Notes (Mad Men)
Episodes - Clips by Category - Two Lyrics - Migglebrink: “Meditations” & “Babylon”
Episodes
For plot summaries, start with Wikipedia, IMDb, or http://episodeguides.blogspot.ca/2010/02/mad-men-episode-summaries.html#Season 1.
On this page you'll find:
- a list of episodes in season 1 and 2 (with Youtube clips)
- clips grouped into 1. General, 2. Female Characters, and 3. Sal
The episodes in blue caps are of particular interest to our evaluation of Migglebrink, Havrilesky, and Cox.
SEASON 1
E 1: SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES
- Rachel & Don: Living Like no Tomorrow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfdihk0HG0w
- final scene and song/credits: "On the Street Where You Live" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwmIxAU-yB4
E 2: Ladies Room
E 3: Marriage of Figaro
- Rachel & Don: "They protect you, they listen..." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEEWhooytbU
E 4: New Amsterdam
E 5: 5G
E 6: BABYLON
- Joan, Peggy, and Belle Jolie: Lipstick - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVI7-ufWR6I
- Joan & Roger: "I hear the fins are bigger next year" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-bnS5NiD8Q
- Rachel & Don: Zionism and utopia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBgyUXN1SY0and
- Babylon song and montage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMr3NCqCvYE
E 7: Red in the Face
E 8: The Hobo Code
- Midge and the ad world: "The universe is indifferent" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQM8UKgt3Qs
- Sal: "Are you happy?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVATV8sMi_M
E 9: Shoot
E 10: Long Weekend
- Rachel & Don: Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEEWRxqhIKg - Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1zZoUVAmOs
E 11: Indian Summer
- Rachel & Don, "Indian Summer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt-pGDiN2yc
E 12: Nixon vs. Kennedy
- Rachel & Don - Coward - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEl6RS8QcCw
E 13: THE WHEEL
- Don: The Carousel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus
SEASON 2
E 1: For Those Who Think Young
E 2: Flight 1
E 3: The Benefactor
E 4: Three Sundays
E 5: The New Girl
E 6: Maidenform
E 7: THE GOLD VIOLIN
- Sal & Kitty & Ken: "Do you even see me?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbUncUTnAhg
E 8: A Night to Remember
E 9: Six Month Leave
E 10: The Inheritance
E 11: The Jet Set
E 12: The Mountain King
E 13: MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY
- Don & the ad world, "Duck is the man for the job" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5N3OQklFEU
Video Clips by Category
1. GENERAL
If you want an overview of seasons 1-6, these are fast and entertaining:
- on the series - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tue6lOzPolI
- on Don - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfw_6rG5hvY
- on Peggy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4BGUnBy6E
Top 10 Most Memorable Mad Men Scenes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCPawawb1Ck
Top 10 Insane Mad Men Moments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCgFzBHX7Fo
"At the Codfish Ball" (S5 E7): Inside Episode 507 Mad Men: At the Codfish Ball - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_VMk62tO7k
"The Phantom" (S5 E13): You Only Live Twice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYAWPV78PrI
On the Ad World
- "The Hobo Code" (S1 E8): "The universe is indifferent" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQM8UKgt3Qs
- "Lost Horizon" (S7 E12): The best scene of all time?- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0e8mfHzAjQ
2. FEMALE CHARACTERS
Top 10 Women of Mad Men - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGJ4IPlPP_o
Inside Episode 511 Mad Men: The Other Woman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqgxAW5fqAk
Inside Episode 409 Mad Men: The Beautiful Girls - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdHyu5r25Ec
Joan
- overview of character development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dl7787u3C0
- & Roger - "Babylon" (S1 E6): "I hear the fins are bigger next year" 1.06 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-bnS5NiD8Q
Rachel & Don
- "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" (S1 E1): Living Like no Tomorrow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfdihk0HG0w
- "Marriage of Figaro" (S1 E3): "They protect you, they listen..." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEEWhooytbU
- “Long Weekend” (S1 E10) Part 1: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEEWRxqhIKg - Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1zZoUVAmOs
- "Indian Summer" (S1 E11): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt-pGDiN2yc
- "Nixon vs. Kennedy" (S1 E12): Coward - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEl6RS8QcCw
Peggy
- overview of character development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JtQ7J5al8Y
- "The Summer Man" (S4 E8): Peggy fires Joey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b28GqQfm49U
