Bill Murray Channels Bing & Frank for a Very Merry Christmas

There's no doubt: My Christmas spirits have been sagging. There is so very much pain in the world, it has taken my blogging voice away.

And then. I finally watched A Very Murray Christmas on Netfilx, and it woke me up, just in time. It spoke to my DNA, and with that connection I realized that I can't help the world at large. But I can be "as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knows or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world." Thanks Bill.

A Very Murray Christmas is a touchstone to my childhood. I know what he's doing with his 57 minutes, and it is not self-indulgent, the word I saw most often in reviews.

In the Beginning, There was Bing Crosby
Yes, I am a Bill Murray fan, from Caddyshack on. And I was weened on 1940s movies. When Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn was on WOR, Channel 9 in the 1970s, my father--a lifelong Crosby fan--said, "this is important you need to watch this." And I found it stunning. The towering talents of Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, set against the glamour of NY nightclub life with those glittering white Christmas trees, was intoxicating. In high school I made my friends sit and watch it with me, and they were glad. High schoolers. In the 1970s.

Fast forward some decades: When I finally watched A Very Murray Christmas, I was immediately connected back to my Crosby heritage, which of course included every Crosby Christmas special from the early 1970s until his death, and his famous Christmas songs. No stretch there, since Murray used the most famous Crosby album graphic directly. (Although I think Bill looks oddly like Derek Jacobi here.)





But the Crosby specials aren't the most direct connection for me: instead it was to a special episode of Frank Sinatra's short-lived The Frank Sinatra Show, for Bulova, called Happy Holidays with Bing and Frank. The premise is that Bing Crosby is dropping by Frank's very chic apartment with some gifts.  The banter is scripted. Sometimes awkward (sound familiar?) while sometimes it's cool:

Crosby "Hey this must be in your key."
Sinatra:  "Well it's my ballpark."

They drink from a Wassail bowl in a visual quote of "Did You Evah" from The Philadelphia Story, and become inebriated enough to see Ye Old Merrie England outside the high-rise door. And they both enter this alternate universe (sound familiar?) in Dickensian costume to join in with the carolers. (To see Crosby wear a Dickensian top hat atilt is alone worth the price of admission.)

1957 friends get together; 1957 friends enter alternate reality.

2015 friends get together; 2015 friends enter an alternate reality.

Frank and Bing then return to 1957, and Bing thinks he needs to leave because Sinatra's table is set for an intimate dinner for two, which then Frank says is for him! (Not a date!).

This allows the duo to continue to sing Christmas songs solo and in duet, until Frank graciously gives the Bing the closing spotlight for "White Christmas." It's a lovely reminder that Sinatra idolized Crosby, even though he was to surpass him in cultural relevance. For sensibilities that love that classic singing, the 27-minute special is sublime.

Bill and His Friends
Many critics found Murray's special lazy at best, self-indulgent at the least. But the vision of combining famous friends playing themselves with others playing characters is neither. It's creative.

The premise of the live show is right out of the Mitch Glazer/Murray collaboration of Scrooge. It continues Murray's homage to the early days of live TV, something that Clooney is also interested in, bringing the 1962 film Fail-Safe live to CBS in 2000, as well as being in the live ER episode "Ambush" in 1997. There is no sense of parody here for Murray, it is a tip of the hat to TV's past.

Bill Murray, both the actor/singer and the "character," would not have the same kind of 1950s polish that we see in Crosby and Sinatra. That's not who he is. But I think he brought his own A game: his echoes of Nick Ocean lounge singer & Lost in Translation's Bob Harris, with some redeemed Frank Cross. So the tone is mixed but always genuine. That is part of its charm.

Murray and Glazer & Sofia Coppola capture the ersatz exuberance of "the Christmas special of Christmases past" beautifully with the chic sparkling white set and snow and cute chorus girl costumes. George "you shook Sinatra's hand" Clooney is the perfect friend to be in the dream sequence. He also has enormous respect and nostalgia for old Hollywood and early TV, which can be easy to mock.

