#eugene draper

[madmen-caps]

[clayduckling]

Baby Gene in Mad Men makes me so sad.

He's constantly ignored, sent out of the room, never shown any affection - even by his siblings.

I know that's probably how some children were treated in the 60s, but it still just makes me sad to see a wee boy so emotionally neglected.

[madmen-caps]

[princessrhcenyra]

don being DISGUSTED by the thought of naming his son Gene

[plasmapoolplasma-blog]

Mad Men: The Special Relationship

This essay is part of “Point-Hyperpoint: Mad Men,” a rollicking series of posts devoted to discussing AMC’s drama series. Spoilers abound. To read the entire series, please visit this page. To see all of Plasma Pool’s “Point-Hyperpoint” discussions, please click here. Guy walked into an advertising agency, and he never walked out. (Or walked anywhere, ever again.) As Guy McKendrick, Jamie Thomas King joined the expanding team of Mad Men guest stars who stroll in, dominate an entire episode, and then disappear (in this case, quite definitively). Still, although he was only uncrowned King for less than a couple hours, he made quite an impression. Flirting with Joan, man-flirting with Don, casually instigating shit with everybody but Harry Crane (lesson learned this season: British people like them their TV Department) ... I don't know about you, but I was totally convinced that he was going to stick around for awhile. You can't say he didn't pour his blood, sweat, and tears into Sterling Cooper. British jokes, this episode had plenty! Just as Season 2 of The Wire taught us that that there's a whole world of Polack humor lurking in the urban enclaves of the Eastern Seaboard, and Season 3 of Deadwood taught us about the lost race of Cornish people, so Season 3 of Mad Men has reminded us that, forty years ago, before the era of postracial humor and white-person self-deprecation, the most fertile ground for SFW naughty ethnic humor were our transatlantic neighbors. I've lost track of the number of references to the Revolutionary War, but Roger made a joke about the Union Jack. He also had the line of the night: somebody mentioned Guy might lose his foot, and Roger shook his head, "And right after he got it in the door." Everybody had a good blood-drenched laugh about that.

Last night scored high on the Hitchcock Index, my mental measuring stick for how much casually surreal imagery the creators can slip into the show's typically restrained aesthetic. During Guy's presentation of the new org chart, he kept walking back and forth in front of the projecter, and his enlarged shadow kept blocking out the screen. I thought it was foreshadowing how completely Guy would dominate Sterling Cooper, but quite the opposite; if Guy lives on at Sterling Cooper, it's only as the terrifying memory of a disaster better forgotten, like a Hiroshima silhouette. There was also the Phantom Barbie -- so effortlessly organized onscreen, with that horrifying payoff from Sally's POV, with Barbie sitting right across from her. A good week for Draper parenting, all the way around!

In corollary to the old writing adage Chekhov's Gun, we now have Weiner's Lawnmower: Don't introduce a top-of-the-line John Deere personal transport mowing device before the first commercial break if you don't intend to have a half-drunk secretary fail-out run it over the new boss's foot. Poor Lois. First she tried flirting with a gay man; then she couldn't even be the lucky girl who the gay man actually married; then she totally Chester Arthur'd herself out of secretary-ing for Don Draper, a job which historically brings people tremendous financial reward and/or office sugar daddies. Actually, now that I think about it, this was probably the best thing she could have ever done for Sterling Cooper. Did you notice how nobody even mentioned her after the accident? Were there no lawsuits for this kind of thing back then?

Other observation from this week: Apparently everyone but me had already guessed that Connie from behind the bar was actually Conrad Hilton. Mad Men has tended to avoid major historical figures (except via television or movies), but I'm wondering if that unofficial policy is going to change as (a) Sterling Cooper (and Don) become a larger part of the Mad Men-verse mediascape, and (b) the media and advertising in general become more central to the American way of life as the 1960s roll along. I can't imagine someone incredi-famous like The Beatles (though they're less than a year away from hitting Ed Sullivan -- Season 4 premiere, perhaps?), but perhaps backroom dealmakers like Robert Moses, or visiting foreign artistes like Jean-Luc Godard? All in all, I would say that this episode was one of the best ever -- it felt like it had just the right mix of Draper House with Sterling Cooper. I'll leave you to discuss Betty's horrifically failed make-nice gift from little Gene to freaked-out Sally. I'm considering going back over the run of the season and trying to figure out how many episodes end with Don at home surrounded by his family in a moment of zen. You can tell that he wants so badly to be a good father, but he only seems to find the strength to do so when his job is so all-encompassing that he has no time for extracurricular extramarital activities. Don would be the perfect husband if he could only work all of the time. What did you think about that scene between Don and Joan? Watching it was interesting, because it made me realize how surprisingly little these two central characters have ever had to do with each other. Sure, Joan was his replacement secretary between the foot murderer and the new Mrs. Sterling, but these two characters so completely represent/dominate their respective genders, it's almost as if there were a magnetic field keeping them halfway across the office from each other at the same time. On a lesser show, their little moment would indicate some kind of affair in the future. I don't think that's going to happen, but isn't this the second time in the season that Don has had a let's-call-it-a-moment with a female coworker? Exactly what does that mean for Don Draper and society? Hell, come to think of it, he meets all his women through work! Rachel Mencken, Bobbie the agent/wife/talent manager ... did we ever hear definitively how he met Midge?

