Category: Television

Part of Audiovisualcy, a column exploring the art and technique of the online video essay.

KEVIN B. LEE: Jim, your latest Mad Men video "The Other Woman & the Long Walk" (watch it above) really got my attention. On a design level, it seems pretty straightforward. Watching it, at first it seems like I'm just watching clips from the show, one after another. But very soon I realize that the video – and you, as its editor – are doing much more than this.

As one clip cuts to another, I feel a conversation beginning to emerge between them, which you are orchestrating. I start to feel like I am watching the show through another set of eyes. To do this without any explicit commentary, text, elaborate editing or effects, is remarkable.

In fact, I think it's because of this non-invasive approach that the viewer can have a special experience. It gives the viewer room to piece together the connections you are making without being told what they are. It's like playing a puzzle with one's eyes – a quality that distinguishes Mad Men from most other shows in that it leaves a lot of subtexts for the viewer to piece together on their own. Your video compresses and intensifies that experience.

Among the things I got from watching your video:

– I LOVE how it reorients the show around the women. One of my gripes with Mad Men for a while has been how it seemed at times to talk from both corners of its mouth, poking holes at the patriarchy while retaining its male-centric hold on the narrative (for all its rich female characters, it still often amounted to The Don Draper Show). Season Five has been a satisfying redress of this imbalance, with Don seeming to slip into the sidelines of a world spinning beyond his control, especially in regards to women – but watching your video is in some ways even better.

– How far the show has come from its first episode. That dialogue with Joan walking Peggy through the office from the series pilot is so expository; I don't think the writers would be caught dead being that on the nose today. Nor do they have to be – after five seasons so many layers of narrative and character subtext have accumulated, that even a simple moment like watching Don Draper teach a boy how to drive resonates on multiple levels and past episodes.

– I noticed how Joan addresses "Mr. Draper" in the pilot and realized how much her relationship with him and the other men in the office has evolved, just as much as Peggy's has. Their parallel trajectories are something you bring out vividly.

Anyway, your video got me thinking about the other videos you've made, as well as the series of videos Press Play produced at the start of the season by myself and Deborah Lipp, with a team of contributors – most notably Serena Bramble, who created "It's a Mad World," a dazzling tribute montage that understandably went viral. I thought the four of us could have a conversation about our experience making these videos and what they taught us about the show and about video essays. For now, over to you Deborah.

DEBORAH LIPP: Mad Men Moments (MMM) were the first video essays I worked on, and it was, for me, an exercise in using images to express verbal ideas, and using words to describe visual ideas. I'm a word person: My life has been spent as a writer. Working with Kevin I got to see how a visual person, someone who expresses himself through visual media, works. The thing I love about our MMM is that each approaches the subject matter very differently. "Season 1: The Carousel" was almost non-verbal, using only words from the episode. "Season 2: The Sad Clown Dress" was about images, but essentially used images to talk about something that could easily have been written. "Season 3: The Lawnmower" illustrated a remarkable written essay, and "Season 4: The Fight" was essentially a dialogue between subtext and image.

So the thing that leaps out at me in your essays, Jim, is the lack of words. You're communicating entirely through visuals. In fact, the essay titles tend to be the only thing that tells, in words, what your essays are about. Yet they're still easy to "read" and they say a lot about the topic.

I almost wish "The Long Walk" had been more strictly chronological, because I cannot get enough of the narrative arc of Peggy's remarkable changes from pony-tail wearing Brooklyn secretary all the way to copy chief at Cutler, Gleason & Chaough. I disagree with Kevin that the series gives lip service to the women. I think Season 4, if anything, was the most powerful in regard to women's issues, and I think "The Beautiful Girls" is one of the standout episodes of five seasons of Mad Men.

So, my question is about how you approach the material visually. How you select images and decide on a topic inside a non-verbal framework. I'd like to ask that same question to you, Serena. How pre-designed and how intuitive was your process in assembling clips from all the seasons? Whatever the case, it worked!

