A Wild Ending for Mad Men

While some sort of soothing, tieing-bows-on-things, ‘where everyone ends up 5 years or a decade hence’ ending for Mad Men is still most likely, here's my own long-shot ‘wild’ ending for the show.
Consider a frame-grab of a guy whose face we never see from the remarkable coda/final scene of Les Bonnes Femmes (1960):

Look familiar? Well, here’s MM’s creator Matt Weiner discussing LBF for a recent museum exhibit and retrospective on MM:

I first saw this in film school and shared it to help the production design of the pilot because it was shot in the streets of Paris, with little embellishment, at exactly the time we were trying to recreate. The thematic aspects were valuable as well, as the film tells the everyday story of four bored working women led astray by their romantic fantasies. My favorite sequence, a kind of postscript to the whole film, is particularly relevant to the series as it features an unknown woman looking right down the lens at the audience.

My first side-bet, then, is that Weiner is going to steal this final shot from LBF for MM's own final shot.
My second side-bet is that Weiner steals much more extensively from LBF’s ending – or more precisely its double-ending – because it’s one of the greatest endings in movie history, yet very few people know it, so it really is super-stealable! Without spoiling anything much, in LBF’s first ending something very nasty and shocking (but also inevitable in retrospect) happens to a beloved figure. Then we get a second ending: a very oblique, dream-like, ultimately fourth-wall-breaking scene with a man whose face we never see and a woman who stares straight at us who’s completely new but also unnervingly similar to - clearly the same type as - the victim in the first ending.

So, here’s my ultra-fanciful long-shot prediction for the end of MM’s finale. A super-shocking first ending for Joan or Sally or Peggy followed by an oblique coda that begins by drifting through a club alighting on a guy in Don’s couch pose whose face we never see as per my first image above, and that ends with that guy dancing with a new woman (presumably another in Don’s line/type of dark-haired, troubled beauties, but maybe waitress Diana) who stares straight at us (my second image above).

It’s unlikely that Weiner will do anything this radical. After all, just the first ‘shocking’ ending would probably cause outrage among most fans of the show (and, with Betty falling to lung cancer this week, would undoubtedly cause some online communities to cry misogynist foul). Does Weiner have the stomach for that?

And what of a very artsy second ending? People semi-rioted when Chabrol dropped this whole package on them in Paris in 1960. Would Weiner go that far out? He's not David Lynch! And yet Weiner has cited Blue Velvet as an important influence, and there have been a few horror notes sounded but not paid off in recent eps, and the whole second half season was dedicated to Mike Nichols, whose period appropriate Carnal Knowledge (1971) has a brutal ending. So a shocking and generally 'far out' ending wouldn't be completely out of the blue if it happened

My 'long-shot' ending for MM is precisely that - highly unlikely – and, looking around online, I seem to be the only one thinking along its lines. Still, Mad Men began by being cinematically true to its original film era of North By Northwest and The Apartment, so if Mad Men were to be true to the film era it’s ended up in – the era of Frenzy, Straw Dogs, Deliverance, Clockwork Orange, Cries and Whispers, Ulzana’s Raid, Get Carter and so on - it should end with a bang. Be Brave Mr Weiner!

Update May 20, 2015: Well, Weiner went for a very safe, fan-servicing ending - no time jumps or narrative surprises of any kind (not even a shift to make Peggy or Joan or Sally at least partially the final perspective of the show; no it's Don all the way). Too bad in my view. Too bad also that the ep. 'Person to Person' committed so thoroughly to its titular phone call backbone. Phone calls, like computer screens, are anti-cinematic and anti-climactic, and having an episode infested with and officially thematized by them doesn't change that.

• Don's three calls
• Peggy's phone-call rom-com ending (frittering away the goodwill from the previous week's 'Just stay on the phone')
• Joan getting to (i) call Peggy, (ii) break up with her Prince while on the phone (to someone else), and (iii) be on the phone for her final shot. 

That's not good TV/Film, let alone good climactic TV/Film.

Doctor Feelgood: Gap-filling Time Again

I plan to watch Oil City Confidential (2010) and to follow this advice on the music:

[Stupidity is] Definitely the place to start, followed by Down By The Jetty and then maybe Ian Dury’s Laughter just to hear how good and radical Wilko could be in different musical surroundings.

Betty Davis

A recent Sound Opinions episode has switched me on to Betty Davis's eponymous 1973 album. Filthily rocking, funked out, with great visuals (see above; I guess that that's who Beyoncé was channeling in her Austin Powers role), it's fantastic.

