Excerpt From 'Mad Men Carousel' by Matt Zoller Seitz

7/24/2019 Excerpt From 'Mad Men Carousel' by Matt Zoller Seitz

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THIS BOOK IS A TIME MACHINE.

It goes backwards and forwards through all seven seasons. It takes longtime fans to a place

where they ache to go again. It guides new viewers on their first trip to 1960s Madison Avenue.

It’s called Mad Men Carousel. It lets us think about the show the way a TV critic does. Around

and around and back home again, to a place where we know why it’s loved.

AVAI LA BL E WH ER E FI NE BO OK S AR E SO LD





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“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” starts with a definition of “Mad Men.” The

white-on-black title screen tells us the term was coined in the late

1950s to describe the advertising executives of Madison Avenue.

After a pause it adds, “They coined it.”

“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”1 not only creates a world, sets the gears of a

story in motion, and introduces us to the show’s hero, adman Donald Draper

(Jon Hamm2 )—it tells us that everything on-screen is about control.

Control of money. Control of power. Control of information. Control of

the image.

The tale is told in accordance with the rules of the society in which it

takes place. Screenwriter and series creator Matthew Weiner and director

Alan Taylor are controlling storytellers. They dole out facts about the ad agencySterling Cooper and its employees on their own timetable. Even though we get to

observe intensely private moments, we’re always on the outside looking in. Our

peeks behind the curtain are not comforting. They confirm that the powerful

decide what we see, how we see it, and what that glimpse will cost us.

The portrait of Don is the best example of the way Mad Men reveals itself.

He’s one of the most powerful characters on the show, but we can’t access his

interior. We gather from the shot of his Purple Heart and the sound of bombs

bursting as he drifts into a nap that he’s a veteran, but we don’t know why it’s

1 Matthew Weiner wrote “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” in 1999 as a spec script. At the time, he was

a staff writer on Ted Danson’s sitcom Becker, eager to make the leap into drama. It somehow

crossed David Chase’s desk; as a result, Weiner became a key creative player on The Sopranos,

writing or cowriting a number of seminal episodes (among them “Unidentified Black Males,”

“The Test Dream,” “Kennedy and Heidi,” and “The Blue Comet”). Yet, terrific though Mad Men’s

pilot may be, there are ways in which it’s clearly the work of a less mature writer than the Weiner

beloved by Sopranos fans—it is only the first four episodes, mainly the pilot, that make ironic

jokes at the expense of the era in which it’s set. Such gags seem a bit like showboating by a

writer eager for attention, but they’re forgivable in light of how substantial the episode is as a

whole. Social anthropology is one of Weiner’s main concerns—we’re dropped into this world

and allowed to draw our own conclusions about it, as was generally the case with The Sopranos (at least before Chase began his meta-critique of audience bloodlust).—Andrew Johnston

2 Although this is considered Jon Hamm’s breakthrough role, he’d previously had minor roles on

several TV shows, including Charmed and The Division. He’s since had roles in movies such as

The Town and Clear History , as well as guest roles on several TV shows, including 30 Rock and

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

SEASON 1 / EPISODE 1

“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”

Written by Matthew Weiner

Directed by Alan Taylor

It’s Toasted



26

Mad Men CarouselS 1 / E 1

important that we know this. When we get to the end of the episode and learn

that Don has a wife and children and a house in Ossining, New York, 3 it’s a

surprise, based on his behavior.4 But even though we surmise that Don must

not be satisfied at home—otherwise, why would he have a mistress?—his warmsmile at his as-yet-unnamed wife and kids confounds that assumption. Who

is Donald Draper? We don’t know yet. When will we find out? When the show

is ready to tell us. The details aren’t filled in, but are slowly unveiled.

We learn a bit about the show’s central location, Sterling Cooper, a small

but respected ad agency whose fortunes are built mainly around one client,

Lucky Strike cigarettes. We also get a sense of the society that surrounds

Madison Avenue: an upper-middle-class to wealthy social sphere, vigorous and

arrogant, with domestic satellites throughout Manhattan and the tristate area.

It is a world ruled by straight white men who are comfortable giving orders to

black men and to women (in the workplace and in the domestic sphere) and

who admit outsiders selectively, and only for profit. These men are complacent

about being on top. They like for things to be done a certain way, and they explain

what, exactly, that way is, in language that leaves no room for challenge.

