My time of day is the dark time
A couple of deals before dawn
When the street belongs to the cop
And the janitor with the mop
And the grocery clerks are all gone.
In the wee small hours of the morning, secrets that were kept can be revealed, and in the strange sweet twilight before dawn, you can see things as they really are, let your longing roam free, and admit to yourself who you are.
Here are some rough notes I jotted down while watching Wee Small Hours:
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People catching other people, seeing through other people’s lies
people throwing things
rejection and the longing for love
and seeing things through to how they end
I am struck first by the throwing things. In the movies and on TV, people throw things dramatically. In real life, that almost never happens, and if it does happen, I’m inclined to think it’s often because it’s an imitation of something seen in the movies or on TV.
Sal tossing the film editing room struck me as cliché, but who could be more desperate than Sal in that moment? Who could hurt more? The statement is “I reject.” I reject that pass and that brutish man. I reject my homosexuality. Or the closet. Or both. I reject what must, inevitably, happen next.
Betty, for her part, throws the money box, and could that be more symbolic? HERE is the facade! HERE is the phony excuse to see you, and the need to be phony, and the desire to see you, and the feeling of not seeing you. “I reject.”
Which gets us to rejection, and longing for love. It was never 100% clear to me that Don was Hot For Teacher until the opening scene of this episode, but by then it was definitely clear. Yet Don doesn’t go to her apartment until after he is rejected by Connie. The father stuff I’ve speculated about before became explicit in Wee Small Hours. For a moment, Don really believed he was loved. Not unconditionally, mind you; Don was more than happy to sing for that supper, but he believed he was loved, and it was Connie’s arbitrary and unfair rejection of Don that drove him to Suzanne Farrell, just as Don’s arbitrary and unfair rejection of Peggy drove her to Duck Philips (as an aside, it looks like Don’s rejection of Peggy didn’t keep her off the Hilton account after all).
Connie rejects Don, and Suzanne at first rejects, and then doesn’t reject, Don. Sal rejects Lee Garner, Jr., which causes Sterling Cooper to reject Sal. Betty feels rejected by Henry and then goes to him, and then rejects him. Everyone wants love, but no one can keep it.
Suzanne says she can see how it will end, but Don doesn’t care. Betty realizes the only “end” with Henry (the end, not of their romance, but of their flirtation) is “tawdry.” She specifically rejects the couch, which is only a little funny if you remember Meditations in an Emergency.
Another motif of Wee Small Hours is insomnia. Betty says she can’t sleep, the baby doesn’t sleep, and Don lies awake. Connie clearly can’t sleep or he wouldn’t keep calling Don in the middle of the night. Lee Garner Jr. probably sleeps fine. The bully.
At the end, with Suzanne, Don at last sleeps like a baby.
In the wee small hours of the morning
While the whole wide world is fast asleep
You lie awake and think about the girl
And never ever think of counting sheep.When your lonely heart has learned its lesson
You’d be hers if only she would call
In the wee small hours of the morning
Thats the time you miss her most of all.
85 Responses to “A couple of deals before dawn”
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@49 Jon — I agree with you 100%. I think there is going to be a BLOWOUT between Don and Connie, reinforcing that Don has no one (after that whole "I see you as my son") exchange.
And also just wanted to say that this show is drawing me in even more than before. I have never looked forward to a show this much.
I take it that the sports bra was invented after 1963? That Miss Farrell must know that her bouncing perky twins must attract the men in Ossining like Don and Carleton.
Empress, ha! I remember the sports bra being introduced. I'm thinking 80s.
gypsy I agree. This whole teacher thing is bound to be a disaster. At first I thought Betty's affair would bring about disaster to her and her family, but turns out it is going to be Don for sure. I have no sympathy for him what so ever. I started to believe that our Don was a good guy underneath, but his greed, and bull shit approach of moving forward with one's life is getting old, and in fact with him preaching this to everyone, nobody seems to care anymore.
#53 To be fair to the teacher, she was running in the very early morning when she could reasonably expect no one would see her.
Why are we assuming Betty would WANT custody of the children if she left Don? I can see her taking baby Gene and leaving Sally and Bobby behind.
To be fair to the teacher, she was running in the very early morning when she could reasonably expect no one would see her.
Well, just because she's running before the invention of the sports bra doesn't mean she has to run without ANY bra. But either way, let's not kid ourselves, Miss Farrell is just as intent on playing this dangerous game as the horny daddies are. She knows exactly what she's doing. The drunken phone call, for starters? The wacko conversation during the eclipse? She is trouble. AND she knows it from experience but she's doing it anyway. She's no more innocent than Don is.
