If you Google “recap” and “Mad Men” you’ll get as many hits as “bridge collapse”. It’s like the app boom, only you won’t get rich off it. A medium percentage of them are necessary; there are those that get off on infusing every detail with irony and significance that aren’t there (comparing Megan’s twice-worn ensemble to Jackie Kennedy’s pink suit is 2 rich for my blood), and others that enlighten with a single fuse, like the rando who spotted Pete Campbell’s physical and emotional resemblance to Stewie Griffin. (Pete will always be Chris Darden to me, but that’s merely a fielder’s choice.) All of them are too long. I prefer to watch the episode while highly buzzed, write an extended riff, and catch the first shuttle out, as opposed to all these boiling-point fanatics who are clearly DVRing everything so as to study every frame with all the alacrity of microbiologists.
I hope this works for you.
This week Don Draper caught some shade from the recappers for kicking in his own door. He was called a monster and a caveman, and both of those are at least Don Draper b-sides. But what’s the big deal with this? I think the eroticized bossy-bottom fissure between Don and Megan is getting way overlooked here. Any physical violence he asserts is purely cosmetic; in any case I’m pretty sure the two of them have a Franco-American safe word.
In Carlito’s Way, Brian DePalma’s Casablanca-sized tour de force, there’s a scene where Penelope Ann Miller chain-locks her door and basically tells Al Pacino to come and get it. Like Borat’s brother, he get this. Symbolically a chain-lock is a fantastically erotic reverse-neg, one about which I don’t think Megan was totally clueless. There are all these majorly-dropped hints that she gets off on pretend brute force, and Don obviously gets off on pretend anything.
If you’ve ever been in a good lovers’ brawl, you know kicking in a door is not much the next day. And I’m not even Andy Bernard. Inevitably you end up with expressions like the ones in the images above, always a little scared that, mutually, you went too far. If Don & Megan’s marriage were on Intrade right now it’d be in free fall. But don’t buy the judgment-rush and sell that shit short.
