AMC
In Episode 3.06, Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency, we learn that Lane has been reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and identifies himself with Huck, who attended his own funeral. Throughout Season 3, Lane became increasingly enamored of American society, its relative classlessness, and its freedom to remake yourself (a theme of the series).
Hands and Knees opens with Lane carrying a big Mickey Mouse doll. Surely no one missed the symbolism, but just in case, Mickey’s balloons were red, white, and blue. The all-American doll is the right gift for a son hilariously named “Nigel,” to let him know that Daddy is staying in America.
In Huckleberry Finn, Huck’s troubles begin with the arrival of Huck’s drunken, abusive father. In The Good News, Lane says his father is an alcoholic, and now we see just how abusive he can be. Like Huck, Lane wants to free himself from the abuse by escaping class; while Huck doesn’t want to be civilized, Lane sees American life itself as wild and unfettered. Yee-hah!
Huck’s adventures involve escaping his life with a runaway slave named Jim. Toni, then, is Lane’s Jim. I don’t want to be dismissive of this relationship; Toni and Lane have epressed love for one another, and I don’t think Lane is nearly the poseur that Paul is. But you don’t just happen to accidentally get involved with someone of another race in the highly segregated world these two live in. Lane clearly likes the Playboy Club, and might have flirted with any bunny, yet he chose his “chocolate” one.
I think the very idea of having a relationship with “a Negro” offers Lane a sense of the American freedom he craves, and he’s attracted to that. I also think the parallels to Huck Finn are deliberate; the violent father, “escaped slave,” and longing for a new kind of freedom all speak to it. I can only hope that Toni, who is adorable, serves more than a symbolic role.
37 Responses to “Lane Pryce, Mickey Mouse, and Huckleberry Finn”
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Perfect post. To me, Lane’s comment to Don that he has been reading Twain and that he felt like he had just heard his eulogy and didn’t like what he heard was one of the most affecting comments any character on the show ever uttered. Beyond that, though, as a plot device and framework, everything Lane has done since then reads as a reaction or at least a response to that realization on his part.
But it fits Don too, doesn’t it? Son of an alcoholic abusive father, tries to reinvent himself in a (supposedly) classless society and so on. Even more tellingly, Don actually does see and attend his funeral, in the death and the delivery to the family of the body, of Dick Whitman. Don is modern America’s Huck Finn, and it ain’t pretty.
There was a big argument in the Project Rungay comments about whether an Englishman would have picked red, white, and blue balloons to symbolize America. But in all probability, either a secretary (with better eye for detail than Sandy) or a salesgirl picked the colors.
Lee, I don’t know why I didn’t see Don as Huck Finn right away. Very astute.
Melissa, I don’t think it’s about whether Lane or Nigel would have seen the balloons as American; those were for us
Don successfully reinvented himself, but as painful as his life is right at this moment, Lane is one of the few characters to have actively chosen a different and happier life. He looked, he said ‘I don’t want to be that,’ and he changed. That’s different from Don’s story.
Deb – I wouldn’t have seen Don as Huck Finn had you not broached it with Lane. Partly this is for the same reason you probably didn’t see it. By assigning Twain and Huck Finn to Lane in the lawnmower episode, the writers put Lane in that story, and kept our focus there. Don’s off to the side, not mentioned, but living another variation of that tale.
Deborah & Lee, thanks for reminding us of Layne’s earlier remarks regarding Huck Finn. Excellent point about my old man, Don; he certainly has lots of Huck in him!
I usually roll my eyes at the litr’ary interpretations, but gosh golly, you hit the fencepost nail on the head with this one Ms Lipp!
Let’s not forget that, race aside, Toni is definitely in a position subordinate to Lane. She’s a cocktail waitRESS in a bunny suit. He’s an affluent British businessMAN. Gender and class rule. He still sees her as inferior and patronizable, and that can’t be good for her in the long run. Identifying with her oppression strikes me as a very poor basis for a relationship.
Forgive me jzzy55 but I love the litr’ary stuff and this poast!
DD as Huck – wonderful! Huck Finn is considered perhaps THE great American novel and certainly the epitome of the American “Romance” novel with the primary theme of finding freedom and taking your own path as opposed to embracing society’s norms. Incidentally it was first published in England and spends a good deal of time poking fun at the Brits (and of course the South). Huck is the ultimate hobo.
I’m also interested in what Mr. Pryce says when he pins Lane down. He quotes some Old Testament saying “put your home in order” and something about living here or there because you can’t live in-between. Wow, how Don Draper can you get?