JIM EMERSON: First, thanks for your comments and for inviting me to participate in this discussion. I'm with you, Deborah, about the women on the show — in 2010 (after the Slattery-directed "The Rejected," which ended with the exchange of looks between Peggy and Pete through the SCDP glass lobby doors), I referred to "Mad Men" as "The Peggy Olson Show Featuring Don Draper" — and the four MM video essays I've done for seasons 4 and 5 ("Modern Compartments," "Beautiful Girls [and Mad Men]: Ghosts of the 37th Floor," "The Ladies in the Boxes," "The Other Women") have all focused on the women, because I think they're the most fascinating, complex and deeply mysterious characters on the show: Peggy, Joan and Megan, of course, but also Sally (the heart and soul of Season 4, in my opinion) and Betty.

And thank you, Deborah and Roberta and Kevin, for "The Sad Clown Dress," one of the most insightful and moving pieces I've seen about Betty. (I'd love to do a piece devoted entirely to the fainting couch…) BTW, I've never understood the criticism of January Jones in this role; whenever she comes across as wooden or phony or robotic it's because that's the way Betty often is! Like when she spews talking points she's learned at Weight Watchers, or talks to Sally about her period. Betty's not a bad person in these scenes, and Jones is not a bad actress. Betty just, fundamentally, lacks empathy — almost as if she's emotionally autistic. She has no idea who she is, and she's not comfortable in her own skin, so she goes on auto-pilot a lot, and you capture that in "The Sad Clown Dress." (Poor Betty is so clueless about other people that she just latches on to the suspicions saboteur Jimmy Barrett implants in her head, without really understanding why. But my theory all along has been that she sensed her husband was not who he said he was, but she can't explain why, and that pretty much drives her insane. Don's deceptions make her borderline schizophrenic.)

The first video essay I ever did (called "close up" was in 2007 for the House Next Door "Close-Up Blogathon" and it was images and music (and a lot of sound mixing) without any titles or dialog or narration, mainly because I did it over the weekend and had to teach myself to use iMovie at the same time. So, I had to keep it fairly simple (even though there are multiple layers of sound under the images). It was just a stream-of-consciousness thing, as most of mine are. My intention, as Kevin points out, is to convey what was going through my head — memories, motifs — while I was watching the episode/movie. Critical writing has to be both descriptive and analytical, and what I love most about video is its ability to create new contexts for the patterns I notice, using pieces of the original itself.

So, briefly (I hope), the idea for "The Long Walk" began with a desire to shuffle between the key conversations in "The Other Woman," because they are all strikingly similar, and all about the women declaring "no negotiation." So, I started with the two exchanges between Joan and Pete (in her office, then in his), the "Little Murders" flare-up between Don and Megan in their bedroom, and the final talk between Don and Peggy. Then it seemed they could be made to reverberate a little more by including Lane and Joan in her office, Peggy and Ted Chaough at the diner, and Don and Joan in Joan's apartment.

The way Peggy went in to collect her stuff (notice the three pieces of technology in the corner of her office: the typewriter, the phone, the speaker box — same as the "technology even women could use") reminded me of Joan's "orientation" in Episode 1, when Peggy first carried a box of stuff into the original Sterling-Cooper offices. And then it grew from there. The first thing I thought of was the sound of high heels on linoleum, because it seemed to me that the whole episode centered on the idea of Peggy walking away, so I searched around for the sound I wanted (bought it for five bucks from an online sound effects place) and layered it under the existing sound at the beginning and the end. I wanted to use it in a disembodied way, like the sound of the ringing phone at the beginning of "Once Upon a Time in America," combined with the dislocated walking scenes interspersed throughout "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie." Anyway, that's where the idea came from, I think!

(Just now, as I was writing this, I got a comment from somebody on Vimeo saying he would never have made the connection between Joan's "men love scarves" in S01E01 and Peggy's scarf in her meeting with Ted Chaough in S05E11 if he hadn't seen "The Long Walk." That's the kind of thing you hope to accomplish with these pieces!)

