Is Plotlessness OK in Mad Men?

Don looking as perplexed as I feel in "Far Away Places."

Since the fifth season of Mad Men premiered a month ago, the "super viewer" blogosphere has sung its praises. Like it did the last four seasons. Just this past week, AVClub wrote, "There are few shows on the air more effective...at portraying how the feeling of everything spinning out of control can seem completely normal in the moment." Slate's TV club gushed, "This was an episode with two marvelous set pieces--Roger's excellent adventure with Jane, and Don's Howard Johnson noir."
I've been watching too, but with less enthusiasm than the typical super viewer. Though I agree that Mad Men gives you great set pieces, are these set pieces enough?

Since Season Five premiered, it has featured episode-long story arcs that beautifully depict how a particular person reacts to a particular set of circumstances. This week, there was the acid-trip that showed Roger's struggle to be hip when his age betrays him. Meanwhile, Don's trip with Megan suggested that he still abides by some classic fifties concept that a husband can control his wife. Last week, the office wet blanket, Pete Campbell, was beautifully pilloried in a series of awkward sexual encounters, culminating in his getting beat upon by Lane Pryce, the company's treasurer. Each of these vignettes highlights some aspect of the characters' personalities. But is this what we really need five seasons in? We already knew that Roger was insecure. We didn't need three episodes this season showing him buy people's loyalties with cash. We also learned that nothing comes easily for Pete the first time he unsuccessfuly flirted with a woman who wasn't his wife in Season One. Five seasons in, the sets are still gorgeous; the costumes are historically accurate, but the plot is starting to stagnate.
Mad Men wasn't always this way. While the show has always been relatively slow paced, there was some mystery and surprise. I was originally hooked by Don's secret in the first two seasons. Would his co-workers and wife find out that he's a Korean War deserter who took on another man's name? How was Peggy going to climb the corporate ladder after bearing Pete's illegitimate child? Now that these story arcs have been resolved, the characters need other challenges that force them to evolve--not just interesting situations that allow them to stay the same.

More and more, Mad Men is starting to resemble the John Cheever short stories that critics have linked it to since inception. Each week features a character in a challenging social situation (the surprise party, the long-absent husband's homecoming, the multi-racial sleepover). How he or she responds (getting embarrassed, kicking the husband out, hesitating before leaving the purse with a black girl) gives us insight into the characters, and his or her environment. In this way, each episode is actually a terrific introduction to the characters for uninitiated viewers. Indeed, last week episode, "Signal 30," even ended with Ken Cosgrove reading out loud from his Cheever-esque short story.

Though I love Cheever, and I love short stories, I'm not sure I want my TV shows to dramatize them. After all, this is a medium that gives writers nine hours over the course of 13 weeks to craft a couple compelling narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. Why waste them telling longtime viewers what they already know when they could be used to create richer challenges for the characters?

Damsels in Distress a Disappointing After 14 Year Wait

Sometimes, an artist's newest work differs so much from his previous work that it makes me wonder if I had misinterpreted all of the previous work. Fifteen minutes into Whit Stillman's latest film, Damsels in Distress, the self-doubt started to creep in. Was I really watching a Whit Stillman film?

True, the film is littered with Whit Stillman signatures. Like his previous work, Damsels is about bourgeois young people trying to figure out their places in the world. Like his other films Last Days of Disco (made in 1998 but set in the early 1980s) and Metropolitan (1990), Damsels goes for a retro look. Much of the film looks like it was shot through Vaselined lens, harkening back to classic Hollywood. Set on a college campus, the film's coeds are dressed anachronistically in button down shirts, cardigans, and pleated skirts. Even the main character, played by Greta Gerwig, looks like the protagonist of Last Days of Disco (1998), played by Chloe Sevigny with their shoulder length blonde hair and expressive round eyes.

But beyond the visuals, the plot and characters seemed like a bad imitation of Stillman. While Stillman's characters have never been sympathetic, They are usually well drawn and realistic. Stillman’s previous three films, Metropolitan, Barcelona (1994), and Last Days of Disco all feature spoiled twentysomethings who think they have profound ideas. They make unsavory remarks like "I've always planned to be a failure. That's why I plan to marry a very wealthy woman." One young man's existential crisis in Barcelona is whether he has been shaving incorrectly his entire life. The audience is typically invited to laugh at them and not with them.

