Spent all of yesterday watching Mad Men, every episode I hadn't seen yet from this current season. As you'll remember I watched the premiere but then the broadcast networks started their seasons early and all those bright, shiny shows full of promise presented themselves.
(And some of them misrepresented themselves on the first date. Hey, TV shows are just like people!)
So yesterday (and a bit of the night before) I watched all the Mad Men episodes on my DVR, just in time to see Don look at Salvatore with contempt and use the phrase "you people " after Sal's run-in with the Lucky Strike guy, Lee Garner, Jr., in the edit bay.
Is Don a bigot, a product of his time and the prevailing wisdom, or does he have some history that has created this contempt in him?
Quick story ... I was the editor of a martial arts magazine in the mid-80s (I know! Me!) and our cover subject the second month I was there was a young, very goodlooking actor who was starring in a movie of said genre and we put him on the cover.
Cover shoot done, we (me, art director, photographer, ad sales guy) took him to lunch, where I had to spend an hour listening to this guy tell me how these "fags in Hollywood" were following him around the gym, into the locker room, into the steam room ... how he hated that, and them, and "fag this fag that fag the other."
I was too young and too scared of losing the job to even know how to deal with such things. I let it go. I probably wouldn't, today, but I was just a kid.
Has the dapper Draper had the same issue? Not that I would for a second excuse Don's derisiveness, especially since Salvatore did everything right. It's like I should have said to the guy on the cover of my second issue of that magazine, "Not all of us want to have sex with you, some of us just want you on the cover of the magazine we work for."
More after the jump.
Salvatore did do everything right, he was perfectly professional. Another quick story ... actually two quick st0ries ... I've had to deal, on two occasions, with same-sex sexual harassment in the workplace. I'm not a litigious guy and I never took any official action regarding the events, but I was older by this point so I did know what I had to do to make it stop and it did. And eventually there was a price paid for what happened and I didn't have to do a damn thing to make that happen.
So imagine it happening in the early 60s. And, imagine it happening to you when you're doing everything and anything you possibly can to cover over your undisclosed homosexuality.
Then, imagine a guy like Don Draper, who can't go five minutes without thinking about putting his dick in something female, implying that by virtue of your sexual orientation you're, well ... some guy who can't go five minutes without putting his dick in something male.
A bit of projection, Don Draper?
Might even make you call your beard of a wife from a payphone near the brambles in Central Park to tell her you're not coming home for dinner.
Though I have no idea what Salvatore thinks he's doing there in a suit and overcoat, unless he thought it would give him a place to put his dildo instead of in his sock (that's right, Richard Quest from CNN, I'm talking about you).
More on Mad Men later in the week, because there's so much more to talk about, including Peggy's weed experience, "Conrad Hilton" and how January Jones has really grown into her role.
I just needed to get this particular piece of business off my chest.
Don Draper doesn't seem so attractive to me anymore. And Sal doesn't yet have the nerve to buy himself a dildo.
I hope he find that nerve soon, and I hope he uses said dildo in a place with hot running water and soap. Indoors, where the towels will stay clean, too.
First off - I was howling by the time I got to the end of this entry. Thanks - I needed the laugh.
I didn't have the visceral response you did to Don's "you people" (although I have my own "keeping my mouth shut" story as you do). This episode was crafted in such a way that there was an echo of "you people" throughout. Betty tells Carla she can leave on "her" radio station, Don tells the teacher, Miss Farrell, that "someone like you" should like having sex with a married man...the entire episode was an examination of a game of King of the Hill (and I think it is more relevant to today, in which gays and lesbians are judged and seen as "less than" by people who are major leagued fucked up). Don's response, I feel, was less about being homophobic and more about his feelings of being superior to everyone else - so he's more of a douchebag and that should come as no surprise since he kind of was one in the beginning. And being couched with the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr about equality, compassion, and minority rage, the episode said so much more. Add to that Conrad Hilton putting Don in his "place" saying you didn't give me what "I" want and Don suddenly become one of the "you's" - a person whom another sees as a lesser being always to be subjugated by "my" will.
We're racing toward the end of the season, and with Kennedy's assassination looming (I love how Roger's daughter's wedding is the day after his assassination - what a mess that event will be!), I'm interested to see how Matthew Weiner will juxtaposition Kennedy's death with the slow unraveling of everything at Sterling/Cooper and the Draper home(Joan is MIA, now Sal, Betty is being lured away by Duck, Roger and Don are at each other's throats, the fainting couch is turning Betty's already childlike mind to mush).
PS - Maybe Betty has the mysterious dildo you wrote about hidden under the fainting couch's cushions. Amazingly, it would solve a lot of these people's problems.
Posted by: bamberluvr | October 17, 2009 at 05:58 AM