Quick Music Nit-Pick Interlude
Paul Shaffer, musician extraordinaire, allowed two goofs on his watch:

•Jenny Lewis starts "Good King Wenceslas" and commits the age-old error of reading the 3 syllables of his name as though he "last" did something.

It's "Good King Wen-ce-las looked out."  NOT "Good King Wence-las LAST looked out."

•Having Miley Cyrus sing 2 verses of "Silent Night" and then sing the first verse AGAIN instead of the exquisite third verse is a gaff. She did a beautiful job.

One funny thing in 1957. They altered the words of the 2nd verse of "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" so that they did not have to say "a Virgin's womb."

CHRIST, by highest Heav'n ador'd; CHRIST, the Everlasting Lord; Late in Time behold him come; Offspring of a Virgin's Womb the favored one.

Big Finish: We Wish You a Merry Christmas



Bill wakes up from his glorious blackout to find himself on the couch, in his robe, with faithful Paul at the piano and Dimitri Dimitrov on call. He sings "We wish you a Merry Christmas" in his alcohol-wrecked voice. Then looks out the window to wish the greeting to all New York in a poignant, sad, grey shot.

Bing and Frank end their tableau sitting down to a festive dinner together as the camera pans back to a window with snow a-swirling, a shot right out of Holiday Inn.

Big difference between 1957 and 2015. In part, perhaps, because men, and I do mean the male gender, are now free to show their fears in a way Crosby and Sinatra would never have dreamed of.  And 2015 does not have the post-war optimism that the 1950s saw.

But what is most important is that we can still enjoy Bing & Frank's talent, and if you're in more of a Joni Mitchell "River" mood, pop into Bill's Very Murray Christmas. So many riches. God bless us, every one.


Happy Holidays With Bing and Frank (Classic) from Dill Bates on Vimeo.

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 Mapeel     12/22/2015     Christmas, music, TV   

Giving Thanks for John Thaw and Inspector Morse

"People who do crosswords..... have blanks in their lives, and no clue how to fill them"  

Adele to Morse, Death Is Now My Neighbour

My inaction to get a flu shot in October lead to--or at least contributed to--enduring a terrible bout of influenza in November. Maybe not of the magnitude of the pandemic of 1918 that killed more people than battlefields of WWl  (Wiki says 50 to 100 million, or 3 to 5% of the world's population) but it felt as deadly.

To make matters worse, I needed to keep going into work, as many do. And so began 14 days of a weird, feverish stumbling about between waking periods in pain and discomfort, and unrestful sleeping periods, not always at night. Living in the fog of the flu is the closest to being a zombie that I ever wish to experience.

Within the fog I was searching for anything to help me feel better, including surfing channels hither and yon, when I stumbled across CUNY NYC that was playing the second half of Inspector Morse, "Fat Chance."

Morse. 

Endorphins immediately flooded my brain at the first sight of John Thaw. Here the world made sense: it was visually beautiful and aurally sublime.  There was strength of thought and mind, not weakness of body (well, not yet).

I watched the 1991 episode with Zoe Wanamaker about theology students who wish to enter the Anglican priesthood (Church of England approved ordination of women in 1992, and the first are ordained in 1994) entwined with complications from a diet pill, with the Mozart Laudate Dominum playing throughout. 

That half episode transported me to a place where I felt a little better, for a little bit of time. And to try to continue any sense of well-being I launched into 2 weeks of a Morse marathon, from the beginning, through all 33 episodes. 

I watched sequentially, but it felt like a mosaic of bits & pieces as I dozed off here and there with the flu fatigue.

"You never married?" "You never married?" "You never married?"

"No,  I didn't, why do you keep asking?" I snap to no one. 

Oh, the fog of the flu. They're not asking  me. In the early episodes of the series someone is always questioning Morse about this. His answer: "Too choosy, too hesitant, too lazy, too busy."  I can go with that.

As I burrow into each story,  I meet several old friends. They are all so young, I first recognize their voices, and then the facial recognition snaps it. 

