Did I love the conclusion of the second season of Mad Men? Sure. Don's reappearance seemed rather sudden, so sudden that I thought it was a figment of Betty's imagination (something Weiner was prone to doing as a writer for The Sopranos). The Cuban Missle Crisis, Betty's infidelity, and Peggy's revelation to Pete were so big that they blotted out the slow burn of Don's trajectory. He just seems completely erratic to me, and not in a way that's compelling. Still, I liked the power play between Don and Duck Phillips. And the HBO touches are still there: the concern with organizational hierarchies, the slight ironic distance between the characters and the audience, the possibility that a flawed main character living a life of ill repute could reform thanks to psychology, religion, or larger cultural trends or institutions. For those, I'll gladly watch another 3 seasons.But here are my main problems with the last episode and, by extension, the show as a whole: the centrality of romantic relationships and the inevitable emphasis on two revelations: pregnancy and infidelity. I was reminded of two things I watched last night: an interview with Charlie Kaufman on Charlie Rose in which he notes that the depiction of romantic relationships in most Hollywood films is inaccurate (5:22 into the clip). I'd agree, and I wouldn't even say that the main problem is that there are too many happy endings (or any kind of endings for that matter, b/c real life relationships never truly end until one person dies). The problem, as I see it, is the overrepresentation of surprise pregnancies and infidelity. The second thing that I was reminded of is essentially a rebuttal of the first (written by the same man, Charlie Kaufman): its this scene (1:30 into the clip) in Adaptation in which Brian Cox (as Robert McKee) berates Charlie for claiming that these types of things (the melodrama of everyday life) do not happen in real life. Everyday, someone gets murdered, someone falls in love, etc. McKee/Cox is right. All of that stuff does happen everyday. People have probably been fucking around behind the backs of their wives/husbands since the beginning of time, and they'll probably continue to do that forever. It is a universal theme. And yet, in practice, it happens to individuals only once or twice in a lifetime on average.
Its the overrepresentativeness of surprise pregnancy and infidelity that bug me, not their mere presence. Maybe its the fundamental discontinuity between character's lives and viewer's lives that does it: the character, presumably, only has one or two revelations like this in their fictitious lives, like us. However, we keep flitting around, watching the same excerpts of fictitious lives, cutting from one moment of relationship drama to another. If we compared our lives to the lives of individual characters, no problem. But, according to cultivation theory, the individual viewer compares his or her individual life to some aggregate life cobbled together from the bits and pieces, the brief windows into millions of people's lives (real and fiction) that we experience through stories. These aggregate lives are typically distorted, to heighten drama, to shorten plotlines, to sell products. They have no single author and they're not expected to be perfectly realistic. As long as they are realistic enough, we'll go along with them, and in doing so, we'll begin to modify our conceptions of human nature and social mores, whether we're conscious of that or not.
A student in the Media Effects class I'm GSI-ing for has proposed a study that hypothesizes a cultivation-like effect of overrepresentation of troubled relationships on heavy viewer's real life relationships, and I'm pretty damn sure she's on to something. Writers need drama, so they put infidelity in their storylines. In and of itself, no individual instance of this is unrealistic. But as they pile up, they give the impression that infidelity is extremely common (read: acceptable?). Though people would never admit to it, I wonder if, in the backs of their minds, they think that many other people are cheating and so they go ahead and do it, thinking "I know its 'bad,' but people do it pretty frequently." In fact, its especially likely to happen and especially hard to ferret out because our culture, every culture, likes to believe that it doesn't happen. I suppose we're that way with a lot of elements of sexual relationships: publicly denying certain aspects, speaking to one another in the code of fiction about how things "really are," but in the process, we overrepresent the dark side and make our lives darker through the cultivation of values that come with heavy viewing.
Its not even the prevlance of infidelity per se that I object to. Its the tired, cliched depiction of how it unfolds: the boredom with fidelity, the temptation, the lapse, the secrecy, the guilt, the revelation, the begrudging forgiveness. Yes, I'm sure it happens a lot like that in real life on its own, but whose to say that we don't go through this charade thinking it is in our nature when we're merely repeating the scripts that were embedded in stories for purposes of selling more soap (or more stories. There's no need to pin the blame solely on commercially-sponsored storytelling. 19th century novels and serialized stories were just as likley to include such heightened drama in order to keep the buying public coming back for more)?
Stories do not implant or invent desires. In real life, there is infidelity and there are secrecy and revelations. And yet, due cheifly to constraints of economy and technology, stories are required to reflect only certain aspects of our desires. Its not the values reflected in the stories that shape our beliefs on human nature and social mores. It is their collective and individual structures. Compare one society in which individuals read one grand narrative (e.g. the Bible, which is a collection of smaller stories, yes, but they have a unifying thread and they're typically treated as a single text) and see their lives as one grand narrative to a society in which individuals watch hundreds of different, unrelated narratives a year. We have little fragments of lives. It might have a baring on our desires or expectations for long-term relationships, as part of a marriage, a business, a country, an institution, etc.
Surprise pregnancies (especially the kind that happens when two people fuck each other once and only once) are another matter. It just seems biologically unrealistic. If you took the number of times one night stands resulted in pregnancy on TV and compared it with the number of times they resulted in pregnancy in real life (again, good luck trying to prove this, but its still my hunch), you'd see a discrepancy.
But the effects issue is beside the point. I'm just sick of it is all. Yes, infidelity, pregnancy, and will-they-or-won't-they romances happen in real life to most people and, as they are universal, are compelling for that reason. But they're overused. In this world overcrowded by stories, it is not enough to be realistic. You must be original, even if it means being unrealistic, in order to be compelling.
So, I wasn't wild about the fact that this season-ender included the old stand-bys of pregancy and infidelity. But at least it treated the former in a somewhat unique manner, lingering on the scene of the revelation in which both characters were neither horrified nor overjoyed, but conveyed something in between (perhaps horror masked by a facade of acceptance and decorum, something that pervades the show). The music, the fade to black: it all had a nice feeling to it, set it apart from the slaps-in-the-faces and the rivers of tears that characterize most pregancy revelations. Or, to be more accurate, it didn't quite set it apart by itself. It characterized the show as an HBO show. It was the kind of scene, the kind of conclusion, that you would expect of The Wire or The Sopranos, that disquiet of ambiguity, the frustration of the need for closure that we all feel when we engage with stories, that frustration mirroring that of the characters.