If Stillman is trying to make a broader statement in his previous films, it is that our culture has made these young people this way. Metropolitan might be the most obvious example of this. It follows a Princeton student, Tom Townsend, the holiday week between Christmas and New Year’s when he is at home in New York City. Tom is invited as a date with his friends on the deb ball circuit. However, Tom's background presents a problem since he's from the Upper West Side with an artsy father while all his friends are from the classier Upper East Side—a classic fish out of water story. The fundamental absurdity is that Tom is even considered an outsider in the first place. This absurdity condemns the entire concept of "society." The characters' bad behavior can be attributed to the strict, arbitrary lines drawn by society.

Damsels sticks with the young people as fools formula, but lacks any real heft. Here, the main target of audience laughter is Violet (Gerwig), a self-righteous coed who heads a suicide prevention center on campus. at one point, she tells a professor that Richard Strauss invented the waltz and that a man named Charleston invented the Charleston. Both these statements are false. The plot--if you can call it that-- is that Violet and her two pals invite a fourth girl, Lily, into their circle. The four engage in various dalliances with boys throughout. these dalliances are mostly absurd, invoking no sympathy for any of the girls. Despite her pretentious, Violet is in love with a dumb frat boy who goes around saying inane things. Lily lets her love interest convince her that his religion only permits anal sex. There may be a general critique of the college hook up culture, but this critique is lacking when it doesn’t link to the characters at all. Indeed, there’s no sense of why the characters act the way they do. Some flashbacks suggest that Violet was an abandoned young child, but why is she so obsessed with the suicide prevention center now? Damsels is full of obvious laughs. The opening credit sequence introduces the young ladies as “The Damsels” and then the young men as “Their Distress.” Damsels does provide plenty of laughs but very little food for thought.

Clybourne Park: A Hollow Hope

The quest for the great American race relations play continues with the Broadway debut of Clybourne Park. Bruce Norris, the playwright behind this 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner, has said that he wrote this play in conversation with Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Indeed, the first half of Clybourne Park is set in 1959, the same year Raisin debuted on Broadway. Clybourne Park discusses race through the lens of gentrification. Though Norris should be admired for highlighting these issues on a national stage, the one-note portrayal of many characters in this play ultimately raise the question of whether it's even possible for a white playwright (like Norris) to shed light on race relations in a non-cliched, meaningful way.

Clybourne Park was critically applauded when it was first produced Off-Broadway. In addition to the Pulitzer, the Times called it "a spiky and damningly insightful new comedy." Funny, it is, but damningly insightful I take issue with. Clybourne Park starts out promisingly in 1959 as a white couple, Bev and Russ, (Christina Kirk and Frank Wood) prepare to move out of their quaint, single family home. Their day is interrupted as some neighbors, Betsy and Carl (Annie Parisse and Jeremy Shamos), come to warn them that word on the street has it that the buyers of the house are "colored." Carl goes on to try to convince Russ to sell to the neighborhood committee for moral reasons. After all, once one black family moves in, the white families will flee, driving down housing prices. Things get awkward as Carl insists on asking Bev's black maid, Francine (Crystal Dickinson) for her opinion.

Much of the racial tension in this first act is subtextual, perhaps reflecting the repressed emotions of the era. This works since it leads to room for ambiguity. Russ and Bev do decide to sell the house to the African-American family, but it's unclear how much of their decision is based on their colorblindness. Underlying their decision is the pain of their son's recent suicide upon his return from Korea where he was accused of killing civilians. The revelation of this secret adds some depth to Russ and Bev, and some insight to their current situation. Unfortunately, Bev is prone to some physical tics, which I found distracting. These physical tics are clearly attributable to the director and not the actress, but I can't figure out for the like of me why the director would want Bev to wave her hands around over her head every time she speaks. She also jerks her head back every time she's about to open her mouth. Maybe she is supposed to be drunk? Nonetheless, this first act is a complete story all to itself with well drawn main characters who have believable motives.

