That was quite a tableau of disillusionment at the end of Sunday night’s “Mad Men” episode, “At the Codfish Ball.”
Sitting in the sad afterglow of Don’s canonization at the Cancer Society dinner, the Commie intellectual (two strikes) and philandering bully (he’s out!) Emile Calvet was disgusted by his daughter’s easy wealth. Then there was Megan, injured by her father’s disregard for her stunning success in essentially closing the Heinz account. And Don, taken aback when Ed Baxter, Ken Cosgrove’s father-in-law and chief executive of Corning, tells him he’s wasting his time schmoozing with the other businessmen because they’ll never work with him, “not after that letter” in The New York Times.
Best or worst of all, there was young Sally Draper, surrounded by grownups — like Shirley Temple when she sang and danced “At the Codfish Ball” in “Captain January” in 1936 — and buzzed from the attention she’d been receiving from Roger Sterling, who called her his date and filled her in on who was who. She had just gone looking for her date and found him in a side room being attended to in a very personal fashion by her step-grandmother, Marie Calvet (Julia Ormond). Adults these days!
Sally’s lesson in ballroom etiquette (and, based on Marie and Roger’s earlier conversation, the importance of continuing to take chances) fit loosely into a theme of mothers and daughters, made concrete in Megan’s winning idea for Heinz, a march-of-time sequence of women through the ages feeding their girls baked beans. She got the idea from her own family’s tradition of spaghetti dinners; I’ll leave it to the commenters to parse what other things she might be inheriting, intentionally or not, from her parents’ contentious marriage. Sally seemed to have inherited her father’s talent for lying — after accidentally injuring her other step-grandmother, Pauline, she blamed the mishap on her brother and got credit for icing Pauline’s ankle.
Meanwhile, Peggy Olson had her own mother issues. After agreeing to live with Abe — more on that in a minute — she invited her mother over for dinner to break the news. It did not go well: there were references to “living in sin,” “selling yourself short” and “he’s using you for practice.”
The big moments of the episode were in the Megan-Don scenes — the brittle co-existence with her visiting parents, the emotional blows of the awards banquet and the high drama of the Heinz dinner, when Megan figured out that Ray Geiger had decided to move the account and proceeded to force Don into, and coach him through, an impromptu pitch of her new idea. (There was also that cigarette, symbol of recklessness, that Megan had to remove from the hand of her sleeping mother before she could set the Drapers’ apartment on fire.)
But the best moments, in writing and performance, belonged to Elisabeth Moss’s Peggy. There was the dinner with Abe at the Minetta Tavern, where she showed up in an uncharacteristically girlish dress, hoping for a proposal, and got a very modern proposition instead. As her disappointment did battle with her determination to follow her convictions, the scene played out in the language of engagement and marriage: “Yes”; “You make me so happy”; and the clincher, when Abe asked if she still wanted to eat: “I do.” (Was anyone else waiting to hear the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” released in July 1966?)
The next morning at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, two scenes captured different styles — and I’d argue qualities — of female friendship: Joan putting a good face on Peggy’s situation, calling her decision to move in with Abe “a beautiful statement”; and Peggy wholeheartedly congratulating Megan on her Heinz idea, even though it thoroughly steals Peggy’s thunder. “This is as good as this job gets,” she tells Megan. “Savor it.”
Please give us your own thoughts about “At the Codfish Ball” in the comments. I’m expecting you’ll have more to say about Roger, and Emile Calvet, whose French accent is the only thing that would have made him out of place on the Upper West Side. (O.K., maybe his Marxism is a little more doctrinaire than the New York variety.) Was anyone else’s ear bothered, just slightly, by snatches of dialogue that sounded a little too 21st-century: “blow up my world,” “it is what it is”? Or startled that we didn’t see Don accepting his award or giving a speech?
No comments:
Post a Comment