Mad Men 406

Peggy recalls the announcement of Don's nomination for a Clio. Don let everybody pat him on the back even though, Peggy reveals, she came up with the idea. And, she tells Stan, Don thought that she was clapping for him. Stan asks her, "Who claps for themselves?"

In this episode, Don, certainly. Also Roger, Peggy, Pete, Ken Cosgrove, Harry, Ned Elliott, Ted Shaw, Danny, the supposed Major General Alvin, and Harry Crane. And, Stan, let it be noted, you yourself. Like most episodes this season, "Waldorf Stories" has a single theme running through each of several subplots and this time it is the desire for and overreaching for credit and acclaim. Three flashbacks simultaneously develop this theme with regard to Roger while also helping to answer the season's central question, "Who is Don Draper?" The flashbacks also mythologize the show's untold backstory, showing us how Don insinuated himself into Sterling Cooper in the days when Roger's hair had some pigment, Joan was the woman on his arm, and Don didn't know how to color coordinate.

We've seen Don bask in the glow of acclaim before. In last season's "The Color Blue", his face told it all when he was recognized for excellence at Sterling Cooper's fortieth anniversary celebration. But only his face. This time, when Don is given recognition but doesn't have Betty on his arm as a stabilizing influence, (and she herself as an ego-sating trophy), the event brings out every worst instinct he has, leading to a horrific all-weekend drinking binge wrapped around two one-night stands who met one another. In this episode's past as well as present-day narration, "Who is Don Draper?" is most easily answered in terms of ambition and a craving to be "a very important man at a very important agency". Past-tense Don wanted to be like Roger. And as the episode also told us pointedly, "Be careful what you wish for, because you'll get it."

The flashbacks show us that Don is much the same man now that he was then, a man whose very syntax works, despite his brilliance, in limited patterns. He tells Roger, "I don't think that's how it goes" and tells Danny, "That's not how it goes." He pitches his ill-advised bid to meet with Life Cereal's executives while drunk by saying "What do you say we put a cherry on this thing?" Later, his pass at Faye begins with "What do you say we get outta here and really celebrate?" And in a pattern larger than mere words and phrases, Don has wished to become like Roger and by now, to an extent that is almost hard to watch, it turns out that he has.

Don and Roger are both successful, but can't be told that enough. The self-defeating nature of such a strong desire for positive reinforcement is put on display many times. Beyond the desire to actually do good work (what Don tells Faye matters, though he's nowhere near actually possessing that mindset), these men and others like them desire the explicit recognition for it to the point of requesting it, and manipulating events to help keep it for themselves to the exclusion of others' success, not to mention to the exclusion of the truth. Roger defines himself to Joan as a man deserving of credit for finding men like Don. But what the flashbacks show us is that Roger didn't evaluate Don's talent; he did everything possible to reject Don and ended up unable to recall hiring Don while drunk; it is a fact either that Roger made such an offer or that Don recognized when Roger was drunk enough that Don could fabricate the story of Roger having hired him without the lie being caught. Certainly the ad men's usual lies increase in frequency when alcohol is mixed in. Don's mid-bender lies to Betty, Doris, and Peggy pale in comparison to his taking the credit for an ad campaign that Peggy thought of. That is, if her memory is accurate, and she's not imagining a larger role for herself in the Glo Coat ad, something that is suggested when she admits that Don came up, at least, with the cowboy concept for the ad.

Peggy doesn't have to worry about suffering the harmful effects of receiving too much acclaim. Any that she deserves for the Glo Coat ad has been directed entirely to Don, and if there were any acclaim left over, Roger would want it. She takes heaps of disrespect from Don and everyone ranging from Stan to Miss Blankenship. And she's not only putting the sexist pig Stan in his place when she uses her bare body to arouse and tease him; she's also getting an ego boost thanks to her body when her career is determined to deny her credit for her mind. Indeed, fact that women could only get recognition for their sexuality is highlighted by the fact that the one woman from the firm who is invited to the awards ceremony is not Peggy, who worked on the prize-winning account, but Joan. In an interaction that we cut in too late to witness, Joan entertains the advance of some unseen ad man, to which Pete says, "That was not a business proposition" and Joan replies, "Catch more flies with honey." Joan may just have received enough positive recognition in her lifetime that she actually cares more about the business ramifications of such an interaction than one more opportunity to have her ego stroked.

