Someone Else’s Writing

Creatively Dead, but Don Draper Still Fills Out a Suit Well

Writing about Mad Men is almost a blogging cliché; it’s one of those shows that only the people who love it watch, thus every write up is either filled with praise or disappointment on a grand scale. It’s as close to a cultural event as we have these days; shows don’t draw 30 million viewers a week any more, so a show like Mad Men that has a certain sheen of class gets attention even if its viewership means it would have been canceled after five episodes in, say, 1982.

I love reading recaps of Mad Men episodes because the collective hive mind of the Internet often finds little details that I missed, details I can then regurgitate and use to seem smart at cocktail parties. Although, come to think of it, I never get invited to cocktail parties, so perhaps my strategery is not working as planned. Put a pin in that. Because as I read everyone’s recaps of the 5/27/12 episode The Other Woman, I am convinced The Internet is getting it wrong.

Specifically, I’m referring to the Don/Joan dynamic in this episode. If you don’t watch Mad Men and don’t give a shit about Don Draper, please, please stop reading before I bore you to death.

In The Other Woman, Joan is asked to sleep with a Jaguar representative in order to guarantee his vote for SCDP to take on Jaguar’s account. It’s a heinous and disgusting request, and Joan is horrified, but also tempted, especially when Lane suggests (for his own heinous reasons) that she hold out for a 5% partnership in the company in exchange. 5% of a growing ad agency about to land a major car account would set Joan and her son up relatively well for the future, especially since she makes about $12,500  a year, which would be about $70,000 today. Not a bad salary, but throw in a kid to raise and 5% of the profits on top of that and it’s pretty tempting.

Let’s put aside the interesting fact that we now know Don owns %25 of SCDP. Or maybe we already knew that. At any rate, I wonder if Joan’s 5% is going to come into play someday.

Anyway, Don is the only partner who votes against even asking Joan to sleep with the rep. When he finds out about the partnership offer (made without his knowledge) he even goes to Joan’s apartment to talk her out of it. Everyone seems to think he does this out of a sense of protective affection for Joan, or moral outrage.

He does not.

He doesn’t want Joan to sleep with the rep because he wants to win the Jaguar account solely with his creative team’s genius and his own power of personality doing the pitch.

The week before, Don made a stirring speech about winning the Jaguar account. He wants to get back to the old Don, the genius who came up with fantastic ideas and who then almost willed clients to buy them. The guy who was so powerful purely in his creative forces that an entire agency coalesced around him. No one else could have created SCDP. Don Draper was the key ingredient.

Since then, Don’s life has faded. He got divorced, then remarried, his best friend died, and he almost drank himself to death. But what’s really gone, truly gone, is his creative spark. Season 5 of Mad Men has been about Don’s creative death. He hasn’t had a good idea in a very, very long time (at least an entire year). When he stayed up all night to come up with an idea for the Snoballs account, he was barely able to squirt out a decent, perfectly usable idea. Nothing genius. He saw the Jaguar account as a away to get himself back, to stay in the office all the time and force himself to be the old Don. I think he would have preferred to come up with the genius idea himself, but he was satisfied to at least be the captain of the team that managed it.

Some people have noted that his Jaguar pitch was staged to be as dramatic and powerful as the “carousel” pitch to Kodak in an earlier season, but was disappointing. I believe that’s on purpose. The pitch was perfectly fine, but not genius, and it reflects where Don is today. He’s a pro. He has the moves. He can pitch anything with the smooth oil of a seasoned ad man. But he no longer has the ability to write something like the carousel pitch, does he? And he’s just starting to figure that out.

Then he finds out that at least 1/3 of the reason they got the account was because Joan Harris slept with one of the reps, and he is ruined by the thought. He thought the old Draper magic was coming back. Now he finds out it was an even older magic, and he’s sick about it.

This show is like a goddamn Russian novel.

Friends, I like me some Mad Men. It’s one of the many television shows I ignored at first, smug in my resistance to marketing and hype, then watched in a marathon On Demand a few months after the first season ended, initially out of bored curiosity, then out of sincere excitement. It is an excellent show, written well and delivering subtle pleasures so consistently it’s hard to remember that the show is written and acted, and not just naturally generated from imagination, sunlight, and liquor.

Full disclosure: The show’s love affair with whiskey usually inspires me to drink a fifth of Rye during every episode, so my opinion of the show is … colored.

