are both significantly older than M and me and are great cooks; S and I earn most of the income these days and both travel regularly for work. Only J has children.
We dug in to a giant communal bowl filled with three kinds of shellfish, a plate of white asparagus, and a platter of oysters. The dinner cost 15 euros total, plus a bottle of 5-euro wine. We talked about S’s recent stomach-removal surgery, after a late cancer diagnosis, and the French healthcare system; J’s daughters and our new puppy; the grapevines growing from a pot on the windowsill, finally bearing raisins after three years; tennis (playing and watching) and taekwondo (M is a brown belt); S’s upcoming sci-fi film project in Berlin and the book that I am researching this summer in France.
It was Sunday evening in Paris: family supper. In the moment, the rather odd details and dynamics of our group were quietly subsumed and absorbed; we were just being together, enjoying our time, without much thought.
J and I came home to our tiny AirBnB rental in Belleville bearing leftovers and in good spirits — much better spirits than after other dinners we could remember, dinners with the families we refer to as “real.” It was late, but J pulled up Netflix on the laptop, and we crawled into bed. We’d been churning through old seasons of Mad Men — partly because we can’t get enough, and partly because I was trying to write something about the current season. The opening sequence came on, that pulsing, percussive theme, and just as it started beating toward its diminuendo, I hit pause. “I’ve got it,” I said, “I know what I’m writing about.” I’d been brainstorming out loud for a week, since the half-season finale. I clicked onto our video library, found “The Strategy,” the penultimate episode, and scrolled to the end.
There they were: Don, Peggy, and Pete, supping together at a Burger Chef — “a clean, well-lighted place” — the image saturated in rich turquoise and red. At this point, Don and Megan have quietly called it quits, Pete just fielded Trudy’s You’re no longer part of this family, and Peggy has lost the only steady in her life, Julio, the neighbor boy who comes by to watch TV.
“What if there was a place where there was no TV and you could break bread and, whoever you were with, that was family?” Peggy had asked, happening upon her brilliant pitch for their newest potential client during a late-night work session with Don. They both knew her concept was good; they needed Pete to get on board. And so they gathered.
Two weeks before, I had beheld this image, actually shaking my head in awe. This is it, I thought. The whole series in a nutshell. This is what it’s about. The image — the moment — was both surprising and inevitable; in other words perfect. And after our beautiful makeshift dinner with our motley family-of-choice, the poignancy of that moment crystallized. If Mad Men is itself a kind of advertisement — a reflection and dramatization of our deepest desires, the ones we didn’t know we had — then its message is both timeless and markedly modern: family is everything; we are hungry for family; your “real” family are, simply, the people who actually know you.
2.
We’re in a golden age of TV; we all know this. There is so much good TV to watch — just look here and here and here. Today’s best dramas are serials, requiring, thus, commitment. If you are a person with, you know, other obligations — you have a demanding job or small children or like to read books (maybe you’re even writing one) — it’s impossible to keep up. You must prioritize. Of all the great TV to choose from, what grabs you and won’t let go? What must you make time for, week after week?
I have watched six-and-a-half seasons of Mad Men, now twice through; that’s nearly 8,000 minutes, or 130 hours. Evidently, I’ve established my TV priorities. But next comes the inevitable question: Isn’t this really a colossal waste of time? “It’s great entertainment” may cut it for 100 minutes of The Hangover, but the demands of serial TV these days call for deeper justification — a substantive understanding of value. And if you are a literary person, there is that nagging additional requirement: your TV shows must do all that literature does; must do it even better.
Mad Men is far from perfect; despite the show’s popularity, the case for a favorable value-to-time ratio is not necessarily self-evident. On the interwebs, critical chatter spins endlessly: Don is an asshole, Don is boring, Don is getting old and fat; plot lines are riddled with non-sequiturs and inconsistencies, too frequently straining credibility; back stories are overly foregrounded, or confoundingly obtuse; the scripting of politics and racial dynamics is clunky, smug, and sometimes offensive (not in an ironic way); the hairstyles are over the top!
