"Pragmatism Refreshed" ends: so does Lane Pryce

Final entry for this blog. From this day forward, I'll be blogging at Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed, and the URL will be http://jamesian58.blogspot.com/ So for now, let's say something about Mad Men, which has also of late been about endings!


Episode 12 will be dominated in the mind of most viewers by the death of a character who has been a mainstay of the show since the beginning of the third season, Lane Pryce, as played with uniform greatness, by Jared Harris.

This death, a suicide, happens as most of the office continues to float on a sense of elation about landing a big automotive account: Jaguar.

The writers bring these two facts: Lane’s despair and his co-workers’ elation, into several layers of collision. We see for example that the Jaguar of the time was mechanically a rather shoddy piece of work, and this in fact dooms Lane’s first effort to kill himself, by asphyxiation. He can’t get the ignition to work when he needs it to!      


When Lane does manage to kill himself, it is with a noose, in his office, and after typing out what should have been a suicide note but was in fact just a “boilerplate” letter of resignation.

Why not pills, Lane? The thing about pills is: they leave some room for doubt. The coroner may call it an accidental overdose rather than a suicide, which may make a difference to grieving relations and their insurers.  A noose, though, doesn’t leave any doubt. So does that mean that a real suicide note would have been, in methodical Lane’s eyes, redundant?

Also, the events leading up to the suicide are designed to leave Don feeling as guilty as possible. Don demanded that resignation, after discovering Lane’s embezzlement. He thought that Lane would and could recover from this and make a new life for himself back in England. Indeed, he said as much. “I’d had to start over a couple of times in my life. This is the worst part,” he assured Lane.

Well, no. Don is not Lane and neither of his start-overs seems analogous. Don learns how badly he had misjudged the matter with that chipper assurance only when he sees the body.

Likewise episode 13, the season finale, will likely be dominated in many minds by one scene – that in which Don encounters Lane’s widow, Rebecca. Indeed, the title of this episode is “The Phantom,” indicting I think that the writers meant for Lane to hang over the whole of it. Except of course there is another “phantom” involved. The titles always have multiple meanings. Don thinks he sees his dead brother.   

But let’s get back to Don and Rebecca. He gives her a check meant in effect to buy out Lane’s share of the partnership. She accepts it, but wants Don to know that however this may alleviate his own sense of guilt, it does nothing to make matters square between them. She blames the agency for giving her husband “ambition.” She appears to see him as always having been a frail reed, always best shielded from ambition and other potentially sharp things.

Also, it is in the course of this confrontation that Rebecca discloses she found the photo of a mystery woman in Lane’s wallet.  The photo brings us back to the start of the season.

I’ve wondered through this season why the writers would introduce that photo (and the trouble to which Lane went to keep it, and the single phone call he made to the woman it represents) without doing more with it than they have. I still wonder.  Will Rebecca start looking for her? Is that one respect in which Lane’s phantom will continue to hover next season?

Strong season over-all. The series' best since but not inclusive of its first.  

Thoughts on Mad Men

Mad Men works as a series in large part because of the look. A lot of bright and hard-working people are evidently working very hard to get the 1960s right -- the clothes, the furniture, the cars, the ubiquitous use of cigarettes -- and it pays off.

But how often would you want to keep going back to the same museum? The show works, and is sustainable as entertainment, for some other reason.

Is it the plotting? As I believe all of the posts I have devoted to the question have helped illustrate: the plots are almost absurdly complicated. They deal with all the great themes that your undergraduate Lit professor told you were important: birth, death, commitment, abandonment, conflict, reconciliation, mystery. But every drama, and every comedy, treats of these themes. So what?

Is it the acting? The acting is serviceable but not, I think, in a stand-out way.

So (by process of elimination) is it character? I think there we have to say yes. The characters are indelible, and the otherwise rickity plots work only because these characters are interacting.

Why are the characters indelible? For those of us of a certain age, these characters are our parents, when we were kids and they were in their prime. (Yes, I know I'm not the first to make this point.) I was born in October 1958. Most of the events of the first season of the show took place before I turned two. But the world of the series, especially in seasons three and four, is decidedly my parents' world.

I had only the vaguest of ideas what my father did for a living, and the byzantine nature of the office intrigue at Sterling Cooper in a way captures this vagueness. The idea that the grown-ups were doing grown-up stuff and it wasn't something for me to worry about overly much.

The scenes in Westchester are priceless, they play to this sense of seeing events from a child's POV more directly.

What about for the younger fans of the show? I understand it has a lot of admirers who were born in the 1970s or later. My sense is that they pick up on the same inter-generational theme, even if it isn't meant for them in quite the same way.

Paul Kilduff

Of late I've been reading a novel by Dublin-based author Paul Kilduff, entitled The Dealer (2000).

You can read about him via the above link, and about The Dealer via this one.

What I'd like to mention today is simply the wide disparity between the dust jacket copy, which on its face is designed to tell you something about the contents, and those actual contents. Here's the dust jacket copy:

When the multi-billion-pound takeover of Provident Bank is sensationally announced at a West End press conference, life will never be the same for many influential players in the City of London.