It's the 9th Doctor! (1991 Second Time Around)

It's Doc Martin! (1992 Happy Families)

It's Chief Superintendent Foyle! (1992 The Death of the Self)

It's Boromir! I mean Ned Stark! (1992: Absolution Conviction)

I knew none of these actors when I first watched Inspector Morse, back in the 90s. It was appointment TV for me, as for many.  You knew it was going to be a special series from its first distinctive opening sequence of The Dead of Jericho: glimpses of disparate scenes, which didn't yet make sense, intercut with black title cards, usually to the strains of some soaring piece of classical music.

The music was the most breathtaking for me. I had recently started singing with a choir and learning much of the basic choral repertoire.

Scene up on The Dead of Jericho, and we hear Vivaldi's Gloria.  It's actually very funny, given the later swipes that Morse will take at the piece, putting it down, particularly in relation to the greatness of Wagner.

There is lots of Wagner during the series.  Lots & lots of Mozart, Brahms, more Mozart, the cascades of the Allegri Miserere (years before it was overused).

No other episodic series has ever used classical music with such conviction of its worth, and implicitly, its ability to connect to wide audience.

There series is also imbued with poetry and poetic references of all kinds.  The one that jumped out at me was in "The Last Enemy"  when "the guy" [as Monk would said] is in hospital, and from his bed starts in with:

I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;
 I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
 I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
  Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
   I hid from Him, 

It is the very distinct opening of Francis Thompson's feverish "The Hound of Heaven."  (Well. everything Thompson wrote was feverish, as is wont for a Jack the Ripper suspect.)

Morse then jumps in with the end of the first stanza.

But with unhurrying chase, 
And unperturbèd pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
They beat--and a Voice beat 
More instant than the Feet-- 
'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.'


Ok. Maybe.  Then the guy continues

"Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds 
From the hid battlements of Eternity"

and finishes with couplets that actually come a little earlier, and is not the end of the poem:

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke, 
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream. 
Yea, faileth now even dream 
The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;  

"The Hound of Heaven" is a very long poem. I fear that gone are the days when people committed stanza upon stanza to memory. But the series committed to poetry as deeply as it did to classical music.

The distinct cinematography and Barrington Pheloung's whistful, witty, haunting, Morse Code-influenced theme music, that beautiful Jaguar sliding through the canyons and exquisite spires of Oxford are all compelling, but the real draw are John Thaw and Kevin Whately.  

Thaw inhabits Morse with enormous authenticity: the misanthrope who accepts being alone, but continues to try to connect with women. The lover of logic and rules and law, who finds some release for his emotion in music. Who loves crossword puzzles (the Brit kind, not the simpler US type that I do) and good ale to a startling degree. 

And at his side, Whately's epitome of the "comfortable in me skin" man. Genuinely baffled by much of Morse, but drawn to the talent and a shared love of the rule of law.

Their work marriage--both the characters and the actors--is a joy to experience. 

In between watching episodes I was reading 30 years of articles on the series.  When the Blue-Ray 25th anniversary came out lots more articles were written, now with lots of comments.  One sentiment that I saw over and over was "I can't watch 'The Remorseful Day' again."  That is the episode where Endeavour Morse dies, set beautifully to the strains of the Faure Requiem.  I hadn't thought of it in years.

When my own marathon brought me to that point in the story, I thought I was ready. But my fellow fans were right.  It was terrible to watch again, to lose that special character again. My congested chest started heaving amongst deep sobs drowning out "Libera me Dominum . . ."

I knew what I had to do.  

A few clicks of the fingers, and Morse is back creating havoc trying to get his Jaguar fixed at the closed garage, set against the cheery Vivaldi's Gloria, intercut with a choir room rehearsal of Parry's "My Soul, There is a Country," until Morse slips into his front-row seat in the choir, and the story is off and running. All the sorrow of "The Remorseful Day" is gone, and I can visit Oxford again now whenever I want, outside of the fog of the flu. 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

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 Mapeel     11/24/2015     holidays, Morse, TV   

Leaving for the Land Where "Games of Thrones" & "Doctor Who" Film: aka, Croatia

I leave tomorrow for an end-of-summer,  Labor Day weekend vacation. Destination: Croatia. Trogir, to be exact. The entire island is an UNESCO heritage site.