[plasmapoolplasma-blog]

Mad Men: Postpartum Repression

This essay is part of “Point-Hyperpoint: Mad Men,” a rollicking series of posts devoted to discussing AMC’s drama series. Spoilers abound. To read the entire series, please visit this page. To see all of Plasma Pool’s “Point-Hyperpoint” discussions, please click here. Like all odd-numbered episodes, Sunday's Mad Men was about the way that people's best laid plans don't always work out the way they want. As usual, we saw all sides of the situation: plans in their inception, as seen in Peggy's belief that Don's life is exactly what she wants; plans on the brink of being realized and all the terror that comes with standing on that precipice, as seen in the case of prison guard Dennis Hobart; and plans that have already been realized but haven't worked, and yet they still get trotted out again in the hopes that this time will be different, as seen in Don and Betty's hope that little Eugene Scott Draper will make everything better. There have been complaints that nothing major has really happened in this season, and I suppose that's true. This episode finally gave the haters what they wanted with the birth of the newest Draper, but Mad Men handled it with characteristic disdain for the standard importance of such an event. I can't remember ever seeing a trip to the maternity ward without a scene of the actual birth of the child -- it's practically TV and movie law that there needs to be at least four shots of the mother pushing hard and nurses and doctors telling her to push. Hell, even Peggy got this scene back in Season One, and I'm not even sure we've learned that kid's name yet. But we never saw Betty's labor pains, instead getting Mad Men's first extended dream sequence, albeit one sadly devoid of talking fish, Annette Bening, or horses. (I will stop making Sopranos references when Mad Men stops being like The Sopranos, dammit.) Instead, Betty and the audience meet the new child at the same time, after a hazy period in which birth maybe the third or fourth most interesting subtext. Baby Eugene is almost an afterthought, someone who just happens to appear because it's his time, even if no one really seems to be that thrilled about his being there. Dennis beamed with pride when he learned that his son was born, but we see nothing similar with Betty and Don -- if it happened at all, it's withheld, an emotion seemingly superfluous to what's actually going on here. Their new child might as well be Geena Davis's maggot baby in The Fly or the whatever-the-fuck from Eraserhead. He was supposed to make everything better, or at least more tolerable. In his review of this week's episode, Alan Sepinwall argues that Betty thought the baby would fix everything, and while I'm not sure I'd go that far, she certainly assumed it would bring her and Don closer to each other. That's still possible, I guess, but with Don developing typical adulterous feelings for Sally's teacher, it seems like only a matter of time before that falls apart. Even outside of whatever Don's doing, though, Betty clearly isn't too thrilled with the reality of having to care for another child. The fantastic final moments of this episode put Betty on the threshold of Gene's room, in a pregnant pause before comforting him. It seems clear that the realities of caring for a baby never really entered her mind prior to this moment. Expect long days caring for Eugene as Don comes home right before bed time, Betty, because it's unlikely Don will be attentive to three children when he hardly spends any time with Bobby as is. And what of Eugene Scott's name? In typical Betty fashion, she's made a nice gesture because it seems like the right thing to do, but it's not apparent that she has any clear conception of her relationship with her father. As we saw last week, Gene didn't quite like what Betty has become, and she seemed entirely unwilling to face the reality of his failing health or care for him in any meaningful way. now Betty must take care of a Gene that can't take care of himself; there's no way she can shirk her responsibility without being seen as a monster. Naming the baby after her father is essentially a misplaced coping mechanism just like Sally's hitting another girl in the head at the water fountain. Her daddy issues are bound to come to the forefront now. Here's hoping it doesn't end in television's first simultaneous Electra/Oedipus complex.

[princessrhcenyra]

LMAO DON!!!

[princessrhcenyra]