Wonder if she has any idea what she's getting into with Don, though. She just opened up a whole huge can of worms on that one. I don't think this is going to end up like boffing Carleton for her this time.
I've been thinking about Pete's rifle a lot since last night….
Jon,
Connie's rejection of Don would be the rejection of a son by a father figure. Satisfying? Perhaps — but world-shattering, in another way.
Unless it really is Don's conscious intention to run around collecting fathers, that is. I see his tendency to encounter them as more of an unconscious — happy or unhappy — accident.
By the way, I loved what Connie says to Don in this episode:
"You're my angel … like a son. More. Because you didn't have what they had. You understand."
The beauty of these lines lies in knowing what the old man's kids were like at the time. The survivors are now old, of course, and the kid who was the biggest thorn in his father's side now seems set to pull a Connie and leave his fortune to charity. (Having a granddaughter like Paris is just that scary.)
Still, 1963 Conrad is dead-on. His kids can spend, travel, and marry, but they have no idea how to work for a living.
That little speech to Don is what stings when Connie tells him he is "disappointed", later on. "You did not give me what I wanted," he says.
So this "parent's" love is conditional. Just like all the others.
That was my only moment of sympathy for Dick/Don last night, Anne B. But, I doubt Archie ever said he loved him.
Which makes it all the more crushing of course.
#55 I guess that could be true. Maybe she got sick of running in the mornings after catching Carleton ogling at her too many times. Lucky for her, Don is became an insomniac.
I can't wait until we hit the late 60s, and Sally goes wild child on us. If she found out about Betty and Henry, she'd probably get over it pretty quickly. But her daddy and Miss Farrell, the teach she loves and looks up to? She'll need those drugs to get over that.
#41, To be fair, I think you have a point, Donny. Technically speaking the scenes with Don and Pete seem to mirror each other.
- man arrives at woman's home in the middle of the night, obviously angling sex
- man hassles woman to let him inside, once inside comments on the nice surroundings
- man doesn't wait for consent, just steps right into woman's personal space, telling her what he wants
- woman seems reluctant but submits without a fuss
Which is to say both incidents would read the same in court! The main differences would be that Pete was very drunk while Don wasn't and that Farrell seems to be attracted to Don while Gudrun didn't seem attracted to Pete. I'm using the word 'seems' here because I'm still very puzzled over whether Farrell likes Don or not. The tipsy bra-strappy phone call certainly seemed like flirting, but in the eclipse scene and in the final scene she seemed to be expressing a lot of distaste for philandering men like Don. She says she knows this affair will end badly so why is she doing it? I don't buy that Don is sooo hot that women will overlook his jerkiness.
Part of me thinks Miss Farrell has been used and discarded by married men before and she is perhaps 'testing' Don to see if he is any different. Maybe she is some sort of self-appointed honey-trap. I get the feeling that Farrell could really make Don suffer if she wanted to.
I don't agree with Roberta. I think that Betty knows what she doesn't want. She doesn't want a cheap and tawdry affair or tryst, like she had in "Mediations on an Emergency". She wants a meaningful relationship with someone. That would explain the letters she exchanged with Henry, her anger at Don for keeping her in the dark about his contract problems, and her tears following the dinner with the Barretts in "The Benefactor". And when she visited Henry's office, she realized that she was not going to get it from him, anymore than she was ever going to get it from Don.
gypsy,
Yes! That rifle!
I've been thinking about it too. As a metaphor, you understand.
I think that we saw Matt and company take a "rifle" off the wall* in the grass-fondling/maypole scene, earlier this season. In Wee Small Hours, that thing finally … um … went off.
* Apologies to Chekhov. ("One must not place a loaded rifle [or a pretty teacher] on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.") Things typically don't end well in Russian plays, either.
Let's see if it remains only a metaphor, Anne! We still have 4 more episodes, and things are definitely heating up.
#27 Gypsy Great analysis of the situation. Don wants to get caught. It is no longer about the thrill of the chase or the rush of the new affair. When Don tells Betty that Connie just called and wants him to come over, she replies that she didn't hear the phone ring (because she suffers from insomnia too). With Connie calling the Draper residence at all hours of the evening, what will happen when Betty answers the phone and Connie asks for Don?
