'Mad Men': The whole country's been drinking

In the middle of ordinary life -- fights with the boss at work, demoralizing demotions, affairs with inappropriate people and witnessing the last vestiges of a formerly intact marriage -- a shot rings out, prompting all to reconsider the fragile tenets of their existence.

Creator Matthew Weiner has always been cagey about whether he’d touch upon the Kennedy assassination in the third season of “Mad Men.” At times Weiner led interviewers to believe he wouldn’t. There’s no way of knowing what impulse was dictating his coyness at the time -- it seems most likely that he simply enjoyed the opportunity to be a big tease to the press, not that we can blame him -- but let’s all take a moment to rejoice that Episode 12, “The Grown Ups,” used the shocking murder of President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, as structure and catalyst for the events of the season's penultimate episode. Weiner and episode co-writer Brett Johnson so adroitly stitched in the historical with the characters’ personal lives that the event, documented to mega-conspiratorial degrees and back again, was made new, almost as if it was unfolding now, especially for those of us who didn’t live through it.

The first character on “Mad Men” to experience the news of Kennedy’s shooting is Duck, of all people, and our after shave-loving friend promptly unplugged the TV to eliminate distractions for his “nooner” with Peggy. This is real life, of course. Every day something tragic leaks over the airwaves, the Internet, the TV and though we might not literally unplug the device, we intellectually distance ourselves from it in order to get through the day. The news first being absorbed by a minor character seemed like a meaningful choice -- this is how big information can disseminate. Maybe you found out that the plane had gone into the first of the Twin Towers from the guy who sold you coffee every morning.

At Sterling-Cooper the news first hangs over the office like a poison cloud that hasn’t yet settled. Pete, dejected from the news that Cosgrove would ascend to senior vice president in charge of account services while he’d languish as head of account management, went to Crane’s office to mope about it and ostensibly strategize for the future. The TV droned in the background -- mundane and omnipresent but not yet revelatory. In another part of the hive, Don barked at Price to let him hire an art director now that Sal Romano is gone.

Then it swiftly descended. The secretaries and various creatives, like frightened gazelles, herded into Crane’s office, changing the channel to the announcement. In one of the most powerfully dreamy scenes of the episode, Don drifted down the hallway, perplexed and alarmed at the shrill ringing of unanswered phones. In Ossining, Betty and Carla sobbed and smoked together as the news roiled out at them.

And then we got a much-needed moment of comic relief. Peggy, adding to her fine cadre of one-liners this season, THC-enhanced and otherwise, asked Duck: Did you give me a hickey? In all fairness, hickeys are embarrassing. No one wants to sport that badge of seduction past age 16. After Duck absolved himself of that particular trifling, he admitted that a particular news story was taking his attention. Together, they watched Walter Cronkite announce that President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time.

Cut to Margaret Sterling sobbing in her wedding dress that her big day -- that she presciently didn’t want to carry on with anyway -- is now ruined. Indeed, the wedding planned for Nov. 23 is a disaster, to loosely quote Roger Sterling. The cake doesn’t arrive. There are no waiters. So many guests don’t show up that they consolidate tables. Cooper and Jane Sterling are glued to the TV in the kitchen, contemplating the banal monstrosity of Lee Harvey Oswald. To his credit, Roger gives a toast that’s wise, witty and perfectly attuned to the bizarre occasion. Later, he phones Joan and admits he doesn’t know how to react to Kennedy’s death. There is nothing wry or amusing to say about a mammoth figure killed in his prime.

While Pete Campbell plots with Trudie about leaving Sterling-Cooper, Betty begins to plot a departure even more grand in scope. Our first hints that Betty no longer takes comfort or strength from Don is cleverly bound in how they react to the assassination. He wants to hide the TV from the kids. He tells Betty to take a pill and lie down, which is also the way he’s tried to buffer the woes of their marriage. For years, he’s tacitly instructed her to look the other way, to not open that desk drawer, to sleep through it, succored by the emblems of a supposedly stable, successful life: the beautiful house, the beautiful children, the cocktail dresses and jewelry and daily maid and glamorous dates in the city.