But the second act is rather useless once the initial conceit is exposed. As the curtain rises, it's 2009. We see the same set, but this time with graffiti covering the 50's wallpaper. Six people--the same actors in different roles--sit around in chairs. They are discussing the gentrification of the neighborhood--particularly two characters' impending desire to renovate the house into a McMansion. Isn't this neat, you think. In 2009, white people are trying to get into the same neighborhood that black people couldn't break into fifty years ago. The ensuing escalating arguments about race then show how conversations about race stay the same, even as political correctness has taken over. Message conveyed in about five minutes, the next forty-five are filled with gratuitous jokes that come at the expense of reducing each of the six characters into a stereotype.

Most stereotyped is the renovating white couple (Parisse and Shamos). She is the Whole Foods liberal armed with politically correct platitudes. "Half my friends are black," she remarks. Shamos plays the angry white man pissed that he can't say the N word when black people say it all the time. He spends most of the time trying to tell a racist joke, much to his wife's chagrin. Their black counterparts (Dickinson and Gupton) are no better. Dickinson plays a self-righteous protector of African-American culture. Gupton's character is the snide deflector of tense racial conversation. christina Kirk's deadpan portrayal of a one-upper lawyer is the most credible. When some characters mention a retarded man they know, Kirk responds "My niece has Asperger's." The banter is fun, but ultimately covers much of the same material that other plays about race address.

Earlier this season, The Submission by Jeff Talbott ran at the MCC's Lucille Lortel theater. This play about the consequences of a white man submitting a play under a black woman's name addressed issues of affirmative action and white privilege. In The Submission, Jonathan Groff played the playwright who was fed up with what he saw as affirmative action for women and minorities. He held many of the same attitudes as the white characters in Clybourne Park. Why couldn't he say the N word when black people can? His foil, the black actress he hires to pretend to be the playwright (Rutina Wesley), judges him for the distince lack of slavery in his family.

When it comes to race relations, these plays leave me wondering if it's possible to tell a meaningful story without resorting to angry white man, and angry black woman stereotypes. Is there a way to do it without resorting to once edgy racial jokes that have had their corners softened by overuse? Clybourne Park doesn't transcend these constraints. I won't be waiting with bated breath for a play that does.

Reading John Leonard's Life

John Leonard's posthumously published collection is a remarkable exercise in criticism as biography. The essays in Reading for My Life span fifty years from 1958 to 2008, when Leonard, a critic for Harper's and The New York Times Book Review, among others, died of lung cancer. Reading the fifty pieces compiled in this one volume, I learned just as much about Leonard as I did about his subjects.

One obvious reason that Leonard's biography comes across is because his essays span his entire reviewing career. We see him grow as America grows. In an essay about the Beat Generation, we see him dropping out of Harvard and heading to the West Coast like so many others who came of age in the late 1950s. In another essay, we see Leonard safely within the New York intelligentsia from where he critiques Tom Wolfe's narrow portrayal of New Yorkers in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Leonard's subjects map the tumultuous American-century. Whether discussing the sexual revolution (through the lens of Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife) or Israeli-Palestinian relations (through the lens of an interview with David Grossman), his essays exclaim "I was there."

But the most revealing thing in these essays is Leonard's frankness about his own life. He injects himself into his book reviews as frequently as possible. Though one could mistake this for self-indulgence, Leonard presents himself as a common observer. When condemning Richard Nixon's campaign memoir, Six Crises, Leonard adopts the view of the every day American as opposed to the entrenched intelligentsia. He warns the reader, "Let me make it clear at the outset that I am not going to be objective." Not because he has some secret liberal agenda, but merely because he is "fascinated by the flower of rot, and because ...more interesting and instructive than Richard Nixon the success is Richard Nixon the failure."

Besides, Leonard's disdain for some writers is balanced out by his honest, lavish praise for others. He doesn't have enough good things to say about Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, finally going out on "She has done her job, and what a staggering one it is." Later, he dubs The Satanic Verses "infinitely more interesting than those hundreds of neat little novels we have to read between Rushdies." Through these essays, we learn that un-selfconscious praise can be delightful.

We also learn that Leonard was a colorblind feminist before those terms were invented. As one of the first to write about women novelists without condescension, Leonard made bold, unqualified statements about the women he admired. On Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: "It is fierce intelligence, all sinew, prowling among the emotions." Quite a masculine description indeed. We can't blame Leonard for occasionally taking a victory lap for his prescient admiration for women writers by scolding his fellow critics for not recognizing their talents earlier.

