Monday, May 18, 2015

The Mad Men Finale

The central metaphor of the Mad Man finale is its title, “Person to Person,” the phrase which introduces most of the very significant phone calls.  The series climaxes with Don Draper finally exposing himself to direct human contact, whether across distance (via phone call) or intensely close (his weeping embrace of the weeping man at the retreat) or both (his phone conversations with Betty and Peggy).
In his westward odyssey Don continues to live his reduced spare life — no car, his only luggage a paper bag (which makes implausible his change in clothes), and an envelop of cash he saves from a call girl but taps to fund a speed trial. If the former suggest his withdrawal from his old life the latter show him still hungry for the expensive thrill. He’s now going by his real name, Dick Whitman, but still living his old Draper.
When the cancer-stricken Betty refuses to let Don come visit he’s reminded of Anna Draper, whom he fled at news of her fatal cancer. Thwarted of his desire to help his own wife he goes to amend his neglect of the real Don Draper’s wife. Her troubled hippie niece Stephanie takes him to a retreat. There another woman’s testimony reawakens her guilt at having given up her son. Stephanie’s abrupt departure leaves Don stranded at the camp. Though he has been immune to all its New Agery, he makes a profound connection to the bald man who sobs at his own nothingness.
The man is aware his wife and kids pay him no attention, whether they love him or not. He identifies himself as a non-entity. He feels like food in a refrigerator, cut off from the life outside, only briefly noticed then abandoned again. Don crosses to the man, kneels, hugs him and they cry together. The nonentity is only apparently antithetical to the handsome, successful ad executive and playboy. But that’s the Draper image, not the real Whitman. The real Dick feels as cut off from connection as the weeping witness. In that embrace Don/Dick makes his first profound person to person connection. He abandons his surface slick and embraces his true but neglected self. 
Several phone calls — all person to person — have in this episode brought Don to this self-awareness. In each he reaches out from his chilled isolation to try to connect. In the first Sally shows a new maturity when — betraying her mother’s confidence — she informs him of Betty’s cancer and insists he honour her wishes he stay away. When Betty also insists that, he crumbles, calls her “Birdie,” and starts to cry. Betty’s reminder of his neglect of their children anticipates the weeping loser at the retreat. From the retreat Don phones Peggy to say a proper goodbye. To her he implicitly confesses his false life: “I broke all my vows, I scandalized my child, took another man’s name, and made nothing of it.” In each call his mask drops further, until the weeping man compels Dick’s naked expression of empathic pain.
A new serenity appears in Don’s closing smile, at yoga. But the smile ends in thoughtfulness, not ecstasy. The leap to the famous Coke commercial suggests that Don followed Peggy’s temptation he return to McCann to do the Coke account. Sure, he has found a way to commodify the New Age spirit and his new open soulfulness. That may be the ironic undertow to the ad ending the series. In effect, the yogi's ting gives way the adman's Ka-ching. After all, as the show’s success prompted several advertisers to run Mad Man style ads, why shouldn’t its life conclude with one. But it’s a new Don who’s playing the old game and promoting new values through the old product. So complex and ambivalent is this ending that Don reads as both a sellout and a growing sense of self-awareness. In any case, he's recovered his self-respect and purpose.
The other characters provide lower key replays of that central thrust. Pete has a touching goodbye scene with Peggy, whom he long ago exploited and unknowingly impregnated, before taking his recovered family off on a flight that’s a perk of his amazing new airline job. The Learjet at his disposal is a paradoxical image of his new grounding. The shallow twit achieves a shallow version of Don’s self-discovery and family connection. 
Roger achieves his own solid grounding at last. As his teasing her at a Paris lunch suggests,  he is happily settling into his solid and sexy relationship with Marie (Don’s latest mother-in-law). He also met his responsibility by settling half his estate upon the little boy he had with Joan.
Joan and Peggy find opposite resolutions. Having tasted — and snorted — the life of idle hedonism Joan prefers the challenge of establishing her own production company. That comes at the cost of her latest lover, who loves her but won’t allow her to pursue her own design. He walks out when she’s on a business phone call. 
Peggy rejects Joan’s offer of a professional partnership to stay at McCann, where she will build her career doing what she does best, eschewing the executive plaque. Peggy also finds love in a phone call — with Stan, her longtime colleague. Unlike Joan’s suitor, Stan accepts Peggy for what she is. As a bonus for the new woman, Stan loves the woman he’s working for and Peggy doesn’t have to sacrifice her love for the job. 
     Their connection encapsulates the person to person theme. Over drinks in her office Stan and Peggy quarrel over her leaving and his supposed lack of ambition. But on the phone Stan admits his love for her and the awkwardness that attends their physical meetings. For them the talk across physical separation finds a new intimacy. Peggy is jolted by his admission and babbles into realizing her love for him — all of which he misses because he’s left the phone to join her. Their connection begins with the remoteness of the phone call but ends in their physical union. They move from “person to person” — aka voice to voice, image to image — to the real person to real person. That -- in a song -- is The Real Thing.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Far From the Madding Crowd