So this bible quote is also well known from TS Eliot’s Wasteland: “Shall I at least put my lands in order?” followed by “London Bridge is falling down.” We obviously hate Mr. Pryce, but like Lee Garner Jr. at Christmas, the villain gets the most meaningful line. The point is that we root for Huck and for Lane but you can’t live in limbo very long. Huck had to come back home and so will Lane.
Could somebody post a link to that discussion on Project Rungay? Because I agree: red, white, and blue are also the colours of the Union Jack (though not the English flag) the French flag, the Dutch flag and the Luxemburg flag, especially with that pale blueish colour. I know that in American media, red white and blue are supposed to symbolize the US. And, well, with an American icon like Mickey that isn’t really far fetched. But for a European, and especially a Dutch girl like me, these colours symbolize many more countries than the US – my first association is Holland. So I definately think the balloons were chosen by a well-meaning secretary, because an English boy might see these colours and think “Why does Daddy think Mickey Mouse is French? Is he into France too, now?? Wait, hang on…” And I think “Mickey with the Dutch colours… weird… ‘Cause Lane is English… O, wait, is this supposed to mean America?” Now, if Don had done this for his American kids, I wouldn’t have thought he meant anything but the US; with Lane, however, there are so many different symbols clashing that it can get quite confusing.
I was wondering, what if Toni’s Chocolate Bunny served as a contrast to Carroll’s White Rabbit? It’s a rather trite, go-to symbol especially employed when a character needs to be introduced to a foreign land, but Toni is interesting as she ended up being more of an anti-White Rabbit in Hands and Knees. In the end, she inadvertently played a key part in Lane being driven out of America (a wonderland full of souvenirs and balloons), instead of being invited deeper into the rabbit hole (Which I admit might have some very dirty connotations.)
As long as we are looking at MM through the literary lens for the moment, might I suggest seeing Don as that other classic American seeker of personal transformation, Jay Gatsby. There are some nice parallels; the mystery, the air of menace and scandal which both attracts and intimidates people. Then there is the willed projection of a “perfect” persona for the sake an ideal woman (Daisy/Betty). Lastly of course, there is the sense of emptiness and desolation that goes along with the puncturing of the facade…let’s just hope none of the women Don has been with has an auto-mechanic husband with a pistol…
The funeral Huck attended, along with Tom and other boys was for him, but it was in the book dedicated to Tom Sawyer, not in the Adventures of Huck Finn.
And Lane was referring to this book after the John Deere incident. Regardless, the reading you gave still holds.
In Huck Finn, Huck runs away because a widow who was taking care of him is trying to civilize him and making him lead a ‘normal life.’ It is interesting to note that Don ran a way from his mess of a childhood into a ‘normal’ life of his own creation which he cannot seem to adjust to. Both of them had bad fathers and no guidance in their childhood.
Maybe Roger is a bit of a Tom Sawyer? Not quite satisfied with his marriages, but able to escape momentarily as when Tom ran away to an island? In this case, Roger resorts to booze and women, but cannot, like Tom, make a complete break with his life, like Huck/Don did.
el presidente, I didn’t trust my own memory, and read the Spark Notes for Huck Finn. He fakes his own death to escape his father, so if he attended a funeral in Tom Sawyer, he fake-died in both books?
Restatement: I liked this po(a)st.
Well the fake funeral Lane first refers to is from Tom Sawyer, and it’s more of a funeral for Tom and the other middle class boy. But now that I recall I guess people thought Huck was dead too in his own book. In the case of Huck, he staged his own death to run away from his father but there is no funeral described, at least not in spark notes.
When Huck and Tom appear in the funeral in ‘Tom Sawyer’ it is clear that the townspeople were mostly upset about Tom. This first death was not faked, they realized people thought they were dead and decided to let them believe that to take advantage of the situation.
The first death was an accident – like when Dick was taken to be Don at the hospital. The second death was faked in order to escape a situation. Maybe we can tie it to Dick’s decision to continue to be Don….or to the partner’s being fired by Lane in order to create the new firm.
This is SO confusing.
Regarding the red, white and blue.
I am sure MW could be [yank]ing our chains a bit here, because yes, it’s true that RWB are the colors of many nations’ flags.
But the context is purely AMERICAN: it’s Lane, with his new American identity and Hefner lifestyle, going to greet his son with whom he wishes to share his love of the USA.
Playboy club, black girlfriend, Mickey Mouse, overtones of Huck Finn. Sure, the balloons symbolized the Netherlands or France or the UK. Oh, c’mon!
