Musings on Mad Men

 

Let me admit something right off the bat: I don’t, generally speaking, like American television It is full of, at best, mediocrities situated between what is really important on American commercial television, product. The real point of American television, along with its socialising function, is to sell consumers consumer goods. The shows are simply there to bring consumers to the idiot box so the networks can sell product.

Now don’t get me wrong there are some American television shows I quite like. I like, for instance The Twilight Zone. I like the Dick van Dyke Show. I like The Wonder Years. And I really like the knowing and multitonal Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the few American television shows that can, in my opinion, be spoken of in the same breath with great British and European TV shows like The Jewel in the Crown, Brideshead Revisited, Lewis, Morse, House of Cards, Dekalog, Forbyrdelsen, Broen, and Badehotellet. But these are anomalies. The less said about drek like Gilligan’s Island, Full House, The Facts of Life, and The Brady Bunch the better. Hell even France, a country where television was often considered an aesthetic wasteland by its artistic elites, has better television shows than American television these days.

This brings me to Mad Men. Mad Men of course, is a basic television show. It was broadcast on AMC, which once upon a time showed mostly American movie classics. For many, including critics, with a kind of midcult cultural capital, it is cable television where the great American TV shows are shown these days. They like to point to Game of Thrones and The Sopranos as examples of what American TV and American television auteurs can achieve if it and they (though many leave this unsaid) adopt the British writer centred limited episode model of TV. Their mantra seems to be that is not cable TV it is, fill in the blank. 

The problem with this argument, and it certainly relevant to what I have seen of Mad Men, is that most of the shows on American cable television aren't very good relatively speaking or absolutely speaking. Game of Thrones was a self important misogynist mediocrity aimed at a fanatic fandom, some of whom wanted to see tits, ass, and pussy, and they got a lot of all three during the run of the show. The Sopranos was a self important mediocrity with lots of sex and tits, something that apparently makes HBO better than American commercial television, and something that certainly draws certain viewers to it, and violence (bang, bang, shoot em up), a mafia Western for the anti-Western generation.

This brings me to Mad Men. From what I have seen of the show so far it is a self important mediocrity that wears its Hollywood social problems theme on its sleeves, something akin to being repeatedly hit by a hammer on the head. Mad Men is something I imagine Stanley Kramer, the producer and director of the 1950s and 1960s social problem Hollywood film, would have loved or even made in the 1950s and 1960s. The problem with these social problem films, however, beyond their social problem obviousness—something known to appeal to Oscar and Emmy voters and to critics at elite magazines and newspapers—is that it doesn’t feel organic. I prefer social problems to emerge organically out of a narrative.

There are other problems I had and have with Mad Men. The acting is generally mannered, presumably to hit viewers over the head with stereotypes, in this case misogynist frat boy (something actually mentioned in the first episode) stereotypes. Such an acting style doesn’t feel organic as it does in the theatre, however. Additionally,  the show wears its attempt at high art on its sleeves. It tries to tell viewers (check out that mise-en-scene) that it is clever, something some viewers undoubtedly accept because of its seriousness and the fact that it is on cable. To me it really isn’t clever. To me Mad Men is Saturday Night Live to Britain’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It is, in other words, sophomorically clever while Python is often truly clever. 

For these reasons Mad Men is not my cup of tea at least at present. I will keep watching to see if I will change my mind.

The CVS Kiada Goes On and On and On and On and On

 

I am truly shocked, shocked that I was able to go almost half a month without a bureaucratic feck up I had to deal with. Now, however, I have to deal with yet another bureaucratic feck up. The more things change, I guess.

I have told this story before but I have to tell it again. With bureaucracies you have to retell the story again and again and again after all. I was overcharged for my Pregabalin by CVS in Delmar. I did not catch this overcharge, the result of, you guessed it, another bureaucratic feck up, until I got the second prescription filled. I was thus only able to get a refund for the second filling not the first.

The bureaucrat-workers at CVS Delmar told me to contact my prescription insurance to get a refund. And that is what I did. Do I called CVS Silver Script Empire, explained the situation to them, and filled out, what I could, of the form they sent me. Much of it was irrelevant and confusing. Ah, bureaucracy.

Well today I got a missive from CVS Caremark. It was not the refund I expected but a denial of my request for a refund. Here we enter Orwell and Kafka and Voinovich territory. I got a refund for the second Pregabalin filling but not the first. Take that in. I was refunded for the second filling of Pregabalin but not the first. Can I get an absurd?

So I called CVS Silver Script... again. After getting the runaround I was told I needed to fill out a form, perhaps even the one I had already filled out. I did the eye roll thing and declined and said I would file the appeal form I had received from good old CVS Silver Script NY by post. It is simply easier to do that than to spend half hours and hours on the phone trying to explain the situation. And this strategy allowed me to get back to the movie I was watching.

Will the appeal work? Who the hell knows. I suspect it eventually will when the bureaucrats at CVS Caremark realise I am owed the same refund for the first filling of my Pregabalin I got for my second. Until that time I live somewhat in Orwell and Kafka and Voinovich territory. Ain’t that fun.

