This post discusses minor plot points from Mad Men‘s sixth season, though none that Matthew Weiner has requested that critics refrain from talking about.

The sixth season of Mad Men kicks with an image that’s an equivalent of a John Deere lawnmower to the foot: Don Draper reading Dante’s Inferno to himself, murmuring “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the stright road, and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.” Don’s been in the midst of a midlife, or perhaps life-long, crisis since Mad Men‘s earliest days, so it’s not as if he’s suddenly wandered off the right road. But when season five ended with the clear implication that Don would always stray from his intended route, no matter the woman along for the ride with him, it left Mad Men with a problem. If the show’s argument that Don can’t really change, what does it have left to say over the two more seasons creator Matthew Weiner has budgeted for it?

The premiere of season six offers a number of options. One potential new theme is mistaken identity. Don’s spent years concealing his birth as Dick Whitman, but he seems disconcerted by the extent to which people buy his polished image. “You some kind of astronaut?” a veteran asks him in a hotel bar. “I’m in advertising,” Don tells him, a bit rattled by the extent to which his pitch has obscured even the fake identity he’s built for himself over the years. Megan, who continues to find success as an actress, finds herself mistaken for one of her characters. “Excuse me, Corrine, I hate to bother you. I know your name isn’t really Corrine,” a woman from Minnesota approaches her. “You’re so much trimmer than you are on television…You just have a way.” Betty, who’s given much more to do this season, to the improvement of the show, even finds herself rattled by the assumption that she’s nothing but a judgmental suburban housewife.

Then, there’s the idea of flawed men reconciling themselves to their inability to transcend themselves. “They all open the same way. And they all close behind you,” Roger Sterling complains, using a metaphor that new life experiences are supposed to function like doors. “Look, life is supposed to be a path. You go along, and these things happen to you, and they’re supposed to change you. Change your direction. But it turns out that’s not true. It turns out the experiences are nothing.” Later, Mona Sterling, meeting up again with Roger, remarks “That man never tires of embarrassing himself.” When Roger assumes she means her new boyfriend, Mona corrects him, saying “I’m talking about Don.” Playing more aggressively with how Don would like to be seen, and how others see him, could broaden the emotional scope of the show in effective ways beyond the question of whether it’s possible for Don to transcend his instincts for deception. If he’s settled that question with a no, then there’s still plenty to be interested in as other people discover the extent to which he’s flawed, a dynamic that marked the end of his marriage to Betty and Peggy’s departure for his competitors.
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In a project that sounds alternately fascinating and disappointing, and certainly is proof that we’ve looped around a bit from the pro-soldier anti-war flicks of the first decade of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tom Hardy is going to play a Vietnam veteran who, disillusioned by anti-war sentiment on his return home, reacts by joining a violent motorcycle gang. I find this thing sort of irritating because it feeds the persistent, and false, narrative that opposing sending young men into situations where they can be killed, maimed, and traumatized somehow means not being supportive of those men and their interests. But it’s also kind of too bad because one of my favorite, deeply weird movies about Vietnam deploys bikers to precisely the opposite effect.

I discovered The Losers a couple of years ago while writing a piece comparing Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan movies. The plot of the movie is essentially as follows: a group of violent bikers get dropped into Vietnam to do a covert mission the military apparently can’t, in its official capacity, carry out. They soup up their bikes with ridiculous killing machinery, wreck dive bars in Saigon, plot to get their Vietnamese girlfriends home, and behave with honor after serving time for rape. Eventually, they’re sold out and killed by the C.I.A. after they succeed in rescuing a captured officer in Cambodia—it turns out, they were meant to fail, and their failure was supposed to be a pretext for expanding the war into yet another country.

The movie’s a total mess, but it’s entirely comfortable with the idea that you can separate out the government’s interests from the interests of the men in its service. It’s unfortunate that it takes a B movie to embrace what should be an obvious principal, and one that, if it was championed by slicker, more high-profile movies wouldn’t be so easy to marginalize.