There is truth in all these criticisms. Like all ambitious, voluminous work — like an epic novel — there is bagginess, missteps. But also like a great novel, each viewer is grabbed by something different: a particular through-line keeps her watching, crowds out the shortcomings; a specific narrative or emotional thread compels devotion.
One could argue that an artist aims for this, prefers not to think about “overall audience appeal,” but rather to focus on creating a captivating world, characters, ideas — hoping that a great wide audience is responsive by virtue of depth and universality. Matthew Weiner confirms this idea:
What I mean and what it means to people are not related to each other and none of my business. All I have to do is get my house in order when expressing it, but when people get it and own it, that’s your dream…Sometimes, you put down a steak and they think it’s pudding, and that’s all you can do.
Roger Sterling could not have said it better.
3.
It’s all about family. About knowing and being known. Real family. Once I saw it, I couldn’t un-see it.
J hrrmphed. The idea wasn’t coursing through him like a current, and I couldn’t imagine why not. It’s true that Matthew Weiner would hate the idea of Mad Men having some overarching “message,” and yet, I am convinced that the creation and dissolution and re-creation of families — literally and conceptually — is Weiner’s steak; no way it’s pudding. In gathering for family dinner, the Don-Peggy-Pete triumvirate enacted a Great Convergence — of three physical bodies, along with a clan of invisible secret selves. Their so-called “real” families were also present — specters of dysfunction and failure, but muted in the wake of Technicolor clarity.
Has it been a colossal waste of time? For me, the Burger Chef scene was pay-off, big time. There is so much that ties these characters, inextricably, to each other, so much that has evolved. It seems inconceivable that Peggy was once Don’s wide-eyed secretary and that she mooned over Pete, all the while carrying his child; that Don once fired Pete and that Pete threatened to reveal Don’s identity as the army deserter Dick Whitman; that Pete once said to Peggy, “You know me, you know everything about me, and I know you, and I think you’re perfect.” Among them, they’ve inflicted cruelty and betrayal all around; and they’ve shared just as many profound moments of recognition and mutual respect. For those of us who’ve lived through the complexity of these intimacies, all of it culminates perfectly at Burger Chef. It’s true that the show’s infamous opening sequence evokes solitary free-fall, and the characters themselves express feeling alone; but we know different. Don, Peggy, and Pete have each survived much, and they’ve done it, despite themselves, together. They’ve been there, for and alongside each other — not just like family, but in place of.
(Notably (J reminded me), Peggy has never been explicitly apprised of Don’s alter-life as Dick Whitman; and Don never asked about the father of Peggy’s baby. Not on screen, anyway. But such is the nature of the trust and familiarity among them: there is a feeling that all is known, even if not spoken. Put another way: if it were spoken, each would feel that he/she had already known.)
It seems at times implausible that these characters go about their days in such close proximity, pitching and collaborating and strategizing around conference tables, smirking and drinking scotch with their feet up. How is it that these subtexts matter so much and at the same time not at all? Is this how life is really lived? I would say, No, not really. In our world, one wouldn’t work side by side, year after year, with so much water under the bridge; the bridge would have flooded and collapsed long ago. Again, these are the behaviors of family, not co-workers. But Weiner and company achieve believability, to my mind, by virtue of a quality that these three characters share absolutely: ambition. The subtexts are functionally subsumed because, for Draper-Olsen-Campbell, more than any of the others, the work matters. Success matters. From the beginning, it is for these three that this craven, insipid business has truly meant something. Advertising — and winning at advertising — is their blood tie.
4.
