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I mean saved the day by a problem he caused, entirely by his own greed. Also if he compromised he could have not died CharlestheHammer fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Feb 20, 2021 |
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Feb 20, 2021 17:11
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Shageletic posted:But you said BB made Walt out to be a villain? Yes. I'm not sure where you are seeing the contradiction? He's a much more effective villain that Don. Walt is driven by pride. Don is passive, he's a catalyst who remains fundamentally unchanged. A man liberated by death vs golden handcuffs of the patriarchy. Just because they are a villain doesn't mean they can't have some measure of redemption. That's also part of what makes a villain compelling instead of just lifestyle porn. Somebody fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Feb 20, 2021 |
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Feb 20, 2021 18:35
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CharlestheHammer posted:I mean saved the day by a problem he caused, entirely by his own greed. "Saved the day" is also pretty restrained. He's destroyed his family, left a trail of bodies in his wake with a massive power vacuum -- plus a dangerous drug is more popular than ever because of what he did. Freeing Jesse, killing Nazis and going out on his own terms with his creation offers some redemption but I don't think you can call Walt "redeemed".
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Feb 20, 2021 18:37
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VinylonUnderground posted:Yes. I'm not sure where you are seeing the contradiction? He's a much more effective villain that Don. Walt is driven by pride. Don is passive, he's a catalyst who remains fundamentally unchanged. A man liberated by death vs golden handcuffs of the patriarchy. Just because they are a villain doesn't mean they can't have some measure of redemption. That's also part of what makes a villain compelling instead of just lifestyle porn. I'm confused. You said you didnt like Mad Men bc it was valorizing bad men. Breaking Bad is valorizing bad men. And you like BB because it valorizes him even harder?
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Feb 20, 2021 19:56
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Shageletic posted:I'm confused. You said you didnt like Mad Men bc it was valorizing bad men. Breaking Bad is valorizing bad men. And you like BB because it valorizes him even harder? I never said I didn't like Mad Men. I like it quite a lot. I think Mad Men fails to condemn bad men.
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Feb 20, 2021 20:08
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For the most part, I think Mad Men is not interested in condemnation. There are some exceptions (Greg is very rarely given a sympathetic scene). But overall, I think it takes a perspective on people that reminds me of Vonnegut. It observes and examines people doing bad things and making themselves and others miserable, but it has a fundamental compassion for almost everyone. It observes the characters and encourages us to root for them to become better and happier versions of themselves. At least, that's how I feel about it, and that's part of why I like it so much. e: that is not to say that there is no value in works that condemn certain types of people. sometimes it's even good to produce works that are outright propaganda, galvanizing people against some kind of injustice. but not everything has to be like that, and Mad Men's primary subject is life itself, and life is full of ambiguity and unresolvable questions and problems. Yoshi Wins fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Feb 20, 2021 |
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Feb 20, 2021 20:33
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Sure. I just think that one of the things that Weiner talks about a lot in interviews is the fundamental hollowness of Don. I just don't think he actually does a good job translating that to the screen where Don is Captain Awesome followed by *sad trombone*. It alternates between Frank and his Brother talking about "Those were the days!" at Shadynasty's and a middle schooler's idea of being "deep". Don Draper is a clove cigarette. And Weiner loving loves clove cigarettes. In Mad Men you have an awesome man being awesome (but he is sad inside because he is deep and has real feelings. ). In Breaking Bad you have a small pathetic man freed by death (that starts at the pilot and ends at the finale).
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Feb 20, 2021 20:47
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You can like a a show and think it fails at something. As an example I like the shield but I think it kind of muddled the Vic is bad message during the middle. It has strong beginning and a strong end, but the meat of the show kind of fails on that
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Feb 20, 2021 20:51
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VinylonUnderground posted:I never said I didn't like Mad Men. I like it quite a lot. I think Mad Men fails to condemn bad men. Is this a negative? If so, Breaking Bad does that even worse. I'm a fan of Breaking Bad. But the above is one of the reasons I dont go back to it. E: Just to be clear, I don't think a show is "bad" if it glamorizes bad behavior. I do think its a failing if the show seems to believe in its own bs, if it tries to make the world turn to justify those actions. I wasnt the one who brought up the morality of characters, that was Vinylon. I'm just trying to figure out their point Shageletic fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Feb 20, 2021 |
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Feb 20, 2021 22:25
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I loving love BB and it’s definitely unfair to say it’s just plot-focused because the character work is fuckin fantastic but it’s definitely more plot-based than Mad Men
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Feb 20, 2021 23:55
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Escobarbarian posted:I loving love BB and it’s definitely unfair to say it’s just plot-focused because the character work is fuckin fantastic but it’s definitely more plot-based than Mad Men I do too, I'm just thinking of a few elements, eg the atc guy, gus' deathless hunger for perfect meth, etc. Areas where people just are a certain way because otherwise it wouldn't work. This puts it well: https://tv.avclub.com/how-breaking-bad-broke-free-of-the-clockwork-universe-p-1798239868
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Feb 21, 2021 02:07
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VinylonUnderground posted:Sure. I just think that one of the things that Weiner talks about a lot in interviews is the fundamental hollowness of Don. I just don't think he actually does a good job translating that to the screen where Don is Captain Awesome followed by *sad trombone*. It alternates between Frank and his Brother talking about "Those were the days!" at Shadynasty's and a middle schooler's idea of being "deep".