There are hints of disquiet and dissatisfaction, mainly in scenes with

the Jewish department store manager Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff 5 ), whose

wealth gives her the power to rattle Don’s sexist assumptions; and Don’s bohe-

mian girlfriend, Midge (Rosemarie DeWitt6 ), who digs Don’s magnetism and

creativity but seems unimpressed by his status. And there are moments here

and there that make easy jokes about antiquated technology and attitudes,

such as when office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks7 ) describes

an IBM Selectric typewriter8 as “simple enough for a woman to use.”

3 The Drapers could plausibly live in any of a number of Westchester commuter suburbs but Ossining

is an homage to John Cheever, who moved there in 1961. According to the exhibit Matthew Weiner’s

Mad Men at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Matthew Weiner opened the first

writers’ meeting of each new season by reading a Cheever short story aloud.—Amy Cook4 It’s also a “Well, of course” moment. Mad Men debuted in 2007, on the heels of the finale of

The Sopranos, one of many cable dramas from the aughts that were built around married men

who got action on the side.—Matt Zoller Seitz

5 Maggie Siff previously had roles on Rescue Me and Law & Order: SVU. She went on to play

Tara Knowles on Sons of Anarchy .

6 Rosemarie DeWitt has had roles in Cinderella Man, Rachel Getting Married, and on Showtime’s

United States of Tara.

7 Christina Hendricks had roles on several TV shows, including ER and Firefly , before taking the

role of Joan Holloway. She’s since been in films such as Drive and John Slattery’s God’s Pocket.

Her Mad Men character Joan shares a first and last name with the heroine of John Cheever’s

short story “Torch Song.”—MZS

8 The IBM Selectric typewriter was not actually introduced until July 1961; it replaced the rib-bon and typebar found in its predecessors with a “typeball.” The Electric’s typeball and ribbon

moved back and forth, but unlike traditional typewriters, the paper stayed in one place, and

the Selectric could print different fonts on the same page. Matthew Weiner has said that he

knew that this was an anachronism, but the more period-correct 1960 models were harder to

come by and repair, and also much louder, which created more sound issues.—RKL



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It’s Toasted S 1 / E 1

But for the most part, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” denies us the sorts of

comforting anchors that many period stories provide. There are no characters

who represent the twenty-first-century, college-educated, bourgeois American’s

perspectives on race, feminism, economic inequality, or anything else.The new secretary, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss9 ), exemplifies the epi-

sode’s storytelling approach. It places viewers on the outside. Most TV pilots

have a character like Peggy: an audience surrogate who gives other characters

an excuse to deliver exposition. But not many go so far out of their way to

make the “surrogate” character an emblem of what it means to be relegated

to the outer boroughs of the American Dream. Peggy’s presence reminds us

that while Don feels somewhat detached, even alienated, from the world he

seems to rule, this is but another example of Don’s privilege. Peggy doesn’t

just feel like an outsider, she is one: a woman in a man’s business.

Peggy arrives from the outside, knowing only that this is her new work-

place. It’s a white-collar cattle pen, with boxy desks and featureless columns

and walls largely devoid of art. Secretaries type away under rectangular light

panels. Switchboard operators connect the firm to the outside world. [END. 1]

As Joan, the boss of the secretarial pool, takes Peggy (and us) on a tour [END. 2],

she describes a male-supremacist workspace, and a job that’s equal parts

nanny, maid, mother, and concubine to men who act like bosses even when

they aren’t. She also lays out what she considers an ideal future. She says if

Peggy, who currently lives in Brooklyn, makes the right moves, within a year

she’ll be in the city “with the rest of us,” and if she’s really smart, she’ll be out

in the country and not have to work at all.

Also: She needs to show more leg.

Joan’s not just telling Peggy how to do her job. She’s telling Peggy how

she’s expected to present herself to men, appeal to men, and live her life in

service to men, while pursuing dreams that were defined by a male-dominated

society, with a mighty assist from fantasy-enablers like Don.The most unnerving moments in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” make it

seem as though being a woman on Madison Avenue circa 1960 was to feel

constantly scrutinized, rated, and otherwise dehumanized by men. The

junior accounts man, Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser10 ), who’s about

to get married but ends up wheedling his way into Peggy’s bed at the end of

“Smoke,” presumes that Peggy is a concubine or a concubine-in-training. He

says he’s looking forward to taking first crack at the female entertainer at his

9 Elisabeth Moss played presidential daughter Zoey Bartlet on The West Wing from 1999 to

2006, among other roles, and went on to star in the acclaimed miniseries Top of the Lake and

in Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love.—LP

10 Vincent Kartheiser had several movie roles from the nineties on, beginning with Tony Bill’s

Untamed Heart, and was best known for playing Connor on the TV show Angel before Mad Men.



