mythogyny

great art comes for you where you are. it is so large it finds you, small you, in the middle of your turmoil, of your frenetic living. i am talking about savage detectives and emperor's babe, the latest book i started, but really right now i am talking about a tv show. mad men. it finished its season this last week and i've been watching it thru on demand.

talking about a show is in some ways as hard as talking about a novel because great shows have epic qualities. of course this one is from people involved with the sopranos so clearly, epic qualities, complex characters and storylines, layers constantly peeled off. some reviews say it moves too slow. i think that has made me pay more attention, slow down for it. the payoffs coming later are so satisfying i stand up from my couch and clap. i should apply that slowing down to my life but that is a whole other show that needs a lot of work.

mad men is about advertising guys on madison avenue at the beginning of the 60s. the secretary pool is like a harem and the wives are tucked away upstate while the men roam manhattan, lying and selling. it's about mythology and misogyny. it is totally irresistible to me. tonight it even slapped me awake from the foolishness i live. the lead man is basically clark kent, jet black hair, looks like he's gonna bust out of his suit, but his alter ego is not a hero, he is all the shame that america loves hiding. i could even lend him my updated alter ego moniker, pena honda, deep pain, deep shame, said with the head buried in the hands. it's a shame of poverty and unwantedness, his more than mine but mine is certainly related and empathic, empathetic?, pathetic at times yes, connected to the blood that has felt such hurt.

the leading lady in the show is not his wife but his secretary, who is not his daughter but he treats like one, or at least like some kind of little sister. she is smart of course and of course becomes the first lady to write copy in that taliban-ass office. she is young and her mythology is just forming in some devastating ways. one episode has her in the throes of an affair with a junior executive one moment, celebrating her first successful copy the next, and losing that boy in the last. it's much better than that even. i don't want to give away too many details even though i know most everyone i know who reads this won't see it for months if ever cuz of lack of cable, or lack of its priority in their lives. but at this point the details aren't so important. it's the feeling it's giving me. that what i suffer thru ain't shit. that it's time to be an adult no matter how much i fight it. that i can be a smarter person. that i can see thru illusion once and for all. that i shouldn't discard my instincts. that self-preservation matters. it destroys too but it matters.

the last episode found me where i'm at cuz it dealt with nostalgia, a.k.a. saudade, a.k.a. mythology. inkaquatic thought i was gonna be more brutal about all the abusers of the word but when i got to it (see "the abuse of saudade") i realized that's just not the point of the word. not that the writers don't deserve some lashing for their superficial use. still the important thing is the feeling. clark kent of mad men, his name is don draper, sort of, he talked all about it. something about a greek root for nostalgia that is about a literal pain from an old wound, a twinge in the heart at the memory of it. i discussed saudade with kalyban and we wikied it and there were other words in german and japanese that he latched onto, more nuances for this missing feeling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade, scroll down to "See Also sehnsucht and mono no aware"). don draper, a.k.a. clark kent, a.k.a. pena honda, was using nostalgia to sell product and he uses family portraits of his own, him and his barbie doll wife and 2.4 children, the ones he won't be with for thanksgiving cuz he's selling product that sells memories, in this case the carousel projector that provided those suburban slide shows for decades. not like i would really know anything about that, i'm not that generation or that race or even really that nationality to know about that kind of american nostalgia. the only way i know about is from watching tv families like the brady bunch watching slide shows in their episodes.

it's tall tales upon tall tales, us creating ourselves constantly, an idea as frightening as it is empowering. it gets frightening when say the show connects the nixon-kennedy election to the fraud of today, the illegitimacy we've always lived with in this country, all of it as fixed as any sport. it is empowering when it shows one mistress of clark kent's, a jewess too smart and self-worthy to believe illusion, calling him out, calling him a coward, someone she doesn't know. she wanted to believe that surface as much as anyone in america does, especially anyone outside of what is considered american, but she couldn't ignore the truth behind the myth when it peeled back before her. it made me unwrap the reality of the crap i've been living with today, the fixation, the refusal to see what's true. yes, about men, but about me, about history, personal and large. it's a lot that some two-dimensional character has that much to say to me but that's how i'm gotten to, mythologically. the reality is not enough. i need the parallel, the reflection. the only way i see me.