- "Waterloo" (S7 E7): Peggy's pitch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4LHb89pAlA
Betty
- overview of character development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10fRkZLBghA
- "Shoot" (S1 E9): Betty Draper vs. the Pigeons - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltl0EQ9O7Gg
- "A Night to Remember" (S2 E8): Heineken and Betty's dinner - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deXGXYJo4-0
- & Don in Rome ("Souvenir," S3 E8): Don Draper VS 2 Neapolitan guys (1-0) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxnoPasZdkA
Suzanne (Sally’s teacher) & Don ("Wee Small Hours," S3 E9): Don knocks on Suzanne's door - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbSIWN3nS7w
Sylvia & Don (“The Collaborators,” S6 E3): "You want to feel shitty right up until the point where I take your dress off" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifn1n8JeT4U
3. SAL
"The Hobo Code" (S1 E8): "Are you happy?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVATV8sMi_M
- & Ken & wife Kitty - "The Gold Violin" (S2 E7): "Do you even see me?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbUncUTnAhg
"Out of Town" (S3 E1): The one I have at home is different - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL2-GTLyZYc
Mad Men and Homosexuality - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wswIGHBYmR8
Gay TV Now: Episode 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLFOh4gorc0
[A general – brief, light -- look at sexuality in the show) - http://www.newnownext.com/the-13-gayest-moments-on-mad-men/05/2015/
Two Lyrics
In the rhetoric part of the course, we'll analyze the opening credits to Mad Men, and I'll refer you to the sample essay, "The Falling Cat" (in Rhetorical Analysis Samples), which includes a reference to "The Phantom" (S5 E13). In class, we'll look at how the Bond song "You Only Live Twice" is integrated into the final sequence of "The Phantom."
You Only Live Twice (S5 E13; Barry & Bricusse, sung by Nancy Sinatra, 1969)
You only live twice, or so it seems
One life for yourself, and one for your dreams
You drift through the years and life seems tame
Till one dream appears and love is its name
And love is a stranger who'll beckon you on
Don't think of the danger or the stranger is gone
This dream is for you, so pay the price
Make one dream come true, you only live twice
And love is a stranger who'll beckon you on
Don't think of the danger or the stranger is gone
This dream is for you, so pay the price
Make one dream come true, you only live twice
❧
On a number of occasions we'll look at the opening episode "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" (S1 E1), which ends with the song "On the Street Where You Live."
On the Street Where You Live (Loewe & Lerner, 1956)
I have often walked down the street before
But the pavement always
Stayed beneath my feet before
All at once am I
Several stories high
Knowing I'm on the street where you live
Are there lilac trees
In the heart of town?
Can you hear a lark in any other part of town?
Does enchantment pour
Out of every door?
No, it's just on the street where you live
And oh, the towering feeling
Just to know somehow you are near
The overpowering feeling
That any second you may suddenly appear
[the rest of the song isn't included in the final credits]
Migglebrink
From Steven Johnson’s Everything bad Is Good For You; How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2006):
From Migglebrink (Mad Men Texts):
1 — In the midst of Mad Men’s first season, Sterling Cooper’s office manager Joan Holloway informs secretary Peggy Olson about her promotion to copy writer. At the end of their conversation, Joan refers to her position as messenger: “Well, you know what they say: the medium is the message.” Of course, the viewer can classify this as one of the show’s many anachronisms. We know that Marshall McLuhan’s slogan, which is one of media studies’ essential phrases, became popular in 1964 and not in 1960 as depicted by the show.2 But there is more to that. This famous sentence self-reflexively signifies that Mad Men’s form, its complex serial condition, is central to the way it represents the past.
3 — … Telling history through the modes of seriality and narrative complexity establishes a deepened narrative scope that is not driven by linearity and closure, but provides space for historical complexity.
4 — … (historical) events in Mad Men are not presented as a coherent narrative but are marked by dissonance. … The Mad Men narrative offers its audience the opportunity to experience abstract history through the life of different individuals. As we are witnesses of the micro-perspective on 1960s history, we are asked, as viewers, to draw conclusions about the macro-level production of history by historians, textbooks, and a conservative culture. Glen Creeber states that the historical serial, as Mad Men may be considered, is so successful because it is “able to balance and address the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ within one complex narrative trajectory.”
