This post discusses plot points from the April 28 episode of Mad Men.

During last night’s episode of Mad Men, the most hotly-contested point between viewers I saw discussing the show on social media was whether the show’s white characters would have reacted to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. the way they did, experiencing emotions from Peggy’s anxiety about how riots might affect the value of her first apartment to Pete’s outraged expression of grief. But what struck me about the episode was less the idea that it was an illustration of the relative goodness and racial progressivism of the characters we’ve come to know over the years, and more that it was about those characters adjusting to changing standards of whiteness. Rather than treating the civil rights movement as something rather distant, and perhaps something to get involved in only if you have personal reasons to do so, as was the case with Paul Kinsey’s Freedom Ride, Mad Men‘s core characters sensed that King’s death wasn’t an event confined to the black community, and not just because of the riots that it inspired. His murder was something they were supposed to have a reaction to if they were to be seen as compassionate people. But unaccustomed to honest discussions with black coworkers and wholly unfamiliar with the idea of genuine cross-racial solidarity, their reactions to King’s death ended up coming across as awkward and contrived, because, of course, they were. Opposition to racism, and genuine comfort with people who don’t share your race, it turns out, are things that take practice.

Many of the white characters on Mad Men treated King’s murder as if it were personal to their black coworkers, a death in the direct, rather than extended, family. “You should go home,” Peggy told her secretary Phyllis. “In fact, none of us should be working.” Don encouraged Dawn to go home, too, and only accepted that she would prefer to be at work, her persistence and dependability a deliberate counterexample to the rioters Phyllis called “these fools, running in the streets” whether Don recognizes it or not, when Dawn told him firmly “I’d really rather be here today.”

The decision that black employees should be allowed time to grieve, whether they wanted it or not, also inspired some of the first physical familiarity between Joan and Peggy and their African-American coworkers, though their hugs were markedly different affairs. Peggy and Phyllis, we know, have at least some sort of relationship other than a simple employer-employee one. Phyllis has told Peggy to be as encouraging to the men in the office as Peggy has been to her, though it’s not clear whether Peggy is encouraging Phyllis to try copywriting, or simply being a good boss. She feels comfortable enough with Peggy to watch the television in her office. They’re capable of talking about King’s death, at least a little bit, Peggy offering up Abe’s assessment that the riots “could have been a lot worse,” and Phyllis tearfully telling her boss, “I knew it was going to happen. He knew it was going to happen. But it’s not going to stop anything.” And when they hug, it’s a direct, if slightly brittle embrace. There is real feeling there, even if Peggy isn’t capable of being as open with Phyllis as Phyllis is being with her.
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Race has always hovered around the edges of the storytelling in Mad Men, though the racial politics of the sixties have usually served to illustrate characters’ personalities, rather than driving the storytelling. When Pete Campbell notes the emergence of a distinct black market, it’s an illustration of his sharpness as an advertising executive, and his inability to push the insight forward through conversations with the office building’s elevator operator serves as a reminder of his social deficits. Paul Kinsey’s decision to go on a Civil Rights organizing trip with his girlfriend is more about demonstrating his desire to simultaneously ingratiate himself and prove he’s on the cutting edge than about him actually having particularly evolved racial attitudes. Lane Pryce’s dalliance with an African-American Playboy Bunny was an act of fairly childish rebellion against his father, as much as his wife. And Peggy’s willingness to take Dawn, her replacement as Don’s secretary, home for the night, only then to worry that the more junior woman might steal from her, is an illustration of the struggle between her desire to be kind and her self-interest.

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s been actively resistant to the idea that he has to tell stories about the Civil Rights movement on the show in the past, even though he’s obviously made a choice to depict a segment of Madison Avenue that’s whiter and more male than the industry was overall. So Sunday’s episode of the show, in which we both learn more about Dawn Chambers (Teyonah Parris), Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first African-American employee, and see racial and gender strife come to the firm not through a racial incident but through the kind of petty office politics that have driven so much of the show’s drama for the past five years, feels both like a response to long-running criticism of the show and a rebuke to the critics, Weiner showing us that his show would get to a key subject in what he determined to be good time, and in his own way.

What Weiner decided to do was make Dawn’s race a factor in a conflict that was simultaneously larger and smaller. While Dawn wasn’t willing to skip out on work to help Scarlett (who must be named for Miss O’Hara, in a great nod to pop culture’s influence even on these pop cultural characters), she did agree to punch her fellow secretary’s time card. When Joan found out, she fired Scarlett for effectively stealing wages from the company, setting up a confrontation between her and Harry, who resents that Joan is a partner, while Harry’s work on television hasn’t earned him the same thing—”It’s a shame my accomplishments happen in broad daylight,” he spits at her in public, ignoring that what earned the partners that title was sacrifice and investment, not personal accomplishment—and bringing up the question of Dawn’s race as one factor, along with her lower level of complicity in Scarlett’s offense, in the decision about whether to fire her.
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On Friday 42, the big-screen treatment of Jackie Robinson starring Chadwick Boseman as the player who integrated Major League Baseball and Branch Rickey as the man who gave him the contract to do it, hits theaters. Unfortunately, what could have been a nuanced and complex exploration of racism and the role of sports in progressive movements and American life at large is a cliched, hackneyed mess that exists more to lionize Branch Rickey than to explore the real journey to desegregating America’s game. ThinkProgress sports columnist Travis Waldron and I saw 42 together, and discuss the problems with the movie’s treatment of history—as well as with its acting and writing—here:

Hi Travis,

On Wednesday, you and I headed out to see 42, the Jackie Robinson biopic that might be better titled The Oracular Pronouncements Of The Sainted Branch Rickey. I think we both walked out of the theater thinking that it was a terrible movie: there’s no human moment the script can’t resist immediately quashing with cliched oratory, and with a few exceptions, it seems to have some real anxieties about portraying the uglier side of racism.