The extended family equally enthralls. Roger and Joan are the more jaded and battle-wounded big brother and sister to their entitled younger siblings Don and Peggy; and they share yet another unspoken family secret (baby Kevin). Young Sally comes of age, prevailing over Betty’s attempt to use her as a tool of revenge by acing her family tree project — “Daddy’s first wife” Anna Draper included — and by seeing something authentic in her father’s love for this mystery ex-wife. On the topic of Anna’s terminal cancer, Anna’s sister tells Don that he has “no say in the affairs of this family,” but the viewer recognizes her villainy: Anna and Don exemplify pure family, agape — unconditional love between the strangest of bedfellows, their kinship born of deceit and a peculiar mutuality. Sally and Glen nurture their close-cousins bond, battling disapproval all the while (Betty, boarding school, adolescent peer pressures), and yet we see in them a version of the same powerful knowingness shared by Peggy and Don.
On the flipside, “real” family falters, again and again: after announcing over dinner that she and boyfriend Abe are moving in together, Peggy says to her mother, “It’s important to me that you understand what we’re doing…I want you in my life” — to which her mother replies, “I need my cake…because I’m not giving you a cake to celebrate yas livin’ in sin.” Pete’s old-money/squandered-money parents, while alive, are stingy and cold, through and through, and when his father dies in a plane crash in Season 2, he goes straight to Don: “I don’t know what to do…What does one do?…Am I going to cry?…Everything’s exactly the same.” And of course we know more than we ever wanted to about Don’s whorehouse boyhood. We’ve also seen divorce after divorce after divorce: Don (twice), Roger (twice, plus daughter Margaret estranged), Joan, Pete, now Harry Crane (always late to the party, but still finding a way to crash). Remember when divorcée Helen Bishop was such an anomaly?!
My favorite moment of traditional family gone awry is the closing shot of “At the Codfish Ball” in Season 5, when Megan’s parents join Don and Roger, along with Sally, at an advertising awards ceremony: the Calvet’s are on the outs, and Sally has just walked in on Megan’s mother Marie fellating Roger; Megan is pissed because her father has just accused her of “skipping the struggle” and giving up her dreams; Don, for once, is clueless. The family members take their seats around the table, awkwardly sipping drinks and staring into the What-the-hell-am-I-doing-here unknown.
The one core relationship that currently puzzles me is that between Joan and Don: Don respects Joan and has been nothing but decent towards her (Season 4: he takes her for a joy-ride and drinks after her loser husband serves her divorce papers; Season 5: he tells her not to sleep with the skeezy Jaguar exec in order to get the business). In Season 7, she votes him out of the company — twice. “I’m tired of him costing me money!” she shrieks. Perhaps Don deserves it, but I find myself wanting him to make Joan feel like shit about her lack of loyalty, to the family. There is something regressive about Joan in the end — she is Colette’s bohemienne dancehall girl, always orderly, her garments pressed and hung, her gold hidden in a secret compartment in her purse. Some interpret Joan’s Season 7 refusal to be Bob’s sham wife (we all know by now that the handsome upstart is gay) as a show of self-determination; I read it as precious and fundamentally conservative. Why can’t Joan have both love and a benevolent provider? Bob sees that these are not mutually exclusive, which is why he offers it, no strings attached. But Joan hasn’t understood yet about real family; she’s still trying to configure herself into the conventional formula.
5.
And now I can add another 500 minutes to those 8,000 — more time spent thinking and writing about what all this mental investment means.
In an interview with Salon, Matthew Weiner said:
I try to make it so that every season finale could be the end of the series. I plot the story out that way and deliver it that way.
Had the Burger Chef snapshot been the end of the series, I would have been thoroughly satisfied. This tells me that, given the unsavory horribleness of so much of what happens on Mad Men — the lies, the pettiness, the violence and despair and random acts of betrayal — I need to sense some sort of moral vision when all is said and done. By “moral” I simply mean endowed with meaning, somehow adding up (even if 2 + 2 = a flying unicorn, or pudding, for that matter). For there is no value without meaning, and it’s value that I’ve set out to uncover here.
