THAT’S WHAT THE BLOG IS FOR! Mad Men S1E7–S1E8

S1E7 Red in the Face

In case you missed it: when HBO started streaming Mad Men they uploaded a batch of files with several serious errors in them, including an unedited version of Roger’s vomiting scene where the tubing and crew was clearly visible. By the time I got to it the episode had been replaced with the correct version, and Roger’s column of puke held the suspension of disbelief once more. If I had more faith in Warner Brothers right now I could imagine these errors were actually a viral marketing stunt designed to let new viewers know that this wasn’t just a show about beautiful people with secret pasts. This was a puking show.

The mighty ejaculation, along with Roger’s gray and sweaty face (awards for the makeup team!), is the culmination of a revenge plot for hitting on Don Draper’s wife. Much like this hasn’t been a puking show, to this point it has not seemed like a show in which there would be a revenge plot, nor does Don seem like a character who would even bother with concocting one, but the insult of a man hitting on his wife and not being there to address it has Don acting out of character.

This episode has a lot of characters feeling their gender position is threatened or offended somehow, and a lot of off behavior as a result. Roger’s pass at Betty threatens Don because he’s the boss, which constricts his options to react, but Roger spends the whole episode feeling slighted and unappreciated which makes him act out, bullying Pete while at work on the Nixon campaign and harassing Peggy for being sweet and friendly with him. None of this is necessarily out of character for him, actually, but it shows how a long time of feeling resentful or overlooked can calcify into a selfish personality and thoughtless bad behavior. Roger is a named partner at Stirling Cooper, but as much as he talks about his name being on the building it’s really his father’s name, and the way Cooper talks to him, Roger can never forget it.

Betty meanwhile gets scolded by Don for being sexually harassed, and then slaps Helen Bishop in the supermarket when she asks in disbelief why she thought it was okay to give a little boy some of her hair. This is out of character, and when her friend Francine asks about it her response at first seems only tangentially related: “My mother always said, you’re painting a masterpiece. Be sure to hide the brushstrokes. She was really beautiful. Then I think… why am I doing all this? I’m not that vain.”

It only made sense to me once I realized her rationale for giving Glen that hair is the same reason it feels so unfair for Don to get upset with her when Roger makes a pass. This is her job, being beautiful, and she does it better than anyone, and suddenly she’s getting in trouble for that. (It is unfair that Don gets mad at her, but that’s because she’s a victim in that situation, not because she’s being punished for being so beautiful). As far as I’m concerned, as long as men look at me that way I’m earning my keep.

Pete is also stomping around feeling like no one is letting him do his job. He tries to be a good husband and returns a wedding present and gets nothing but shit for it. He tries to make up for the emasculation by buying a hunting rifle and Trudy screams at him. Roger bullies him for correctly assessing the celebrity-like appeal of Kennedy in the election against Nixon. Like Betty, he feels like he is being punished for trying to act like a man, and so he keeps trying out different kinds of men to be and feels like he’s rejected for all of them. In the midst of this, Peggy comes into his office and asks him for his opinion on the copy she’s writing, a thing that affirms not only his desire to be masculine but his desire to be creative. Seeing if she’ll indulge him further, he tells her a fantasy about killing a deer in the woods and bringing the loin back home to a woman, and in the most unpredictable moment of an episode that includes projectile vomiting, she is not only charmed by the story, she is made so lustful by it that leaving his office she immediately has to satisfy her craving with a food substitution (eating a ham sandwich and a danish is also acting out against a certain kind of gender performance).

Like in the pilot episode, I’ve never quite been able to get a handle on this early relationship between Pete and Peggy. We’re not really given much to understand what draws them together except that they are both people who are (or feel) underappreciated in other areas of their life, and have bumped across someone who sees them in that moment as the person they want to be. And maybe that’s it. Maybe this is the way Pete gets to feel like a man and Peggy gets to feel like a woman, and for the time being, those goals are at a mutually beneficial alignment.

