Mad Men
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Where are the doors?
Who gets to say who can walk through them?
And when people realize that a door is locked to them, how do they feel?
Every scene in The Hobo Code asks some version of these questions, and the timing seems just right.
The Hobo Code strings its story through four key scenes.
After she hustles in, the doors stay open a bit longer so an African-American janitor can board.
The man doesnt smile or roll his eyes or mutter in disgust.
His face is blank.
Theyre laughing as they enter, and after the door shuts they laugh again, more loudly.
The scene holds on Peggys face in close-up as she hears their laughter.
Its as clear an image of gender discrimination in the midcentury white-collar workplace as the show has given us.
Peggys face is anxious, as if shes worried the jokes on her.
This scene and others that follow sully what might have seemed like an unabashed victory.
The appearance of progress is not progress.
This is the episode where Peggy starts to separate from Joan, her supervisor and would-be mentor.
Joan, on the other hand, brings everything back to sex.
Clarkes, with melancholy Petes encouragement.
He says, I dont like you like this.
He sounds betrayed and miserable.
What does he mean like this?
Not dependent on Pete?
She drifts back to the revelry as if on tender soles.
When she resumes her dance, she wipes away a tear.
The heart of this scene, though, is a consideration of Midges friends.
Provenzanos script mocks them a bit.
But it also situates them accurately in this time and place.
Midges pals couldve been figures in Norman Mailers essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.
Don is a young Dick Nixon on the outside, but inside, he has a rebels temperament.
He treats people of lower social station as emotional and moral equals.
And he subconsciously rejects the suburban nuclear-family fantasy that he worked so long to achieve.
These flashbacks feel like the dour real-world equivalent of a superhero origin story.
The sign on the Whitman fence tells those who can read it that a dishonest man lives here.
Excerpted with permission fromMad Men Carouselby Matt Zoller Seitz.
