Was everybody really so miserable all the time, with only flashes of laughter to ameliorate the grimness?
I think that's the beauty of having set it against the backdrop of an advertising agency--that veneer of pretty they worked so hard to sell being the complete antithesis of what "real life" was like.
Fuels the cynicism-- I think it's part of what made that dinner scene with the couple who owned the peanut company so heartbreaking. They were, while a successful well-off couple, too normal to fit into New York. (Weren't they from Pittsburgh?)
Yeah, them. Where the Lenny Bruce-like comic called the wife a Hindenburg.
I was at a party this past weekend, and there was a huge jar of Utz pretzels. I pointed and laughed.
Oh, my recording of The Closer cut off near the end of the Fritz/Brenda conversation. What I got out of what I saw is that there are things that Brenda won't do and won't discuss and I guess Fritz just has to be okay with that. (I saw up to the part where Fritz says something about how if they're going for the bigger house both of them have to want it.)
Anyway, I think that they were talking not just about the house, not just about the not having kids but about the whole relationship.
that veneer of pretty they worked so hard to sell being the complete antithesis of what "real life" was like.
Yeah, I really agree.
Oh, and while we're talking about veneer of pretty, that shot of them all shiny and ready for their AA meeting was just gorgeous.
What I got out of what I saw is that there are things that Brenda won't do and won't discuss and I guess Fritz just has to be okay with that. (I saw up to the part where Fritz says something about how if they're going for the bigger house both of them have to want it.)
I think that the discussion was about them having kids. I seem to recall that her health issues (the ones that made her have to stop eating sweets) had something to do with her ability to have children.
Do folks here know already that the Project Rungay fellows are now blogging Mad Men? This week's post is particularly nice and meaty.
A lot of it had to do, IIRC, with the sense of independence that women had fostered throughout WWII, making up the workforce and having to keep households afloat while the men were overseas. A lot of women who had come of age during that time period had seen possibilities where before there had been none.
My mother was one of these women and boy, was she bitter about it. When she was drunk enough she would rant about how having us and being stuck as a housewife ruined her life.
It was many years before I could see things from her point of view and thank dog that I came of age in the early 70s with the Feminist movement.
I think this is why I feel so uncomfortable with this show. I was one of the kids around the same age as Don and Betty's. Not happy memories.
