<p>Digression- I recognized a “buyer” on House Hunters International as a realtor in that country. Completely fake. But I also knew a buyer on regular HH and although the show was edited for dramatic purposes, it was in fact real.</p>
<p>Thought Mad Men was so slow moving. Giant bore. Huge disappointment.</p>
<p>Great recap and review of the season 6 opener:</p>
<p>[‘Mad</a> Men’ Premiere Recap: The Jumping Off Point | Movies News | Rolling Stone](<a href=“http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/mad-men-season-premiere-recap-the-jumping-off-point-20130407]'Mad”>‘Mad Men’ Premiere Recap: The Jumping Off Point – Rolling Stone)</p>
<p>Anybody else think this series won’t end without Don finally going out that window (in some fashion)?</p>
<p>@vitrac, my neice’s brother-in-law and sister-in-law were on House Hunter’s International and it was real. She was on for a sec, too. </p>
<p>Is this the last season of Mad Men? It would be too obvious for Don to jump out the window. Too predictable.</p>
<p>@OhioMom-I once rode around the Hamptons looking for the house that was featured, found it, and met the buyers (real) who were featured. Some might say I need to get a life.</p>
<p>Betty now looks like Henry’s mom…paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud…
Always great to have Mona and Roger (married in real life) together in a scene.
Bad feelings about the status of Dinkins…
Episode dragged so jumped back and forth to GoT.</p>
<p>@Vitrac - Like.</p>
<p>I enjoyed the show, but can’t say I understood several things? </p>
<p>Who is the girl who played the violin? Why was Betty so focused on her? I thought the guys in the house would rob her but they didn’t? Why is Betty so fat and why did she change her hair color?
Why did Roger not like the guy who came to the funeral? Why did Roger only cry when he learned the shoe guy died? Why did Don go after the doctor’s wife?</p>
<p>It looks like Don will end the season by jumping off?</p>
<p>There was an article on front page of our paper this morning about how they just filmed an episode in Waikiki set in 1967. Should be showing soon. Photos of shoot were lovely. They based it off period photos.</p>
<p>Roger cried for the shoe guy because they had interaction…they “met” once a week as opposed to Roger’s mother/son relationship. One senses that he never saw or talked to her. Roger gave his daughter a tremendously sentimental gift of the water from…the Sea of Galilee (?) so that his grandchildren and great grandchildren would be able to be forever linked…and daughter wanted the money. The shoeshine guy gave Roger his life’s work…linking them together…</p>
<p>Betty was pregnant last year (?) in real life. Her character arc is on a downward spiral. In those days a wife"s job was clearly defined…no escaping that she could see. So she is fat (not good), cold and not a 25 year old beauty anymore.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree. I think Roger was immensely touched that the shoeshine man gave Roger his shoeshine kit compared to his mother who left everything to the zoo.</p>
<p>
Probably because the Julliard-wannabe girl, her daughters friend, reminds her of how she used to be an ambitious young girl. She changed her hair color because I think one of the kids in the home shelter commented how her blonde hair was dyed.</p>
<p>I thought Roger cried for several reasons. He was emotionally spent. He is holding back all sorts of feelings about what he could have been as a son and father and husband. He sees an enactment of his talk about doors right in front of him: he’s the only one who called about the shoeshine guy not being there - and that wasn’t out of concern, we know because we saw the scene where he wants to know where the guy is. It’s all so empty. Here’s a man’s life in a box, handed to him by the man’s family. They don’t care about the box, it seems, any more than Roger’s daughter cared about the water from the Jordan in which her father and she were baptized. Where is the sentiment when you can feel the end approaching?</p>
<p>I have mixed feelings about the episode. It was meant to disappoint, with Don’s failure, with Betty’s failure, with Roger’s failure, etc. But I also thought it was more of a ground-laying episode than we’ve seen before. </p>
<p>The agency is obviously doing well: the crew is working on an ad for Dow, so they’ve picked up business from one of the biggest advertisers in the country. They have Sheraton as a client. Despite the pitch not going well, that is the basis for a campaign once it is refined. Not all meetings go well. Remember, it is less that Peggy did well and Don’t didn’t then that Peggy had to handle a crisis and Don is just at the beginning of a campaign for Sheraton. The point, I think, is they’re at different points but they’re also the same: they both see through what others do and they work through the problems until they find the right solution. Remember, Don also talked about how taking the word “love” into the kitchen cheapens it so they need to find a better alternative. That scene was brilliant, as was Peggy dismissing the 3 lines her subordinates developed because they were just one idea said 3 ways. </p>