The minor characters in the episode provide a veritable tidal wave of moments when they, too, crave their moment in the sun. Lane responds to Harry's Red Skelton story, "I surmise due to the usual nature of your stories that that's someone of note." Danny, whose name is not coincidentally like Don's, puts famous ads by other people in his portfolio. The "general" calls attention to his quilt of decorations. The first of Don's two conquests won an award for a jingle that is the Star Spangled Banner.

Inflating one's self is only one approach to ego. Downplaying others is a path to the same result. While Don has taken the credit for Peggy's work, and to her chagrin is in the process of doing so with Danny.
Astonishing given the later revelations, Don early on tells Peggy, "You finish something, you find out that everyone loves it right around the time that it feels like someone else did it." He means that it feels like someone else, in the abstract, did it even as she knows that she actually did! And she's not above cutting others down when the time comes. When Peggy needs to get back at Stan, she says, with an anatomical second meaning referring to his earlier arousal, "I only changed one small thing".

While Don and Roger are busy illustrating "Pride cometh before the fall", the moment priming Greek tragedy in the episode is when they witness and respond to the public self-humiliation of Duck Phillips, the duplicitous former colleague who sold the company from under them and bedded Peggy in hotel rooms. Duck, a relapsed alcoholic, attempts, but badly, to heckle the presenter at the Clios. Roger and Don laugh at Duck's drunken attempt to capture the spotlight. In the same weekend, they'll both hit resounding lows helped by the mixture of alcohol and ego. The only consolation for Don and Roger is that they go on to do so before smaller audiences.

Batman 702

It's hard to read Batman #702 and be aware that it is, on a factual level, a sort of "clip show", composed more than half of scenes, art, and almost-exact dialogue from previous issues. It shows things we've already seen tied together, mainly, with transitions that are not surprising given what we know. And yet, it raises an extraordinary number of extraordinary questions. Grant Morrison's intertwined "second season" of Batman has five issues to go in Return of Bruce Wayne and Batman & Robin, and this issue seems to hint at momentous reveals for the events in those stories. Though much of this issue sketches out an easy-to-understand pattern, one sees in more than one place a hole in things.

Batman, R.I.P.'s final issue, Batman #681, had a first person narration by Batman himself, illustrated in the style of notebook excerpts. As we read these, we knew that Batman at least survived the threat to his life which was still playing out in the graphical presentation of the story. But that narration left more than one enigma, including the terms under which Batman composed it. By the time Last Rites showed that Batman recovered from RIP at least momentarily, it offered a possible explanation for when Batman performed that narration -- he might have done it during the brief respite between RIP and Final Crisis. But for one anomaly: He says "And so I write this final entry in the Black Casebook". Accepting at that moment that he survived RIP, we don't know of any reason why he would believe in its aftermath that there would be no more for him to record in the Black Casebook. Because he was near death? Because he could no longer be Batman? Because after an encounter with Doctor Hurt there was nothing left to consider mysterious? We still don't know. But it is suggestive that the narration in Batman #681 and #701-702 is all part of one message that is recorded in audio format (and not written) and is composed in a cave at the beginning of time, where Darkseid's Omega trap first sends him. Certainly the narration in #701-702 comes about like that, spoken into a utility-belt recorder while the Omega amnesia rapidly spreads over Bruce, leaving him the nearly-mute cipher he is when ROBW begins. What we learn in this issue is what Bruce knows just before the amnesia kicks in. He's losing his brilliant mind just after appearing in the past. Like the protagonist of "Flowers for Algernon", he knows this, which is why the last line of #701 is "Think fast, Batman..."