28


bachelor party because “it’s rumored that she took down more sailors than

the USS Arizona.” In the scene where Pete peals, “Ready to sweet-talk some

retail Jews?” he refers to Peggy as Don’s “little friend” and asks her if she’s

“Amish or something.” (“I’m from Brooklyn,” she replies.) At Joan’s urging, Peggy visits a gynecologist. He lights up a cigarette,

tells her to relax, and thumps her belly as if testing the ripeness of a water-

melon. As we hear him ask Peggy if she’s there to get on the Pill,11 we’re looking

at a close-up of his hand sliding into a latex glove—an image redolent of an

older form of birth control and a different method of penetration. The doctor

shockingly betrays Joan’s confidence, mock-worries that once Peggy gets on

the Pill she’ll become a “strumpet,” and warns her not to turn into “the town

pump” to “get your money’s worth.” A couple of minutes into this already

uncomfortable scene, there’s a cut to a wide shot of the doctor leaning into

Peggy as she turns her head in the direction of the camera. The new vantage

point makes it look as if Peggy is in the preferred birth-giving position, circa

1960. Supine, subservient, helpless.

“I really am a very responsible girl,” Peggy says, in a faraway voice.12

Everywhere you look, men are making jokes about “having” women,

as they might have lunch or drinks. Whether the women want to be had is

immaterial. It’s all part of a script that men and women know by heart. At

Pete’s bachelor party, a woman coiffed like Marilyn Monroe slinks onstage

in a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dress, removing a black glove to organ music.

The entire setting is theatrical, and not merely because it is a cabaret. The

waitresses and the performer are playacting a certain ideal of femininity. The

men are playacting the rituals of moneyed urban masculinity. At one end of

the table sits the closeted gay art director Salvatore Romano13 playacting the

straight young tomcat on the prowl. “Do you have a girlfriend, Salvatore?” Pete

asks him. “Come on, I’m Italian,” he says, an ad-libbed nonanswer that leaves

the evening’s script undisturbed.

11 It is believable that Peggy would not know exactly how birth control pills work. The episode

takes place in March 1960, but the Food and Drug Administration didn’t approve Enovid, Peggy’s

prescribed birth control, for contraceptive use until June 23, 1960. It’s not a mistake, though:

The Pill had been in general use for three years before it was cleared by the FDA. It has been

conservatively estimated that at least half a million women used it before its approval, without

appropriate directions for its use or full knowledge of its risks.—Roberta K. Lipp

12 Then comes the first of many perversely funny insert shots/cutaways in the manner of The

Sopranos, on which Matthew Weiner served as writer-producer: As the doctor probes her and

tells her, “the fact is, even in our modern times, easy women don’t find husbands,” she stares

blankly at the first significant object that captures her eye, a wall calendar advertising EhrlichAutoclave in Lodi, New Jersey.—MZS

13 Salvatore Romano is played by Bryan Batt, who had previously served most of his career on

Broadway, with major roles in La Cage aux Folles (2005), Beauty and the Beast (2002), and

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1993–1994).



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A lot of the dialogue in “Smoke” conflates sex and ownership, women

and property. Ken Cosgrove14 shows up at Pete’s party with employees from a

nearby Automat; “You press a button and they come out,” says another of Pete’s

coworkers, Paul Kinsey.15

When Don takes umbrage at Pete’s treatment of Peggyand cautions him to watch his mouth, Pete assumes that Don and Peggy are

sleeping together.16 It’s not true, but we’re given to understand that it’s not beyond

the realm of possibility: In this world, dominance and control are masculine,

compassion and surrender are feminine, and that’s just how it is.

Although the dialogue sketches the characters in brisk strokes, it’s never

purely functional. It returns again and again to control, and what it means

to be “in control,” and how it feels to be controlled by someone else, and how

words and images can be deployed to control how people perceive themselves,

and the world.

Consider the agency’s condescension to Rachel Menken.17 It’s about con-

trolling a story and an image. Rachel wants to change the store’s image because

its narrative has grown stale. Don is pitching a campaign based on Sterling

Cooper’s preconceived notions of what Menken’s Department Store is, and (to

their mind) always will be. When Rachel balks, Don tries to shut her down by

invoking her father. Rachel parries by telling Don and his colleagues that her

father no longer runs the store because they just had their lowest sales year—a

fact that proves the old story and image aren’t working. Pete senses that the

agency is losing control of the meeting’s narrative and rides to what he thinks

is Don’s rescue. Lighting Rachel’s cigarette, he asks why she came to Sterling

Cooper when there are “dozens of other agencies better suited to your needs,”

code for “firms that employ Jews.” Translation: We aren’t here to change the

story or the image, lady, and if that’s what you want, you’d better ask someone

else to give it to you.