When Danish director Thomas Vinterberg — director of The Celebration, Dear Wendy The Hunt, etc. — undertook a mainstream film he did well to alight on Thomas Hardy. Both artists focus on the fragility of the social structure, family relationships, even the individual psyche. 
The early hymn is Blake’s “Jerusalem,” of “England’s green and pleasant land,” an effulgence borne out in the film’s landscapes, with its plush harvests and rich fields. But that rich nature is a taunting antithesis to — not the Romantic reflection of — the human condition. Vinterberg’s and Hardy’s nature has no sympathy for human suffering, for dashed hopes and romantic dreams. People and relationships are broken while nature continues unperturbed and uncaring.
Of Bathsheba’s three suitors the two good men are connected to nature, the hands-on Gabriel Oak and the wealthy estate owner and gentleman William Boldwood. Unlike Hardy’s insentient nature, both men want to protect Bathsheba. Boldwood says it and Oak does it. Unlike the generous Oak, Boldwood wants to possess Bathsheba. He's content to have her even if she doesn't love him. He buys a private collection of clothes and jewelry dedicated to her, as if already possessing her, and he assumes she will accept him.
The dangerous soldier Troy evokes classical fiction and the literary rascal type. When he weeps at his first bride’s apparent abandonment — as at his real loss later — he begins with our sympathy until he dwindles to literary type, the irresponsible, carousing, gambling soldier. After Bathsheba spurns the solid suitors — Oak of the earth and Boldwood of economic security — she falls for the thrill of risk. She’s won by the danger of Troy’s swordplay, which seems dashing in Fern Hollow but silly in her farmyard. There he fences emptily with the cow Bathsheba milked.
But Troy gives her the taming she initially told Oak she wanted. After that proves to be false she accepts Oak’s more civilized training, when he makes her come after him with a civil request to return to save her sheep, then finally to pursue him to wed. Having prided herself in her independence she finds her most substantial relationship in a man upon whom she can depend. Hardy’s fundamental feminism appears in his great line about the difficulty women have expressing their feelings in a language men have developed to express their own.
The story abounds with disastrous accidents. Four lives are ruined when a bride goes to the wrong church —in the country yet, far from the madding crowd. Oak is secure and affluent until his independent sheepdog runs amok at night and chases the entire herd off a cliff, ruining him. As Young George descends from reliable Old George there is no more security in bloodlines than in a solider’s uniform. Young George’s lack of discipline makes him a negative reflection of Bathsheba’s independence and self-assertion, in the face of Victorian convention. The most civilized man, Boldwood, is drawn back into human and social relationships only to go crazy and kill Troy.
Troy himself seems accidentally — or providentially — risen from the dead. Nature erupts destructively in the fire, the dangerous rainstorm and when the vast sea spits Troy back to some fishermen. A nature that doesn’t care for man confirms the helplessness of the human condition.     