So the question now is why is Don back on the road to self-destruction? Because Don got played. Like a piano. Annie quotes Connie, "You're an angel . . . like a son." Man, that's the oldest play in the book. Older, successful businessman takes the young, talented relatively new guy under his wing and promises to help him along the way. What is shocking to Don and the audience is that he starts to see himself that way. And then the truth of their relationship is revealed when Connie tells him the work is good but he is disappointed. "What did you want from me? Love?" Since the very beginning, its been about what Connie wants.
Connie and Lee Jr. in this episode are examples of powerful people imposing their will on those underneath them. What gets Connie off is making Don come over at 11:30pm for a drink in downtown Manhattan. Once he agreed to this, Don became Connie's bitch. So what does Don do after Connie's rejection? Impose his will on Miss Ferrell. No birth control. No pulling out. I predict another unwanted pregnancy. Only this time, Miss Ferrell is not going to have an abortion or "give it away".
"He's been dying of the same heart attack for twenty years." – Michael Corleone
#60 Thank you, falafel, that's exactly what I meant. Same can be said for Lee, Jr., with Sal. Only Henry Francis is a gentleman. It's surprising one even exists in this universe.
Mad Men: where all the men are rapists and all the women are crazy! Woo hoo!
I totally agree, DRush. I thought it was fairly obvious that Betty has had the cheap affair and wants something more this time. In her letters, she told Henry quite emphatically that she does "have thoughts"; her problem is that no one wants to hear them. She thought Henry might, but it turned out he was just like the guy in the bar.
#64 Frank,
What else I saw in Connie's words to Don ("you're an angel"): an echo of Don's own words to his wife, back in Season 1.
Those words were not yet an expression of fact. They were wishes. What else do you say to someone who gets out of bed at a few minutes to midnight to have a drink with you? To the person who accepts the loss of her job, even justifies that loss to herself, then has a lovely dinner waiting when you come home from work?
As for "love": I'm not sure that's what the "angels" want. I see them wanting to finally earn their wings and fly, far away from all that keeps them earthbound.
"Angel" seems like an odd thing for one man to call another, even a man of deep religious convictions like Connie.
I hope Connie is not just toying with Don (there I go already, caring about what happens to Don again) as a power play. Do you think Connie does feel a connection to Don, or is he just using him.
On another subject, it occurs to me that Miss Farrell is going to take JFKs death particularly hard. I bet she's running because of JFK's physical fitness program. Anyone else remember that in the early 60s? My parents even had us doing jumping jacks and running in place every day! Funny, I'd forgotten all about that til this morning, thinking about Miss Farrell out jogging.
#65, I don't know if I see Henry as a real gentleman. He wouldn't politely attend Betty's fundraiser. He seems to have decided after meeting with Betty a whole three times, that their courtship is now over and it's high time they were having tawdry sex in his office.
There are distinctions that can be made between Don and Greg and Pete and Henry and Lee Jr., etc, but I think they are all complicit in the same culture of male entitlement. Don showed again in his talk with Sal that this notion of sexual obligations is deemed acceptable. It feels like the very idea of sexual harrassment hasn't been invented yet. But to be fair, I don't think it comes down to evil individuals – it is an evil in society that these men are conforming to, in differing degrees.
You mention The Wire, another great show that asks the viewers to sympathise with a variety of "bad guys", crooked cops and murdering criminals. Again I think those characters are largely shaped by their society and their environment. We the viewer can comfortably say that shooting someone in the head over a petty grivance is wrong, wrong, wrong…but as far as the corner kids know, that is just the way that life is.
#68 Gypsy–Yes, I remember, "The President's Council on Physical Fitness." That was when they first started worrying that America's youth was getting soft and out of shape. Of course, the irony is that nearly 50 years later in an era of super-sized portions and high fructose corn syrup seemingly added to virtually everything, that all those kids of yesteryear appear positively svelte today.
Re The Wire: It was a show that had complete compassion for its characters, no matter how flawed. It took people who have already been marginalized and showed their underlying humanity and made you root for them. Mad Men makes its privileged, physically attractive characters rotten to the core and invites the viewer to slowly come to despise them.
The Wire used to make me weep on a regular basis, and find compassion in my heart for murderers, politicians and drug lords. Mad Men makes me simply disgusted and annoyed at the supposition that most regular middle or upper class Americans have not one shred of decency or integrity.
@ 12 freeperson- I think you have it exactly right. Don told Sal to limit his exposure. Don did not care what Sal's personal life was like, as long as it did not interfere with life at the office. Don saw it as Sal's personal life affecting Sterling-Cooper, which he couldn't have.