Why write new, when you can just quote Wiki:

Trogir has 2300 years of continuous urban tradition. Its culture was created under the influence of the ancient Greeks, and then the Romans, and Venetians. Trogir has a high concentration of palaces, churches, and towers, as well as a fortress on a small island, and in 1997 was inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List. "The orthogonal street plan of this island settlement dates back to the Hellenistic period and it was embellished by successive rulers with many fine public and domestic buildings and fortifications. Its beautiful Romanesque churches are complemented by the outstanding Renaissance and Baroque buildings from the Venetian period", says the UNESCO report.

Trogir is the best-preserved Romanesque-Gothic complex not only in the Adriatic, but in all of Central Europe. Trogir's medieval core, surrounded by walls, comprises a preserved castle and tower and a series of dwellings and palaces from the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods. Trogir's grandest building is the church of St. Lawrence, whose main west portal is a masterpiece byRadovan, and the most significant work of the Romanesque-Gothic style in Croatia.

Pretty amazing, yes?

I am drawn there by the prospect of a Renaissance Polyphony workshop, lead by the extraordinary Patrick Craig.  The music and theme of the week he has chosen: "Hope Amidst Turmoil in Tudor England," with brilliant compositions by the usual suspects: Tye; Sheppard; Taverner; Morely; Weelkes; Tompkins; and my favorite: Byrd. Whom we Catholics claim as our own, though scholarship has placed him on various sides of the Reformation divide through the years.

After a week of rehearsal, we will give a free concert of this extraordinary music in the famous St. Lawrence Cathedral. Anyone in the neighborhood, please come by.

And as fate would have it: that concert is on 9/11. This is the first 9/11, I will not be home. And so for that day, I again offer my own witness.

If I have to be anywhere other than NYC on this most New York City of all days, giving a free concert in an Eastern European city that has known great strife and sadness itself seems like a good place to be.
And now for the pop cultural conundrum: Game of Thrones films in Split (nearby to Trogir), and there is a now a tour: "Get a behind-the-scenes look at the hit HBO series ‘Game of Thrones’ on this 3.5-hour tour of the show’s filming locations in Split. Hear insider gossip about the series, see where Daenerys Targaryen plotted her return to power, and creep around the cellars where the slaves conspired with the Unsullied Army to overthrow the masters."

Now, I don't watch Game of Thrones. But, it's unlikely I'll ever be back in the region. So, do I find time to take that tour? More importantly, I'm hoping to stumble on some of the streets from Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor in Trogir. 

Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor, recreating Van Gogh paintings in Trogir

Please follow me @mapeel on Twitter for dispatches during the week. 

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 Mapeel     9/03/2015     Travel, TV   

TV Board Games 101: Dan Harmon Is Community's Old Soul

For some reason I started watching Community back in the day, Anno Domini 2009, aka season 1, and I was hooked. The repartee of the study group at Greendale Community College was some of the wittiest to be found. The pop culture references resonated strongly with me, making me part of its "cult following," and I was not afraid.

I will not try to summarize the élan of a series, you have to experience it for itself (try Hulu, Netflix).

But I must celebrate the tag scene of the season 6 finale--the season that streams on Yahoo--as a beautiful revelation of the old soul of Dan Harmon.

SPOILERS

As of this writing it is not known whether the season 6 finale "Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television" is the series finale, or if there will be a season 7 on Yahoo or some other streaming service.

Dan Harmon wrote the episode with the characters pitching what could happen in a season 7. And that was fun.  But it's a fake TV commerical for the Community board game, with a family playing it on the dining room table, that is one of the all-time smartest endings of a series.

Yes. A board game. Based on a TV show.

They were a staple of my childhood. But I would think the whole phenomenon was about 10 years before Harmon's time: he was born in 1973. He wouldn't have first-hand attachment to this early merchandising.

