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more ideas for next post lostcosmonaut June 23 2012, 17:08:14 UTC
also, for some reason season-long-story-arc tv is my favorite catalyst for psychological reflection these days.

mine, too, if that hasn't become obvious -- it's pretty great, isn't it? Now that novels for adults have become irrelevant as shared culture, and feature-length popular films are either pretty narrow in scope or insta-forgettable, long-form TV dramas are our novels. I mean, I read a lot of comix, too, and they're great for thinking, but if I start talking about Yuichi Yokoyama on el jay or F-book, something like two people will know what I'm talking about.

Another admirable thing about th show: it seems to elicit real talk like nothing else -- especially on sexual poltics, a topic that can get heated in a hurry and seems to need that extra level of distancing that fictional abstraction provides. I.e., I doubt th present conversation would be as civil if we were anatomizing yr relationship (about which I know nothing, of course) or my marriage (about which you know nothing, although I might have mentioned in a recent ( ... )

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danschank June 23 2012, 18:34:35 UTC
Nobody has to suspend disbelief when Don marries a woman who makes him feel happy and who makes him feel "like himself" when no other woman has done that.

i think faye (and maybe potentially rachel mencken, had she stuck around) made don "feel like himself" in a deeper way than megan does, because she made him feel like the self he actually is (i.e. chauvinistic and manipulative in addition to intelligent and attractive) rather than the self he'd like to think he can become. you can't get to YYMB without a clear look at YYA, to bring it back to your post!

there's something about men choosing women of mystery who haven't found themselves yet that strikes me as kind of yucky on premise alone.the other part of the sentence is more important than the "mystery" part - it's the idealization of women who haven't found themselves yet. this is also why peggy leaving SDCP is so encouraging - it denies don the role of surrogate father (and author-by-proxy of her accomplishments). don has woody allen syndrome - he likes the "smart-but-not-as- ( ... )

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my sad little book report lostcosmonaut June 23 2012, 23:52:26 UTC
all right, our perspectives on Don have a chance to converge a bit here: Peggy's leaving SCDP is certainly a hopeful move -- for her and (I hope, ultimately) for him, too. He hits a low point when we see him on his knees kissing her hand, and still trying to take credit for her work -- it's pathetic, and I never want to see him there again. While it's appropriate for him to see himself as a mentor to Peggy, since that's exactly what he is, it's v. unbecoming for him to act this way. It ought to serve as a wake-up call, and it does. Later, when th two of them bump into each other @ th movies, he gets hit by Part 2 of that wake-up call: Peggy suggests that instead of being hurt for being left behind, he could be happy for her success. Next we see him experiencing wake-up call #3 in private, watching Megan's screen test in his office, seeing something special in her on screen, th way he first did in person in California. But he knows that helping her get her big break might put distance between them, literally and emotionally, ( ... )

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