At first, Betty swallows the pill and passes out, but later when Don tells her that everything will be OK, she challenges his rote platitude. How do you know, she asks. It was a telling question from Betty, who in the past has become angry when not shielded from harsh realities like planning for her father’s imminent death. Betty has always demanded to be coddled, protected and treated like a child -- but her questioning of Don showed her fledgling independence. She knows he has no idea whether anything will be OK. How could he or anyone know such a thing right now?

At Margaret’s wedding, Henry Francis arrived to an affectionate greeting from his date, a lovely young woman -- and phew, it was only his daughter. Betty and Don danced dangerously close to them and Don, interpreting his wife’s flittering eye contact as anxiety, tries to plant one on her. The Drapers have never burned with sexual chemistry, despite their daunting beauty together, but this kiss was particularly cold, even or especially in its perfection. It was the death of love, this kiss.

On the heels of another disorienting event -- the televised killing of Oswald -- Betty leaves the house by herself. It’s hard to say what Betty felt when she met with Henry and heard his appeals for her to leave her husband and marry him. Does she simply see a golden opportunity to get out of one marriage and land in another relatively painlessly? Is it just a matter of arrangements and convenience? How is love factoring in or is it at all?

She doesn’t know much about Henry, they’ve only had a handful of interactions, but his offers combined with her feelings of withdrawal are enough for her to tell Don that she doesn’t love him anymore. Maybe Betty has enough faith in love to know that it’ll grow with Henry. Better to exist in the opening possibilities than the postmortem of it.

Don, inadequate and clearly in denial, gives her the entirely insufficient advice to, once again, sleep it off. You’ll feel better tomorrow, he says, barely believing his own hollow words.

At the end, we get a fade-out of sorts with Peggy and Don, two consummate secret-keepers who most like to escape into their work, finding each other at the otherwise empty office. Call it a hunch, but it seems like Aqua Net might need a new campaign now.

In another moment with several meanings, Pete laments Kennedy’s death for aborting a cultural moment when everything felt like it was about to change. Pete doesn’t know that, if anything, the moment just swelled to something bigger and richer. Everything is still about to change and in more ways than he could’ve ever imagined.

--Margaret Wappler

P.S. Notably, this week's episode was delivered with a letter from Weiner stating that he would not be sending out the season finale to critics or pajama-clad Showtrackers. What explosive secrets lie in the intriguingly named "Shut the Door. Have a Seat"? What can be gleaned from this dull synopsis -- "Don has an important meeting with Connie. Betty receives some advice. Pete talks to his clients." -- scraped off the AMC website? The comments section, as ever, is open for wild speculation.

Photo: Sterling-Cooper denizens watching the news of Kennedy's shooting. Credit: Carin Baer

Comments

[JR]

A postscript comment to add. My memory was jarred a bit by other comments made about the episode.

We were all at grandfather's house after JFK's assassination and were at the dinner table when my 12 year old cousin ran through the house screaming, "They shot him! They shot Oswald!" She was watching TV and saw him shot! All the adults jumped from the dinner table and stampeded to the TV to see what happened. I recalled that the universal opinion by all the adults were that Jack Ruby delivered justice and Oswald got what he deserved.

The other thing I was reminded of by the episode was the intense resentment against Dallas. The City of Dallas was represented by a float in a parade later that year and it was pummeled by eggs and taunted and jeered by the crowd. Comments like the one made by the wedding guest that, "we should nuke Dallas", reflected real sentiments felt by people against the city of Dallas for a long time afterward.

The reactions, feelings and emotions shown in this episode really reflected how we all felt and how the adults reacted to Kennedy's death that day. This episode came across too real and accurate.

[beth]

Cheer up Maddicts, Betty will be hosting SNL the following Saturday after the finale, which gives the writers enough time to fill-in the year-end suspense with possible twists and turns!

