Monday, 25 June 2012

The Very Best of Acephalous 2010

Lenin template 2010
January

FEBRUARY

MARCH

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

 VERY IMPORTANT THING TO KEEP IN MIND: POSTS ON THE VISUAL RHETORIC OF FILMS AND COMICS HAVE THEIR OWN SPECIAL PLACE AND ARE THEREFORE NOT INCLUDED IN THIS LIST. YOU MAY FIND THEM HERE:

Jun 25, 2012 3:57:14 PM

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Mad Men: Nostalgia, forestalled, and "The Wheel" (Being the first of many of these I'll be producing this summer.) With summer here and only some online teaching duties to attend to—meaning that I can put the 2½ hours I don't have to commute to and from campus to better use—I've decided to address short scenes from something compelling on a daily basis. This is the first such post, and as the title suggests, I'm not exactly working out of my comfort zone yet. (That will change.) Before I can discuss Mad Men's fifth season finale, "The Phantom," in any detail, I need to look back to its first season finale, "The Wheel," because it contains a scene that subtends the most pivotal moment in "The Phantom." If you recall, in the first season Don's position in the firm is that of a star employee: trusted, but always expected to perform; necessary, but not irreplaceable. Or it was, before he reimagined Kodak's "Projector of Poorly Framed Unprofessional Photographs" into a "Carousel" that transformed photographic imperfection into a dead letter office overstuffed with reclaimable memories. Only Matt Weiner, pulling double-duty as both writer and director here, doesn't seem to believe the power of Don's pitch, despite its seemingly self-evident efficacy. (That link will take you to the entire scene, in case you want to compare my reading of its constituent parts to the amalgamated whole.) On what am I basing my claim that Weiner's trying to undermine Draper's ostensibly successful pitch? Glad you asked. Let's start with the context. In "The Wheel," Betty's discovered incontrovertible proof of one of Don's many infidelities, and Don's decided not to spend Thanksgiving with the in-laws because he recognizes, rightfully, that his family is falling apart. His situation makes the substance of his appeal to Eastman Kodak all the more difficult to deliver, because it consists of images of his formerly happy family interacting in a manner they never will again. In short: Draper pushes the "nostalgia" angle because, at this point, his family consists of the memories he has of what they'll never be again. He's lost the right to say that's "his" wife or "his" children being projected on the wall, but he has to sell the fact that, by virtue of Eastman Kodak's marvelous new technology, they can always be "his" again, on celluloid if not in life. To wit: Weiner begins with a long shot, center on Don, with his colleagues flanked to his right and his customers to his left. ("Duck," the firm's intermediary with the clients, is positioned appropriately enough between the Eastman Kodak cartel and Don.) It's a well-balanced shot, with the windows frame-left balanced by the painting frame-right, not to mention the diegetic lights emenating both from behind and above Don that signal (in case you somehow missed it) that he'll be the focal point of this scene. All of which is only to say that this scenes screams of hierarchy—of a controlled environment in which professionals will do what professionals will do. Of course,...
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LURKER AMNESTY WEEK 2012 IS UPON US! Just because I like to have a sense of who exactly I'm writing for—especially in this age of reading material in one place and commenting on it elsewhere—I'm declaring what began this morning at 12:01 a.m. to be LURKER AMNESTY WEEK 2012! If you're reading this and comment all the time, skip the rest of this post. (Which isn't most of you anymore. Where have y'all gone, my regulars of yore?) If you're reading this and have never commented, feel free to leave a comment. (And an explanation of why you've never commented, if you'd like. Lately I get the sense it's because no one else is commenting, so it'd seem strange to break the silence by commenting.) If you're reading this and have never commented and would rather not comment, feel free to send me an email at allmynamessquishedtogether at gmail dot com. Or via Facebook, where I can be found by unsquishing allmynamessquishedtogether. If you're reading this and have never commented and would rather not comment and don't do email, then I'm not even sure how you're reading this, but feel free to contact me via whatever medium is valued by your people. (I hear ravens are in this year.) You need not use your real name or even your regular pseudonym, but please do give a sense of who you are, how you got here and why you've stayed, so that I might make this place more hospitable to good folk like you. You never know, I might be inclined to TAKE REQUESTS if I knew who wanted me write about what around here.

Scott Eric Kaufman

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