Mad Men – The Color Blue
In one of my favorite, if slightly predictable, scenes from last night’s episode, Paul Kinsey manages to inspire intelligent ad copy despite his drunken late-night office escapades. The pleasure of the scene comes both from Peggy and Don’s surprisingly sympathetic responses to a familiar writer’s tragedy (“I hate when that happens”) and, of course, from Peggy’s impressive on-the-fly thinking. Trying to find the benefit of telegrams over phone calls, Peggy hits on Paul’s wistful Chinese aphorism, “the faintest ink is better than the best memory” and turns it into copy for Western Union. A telegram, unlike a phone call, leaves a permanent physical trace that can be framed and kept as a memento. After railing against Peggy’s use of her gender, which Paul views as an unfair advantage, it’s deeply satisfying to watch him gape at Peggy in amazement when she turns his own idea into the concept for a great ad campaign.
Eat your heart out, Paul Kinsey
The scene is about Peggy earning her male peer’s respect in the workplace, something she deserves and has often been denied. But as is so often the case on Mad Men, the shallow, manipulative ads, which appeal to our basest instincts and unthinking emotional responses, also provide important subtext for other aspects of the plot. The many plot threads were so thoughtfully, subtly entangled in this episode that it’s almost a shame to pull them out and set them against each other in a comparative way, but nevertheless: thanks to Betty finally submitting to curiosity and breaking into her husband’s locked desk drawer, we now understand that the faintest ink may be better than the best memory, but it’s also far more dangerous.
What, after all, is Betty examining as she sifts through the documents in Don’s shoebox, his tombstone for Dick Whitman, but pages and pages of faint ink? She finds pictures that say “Dick and Adam, 1944” on the back, a deed to a house in California under the name Anna Draper, and most damningly, a decree of divorce between Don and Anna Draper. The documents are dangerous because they live in a permanent, physical place outside Don’s ever malleable, ever playacting identity, and for some reason he can’t bring himself to destroy them. (What’s more, he’s even continuing to create them, giving Suzanne Farrell’s little brother his business card.) The ink is also dangerous because it forms an incomplete narrative. Sure, you have the telegram to permanently remind you of the message you received, but it can only retell the message’s content, not its context.
Dick Whitman's papery remains
From the beginning, that’s what Mad Men was striving to be – a retelling of more than just our surface assumptions about the 1960s. It’s easy to grow distracted from that initial intent, because as the show progresses we get all caught up in the singularity of Don Draper and the whole cast of characters. The earliest episodes, though, were more about showing us both the typewriter – the physical reminder of the period, the newfangled ink-slinger – and then also showing us Joan Holloway reassuring Peggy Olson that the typewriter would be simple enough for a woman to use. We saw the faint remnant ink, but we also got to see its surprising, forgotten context. It was lovely to see that early intention return, now carefully embedded inside an ad campaign and a character’s plot line.