To make sure I have my Hilton geneology, Connie Hilton is Nick's father. Connie thinks Nick is just a spoiled playboy. Fast forward a few decades. Nick is Paris's grandfather. Nick thinks Paris is a spoiled girl, and plans to give his money to charity, rather than have her waste it. If I understand this correctly, that is delightfully ironic.
Both The Wire and Mad Men are/were beautifully underwritten shows that allow for plenty of interpretation on the part of the viewer. Both exist as a comment on modern life, as well as an escape from it.
I relied far more on the world The Wire created for me, and brought almost no baggage to it from my own life (because I had no experience with the life most of the characters lived). The beauty of the language, the depth of story, the weight of the characters' pain: those resonated in indelible ways. As did the humor, which was pitch-perfect and as dark as every single night hit.
I don't necessarily see Mad Men's characters as morally bankrupt. Because they remind me of people I knew (and know), because that world preceded and in some ways explains the world I grew up in, I feel some compassion for the characters' inability to reach beyond their comfortable habits and enjoy lives of greater honesty and risk.
The thing is, this world still has not changed. A whole lot of conventional people still like doing things in the old, conventional ways: and they easily get away with maintaining, protecting and enforcing the status quo, often at the expense of others. I credit Mad Men with keeping my eyes open to this.
In The Wire, the system that the people were a part of was encouraging the evil behavior very explicitly and meant survival: Stringer needs someone dead, he tells you to kill them or be killed; Rawls tells you to juke the stats or you lose your job, etc. However, no one is holding a gun to Don's head to yell at Peggy, betray Sal or seduce that teacher. Just because you can "get away with it" doesn't necessarily mean it's imperative for your survival. That's a very large difference.
I still think there is a sense of a "food chain" on Mad Men. Most everyone is fucking someone over, whilst getting fucked by someone else. Don usually has power over women and his office underlings, but there are also people like Connie and Cooper who have power over Don. In this episode, Lucky Strike Lee had the ultimate power to ruin the company. Characters can be the villian in one scene and a victim in the next.
But Donny, I agree. The last three episodes especially have been very unflattering to our core characters. It does feel like overkill. This episode really depressed me.
Another theme in this episode is submission to a master, whether it's Don to Connie, Sal to Lucky Lee (then Don), or Carla to Betty.
In the shots of connie in his room late at night, there is a glass of "Hair Tonic", a rosary, a Holy Bible, business papers, and his glasses. Behind him is a painting, which I knew would be thematically important. I couldn't quite make it out on the TV freeze frame, but it appeared to be a religious painting with someone being supplicated to by someone else. From the composition I guessed that it was a painting of Mary Magdalene with Jesus, perhaps washing his feet. After looking at a screencap, I am 99% sure that's what it is, rarely is there a religious painting where a man in a beard is standing and a blonde woman is supplicating, when it isn't Jesus and Mary Magdalene:
http://s18.photobucket.com/albums/b146/little_eni…
Sports bra, 1977 http://www.944.com/blog/who-invented-the-sports-b…
#70, I second that!
Eep, I meant #79.
#48 musingegret said
"…Beginning in paragraph 5 with naming the song “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning†and its description as “music to make love by†the entire piece is whisperingly evocative of the era of Mad Men. I invite all Basketcases to read and enjoy."
speaking of… I was in Starbucks yesterday and saw Barbara Streisand's new album while in line. The song "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" is on the album. I assume it's the same one…
I don’t wish to derail, but #70, could we cool it with the fat-bashing? More kids than ever play organized sports. More kids than ever eat organic foods, whole grains, a huge variety of fresh vegetables and fruit. I don’t buy all this “kids were healthier 50 years ago” crap. I was around in the 60s and 70s; with a total of one exception, I was the ONLY kid in my school who got whole wheat bread for sandwiches, the ONLY kid whose parents didn’t buy snack cakes or sugared cereals. I practically dove on spinach when it was served to me. And I was one of the chubbiest girls in my school. People, including very young people, ate crap then, and plenty of it. I’m pretty sure Sally and Bobby Draper don’t have any idea what brown rice tastes like.
Sorry if my remarks offended you Meowser, but I don't think I was "fat bashing." My comments were based on my empirical experience teaching school and study after study confirming that as a country we're far heavier than we were during the MM generation and that there's a direct correlation between an increase in portion sizes (ever see "Super Size Me?") and the over abundance of cheap, high fructose corn syrup which flavors *everything* and not just sweet food. All you have to do is compare the size of an old sixties bottle of coke (about 6-8 oz, compared to standard size vending machine can now–12 to 15 oz). The National Institute of Health says that the average sugar intake for the average American in one generation has gone from 150 grams to 300 grams, which is huge, and fully one third of the American adult population is overweight. In fact, it's become such a nationwide problem, that Congress has just begun to consider taxing sugary soft drinks like Coca-Cola (who is now starting to run full-page ads suggesting how responsible they are), and in PC San Francisco where I live, there's already legislation on tap.
