Breaking Bad: Without question, the best show on television. It’s a close fight with Mad Men, but Breaking Bad beats it. The S4 premiere makes that clear. No other show unifies plot, theme and cinematographic vision with as much fidelity as Breaking Bad. No other show tells a grander story with more picayune subject matter. Brilliant.
SPOILERS for S4 follow.
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New post up on OTI, in which I rave aboutAMC’s The Killing:
The Killing is a police procedural for people who know police procedurals backward and forward. In the pilot, it plays to all the tropes we expect. Nubile victims being chased through the woods by flashlight-wielding killers. Tired cops who’ve seen it all before. Working class suspects. The Killing lays out every scene that we know should be coming. And then it screws with them. Not just once, but three times. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times (to quote Ian Fleming) is enemy action.
Why is Sud rattling our expectations like this?
Some spoilers for the pilot, but really, just watch the damned thing already.
Man, that Internet sure seems divided on the season finale of Mad Men, eh? First, let’s talk about the season as a whole.
Doesn't that sound like fun?
If the last few seasons have been about shedding the trappings of the past, S4 is about considering who you really are. S3 ended with our heroes taking a stand – breaking out of the old ways of doing business and forming a risky new concern. S4 is about looking around as the dust settles and asking, “Okay. What now?”
With Peggy and Pete, this questioning makes sense. They’re both young; they’re at the stage in their lives when they should be asking these questions. Pete has lost his father (S2) and he still wants to take advantage of the ties that wealth and connection allow him (S3, S4). But he’s defining himself through his work. And not just by having a lucrative job that will provide for his family – note how he turns down that offer from Chaough. He likes being a partner. He takes enough pride in it to call Roger out on being lazy. He also takes enough pride in it to gloat when Ken shows up. So it’s not all admirable, but it’s character.
And to think I wanted to be you ... oh, crap, I still do.
Peggy is already defining herself as a “career woman” as S4 kicks off. Now it’s just a question of living with the consequences of that choice. She’s forced to confront that choice directly, and memorably, in “The Suitcase” – choosing between a birthday dinner with her boyfriend and staying in the office. She also has to choose between a conventional romantic life (courtship, engagement, marriage, kids) and the bohemian life of 60s Greenwich Village hipsters. The process of discovery has been rocky for her, but she’s stayed true to what she wants throughout.
(It’s also a little sad that Peggy Olsen is a more sex-positive female character than most female characters on primetime dramas set in the modern day. She wants sex, she has some, it’s great, la-di-da. Sometimes it’s with the wrong guy, like Duck. Sometimes it doesn’t end well, like with her last boyfriend. But she marches on, unscarred)
The process of uncovering “what now?” has been the most dramatic for Don because Don’s already an adult. At least notionally. And yet he never really had a childhood, not a pleasant one anyway, and what little he had he wants to repress. Free of Betty and his children, he has the opportunity to date around. Women present themselves to him: his secretary Allison, his fetching neighbor, the actress Bethany van Nuys, Dr. Faye, his new secretary Megan. It’s an adolescent fantasy: rich, single, living on your own in the big city. And yet we see how hollow it is. The dingy apartment, the drunken one-night stands, the lost contact with his children.
Don gets a clean break with his past when Anna dies. With her gone, he’s free to be whoever he says he is. And, as the final episode showed us, Don is happy being the man he was before. Don Draper is the type of man (as predicted by Dr. Faye) who marries his secretary. Or the model on his photoshoot. And yet he hasn’t remained completely inert. He’s drinking less. He respects Peggy and Pete more. He’s growing a little more wary of Roger – the man’s a friend, but he’s also a mirror that shows the future. And he’s come to terms (for now) with Betty.
S4 presented Don with an opportunity to change. And, with a few small exceptions, he said, “You know what? I’m good. Thanks, though.”
Retching in terror once every five years is a small price to pay.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, S4 presented Don with a choice between Faye, Bethany and Betty. Faye is smart, warm, supportive and mature. She pushes Don to confront his past. Bethany was young, gorgeous and good at presenting herself. She wanted everything Don had to offer. When Don seemed torn between those two, Megan split the difference. She’s young, gorgeous, warm and supportive. She’s clever but not smart enough to challenge Don. She’s a way for Don to hedge his bets. And that’s something Don’s always excelled at – holding off on signing a contract for as long as possible; bargaining with Pete to keep the DoD off his back. When given a choice between three blondes, Don goes with the brunette and thinks he’s making progress.
More importantly, Megan doesn’t know who Don was before. And that’s crucial. If Don is going to change himself in S4 – or do what he thinks is changing himself – he needs someone who doesn’t know his past. As soon as Don let Faye in on his secret, a world of trouble fell from his shoulders. But she was disqualified from becoming Mrs. Donald Draper.