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Feb 21, 2021 04:56
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doublepost
lurker2006 fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Feb 21, 2021 |
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Feb 21, 2021 04:56
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Shageletic posted:Is this a negative? If so, Breaking Bad does that even worse. Nah. Other people are vibing on what I'm saying but since you are misunderstanding me, I want to focus on this. Walt is a small man liberated by death and despite being a male fantasy, he dies a small man. That is what makes good drama. Don is a totally awesome dude who is totally amazing with "sad dog" moments. That is what makes bad fanfics. In terms of my original "you can't make an anti-war movie" argument, Vince has a lot of sympathy for small pathetic men. I think Breaking Bad does an effective job showing what Walt's power fantasy ends up becoming while telegraphing it the entire time in an organic way. The first lesson of chemistry is "hot glass looks like cold glass". That leads to burned fingers. Vince's sympathy makes a sad pathetic man seem awesome. Contrast that with Mad Men. "You can't make an anti-war movie" because here Weiner adores sexual violence and wealth. Weiner's sympathy makes a suave dude who is wealthy and can just "grab them by the pussy" seem awesome.
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Feb 21, 2021 08:59
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VinylonUnderground posted:
Don seems pathetic, not awesome, like at least half the time.
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Feb 21, 2021 09:05
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niethan posted:Don seems pathetic, not awesome, like at least half the time. Only when a *sad trombone* is playing.
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Feb 21, 2021 09:07
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VinylonUnderground posted:Nah. Except when he sweatily begs his mistress to run away with him, bails on his own kids birthday or gets kicked out by his wife? Idk I just don't see how you get 'bad fanfic' out of the series, he's a front and we see the front and what's behind it.
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Feb 21, 2021 09:14
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Gets walked back immediately. Used to establish that "Don is a heel" which is a great example of Weiner "telling" with a *sad trombone*. Last one starts to be something. But by that point the show has established that Don has a clear "type" and it ain't Betty. Betty is the "type" he feels he needs to pursue as a function of the mask he wants to present (as I said before, "Confessions of a Mask" this ain't). Don losing Betty isn't a thing. The only "show" aspect of Don losing Betty that might be bad would be a Rodger parallel where Don could go from being "really rich" to "rich" like how Rodger had to go from being "really really rich" to "really rich". You'll forgive me if I don't give a poo poo.
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Feb 21, 2021 09:26
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I wish you luck finding the shows you want to see.
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Feb 21, 2021 09:28
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sebmojo posted:I wish you luck finding the shows you want to see. I mean, I've taken part in the "Best shows of the Year" thread for the last three years and made effort posts. I continue to make effort posts about the shows I like. I also adore Mad Men, especially where we are in the thread. I don't care for Elizabeth Moss and I do like Peggy. How her role shifts is a juggling act between those two. Pete is good. The whole supporting cast is amazing. Like Moss/Peggy, I love what Weiner is *telling* us, I just hate what Weiner is *showing* us. That tension is fun too and I'm absolutely going to call it out. That's what makes it fun. CharlesTheHammer has the right idea. You can like a show even if you think it fails at certain things. When it comes to people I love them because of, not in spite of, their flaws. I'm going to be more critical of an artificial construct like a show. Especially if the show runner keeps saying, "I'M SAYING THIS!" and then absolutely not showing it. Going with CtH's point about the Shield, when the Shield was airing narrative TV was something done by professional wrestling, soap operas and weird poo poo that either nobody watches (B5) or weird poo poo on prestige networks like HBO. So you end up with a "narrative Vic" and a "procedural Vic" and there was a stretch where The Shield flirted with the idea of being another Law and Order so it was all "procedural Vic" with him occasionally grumbling about "the Armenians" to keep "narrative Vic" alive. Artistically, that isn't a great thing but deciding to get a paycheck makes sense to me. That is different from the artistic choice to venerate wealth, which leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
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Feb 21, 2021 10:01
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Hey sorry I haven't written up the latest episode, I'm dealing with a real life deadline that absolutely has to be met and it's taking up a lot of time and creative energy, and I'm really keen to get past it so I can kick back and watch more of this very good show. Thanks for your patience.