But it's as though Dan Harmon was hovering over my girlhood birthdays (and my older brother's) and our Christmas mornings and learning what these games meant to us. From a crass perspective it was all the beginnings of the movie/TV tie-in merchandizing—sometimes officially counted from the Star Wars product juggernaut that started in 1977—but for a child these Milton Bradley/Ideal games were the first real-world extension of the TV show bond.

TV watching for me as a child was family time together, either the whole family, or just with my older brother in our playroom. I didn't really follow the shows we watched in the late sixties/early seventies, but that wasn't the point. It was time together around something as powerful as narrative.

Land of the Giants; The Time Tunnel; Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea; Get Smart; the Saturday morning game show Shenanigans.

And then, when either my brother or I would get the board game as a present, it was exciting. We could use our imagination and  play at being the characters in Land of the Giants: I remember that safety pin circle card as though it were yesterday. And for Shenanigans it was like being in the TV game: I remember the Pie Eye and the tiddlywinks SO vividly. We played these games for hours and hours, and I played them with my friends for more hours and hours.

Community: the Board Game

For Harmon to end Community with a board game—a nondigital, noninteractive game— in 2015 is absolutely hysterical. The usual Community attention to the details of an homage is top-notch: the board pieces, the spinner, the action cards are all spot on.  It all works beautifully and harkens back to my childhood's simpler TV time, when the beloved tropes and semiotics of TV programming were just crawling their way out of the primordial soup. 

And then Harmon introduces the twist: the Son plays the script for Community as a ploy to take his Dad's pieces. But Dad realizes that if there's a script, then "they" don't exist. "We haven't been created by God, but by a joke."

Dad then plays the trump "snow globe" card: "We're all just a part of the universe in here."
(That's the Tommy Westphall Universe of course). This brings the family into sadness, as they contemplate their non-existence.

And so the ad voice-over comes in, as it does, with the details.

"Dice not included. Some assembly required."

(The dice were always included, so maybe it's a nod to "Remedial Chaos Theory" and the role of the die that lead to the darkest timeline?)

And then Harmon gives the perfect summation of his show, read quickly in his own"fine print don't pay attention to this" voice.

Lines between perception, desire and reality may become blurred, redundant or interchangeable.

Characters may hook up with no regard for your emotional investment. Some episodes too conceptual to be funny, some too funny to be immersive and some so immersive they still aren't funny.

Consistency between seasons may vary.

Viewers may be measured by a secretive, obsolete system based on selected participants keeping hand written journals of what they watch.

Show may be cancelled and moved to the internet where it turns out tens of millions were watching the whole time. May not matter.

Fake commercial may end with disclaimer gag which may descend into vain, Chuck Lorre-esque rant by narcissistic creator.

Creator may be unstable. Therapist may have told creator this is not how you make yourself a good person. Life may pass by while we ignore and mistreat those close to us. Those close to us may be those watching. Those people may want to know I love them but I may be incapable of saying it.

Contains pieces the size of a child's esophagus.

To capture entire imaginary worlds and systems of media in a minute ad takes a lot of talent. To also evoke an emotional component is the work of an old soul. I hope Harmon turns down any opportunity to continue on to a season 7. I don't think the fans would be well served, and it would ruin this perfect closure.  But I'm all for #andamovie.

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 Mapeel     6/08/2015     TV   

Coke. Is. It. And Mad Men Ends.

“I had a dream I was on the shelf in the refrigerator. Someone closes the door and the light goes off, and I know everybody's out there eating. And they open the door and you see everyone smiling and they are happy to see you but maybe they don't look right at you and maybe they don't pick you. And then the door closes again, the light goes off.”


This epiphany-inducing speech by Mr. Average at the Esalen-like retreat is strange, as dreams often are, until you realize that he dreamt he WAS—Kafka-like—a bottle of Coca-Cola. And he was worried that people were going to go for the Chablis on the door instead of him!

Yes, the entire Mad Men series was about Coca-Cola, pure and simple.

SPOILERS.

I appreciate that the Mad Men finale has been analyzed from every angle known to man, and a few that may be extraterrestrial in scope.