Anyways, I just watched episode “Lady Lazarus”, which I won’t bother summing up here because, why would I do that? Go watch it, you lazy bastards. Or find the eleventy-billion recaps out there waiting for your greedy eyes. This obsession with recapping the plots of TV episodes has got to stop. You know what’s really interesting about this episode? The fact that every single review or write-up about the episode I’ve seen mentions how much they paid to license Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles for it ($250,000).

Now, I’m a huge fan of Tomorrow Never Knows. It is a kick-ass song and is on a short list of songs that I think should never be seriously covered or re-imagined, because it is pretty much Awesome in musical form. And I think it was used wisely in the show, demonstrating to us that Don is not young and hip any more, and then demonstrating to us that he has no interest in being so any more. It’s important, I think, because Don is forty years old. In today’s age, forty is not so old any more. Forty year-old men today can be found at the same rock concerts as their kids. But back in 1966, friends, forty was fucking old. I’m sure there were some hip forty year-olds, but Don is certainly not one of them, and they used this song as a perfect way to demonstrate that: First of all, he can’t even tell a Beatles song from some horrible knock-off, and secondly, when he does give it a listen, he switches it off after a minute, disinterested.

All well and good, but for so many people, the big news was that they paid the whopping quarter-of-a-million bucks to use the song. Which is a lot of money. But why do we care so much? In today’s media-saturated world, it’s not so much that we’re so used to looking behind the curtain, there is no goddamn curtain any more.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s just interesting. Writers and other creative folks making these books and shows and movies are basically flim-flam artists. We fool you, we con you. We make you feel for imaginary people. We get you outraged at imagined atrocities. We trick you, over and over again. So it’s disturbing to realize how many tricks are no longer, strictly speaking, tricks any more, since y’all seem to know all about them.

It’s a challenging time. You know how you read books or see TV shows from 50 years ago, and they seem kind of simplistic and dumb and you know how they’re going to end like on page 2? Yup, because the audience is smarter now. Not in a general-IQ kind of way. In a media way. The tricks don’t work as well as they used to. These days, you buy a license to use a famous pop song from the ’60s and not only does everyone comment on your choice of music and what it means to the narrative, they also know exactly how the business works. They know you have to pay for that song, they know the song is expensive because of who wrote it, and they kow that as a result it was chosen very carefully.

I mean: Fuck. Where’s the mystery?

Of course, in a novel I can reference songs all I want, as long as I don’t print the lyrics. Titles can’t be copyrighted, so I can have my narrator cue as many damn songs as I like and hope the reader just hums along. Assuming they know the song. If they don’t, it goes awry – although, in the age of Spotify, that really isn’t a problem. In fact, if you’re writing a novel with a lot of song references, why not put together a playlist and be all 21st century and shit? Why not. Your readers will figure it out anyway.

Friends, I saw The Cabin in the Woods over the weekend. It’s rare these days that I actually buy into hype and get excited about a movie, but this one grabbed me. It just looked mysterious and cool, like that kid at a high school party smoking weed right out in the open, wearing sunglasses, and you’re fifteen and you see him and think, shit, if I could just hang out with that dude I’d be set for life.

So, this isn’t a review. I liked the movie a great deal, but everyone in the universe is reviewing it and breathlessly praising/criticizing the twists and turns and the premise, which is so huge and ungainly it either works for you or doesn’t, frankly. It worked for me. Enough said.

No, what I’m most excited about is the five minute sequence towards the end of the film where everything goes batshit insane. I think of this moment as the Natural Batshit Moment. Warning, I’m a gonna spoil the heck out of this movie.

The Natural Batshit Moment in a story is when you come to a point in the plot where something you’ve set up long before is sprung into action and the pace of the story goes into overdrive for a bit, careening off into complete joyous insanity – but it feels natural, like a piece clicking into place instead of a desperate attempt at injecting life into your moribund plot. Towards the end of The Cabin in the Woods, our two surviving sacrifices make their way down into the corporate offices. On the way they encounter a selection of the supernatural horrors kept in cages for use in their ritual sacrifice to the Elder Gods – it being revealed earlier that the evil they summon to destroy them all are trucked up in an elevator – and when pinned down by a cleanup SWAT team of sorts, they notice a huge, candy-like PURGE SYSTEM button. So they press it, releasing the horrors hidden under the cabin in waves, delivered promptly every few minutes by the dinging elevators.

Put aside the silliness of a PURGE SYSTEM button like that – we’re talking a universe where giant spiders and Pinhead-knockoffs are kept in glass cages to be delivered unto unsuspecting, drugged teenagers. Forget the silliness, and just sit back and enjoy the insane spectacle of the buttoned-down corporate environs being invaded by the nightmare creatures they’ve been serving upstairs as part of their jobs. This is batshit territory, but the story earned it. One, we’re shown how subdued and corporate the basement areas are – these fucks are killing innocent teens as part of their jobs. Two, we pretty much know the creatures are selected and delivered already, so the “storage system” isn’t too much of a stretch. Three, it doevtails nicely with the protagonists being pinned down with no way to fight back – except to purge the system.