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Feb 21, 2021 10:40
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Jerusalem posted:Hey sorry I haven't written up the latest episode, I'm dealing with a real life deadline that absolutely has to be met and it's taking up a lot of time and creative energy, and I'm really keen to get past it so I can kick back and watch more of this very good show. Thanks for your patience. c'est la vie. bon chance
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Feb 21, 2021 14:07
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Also if I had to choose, I think Jon Hamm is more attractive than Bryan Cranston (although it is extremely close for me, don't get me wrong), therefore I think mad men is the better show
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Feb 21, 2021 14:08
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VinylonUnderground posted:Gets walked back immediately. You have repeatedly said moments like Don disgusting his mistress by urging her to help him bail on his entire life and family is 'sad trombone' (or 'sad dog', whatever the gently caress that is) plotting; only the moments where he has sex, gains money or lands a business deal count. I've got a feeling that any example of how Don being deeply flawed and pathetic throughout, and how that's inextricably linked with the his positive moments, is going to be written off as a sad animal or brass instrument, but gently caress it, I think I can talk about what appeals to me about Mad Men, and mostly implying what I don't care for in Breaking Bad, without totally making GBS threads over the thread. Because I do think that great TV needs to succeed at what it sets out to do, and I do think that Mad Men, for all its own flaws, succeeds. When I watch this scene it cements the whole season long reveal of how far Don is, amongst other things, a coward. It follows the reveal of his Korean (pro?)war experience as pissing himself in fear, trying to light a smoke with quivering hands and accidentally incinerating with CO - which is fair enough reaction to getting shelled, until he uses it as an opportunity to steal the dead man's identity and leads directly to the entirely passive but very deliberate fleeing from his little brother and leaving him to parochial misery. This reframes the earlier moment of rejecting his brother as an adult from ruthlessness to cowardice, which is a good idea, because behaving ruthlessly in a show tends to read as badass rather than repellant - unless there's someone who matters on the receiving end, and not an incidental nobody or rival tyrant. Most of the time Mad Men doesn't have to worry about this, because it's sincerely invested in a network of characters who have relationships and goals and flaws of their own. We don't need to be told that Don abusing and neglecting the people in his life is bad, because we already care about characters like Betty, Peggy, Roger, and Joan in their own right and we know they're all hopelessly interdependent. Even the antagonists like Pete and Duck, who represent his key work triumphs so far, stick around, because the show is demonstrating, not telling, that Don and his work victories are only so important. This isn't Weiner waking up with night sweats and inserting mea culpas into all his self-insertion fantasy scripts about the cool misogynist businessman from the 60s. The tension between the glamour and persuasive power of advertising and its manipulativeness and false promise just is the purpose and drama and characterisation of the show, and it works for those willing to grant sympathetic moments and accept alienating ones, which are often weaved into one. Don's an untutored hillbilly pariah who inhaled the promise of advertising and reinvented himself with the power of imagemaking; this is baked into everything he is and does. When Roger is in a hospital bed trying to form thoughts about his whole existence fading out along with his all little fleeting moments of sexual conquest, Don still sounds half dipshit hayseed and half compulsive sloganeer when he weakly wonders if Roger is talking about vitality as 'the thing that makes you get up and go'. The connection misses, Don leaves uneasy but baffled and Roger forgets his own moment of humility as soon as he's well enough to gently caress around again; by the end of the season, Don's begging for the love, permanence and stability of family, but they're both going to need years more of bottoming out and threatened irrelevance to push them to change and not try and piece their self-image back together. That arbitrarily plucked season one moment might not speak to human nature for everyone, but it does to me, and I'm guessing most of the people into the show. Don's frequently and irreducably a horrible person, but he's not evil and never a villain; as you pointed out yourself, his problem on the show is one iteration of everyone's problem. The whole thing feels like a miscategorisation - you've insisted on a superficial read of who the main character is and you've decided that the show has set out to celebrate his villainy. This is not why Don is entangled among a set of characters with their own fully realised lives, and that's not why it's placed specifically in the slipstream of 60s history where postwar prosperity and white male supremacy as a given are going to have their first actual crisis moment, for reasons outside any of their control. If he were given Walter White level status in this show - if the entire world genuinely revolved around him and the plot momentum he generates, if opposing him was only ever a total act of hubris in which you could only be destroyed or subordinated, if his wrongdoing was played overwhelmingly as notes of slick ruthlessness and comic self-pity, if condemnation of that wrongdoing were reduced to silly too-huge moments of symbolic in-air plane collisions and whistling a jaunty tune after dissolving a child in acid before granting him comprehensive victory on his own terms - the show would be what you're describing, and it would be loving woeful.