(That being said, I’m not in love with this development. What sort of plots will it lead to in Seasons 5 and 6? “A visitor from the past forces Megan to confront Don’s true identity”, etc? Shocking)
Of course she's surprised. But she still has the speech rehearsed.
When I recapped the first four episodes of S4, I said that this season would be about dismantling the myth of Don Draper. The season finale puts a capstone on that. Don Draper will not get out of the Sixties intact. When he gets out of one scrape, his first instinct is to retreat to the behavior that got him in trouble in the first place. He’s saved from an FBI background check, and the first thing he does is ogle his secretary (literally, right after she drops the Beatles tickets on his desk). He loses Lucky Strike and he publishes a full-page ad in the Times. We may deplore one and admire the other, but they come from the same place.
“I’m living like there’s no tomorrow,” Draper tells Rachel Mencken in the pilot, “because there isn’t one.” That hasn’t changed in five years. Dick Whitman has been living a borrowed life since his near-death experience in Korea. He doesn’t think about building a future. He thinks about what will get him through today. Just to tide them over; just a little more time; just a little more room. Draper’s idea of planning for the future is to propose to a woman he barely knows with a ring he got three days ago.
Has there been any change? Yes, but not in him.
Note what happens when Draper announces his engagement to the partners. There’s a room of blank faces. The first person to congratulate him is the person in the room who knows him the least: Lane Pryce. And when Megan is invited in and Lane congratulates her too, Pete corrects him. “You don’t say ‘congratulations’ to the bride,” he says, adding an unspoken of Don Draper to the end. “You say ‘best wishes’.” And really, that’s all we can offer this poor girl. Our best wishes in dealing with this mess.
Who the hell's that?
A man wakes up on a desert plateau. The staccato pops of automatic fire draw his attention; looking over a ridge, he sees an old man in an outmoded jacket tumbling down a hill. He picks the old man up and carries him out of the sun. The old man dies; the younger man buries him. Alone, the younger man staggers across the desert until he finds:
The Village.
The notion of a remake of The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan’s legendarily inaccessible 1967 BBC series, thrilled me more than it bothered me. I don’t like remakes. I don’t like the idea of dredging the same river for new fish. But the original Prisoner, for all the thunder of its premise, lacked something in execution. McGoohan wanted the audience to draw their own conclusions, but a little more explicitness couldn’t have hurt (“yes, Patrick dear, but what do the monkey masks mean?”). And toward the end, the show drifted from challenging-weird to just weird-weird. The same ideas, given a fresh start and a proper budget, would devastate.
Number Six (Jim Cavielzel) stumbles through the Village. Exhausted from walking in the desert all day and afflicted by hallucinations of life in New York, he falls off a rooftop. He awakes in a clinic – The Clinic – under the warm gaze of Dr. 313 and the blue-eyed fatherliness of Number Two (Ian McKellen). “Why are you keeping me here?”, Six demands. Two shrugs: “I see no locked doors.” This is the insidiousness of the Village: it responds to direct confrontation with gentle redirection. Aside from Number Two, no one denies the existence of a world outside – Isaac Newton, Alexander Graham Bell, David Beckham, Manhattan. But they don’t understand why it’s so important to Number Six. They just want to help.
The beauty of the original Prisoner was the distinct visual and auditory style of the Village. Shot in Portmeirion, Wales, the use of gay colors, cheery announcements and signs in Albertus typeface all contributed to the air of stiff, enforced conviviality. AMC’s The Prisoner has a style all its own as well. Identical 60s-era bungalows, duplexes and diners form neat little rows in the middle of a vast desert. The occasional flashback to New York or to static-ridden surveillance footage jars Six out of his attempts to focus. There are no walls and no guards: there are the simple limits of sand and sky. But Number Two keeps control in other ways. He can’t suppress every citizen’s desire for escape or their search for something more, so he gives it to them: the Escape Resort! The nightclub More! And just to remind you that this world isn’t right, there’s the occasional touch of weirdness for its own sake, like the soap opera Wonkers or Brian Wilson’s “In Blue Hawaii” or the twin therapists, Number 70.
And no, they don’t have anything that’s not a wrap.
I love Ian McKellen as the new Number Two. He brings a sinister warmth to the bland pronouncements that he bestows on people: “Every day above ground is a good day.” He lives in a pristine opulence that the rest of the Village aspires to. And yet behind everything there’s an air of instability. Everyone gets very still whenever he enters a room, as if he and Mommy were just having a screaming argument in the kitchen downstairs and it’s imperative that we be good. He carries a grenade with him everywhere, pulling it out of his pocket once or twice an episode and tossing it to make a point. He is the capricious tyrant, just as likely to bestow prizes – a free vacation, a medal for service – as punishments. It takes a brilliant actor to pull that off and still appear sane.
