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Season 5, Episode 5: "Signal 30"
Here's the thing I can't get past: Ken Cosgrove does not want to write like John Cheever. Nor does he want to write like John Updike or Richard Yates, whose Revolutionary Road does not, in fact, contain Don Drapers's crack about suburbia in this episode of Mad Men: "Saturday night in the suburbs?" he scoffs. "That's when you really want to blow your brains out." But anyone who has read Revolutionary Road will tell you that such a line would fit in the first pages of that novel like a car pulling into a garage. Still, Ken reaches for an alternative to the norm. Yes, Ken Cosgrove wants to write like Ray Bradbury. You know, "robots and planets and things." Oh, my. With over twenty short stories having been written under the table (in the grand tradition of advertising, publishing, and media associates), Kenny's well on his way to becoming an author author. His story about a woman who lays eggs has already been published in Galaxy magazine (shuttered in the 1980s) under a pseudonym. Different first name, same last name (well, almost: Hargrove). As it turns out, this is not only plausible — lots of writers published genre fiction under pseudonyms between the '40s and the '70s — it basically happened: This woman was also named Cosgrove and published in the same periodical at the same time. Things are going so well for Ken, he has lunch with an editor from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Though, sadly, he is at the Chinese food stage and not the Union Square Cafe stage.
But why? Why isn't he trying to be John Updike? Maybe it has something to do with living in Queens instead of Cos Cob (aka Division II Greenwich)? Maybe you have to know something to hate it, as Pete Cambell does or as Don Draper did before he moved to Manhattan, but you don't have to know something to love it? See also: outer space. Still: What the friggin' hell, Kenny? The other time our Kenny poked his little literary head out of its advertising shell, it was for The Atlantic Monthly, during season one, in the perfectly cruel bit of Mad Men satire that was "Tapping a Maple on a Cold Vermont Morning." As Ken mentions in this episode, he did grow up in Vermont, and he did start by writing what he knew. (As Don poetically puts it, Ken must "miss the horseshit.") I'm not suggesting Ken can't have grown as a writer since then and between seasons. But what happened? Okay, Kennedy got shot, some nurses in Chicago got strangled, there was an awful shooting at UT Austin (just wait until 1970 if you want to be devastated by the school-shooting image of our times), and bam: Kenny the escapist would like to move to a series of planets connected by bridges and maintained by a robot workforce? Jesus Christ, take a Seconol like a normal person and fall in line, Kenny. As Roger says, when he finds out about Kenny's genre-fiction career, "You knew to keep it a secret because your attention is divided."
Why, as you may have already asked yourself and as I have certainly asked myself, am I making such a big deal about this? Maybe because this tiny, interesting development stood out from the rest of this episode, directed by John Slattery, an episode that made me hum this. Everything was... fine and normal, with just the right amount of twist. Only Kenny interested me or surprised me in any way. Nothing went horribly wrong with the trajectory or the directing, no, but the episode felt unintentionally yet aptly like a series of short stories instead of a whole unit. Like a series of "wouldn't it be great if"s strung together and overlaid with some strong metaphoric Chinese water torture (NB: Peggy's lunch) coming from Pete's kitchen sink. Wouldn't it be great if Lane and Pete came to fisticuffs? Wouldn't it be great if Roger lectured Lane on psychological wooing? Wouldn't it be great if Megan expressed disappointment that Don wasn't wearing the cartoonishly hideous jacket she bought him in public and then, in the next scene, he wore said jacket, a move recently seen here? Wouldn't it be great if "Superman" Don stripped off his shirt at a dinner party and fixed Pete's pluming like, um, a real man? Yes, it would, sure, but the parts never really added up to a sum here.
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Granted, there are subtly dazzling moments of editing in the show, like the one in which a girl in Pete's driver's-ed class taps her sandal in time with the dripping faucet that starts the first real scene. But they can't let themselves be. Slattery puts too much pressure on them to string the scenes together. This episode, after ending several billion times, with a reference to Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 and a voiceover from Ken, writing a short story in bed roughly about Pete's life ("the country was killing him with its silence and loneliness"), comes back yet again to the faucet sound. Ah, yes, the sound. So symbolic. It returns for the closing credits like a killer grabbing our ankles from beneath the stairs.
On the other hand, one unifying quality to this episode of Mad Men, and one I didn't quite realized I had missed, was that it was a "truth in advertising" episode — it was about the men. The past few have been almost entirely about the women.
Yes, I missed Harry. Harry, America will never forget how we sat in that car with you after the Rolling Stones concert as you wolfed down a bag of White Castle burgers. We will never forget. But during this episode we got to spend some much-needed quality time with every other major red-blooded American male in the series. And a couple of expat ones as well:
1) Lane: Lane's wife pressures him to go to a "pub" and watch the World Cup (which England won for the first time in a very historic match against West Germany, news to which Roger Sterling says, "Cup of what?"). He hates "this business of bringing England over in pieces." Once at the pub, they meet up with their friends, who are really his wife's friends. But Lane gets into the Union Jack groove, puts on a silly hat, screams and drinks for the sake of sport like a man, and soon enough he's befriending the senior vice president for Jaguar public relations while their wives make chit-chat about the differences between New York and London. Lane is thrilled that he might finally prove of some use by adding an automotive client to the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce roster. I, for one, couldn't get this out of my head — perhaps the best scene in cinematic admen history.
