I’ve watched Sunday’s divisive episode of “Mad Men” twice, and at last I have an opinion. I’m not sure that what Joan did was realistic. But I also don’t care, because as TV, it worked.
In case you haven’t seen the episode, “The Other Woman,” and feel like having it spoiled, well—SPOILER—Joan slept with a client in order to win the firm the crucial Jaguar contract.
And my, that was one queasy hour of TV. As has been generally true of this season of “Mad Men,” it was also surreal, beautifully performed, and extremely tense. The theme was the one that has dominated the show from the beginning: prostitution as a metaphor for the relationship between men, women, creatives, and clients (in every combination). Don Draper, né Whitman, might look like the world’s fantasy of a man who doesn’t need to pay for sex, but over five seasons, he’s been both a whore and a pimp, as well as both an actual and a metaphorical john. He is still that “whore’s son,” the abused child of a prostitute who died in childbirth, who changed identities in order to escape that history, but managed to recreate it again and again.
“You’re a whore. You know that?” he spat at his wife Betty during their biggest fight, the one in which he also memorably sneered at her “little white nose in the air.” He’d spent years privately comparing bad Betty to his angelic “other” wife, Anna, the one who was never critical and who always forgave. But of course, Anna—that stoned blonde angel of California—was also living off his money, and serving his needs, if only for acceptance and forgiveness. (Think of this as a maternal variation on “The Girlfriend Experience.”)
When it came to cheating, Don didn’t discriminate: he slept with clients and secretaries, but also with beatniks, his daughter’s teacher, slinky jetsetters, and so on. Then, in season two, during a period when he was trying to stay faithful to Betty, he was coerced into sex by Bobbie, the wife of the comedian who controlled the Utz account. Although Don told her no quite clearly, several times, Bobbie insisted that he’d lose the account unless he had sex with her—an act of premeditated blackmail not all that different from the sort that Pete used on his neighbor’s nanny. Bobbie wanted “the Don Draper treatment,” and she got it, for a while, until he turned the tables with a scene of digital one-upmanship that blurred the line, as the show frequently does, between sexual assault and role-playing kinkiness.
In season four, the partners reformed as Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. They had only one client, the closeted sadist Lee Garner, Jr., who had aggressively come onto Sal, the gay art director, in season three. Back then, when Sal said no, Don fired him. “What if it was some girl?” Sal had asked. “Then it would depend what kind of girl it was,” Don replied. “And what I knew about her.” SCDP’s first Christmas party seemed to take place in Garner’s own symbolic brothel, the staff dancing in a conga line to fulfill his fantasies. He even forced Roger Sterling to put on a Santa suit, then used his new Polaroid camera to take photos, a scene that played out like a porn shoot. That was the year when even Christmas bonuses seemed to operate as payment for sexual services rendered: Don got drunk, seduced his secretary, then left a cash bonus on her desk the next day. Alone among the players in the office economy, she quit.
Of course, sometimes this theme was less subtext than text, from the visit Don and his buddies made to a brothel earlier this year (“You are my king”) on back to Don’s own working girl, the one who slapped him through his post-divorce funk.
When you look at this bigger picture, Joan’s night with a Jaguar client is not only merely foreshadowed, but practically foreordained. And yet, why did it feel so traumatic? In part, of course, because Joan (and the charisma of Christina Hendricks) has become so much the heart of the series: she’s the beauty who has stayed past the point of obsolescence, the one she used to warn would come for every woman. But it also raised questions, at least for me. Despite Pete’s weasel words, I was suspicious of the idea that Roger (the father of Joan’s child), Lane (who has a financial motive, but who cares for her), and Cooper (well, who knows about Cooper) would all go along with this particular plan. Besides, Joan herself isn’t truly desperate: she may be a nearly divorced single mother, but she’s also a high-up office manager. The economy is booming. If the firm went under, she’d be able to get another job.
There’s also the bigger problem: if Joan is an expert on anything, it’s gossip. When Peggy first arrived in the office, Joan was the queen bee and enforcer of gender norms. Yet, over the years, she’s become the target of the talk she used to monitor and control. In her mid-thirties, Joan had her driver’s license pinned to the wall, so younger women could mock her age. Last season, a piggish copywriter pulled a similar prank, parodying her with a dirty cartoon. When, in the show’s single cruellest moment, Joan was raped on the office floor by her fiancé, it played out as a particularly sadistic twist on the secretary-boss role-play that provided her power—and when she didn’t scream, it was likely in part because she knew what people would say.
Can she really become a partner at that firm, a member of the inner circle, with everyone around her knowing just how she got that step up? Joan knows better than anyone there that secrets rarely stay hidden. It seems like a strategic misstep, and so, for this to make sense, I have to believe that Joan’s thinking was not so much pragmatic as a statement of her disgust: a furious response to the news of that closed-room discussion among men she knew—and of course, a way to get into that room. Joan might be a man’s woman, but this felt like a decision to both embrace their opinion and up the ante—to throw herself into the flames, not be thrown.
For all its historical aspects, “Mad Men” has always been a dreamlike show, full of scenes that edged on the unreal, from Roger’s blackface performance to that lawnmower gliding through the office and over a man’s foot. Joan’s decision had that kind of primal force. And of course, the episode wasn’t only about her: it was was a story of two promotions, not one. Hard work would never get Peggy anywhere, let alone into that buffet with the free lobster. It was Don’s revelation that Joan was a partner that steeled Peggy’s spine, making it impossible for Don to negotiate. That long kiss he paid Peggy, his head bowed, his lips to her hand (“a kiss on the hand may be quite continental…”), was an inversion of their touch at the end of Mad Men’s pilot, when a younger Peggy reached out to touch her boss’s hand, having learned that this was the only path to power. She’s come a long way, baby.
Photograph by Michael Yarish/AMC.