I want to talk about all of those things, but I thought we should start with the one thing the movie got right: the economics of bringing Jackie Robinson to the major leagues. “New York is full of Negro baseball fans,” Rickey (Harrison Ford, overacting so dramatically I’m amazed he isn’t sponsored by the ham council) tells his assistant Harold at the beginning of the movie. “Dollars aren’t black and white. They’re green.” When a gas station attendant refuses Robinson access to the toilet when his Negro League team is on the Deep South, Robinson blackmails him into desegregating it by suggesting the team can buy its gas elsewhere. “Jack, is this about politics?” a white reporter asks him at his first spring training. “It’s about getting paid,” Jackie (Chadwick Boseman, who might have had a star turn with a better script) tells him. “I’m in the baseball business,” Rickey tells Robinson at a later point. “With you and the other black players I hope to bring up next year, I can build a team that can win the World Series. And a World Series means money.” Dodgers manager Leo Durocher (a fantastic Christopher Meloni) lectures his players, some of whom oppose the idea of playing with Robinson, “I’ll play an elephant if it’ll help us win…We’re playing for money, here. Winning is the only thing that matters.” Durocher himself is suspended from baseball when the Catholic Youth Organization threatens to boycott the league over his affair with a married actress. Even the racist manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman (a very strong Alan Tudyk) recognizes the economic imperatives, taunting Robinson at the plate “You’re here to get the nigger dollars for Rickey at the gate.”

That economic imperative story is interesting, and it’s important—and it’s a critical reminder that the decision to desegregate baseball wasn’t simply done out of the goodness of Branch Rickey’s heart. I actually wonder if that’s one of the reasons we haven’t seen an out player in professional sports, yet. Unlike with black players and black fans, who were visibly excluded from the game, and who represented a clear pool of both ticket dollars and playing talent that were shut out of sports, it’s not as if there are alternate gay leagues and alternate gay fan bases that are visible to mainstream sports and mainstream executives.

But it’s a story that pretty much gets smothered in sentiment. What did you think? I’m particularly curious what your reaction was to the way 42 presents how Robinson’s teammates came around to his presence on the club.

Cheers,
Alyssa
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This post discusses plot points from the April 10 episode of The Americans.

I’ve been rewatching all of Mad Men in recent weeks, and one of the things that’s struck me about the show on a second go-round is precisely how broad it is, from its limb-removal via lawnmower, to the bluntness and bigotry of Mrs. Blankenship, to its frequent use of vomit. The show’s silliness and sometimes obviousness are a counterpoint to the often opaque natures of its characters’ motivations and the slow burns of its plot arcs. I mention this to begin a consideration of this week’s The Americans because of how austere the show is shaping up to be, and how clear its lines are. I don’t think these are faults, or that they make the show boring—The Americans can do an action sequence or a domestic scene and make each hit like very few other shows on television, and do them equally well—but because there’s something fitting about the show’s clarity and nakedness given its exploration of absolutists on both sides of the Cold War.

This week’s episode divided into three very well-defined tracks: the escalation of the FBI from an investigative agency to a body on a war footing, the impact of that kind of escalation on the people who practice it, and the limits of the actual appeal of Phillip and Elizabeth’s Communist ideals. It was an elegant and painful triptych.

After Amador’s death, the FBI mobilized to respond, and Stan and Chris’s boss rallied his team with rhetoric that served as a sly reminder that the militarization of law enforcement dates back further than the War on Terror. “So, um, I knew Chris when he started here at CI. He’s— he was a good agent, a good friend, just…a good man. I’m sure you all have your stories about him. I was a little hard on him sometimes. But he did a lot of his department and his country,” he explained. “And now here’s what wer’e going to do for him. we’re going to take every resource we have, every ounce of energy and focus, and we are going to hunt…And we are not going to rest until they are behind bars, or better, until we zip them up in a body bag.” In that moment, he’s just a step away from Mark Strong in Zero Dark Thirty demanding lists of people to be killed. And later, he told Stan “It may be a secret war, but it’s a war. We have to fight like soldiers now, and your’e one of our best…In a war, blood gets spilled. That’s how it goes.”

But one of the strengths of The Americans is that it reveals the hollowness of that pep talk, in this case in a pair of scenes in which Stan and Phillip are each confronted with the impact of what they’ve done in killing Chris and Vlad. There’s something incredibly sad about Stan seeking out Phillip in the hotel room where he’s living out his separation, telling him “No offense, Phil, but this place is kind of depressing,” and then unloading about his friend’s death to his neighbor, who is the author of his misery. “He was stabbed,” Stan explains, and Phillip, for reasons of both friendship and self-preservation, asks “Who did it?” “Bad guys,” Stan tells him decisively, unaware that his confidant is the author of his misery, and that Phillip stabbed Chris in self-defense in a fight motivated by jealousy rather than international intrigue. “We’re going to find them.”
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