<p>I think the overriding message of the show was that you are what you are even as the world goes haywire around you. This is the year when that happened in the world: assassinations of MLK and RFK massacres, the Tet Offensive (giving lie to the notion we were winning), riots and a machine gun emplacement on the steps of the Capitol. But the people are the same. Under the hair. There are brown nosers trying to get ahead. Unhappy people trying to stop being self-destructive. People wasting their lives. Last year, at a college forum I asked the Exec Producers how they would handle the intrusion of the world into the characters’ lives and they were very clear: life is not the headlines but sometimes the headlines shape what you say and think and do even as the petty attributes of your life continue. They said they want you to experience the headlines through how the characters live their daily lives. </p>
<p>I’ve been thinking about The Inferno, which I’ve read. A main message is simply: Abandon hope, all you who enter here. The rest of the book describes the various forms of hell, from limbo, which is rendered as the hell for the unbaptized no matter how good they were, through lust all the way to treachery. The book’s aim is to make you repent by showing you what happens if you don’t. But I think the message we saw was more: abandon hope.</p>
<p>Abandon hope. Betty leaves the violin on the floor and walks away. Can’t find her. Can’t fix her. Her daughter closes her bedroom door in Betty’s face. Can’t reach her. Can barely talk to her and now her daughter calls her Betty instead of Mom. They grow up and you can’t control them, if you ever could. Abandon hope.</p>
<p>Your mother is dead. You barely know your children. You’re divorced … again. You have another child you’ll never get to know. Every door you open leads to another door. Perhaps the doors are like the journey Dante and Virgil take across the River Acheron into hell. Perhaps it means: repent. Perhaps it means you can’t repent because you are what you are. See Claudius in Hamlet. See Don Giovanni. </p>
<p>You have a wife who adores you. She works to bring sunshine into the darkness she knows is in you. You can’t hold it together long enough to stay sober for one day without her. </p>
<p>I had trouble with the Doctor’s wife affair for 2 reasons: it must have been going on before the men became friends because we see that happen and I can’t understand how on a night with a blizzard Don could disappear and then slide into bed without a question. And how he must have smelled of this other woman. I think a meaning is that Don may be, along with her, in the 9th Circle, the one reserved for the traitorous, because it is not merely Lust - circle 2 - but betrayal of one of the few men Don has seemed to genuinely like. If there is any foreshadowing in that, then we can’t expect a great turning in Don’s life. I can’t believe they chose this person for this affair casually without understanding this is a different form of betrayal than with affairs past. It isn’t merely a betrayal of Megan but of the part of Don that reaches past women to the world of respect among men. He respects the Doctor. He likes him. He betrays him. </p>
<p>In many ways, the “stepping off point” is exactly what people have said but the implication is that Don is getting on the boat with Charon to cross over into eternal suffering. I think they set up the ambiguity in that very well: we want heaven, but we’re incapable of making it happen. Life intrudes. We are who we are and fail because of who we are. We can’t help those we want to save. We can’t even reach them. Poor Dinkins probably dies in Tet. </p>
<p>I expect a struggle between heaven and hell. I remember 1968 well. I was 11. We watched our soldiers struggling to take back our embassy in Saigon. The massacres by the VC at Hue. The siege at Khe Sanh. Kids dropping out. Drugs spreading through my suburban neighborhood, driven by fear it was all collapsing as Soviet tanks crushed Prague’s Spring. But the struggle will be in the daily lives of the characters.</p>
<p>^^^ impressive post - just watched the show, and was confused, but you brought the episode into focus, ** lergnom ** - well done.</p>
<p>Eloquent, Lergnom. I also think Don is in one of the circles of hell. The first long scene, at Waikiki is so dreamlike. Don doesn’t say a word until he is in the bar with Pvt Dinkins. The flame twirlers and the drums…The Inferno. He can’t get rid of that lighter, it follows him.</p>
<p>Drunk Don asking the doorman what it was like to die and come back. “Did you hear the ocean?”</p>
<p>Really spooky. Okay maybe he is not going to physically jump out the window. But my money is on him seeking death. His Royal Hawaiian ad campaign seems to indicate that is all that is on his mind. The experience changed him, he said.</p>
<p>The fact that the news and major happenings not in NYC have very little impact on their lives is very realistic. Most of us move along our path and the outside world has very little impact on our route. Especially as we get older.