The sequence that follows is fantastic. The quick shots of nightmare fuel killing the salarymen and women are quick and creepy. The throwaway scenes of people committing suicide rather than be taken by their worst nightmares are brutal and done with the right touch of blank affectlessness. The chaos, the panic – it all feels right. These people might work for some ginormous conspiratorial nightmare factory, but they woke up that morning, drank some coffee, went to their day job, and started making plans for diner. And then someone released the monsters, and the place became a massacre.

The rest of the movie is OK. Better than most, worse than others. This one sequence, however, will always raise The Cabin in the Woods up beyond the mediocre for me. When structuring plots it’s always hard to come up with a Natural Batshit Moment. You always want that crazy moment of freefall, that exhilarating sequence where plot points come together and send the reader/viewer on a brief gravity-free mission to fuck yeah. But it’s hard to pull off. The Cabin in the Woods pulls it off, and for a few minutes there every time the elevators dinged I almost cheered.

So there.

All right, let’s discuss Sucker Punch. First, some stipulations:

1. Sucker Punch is not a good movie.

2. However, something this banal and shallow almost certainly has to be this banal and shallow on purpose or life has no meaning and I might as well shoot myself in the head right now.

In fact, the banality, shallowness, and ridiculousness of this film is very likely the whole fucking point. I’m going to assume you’ve watched it, and thus know the story, as I will not offer a summary and will offer generous spoilers.

Here’s the thing: Zack Snyder thinks he’s smarter than he actually is, and to give credit where it is due, he tried to do something remarkable here. I think. The whole thing is so incoherent this all might be some sort of Dying Dream where my brain, murdered by awfulness, attempts to create a new reality that makes more sense. I think Zack Snyder made most of his movie ridiculous and meaningless on fucking purpose.

Consider: The title of the movie, when considered after having watched it, pretty obviously signifies a trick.

Consider: The set-up to the plot is perfunctory, barely sketched. I get the feeling Snyder would have preferred to just cold-open in the asylum and not bothered explaining how Baby Doll got there. In fact, that might have been the wiser choice, for all the good the wordless set-up actually does.

And then, just as Don Draper is about to shove a pick up Baby Doll’s nose and lobotomize her, bam! We are dropped into two levels of bullshit in which nothing matters. The use of the word levels is intentional, because while the first part of this portion of the movie is just a bad, boring Caged Heat riff, the second part is best described as Extended Video Game CutScenes. In the first level of bullshit, Baby Doll filters actual events in the asylum through her imagination as she sketches a plan to break out. In the second level of bullshit, she and her fellow inmates murder hundreds of mooks in order to prosecute their plan. But don’t worry; it is specifically stated that the mooks are not human, so we shouldn’t feel at all conflicted about their wholesale murder.

That’s important.

So here, then, is the trick, the sucker punch. We’re told explicitly not to worry about the slaughter, because it doesn’t matter. And the artificiality of the bordello level appears to imply that none of the main characters will be killed. It’s falseness, stylized design, and clear implication that it’s all a dream coupled with the ludicrous nature of their bloodless adventures makes your mind wander, secure that none of the pretty girls will get killed. Maybe they’ll be in danger, as Rockett is once or twice early on. Maybe a mission will go wrong somehow. But nothing’s going to happen in these two layers, because these two layers are bullshit, and Snyder works hard to make sure you’re aware they are bullshit. And we, the audience, are familiar with the tropes that apply to these kinds of bullshit and so we think we know what’s going to happen.

And then, boom! The girls die.

That, of course, is the sucker punch of the movie. After working hard to convince you that none of the main characters is going to die, he kills off three main characters in ten minutes. Their deaths are not really heroic or beautiful. They don’t really die for anything. After spending an hour or more convincing you that the story is just cutscene nonsense, he shoots them in the head, smears blood on his fingers, and paints a question mark on your forehead with it.

I’m not sure I would have liked a successful Sucker Punch, to be honest. This kind of haughty See? You’re the Monster! kind of storytelling is dull. Yes, yes, I am desensitized because of media violence. Fuck you, Zack Snyder. However, at least Snyder tried something. It didn’t work, and maybe it sucked, but he tried. I give him that.