The Books of My Life: Gun Crazy

 

With the advent of digital television and its many channels and sub-channels it feels a lot like 1971 again today. 1971 was an age where you had the big boy network channels of ABC, CBS, and NBC on your local television box and also, at least in major metropolitan areas like the Dallas I grew up in, independent channels that showed old American movies and television shows. I loved watching old films and television shows like The Dick van Dyke Show and The Twilight Zone so I tended to watch the independent channels more than the network channels back in the day.

Given this, I actually kind of like this back to the past aspect of contemporary digital television despite the fact that many of these future past retro channels like WYBN here in upstate New York, are often poorly run by hacks who regard commercials as the real star attraction of their we want their money stations. The problem for those of us who actually want to watch the television shows or films rather than the commercials on these stations is that these stations are run by money grubbers who care more about commerce and profits than the shows or films they run and so they run their commercials, many of which make you wonder about their professionalism (amateur is actually too kind of a word to describe their incompetence), literally over the shows and films they broadcast. This makes watching any shows or films broadcast on these stations and their sub-channels next to impossible because these commercials often run over the end of the television show or at critical points during a film making it literally impossible to make sense of them. Such, I guess, is media life in neo-liberal America where the surreal is no longer surreal. It is the neo-American way.

Amidst the uber-amateurish retro TV stations out there in digital TV land there are some good stations, stations which are actually run by professionals who know what they are doing and who actually know how to make bot technologies properly. They don’t, in other words, incorrectly use one size all automation programmes to run their stations so they can milk them for the largest profits possible disrupting the flow of television shows and films in the process. One of my favourite of these quality retro TV networks is the Movies network.

The Movies network is a retro joy to watch for those of us who became cinephiles in the 1960s and 1970s thanks, in large part, to TV stations, particularly independent television stations, independent stations which showed classic Hollywood movie after movie on their channels in the 1960s and 1970s. And watch movie after movie on these channels my sister and I did. It was only after I went up to college that I discovered another way you could watch classic Hollywood flics, namely, in second run film theatres and in film society showings, both of which  ran classic Hollywood films but who also added into the mix classic and current foreign films for ones viewing pleasure.

It was on the Movies channel that I finally saw the celebrated film Gun Crazy, a 1950 noir made by the poverty row studio Monogram, produced by Monogram’s King Brothers, directed by Joseph Lewis, written by MacKinlay Kantor and blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, and starring Peggy Cummings and John Dahl as the two leads, Laurie and Bart. The film, originally titled Deadly is the Female, which is often cited by critics and historians as a precursor to the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde given that both films, as is Fritz Lang’s 1937 film You Only Live Once, centre around a couple who, in Gun Crazy’s case, meet cute at a gun shooting exhibition at a low rent carnival, and who proceed to rob their way across the American Midwest.

I liked Gun Crazy quite a lot but then I am a sucker for the cynicism and darkness of film noirs. They suits my perspective on the world quite well. So, after watching the film I picked up Jim Kitses’s book on the film, Gun Crazy (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 1996), to read more about the film. Kitses does a nice job of putting the film in its production contexts giving readers details about its writing, the impact of censorship on the film, its making, and those who made the film. Kitses, in a swipe at auteur theory, argues that the film was a collaboration between the King’s who produced the film with a proletarian chip on their shoulders. They were aided and abetted by the aforementioned Kantor and Trumbo, the latter of whom wrote under an assumed name, who wrote it, and the craftspeople, including the actors, who helped make it and helped give it meaning, even though it is, I would argue, the director, the general or the conductor, who ultimately leads the troops or players who make it into film battle or film performance.

Kitses also does an excellent job of exploring the noir context of the film. Additionally, he makes interesting connections between the noir aspect of the film with its narrative, character, and mise-en-scene codings, and other genres and tones the film, according to Kitses, draws on, including, surprisingly, the Western and Screwball Comedy. Kitses asserts that Gun Crazy is playing off of American myths about the freedom American frontier and the ideological spaces our two protagonists are confined in and which they try to break out of, to no avail, of course, in the deterministic world of film noir. It is on this cultural level that Kitses links the cultural to the political, to an America increasingly standardised and packaged and which is not particularly, as a consequence, palatable to our protagonists.

It is also on the cultural level where Kitses’ interpretive analysis, one grounded in exegesis, an analysis of the how the text was produced, gave me pause. Kitses utilises the standard operating practises of contemporary scholarly film criticism to explore, for example, the psychological and psychoanalytic aspects of Gun Crazy, but largely does so without documenting these presumed aspects of the film in the archival record. And while these suppositions may have validity one would, or at least I would, would like to see them linked to the historical record rather than to problematic and interesting conclusions based largely on a reading of the text. Sometimes it really does seem that the criticism aimed at so much film criticism is true: it far too often over analyses and over interprets a film on the basis of less than fully documented information in such a way that it appears that the socialised eyes of the beholder/critic is guiding the interpretation rather than the empirical evidence. 

Recommended.