Jim Cavielzel as Number Six, I’m not as sure on. He plays crazy very well, while McGoohan was always proud and stiff. This is essential: Number Six is the man on the fringes of society, and people on the fringes are “crazy,” even if they’re not disordered. When he’s trying to convince 313 or Two that his memories of a world before the Village are real, he fumbles for the thread of his own thought. He lacks the thunderous contempt that McGoohan’s Six had for the other conspirators in the Village, but that’s for the better. Cavielzel’s is a more sympathetic Six. He bites back, but he doesn’t bark.
What doesn’t quite work for me are the slow-mo shots of Six running through the desert, dropping to his knees when faced with some implacable object – the twin towers, the weird anchor – and screaming. They seem a bit too forced. The horror of the Village comes from its cheerful banality and its absolute impermeability to logic, sprinkled with the occasional bit of grotesque: a giant bubble bouncing down the street and absorbing someone. The horror shouldn’t be something that we sit and watch with flashing lights: hey kids! Here’s where the horror is!
I watched the first two episodes, “Arrival” and “Harmony,” last night (and thanks to Sylvia M. for being a gracious host). So far we already know more about Number Six in two episodes than we ever did in the prior series: he worked for a company, Summakor, that collects CCTV footage to analyze trends in human behavior. We already have a hint of why he resigned as well. Interestingly enough, no one in the Village seems to want to know why: a major plot point from the original series. But this cute and accessible woman he picked up on the streets of Manhattan in flashbacks – Lucy – won’t let up on it. But if she’s the only one who’s curious, why can’t Six leave the Village? And if Two wants to know, why hasn’t he asked yet?
Ultimately The Prisoner is not about Number Six. We are not supposed to see ourselves in Number Six; we are supposed to see ourselves in the rest of the village. The Prisoner is about how the institution of society deals with a man who will not conform. Perhaps he’s not conforming because his brain is chemically imbalanced; perhaps it’s because no one around him can supply what he wants. Or perhaps he has memories of a past that no one shares and every time he tries to pursue them, a giant bubble attacks him.
Regardless of why he feels that way, he can’t fit in. He rejects all attempts to make him fit in. So how do we respond? Some of us watch him with sad compassion. Some of us write him off (“she’s a crazy”; “he’s an old drunk”). If he gets too loud or violent, we lock him away. And if he persists in being unmutual, we gently nudge him to the far edge of the herd.
Two more episodes tonight and two on Tuesday. Expect my final thoughts on Friday. Be seeing you.
MSNBC confirms the death of Patrick McGoohan yesterday.
I first discovered him as most people did, through the bizarre 60s sci-fi / espionage / magical realism British TV show, The Prisoner. McGoohan plays an unnamed secret agent – an apparent reference to a prior role, John Drake in “Danger Man,” but not the same character – who resigns from the British secret service. He refuses to announce why he resigns. Unfortunately, the sensitive nature of his work means he has a head full of valuable intelligence.
McGoohan is captured – it’s never clear by whom – and taken to a cloistered seaside resort town called only “The Village.” Surveillance cameras hang in every home and street corner. Everybody in the village wears a number instead of going by name. Number Two, whose identity changes every episode, supervises the Village. He/she uses enforcers, hypnosis, drugs, misdirection and a weirdly animate bubble named Rover to keep order. He/she has one recurring goal: to find out why McGoohan, a/k/a Number Six, resigned.
The entire brief series is a variation on that one theme: what does the social order do with a man who simply will not cooperate? If the hierarchy or the aggregate want something out of you – a pledge of allegiance, an answer to a question, a willingness to get out of your bed and work eight hours a day – that you’re not willing to give, will they leave you alone? Even if you’re no threat to them? If not, what means will they use to get it?
The episodes vary in quality and transparency, with the series finale, “Fall Out,” being legendarily bizarre. But you can watch every episode of ‘The Prisoner’ online and judge for yourself. The first dozen are all straightforward, and gems besides. “Free For All,” “Hammer into Anvil” and “A Change of Mind” are among my favorites.
AMC’s hosting these original episodes online because they just wrapped shooting a remake, starring James Cavielzel and Sir Ian McKellen (check out McKellen’s blog; it’s a great look into the production process and a joy to read). I’ve got high hopes for it. I’ve got high hopes for any work of art that promotes individualism for its own sake – sometimes stubborn, sometimes self-destructive, but private and certain and unshakable.