Let’s also consider, as a parting gift, the clear implication that Blue the Orderly has been forging lobotomy documents for years in order to rape lobotomized girls. That, my friends, is what scientists call Entertainment.

Is there anything less engaging on television than The Walking Dead right now? I mean, Jebus. This show is becoming a seminar in how to take apocalyptic zombie fiction and make it boring. Here’s the recipe, in case you’re interested in creating your own boring apocalyptic zombie story as a sleep aid for the restless:

1. Have very, very few zombies. Zombies do show up from time to time on this show, and when they do it’s usually effective. But for a world overrun by the walking fucking dead, the characters spend a lot of time sitting around, sunning themselves, with no zombies, like, anywhere near them.

2. Put your characters in stasis for long periods of time. By my reckoning, the survivors have been at the farm for sixty or seventy years at this point. The farm is magically resistant to zombie invasion, so the characters are just sitting around talking endlessly about … being on the farm. When they originally arrived at the farm I thought this was a decent idea: On the one hand, the implied security of the farm, it’s resemblance to a normal life would tempt our merry band of survivors to steal it, or force their way into it. And of course I fully expected – and still expect – the survivors to destroy the place, to lead the Walkers there and see it burned to the ground. The fact that neither of these things – or something else I didn’t predict – has happened means the characters have just been sitting around, with occasional bouts of action clearly thrown in just to jolt the audience from its nap.

For a short while, admittedly, the missing girl storyline justified this. I could get behind that. But then the girl was missing for what seemed like years, and I’d lost interest in her story long before the Reveal. The Reveal was decent enough, yes, but would have worked better if they’d snipped a lot of the intervening story out, like a tumor.

3. Revert to SitCom character stability. I think we get it by now: Rick is moral, indecisive, and prone to lengthy sermons on This Is How We Live Now. Shane is angry and unstable, prone to violence. All of the characters now have a schtick, and by gum they are steady. Any time the show flirts with the possibility that Rick might grow a little less conflicted, or Shane might restore some of his humanity, or Dale might stop being the nagging, ineffective Voice of Timid Reason, they find a way to write their way out of it. God forbid a character actually evolve, because that would mean they’d have to find something else to write instead of another scene where Shane rants and raves about how he’s the only one capable of keeping everyone safe.

This is, of course, can be easily corrected, and likely will be by the end of the season as they ramp up a spectacular finale. In the mean time, I’ve stopped watching. If I read some reviews that urge me to reconsider, I’ll be happy to. until then, I’m sick of the Hand Wringing Zombieless Zombie Apocalypse Gang.

This Guy. Damn.

So, in our continuing series of Jeff Complains About Other Writers’ (Mainly TV & Movie Writers) Missteps While Wholly Ignoring His Own, what should I complain about? That while Boss is a good TV show comparisons of it to The Wire are ridiculous and make me want to smash my television in righteous anger? That I am wondering just how long the electricity and other utilities, not to mention fresh bread, will be online in the universe of The Walking Dead? (I mean, it’s been weeks or months since the epidemic destroyed civilization, right — and yet they are STILL USING THE POWER GRIDS).

No, let’s discuss Boardwalk Empire and why you’ve got to resist SitComming your stories.

SitComming, in Somers Parlance, refers to those static situation comedies where you cannot ever actually change the situation, the balance of circumstance and characters you’ve created. Every episode has to end with the characters back at square one. Sometimes, for Sweeps or something, you can introduce some chaos, but by the end of the cycle, everything is back where it was. This makes sense in a Sit Com, as that is entirely the point of such shows. But for a drama, especially a drama that is supposed to be multi-layered and complex (like Boardwalk Empire), part of the appeal is the fact that things will change and evolve.

One of my biggest complaints about The Sopranos, after all, was that it struggled mightily to keep Tony in exactly the same position week after week. The show would have been much more interesting if they’d sent him to prison, or witness protection, or simply had his empire crumble beneath him. The show flirted with these ideas, but it never actually followed through, and it weakened an otherwise excellent show.

In its first season, BE established the universe and the ground rules and the characters: Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson was a smart, sharp-dressed political boss with a dangerous Dragon as his right-hand man (Jimmy, who rose from schmuck to a cold-blooded killer pretty awesomely) and all the clout in the world. Season One was fine, if not brilliant. I enjoyed it, and I looked forward to Season Two. I was encouraged, incredibly encouraged when Season Two immediately established that Nucky was in serious trouble: He’s abandoned by his Dragon, his brother, and all of the Ward Bosses with any brains. His income dries up, his influence disappears, and everything is up in the air in a delightful way. I was hooked. I knew that Nucky would probably end up on top again at some point, but how were the writers going to do it?