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Feb 21, 2021 14:12
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I thought Don was a sad, pathetic shell of a person desperately crouching beneath a facade of awesome for most of the show's run...so I'm not sure what you're talking about with "sad trombone" moments and "walking everything back".
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Feb 21, 2021 14:21
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I actually agree that Don is very much do a thing then feel bad about how sad he is. It wouldn’t be so bad if the show wasn’t so formulaic about it but mad men runs into the problem a lot of the prestige television shows where you can see how TV it is coming from a mile away. Ultimately it’s a silly show that fans desperately want to pretend is grounded instead of a bit cartoonish. Which is fine with me but I think people wouldn’t like that to be true
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Feb 21, 2021 16:44
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CharlestheHammer posted:I actually agree that Don is very much do a thing then feel bad about how sad he is. It wouldn’t be so bad if the show wasn’t so formulaic about it but mad men runs into the problem a lot of the prestige television shows where you can see how TV it is coming from a mile away. There is no problem when you can see what's going to happen. Doing something against what the character would actually do in this situation because its too predictable leads to bad TV. Then you get showrunners doing dumb things because they want to be smarter than the audience.
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Feb 21, 2021 16:54
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I’m tired of show and movie creators feeling that they need to subvert our expectations because it usually goes horribly.
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Feb 21, 2021 16:59
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GoutPatrol posted:There is no problem when you can see what's going to happen. Doing something against what the character would actually do in this situation because its too predictable leads to bad TV. Then you get showrunners doing dumb things because they want to be smarter than the audience. I I don’t mean there decision making I mean bad thing is going to happen and it does because that’s what these types of shows rely on for drama. I’m not as mad at mad men for it because the show was 8 years ago and it was new then. but I feel it’s a whole these types of shows overrely on this so I’ve lost interest in them really. Just reveling in how tortured your character is. At least for shows like Sopranos and Mad Men these characters are so over the top I don’t mind it as much
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Feb 21, 2021 17:07
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Good luck Jerusalem!  For what it's worth, I think the show successfully does condemn bad men, after all it's Don's attempts to actually break his cycles in season 6 and 7 that are the catalyst for the show's final arc. That has to be worth something for it to land.
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Feb 21, 2021 19:20
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Getting mad when a show doesn't condemn bad people instead of getting mad at the nerds who can't read enough subtext to understand that Don is not a figure to emulate.
a new study bible! fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Feb 21, 2021 |
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Feb 21, 2021 21:49
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buddy I haven't read a page of subtext in my life, and you're gonna tell me i need to read it here? nice try
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Feb 21, 2021 22:18
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I wrote my masters thesis on the use of sad trombones in literature, and I assure you that Mad Men is a good show.
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Feb 21, 2021 23:10
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I knew Don was a piece of poo poo from the end of the first episode. A piece of poo poo that's really loving good at his job, but a piece of poo poo nonetheless. The show then proceeds to show us how every character is also a piece of poo poo for one reason or another and that Don is a scared sweaty nobody terrified that the world is one second away from finding out that he's a sweaty nobody. Because once the world finds out he's nothing, then he can't get away with being horrible in every regard. It isn't that complicated.
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Feb 22, 2021 00:00
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a new study bible! posted:Getting mad when a show doesn't condemn bad people instead of getting mad at the nerds who can't read enough subtext to understand that Don is not a figure to emulate. The argument over "Death of the author" is probably the defining conversation of the current era of film/literary criticism. I.E. what are the author's intentions for a work, and do those intentions show through the work?
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Feb 22, 2021 00:09
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Sash! posted:I knew Don was a piece of poo poo from the end of the first episode. Almost like that was the entire point of the pilot.
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Feb 22, 2021 00:59
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The Klowner posted:The argument over "Death of the author" is probably the defining conversation of the current era of film/literary criticism. I.E. what are the author's intentions for a work, and do those intentions show through the work? Is it Martin Scorsese’s fault that his inarguably critical stories on the poo poo that is the mafia has glorified it in the eyes of a lot of stupid people?
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Feb 22, 2021 03:42
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Jon Hamm was capable of desperate panic sweat better than any other actor that has ever lived and Don would be nothing without it.
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Feb 22, 2021 03:46
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before each episode he had to enter nervous panic sweat, Weiner would walk right up to Jon Hamm and tell him that the Kansas City Royals were in the ninth inning and they were tied. After filming Weiner would laugh it off and say they weren't actually a real baseball team, which is what leads to the great Don Drinking Things scenes.
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Feb 22, 2021 03:51
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Sash! posted:Jon Hamm was capable of desperate panic sweat better than any other actor that has ever lived and Don would be nothing without it. People love when he's cool, calm, and confident. But he sells desperate man walking on quicksand better than nearly any actor I could name.
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Feb 22, 2021 03:52
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