One of the most affecting pieces--and the longest--is an essay on television. Leonard was as much a TV critic as he was a book critic. In "Family Values, Like the House of Atreus" Leonard charts a half century of television, demonstrating how the medium simultaneously shapes and reflects American values. The epidemic of single dads on TV in the 1980s could be attributed to our society's reluctance to accept the fact that 89% of single-parent households were headed by women. Leonard surmises why thirtysomething was so popular at a time when "I could leave the house, and go to the corner, and find an overmuch of such people in my own yupscale neighborhood: sun dried as if in extra-virgin olive oil, crouched to consume their minimalist bistro meals of cilantro leaves, medallions of goat cheese, and half a scallop on a bed of money." Perhaps it reflected yuppie navel-gazing at its worst.

Reading for My Life is an absolute must read for any aspiring critic. In a world of cold, academic criticism, Leonard shows us what it means to have a personal connection with culture.

Death of a Salesman

The Mike Nichols production of Death of a Salesman is the best Broadway play I expect to see during my time in law school. After waiting for two hours, I successfully rushed a pair of thirty dollar student tickets this past Friday.

I had heard good things about the production, but didn't expect to connect to the material in a very meaningful way since I am a Miller novice. After seeing the terribly staged mid-century play, Look Back Jin Anger, a couple days ago, I was worried that I was in store for athree our snoozefest. sitting down in a partial view box seat with my friend as the curtain went up, I was also skeptical of the casting. Though I love Philip Seymour Hoffman, isnt he a bit too young to play Willy Loman, the sixty year old salesman drifting into senility? His sons, Biff and Happy, the inheritors of his hopes and dreams, are portrayed by the too-young looking Andrew Garfield and Finn Wittrock.

But ten minutes on, I was hooked. Philip Seymour Hoffman carries his heft around convincingly as a man who has eaten unhealthily for thirty five years as a traveling salesman. He first enters the stage, muttering "boy oh boy" quietly, after returning early from a failed sales trip. There's no sense that he's aware of an audience, but rather is just inside his own head. When his wife, Linda (Linda Emond) hears him shuffling around, she comes and persuades him to go to bed in the manner of the lifelong partner who just wants to make things easier for her husband near the end.

As a first time viewer of any production of the play, I was also drawn in by the writing and the plot. set in the 1940s, Miller's story is eerily resonant today. People of Willy Loman's age were the most susceptible to losing their jobs during the recent recession, no matter how loyal they were to the firm for the past thirty five years. I know many Biffs today--though generally from more affluent families--whom, having been raised by the school of self esteem, now find themselves unable to do anything. But the story is both general and specific.

Despite the global issues it addresses, Death of Salesman focuses on one specific family. Though everyone can relate to Willy's tendency to ask what could have been had he taken a different road, his plight is unique. We see Willy's life and motives through the hallucinated conversations he has with his brother (John Glover), a man who had gone to Alaska to make his fortune off the land. Now Willy, overweight and tied to the trappings of a middle class existence--- nice house in Brooklyn, a refrigerator, and other appliances--he wonders if should have gone the way of the other Loman and inhabited a new frontier.

The play's success must ultimately be attributed to the Mike Nichols, the director. Though I'm new to Miller, there were several scenes that were conducive to melodrama. Many scenes where people could be yelling at each other are toned down to reveal several notes of both disappointment and anger. The only person who overacts at times is Andrew Garfield, who shakes his head in anger a few too many times in the final twenty minutes of the play.

Death of a Salesman is a must see show. My only regret is that I hadn't seen other productions to compare it to.

Why is Everyone Mad at Mike Daisey?

Mike Daisey has been pilloried in the press lately for making false statements on This American Life recently. Daisy, a monologist, wrote and starred in the immensely popular The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which debuted at the Woolly Mammoth in DC last year and went on to achieve great success at the Public Theater in New York. The Agony and Ecstasy is a one-man show about the factory workers at the Chinese Apple supplier, Foxconn. Daisey tells his story in the first person relaying things that he supposedly saw first hand when he went to ShenZhen, China. Some of this show was excerpted in This American Life in January.

But last week, This American Life aired an hour-long retraction of Mike Daisey's segment. Apparently, Daisey hadn't experienced many of the things he said he had, including meeting many under aged workers, workers who had been poisoned by n-hexane, nearly driving off an incomplete bridge with his translator, and even going into the factory dorms with his translator.