I looove literary-comparison posts. Great catch on comparing abusive drunk Pryce Sr with abusive drunk Pap Finn. El presidente is correct, in that it was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that Lane was reading, and that it was in that book that there is a funeral and eulogy for the three boys (Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper) who are believed dead. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck fakes his own death to escape from Pap, but there is no funeral.
@ d davies denver #7
Huck had to come back home and so will Lane
True, but at the end of his book Huck is again talking about “lighting out for the territory.” I always assumed he did. I can’t believe Huck would ever be civilized. It’s the American in me. I’m hoping that Lane gets away from hidebound ‘civilized’ England, too. (Note: When Huck returns at the end of his book, assuming that Pap Finn has spent all his money, he discovers that his father is dead. He’s free of him, at least.)
I was trying to think of other Huck/Lane parallels. Huck gets caught up in a feud between two hillbilly clans. Lane gets caught in the middle of Ken and Pete’s ancient grudge, for the sake of Ken’s hillbilly-mascotted Mountain Dew account.
@ gpdoe #10
All through Season One, I often thought of Don as Gatsby: the self-created identity, the idealized woman who turns out to be far different from what he dreamed.
@ el presidente #11
Re Roger as Tom Sawyer: I’m reminded of a famous interview that an aged Twain did with Rudyard Kipling. Kipling asked if Twain had yet written anything that would take up the story of the characters in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when they were older (which he says he might do at the book’s end.) Twain says that he’s contemplating two possible endings for Tom, one in which he becomes very famous and is elected to Congress, and the other in which he is hanged. He says he hasn’t decided yet.
Sounds like Roger.
Finn, Gatsby, Prynne. Twain, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne.
We even have a Basketcase named ‘Melville’.
I see these strains not as consistent character parallels, but as roadside markers on Mad Men’s unique telling of the American journey.
Lane may indeed be a Huck Finn stand-in, or Don a Gatsby. However more importantly it shows how deeply ingrained, and thought-out, this show is with regard to the key themes of American literature.
When people ask why it’s so interesting to blog about this show, I have a couple archived posts I like to share that are indicative of the quality you can expect here. This is the post I’ll be sending from now on.
Lane desperately wants to be an American. In particular, he wants to be a frontiersman, a man on the edge of civilization, but the real frontier had long ago closed. However, there was a new frontier for Lane to explore: the sexual frontier of the swinging Playboy era. The great irony of Lane’s embrace of American freedom as represented by his new lifestyle and Chocolate Bunny girlfriend is that were really an American, I doubt that Toni would be so enamored of him. For Toni, Lane represents not the usual American shmoes that she meets at the Playboy Club but civilized and sophisticated (yet rocking and mod) England. In his quest to be American, Lane has found a love interest who seems to appreciate the very fact that he is much the Englishman.
Nigel Pryce strikes me as a perfectly adorable English name. I’ll bet he wears a blazer, shorts and knee socks with a little ball cap as his school uniform.
Remember Lane’s comment early on that nobody here cares where he went to school. England may have been mod and rocking culturally at this juncture, but it wasn’t — nor has it ever been — mod and rocking for anyone in the middle class and above. After all, his father is in TRADE. There’s no way Lane would ever crack the upper social strata there, which probably made his wife into the snob that she is.
Upon reflection, Lane seems more akin to Tom Jones than Huck Finn in that Lane’s American adventures are ribald rather than picaresque. Lane still wants to be an American, but his journey is less about individual identity and self-exploration (in broad terms) than about sexual freedom and erotic expression.
Great post! I forgot about the Huck Finn reference.
With the big rabbit ears and the skimpy Playboy outfit, Tony almost looks like a cartoon character in a Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny cartoon.
In “The Suitcase” Don called the mouse Mickey. Is there some meaning related to Lane’s Mickey Mouse toy?
It’s interesting to me that of all the colors the MW could have chosen for Toni to wear the night she met Don and Lane’s father was the color white. Toni is a waitress serving three white men wearing a degrading outfit. Where is the escape, really? Toni is still a slave.
Lorna, I don’t follow. She wore blue in the Playboy Club, pink for her dinner with Lane and his father.
In the stills on AMC’s site, she is wearing a white floral print, but apparently there was a reshoot of that scene, or it’s a deleted scene, because we never saw that dress.