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Ex Machina

Alex Garland opens and closes Ex Machina on shots of human bodies in varying degrees of substantiality, some firm, some phantom reflections. Like any story about Artificial Intelligence, the film is about what distinguishes the human — and how human we are at this point in social history and science. Spoiler alert: not very. We’re losing our humanity in our retreat from human relationships into high tech insularity and soulless ambition.  
Like any story about man aspiring to a god-like power to create life, from Frankenstein to robotics, the measure of the human is the fullest realization of the human, not its transcendence. Trying to be more than human makes you less. We need humility and acceptance to be fully human. 
Super-scientist Nathan is less than human when he creates his unnatural creatures, instead of living the normal human life of romance, relationships, sex and reproduction. His brilliance turns into evil.        Because he thinks all our lives are programmed, whether by nature or nurture, he arrogates the right to program his subjects’ lives.
     In the lonely nerd Caleb he thinks he has found a suitable gull, but Caleb’s seduction by Ava proves Nathan’s undoing. Ava highjacks the relationship Nathan planned for Caleb, in order to escape both men’s control. Ava takes over her maker’s plan the way she assumes the limbs and skin of his other models, asserting her will and breaking free not just from her maker’s control but from her besotted saviour’s as well.
The title derives from the theatrical term for a superhuman resolution to a play, that like a machine from the heavens arrives magically to solve all the characters’ problems. Here the playfully literal machine is the helicopter that delivers Caleb to Nathan’s Edenic retreat and sweeps Ava off to unsuspecting civilization at the end. But there are two metaphoric plays on the device. Nathan’s plan to create a new form of life is his attempt to produce a happy ending — for himself, not necessarily the world. The power of film, another machinery, is imaged in the framing shots of the spectrum of human substance.
The plot is weighted in Biblical and literary references. Ava is the new first woman, a technological advance upon Eve. Caleb recalls the spy Moses sent to report back from the promised land (here the Canaan of high tech). Nathan recalls the prophet who inveighed against King David, here a mad scientist maddened by ambition and the power his internet company has given him to harness all its users’ minds. These allusions draw on the Bible’s function of defining the origins of our social system. Here they augur our world to come. 
For currency the film situates itself in the matrix of modern art. Nathan uses his Pollock painting to promote the principle of unthinking spontaneity, but only in order to lower Caleb’s defences against Ava’s manipulation. He doesn’t really believe in mindless action; he’s a coder. His Blue Book search engine company is named after Wittgenstein’s journal and the Klimt painting we see is of Wittgenstein’s sister. Wittgenstein signifies three things. Though not an architect he designed a house in fastidious detail, as Nathan has done here. He's a key figure in the post-modernist denial of fixed meaning. And he argued the impossibility of certainty in understanding language -- again, one of Nathan's arguments and strategies.
The film allusions to Star Trek, Ghostbusters, It’s A Wonderful Life, etc., and the ubiquitous cameras and videotaping recall other treatments of the themes of humanity and emotional vulnerability and remind us of the film’s film-hood. This film is an artifice about the convincing artifice made to emulate life. The film is like Ava and vice versa. Caleb is a bright coder and a good man — which leaves him susceptible to seduction by a fantasy of life and love, whether in the body of a robot or in the imagery of a film. The prototypal film, of course, is Plato’s allegory of the cave, which is described in the Mary’s Room story here and is imaged in the shadow play that introduces Ava’s appearance amid human traffic.
     Perhaps the film draws on an even deeper myth in our culture — our fear of the feminine. Eve, after all, is our first woman only because the more rebellious and independent Lillith was expelled from our mythology. Ava is the new Lillith. Here what begins as an ostensible victory by a male office nerd turns into the triumph of a fabricated woman’s body, equipped with the power of female sexuality. The film may seem to be about the triumph of new robotics but it’s really the archetypal unleashing of the woman’s indomitable sexual power. Of course, it’s the male imagination that envisions the projection of evil as female. A less frightened sensibility would find in the feminine power the fulfillment of humanity, not its doom.