The elevator stuff at the end seemed natural, but I wanted those last two false endings to echo the repeat of Don's visit to Joan's apartment in the episode itself. Also like "Discreet Charm" (in which people wake from dreams into other dreams), Peggy breaks the spell of the final shot of "The Beautiful Girls" by pushing the elevator button again, and then Don interrupts "You Really Got Me" by pushing the same button… and then peering into the empty elevator shaft. For me, that's the void Peggy's leaving behind. Then there's "She's a Lady," which I started singing after I'd finished dancing around the room (with tears in my eyes) after "You Really Got Me," the first time I saw the episode. It's anachronistic (1971), but I didn't start it until the end credits. I considered doing a music video for the song using images of Peggy, Joan and Megan from this episode (lyrics by Paul "My Way"/"Having My Baby" Anka; lead guitar by Jimmy Page!).

Serena, "It's a Mad World" is absolutely beautiful and haunting — a dazzling example of my personal-favorite kind of video "essay" (sans narration). I love the way it's thematically organized into sections/songs on various subjects: the city, "Who is Don Draper?," advertising, booze and smokes, "What do women want?"… Can you tell us a little about how you went about organizing and putting all this together?

SERENA BRAMBLE: Well, luckily I was already a big fan of Mad Men before I created the montage, so I already had a grasp on the myriad of themes Weiner and co. spin in the series, but doing the montage I scraped just an inch more underneath the surface of who Don Draper is–or rather, the conflict between the man Don wants to be (which to me birthed his rush engagement to Megan and seems to be haunting him into their marriage), the very imperfect man, husband and father he really is, the image of perfect masculinity he sells with the same soothing reassurance as he sells products that people do not need, and above all, the man he is running away from, Dick Whitman. That is the heart of Mad Men: the secrets that pain us versus the lies we tell ourselves to keep face. Five seasons in, we are no closer to truly understanding who Don Draper really is, because he himself doesn't even know how to answer that question. I don't know if this is true or not, but I've heard a rumor that in every single episode, there is a line of dialogue that is a variation on the line, "What do you want me to say?" I really, really wanted to include a clip of Don saying that to Betty in "The Inheritance" (the episode where Gene is conceived in a moment of desperation), because it encapsulates the heart of that: that the Don Draper persona is a projection of what Dick Whitman thinks people want him to be: the debonair professional, the loving husband and father, the man who says what you need him to say. Essentially, the man who can be whatever we want him to be–the man who is whatever room he walks into, according to Bert.

I knew that I wanted to construct my montage so it would start on the surface–establishing the setting, time and place because it's so different from what we understand from modern times, yet as Rachel says, is the place too perfect to be true, and then work my way inward as best as I could. I was also influenced by the opening of Midnight in Paris with my opening montage, so I found public domain footage of Greenwitch Village from the late 60s, as a way of showing life as it really was, then cross-fading to the old New York of Mad Men, the place too good to be true, and the secondary characters trying to pinpoint Don, to no avail. Of course another major facet of Don's life is his work–in the season 4 opener and later in "The Suitcase," he uses his work as a shield for his crumbling personal life, so I segued into a work montage since most of the series' best moments take place at the office. I feel it's impossible to talk about Mad Men without mentioning the drinking, which is frequently covered up with a sly, Nick-and-Nora-like playfulness and slightness, and I also didn't want my montage to get too heavy with existentialism, so it was a fun part to put together.

I feel inferior talking about this when Jim did such a lovely, perceptive job at depicting the same theme in his essay "The Other Woman & The Long Walk," but I also felt it was important to at least note the treatment of women on the show in my montage–namely, how men perceive them, and what they're actually going through. The pitch of Belle Jolie lipstick as a woman "marking her man" is comically ironic, first for the way Don weaves female territorialism into something romantic (Peggy does the same thing later with the ham publicity stunt in Season 4), and secondly because it's impossible to believe that anybody in the real world would find lipstick on a man's cheek as anything other than a nuisance.