Deb – re Lane as Huck Finn, and the idea that Lane didn’t like what he saw in his eulogy and changed his life, he actually did not, and that I think is what is more interesting. Rather, he was acted upon by others in a way that forced it on him. His wife left him and Sin Jin sold him down the river after years of faithful service (I am sure there is another significant literary parallel for that relationship), putting him in a position where he was forced to act; the changes were forced on him, but to his credit he acts affirmatively in response, rather than just taking it on the chin (like he just did from his father). Don, on the other hand, has consistently acted on his own, as the protagonist in his own story. In an interesting comment on the nature of American middle and upper middle class life, their two paths suggest that it makes no difference; acted upon, like Lane, or self-actualizing (in more ways than one), like Don, they end up in essentially the same place. Divorced, on the outs with fathers/ex-wives and children, and at the whim of Lee Garner Jr.
Deb-
Sorry, I saw this picture and took it for granted it was the color Toni had wore on the airing. However, my reasoning remains since this picture caused my reaction, so here I go….
Whatever we put over our skin can be considered a mask, a covering, a restriction of some kind that prevents us from being free or who we really are. (Recently I was on line reading about nudist camps and every one of them said how liberating it feels to shed your clothing.) After seeing this picture , I was struck by two thoughts. The first was how bright the white looked and the second was how deep Toni’s skin tone was in comparison. It made the fact that Toni was black all the more prominent and I wondered whether MW had done the contrast deliberately .
What I can say for myself is that personally to see Toni serving men (who of course were white since in that time a black man would never have the chance to be seated at a table in the Playboy Club) I saw a black woman who was there mainly to be subservient ( a waitress) and also dressed in a color specifically chosen by management not to be missed . Since I have always found the Playboy bunny costume to be degrading, the picture made me question how much “prestige” Toni as a black woman had achieved in getting this coveted job. It made me feel badly for her if Toni was being put “on display” moreso than the other girls because of her color. And that I feel adds insult to her injury.
It’s an interesting point, Lorna. However, we’ve heard elsewhere from a former Playboy bunny; bunnies chose their own costume colors. I’ve also seen another commenter point out that a woman like Toni, as beautiful as she is, would not have been hired by Playboy. African-Americans hired as bunnies were much lighter-skinned, which is also, let’s face it, a fraught subject.
Deb,
I did not read the piece by the former Playboy bunny. The second fact unfortunately does not surprise me. I am glad MW decided to break that rule when hiring his actor for Toni. Thanks for the clarification request, it keeps me on my toes.
Dear Jzzy55, I *know* the context is American, I *know* the audience is American, (mostly) I *know* Lane would probably want to express his love for America. That’s because I’m a member of the audience of Mad Men, and I’ve seen Lane move into that direction. But in the Mickey scene, I am not the one the gift is intended for. Nigel is supposed to be the recipient of the gift. Has he seen Lane fall in love with America? No, he hasn’t; not in the way we’ve seen Lane. Has he seen other things? Sure, maybe, but I don’t know, I’ve never seen Nigel on screen and I know little about his relationship with Lane. So would Nigel immediately get that this is supposed to be an ‘I love America’ gift? Is he hardwired to see red, white and blue as American? I’ve just pointed out that he might *not* be, making Lane’s gift a little confusing in a British context (and therefore all the more likely that not Lane, but an American secretary would have chosen those balloons). Since Lane’s son *is* European, that’s a valid point to make. I’m just pointing these things out because here at the basket, we like attention to detail and different viewpoints. And watching this show with an American viewpoint is not self-evident. It is shown in the UK and The Netherlands and has an audience there, something Matt Weiner and his team know. They might not incorporate it into their writing, but they do know.
Yes, and Faye is not Jewish.
Please.
jzzy, why do you think that Faye isn’t Jewish?
Is it because she uses Yiddish phrases?
Is it because Carla Buono has said in interviews that the character is Jewish?
Is it because her back story explicitly references the Jewish mafia?
Or is there some other reason?
I’m sorry — I forget that sarcasm doesn’t work well in writing.
I was one of the first to say that Faye WAS Jewish and was bombarded with fofllow-up posts asserting that she could be Italian or a NYer of whatever ethnicity who knew some Yiddish.
Sorry, jzzy, I didn’t realize that.
Lane has probably read most of Twain by now. He has reinvented himself. Lane is going to have the opportunity to make a clean break with his past by divorcing his wife. Don will never be able to make a break with his past.
RG, there is no such thing as a clean break via divorce when children are involved.
It’s OK Deborah, you do have a *few* things to keep track of here!
If you could keep track of what every regular poster said I would say, “Imagine — a thing ilke that!”.