By SitComming it, apparently.

Nucky’s Dragon, Jimmy Darmody, is seduced over to the opposition. This leaves Nucky without a capable killer on his payroll. Nucky himself is not intimidating. He’s Steve Buscemi, after all, and while I can believe Nucky slitting a throat in the dark, he’s not a guy to walk into a building with a shotgun and murder an entire family. That was Jimmy’s job. Removing Jimmy from Nucky’s team was the engine that drove my interest in the storyline — Nucky’s a political operator who’s gotten into the organized crime game, not the other way around. How would he handle himself? What surprises would the character hold for me?

None, because the writers wasted little time in introducing a replacement Jimmy for Nucky, a mysterious Irish immigrant Nucky is asked to give a job to. The new guy, Owen Slater, observes Nucky’s businesses for a bit and then marches into Nucky’s office and announces he’s a man who can get people to stop doing things. With a nod from Nucky he goes off, beats up some of the opposition’s guys, and establishes that Nucky has some muscle again.

In other words, Nucky’s situation is nudged back towards the center. He loses his Dragon, and thus his ability to translate his will into violent action … then he gets a new Dragon. Yawn.

Now, It’s still interesting, and well-written. And I’m curious what the New Dragon’s real motives are, whether this will turn out to be something more or different. For the moment though, I feel like the writers just couldn’t think of a way for Nucky to fight his way out of the current situation without someone like Jimmy/Owen to kill folks for him, so they surrendered to practicality and brought in the new character to redress things. It’s kind of disappointing.

The WWI veteran who wears half a mask to hide his shell-destroyed missing face? THAT GUY is awesome. I want a spinoff show about him.

Continuing my series of essays about SFnal Movies Beginning with the Letter “P” Starring Actors Who Really Ought to Have Better Things To Do, I watched the movie Priest the other day, starring Paul Bettany.

This was a mistake.

The film is based on some sort of Korean graphic novel I have never heard of. Which means nothing. The list of things I have never heard of is vast, and no one cares about it. The list of people in the world who, in turn, have never heard of me or Avery Cates is also vast, and dwarfs most known quantities. Let it drift.

The basic idea is: In an alternate universe, vampires (which are freaky ugly monsters, not suave, good-looking European gentlemen or teenagers) have always fought humans. For centuries they battled, with the vampires slowly getting the upper hand despite the technology and 24-hour existence of the humans. When things looked most grim, the Church (which is, basically, the Catholic Church, invoking the old trope of All Christians are Catholic), somehow figures out how to train Priests, human killing machines specially trained to destroy vampires. While everyone else crowds into walled cities under the Church’s protection, the Priests go forth and kick ass, presumably with Jesus Power helping them along, and kick so much vampire ass the vampires surrender and are locked into reservations. The Priests are deemed too scary and are decommissioned and forced to take up normal lives, but because they are feared they struggle to assimilate back into society. The huge tattoo of the Cross on their faces might also have something to do with their shunning.

That’s back story. There is a plot, yes. It involves the main character seeking to avenge the death of his brother and rescue his daughter-in-law (or IS she?) from a former priest turned super special human hybrid vampire, and discovering a vampire uprising in the process.

That’s all you need to know about the plot. The real question is, does any of this work. The answer is, no.

The main problem I have with the film is that the whole priest/church part is completely superfluous. Sure, imagining a world where Roman Catholic Priests are trained as superhuman vampire killing machines is a cool idea, but that’s all it is, an idea. To make it into a universe, we need to see how this impacts things. How the religion has mutated, how the Church has incorporated vampirism into its teachings and beliefs. How the religious beliefs of the priests influence their personalities and personal struggles. Instead, it’s just used as the barest of a sketch, and then we have many many fight sequences where Paul Bettany kicks vampire ass.

If nothing else, since the vampires clearly have sentience, you might imagine the question of whether a vampire has a soul might come up, and that this question might be of interest to mean and women who believe in God and life after death and all that. The vampires, however, are treated as standard CGI-Orc beings, meaning it is sure as hell okay to murder them by the dozens, and to enjoy the spectacle of their slaughter. I don’t have any problems with this, per se, but if AlternatePriests don’t give a fuck about killing things that scream in pain as you kill them, then I would like to explore a bit about how they came to this frightening mindset.

In short, Priest is a shallow set up and then a very long fight sequence. If that’s your thing, enjoy.

One thing I would recommend: If the movie comes up for free on TV, watch the opening animated sequence. It’s fun, it summarizes the backstory efficiently, and is entertaining as heck. Then change the channel.