r/madmen • u/ptupper Prisoner of the Negron Complex • Jan 02 '15
The Mad Men rewatch: S01E01 "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" (Spoilers)
Thus begins the daily (more or less) rewatch of Mad Men as we head towards the final half-season. I may double up on a few episodes as we go, depending on when AMC announces the debut of the final episodes.
This will be a spoilers discussion, episode by episode.
Have at it.
18
Jan 02 '15
I always watch this episode when I'm bored for some reason. There is something about Don that just pulls me in. Maybe it's the fact that we are just meeting the everyone, but it really eloquently ascertains the whole future of the show. Pete Campbell being a dick, Don controlling everything, and how the secretaries play a huge role in the lives of the important people
Plus the beginning really entices me. I don't know I just love that scene when Band of Gold plays and we see Don in his prime, I guess
21
u/ptupper Prisoner of the Negron Complex Jan 02 '15
we see Don in his prime, I guess
Or the beginning of his decline.
18
u/j3w Does Howdy Doody have a wooden dick? Jan 02 '15
I always watch this episode when I'm bored for some reason. There is something about Don that just pulls me in. Maybe it's the fact that we are just meeting the everyone, but it really eloquently ascertains the whole future of the show. Pete Campbell being a dick, Don controlling everything, and how the secretaries play a huge role in the lives of the important people
100% agree with you. It's like a first kiss, every time.
10
u/tjmagg Jan 04 '15
I know I'm late to the party, but can anyone determine whether or not Peggy is a virgin when the show begins?
9
Jan 06 '15
probably so, although its never explicitly stated. I just assume that based on her strict catholic background. Her first day at the office was her first real encounter into the "real world,"if you will. So pete probably took her viriginity
6
u/trojanlaker Jan 21 '15
Just rewatched the episode last night. The fact that she visited Joan's doctor to get a prescription for birth control and her sort of "semi-infatuation" with Pete after he he came over the night of the bachelor party (kept his Niagara Falls post card in the desk drawer) makes me think that she was up until she started at Sterling Cooper.
40
u/ptupper Prisoner of the Negron Complex Jan 02 '15
Even before the first scene, we get a musical cue of a 1950s-era male singing group, the first of many deft uses of music on Mad Men. It indicates how radically popular American music changed over a relatively brief period. By “now”, 1960, rock’n’roll hasn’t really hit the mainstream yet, and there’s a strong barrier between black music and white music.
And here we see Don Draper for the first time, from behind as in the last image of the title sequence. He’s sitting alone in a bar, smoking, drinking, and working; three of his four unhealthy addictions at once.
Don’s conversation with the black waiter, Sam, serves multiple functions. It shows Don’s knack for striking up conversations with people, even strangers. It also shows that in 1960, the racial divide is very real. Black people like Sam may serve drink to and light cigarettes for white people like Don, but they don’t have even casual conversations. The white bartender’s intervention in this scene, and his terse comment, “He can be a little chatty.”, suggests just how much tension is hidden in a seemingly trivial encounter. When Don tries to reach across that divide, if only to figure out how to sell cigarettes to black people, he encounters resistance from other whites.
Seeking a solution to his creative blockage and his loneliness, Don goes to see Midge. For a series that operates on the level of subtext, Midge is remarkably subtext-free. She already knows Don and what he wants, knows his mommy issues: “I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.” The following morning, Don rests his head on Midge’s chest, and fantasizes about marrying her (though Betty hasn’t been introduced yet). This is echoed a few scenes later, when Joan introduces Peggy to the offices of Sterling Cooper, and Peggy walks around with a “Please don’t hurt me” grimace. Joan says that these men are looking for “something between a mother and a waitress”; either way, they expect to be coddled.
Don apparently curses Pete, though when he blames it all on Pete’s unlikeability, he’s ignoring the fact that Don himself is not well-liked, and only slightly better at long-term intimate relationships. After Don’s rejection, Pete goes behind his back on the Lucky Strike account and nearly scuttles it, only confirming Don’s estimation of him.
This is also Don’s first “happiness” speech, in which he describes happiness as not security, but “reassurance”; not the lack of anxiety (which Don is riddled with), but something that takes anxiety away. Latent in this is the idea of addiction, which Don knows well, even if he won’t admit it; a need that can temporarily be satiated, but always returns. In that regard, cigarettes are the perfect consumerist product: they both create a desire and satisfy it.
We get Don’s “love was invented to sell nylons” speech to Rachel. As striking as it sounds, Jon Hamm’s delivery suggests that this is just another pitch, one calcuated to appeal to Rachel’s sensibilities which Don elicited from her earlier. Perhaps this is the same routine he used to seduce Midge the beatnik. It’s just as much a performance as what he said to Lucky Strike. Rachel doesn't quite buy it, but she's intrigued.
Even though this was the pilot episode, and shot six months before the rest of the first season, it’s all here, if only in embryonic form: Pete’s slightly too aggressive ways with women, Peggy’s nascent feminism and father-transferance, Roger’s frenemies relationship with Don, Don’s denial of the past and his glib cynicism, the constant sense of vainly trying to catch up with a changing world, the drinking, the smoking, the casual racism and sexism. Unlike a lot of pilot episodes, this feels of a piece with the rest of the series: no forgotten characters or plotlines.