Television Suicides

Well, that was some kind of evening on AMC.

On The Killing last night, the (apparently) idealistic young councilman running against the (probably) evil ensconced mayor on (theoretically) a platform of reform, announced to his supporters the night before the election that he had lied about his whereabouts on the evening of the murder of the sixteen-year-old girl on which the series is based. He lied because where he had really been was jumping off a bridge in a suicide attempt.  

We, the audience, already knew that, but this was the first time that he had talked in detail about the sadness that led to his impulsive jump. He then deftly twisted the story into one of near-heroism, stating that while he had been no icon of courage on that night, he had found the will to live on the way down, and had become possessed of a will to fight, for himself and for the people of Seattle.

We always wonder.  After someone has taken an irreversible step, are there seconds of regret?  We cannot know.  But we wonder.  Every day.

About an hour later, one of Mad Men's partners in the advertising firm was found hanging from his office door. That one was easy to foresee; he had been caught embezzling from the company and fired, and was unable to confide in the wife whom for three years he had misled about their financial situation and who had just purchased a Jaguar for him in a misplaced desire to celebrate what she believes to be his most recent success.  There was no outlet for his humiliation and despair.  

Don Draper, the partner who had recognized and acted upon the fraudulent financial transaction, stands in stark contrast to the beaten and destroyed Lane.  In demanding Lane's resignation, Don had told him that he would be able to reinvent himself; Don has done so many times.  But now, Don has been instrumental in the suicides of two men, as well as the demise of his own first marriage; the repercussions of his reinventions have left bodies, literal and figurative, strewn all over the.place.

We always wonder.  What might have been said or done to alter those final steps in an individual's journey?  Who else might have intervened, might have  influenced a change in a course of action? We cannot know.  But we wonder.  Every day.

Both of these series explore the vast, opaque gap between appearance and reality, The Killing through the genre of murder mystery and Mad Men through the artifice of the advertising world.  That they are highly regarded shows tells me that we are all drawn to an exploration of that edge, that brink of horror at the darkness of the human condition.  

Watching it is one thing.  The living of it is another.

Image: Mireille Enos as Detective Sarah Linden, now my all-time favorite television character.

Sally Draper II

So no one is interested in Miss Sally?

She's going to grow up to be a pastor, you know.

Sally Draper

As I said in my own comments last night, the opener to Season 4 of Mad Men was a dark, dark episode and ~ Sally Draper may be the barometer to watch.  Little Sally has been almost invisible for the previous three seasons, other than as the object of Betty's excuse for mothering  ~  but suddenly she's grown into a self-aware child-woman, trying to call her father in the middle of the night ~ both last night and in the preview for next week ~to express her frustration at the new "family" arrangements.

I got interested, so I googled Sally Draper and came up with some information on the actress, Kiernan Shipka, who turns 11 this year.  She's just the age I was in 1964, which I wrote about in my previous post, and she's dealing with some of the same issues, which I didn't write about.

I had a confusing family life, too, although mine involved a dead mother rather than a philandering father, and a new stepmother rather than the reverse gender.  But I do remember that era well ~ a time in which children were presumed to be without emotional reactivity and were subject to adult decision-making about marital and living arrangements with barely a moment's warning.

It will be interesting to watch Sally as she reflects the conflicts of the grown-ups while growing into her own adolescence.  What a tough time that was to be a girl!  Neither my mother nor my first stepmother were college graduates, but my father's mother was, like Betty, a Seven Sisters alum, and I inherited the blend  of expectations that in the 60s were communicated as a charge to become a well-educated partner to an executive or professional husband.  The advantage to being without a mother of my own, according to the book Motherless Daughters, was the chance to grow up without being overly burdened by traditional expectations for women, there being no one woman as invested in my future as a mother would have been.  The disadvantages were somewhat more numerous.

I would say that Sally faces an interesting blend of expectations.  Her mother is ~ well, Betty: a stunningly beautiful child.  Her father is ~ well, Don: a man who cannot have a mature relationship with any woman with whom he sleeps, but has interesting friendships with professional women (and with the woman he married after stealing her war-dead husband's identity and then divorced to marry Betty).  Talk about  mixed messages!

Yeah, I'd say we should watch Sally.

Mad Men Season Four Begins Tonight!

One of the things I love about this, my most favorite series, is how carefully everyone connected with it guards its secrets.  There are many movies and tv shows I have never bothered to see because the previews have given the whole thing away.

But this morning's paper does say that the new season opens around Thanksgiving of 1964, which has got me wondering ~ what were we all doing then?

I was 11, which means that I was in Mr. Curran's 6th grade class ~ in the one year of school that I really, really loved, because Mr. Curran ignored the fact that our tiny rural school had no science curriculum to speak of, and taught us about amoebas, euglenas, and paramecium.

It was also the first year of endless arguments with my stepmother over my attire and appearance ~ the year that some girls began to wear hose and lipstick.   It's hard to believe that we imagined the girdle to be a desirable undergarment!  I guess this was my idea of how I should look:

And it was the year I fell in love for the first time, with Toby Adams, the smartest boy in my class.  Since The Addams Family was on television, my main role model was Morticia, whom I planned to become when Toby and I got married and both became brain surgeons (that science class influence was pretty strong):

And lest you think we were all about love and marriage and careers, let me remind you that Bewitched was also a hit that year.  My friend Sarah and I spent our recesses  dunking basketballs (we staged a fruitless demonstration for the institution of a girls' basketball team) and hopefully twitching our noses.

We were little girls in penny loafers and pleated skirts, playing basketball on a crumbling blacktop in farm country, far from the glamorous women we longed to emulate ~ but we were full of hope.

It will be interesting to see if either the Addams or Stephens families makes it into Mad Men's  advertising portfolio.

What do you remember from 1964?