Silly Little Country

Mad Men Recommendations

Almost as much fun as watching Mad Men is commenting on it and reading the comments of others. There are a lot of entertaining sources, but I am becoming utterly engaged with Tom and Lorenzo. Not just with the weekly episode reccaps, but with the (to me) apparently quite knowledgeable occasional analysis of the week's fashion. It must take SO many people to make such great entertainment so rich.
Enjoy this for last weekend's episode. They really do deepen the experience of the show for me, no fashion maven. You get really good observations like:

Notice that the colors in Sally's dress; the pinks, yellows, and greens; are all picked up in the outfits of the other women in the scene, except for Betty. The other woman have a connection to Sally at that moment through her pain and despair. Betty seems to have no connection to her at all.

Of the women in that beautifully framed shot, it's the three on the right that are one bookend for the episode, the epiosde's fabulous closing scene in the elevator. Megan, (BTW - Canadian content - and even better, at least for a role like this, French-Canadian) in her yellow, is clearly not quite worthy yet of such a scene, but the fact that a sort of yellow is the color worn by the only two people in the episode to listen to Sally hints to me Megan will be more important.
Another great resource is Slate's Mad Men Corner. That link rather arbitrarily points to one post, but it is a post that starts with a statement I rather agreed with:

The gods of Mad Men smiled kindly on us this week. We asked for Sally to walk the halls of SCDP. We asked for Betty to remain off-screen in Ossining. And we asked for Don to please, please stop writing in that diary. The episode obliged us on all three fronts—although it was a close call, there, when Don briefly opened his journal and picked up his pen.

Well, Betty did in fact come on-screen, but after a wonderful dressing-down of Don who thought he could fob his renegade daughter off on Mom yet one more time in short order.
That journal was a conceit whose time has not come; I think it should never come again. And I want way more Sally in the future; that actress is someone I suspect I will be a seeing a lot of on-screen for the rest of my life; she was magnificent in that episode.
And a thought from Tom and Lorenzo about Joan in her PJs and glasses:

From a style point of view, there's not much to say about this look except that she looks adorable. We wonder how long she's been wearing glasses and we pray a pair of Ida Blankenship cateye frames aren't in her future.

Amen!
One thing also that is a lot of fun is noticing how differently people read a lot of scenes. Basket of Kisses' (the premiere site - thanks, Lipp Sisters) first response to S04E09 seemed to feel all three women in the elevator were in great turmoil but I am not buying it. Peggy almost has a smile, and I think Tom and Lorenzo have that. She has a little interest in Abe but I am pretty sure she has no wish to shape herself like a pot to hold his soup:

Look at their differences and what each outfit is saying about them. They are all three career women in their own way. Faye has arguably worked the hardest out of all of them to get where she is, since she pursued an advanced education. Her look is the most business-like of all. Peggy wandered into her career and found that she both loved it and was good at it. She's still a bit wide-eyed about what it means on both a personal level and an ethical one. She is dressed the most youthful; the most "girly." Joan used her looks to make her way and now that the world considers her looks outdated, she's struggling and possibly falling back into old romantic habits. She is dressed the most...romantically, is the word we'd use. Swirling florals of pinks and purples that hint at her confusion and the depth of her feelings.

And nobody should forget Sis as a source of weekly comment. This week she caught me up with a great comment about one of my favorite lines from this weekend's episode, Peggy's remark about civil rights and her problems. While listening closely to the script could have caught me up there, it did not - there is too much going on to keep up in real-time. And while I feel corrected, I also understand Peggy's view, though how she thought anyone could have pushed his or her way into Sterling-Cooper is curious, given that she got in as a secretary, and just lucked out when Don hit one of his few insightful moments, that she had some talent.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 2:38 PM