2) Don: Don is so bored in the weekly meeting, he is doodling a (quite well-rendered) noose and taking some vague notes about Topaz pantyhose. Man, this guy was not at all joking during the season premiere when he told Megan he cared more about her than work. (Speaking of which, Megan brings brownies from this bakery to a party at Pete and Trudy's later in the episode, and thus I forgive her for everything she's ever done.) Aside from fixing Pete's sink and getting amusingly drunk enough to tell Megan he wants her to pull the car over so he can put a baby inside her, Don's just towing the line of Don here. He's not faking it with his love of the city and disdain for the 'burbs, but, well, you can take the Draper out of Westchester, but you can't take the Westchester out of Draper. When he sees Pete's baby, he beams with an ear-to-ear grin almost more reminiscent of the Bridesmaids Jon Hamm than the Mad Men Jon Hamm. Plus, towards the end of the episode, he has cause to give Pete some hard-won marriage advice about how, if he had met Megan before Betty, he'd "know not to throw it away the first time."
3) Roger: Roger, as always, has the best lines. While giving Lane advice: "I once went on a five-minute tear about how my mother loved my father more than she loved me, and I can assure you that is impossible." Roger is settling — for now, at least — into his role as "Professor Emeritus of Accounts." He's like the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Yoda, this guy he is. He is "happy to ride shotgun" on the car account and able to walk Lane through a client R.F.P (request for proposal). This includes "finding out everything" about the client before the meeting, a charming reminder of this Google-free world we're living in for the hour.
4) Pete: Peter, Peter, Peter. After unsuccessfully hitting on a girl in his driver's-ed class (a girl young enough to get drunk on vanilla extract), Pete tries to impress her with his family's donation to the Botanical Garden in the Bronx. They should go sometime! Alas, she had eyes for a peer nicknamed "Handsome Hanson," who winds up putting his hand up her skirt while Pete watches, helpless and jealous and mournful, from the back row. Pete feels almost as rejected as Lane does when he stupidly and semi-randomly kisses Joan in a moment of weakness. (Joan, free of her death-wish albatross of a husband, is back to knowing how to handle men at the office). At one point, Pete stands in front of a high-school trophy case with the driver's-ed girl, a fitting background for his musing about glory days and achievements past. "Time feels like it's speeding up," says the ponytailed driver's-ed girl, referring to her delightful summers. Speaking of John Updike, this is his line, referring to a teenage girl in the short story "A&P": "You really think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?" The viewer can feel Pete wondering the same.
Pete agrees with the girl, but he is referring to his whole lousy life. And, hey, he's not alone — at a dinner Trudy organizes, Ken's writing and Megan's acting come out as "real" life goals that may never get achieved. As for Pete, his life is not lousy. Not really. He has just about everything he wants, which was basically to be Don Draper. The problem is now he wants all the naughty trappings that come with being Don Draper, and Don will not be his wingman in this endeavor. He has outgrown hookers (not that Don Draper ever really had to pay for it, though, in the reported words of Charlie Sheen: "I don't pay them for sex. I pay them to leave."). He has matured and is determined to make a success out of his marriage to The Woman I Am No Longer Allowed to Call Crazy Because She Brought the Brownies.
Because Pete take his Scotch neat and his slights personally, he gets drunk-paranoid, thinking that Don has judged him over a (fantastically written) bit of role-play sex at a brothel. True, Don, Roger, and Pete are in said brothel/apartment because the Jaguar VP wanted to go, but Pete is stretching it just a tad when he suggests he screwed a stranger in leopard-print lingerie for the benefit of a client. On top of everything else (if you'll pardon the pun), the agency winds up losing what would be Lane's first client when the client's wife catches him with "chewing gum on his pubis." Pete finds this too amusing for words. Well, almost. He does manage to inform Lane that the client "thinks you're a homo." Lane flips out and threatens Pete. Pete looks to Don and Roger for help in ending this nonsense, but Don? Don, who was doodling during a meeting? He's come a long way from the Don who got drunk and bloodied in motels last season. Don's ready for some action. He draws the curtain, and Lane kicks the crap out of Pete in this episode's answer to Megan's burlesque show. Turns out that "gruesome" driver's-ed film at the start of the episode was foreshadowing, and Pete is headed towards his own self-destructive car crash.
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An illustration of a quote from Sunday night's Mad Men, by Chris Piascik for Unlikely Words.
ALL THINGS MAD MEN ON ESQUIRE.COM:
• How to Own a Business Meal, the Roger Sterling Way
• Don't Let the Wife Pick Your Clothes, Mad Men Edition
• The Season 5 Preview from Stephen Marche
• The A-Z Guide to Seasons 1-4
• The Style Blog on Why Mad Men's Look Is Dead
• The Roger Sterling Diet: An Experiment in Drinking and Stairs
• Tom Junod on the Season 5 Poster, 9/11, and the Falling Man
• How to Make an Old-Fashioned Like Don Draper Makes One
• How to Wear Suits Like Jon Hamm Does (Which Is Better Than Draper)
• Elisabeth Moss (You Know, Peggy) in Her House, Not a Lot of Clothes
• EARLIER: Stephen Marche on Draper's Double Life and Class Reality
• PLUS: The 100 Best TV Shows for Men (with Mad Men)
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