And with the kids, sorry, but the situation is desperate. More of them than ever have Type 2 Diabetes, a form of diabetes which usually doesn't surface until adulthood. Yes, we ate plenty of junk food in the early sixties when the President's Commission of Physical Fitness was started in the Kennedy years, but as I mentioned earlier, portion sizes were smaller, we drank much more milk–the kids I taught had to be forced to drink it, juiceboxes are ubiquitous–and –gasp–*we got more exercise* just by walking to school, longer recesses, and all the informal running around we did before and after school. When I was going to school in the late fifties and early sixties, there was maybe one poor kid in every class who was a "fatty." When I taught elementary school here, it was not uncommon in a class of 25 kids to have at least 4 or 5 in each class who were seriously overweight. That's huge (sorry about the pun
. The National Institute of Health is speculating that this may in fact be the first generation to live shorter lives than their parents.
You say more kids than ever play organized sports. I don't know where you live, maybe that's true in the suburbs but that surely is not true in a major urban area like San Francisco where I live and taught. Maybe one reason "more kids than ever play organized sports" is because the daily PE we got as kids in the sixties–a full forty mintues worth–has by and large been cut, at least here, to 3x a week for 20 minutes, and the organized sports leagues have to supplement what we used to get as a matter of course. Kids' lives are much more scheduled, and indeed probably overscheduled–many don't have informal free play and the kind of lifestyle we now lead and all the attendant fears for their safety–means that they are by and large driven to school.
The reason the President's Commission on Physical Fitness was started was because the genesis of our current health problems had their roots in the MM era–the excessive drinking, the increasing mechanization of routine work (i.e., the John Deere tractor lawn mower) that used to burn calories, the increasing proclivity of watching the still-new tv instead of throwing a ball around–got them all worried that as a nation we were starting to get soft. So what I was saying was not that we were all that great then but given the gradual, cumulative changes in our lifestyle, it looks much better by comparison.
I remember what school PE was like in the 70s. It was mostly a lot of standing around in an itchy gym suit and about 3 minutes of actual moving around. Kids would get more exercise from putting on the music for five minutes in the middle of the day and dancing than we ever got from PE, and they wouldn't be scared off physical activity for life from other kids taunting them for stinking so bad at gym.
And "dire"? Seriously? For children who grow up poor, yeah, their situation is for crap, because their stress levels are off the charts, there's no safe place for them to play, and they have limited access to high-quality food. But I see no reason for handwringing about middle-class and affluent children; as a group, there's nothing wrong with them (although there can, of course, be individual exceptions).
Type 2 diabetes was never even tested for in kids before 1988 — trust me, nobody ever took my blood — and now they look for it under every rock. The standards for what is considered "diabetic" have also tightened; it used to be a fasting blood sugar > 140 was diagnostic, and since 1997 it's 125, and now you're "prediabetic" if it's over 100 and you're fat. You can't compare new data to old when no old data exists; therefore, we don't know that there has been any increase in FBS at all in kids in the last 30-40 years.
And even the ADA, not exactly a fat-friendly group, says on its Web site that the prevalence of T2D today in people younger than 20 is rare enough they don't even keep statistics on T2D in particular. However, extrapolating from other data on their site about diabetes in general, the prevalence is something like 1/8 of 1 percent. Oooh, scary. And considering that the majority of the prevalence is in children of lower socioeconomic status, the number of middle-class and affluent kids who have it is more microscopic still. Not to mention that kids have fluctuations in insulin sensitivity and blood sugars throughout childhood and adolescence that could greatly skew results; many of these "diabetic" kids might not actually be diabetic at all.
Sorry for the derail, Deb and Roberta, but I really hate all this "kids were so much healthier in the Mad Men days" nonsense. It's just not true.
Well, sorry Meowser, why don’t we just agree to disagree on this one.
I’m actually about as far from being a health Nazi as you can get, and I certainly don’t want to get into a protracted discussion about this. All I’m saying is that I think it’s pretty well established by now that as a country we’re now in horrible shape, a lot of which has to do with pervasive societal/industrial factors, and that a lot of those factors got their start in the MM era, hence President Kennedy’s Commission on Physical Fitness.