An overarching idea in #702 is that the New Gods and their artifacts are platonic in nature -- the essence of things rather than things themselves. There is the idea of horseness and then there are particular horses. You could kill every horse that's alive but the idea of horses would still exist. Morrison portrays the New Gods not as superpowered aliens but as ideas that happen to interact with the real world. As Morrison said in an interview before Final Crisis began, "We discover that all the previous experiences of the New Gods have kind of been projections into the DC Universe, and we’ve never seen the real thing until now." Darkseid, the bullet that kills Orion, and other things are more the idea of stuff rather than stuff itself. The bullet is the archetype of all bullets. Darkseid is the archetype of all terrible beings that have plagued men. And as in Morrison's Superman Beyond and Final Crisis, he writes a story about story. Zillo Valla's line from Superman Beyond #2, "I found a better story; one created to be unstoppable, indestructible! The story of a child rocketed to Earth from a doomed planet..." is reprised when Batman says in #702 that he has "a New Myth of my own. A myth where Ultimate Evil turns its gaze on humanity and humanity gazes right back and says 'Gotcha'." Just as the first line is a synopsis of Superman's origin from Action #1, the second is a synopsis of Batman's; in particular the gazing right back speaks of the origin as told in Batman #47, when young Bruce's "accusing eyes" turn on Joe Chill and terrify Ultimate Evil itself. The Wayne murder, depicted on four different pages, is very much a topic of #702 when it says that the bullets that killed them are mere examples of the idea of bulletness. As Batman says in Final Crisis #6, "A gun and a bullet, Darkseid. It was your idea." At the time, it seemed that Batman was speaking only of Orion's death, but in #702, he's speaking of every such death -- Orion's, his parents, and all others. Granny Goodness' attack is "like Joker venom. Fear Gas. Doctor Hurt's smile. All at once." It is the prototype from which examples are made.

And what is Batman going to do about them? Another moment from the past is when Jim Gordon says to him, "Look at you, all beat up to hell. Why did you have to choose an enemy that's as old as time and bigger than all of us, Batman?" And he answers, "Same reason you did, Jim. I figured I could take him." Like the platonic essence of bullet, this line simultaneously applies to many situations at once. Jim Gordon is referring to the sort of corruption he can see between the mayor and the police in Batman #665. But he sees it as something bigger than one mayor or a handful of conspirators. In time, the line took on a meaning regarding Doctor Hurt, and in its superlatives and the use of "hell", his identity as the Devil.

#702 seems to suggest that Darkseid is the bigger villain than Doctor Hurt, that Darkseid had a causal role in creating Hurt. Bruce, knowing that Hurt has called himself "the hole in things" (the title of #701), decides that Darkseid's fall "made the hole in things". This suggests a literal cause-and-effect relationship, and that Hurt is therefore secondary to Darkseid. I'm not sure that this suggestion is going to prove important to the larger story. The hierarchy of ultimate evils is tangled. In Final Crisis, Darkseid's crimes precipitate the arrival of Mandrakk, but the Monitors had been planning an evil coup when Darkseid's plan was at its inception.

And the "hole in things" seems to have the Evil Gods' number. Batman remarks, of his escape from the Evil Factory, that the Evil Gods hadn't prepared for any of what was then happening, that the best laid plan of Darkseid was also prone to the Hole in Things. Nothing's perfect. Batman finds gods and aliens hard to prepare for. And they, him.

And so, his counterattack becomes an archetype, too. Humanity (not superheroes, a point of contrast all throughout #701-702) gazes back at Ultimate Evil and says "gotcha". Bruce swinging his black-gloved fist at Doctor Hurt in the helicopter. Cowboy Bruce doing the same to Doctor Thomas Wayne in ROBW #4. A new story, a better story. Or, if you'd like, a very old one, Beowulf. Humanity has a representative who will stare down evil gods and strike fear into devils and never give up and never, ultimately, lose. By giving him Ultimate Evil to face on a platonic battlefield, Darkseid makes a colossal error, allowing Batman into a world of "ultimate stakes" where he can alter the myth of evil and give birth to himself. As Morrison said in an interview, "Batman himself is finally standing there to complete that big mythical circle and to have the image of Batman up against the actual personification of evil." The showdown in FC #6 creates what Batman #679 calls "a miracle in Crime Alley". Retroactively, of course.

