Mindless Mad Men #6 – At the Codfish Ball
May 4th, 2012
This post has moved to Adam and Amy’s new Mad Men tumblr, She’s an Astronaut
http://shesanastronaut.com/post/47300023031/at-the-codfish-ball
Mindless Mad Men #5 – Far Away Places
April 27th, 2012
Mindless Mad Men #4 – Signal 30
April 19th, 2012
Botswana Beast: A lot of folk seem to be wetting themselves about the quality of this episode, which – I mean, I liked it obviously, Pete Campbell being a prime turd and getting an unlikely comeuppance, but it didn’t seem so tightly structured or to have so much of an “aboutness” to it? I guess last ep was maybe – arguably – a bit too on the nose for some of it, this was more about just the characters? (My favourite MM ep is still the first season’s closer, just for frame of reference).
Amypoodle: Oh The Wheel is a very good episode. Very sad, amazing ad pitch, etc. So people are getting excited over this one? I can see that. I mean, I preferred last week’s (despite on the noseness), but that’s a personal thing to do with liking ghost stories/Joan, but Signal 30 was still pretty bloody good. In some ways it was very traditional fare with its alcohol greased dinner party in a suburban dream home and Pete Campbell acting like an ultra dick (which is of course going to be the main focus here, isn’t it?), and it came complete with lots of nods to the past, particularly the first season, so it’s exactly the sort of episode someone who likes Mad Men should like.
But it very definitely was about something: Status. Status and Power.
More on status, power and Pete Campbell’s Don Draper meltdown after the cut!
Mindless Mad Men #3 – Mystery Date
April 12th, 2012
Amy: This episode wrapped its themes around itself so tightly the drama could have suffocated, but in the end it never got so arch that it failed to pack a punch even though as a construction it was pretty close to immaculate and, so, highly conspicuous.
Ad: Absolutely. It was testimony to the fact that Mad Men is only superficially realistic – realism is never so overtly self-conscious of its themes, or given to blurring the lines between dream and reality, for that matter.
Amy: It’s enjoyable to watch Weiner and co unpacking the theme of change in all these different ways, isn’t it? In Mystery Date it was all about the intrusion of an unknown element into the characters’ lives – a date with someone they didn’t know, a situation they couldn’t plan for. Basically they’re all Cinderella in Michael’s commercial, aren’t they, turning round to confront the stranger? We could break it down every which way, but that’s just a bit too anal for me. I think we should just play it by ear and discuss the threads we liked most.
Your date with mysterious mindlesses continues after this jump
Mindless Mad Men #2 – Tea Leaves
April 6th, 2012
This week we’re out in force. We’ve now got Illogical Volume added to the roster of mighty discussonaughts (‘Tremble before our discourse!’) So, yeah, they’re definitely a cast iron weekly thing now, these Mad Men posts.
Amypoodle: Although I haven’t checked, I think I can safely guarantee that over at Basket of Kisses there’s a debate genteely raging wrt whether or not this episode was fattist.
Illogical Volume: “Don’t you want to get back into that incredible closet of yours.” – American tv shows do love to fat up their pretty people, huh? It’s everywhere, from Monica’s fatsuit in Friends (“lol, remember when she was too fat to be in this TV show”) to Fat Lee Adama’s temporary command of Battlestar Galactica, in which fatness is a sign of weakness, something to be overcome on the road back to becoming a proper character.
Betty’s fat period is probably closer to the latter than the former, but we’ll see how it plays from here. Mad Men is a more nuanced sort of show, so – hopes, I still have them! To be honest, I found it hard to focus on that element of this episode because of the way it blurred into the “I found a lump” plot. It was almost too much drama for one episode (which is also very Betty somehow, plus it really amplified the sense that she’s frozen in her new life, that the skills she’s been told to value might not be much use to her if her body won’t oblige), you know?
Still, Betty’s… it’s hard not to empathise with her current situation. Plus while “I found a lump” stories are easy to overdo, they’re also scary stories to which we can all relate, sadly. And then you get to “your mother is obese” and “it’s good to be put through the ringer to find out I’m just fat” and it’s… ooft, the lady, she deals with horrible situations in some horrible ways. It was fashionable to slate January Jones’ performance in Sex-Men: First Class last year, but she was pretty great here, I thought. Her face conveyed just the right mix of blank terror and blank huffiness in pretty much every scene she was in.
Ad Mindless: Has everyone noticed that Betty actually lives in a castle now?
Mindless Mad Men #1 – A Little Kiss
March 31st, 2012
For those of you who don’t know – probably all of you - some of us Mindless like Mad Men a whole lot, and I think now that the new series is underway it might be time to get my thoughts down about it. The general format of these posts is presently undecided, so it’s difficult to give you an idea of what to expect. Whole screeds, mini essays, round robins with the other Mindless – all are possible. Whatever, these posts will be dense, but hopefully enjoyable if you’re familiar with the show, and, I’m sure, in some cases even if you’re not you can even enjoyed it with the delta-8 or a good cup of wine.
