Mad Men Meets Forrest Gump

And now for something different....I haven't done a post in over a year, yes I know.  My life took a drastic turn in 2014 as I've described in one of my videos and to many I know through Facebook:  someone close to me for many years, my significant other, former husband and one whom I reluctantly accepted as a life mate, suddenly and unexpectedly, literally dropped dead  from a massive heart attack.  But that's not what this post is about.

 

Late last year I decided to watch the series Mad Men for the very first time....I was quite late to the game, as Mad Men has been around since 2007 and I was only familiar with Jon Hamm.

Well, I got so hooked that I spent the last two weeks of December into the New Year watching every episode available, and watching it a second time during AMC's Mad Men marathon prior to the concluding show.

I've read some of the articles about the last show; and now I'd like to give my own review.

On Mad Men

Mad Men deftly combined fantasy and reality:  in the story, the fantasy advertising firm Sterling Cooper was eventually absorbed by real life advertising firm McCann Erickson.   The fantasy advertising firm Sterling Cooper had real clients like Heinz and Jaguar, and fantasy clients like Secor Laxatives and Topaz hosiery.

So the reality against the backdrop of the tumultuous sixties were potent memories for me.  Firestone, the first major company I worked for in the early seventies as a secretary, had offices set up much like those at Sterling Cooper, with the executives' offices (at the time, occupied solely by men) around the side, and the secretaries sitting in the middle.  But the fantasy was no executive I knew of had a liquor bar in his office, and didn't drink during work.  The women really didn't dress so impeccably.   And hardly anyone smoked--or it wasn't so obvious.

Firestone was mentioned once in Mad Men as a potential client, as back then it was a much larger company, a major industry.  I remember when a manager scoffed about  the growth prospects of an upstart Japanese Tire manufacturer/competitor named Bridgestone.    Bridgestone, who would eventually buy out Firestone.

But it wasn't Firestone that held my interest, it was the auto company that would hire me later in the 1970's when I ended up living outside Detroit in what was basically a GM company town, Flint, Michigan.  Mad Men's portrayal of Buick as a client of McCann Erickson was very near and dear and real.   One of my many jobs was in the Buick Audit Department, and we had one person whose sole job was to audit McCann Erickson billings.

(Sidebar:  And the woman who audited these billings, a slender, harsh looking platinum blonde, was having a [blatantly obvious] affair with the married Audit department head.  That sex stuff was real, although not quite as extensive as Mad Men portrayed it to be.)

In the second to final episode, when one of the characters was informed that they would end up getting hired by Buick and living in Detroit, I started laughing and sarcastically yelled at the TV, oh no, if you're getting a job with Buick, you get to live in beautiful Flint, which is even better (choke) than Detroit!

The Final Show

I don't know how this could be called a "finale" because it left itself open for everything to be continued, especially with the character Don Draper.   Everything was plausibly believable except for Peggy Olsen and Stan Rizzo, there could at least been some build up there from previous shows, but this came out of nowhere.  But there is plenty of potential drama in the new alliances.

In the scene where Don was stranded in Alva, Oklahoma, getting his Cadillac fixed, too much time was spent lingering on the coke machine that the hotel owner told Don he wasn't interested in fixing.  Then there's the tweets about the dress of some of those in the hippy commune being eerily similar to some of those in the coke commercial the show ended with.  Then there's the conversation with Peggy who tells him that work needs to be done on the Coca-Cola account.  So every implication was that Don was going back to the McCann Erickson to make Coke the "real thing."

(On the other hand, when Peggy was told that someday people were going to know her name and that by 1980 she'd be a creative director like Don, it's also a good possibility Peggy was behind the Coca-Cola commercial.  Too much was pointing to Don, however.)

Then there's Joan Harris snorting the other coke (which was why coke was called coke originally, if I'm not mistaken).   That portends of what Don's new inebriant of choice might be.

If I could do my own continuation, and it's now the early 1970's, I'd have Don coming to Detroit to meet the incoming president of GM, one John DeLorean, who at the time could easily match the dapper good looks of Don Draper, along with the womanizing.   Don's knowledge of cars and his racing in the salt flats in the final episode would make another good fit.  Those two would make a great pair.  John DeLorean could even introduce Don to cocaine.  Oh the possibilities!

The Forrest Gump Connection

Just need that fickle feather of fate.

When Don gave his Cadillac to the kid in Alva who took the "kitchen" money and sat at the bus stop, I could see the feather drift through the air in front of him.   They could have ended it right there, but it was too similar.    "Mad Men" took us through the sixties in almost the same way  the movie Forrest Gump took us through the sixties and seventies.  One was an innocent, naive and slow-witted, while the other was a corrupted, hedonistic genius, and yet, there at the end, they both sat waiting for a bus and nothing really mattered, and money had no meaning for they had given away most of it.  One a war hero, one a deserter.   One whose first love interest died of  HIV due to unprotected sex, one whose first love interest died of cancer from smoking.   Both were ready, as Don would say, to "move forward."  

And time for me to "move forward" on the Great Debate.