“If I wanted some man who was from the same village as my father to

manage our accounts, I would have stayed where I was,” Rachel says. Herunflappability would be impressive even if she weren’t the only woman in the

room. But the Sterling Cooper boys keep pushing for the store to use coupons

until Rachel says that she doesn’t want them, she wants something besides

coupons, she wants “your people, Mr. Draper”—the gentiles.

14 Ken Cosgrove is played by Aaron Staton, who had previously been seen on 7th Heaven and

Law & Order: SVU.

15 Paul Kinsey is played by Michael Gladis, who was seen on Third Watch and Hack before

Mad Men.16 When the phone operators find out that Peggy is replacing Don’s previous secretary, Eleanor,

they ask why, and Joan says she “moved on” because Don “wasn’t interested.”—MZS

17 Not only has the firm failed to visit the store, but they also serve traif (shrimp cocktail) at the

meeting.—AC



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Rachel calls Don on his BS, but rather than listen to her and bend to suit

her needs, Don gets his back up. Rachel has punctured Don’s sense of entitle-

ment, and it stings because he’s not used to that. Senior partner Roger Sterling

(John Slattery18

) cautions the room against getting “emotional”—a genderedadjective that in this case seems meant to control Don, by intimating that his

behavior is unmanly. It doesn’t work because Don is in aggrieved mode, ridicul-

ing Rachel’s notion of enticing strangers to visit a store for aspirational reasons.

He is offended by the idea of taking the very illusion upon which American cap-

italism, an institution run by WASP industrialists, was founded, and applying

it to a campaign for a Jewish-owned store whose clientele consists mainly of

immigrants and their descendants. “I’m not gonna let a woman talk to me like

this. This meeting is over,” Don says, and storms out.

He and Rachel find common ground during an amends-making dinner.

She senses that Don feels like an outsider, too, and says there was a silver

lining to that meeting: the chance to hear “all the things I always assumed

people were thinking.” Their conversation is charged with sexual possibility,

but Don’s presumptions dampen it. His end of the conversation is meant to

jam Rachel into an ill-fitting narrative that other women, Joan especially,

wear with pride. Don asks her why she isn’t married, which presumes that

her life as a single professional is a way station on the road to marriage and

motherhood. “If I weren’t a woman I would be allowed to ask you the same

questions, and if I weren’t a woman, I wouldn’t have to choose between

putting on an apron and the thrill of making my father’s store what I always

thought it should be,” she replies. (This is another moment where “Smoke”

condescends to the past.)

The Lucky Strike meeting is also about how language can shape per-

ception and self-perception, and give a person or a company permission to

do as it pleases. Lucky Strike honcho Lee Garner Sr. (John Cullum)19 says the

company is about to get sued for false health claims. [END. 3] Roger, a masterdiplomat, blames “media manipulation” for the industry’s troubles. Lee gripes

about government regulators. His son, Lee Jr. (Darren Pettie), moans that

they might as well be living in Russia. They’re both miffed that they can’t do

business exactly the way they want to. They’re the most entitled people in

an episode filled with entitled people. They crave language that will cripple

constraints, erase them, wipe them out like the Native Americans, who, Lee

Garner Sr. insists, “gave us America, for shit’s sake.”

18 Slattery had roles in several TV shows before Mad Men, including Sex and the City , Desperate

Housewives, and K Street. He has taken more comedic roles since Mad Men, including Wet

Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, which reunites him with Jon Hamm. He also

directed God’s Pocket, costarring Christina Hendricks.

19 Known for Northern Exposure, One Life to Live, and The Day After .



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So Don comes up with “Lucky Strike: It’s Toasted.”20 Don’s speech jus-

tifying the slogan is the most powerful moment in “Smoke.”21 It reframes all

of the screenplay’s control issues as variants of Freud’s “death wish,” which

Sterling Cooper’s researcher, Gretta (Gordana Rasovich), outlined in a reportthat Don threw away and Pete snuck into his office and stole. Don says that

all advertising is based on one thing: happiness. In the context of “Smoke,”

happiness means the ability to do as you please, without worrying about other

people’s expectations, opinions, rules, or laws. Don tells the Lucky Strike gang

that happiness is not the past; happiness is the future: a promise of something

better than whatever you’ve got right now. Happiness is defined here as finding

a way to give yourself permission to do whatever you’re inclined to do anyway.

