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.

Pete Campbell: Standby

After the Spector-produced and Weil and Mann-written You've Lost That Loving Feeling, and after producing the Weil and Mann-written (You're my) Soul and Inspiration, Stand By was Bill Medley's attempt to do the whole thing himself: write, produce, sing (w/o any help from Hetfield). It's the same (force 9 gale, melodramatic) song and performance again, only this third time through impassioned, abject masculinity, the leavee's lament is from an even more pathetic perspective: not a current-leavee but a past-leavee who's stuck in the past ('I'm not her man, I'm just her standby/...So I'll pretend her love is mine'. Interestingly Medley swallows many of the 'her's so that, in particular the key line ends up mostly sounding like, 'I'm not a man, I'm just her standby' which is more self-lacerating and somewhat less pitiful.

The song's pathetic perspective reminded me of Mad Men's Pete Campbell (brilliantly played by Vincent Kartheiser) esp. in the wonderful Season 5 episode, Signal 30, written by the late, great Frank Pierson and splendidly directed by John Slattery. In the ep. Pete flirts with a high school senior (Amanda Bauer) in Drivers' Ed. and gets punched out by Lane. Signal 30 is set in 1966, the year when the album Stand By appeared on was released.

Betty & Megan & Don & Ambition

The Women of 'The Other Woman', Mad Men S05E11

Mad Men's pivotal, Season 5 Episode 11 ended with a terrific musical flourish: The Kinks' immortal 'You Really Got Me' from 1964, which cuts off over the credits. It seemed like a good idea to put together a montage starting with the song's entry point in the episode but then continuing on for the whole song.

Mad Men's first Hitchcock Overhead Shot?

You know you have an Alison Brie problem

When you find yourself getting inexplicably angry whenever Community spends much time with anyone other than her character Annie:

I'm starting to think that this response might interfere with Mad Men Season 5 when it screens. Like everyone else, I've loved the Trudy and Pete Campbell 'surprisingly strong marriage' sub-plot on MM, but my now evidently borderline prurient interest in Trudy (Alison Brie) may throw off the equipoise of my interest in the show. I'll be slightly, unconsciously angry at Don and Sally etc...for drawing attention away from Trudy, which is crazy!

At any rate, I hope Brie does some movies soon, and that, in particular, someone writes a great screwball comedy for her. She's incredibly funny and smart as well as being smoking hot in a pretty-gal-next-door way. That's the combination that Lombard/Colbert/Stanwyck/Dunne/Hopkins/Arthur had in Hollywood's golden age. Make it so again Hollywood!

"Can you believe it?"

The best scene in Mad Men Season 4, Ep. 13 ('Tomorrowland') - the climax of the whole season, maybe of the whole show so far - was Peggy and Joan's smoking, cursing, laughing together at events and their lots.





Christina Hendricks (Joan) gets lots of attention for her Monroe-/Jayne Mansfield-esque figure, but to me she's principally an amazing facial actress - Gong Li, Maggie Cheung, Stephane Audran are good reference points for her. Elizabeth Moss (Peggy) acts in a more balanced way, through her face and body and limbs, but opposite Hendricks her facial acting blossoms.

At any rate, in this crucial payoff scene, where the characters really spoke for the shocked audience as well as for themselves, Hendricks and Moss were on fire, bouncing off each other, their eyelines so exact and locked in, their mutually translucent skin making every other face on the show look like a mask, and so on. Related bouquets: the precision camera-work and editing captured everything with minimal fuss; the lighting people performed their usual miracle of making an ostensibly fluorescent-lit, totally interior room seem realistically lit yet still warm and flattering to faces and complexions; shrewdly chosen costumes - Joan in black and Peggy in dark-gray - made them business-like and adult; and thank god for cigarettes. (Cigarettes are so so good for visuals and acting, pointing scenes. I mean, just look at the images above.)

The upshot: in some respects, and regardless of what Matt Weiner wants or thinks or plans, Mad Men is Peggy and Joan's show now. And if it isn't? Well, we'd pay money to watch a post-Mad Men, rise and rise of Olsen Holloway in the '70s show.

Jan. 2011 update: Fabulous interview with Elizabeth Moss here.

"No, it's not."

Mad Men Season 4, Ep. 9 ('The Beautiful Girls') was extraordinary. While remaining true to a set of characters, it meditated on the overlapping destinies of 5-6 micro-generations of women. Apparently, Sondheim's Follies, which opens and closes with the number 'Beautiful Girls', is an important reference. Will have to check that out now.
At any rate, the episode climaxed with a remarkable series of Resnais-meets-Demy, female tableaux, anchored by the amazing facial acting of Christina Hendricks. Just, wow.





I don't pretend to know what to think of the final image of Peggy, white-gloved (like Betty), smiling. She's less touched by Sally Draper and Miss Blankenship than the others of course, but evidently there's a lot more going on than that. Peggy looks the best pulled-together she ever has in that final shot. On the one hand, she looks like she's off to the Country (white privilege) Club, which, given the racial themes of the ep., would be somewhat disappointing. On the other hand, her hat/bonnet is halo-like, and the light that flares up off the closing elevator doors creates angels' wings for her. A Catholic icon or an astronaut like Blankenship? I dunno, but either way this is impressively suggestive cinematography.
And is Mad Men secretly, actually Peggy's memoir/novelistic reconstruction of her time with Don Draper (written when, say, she's herself an '80s, eminence grise of the ad. world)? Probably not, but that possibility, among others, was certainly opened by the end of this extraordinary, gut-twisting, brain-bursting episode. For some reason too, the end of the ep. made me think of (is soundtracked internally for me by) this piece by Olafur Arnalds:

One flaw with the ep.? Megan (Jessica Pare) half swallows her lines before and after Sally's heart-breaking 'No, it's not'. Of course, Megan is supposed to be a little awkward, unformed, not especially poised, possibly vaguely promoted above her abilities because of her looks (although I don't quite get those beyond her impressive, but somewhat generically runway model-ish height and figure), etc.. So her verbal clumsiness is arguably a feature of and not a problem with Pare's performance. Still, the near-('80s Valley-girl-to-early-Anne-Hathaway) lack of enunciation, the speaking from the back of her mouth and in scattered sentence fragments grates. It makes Megan (and Pare) stick out like a proverbial sore thumb on Mad Men. The end of ep. 4.10, indicating a wider role for Megan on the show therefore currently looks to me like a mistake, even setting aside the dread that a Don-Megan 'ship inspires. Update October 5: The end of ep. 4.11 confirms that Mad Men has indeed made one of its occasional blunders (comparable to some about Betty last season), this time with Megan. Having been quite inarticulate and apparently unsophisticated up until this point, Megan is now quickly and implausibly revealed as a college grad., as super-calculating and worldly, and as, in fact, pretty much just a plot device to heighten Don's damage-done-already to Faye. Having Faye breach her Chinese wall at Don's suggestion was enough: it's a fateful self-betrayal by Faye that was well set up over a couple of eps. The additional element with Don and Megan then and there is insane, soap-erific overkill. And, realistically, that they actually have sex brings to a head that the show has gone to the well of spontaneous, causal sex too often. It's become a crutch for the writers at this point. Don going out for a bite with Megan and having a good time (i.e., her surprising us and him with her depths, etc.) would still have been unnecessary heightening for Don's situation with Faye, but it would at least have satisfied basic believability. Badly done Mr Weiner. Badly done Erin Levy (the official, sole author of ep. 4.11).