The time travel itself is not such a complex part of the story. Darkseid sends Bruce back to 9,000 B.C., with regular jumps to other times (circa 1645, 1718, 1880, and 1980, respectively), but always near the vicinity of the cave. Bruce records his message in a brief interlude before ROBW #1 and this message is found by Rip Hunter and brought to the JLA. This takes place at some point in time after the events of Batman and Robin #12, sending Rip, Booster Gold, Hal Jordan, and Superman on a rescue mission that begins before Batman and Robin #13. Bruce's path goes on as illustrated in ROBW.

But this wonderfully ornate story has two other levels of complexity. One, in known references to earlier stories in the Morrison Batman era. We see his memory of the discovery of the well that connects to the Batcave and his imagined funeral from Batman #673 as well as the funeral from Neil Gaiman's Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader? There are logical and thematic connections from Final Crisis, ROBW, Last Rites, and Batman #665.

But the more intriguing references are those which are left dangling without clear resolution. The missing portrait is a clear reference to the Old Thomas Wayne character mentioned in B&R #10 and seen in ROBW #4, and if we merely find out that he is the basis of Doctor Hurt, then it only confirms what has been coming into focus in recent issues. But the issue also has a stunning visual pointer in the depiction of the gates of a "Willowwood Asylum" which is a very obscure pointer to World's Finest #223 and the 1974 story of a pre-Crisis "lost brother" of Bruce's named Thomas Wayne, Jr. This brother was the subject of a brain trauma during childhood that left him mentally unstable, so he was therefore incarcerated in Willowwood Sanitarium. Why is Morrison showing us a pointer to that story?

Many fan-detectives have guessed that Doctor Hurt might be Thomas Wayne, Jr. The Bronze Age stories of Bob Haney have not been acknowledged by Morrison until this time (nor indeed, were much acknowledged by other DC writers at the time). Hurt has already declared himself to be a "dark twin". Could Morrison be opening the door to Thomas Wayne, Jr. being in continuity again, and if so, could he, rather than Old Thomas Wayne, be the body of Doctor Hurt? The answer to the second question is almost certainly "no." Thomas Wayne, Jr. was only three years older than Bruce, whereas Doctor Hurt was an adult in 1978, clearly too old to be the son of Thomas and Martha. The Devil in this story goes far back into the past, and if Morrison were to bring back Thomas Wayne, Jr., this would be quite separate from the origins of Doctor Hurt. The pages showing Willowwood remark on time being pliable, so this may be from a timeline that did stay with us, but only winked in and out of existence as Darkseid turned the Ancestor Box to craft a trap for Batman.

And that brings us to the issue's final chain of suggestive associations. The Ancestor Box (like "Rock of Ages'" Grandmother Box, taken to the platonic, inductive step of generality) has a many-tentacled thing creeping from and about it. Perhaps the hyper-adapter creates the hyperfauna seen in ROBW #2. It is likely that of which Jack Valor cannot speak and that which Alan Wayne calls "sickening." But almost certainly, a box with bells is the same one that is associated with the casket that has become the McGuffin of ROBW and B&R. This is not a great surprise. Somehow, Bruce gets to the end of time, and somehow he stops Green Lantern and Superman in their tracks; a Mother Box is a likely tool for accomplishing these things. It is interesting, though, that something pertaining to the New Gods would also supply "The bells of Barbatos". Whatever blocked the radio transmissions of Dick and uses eclipses as portals for Bruce's jumps, it seems to tie all of the larger story's demons and devils together into one myth, one mythology, and one central hero. Batman #702 is a grand telling of that myth.

Mad Men 405

The Chrysanthemum and The Sword, Ruth Benedict's 1946 study on the culture of Japan, rests on the central premise that Japanese culture exerts influence on the individual through the threat of shame. In contrast, many Western subcultures such as Roman Catholicism rely on guilt as a comparable motivational force. The distinction comes down to whether or not one must be caught to feel punished. Shame as a motivating force is an apt lens to hold up to Don Draper, who is avidly immoral when certain of not being caught but is consumed with the fear of having his secrets found out. Whether or not that book or this idea offer accurate insight regarding Japan, the distinction between guilt and shame is the central principle for the episode as a whole.

