5G
So I was watching 5G and preparing your forthcoming episode recap, and I do this by taking notes (you know; by hand…with a pen), and I wrote, “Don gives Adam 5g.”
5g. As in “five grand.” Or as in “Room 5G.” Or as in “Episode 1.5: 5G.”
Holy crap.
It doesn’t mean all that much. I mean, somewhere in there, Weiner saw it and edited the script to slip it into the episode. No big. It doesn’t uncover an extra layer. Except it does. It speaks to an attention to detail, a respect for the script as a holistic entity, that is just remarkable. I mean, remarkable.
5G.
December 18th, 2007 at 10:16 am
This is what I’m saying. I can watch and talk about this show forever because every line, every word, every detail is placed lovingly and deliberately, like the writers are decorating a Christmas tree before the President comes for dinner (except in a world where the President is a human that the writers would in fact, want to have for dinner).
December 18th, 2007 at 11:49 am
It’s “Connections”, and it speaks to those of us who pay attention. Sort of like the first time we watched Babel, we did so without subtitles. In good art everything has a layers of meaning and connection. Thanks for the blog…
December 18th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Ooh, are you the famous “bird man” grinbear? Hi!
December 18th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
(with the scary dog avatar.)
Hi! Thanks for checking us out.
December 27th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Dog not scary. Dog haz opinion.
WW
December 27th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Sometimes, opinion of big dog (perhaps not this one) is “Roberta tasty”. Opinion is correct, but not a favorite of Roberta. is all I’m saying.
February 13th, 2008 at 12:06 am
There are gazillions of details in “5G”. One of the sneakiest and most significant is that damn award Betty and Don come home with in the first scene.
The award has a horseshoe that falls upsidedown when Don slams the door in his hangover haze the next morning. The old superstition about horseshoes is that they must be nailed rightside up, to hold in all the luck and success; upsidedown all the luck runs out. The falling horseshoe is almost a portent of misfortune for Don; a portent that fulfills itself when Adam Whitman comes to SterlingCooper because he has seen a picture of Don and Roger posing with their horseshoe awards. “I’ll take any excuse to get out of this meeting,” says Don when Peggy hands him a note from Adam waiting in reception–any excuse except to go see his brother.
But the horseshoe also corresponds with Abigail Whitman’s philosophy in “The Hobo Code”. “My mom always said that life is like a horseshoe; it’s fat in the middle, open on both ends, and hard all the way through.” Obviously, there is nothing about that aspect of his past that Don wants any connection with. Yet, no matter how many times Abigail has called Don “whorechild”, no matter how bitter and cramped her or Archie’s perspective on life, it seems not to have touched Adam at all, who looks upon Dick/Don with unequivocal love and hero worship.
I have to say here that when I first saw “5G”, I didn’t like it. I found Adam’s presence too awkward, embarassing, and needy. I had an irrational irritation at the arrival of a character who’s very presence seemed to suck the style out of Don and Mad Men. Like Matt Weiner, I fetishize this period, right down to the shapes of the ashtrays and cigarette holders. I didn’t want anything that took me away from the sleak, cool, surface world that Mad Men proffers. Don thrives in this world and Adam Whitman disturbs it–and with far more than just knowledge of Dick/Don’s secret. A secret that he would most likely keep just to continue his relationship with his brother.
How does Adam upset not only Don’s cool veneer, but also the world of Mad Men? I think the answer can be found in Sally’s morning appraisal of her father’s award: “An award for good horses?” For her there is nothing symbolic about the horseshoe. The primary meaning of a horseshoe is a utilitarian metal covering to protect horse’s hooves while they do domesticated work–farmwork, pulling a plow, a cart, a carriage. One suspects that this is Adam’s perspective as well–a horseshoe is a horseshoe is for horses. It neither represents an unrelentingly harsh life, as it does to Abigail, or luck and success as it is meant to for Don. As for Don, the award may carry too many associations with the farmlife he ran away from. When Betty suggests that he take it to work, he responds, “What, take that thing on the train, like some kid who won at the 4-H?”
It’s not just the harshness of that life that Don does not want to go back to; it is also its simplicity, its unadorned nature, its poverty, not just of material goods, but also of created meaning, embellishment, symbol, and design. Don wants to stay far away from a world like that and Adam brings it with him, pulling Don back into that place. What Adam also brings with him, though, is tremendous love. Adam probably believes in family and family values more than his bible-beating parents ever did. Don thinks that because he can pick up and leave whenever he wants, other people can do the same, given the right incentive. He cannot imagine that such a move is impossible for Adam.
I am sad now, at Adam’s death. I wish he had lived on, to be the disruption to the Mad Men world over and over again.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:10 am
Good stuff, Max.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Max, this is brilliant analysis. Good catch on Abigail’s quote, which I’d forgotten.
I’m going to disagree on a couple of small points; first, I am sure that Adam doesn’t view horseshoes without symbolism; he’s a farm boy and his culture is steeped in folklore.
Second, I think there was an important political point in Adam’s disrupting of Don’s sleek world—one that a Commie like you should have noticed!
—the sleek, pretty world of Sterling Cooper cannot function without the janitors; without the underclass. Adam is part of the machinery that makes the world pretty for the “haves.” He’s also the only white “servant class” worker we’ve seen, indicating just how low on the totem pole of opportunity he is—equal with the “coloreds.”
I also think that Don believes in family values—for other people; for people who had families. It’s why he’s trying so hard to take care of Betty, and is so confused that it isn’t making either of them happy. He’s sure that what’s lacking in his life is the absence of ever having had a mother and a family that accepted him, and he has done his best to create that as Don Draper, so why doesn’t it feel good?
