A Few Further Comments on Mad Men's The Suitcase

Noga1

You can know a person, basman, without actually knowing much about them. It happens rarely and sometimes a person can go through life without experiencing that sort of knowing.

I can't watch Mad Men. Videotron doesn't carry it. So I rely on these weekly updates until I find a way of watching the series.

From the description provided: "She was looking at him the way everyone dreams of being looked at: as if she knew him as well as he knew himself; as if the sight of his suffering hurt her, too." I gather that she did know him, intuitively and intimately as he knew himself, maybe even aware of his flaws as only one who is deeply responsive to another can be, without judgment and in total sympathy. Knew that he had secrets, that his secrets were a source of anguish, that he was a profoundly complicated and tortured man and a decent one at that, for all his secrets.

It doesn't mean they will become lovers. But that encounter is of the essence of love. It's like consummation without the sex, and therefore that much more meaningful and exciting.

Me:

Noga I don't disagree with you as a matter of generality and you put what you say eloquently. I hesitate to disagree with you in the application of these ideas in relation to the shows, since you have not seen them, the specifics of which inform my comments.

Noga1

Well, I've seen the first three seasons so I'm a bit familiar with the characters.

Me:

Then two things briefly:

The first: when Don said the only person who really knew him died, he meant, I think, more than anything, the person who knew his full and true past story. The Don/Dick who goes to California is the good, caring, generous, relatively selfless Don/Dick, and his first wife, I don't think, knew of his now harrowing drinking and his lonely, dark and near coming-apart-at the seams. That's why I think the reference to knowing him points to the fullness of his past life rather than to an understanding, as does Peggy, of the now terrible, condition of his life. And that's why I think he bursts into tears. His connection to what is good in his life, set against being a Mad man, and his reciprocated love for his first wife, truly an instance of Platonic intimacy, of a kind which you so nicely described, are what are lost. So not at all to gainsay what Peggy understands of him, not to gainsay her deeply sympathetic understanding of him, I'd argue she doesn't know him in the way that he means he was known.

As for the second thing, on a tad of instant reflection : it'd be really hard to articulate, and argue for, the sexual tension and sexual intimation in being in the episode beyond what I've described, without you having seen it. It's a felt thing as much as anything else and without both of us having experienced the episode, the discussion is attenuated.

ironyroad:

Peggy also looked like a different woman at the end of the episode, as her poise and self-control and disciplined hair were all looking rougher after a night of drinking with Don, getting rid of the insane Doug, dumping her tedious boyfriend, and sleeping on the office couch. But she looked younger at that final moment, more '60s, less bothered about how anyone interprets her -- I wonder if this is the moment where she sheds the respectability, the need to keep up appearances.