In the episode's central non-business subplot, the idea of guilt and shame are at the forefront of Sally's two peccadilloes. When Sally cuts her hair in an obvious bid for attention, everybody's care is for the shame it might bring upon them: The sitter's reaction is "Your dad is going to kill me... Do you understand I'm in worse trouble than you are?" Don's reaction is that when Betty finds out that he will be "in a river of shit" and he presents Sally with a hat covering her hair, to stall the revelation a moment longer. Finally, in a darkly comic circuit of mutual shame, Betty believes that Sally's misbehavior is for the purpose of publicly punishing Betty herself for the divorce.

Later, when Sally is caught masturbating, Betty's reaction is a spotlight on her hypocrisy: She tells Sally that this is not to be done privately or publicly, but later tells the psychiatrist that it's something she herself did and still does ("mostly outgrew it"). Shame becomes an endlessly rising canon: the resort to psychiatry itself is something that Betty has hidden from Henry, and that Don wants to keep from the world, asking the dense Miss Blankenship, "Lower your voice, please."

Don has always been a reliable source of hidden truths. Early in the episode, a crushing blow to him is contained in a brief interaction with Miss Blankenship: A call to California has gotten no answer. Cultural references ranging from "Help Me, Rhonda" to Selma, Alabama place this episode in March 1965. Months after Don's visit with the real Mrs. Draper, she is likely succumbing to cancer, and Don no longer has anyone with whom this many losses can be acknowledged.

In fact, given the supposed overarching distinction between Japan and the West, the only person in the episode who comes across as a firm representative of the West is Roger Sterling. Though he's utterly isolated for putting a stubborn war grudge ahead of business interests, the principle driving him is all internal: "I made a pledge to a lot of men you'll never meet not to do business with them." He may as well be abstaining from sin in order to please the heavenly saints -- Roger absorbs heaps of shame upon himself to stand by that principle, with xenophobia that is as reprehensible as it is brilliantly executed, with barbs covering unconditional surrender, the atomic bombings, and seppuku.

Maybe because of the particular subculture of advertising, "where the truth lies", anybody driven more by guilt than shame should likely have found an exit long ago. Don, putting his much-lauded brain to use by reading the episode's eponymous work of nonfiction (he channels George C. Scott's Patton: "Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!"), devises a stratagem to destroy his personal adversary Ted Shaw, depending on Don's ability to make the Japanese executives lose face in his meeting with them. Don, who could just as well be speaking of himself when he quotes "A man is shamed by being openly ridiculed and rejected. It requires an audience." correctly understands that the Honda executives can be controlled with shame, and so he launches a plan involving a fake commercial, and he manages to manipulate his nemesis into providing the stimulus for that shame. We should not be surprised if Peggy later cites Don's scheme after he criticized her for staging a fight over smoked ham in the season opener. If all of the racial stereotypes advanced by the episode were true, it is hard to imagine that the translator could bring himself to tell his bosses "You did not honor your own rules." This capped a masterful deceit to drain both cash and honor from Shaw's ad agency, set to the caper jazz from Season Three's finale.

To be successful, drama relies upon character development and not just character. The surprising twist in this episode may be that Don is growing rather that spiraling towards a fall. His "Japanese" outlook is eminently on display when he expresses amazement that a trapeze artist would confess to Dr. Faye Miller a key truth about his relationship with his father. "He said that?" Don asks with characteristic distaste for such personal revelation, especially where one's father is concerned. "Why does everybody need to talk about everything?" But the more he talks with Faye, the more he starts to open up. Soon he's talking about his divorce, his kids, Sally's problems -- just the sort of things one would expect Don to hide. The great mystery laid down by this episode is: Why does Don open up to Faye? Is it that he sees another shallow Betty in the all-too-similarly-named Bethany? As he loses Anna Draper, is he looking for someone to share the truth with? Does he see in the PhD with the fake wedding ring, which she ironically removed as a facade within a facade last episode, someone who lives as he does, with three-level lies? Or maybe he's not developing at all, and thinks that opening up might be a way to win another battle in his never-ending war for sexual liaisons with every attractive woman around him. Thus far in the series, Don's simple self-serving motives have yet to be trumped, and could just as well have been the subject when Joan asked "Not very subtle, are they?" and the translator ogled her signature physique while answering, "No, they are not."