A star equities dealer has just bought a million soaring Provident shares – and others wonder how he does it. A London Stock Exchange investigator begins his work. A leading research analyst speaks her mind to the media. A finance director celebrates with a visit to a discreet Docklands townhouse. A lucrative yet bizarre lifestyle is suddenly in jeopardy.

A Detective Inspector finds a bloated body in the mud of the River Thames and, unaware of the ultimate consequences, explores a complex web of inter-connected lives in his search for a ruthless killer.

Although we do get a brief scene in the novel in which a "leading research analyst" is speaking in an evening newscast, she is not "speaking her mind to the media" about the Provident deal, as this copy suggests. First, she isn't "speaking her mind" at all, she is toeing the company line. She is talking bullish stuff because that is what her brokerage firm bosses want her to do. Second, that interview isn't about the Provident deal, the center of the novel's plot. It is about an earnings report from County Beverages, which is featured in a subplot.

More irritatingly, the finance director who visits the discreet Docklands townhouse in connection with another character's "lucrative yet bizaare lifestyle" isn't doing so in order to "celebrate" the Provident deal. He was the only member of the board of directors of Provident to oppose that deal, and is consoling himself after having lost that vote.

Not important. Just annoying. I know that authors go along with this sort of distortion because they figure the marketing department of the publisher has to do ist thing ... but I really don't see how it would have hurt sales had they troubled to make the copy accurate about the contents.

Other elements weaved in

My "Stalin diaries" story, discussed yesterday, will have other elements. The "girl who didn't dream," for example.

This one involves a circle of friends at a fictional college in the early 1970s (twenty years or perhaps a bit more before the main events of the story line) who would ask each other "have you have any dreams lately?"

It becomes faddish among them to invent wild stories about one's dreams. But one figure in the group stands ou for her unwillingness to 'play.' All she will say when asked such a question is "I never dream."

A couple of neat twists are possible taking off from that. It would be in accord with literary convention -- and for all I know Freudian theory -- to hold that she is suppressing something horrible. And this can link in naturally enough with the nightmare situation in which my lead characetr finds himself when the diaries he has been provided as a "hot lead" turn out to be bogus.

Oh, and by the way, HAPPY BIRTHDAY LIONEL. Famed singer Lionel Ritchie is 60 yeas old today.

Pothole Pictures

Pothole Pictures hosted a film festival Saturday in the picture-book downtown of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. The festival was a pilot, if you will. Organizers hope to make of it an annual event.

The films shown Saturday were a mixed assortment. The old classification of fiction/non-fiction rather breaks down when one is confronted, for example, with a claymation take on the Battle of Trafalgar. There was only one movie bearing the label "documentary," -- it was an awful piece of tripe about why co-operation is good, so competitive sports are bad because somebody loses. Or something like that.

There was also a movie on "tomboys": the concept, some of the girls it's used to describe, and the women they've become. This one wasn't labelled a documentary, but I suppose it could have been. At any rate, the anti-competition movie and the tomboys movie might have made an appropriate pairing had they been played back-to-back. If there's anything that can fairly be said about the girls/women it described, it is that they were/are intensely competitive.

Backing up, though.

The very first film shown had a neat conceit at its core -- a young man who has evidently just suffered romantic disappointment enters a coffee shop and encounters there the ghosts of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. The filmmakers obviously wanted us to see this as a scene in which those deceased poets provided him with encouragement and advice. It doesn't work out, though, because the lines of recited poetry sound too much like recited poetry. The conceit of the film demands that they be delivered in a more conversational style than these actresses could deliver.

Still, there was much better stuff than this. There was an original take on the Mad Hatter's tea party, and a hilarious send-up of "The Da Vinci Code" set in New England and called (of course) The Norman Rockwell Code.

Now that was a conceit that really came off in the execution.

Music Critic

I've had an idea for a story -- or, rather, for a character around whom a story could be written. But I've never gotten very far with it. So I'll just mention the idea here, and put it in the public domain.

The character, and my imagination associates him somehow with the name Mortimer, is a music critic for a major weekly magazine. But -- this is the twist -- Mortimer never writes about music. Somebody else in the newsroom (let's call him Basil) does a search at some point in the story.

"In the five years that he's worked here," Basil reports to some third party, "filing [some number] or album reviews and [some other number] of concert reviews, Mortimer has not yet expressed any considered judgment about rhythm, melody, or harmony -- about, in a word, the music."

The story can have some fun with the various subjects a non-musical music critic could write about to keep such a string alive for a Basil to discover. The design of the concert stage or album cover, the ups and downs in the popular reputation of the band under review, the lyrics. A non-music critic might last in this way for some time.

But the story needs a lot of development. Mortimer would have to react to Basil's discovery in some way -- there might be some comedy to be found in his effort to write something distinctively musical in order to shut Basil up and win the publication's turf war.

And there'd need to be some explanation of why Basil made an issue of it anyway. What is Basil's job? Ombudsman?

I've given up on it. If any of you wanted a story idea: Go.