“Meditations in an Emergency”
(S2 E13): 12:30-21:00; 31:30-47:00 (c. 25 minutes total)
black = references to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis (see Wikipedia entry below)
red & pink = boys in the (tech-deprived) office go to switchboard; mix of corporate and military scenarios; Pete to Don; the old boy’s club
green = Peggy blue = Betty & family
1. What indicates 1962 and not 2019? 2. Is Migglebrink’s argument about personalizing history effective or not? 3. How might you apply her argument to the situation of women?
From Wikipedia:
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day (October 16–28, 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union initiated by the American discovery of Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.
In response to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961 and the presence of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to Cuba's request to place nuclear missiles on the island to deter a future invasion. An agreement was reached during a secret meeting between Khrushchev and Fidel Castro in July 1962, and construction of a number of missile launch facilities started later that summer.
The 1962 United States elections were under way, and the White House had for months denied charges that it was ignoring dangerous Soviet missiles 90 miles (140 km) from Florida. The missile preparations were confirmed when an Air Force U-2 spy plane produced clear photographic evidence of medium-range (SS-4) and intermediate-range (R-14) ballistic missile facilities. The US established a naval blockade on October 22 to prevent further missiles from reaching Cuba; Oval Office tapes during the crisis revealed that Kennedy had also put the blockade in place as an attempt to provoke Soviet-backed forces in Berlin as well. The US announced it would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba and demanded that the weapons already in Cuba be dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union.
After several days of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between US President John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement to avoid invading Cuba again. Secretly, the United States agreed that it would dismantle all US-built Jupiter MRBMs, which had been deployed in Turkey against the Soviet Union; there has been debate on whether or not Italy was included in the agreement as well.
When all offensive missiles and Ilyushin Il-28 light bombers had been withdrawn from Cuba, the blockade was formally ended on November 21, 1962. The negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union pointed out the necessity of a quick, clear, and direct communication line between Washington and Moscow. As a result, the Moscow–Washington hotline was established. A series of agreements reduced US–Soviet tensions for several years until both parties began to build their nuclear arsenal even further.
“Babylon”
From Migglebrink (Mad Men Texts):
11 — Apart from its ongoing serial storylines, Mad Men also features the elements of a series. In the midst of many unresolved and mysterious narrative threads, music gives the audience a sense of episodic closure. … song “Babylon” in a Greenwich Village bar. The old folk song, based on Psalm 137, was adapted and released by the singer-songwriter Don McLean in 1971. The lyrics deal with Jewish exile in Babylon and the quest for unity and match the counterculture setting of the sequence perfectly well. While the song establishes a melancholic atmosphere, it comments on an accompanying montage. Viewers see Rachel Menken, whom Don had courted earlier in the episode, folding ties in her department store, Betty putting on lipstick on her daughter, Sally, each of them absorbed in thought and calmness. While Don is listening intently to the song, Roger and Joan, engaged in a long-term affair, are departing a hotel room, leaving like strangers. The music unites these fragmented images through its affect and tone, highlighting the theme of loneliness. At the end, the song fades into diegetic traffic noise, and finally into silence.
12 — An additional element of closure is given in the episode titles. … The theme of exile extends beyond the physical exile experienced by the Israelites and later Jews, the subject to Don and Rachel’s conversation, but speaks to the self-exile, remaking of self, and dissociation experienced by various characters throughout the episode.
Is Migglebrink convincing or not?
Is what she says about the show accurate? What else in the show supports or contradicts her?
What outside context or theory could you use to back up your evaluation?
——
Plot, from Wikipedia:
Don … meets Rachel Menken for lunch under …
Meanwhile, Roger meets Joan in a hotel room …
Belle Jolie lipstick … two-way mirror. … Peggy sits by herself, watching. … she does not want to feel "like one of a hundred colors in a box" and … "basket of kisses".
Freddy asks Peggy to write some copy for the account. [Joan’s ‘medium is the message’]
The Gaslight Cafe ... a song about the Jews' mourning their exile from Zion in Babylon.
[Montage: Rachel in store, Betty & Sally putting on lipstick, Joan & Roger]
The Flight of the Prisoners, c. 1896-1902, Jewish Museum, New York, NY. (Wikimedia Commons)