More Thoughts

Don is a bully when he’s pissed off (look how he treats Betty in this episode), but he also hates bullies, especially privileged ones like Roger. Look at his face when Roger shuts Pete down. This definitely contributes to his quest for revenge.

There is a steely side to Betty that becomes more pronounced as the show goes on, and we see the first of it here. Not even slapping Helen, which is a panic response, but when she mocks Don instead of cowering when he grabs her arm.

This episode is full of really funny lines. Some that I wrote down:

I’m a vegetarian sometimes. – Betty, pretending she’s not furious Roger is eating her steak.

Humps the Camel Campbell – no explanation given, or needed.

I hate cows – Don, on why he doesn’t drink milk.

S1E8 The Hobo Code

Yey Peggy!

There are so few really nice, sweet moments on this show that you have to really savor them when they come around. This is an episode that ends with a father promising his son that he will never lie to him, and it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.

So yey Peggy! Excited that her copy is being presented that day, and turned on by Pete’s attention, she gets laid in the office, and then the pitch is a big hit! True, she doesn’t get to be in the room, and Don has to really sell the hell out of it, but his fighting so hard for it is just proof that it is good work that he is willing to put his intimidating weight behind.

Given the type of show this has been so far it would not have been surprising if the men took all the credit for Peggy’s pitch, but instead they pour her a drink and give her an appropriate amount of shit when she is confused that they edited her tagline. It’s the jolliest we’ve seen these guys, without anything haunting it. Don even graciously downplays how much work he’d done to sell it. Just good copy, a happy moment, a happy Peggy. Look at her little skip!

So of course Pete has to shit all over it. It’s too bad, because there are some moments in their post-coital conversation that are sweet enough, especially when Pete apologizes for ripping her blouse and Peggy tells him it’s all right. Between those moments though, are two people who think they’re sharing something but really are juxtaposing their own interpretations over an impulse. Pete tells Peggy that when he looks at his wife he sees a stranger, and she thinks it’s an invitation to get to know him, but it’s really just a description of his depression without having a name for it. Everyone is always going to be a stranger to Pete, because he is too unhappy for empathy. When Peggy tells him he’s not in this alone, she thinks it’s the beginning of something, but Pete is always alone in the prison of disappointment he’s built in his head.

Peggy is successful at something he has always wanted to be good at, and she is happy when he cannot be, and so he has to punish her. First by implying she’s a slut when she tries to dance with him (I don’t like you like this), and then by refusing to even look at her in the office, much less continue their affair. Mad Men viewers… take the good moments when you can.

More Thoughts

Speaking of performance and masculinity: Sal finally gets a plot of his own and it’s almost too sad to write about. His closetedness is often played for laughs this season, and it is again here with Lois Sadler’s doomed crush on him, but there’s nothing funny about the legitimately great date with the Belle Jolie rep, and his very sad refusal to go to bed with him.

This is a very cute episode for Don at first. He’s nice to Peggy, and then he’s pretty cute getting high with Midge and the hipsters (great band name). He also has a weed-y flashback to an encounter with a Hobo that makes him fear commitment as much as his terrible father and cold step-mother makes him want to be a family man. These figures are wolves inside Don Draper.

Just as this could easily be the kind of show where Don solves an ad problem every week, it could also be the kind of show where he says kick-ass imposing things constantly. They don’t always go to that well but this episode he has the Jesus speech (“I’m not here to tell you about Jesus. You already know about Jesus. He either lives in your heart or he doesn’t.”) and the moment when the Jazz Hipsters tell him he can’t leave the apartment because the cops are there and everyone is high, and he responds: You can’t. This man….

Don needs to stop giving away all his money!

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Natasha Ochshorn is a PhD Candidate in English at CUNY, writing on fantasy texts and environmental grief. She’s lived in Brooklyn her whole life and makes music as Bunny Petite. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.