The deal here is about NOT being able to Love:
To repressed Don, (unconditional love, or any love for that matter is alien to him); in his eyes, it has always been a Madison Avenue fabricated illusion, which he eloquently articulated in the pilot episode. So it has been three seasons of going through serial ostensible distracting sexual relationships, hoping to feel that absent void; when it wasn't working with one, he tries again and again. But, he always ends up in the same place: EMPTY, DEPRESSED AND NUMB. But now, he is feeling loss. He is beginning to realize that you don't know you love or have been loved, until it has been taken from you. You take your loved ones for granted. He is reflecting upon that feeling of connection he has craved all of his life--- which he had and lost. Sadly, and no fault of his own, he never knew what love was, and he’s feeling it for the first time.
We Americans were caught off-guard when JFK was gunned down, taking our routine robotic lives for granted, seeking a bit of excitement here and there. Don was caught off-guard when Betty gunned him down, permanently disrupting his rote surreptitious existence, replacing it with a reality he is now compelled to confront. His client accounts have never been about reality either, just the appearance thereof. It’s the “end of his world”, as he knew it, which is a good thing for him.

There is no way Betty will have a future with Henry, the Rockefeller aide. He has issues for sure. Any stranger who touches a woman's baby belly in a public venue, let alone never disclosing he had had his own, is creepy. That was the viewer's first clue. All is not what appears to be. Married woman are safe. Did you notice that homely mouse he brought to the Derby days? And why didn’t Betty reintroduce Henry to Don at the wedding? They met at Derby Days, and Don knew Betty and Henry had planned a Republican fundraiser. It was odd that moment was not included.
Here’s some trivia: Happy Rockefeller married Nelson in May, 1963. Custody of her 4 children went to her husband, Dr. James Slater Murphy, who worked at the Rockefeller Institute and a close friend of brother, David Rockefeller. Dr. Murphy also remarried - one his children’s teachers at the Chapin School!!

As for John Slattery (Roger), his comedic timing is impeccable! Always gives levity to the morose. “Marriage is a cakewalk after a day like today.” He and Joan remind me of harry and sally (Billy crystal and Meg Ryan). Harry did say, "You realize of course we can never be friends…because the sex part always gets in the way…Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her." Maybe the final finale, they will end up together!

Don and Betty are doing different dances right now. As overwhelmed as she is with the responsibility of dual parenting, she is still a good mother to her children. She did embrace Don very tightly when he arrived home on 11/22. She is going to go through much more ambivalence before she ends her marriage, which if that ever happens, will definitely expose Don’s truths.

If she remarries, it will be to a wealthy intriguing foreigner, who will rescue her from her boring life: someone like Onassis, perhaps.

As for Pete, for every door that closes a new one opens. He will take his client accounts and move on…maybe Don will be part of it.

Peggy is so emotionally needy, she lacks any judgment with men, which is why her roommate asked why she is fooling around with creepy Duck. (He was creepy on Desperate Housewives, if you recall, also!) There is going to be a psych thread in her future.

The eternal theme: ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Alfred Lord Tennyson

[Rosie]

["Also, I found it quite revealing that Duck would rather have a quick nooner with Peggy Olson and THEN let her know that something big was going on in the news rather than instantly telling her when she walked in the door that Kennedy had been shot. The caring and benevolent Duck seems to have a very selfish side. Note how he unplugged the TV set rather than simply turning it off. Lots to dissect in this episode!"]

Peggy proved to be equally selfish when she decided to go to work in order to avoid her family's reaction to the assassination . . . all because she couldn't deal with their weeping.

[Lee]

It's amazing that so many people are STILL getting into a tizzy over Duck Phillips releasing that dog, Whateverhisname, into Manhattan. At least I knew why he had done it. It was for the same reason that Don ordered Sally out of the bathroom, while he was shaving.

Instead, MAD MEN fans have taken Duck's actions to turn him into some kind of mustache-twirling villain. It's so funny and ironic that it is also ridiculous. And now, they're nitpicking over everything this man is doing.

Would they be acccusing Peggy of having bad taste in men if she had screwed Don Draper? No. Why? Because Don is the show's main character, despite stealing another man's identity in order to desert from the Army . . . and lie to his wife about it for over a decade.