Also teenage girls often are hell on their mothers. In 10 years they will be over it.</p>
<p>Lergnom,that was a great post. Could you do this weekly for the rest of the season? :)</p>
<p>I wanted to add one of my favorite images was the slides of Hawaii using the Carousel. We remember the great pitch to Kodak when he changed the name from “the Wheel” to the “Carousel” because it brings you the scenes from your life, from the lives of those who matter to you and at the end you’re back at the beginning. Besides the humor of an upside down slide, the meaning changes from “These are the memories you cherish” to “This is the you you can’t escape.” Go around in a circle and you’re back to the same unhappy you. That is now Don’s challenge: can he repent and save himself?</p>
<p>I’m most reminded of Claudius’ speech when he prays but knows his prayers fail because he did wrong, killed his brother and married his wife, and he knows he did wrong but he can’t give up what he gained. He is stuck. Is Don? Is he enough afraid of dying? Of what that means? Does he feel he’s worthy of paradise? </p>
<p>As I remember, the Doctor’s wife says something like “Did you enjoy my Inferno?” I think the reference, even the fact she gave it to him, says something about her view of herself as a sinner. There is a crucifix on the wall but she is married to a Jew. He is a Jew who saves lives, who is such a good man that he skis to the hospital in the early hours of New Year’s. But he is a Jew and he would be condemned to Limbo though he is a very good man. It’s her book so she knows that. So where does that leave her? To enact her sinful nature? To bring out his? When he says “I want to stop doing this” is he saying I want to repent … or merely to escape? And when he betrays this Jew, is Don re-enacting Judas in a minor way? </p>
<p>I’ll bet the next episodes shift mostly to other characters so they don’t need to address these issue head on.</p>
<p>The whole Jewish (lifesaving) doctor & Christian (cheating) wife was very jarring for me, and sort of unsubtly done. I hope the writers flesh out whatever idea they were trying to convey here. </p>
<p>I was also startled by the conversation between Betty and Francis about raping Sandy; we know that Betty at times feels maybe less than sexually thrilled by Francis, but describing rape, insinuating it would be a turn on for her seemed extremely aggressive for a woman who rather excels in passive aggressive. </p>
<p>Would love to hear your take on these scenes - you too, Lergnom!</p>
<p>One more thing - yes, Don on the ‘devaluation of’ love was a great scene. Ironically he’s saying this within the hearing of the man whose wife Don’s sleeping with… But I think he’s wrong about the Hawaii ad: it WAS about death/suicide, and Don’s inability to see that shows just how little insight he has (at times) into himself… and also that he’s simply not in with the zeitgeist anymore. </p>
<p>Peggy snapping about her writers’ inability to tell a concept from execution was also a very clever way to show just how good Peggy’s at this stuff. (Tho I certainly wasn’t wowed by her ultimate slogan for the ear phone ad.)</p>
<p>All day I was thinking I hope Lergnom comes on here and explains what the hell that episode was about. </p>
<p>Who knew Don was in the circle of hell? I was confused.</p>