It doesn’t much matter whether Weiner intended this meaning or not: he rendered it so — patiently and in fine detail, I would argue — even as he goes about writing merely “what interests me and what I’m feeling.” His vision is moral — it invokes questions about what matters in this life, and whether those things are attainable — but certainly not deductive or conclusive. The family supper at Burger Chef is filled with longing, mostly unfulfilled, and fear — “that I haven’t done anything, and I have no one” — as Don put it. The visual image evokes the haunting solitude of an Edward Hopper painting, the verbal reference is to Hemingway’s story of aging and the great void (nada y nada y nada). Loneliness and disconnection are diseases of the human condition; the many variations of family that we construct seem to reflect this chronic, sometimes fatal, condition.
And, of course, “The Strategy” was not the final episode; that there are seven episodes to come in 2015 is for me both exciting and worrying. What will happen to my cherished, epiphanic through-line? My Technicolor image of convergence and poignancy? What shenanigans will Don commit, how will the vectors of trust and intimacy shift?
6.
M and S do not have a television in their apartment. This is Paris, small-dwelling capital of the world, and a TV would dominate the room. They’ve been discussing it, though — how much to spend, how big the screen, where to put it — in preparation for the World Cup. “But don’t you want to watch it down at the café with other people?” I ask, channeling Peggy. “Isn’t it a kind of communal thing that brings Parisians together?” S nods, M shrugs. I realize that behind the decision is a desire to spend more time together, at home, given S’s health. Will they buy this television? How will it change their life? Perhaps they will host more Sunday dinners around the table at home. In a year, we’ll be back in Paris, and Mad Men will have concluded. As they say, stay tuned.
Image courtesy of the author.
This is understandable. Unlike its peers, The New Yorker publishes 50 issues a year, each one containing a short story or a culled novel fragment. Until a poorly-paid graduate student sets out to write a dissertation on the stories of The New Yorker, we have only subjective opinions as to what constitutes one of its “typical” offerings. Arguably there is no such identifiable thing as a New Yorker story (other than the story being well-told and the writing edited to an immaculate state). The magazine publishes a wide repertoire of stylistic and artistic modes, spanning realism and postmodernism, fables and modern-day fairytales. More to the point, the diverse array of recent authors includes George Saunders, Etgar Keret, Joy Williams, Charles Yu, Robert Coover, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith. With such an eclectic group of authors, does the fiction of The New Yorker have anything in common? Perhaps critics may argue a sizable portion of the magazine’s stories concern the lives of the middle-classes and that the characters are generally heteronormative and/or white. Indeed, Marlon James once complained in a public Facebook post of highbrow magazines privileging a certain type of story that appealed to “older white women critics.” For James these stories were “Astringent, observed, clipped, wallowing in its own middle-style prose and private ennui.” Whether completely fair to The New Yorker or not, perhaps the Díaz-chosen stories in The Best American Short Stories offer a different demographic of readers a chance to see less represented voices and read about the unfamiliar inner lives and struggles of a more diverse set of characters. Perhaps change is taking place from the bottom-up, in the so-called little magazines.
So are the stories, like, good, or…?
Perhaps read the stories for yourself and decide…
Ok. So the point of this piece is…
Have never been able to grasp the popularity of Junot Diaz. The Oscar Wao book was far and away the most overrated novel of the last decade.
Diaz is pretty much a straight-up racist. A friend of mine (a Caucasian woman with a Latino boyfriend) went to one of his readings a few years ago and tried to talk to him and he completely ignored her until her boyfriend arrived. Then Diaz got all smiley and friendly with her; a complete and total phony, she said. The goal is to pick the BEST stories. If that happens to be 20 white guys, so be it. If it’s 20 black women, so be it. “Celebrating the multitudes” is code for quota-ism. Who the sitting president is has absolutely nothing to do with art. Anything with “Best” in the title should be judged blind, on merit alone. The author should be irrelevant to art anyway, but some people, when given the power to select things, cannot be trusted to not let their identity politics get in the way (ie: Sherman Alexie, who was famously punked and admitted that part of the reason he chose a poem for a Best American Poetry anthology was because he thought its author was Asian).