Check out its brilliant lead track, 'If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up' - a title/hook-line every songwriter in the world wishes they'd concocted - here.

Getting in touch with your inner Scorpio

Via Google Earth:

And via youtube:

One of the best opening scenes of all time with one of the best scores.

Hopelessly Devoted

The movie Grease is mostly shot fairly perfunctorily, but 'Hopelessly Devoted To You' is pretty well thought out. It’s mostly one long 2 mins+ shot – nothing fancy, but affecting and intimate. The song itself is another great Farrar composition and Olivia Newton-John's loveliness and splendid voice makes the time and close-up worth the camera’s while. The mind recoils at the thought of the edited and post-produced to death fate that would almost certainly befall such a number in a movie musical today.

Yes's Tales From Topographic Oceans

God help me, I'm really enjoying listening to Yes's prog monsterpiece, Tales From Topographic Oceans. Reading Dave Weigel's wonderful Prog Spring series (re-)lit the fuse for me: it's great stuff, really, so long as you just relax into it. I've listened to a lot of trance/dance mixtapes over the last few years and they've lost their power for me (either to interest or relax). Right now, Yes is hitting the sweet spot for me that that other stuff used to.

You can listen to the whole album on youtube here.

Olivia Newton-John does the Hollies Live

Like Karen Carpenter and Alison Krauss, ONJ has perfect pitch and an incredibly pure tone. She just kills this classic song, which is hard to sing. Many of us took ONJ slightly for granted in the '70s and '80s ('the singing milkshake'), but she's a great singer as well as, of course, a tremendously appealing presence.

The Emotions' Flowers

A fabulous song from the '70s that was one of the first products of The Emotions' alliance with Maurice White and the rest of the EWF crew. In the disco era that followed, The Emotions became an alternative, female front end for EWF, much as Sister Sledge often did for Chic, and Samantha Sang and Yvonne Elliman, and, ahem, Andy Gibb did for The Bee Gees.

People who want to run down the disco era often focus on one-hit-wonders (i.e., to emphasize the period's insubstantiality or ephemerality say) rather than on this sort of multiple hit-factory substructure of the time, where each of the productions centers were strongly continuous with other, usually more well-established music genres such as soul and funk (think of Quincy Jones and Gamble and Huff as other centers in this regard) and electronic music (in Moroder's case). Disco was no accident. It 'had to happen' just as much as punk did. Talent and ambition had piled up in strange corners of the industry and was ready to spill over by 1978. And it did.

Underrated Abba

10 excellent songs beyond Gold and More Gold (the embedded video below is a youtube playlist of these tracks):

1. If It Wasn't For The Nights
2. My Love, My Life
3. Gonna Sing You My Love Song
4. Disillusion
5. Dance (While The Music Still Goes On)
6. Like An Angel Passing Through My Room
7. The Piper
8. Dum Dum Diddle
9. Hey Hey Helen
10. I'm a Marionette

If It Wasn't For The Nights (Looking for a Happier Theresa Dunn)

If It Wasn't for the Nights is a fan-favorite album track from Abba's 'disco' album, Voulez-Vous (1979). It's musically effervescent but with near heart-breaking lyrics - a sad happy love song, europop, dance banger. Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977) is a famously muddled film, e.g., it keeps the book's ultra-shocking ending but makes its protagonist, Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) more fun-loving than (the book's) self-destructive, dramatizing her inner life with amusing fantasy sequences that are more Molly Dodd or Ally McBeal than Wild Strawberries or The Exorcist, say. In this vid., I use Abba's great disco-hit-that-never-was-but-should-have-been as a clue to how to edit together some of LFMG's lovelier set-ups and facial acting from Keaton to arrive at

Theresa Dunn, happy-sad rom-com heroine á là Fran Kubelik or Charity Valentine, only at the height of both disco and scuzzy, dangerous, '70s NYC/Chicago

At any rate, IIWFTN deserves to be much better known than it is (if only Madonna had covered it on MDNA...).

Focus-pulling in The Stepford Wives (1975)

Radiohead have long made no bones about being inspired/haunted by The Stepford Wives (1975). The final track on Hail To The Thief (2003), Wolf At The Door explicitly refers to the basic concept:

Stepford wives who are we to complain?
Investments and dealers investments and dealers
Cold wives and mistresses
Cold wives and sunday papers.

And Thom Yorke told the NY Times that the excellent Bodysnatchers from In Rainbows (2007) was "inspired by Victorian ghost stories, The Stepford Wives and his own feeling of 'your physical consciousness trapped without being able to connect fully with anything else.'"