When This American's Life retraction episode went live, the mainstream media's judgment came swiftly and harshly. Far too harsh, in my opinion. Most of the criticism focuses on Daisey's representation that he was telling the literal truth both onstage and off. Ira Glass really hands it to Daisy in the retraction episode, asking him why he "lied." The New York Times' theater critic, Charles Isherwood wrote "I certainly believed that the stories Mr. Daisey told — of seeing guards with guns at the Foxconn factory, of interviewing a 13-year-old girl who worked at the factory, of talking to an elderly former Foxconn worker whose hand had been destroyed — were true."

I'm not surprised that the media has been so critical. After all, they are all journalists and editors. The part former (current?) aspiring journalist part of me does think what Daisey did failed to meet journalistic standards. I couldn't imagine telling an editor "Yes, I saw this," or "Yes, he said this," if I indeed hadn't seen those things first hand. I also agree with the Slate Culture Gabfest that it's pretty reprehensible of Daisey to "play fast and loose" with the lives of Chinese workers--the exact people he says he's trying to help.

But is what Mike Daisey did so bad when seen from the audience's perspective? I don't think so. As Isherwood admits himself, we don't expect documentarians with an agenda to take an evenhanded approach. I saw Daisey's monologue in the same way. He clearly has an agenda to criticize Apple's standards for factory conditions. The monologue also starts with a guilt-tripping segment about him being the world's biggest Apple fan. Who in Twenty-First Century America can't relate to that? Indeed, whenever I turn on This American Life and they have people like Mike Birbiglia telling stories based on their own lives, I assume some of the dialogue to be made up or exaggerated. Even when reading John Jeremiah Sullivan's recent collection, Pulphead, I took some if his exact quotes from interesting characters he meets in his essays with a grain of salt. The point is to get at a larger truth rather than retain the accuracy of specific details. As consumers, we also rely on the marketplace of ideas for different views. For a Chinese perspective on factory workers, see the documentary, Last Train Home.

What makes this issue particular interesting to me right now is that I'm also seeing it from a legal perspective. My media law class has me thinking about what the WBEZ/This American Life legal counsel must think about Mike Daisey's misrepresentations. In general, media outlets are liable for defamation in American courts only if the statement is defamatory, false and done with malice for a public figure. For a private figure, the plaintiff must show that the statement is false and defamatory only. In this case, we certainly have a public figure in both Foxconn and Apple. The representations about the factory workers are hardly facts directly about Apple. In other words, despite being riddled with lies, it would be difficult for someone to bring a defamation suit here. (This does highlight an interesting question of whether journalistic standards are higher than legal standards, and whether they should be, but we'll save that for another time.)

If it makes a good story for the audience, and doesn't really seem to be that damaging from a legal perspective, why is everyone so mad at Mike Daisey? Because Daisey hits two nerves at once. First, he seems incredibly lazy, and ended up hurting his cause. Second, he raises the question of what our standards for creative non fiction in an age where many journalists have a tendency to bring themselves into their stories. Daisey is lazy because he wanted a good story, but didn't dig around enough for the story. He probably could have found some underage workers if he tried to. And now his controversy is overshadowing the original story.

But what is really irking people, I suspect, is that it highlights the agony and ecstasy of creative non fiction. What exactly is "truth" when it comes to creative non fiction? Should we even care? This is a huge issue now when more writers are inserting themselves in their works, blurring the line between opinion and fact. The other anxiety-causing thing is that anyone these days can practice "journalism" on a blog. They aren't investing millions of dollars into fact checking everything. The large media companies are the ones who have the most to lose if the floodgates open to allow everyone to exaggerate facts. They would rather readers not expose themselves to ideas in the marketplace, and instead just go to them for having a monopoly on "the truth."

This whole debacle hasn't really changed my mind about Mike Daisey, This American Life, or theater. But I'll worry about artists sacrificing truth for fact in the future.

Interning this Fall

I've been busy finding legal jobs the past month or so. The other--more interesting--thing I've been doing is interning at Slate magazine. This, along with 2L year has been keeping me busy. I know I've always been delinquent with this blog, but now I have a more reasonable excuse. On the bright side, I will be writing stuff for Slate's Brow Beat blog every so often. First post just went up on Friday here.