It’s easier to “address the problem” with quotas than it is to reverse the momentum of American culture and interest “minority” kids in reading… reading broadly, even, outside of their assigned zones. That’s where Writers come from: Readers. Talent is a numbers game… the larger the pool of wannabe-writers to choose from, the more likely you are to produce a few genuine talents.
Of all the kids who are currently book-mad, in America, how many will carry the obsession through into high school and then college and from there to the first wobbly steps as Writers themselves? Statistically speaking, most of these kids are going to be “white”… and most of them will be mediocre. A handful will be pretty good. One in a blue moon will be a Great Writer (and it doesn’t help that TV/movies have moved (and widened) the goalposts: people seem to think, increasingly, that a Great Book is anything featuring a character arc. The technology of Lit is becoming an arcane practise; too few Writers and an underwhelming surfeit of Scriptwriters).
Now apply that above-mentioned winnowing to the much smaller starting-pool of “minority” bookworms… the odds are depressing if you care for Lit. If you want Great Writers of Color, you have to expand the pool by improving the initial conditions. Quotas and Hype won’t change a thing. And, in the meantime, we’ll just keep getting this shameful shitstorm of award-winning Meh. Coming soon to a theater near you.
Sean H,
Both disagree and agree with this comment. As far as Diaz’s selection in this BASS goes, he is free as guest editor to apply whatever metric he wants. If, in his opinion, a part of being “best” is a for a story to concern a relatively unique or underrepresented cultural experience, and not, say, a failed dinner party in Brooklyn, so be it.
I will entirely agree, though, about Diaz being an asshole and phony, as well as a misogynistic self-promoting scumbag who enjoyed every institutional privilege imaginable on the way up, and then shit on everyone who helped him in order to aid his bs anti-establishment pose. And yeah, Oscar Wao sucks.
BASS has been shit for a long, long time, and isn’t getting any better. Junot Diaz has always been shit. That is all.
Why was my comment on “Forty-Two” censored? It wasn’t any meaner than other comments in this thread.
Happy for the diversity fetishists. But it can’t be the “best” by definition. It’s now the Best Most Diversified” American Stories.
No. It means the New Yorker doesn’t dominate as much.
Richard Albarino,
“Happy for the diversity fetishists. But it can’t be the “best” by definition. It’s now the Best Most Diversified” American Stories.”
I see. So if, say, TC Boyle picks a story for BASS that he finds compelling, both in terms of writing style and subject matter/milieu, we can assume he brings none of his own biases to the table, and is picking mostly white people solely based on merit. But if Diaz picks a story using his own metrics, about subject matter/milieu he finds compelling, we should assume he is making biased choices, and that the enterprise is no longer merit-based.
Do you see what a completely obvious, racist double standard this is? As I said upthread, I cannot stand Diaz personally or artistically, but come on people, you can do better than this.
White male bad
I’m not usually big on the term “white fragility,” but if there’s a better example of it than this thread, or the general pearl clutching displayed on this site any time the idea of diversity is put forward, I’d like to see it. Or no, I wouldn’t.
:/?
I tend not to like the term white fragility, as it immediately puts people on the defensive (see: your response), but it describes a real thing, i.e. white people’s incredible sensitivity to the notion that the deck might be stacked in their favor or that they might have their own identity biases (see: this thread, and any other like it on this website when notions of diversity are put forward).
The responses here of “white people bad” and “down with whitey” are perfect examples. No one is saying white people are bad besides you–it’s just a defensive reaction when notions of inequality are put forward, an oversensitivity to having to think about identity and privilege, and a resulting impulse to turn any minor criticism into “Oh, you just hate white people.”
Hope that helps!
Does anyone know who this year’s editor will be?