But this influence appears to have first manifested itself in Jake Scott's acclaimed video for Fake Plastic Trees, one of Radiohead's most beloved early songs.

The video's supermarket setting reprises in part the film's famous, post-climactic 'supermarket scene' (although the vid's supermarket unlike TSW's is a blinding, high-contrast, sci-fi white, which may well reflect another specific influence). But Scott's video also makes very extensive use of very tight/shallow focus which is TSW's visual signature more generally.

My video puts TSW's big focus-pulling scenes and shots together, beginning with the supermarket scene (which the 2004 remake butchered). I cut my video to Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees, for all of the obvious reasons mentioned above, but unfortunately that soundtrack has been blocked. I therefore recommend that (at some point) you mute my vid. and synch your own copy of FPT up to it from the top (it works wonderfully!).

I've also assembled some frames from FPT's video and some frames from TSW to help make the parallelism clear.



I highly recommend TSW. Along with Cronenberg's Shivers (1975), it gives you the perfect image of the backstory to current, unending cultural wars (particularly in the US).

Update March 13, 2012:
Consider the posh-/alterna-babe who flickers discreetly throughout the FPT vid (and whose look roughly crosses the automatized Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) from TSW's supermarket scene with Andie McDowell's character from Four Weddings and A Funeral):

The second time the posh gal appears she trails a small, white dog with brown patches. But Joanna Eberhart's small, white dog with brown patches, Fred, plays a crucial, extended role in TSW (1975):

Note too that the final track on Radiohead's OK Computer (1997), The Tourist, begins with the paranoid/depressed singer imagining himself automatized/replaced and triggering a pet's suspicions:

It barks at no one else but me
Like it's seen a ghost
I guess it's seen the sparks a-flowing
No one else would know.

While the trope of robots who pass as humans but who can't fool animals is a sci-fi commonplace, in the context of general Radiohead interest in TSW, the details of dogs and sparks rings the TSW bell again. And, of course, the FPT video's focus-pulled/differentially blurry images was evidently a touchstone for OK Computer's cover-art:

In sum, TSW (1975) is occasionally overground in Radiohead 2.0 (Kid A and after), but its themes and visual signatures are a component of Radiohead 1.0 (pre-Kid A (2000)) at its most triumphant.

Holy Mother of all that is Funky and Cool

Rodgers, Edwards, Thompson immediately pre-Chic in 1976. Doing Earth Wind and Fire. Wow. Some of the best music ever made starts here.

Nile Rodgers has the story behind the video on his wonderful blog here. (Note that Nile's acronym DHM means 'drunk hot mess'.)

Update: I heartily recommend the Six Million Steps soul/disco site and JJ's Smoking Sessions mixtapes/podcasts in particular to all Chic fans. Every mix that I've checked out has been spectacular. In most cases, obscurities and interview snippets rub shoulders with old favorites in way that's completely intoxicating. Your mileage may vary, but probably it won't. This stuff's gold.

Hitchcock's Family Plot in Dazed and Confused

Nice.

Fox's S-S-Single Bed

A #1 hit in Australia and #4 hit in the UK in 1976, this record (with just a little reinstrumentation and fattening of the bass) could be in the charts in 2011 (e.g., it would then sound a lot like one of Gaga's best songs, Summerboy). Cartoonish, vaguely inhuman vocal tone? Check. Nursery rhyme lyric? Check. Danceable but somehow deracinated? Check. All of that's pretty appalling on one level, but on another level it's an inspired formula that obviously works for lots of people. SB seems to foreshadow much of modern dance-pop in something like the way I Feel Love and TEE and Pop Muzik do.

Update July 19, 2011: I've been listening to Fox's eponymous debut album from 1975. It's fantastic, and like S-S-Single Bed seems way ahead of its time. Very impressive stuff. I can hear why it didn't quite blow up at the time: there's no Lady Marmalade or Dancing Queen or I Feel Love or Holiday or Bad Romance, no one song that really leaps out in that unignorable, star-making way. But there's a consistent vibe here that's fresh and appealing, one that with hindsight lots of subsequent people have reinvented bits of. Fave tracks include Pretty Boy, Red Letter Day, and the Abba-ish Imagine me Imagine you, but, seriously, almost every song (I can do without the Love Letters cover) is great.

Jobriath's Inside

Finally, this largely unheard masterwork, should-be-a-standard is up on youtube. For how long one wonders (I tried uploading it several times and was rejected)? Enjoy it while it lasts.

Kraftwerk Live on late night US TV in 1975

Staggeringly great. Has to be seen to be believed. Autobahn live in '75! On mainstream network TV!