So in my week-later piece,  I'd like to start with a solecism in the all-hallowed Hilltop Coke song that everyone has blithely chosen to overlook:

And that is the bizarreness of "honey bees" and "snow white turtle doves" as direct objects of the transitive verb "grow."

"I'd like to build the world a home
And furnish it with love

Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow white turtle doves"

Come on people, this syntax makes no sense!
You "raise" honey bees and turtles dove, you don't "grow" them. 

And insult to injury: the the meter of the underlying jingle throws a stress on the word "snow" equal to the word "grow"--on top of the natural word rhyming-- making it seem as though it's a parallel verb construction:  "grow tress" and "snow white turtle doves."

Just wanted to put this out there. It's really has been bothering me since I was a kid.

Reverse Angles

Don's unlikely lotus position immediately brought a  reverse angle image into my head: Michael Keaton's opening scene of Birdman. For me Don chanting Ohm in Big Sur was as surreal as Riggan Thomson levitating in the same position in his dressing room.

That said, the interesting thing about the big reveal of Don as the creative genius behind "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing"--called one of the greatest commercials of all time--is that it illuminates for people their own view on advertising itself.

Me: I've never given advertising much of a thought one way or another. I accept the premise--"they" are going to try to sell me something--and I move on. I don't contemplate if they are toying with my emotions, because I don't invest enough in the ads.

People who see the finale as cynical have strong feelings about the evils of advertising. That what was a "real" moment of life as Don chanted at the Esalen-like retreat became perverted to peddle colored sugar water to the world. Hence Don has not changed, when if he had not created the ad, and stayed away from advertising, he would be changed/redeemed.

I like how Tom and Lorenzo put it in their recap:

 *Don took a week of depressed middle class white people and turned it into a minute of hopeful, ethnically diverse teenagers.

*He went from selling cancer to the American public to selling obesity to the American public and he did it using a message of brotherhood and tolerance that he himself would never experience because of his upper middle class trappings.

*This is what we mean when we say the ending is a cynical one. We don’t necessarily mean that as a bad thing. Mad Men has always been a particular combination of capitalist-fueled cynicism and family-based hope.

Matthew Weiner defended the ad at the New York Public Library event:

“I think it’s the best ad ever made,” he said. “That ad is so much of its time, so beautiful — I don’t think it’s as villainous as the snark of today thinks it is.”

So Weiner doesn't worry about the multinational corporation that is Coca-Cola and its impact on Don's soul. That they try to sell "happiness" as carbonated water in a bottle.  That they pervert the whole concept of "it's the real thing."

I don't worry either. I am Coke fan myself. I love the refreshing taste. I know it's not great for me, but I don't drink coffee and everyone picks his own poison. When I first started traveling to Europe 30 years ago it was hard to find "Coca Lite" but every once it a while you would run into it in a little epicerie in the middle of nowhere, and you bet it made me smile. And it usually made the epiciere smile too, at the American who found the Diet Coke. Commerce is not all evil.

As for the finale and the series: From a character angle,  I had trouble with Don's epiphany coming from the refrigerator speech. The dream thing is too weird except as an allusion to Coke bottles,  and I don't think it earned Don's breakthrough connection.

But then I never felt compelled by Don Draper the character. I enjoyed the artistry and style of a TV show that started with the distinct evocation of the 1950s and lead us throughout the decade.

These last episodes for me were a collection of Matthew Weiner's favorite things: particularly the enormous homage to Hitchcock.

But what Mattew seems to have loved most of all was the Coke commercial he saw when he was 6 years old. It's quite a story, especially why it's in Rome (it's because it was raining in England).  More details on Coke's own site.

I applaud people who are able to bring their passions into their work of any kind, and share it with the world, maybe even with a coke and a smile.

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 Mapeel     5/23/2015     Film, Mad Men, TV   

Mad Men: Where Hitchcock Meets Lawrence of Arabia, and We Say Goodbye to Don

In the beginning there was Alfred Hitchcock. He liked mystery, intrigue, issues of identity, Cary Grant, and cold, cool blonds.

Quite the blueprint for Matthew Weiner. 

