I should be working on one of several end-of-semester projects right now, but the new season of Mad Men starts tonight, so screw it. I'm writing a post!
Last August, I wrote that I wasn't worried about Breaking Bad's final spate of episodes because I was reasonably positive that the show would stick the landing. And now that we're in pretty much in the same position with Mad Men [1], I thought about writing the same sort of post about the impending finale of Don Draper and company's story. But as I started thinking more about the post, I realized that I had basically nothing to say about the likelihood of Mad Men's future artistic success.
This, I realized, is because I honestly do not care one bit whether Mad Men's ending is good or bad.
That doesn't mean I'm disinterested in Mad Men's final season. I'm actually super stoked to see it. I am practically on the edge of my seat waiting to see what Matthew Weiner and the rest of the Mad Men creative staff will deliver as their ultimate statement on Don, Peggy, Pete, Sally, Roger, Joan, advertizing, capitalism, family, gender, privilege, history, identity, race [2], love, art, death, and any number of the other fascinating thematic and character territories the show has covered up to this point. I'm just not really interested in where any of the remaining episodes will fall on an A+—F scale, whether or not the finale will be a four-star, two-thumbs-up triumph or an embarrassment that somehow retroactively makes the whole show awful [3]. I just want to experience the show, whatever ends up happening.
And you know what? That's a pretty enjoyable place to be. Sometimes it seems like I spend so much time evaluating the art I consume that I forget to do what that art was actually created to do, which is to give me an experience that conveys something meaningful and/or entertaining about the human experience. I'm so busy discussing whether or not a given movie, series, book, painting, etc. was good or bad that I forget to engage in the experience beyond that binary evaluative system.
A few weeks ago, Sam Adams at Criticwire wrote a great piece about watching movies in which he argues that "when you watch a movie...you agree to submit to its vision." You aren't passive, but by watching the movie, you enter a sort of contract with the film that should make you engage with the work's ideas. You as the viewer are subservient to the demands of the film in that your discussion of it happens on the terms supplied by the work's art.
Those assertions get into a whole lot of thorny theoretical issues about the relationship of author, art, and audience, but one thing about the argument I can definitely get behind is the idea that a given work of art brings to its audience certain premises, and if we audience members ignore those premises, we're doing at least a little disservice to that art's vision.
I can't help but feel that when I try to decide if a work is good or bad and leave it at that, I'm not submitting to that work's vision. That's not to say that evaluation is an inherently bad thing—if nothing else, the work of the late Roger Ebert, whose career's meat and potatoes were basically made of evaluations, is a great example of the vitality of a good review. But when the bulk of the discussion surrounding a movie or TV episode consists of people trying to figure out if that film or episode is good or bad to the abandon of everything else (as the Internet is so wont to do with its myriad of grades, scores, and upvotes), isn't that missing the point? At least a tiny bit?
I'm sure plenty of us will have feelings about the worth of Mad Men's final season in good time (and it's okay to have them!), but for now, I'm really enjoying the respite from evaluation.
Until next time.
1] Well, sort of. I guess to be in the exact same position, I'd have to have written that post back in 2012 when the first half of Breaking Bad's fifth season was about to air, given that Mad Men is pulling the same pointless, greedy, AMC-realizing-with-desperation-that-it-has-basically-only-The-Walking-Dead-and-nothing-else episodic scheme. But let's not get into that.
2] Here's hoping Mad Men's pulling a long-con on this one and will pull the rug out from under us sometime this season, given how underplayed any real insight into American racial politics has been on this show so far.
3] A response to finales I've never really understood. I didn't like True Detective's ending either, folks, but dang it all, how does an ill-fitted ending make the awesomeness of episodes four and five any less awesome?
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