This sounds pretty fantastic:

Christopher Plummer, who could walk away with the first Oscar of his long career in just a few weeks, has closed a deal to star in HBO Films’ Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, which is being directed by Stephen Frears. Frank Langella also is coming on board the movie, which details the legal fight between Ali and the U.S. government when the fighter became a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Ali was drafted into the Army in 1966 but declined to serve, citing his belief that the war was against the teachings of the Koran. When he appeared at an armed services induction in 1967 and refused to step forward when his name was called, he was arrested. After being found guilty, a series of appeals were fought and the case wound its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971 (Clay v United States). Ali persevered, mainly due to the prevailing anti-Vietnam winds, and also managed to throw out provocative lines into the mainstream such as “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me N—–.”

Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan are obviously not perfectly parallel wars, whether it’s the way and the reasons we got into each conflict or the abolition of the draft. But finding an alternate way to discuss the question of Muslim loyalty to the United States and the role of Islam in public life is a really smart thing to do right now. I’ll be fascinated to see how it turns out.

I do think that J. Michael Straczynski is basically correct that, given the nature of storytelling in comics, that “the perception that these characters shouldn’t be touched by anyone other than Alan is both absolutely understandable and deeply flawed…Superman is the greatest comics character ever created. But I don’t hear Alan or anyone else suggesting that no one other than Shuster and Siegel should have been allowed to write Superman.” And given the buzz about a Watchmen prequel movie, some prequel comics were probably inevitable. Given both of those things, and that I’m essentially reconciled to the idea that we’re going to have more of these stories that I see as essentially finished, I think the real problem with this project is that it’s focusing on the earlier lives of the characters we came to know in the initial story arc.

It’s not just that we know them fairly well already, and what the new books would be filling in is psychology and peripheral adventures rather than character details. It’s that I think it would be much more interesting to tell this backstory through structure rather than through characters, looking at a government that first institutionalized superheroes and then banished them to quiet retirements with the Kane Act. This is one of the reasons the Agent Colson moments and continuity in the Avengers movies and peripheral material have been so much fun. These are supposed to be projects that are reasonably thoughtful about what it would be like to have superheroed people in our midst, and folks like Colson, or regular liaisons to the Watchmen are so useful: they’re a way in to the idea not of having powers, but of reconciling yourself to people having powers around you that you don’t have access to and that you hope won’t be turned against you.

Watchmen told us something about ourselves or who we could have been: the forgiveness of Nixon, the decisive victory rather than the slow dissolution in the Cold War, the continuation of a high crime rate, the hypercorporatization of our country and our culture. Fleshing out the Comedian’s role as a sanctioned superhero, and the decisions that lead to his assassination of President Kennedy or his role in Vietnam, would be more interesting than explaining why Nite Owl is depressed because it’s about us, not about them.

I recently read David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts, which is a kind of depressing, if enlightening enterprise. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised than the man who created Charlie Brown was chronically depressed, but the story of his infidelities, and in particular, the way he pressured his oldest daughter to get an abortion in Japan and then barely acknowledged what he’d done when she got back, is less than gratifying.

But I think the counterfactual question that stood out at me most when reading the book is what it would have meant if Schulz or Peanuts had spoken out against the war in Vietnam. Michaelis writes in particular about Snoopy. In one strip, “Snoopy, invited to make a distinguished-grad speech at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, finds himself caught up in a riot protesting the drafting of dogs to serve in Vietnam…Snoopy, at the podium, his hit with a dog dish, then teargassed.” He writes “One of the few ‘enemies’ that Americans could agree on in those years was the Red Baron…From 1966 to 1969, Snoopy could be found pursuing—or being pursued by—the Red Baron wherever American explained itself to itself.”

The answer as to why Schulz didn’t come out against the war lies in this observation: “His opinions on subjects ranging from the miniskirt to the sexualizations of Peanuts were surprisingly tolerant, indeed hospitable.” You don’t get to be a national sage without being largely agreeable. But that quality also denies you your ability to speak forcefully and decisively on divisive issues without alienating somebody. It’s the same thing as perpetual reelection to Congress: if staying the nation’s tolerant Grandpa, or staying a member of the House becomes more important than anything you actually do with the position, you’ve got to start wondering what the point is.