I'm less concerned by the events of last night's Mad Men—which was an incoherent mess that taught us nothing new about any of the characters ("Don Draper's childhood was awful! The 60s were weird! Stan has a crush on Peggy! Black people are scary!*") while laying on the symbolism so thick that it swiftly metastasized into SYMBOLISM!—than the reactions to last night's Mad Men. It was a prime example of "interesting" television.
Mad Men’s creators do this once a season or so. They monkey with the conventions of narrative to give the critical set something they can really sink their teeth into. We critics love this sort of thing; here's how I defined "interesting" cinema a year or so ago, using Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson as an example:
But Bronson is certainly an interesting movie -- the sort of film that might divide critics (it was 70% fresh among top critics on Rotten Tomatoes) but will definitely make them pay attention. "Well, you don't see that every day" is the cliched reaction, but it's accurate: stylistically and tonally, it's different. Ten percent will put it on their top ten list and ten percent will put it on their bottom ten list. Its difference in a sea of bland, unending sameness at the multiplex makes it stand out.
Last night's episode of Mad Men fits that definition perfectly. Here's how the AV Club's Todd VanDerWerff described his reaction to the show:
I think I liked it? An equal part of me hated it. And the largest part of me is sort of blown away by the show’s willingness to just go there and commit.
So interesting! I kind of loved Matt Zoller Seitz's evolving reaction to the episode:
MAD MEN knocking the cover off the ball tonight
— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) May 20, 2013
All right, MAD MEN, you still got it.
— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) May 20, 2013
Watching MAD MEN again to quantify the extent to which they were fucking with us. Early money on "considerable."
— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) May 20, 2013
And then, this morning, in his official recap:
After two viewings, and no desire for a third, I’m convinced that metafiction/jazzing around is the only prism through which "The Crash" is anything other than audaciously annoying. More so than any Mad Men episode I can recall, it doesn’t quite feel like a Mad Men episode, but a bunch of half-formed ideas for a Mad Men episode. ... Some of the ideas are great, others stunningly bad; still others don’t quite feel like ideas, even if you squint. It feels like the TV-drama version of one of those papers that every halfway-smart student writes when they’re exhausted and can’t come up with an idea, and decides to write about their inability to come up with an idea instead, and hope they’ll be so clever that they’ll get an A anyway.
(Fun fact: VanDerWerff gave last night's episode of Mad Men an A.)
Over at Slate, Seth Stevenson grasps around to find a method to the show's madness:
Was the amphetamine clockwork of the episode—skies flickering dark then light, days whirring together—meant to evoke the frightening velocity of the era? It must have felt in summer 1968 like the world was hurtling, spinning frantically out of control.
Why not! The beauty of "interesting" television (and interesting cinema) is that you can find almost any meaning you want. I briefly considered writing a post about Mad Men, the I Ching, and The Man in the High Castle that suggested the episode was about alternate realities and paths untaken. Because, again: why not? That's the sort of thing that "interesting" television allows you to do when you're a critic. It's why we secretly love it even when we proclaim to hate it.
*At this point, it feels as if Mad Men's writers are trolling liberal critics of the show who want it to deal with race. "Oh, you want us to 'tackle' race? OK. Roger and Joan are going to get mugged by a black guy and Don's kids are going to be menaced by a mammy. HA!"