February 14th, 2008 at 1:10 am
Sure, and all the food in the supermarket didn’t emerge out of nowhere; people labored on a farm to nurture it into existence–but we hardly see them, either. The Mad Men world depends on the invisibility or near invisibility of “those people”–blacks, working poor whites, etc. I’m reminded of the episode in which both Pete and Peggy come in early and they have to share the elevator with the black janitor because the service elevator is out. Just the presence of the janitor in the elevator with them is an imposition. He is not “in his place”. He, too, for a moment, is disruptiing the Mad Men world.
We only get one episode to know Adam, so the claim that he sees things simply, without adornment, may indeed be farfetched. But he does focus almost totally on his connection to Dick/Don. And he is not focussing on Don’s success or his whorechild status.
I’m not so sure that Don realizes that having a family is about connections. It appears to me that having a family for him is like having a car or some other possession. The nicer the car, the happier you should be. I go back to his conversation with Betty when they are discussing the possibility of therapy for her in bed. He points to the house and the kids and her beauty and wonders how she could not be happy. To be fair, all of these “things” are things he probably thought he never could have as Dick Whitman, whorechild, so just having them is an immense improvement in the quality, as well as the quantity, of his life. He’s been able to get all of this through taking another man’s identity and lying about his own but he may never have anticipated the cost to himself in terms of authenticity and his ability to connect meaningfully with those he loves.
February 14th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Great observations, Max …
Again, I go back to seeing Don as a metaphor for ourselves, and for post-WWII America: possessing = happiness.
Immediate gratification over emotional investment, surface slick over inner substance. Don has none.
Couple of points on your post:
1) Re: the black janitor … another blog had a post some time back indicating that the janitor in the elevator that morning was the same one that saw Peggy and Pete going at it in Pete’s office. And he’s the same janitor that Peggy got fired in Nixon vs. Kennedy because she complained to management about her blouse being stolen. So when she rants to Don about the unfairness of others doing whatever they want and getting away with it, she misses the irony of an (we can assume) underprivileged maintenance worker having to see two overprivileged white collar-types playing around with impunity — and HE’S the one that loses his job! Sure, such a series of events could happen today, but with the racial element in the story taking place in 1960, the egregiousness is stark.
2) as for Don’s connectedness, I think he’s simply learned to take everything for granted, in the purest sense. He didn’t get a beautiful wife, great job and kids because he earned it, it’s just what he’s supposed to have. The whole self-made thing is a joke and he knows it. “Deserve” has nothing to do with it, so infidelity won’t disrupt the image. But remember that Mr. Weiner has repeatedly stated that everything has consequences, and so this will too. He’s a metaphor for us.
Which leads us to the final frame of the season, with Don starting to feel the walls close in … no Rachel, no Betty, no family … and that brilliant closing music by Bob Dylan, who no one’s heard of yet, but will …
The second verse seems like it was written just for this show … 35 years early …
It ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin’ anyway
So don’t think twice, it’s all right
February 14th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Max, in terms of Adam, I think that his mother and step-father were not nice people or good parents. Sure, Adam wasn’t a whoreson, so he didn’t get the brunt of their cruely the way that Dick did, but I don’t imagine he was treated with love or kindness, and he had an older brother he hero-worshipped who was abused, so that’s gotta hurt too. And everyone is dead, so Dick/Don is the last family he can possibly have.
You’re right that Don doesn’t understand connection. But in “Shoot” he certainly worships the notion of a good mother and seems to believe it has redemptive qualities. Betty already has the most important job in the world, he says. Not as his wife but as mother to his children. She is surrogate for the mother he never had, as his children are surrogates for the childhood he never had, and they MUST MUST MUST be happy, because he believes this can heal him somehow.
Dan, nice observation about the janitor. Good stuff.
February 14th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Deb, Dan, I can’t say that Don has no inner substance. That would make him too boring. But he definitely has limits and when he brushes up against those limits, it befuddles and worries him.
You know, you look at the photographs of Dick and Adam together and you wonder, what was that relationship like? Were Dick and Adam sheltering each other against Abigail, et al?
Don definitely adores his children and he gives credit where credit is due for their well-being, Betty. That’s an important thing that redeems Don; when he sees qualilty in other people, like Betty or Peggy, he acknowledges them for it.
One last little note about invisibility: I finished my entry last night and went to bed, but couldn’t sleep for a while because Paul Kinsey’s lines kept going through my head. A modern world, filled with wonder and ease. That is our space-age dream, no hard work in the future. But when we can’t actually achieve that, when there are still dirty and difficult jobs to do, we make the people who do them invisible, so the rest of us can have the fantasy of a modern world.
Thanks for supporting my obsession.
February 14th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Max, thank you for your awesome contributions.
February 14th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
One thing, and it’s not a complaint: Mad Men does need more black people. Of course, its janitors, elevator operators, bathroom attendants, and lunch cart guys now but one college educated African American walking in there and working day to day, THAT WOULD UPSET EVERYBODY! Maybe 1962.
February 20th, 2008 at 6:53 am
[...] The big question, of course, was, what was in Don’s case? We all know how it turned out—5G was in Don’s case. But the question in everyone’s mind was, Is it a [...]
September 28th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
[...] There have been several episodes of Mad Men with numbers in the title, although Seven Twenty Three is the first episode that is entirely a number. Some of the numbers don’t seem significant, like the 6 in Six Month Leave, but some are pretty potent, like 5G. [...]