I personally must say that it is so interesting….

Thanks for all the links to the lengthy, thoughtful Matt Weiner interviews.

i’m addicted, and I was so thrilled to find out it’s renewed for season two. I’m speccing it, for sure!

Another reflection between Peggy and Don: his relationship with his mother was severed at birth as hers with her baby will be. It almost makes her analogous to the mother he’s looking for.

Thanks for the great comment. Keep ‘em coming.

Your post is particularly timely, because I had been talking to some friends about Mad Men recently, and comparing it to a lot of modern literature that I like, but never quite had a handle on. A lot of books that I like have the oblique structures you describe here where I’d be reading them, knowing that the stories were engaging that they were the stories were operating at a high level of storytelling. This drove me crazy because I couldn’t quite figure out the mechanism that they were using. Now I’m pretty certain that they’re using what you’re describing here, and which, for the lack of a better name I’ll call, “indirect mirroring”.*

As you pointed out in your post on “The Wire” a while back Jimmy’s and D’Angelo’s position in their various groups (Cops/Gang) were analogs of each other, as were their basic motivation (Jimmy thought Baltimore cops needed shape up and be real police, and D’Angelo thought the Baltimore drug dealers needed to shape up and learn to sell without killing each other). This provided some strong storytelling (“The Wire” is still my favorite TV show, bar none, we’re comparing gold to platinum here), but the mirroring was a bit out in your face. And this had the sad effect of making the show seem a little more like a TV show. You can kinda “feel the plot” in a meta sense, which can take you out of the moment.

I’d distinguish “indirect mirroring” from what’s happening in “The Wire” as a matter of degree. There are fewer similarities between Joan’s and Rachael’s character/situation than there are between Jimmy’s and D’Angelo’s character/situation, and because of that the audience doesn’t “feel the plot” in the same way. Basically, upon casual viewing the powerful data processing of the unconscious mind will likely pick up the connections, but the conscious mind won’t.

To rephrase everything I’ve said, “Man Men is good cause it doesn’t rub stuff in your face.”

* I’m not married to this term at all. I was first thinking of calling it “thematic mirroring”, “tenuous mirroring”, or “minimalist mirroring”, but they seemed a little too restrained. Characters like Joan and Rachael don’t so much share a theme, as they share concerns.

On other topics, I’m getting the feeling that Peggy and Dan are supposed to be pretty much the same character. If anything has come out about Peggy’s past this season, I don’t remember it, she shares the same raw talent and ambition than Dan does, and why Dan gave away a brother near the beginning of the season, Peggy seems to be giving away child near the end. And, of course, both have loneliness down to a fine art.

If this theory about their basic underlying character is true it makes Pete’s running to Peggy’s door near the beginning of the season the best-sublimated longing I’ve seen on prime time!