Mad Men opened with the the intriguing "falling man" while it's Roger Thornhill in Hitchcock's North by Northwest who is the original falling man (with what I think is a much more closely matched "fall" than the oft-cited Vertigo poster) and an advertising man to boot who can't get people to believe who he is once he gets mistaken for a spy.  And so we know whence Don Draper sprang fully formed from the head of Matthew Weiner.

Much of the magnetism of the series came from the evocation of the 1950s (which the series rightfully depicts as continuing on well into the 1960s). North by Northwest opened on July 28, 1959; Mad Men debuted on July 19, 2007. Weiner brought us the great visual quotes of the NxNW cornfield scene in "Lost Horizon," and the "Thornhill at bus stop in the middle of nowhere" quote in "The Milk and Honey Route." Weiner has elegantly achieved the homage to the Master.

The Plot: Through the series we've learned a bunch about how Dick Whitman became Don Draper, taking on the identify of his lieutenant in Korea, after he accidentally killed him.

And why did he want to change his identify? He had a difficult childhood. For me, none of this was why I watched. I've watched because of the visual beauty and artfulness, a distinct place on the TV landscape to spend an hour a week, sporadically through the years.

Everybody Loves a Mystery
So how will it all end? Don has been stripping himself of the Don Draper identifiers: his beautiful wife Megan; their apartment (and furniture, which her mother took); his advertising career; his first family; his car.

And . . . we last saw him at a Thornhill-like bus stop in the middle of nowhere. (h/t Michael Beschloss for the Cary Grant screen grab.)

WITH A SMILE. A SMILE.

Hmm.  Happiness, at having little left to lose, made me think of one person . . .

T.E.Lawrence.

Thomas Edward Lawrence struggled with identity his whole life.  His father, Sir Thomas Chapman, was married with four daughters. They hired a nanny, Sarah, to help, and Tom fell madly in love with her.

He left his wife and daughters, and started a new life with Sarah, under the name Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence. He never divorced his first wife, and he had five sons with Sarah, of whom T.E. was the second.

T.E. had an enormous intellect, which is what propelled him to great heights in leading much of the war in Arabia during WWI. He idenfitied with the Arabs, and believed he was fighting for their independence.  That's not what happened: Arabia was portioned off between the English & French. He felt he had been a fraud (this is all in enormous shorthand.)

When Lawrence returned to civilian life we was given a teaching gig at Oxford. Perfect, right? But he enlisted in the R.A.F. under the name John Hume Ross, to lose himself. When it was discovered who he really was, he was thrown out. Then he enlisted in the Royal Tank Corp, as T.E. Shaw. He didn't really like that and he petitioned to be let back in to the R.A.F, which happened in 1925. He served until 1935.  Two months after he left the service, at the age of 46, he was mortally hurt in a motorcycle accident, and died.

Lawrence wrote about his time in the RAF & the Tank Corp. in The Mint, which was published after he died. It is a tortured telling of wanting to be a complete non-entity.  Shedding all identity was the only way he could find peace, dare we say happiness. That's why he popped into my head when I saw Don's smile at having nearly nothing.

I don't think this has anything to do with the actual ending, but I did find Weiner made a reference to none other than David Lean's movie in a Washington Post interview on the idea of Jewish-ness & Other-ness. . . .HA!

"So when you start making a decision to represent people, and you have Ginsberg’s father, who’s a Holocaust survivor, who is from Poland, you’re gonna have him talk like Lawrence of Arabia?"

Clues That Have Been Dropped
John Slattery is on record as saying that the ending is "Of course."  I believe that Weiner has said that he's known how it will end since he started.

I love the D.B.Cooper idea.  Such a creative exercise, to take one of the great mysteries of the 1970s, and trace it back to who D.B. was before he disappeared.

Other than that, I'll just be happy with almost anything as long as it doesn't have any completely illogical occurence: like a man who clearly is dying of frostbite, in a car enclosed in ice with a dead battery, and then miraculously turns up in a kitchen in sunny Arizona . . .

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 Mapeel     5/16/2015     Film, literature, Mad Men, TV