The “Smoke” of the episode title is not just tobacco smoke; it is a wreath

that obscures the inevitable facts of change, of loss or absence of control, of

decline, of death. Smoke is the hair dye, the makeup, the camera face, the good

side. It is the slogan, the homily, the maxim, the song lyric, the home-team

motto, the billboard slogan that tells us who we are so that we don’t have to

wonder.

Is Don smoke? Is he mirrors? What is his story? How did he get to be so

persuasive?

The first time we see him, we’re looking at the back of his head. Don is

introduced with a camera move that tracks from screen right to screen left

through a crowded, smoky bar,22 then pushes in to find him sitting alone in a red

booth: a broad-shouldered man in a dark suit. Subsequent shots reveal a circa-

1960 “dreamboat” type along the lines of Rock Hudson or Kirk Douglas. His hair

looks Brylcreemed. There’s an empty glass in front of him. He’s scribbling notes:

Brand name. Freedom. Conversion. Lucky Strike. Old Gold. He stays seated as he

interviews a busboy (Henry Afro-Bradley) about his smoking habits. We never

see Don from head to toe in this scene, only in close-up. How tall is he? What

kind of shoes is he wearing? Does he carry a briefcase? We don’t know.

20 It’s Toasted was in fact adopted as the Lucky Strike slogan in 1917, and remains on its packag-

ing as of this writing—it refers to the heating process, distinct from sun-drying. The slogan’s

origins are debated, with credit going to either the advertising agency Lord & Thomas or

Percival S. Hill, a then-former president of the American Tobacco Company.—Lily Puckett

21 A Jewish-owned department store says it wants to change its image, only to be pitched a

campaign that reinforces its existing image, and when the manager balks, the point man for

the account appeals to patriarchal authority: the manager’s father, who owns the store. We

see language being shaped in response to language: Don’s Lucky Strike pitch, which is essen-

tially meaningless, takes the piss out of the federal government’s rules against claiming thatsmoking is approved by doctors. Don wins over the client’s reps by telling them that advertis-

ing appeals to the consumer’s desire to be told that he can go where he wants, and do what he

wants, and reinvent himself when he wants, and not to worry, because in the end, he’s going

to be okay.—MZS

22 According to the script, Don is drinking at the “Knick Knack Bar.”—AC



32


In the next scene, he’s introduced in a slightly blurry profile close-up,

knocking on Midge’s door. When Midge opens the door, the camera stays on that

angle, so that for the second time in “Smoke,” we’re looking at the back of Don’s

head. Finally, there’s a cut to a wide shot of Don entering Midge’s apartment. It’sthe first time that we see all of him. The glimpse lasts a few seconds, and then

again we’re looking at the back of his head. We see his face briefly as he crosses

Midge’s threshold, then he closes the door, shutting us out. Inside the apartment,

the camera gives us a long look at Midge’s face, but Don remains a foreground

blur, seen mostly from the back. When we finally get our first glimpse of Don from

head to toe, it’s in the same frame with Midge, who is also pictured in totality;

in the next scene, they’re both naked (under sheets), and Don immediately gets

up and starts putting his clothes (his work uniform) back on.

In the bar scene, we learned nothing about Don except that he’s prob-

ably in advertising and that he’s concerned about how to sell cigarettes at a

time when the government is cracking down on the tobacco industry. In the

scene with Midge, the talk is mainly about work (she’s an illustrator, and they

seem bonded by their creativity), with fuzzy detours into their relationship.

Throughout the rest of the episode, it’s work, work, work and words, words,

words. Don chooses his words carefully, to sell pitches to clients and his image

to colleagues. He rarely reveals more than he wants to.

Is Don as selfish, cold, and reactionary as he seems?

His scenes with Rachel suggest otherwise. And his final scene with

Peggy very nearly confirms it.

Peggy thanks her new boss for sticking up for her with Pete Campbell,

and nervously places her hand on top of his. What little we’ve learned about

Peggy makes us think that this is anathema to her. She’s only doing it because

it’s the kind of thing that Joan advised her to do.

Descriptions of Don’s previous relationships with secretaries suggest

that his removal of Peggy’s hand is also a break from tradition. “First of all, Peggy,” he says, “I’m your boss, not your boyfriend. Second

of all, if you ever let Pete Campbell go through my trash again you won’t be

able to find a job selling sandwiches in Penn Station.”

Peggy apologizes for letting Pete in, then assures Don that she’s “not

that kind of girl.”

Don’s boss mask falls—but only for an instant.

“Of course,” he says. “Go home, put your curlers in. Get a fresh start

tomorrow.”

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Excerpt From 'Mad Men Carousel' by Matt Zoller Seitz