Communicator (communicator) wrote,
Communicator
communicator

Mad Men: Dick and Joan and Lane

Ha. Sunday night is the best telly night, both sides of the Atlantic. I just watched Mad Men 4.3. One of the things I like best about Mad Men is I feel it is intelligently engaging with my expectations, and making me deepen them every time. It knows what I have been thinking (I assume because I am representative of the intended audience), but builds from my cynicism, and overturns it, rather than simply checking it off. Learning what it's like to be on the other side of love - check.

Everything I am going to say next is a bit spoilery, but I don't think reading it will spoil your fun.

My fantasy/prediction was that Don would get hit by his overdue karma in an aggressive, masculine way. In short, I thought he would get yanged by the cigarette-guy. I guess this is because that is what I am like, the way my spirit goes.

Instead he is yinned: overthrown by the feminine, the anima of the world. In fact this episode is all about the female principle flooding the world with love, dissolving rigidity away, via multiple people, both male and female. Don's platonic wife in California being the incarnation of the principle of love, not asserting herself in any way, but overcoming all, like water in the Dao De Jing.

Don isn't aggressively harassed by the cigarette guy, but (among other lessons in love) gently romanced by Lane.

'You remind me of a chap I knew in school... He died in a motorcycle crash...'

The episode ends with Joan, in blue like the virgin Mary, presiding over a tableau of chastened male executives. 'Gentlemen, let us begin 1965.'
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