Mad Men: Love Among the Ruins

“New York City is in decay” – Don Draper

New York City was indeed in decay in 1963, the year in which season three of Mad Men is set.  Liberal social and economic policies had begun to take its toll, sending the city into a downward spiral marked by two decades of rampant crime, disillusionment, and near bankruptcy.  Don utters the line during a conversation with the head of the organization that is about to tear down the old Pennsylvania Railroad Station and replace it with the new Madison Square Garden.  Now, New York has always been famous for its unsentimental attitude towards its historical architecture, tearing down and building back up at will, always in the name of progress, and nearly always with the approval of its denizens.  But no other episode in its history has shown the downside of this attitude as the tearing down of Penn Station.  This:

was replaced with this:

Is it any wonder the Penn Station episode caused such furor among the natives?  Recall architect Vincent Skully’s famous quote comparing the new and old buildings: “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.” 

The grief over the loss of such a grand building is conveyed in last week’s episode of Mad Men by Paul Kinsey, the beatnik-wannabe in resident.  But Mad Men, as is its norm, refuses to come down on one side or the other.  For everyone else at Sterling-Cooper, if it means more business in the form of a relationship with the owners of the new Garden, tearing down Penn Station is a good thing.  The only hint that the producers may be sympathetic to the Paul Kinsey side of the argument is that the demolition plays such a large part of an episode entitled “Love Among the Ruins,” inspired by a Robert Browning poem of the same name whose subject is that of two lovers who meet in a turret of the last remaining tower of a once great city, now overrun with nature:

That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come….

But he looked upon the city, every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then,
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.

Like the lovers in the poem, the characters in this episode of Mad Men are shown searching for love and fulfillment amidst a decaying city.  It does not come so easy for them as the poem’s narrator.

The largest part of the story, I think, was the sexual awakening of Peggy Olson.  The early Peggy was sexually naive to the point that she didn’t even know she was pregnant until she was about to give birth.  Her prudish nature otherwise has been well-documented through the series run, and it is reinforced in “Love Among the Ruins” in her reaction to Ann Margaret’s performance in the Bye, Bye, Birdie ad.  She seems threatened by both it and the men’s reaction to it, especially Don’s.  But when she notices how men react to Joan’s flirtations she goes home and sings Bye, Bye, Birdie in front of her mirror – she’s seeing if she can be that girl, the kind of girl Ann Margaret was portraying.  And she can.  Later on she picks up a young man at a bar.  She does the picking up as he seems almost incapable of it – she seems worlds more experienced than he.  Later at his apartment when he doesn’t have “a Trojan” and she refuses intercourse, he is ready to dismiss her (“It’s getting late”), but she is the one who suggests “there are other things we can do.”  As she leaves, he drops hints that he’d like to see her again, which she ignores.  On the way out the door, though, she turns back and says, “This was fun.”  While Peggy has grown and matured in front of our eyes the past few years, it is unimaginable that she would have said something like that, or acted like this, in season one or even season two.  She is a harbinger of the sexual revolution to come within the next few years.

But in 1963, some of the old attitudes still survive, even on Madison Avenue.  Roger Sterling’s divorce and remarriage to a girl young enough to be his daughter has cost him respect.  His daughter, Joan Holloway, Bert Cooper, and even Don all have new attitudes towards him – they see him as frivolous, or worse.  The most interesting part of this new attitude is how his relationship with Don will be affected.  At the restaurant meeting with the Madison Square Garden executive, Don’s contempt for Roger is barely disguised. 

Another aspect of how the episode shows “Love Among the Ruins” is the date set for Roger’s daughter’s wedding: November 23, 1963.  President Kennedy will be assassinated the day before her wedding and one has to think that, due to this, there might not even be a wedding.  Even if there is, it will be against the background of national grief and mourning.  Love among the ruins, indeed.   

As for Don, he continues his attempt to be a good husband.  He intercedes in the disagreement between Betty and her brother about what to do about their ailing father, telling the brother how it will be.  Don does the right thing, taking the old man into his home.  Don Draper, the serial adulterer, often does the right thing.  In many ways he is the most sympathetic and humane of all the characters on Mad Men.  Witness his reaction last season to the younger associate’s jokes about Freddy Rumsen and this season to his discovery of Sal Romano’s homosexuality.

Still, he struggles.  At the outdoor Maypole event, Don lapses into reverie about his daughter’s young teacher, a young pre-hippy type, watching her intently as she circles the pole.  Almost subconsciously, he reaches down with his hand to touch the grass, caressing it, getting in touch with the earth.  It’s a startling effective scene.  You can feel the summer heat, you can feel Don’s desire.  Mad Men does scenes like this, scenes with subtle, subliminal messages, told without words or with words that obscure the scene’s true meaning, better than any show in television history. 

The final scene is another example of this.  The show ends with a sort of rapprochement between Don and Peggy, as she comes to his office to discuss a Pampers ad.  They sit together, wordless, until the picture cuts away to black.  The two characters with the most to hide, with the most formidable facades, share a common bond, one that need not be spoken about or acknowledged, but one they are aware of nonetheless.  Every scene with these two alone together has echoes of the flashback scene is season two when Don visits a disoriented Peggy in the hospital and tells her to get up and get out of the hospital and get on with her life.  “This never happened.  You’ll be shocked how much it never happened.” 

Much, much more went on in this episode but since I have other things to do today I better end it here.  I wish I could get to these Mad Men reviews earlier in the week but having a full-time job gets in the way.  I’m a slow writer and I don’t have time to get to them during the week.  Anyhow, I’m enjoying writing them but they will necessarily have to wait until the following weekend.