Mad Men and Epi-slams

Don Draper

Late on the Mad Men bandwagon, I have spent the last two weeks in a feverish reverie, watching as fast as I could to complete the first two seasons before the season three premier.

Television episodes designed for hour broadcast are actually about 47 minutes long, to allow for commercial breaks. When watched on DVD or on cable-on-demand or internet streaming, the stories can flow seamlessly without stopping, like movies. Suddenly, without the constant interruptions of loud and annoying commercials, the attention span is restored, the wandering around the house stops, the internet surfing idles. The lie of multi-tasking is laid aside, and one can be completely absorbed in the characters, plots, and subtleties. In conjunction with storylines that arc across multiple episodes, even across multiple seasons, the viewer can be drawn into a dreamlike immersion in story.

With a complete season of disks, an entire weekend can be consumed watching an epislam of episodes. Easy obsession that is cheap to satisfy and less destructive than many other weekend hobbies. Like civil war re-enactors who immerse themselves in a long re-creation of experience with such verisimillitude that they experience "period rush" and "Civil War-Gasm", the viewer of an entire season of Mad Men can feel like they have smoked a carton of cigarettes, clinked a couple dozen of ice filled glasses, and sat in perplexed and moody silence until the new era dawns. Like collectors of particular vintage artifacts, viewers can suffer "completism," in which every episode must be watched in chronological order, every commentary track parsed, every set of credits analyzed.

A Google blog search of "dvd watching mad OR men, OR wire, OR lost, OR true OR blood" turns up over 1,295,416 hits; the addition of the word "obsessed" narrows the results to 51,027. How many people do you know who've told you they were watching one of these popular series from end to end?

But Mad Men has a special hold on me. My parents were the same age as Don and Betty Draper at the same time in which the series is set; my father commuted to New York City from the suburbs; came home late on the train; traveled in a world of men and cocktails and golf, riding elevators in office buildings and having secretaries sit outside his glass windowed skyscraper offices. The sheer virtuosity of this recreated world has transfixed me, the details enhancing the effects of the "period rush." And the characters, beautifully clothed and riddled with flaws, mysteries, and self-occlusion, are fascinating in a way that is rare in television or movies of any kind. Like the opening credits, in which a stylized Don Draper falls through the caverns of skyscapers covered with advertising images, so I have fallen prey to series-itis, a benign ailment at worse, and at best, a dream to wallow in for a weekend or two.

A Contrary Opinion About Mad Men

The Real Madison Avenue

Mad Men: Official Website

Opening Credits (Beautiful!)

What Would Don Draper Do?

Stunner Ow-ers

Summer Hours, 2009
L'Heure d'été

Summer Hours. Lovely and languid or tedious and torpid?

Flat. Flatlined. No rising or falling action. No action. The plot points are barely blips in the flatness. It's discouraging to read the film website's synopsis; in fact, the reviews, too, which describe a "struggle" among the siblings, that they "remember" together about the past, that the objects represent something important, that there is conflict and resolution. The family dynamics are so slight, the reviewers' words over-describe the almost invisible events of the movie. Perhaps this is just the filmed equivalent of the Gallic shrug: to recognize their differences, however minimally, is a big struggle to the French?

The teenage invasion at the end almost redeems things, with its implications of doom (the fire, the studio, the pond) and the fresh carelessness of the new generation: stupid, willful, and yet still nostalgic.

""Summer Hours," as calm and quiet as its title, is in some ways [Olivier Assayas] most coherent and complex exploration of the current shape of the world. Don’t be fooled by the apparent modesty of its ambitions. Sometimes a small, homely object — a teapot, a writing desk, a sketchbook, a movie about such things — turns out to be a masterpiece." -- A. O. Scott, New York Times, May 15, 2009

"A movie whose true central subject is how sad it is to sell your two Corots, [but of course who could afford the inheritance tax etc.] is bewildering. Even more bewildering is the fact that Mr. Scott eats it line, hook and sinker."
-- Comment 14. New York Times, May 18th, 2009 8:27 pm. George.

"The actors all find the correct notes. It is a French film, and so they are allowed to be adult and intelligent. They are not the creatures of a screenplay that hurries them along. The film is not about what will happen. It is about them. The recent American film that most resembles this one is Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married." Some audience members didn't know what to think of it, because it didn't tell them. Sometimes you just have to figure out what you think for yourself. "Summer Hours" ends on the perfect note, the more you think about it."
-- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, May 20, 2009

"Lots of films are called haunting, Summer Hours truly is."
-- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, May 14, 2009

"Parts of "Summer Hours" feel very much like real life, which is both the film's strength and its ultimate weakness. The sense of realism can only sustain this downbeat French drama for so long. After a while it feels like you're really spending nearly two hours with your squabbling siblings."
-- Jeff Vice, Deseret News, June 25, 2009

"What is most unusual about "Summer Hours" is that it is concerned about what will be left of French culture if the country's best and brightest move offshore. French films traditionally take France and its eternal appeal for granted. "Summer Hours" is the rare film that worries about that, worries about the future, and that proves to be invaluable."
-- Kenneth Turan, L.A. Times, May 29, 2009

For the real thing, see the patrimony of France and the rest of the Western World at the Musée d'Orsay