Betty Draper gets a lot of hate on the show, but I don't see her role as an initially vacant housewife a detraction from the series; after all, like Newton's law of motion, if you believe there is a girl like Peggy who is so progressive she eventually becomes Don's professional equal, you have to believe there is an equal and opposite reaction–in this case, a woman who remains stuck in the past of traditional values. And it's too easy to forget Betty's past, her love/hate relationship with her mother that also seeps into her relationship with her own daughter Sally, though I imagine the generational gap of the 60s will drive a deeper wedge into their relationship. The mother who wanted her daughter to be beautiful "so I could find a man," only to denounce Betty's modeling career by calling her a prostitute–in retrospect, Betty's current weight problems were hinted at in season 1, with Betty telling her therapist, "My mother was very concerned about looks and weight. And I've always eaten a lot. And I like hot dogs. My mother used to say, 'You're going to get stout.'" Which begs the question: Is Betty's current dramatic weight gain a side effect of another unsatisfying marriage, or a form of freedom from her mother's restrictions just as Sally's friendship with Glen is from Betty's curtailment? Finally, is it really fair to blame Betty when all her life the only value placed on her was her beauty, and then she had the bad luck to fall in love with a man who personifies whatever people want him to say?

Don can sleep with as many women as he wants–13, according to James Lipton–but the most healthy relationship he will ever have with a woman is his deep professional and personal friendship with Peggy, who has had the most growth on the show than any other character, from the girl who didn't know how to say no to her male co-worker's gaze to the only woman to truly stand up to Don. Their argument in "The Suitcase", wonderfully broken down in Kevin and Deborah's video essay, encapsulates their differences, yes, but also how comfortable they are with each other that they *can* shout at each other as a way of communicating. I felt it was a perfect way to segue from the women's issues to the existential gaze on the ruins of one's life that Frank O'Hara's poem Mayakovsky. I knew I wanted to use it because it so beautifully states the thing Don is always trying to do, which he nearly accomplishes in season 4: to find himself, or at least the honest, better man he aspires to be. Season 4 is so much about Don's rebirth from the ashes of "the catastrophe of my personality," yet self-defeat is inevitable, and maybe another reason why Don's controversial decision to marry Megan instead of Faye makes so much sense, if only from a screenwriter's standpoint: Once Don finds happiness and realizes who Don Draper actually is, the show will no longer have a purpose.

Because of my previous love for the show, the montage was exceptionally easy to make–once I had all the clips imported, it took me about 5-6 days to create an 8-minute rough cut, which repeated itself on a True Blood montage I'm currently working on. Whenever I do a montage, the first thing I do is look for the perfect music, because once you have the right music, everything will write itself and the wheels will turn so easily. (This is a good lesson that is being lost in the conversion from film to digital movie-making: always have a pre-production outline instead of winging it; editing is indeed a process of trial and error, but even that process is greatly aided by a map). There are still things I wish I could have included, clips I should have changed up, and even weeks after the fact I recently went back to delete a cross-dissolve. But the greatest gift, and in some ways the greatest curse the montage gave me is the realization that Mad Men is the greatest show on television right now, to which nothing can compare. It personifies patience, showing not telling, and audience gratification. It is not a show designed for the narrative cliffhanger hooks shows like Lost or Christopher Nolan movies have conditioned us to expect. It fills the screen with so much information that even on numerous re-watches, there are still subtle jokes to be discovered in the background of a shot. It's the patience of the audience that is rewarded handsomely by Weiner's utter trust in us to discover the breadcrumbs he leaves for us. People complain that nothing much happens on Mad Men. Everything happens–it's just up to the audience to discover the changes better than the characters themselves realize.

JIM EMERSON: Kevin, your piece on "The Carousel" (I used only one little snippet from Don's Kodak presentation leading into a similar line from his Jaguar presentation) is exquisite, with bizarre Lynchian moments, as well. I would never have put the maypole together with the carousel (and other circular motifs) without having seen this. (I wish I'd used something from "The Carousel" when I used the merry-go-round-like loop I made from "I've Got You Babe" — final song in "Tomorrowland" — in "The Ladies and the Boxes.") A lot of narrated video essays strike me as simply written pieces with audio-visual accompaniment; there's very little meaningful give-and-take between the images and the commentary. It's like the images are just there to give somebody the opportunity to talk over them. And in "The Carousel," you were working with a pre-existing written essay, and yet you integrated it with the images perfectly. Can you talk about how you approached composing this one?

KEVIN B. LEE: Jim, whatever the circumstances that necessitated it, it's remarkable that you caught on to a non-narration oriented approach to video essays right out of the gate. Same with Serena, who's always been skillful at speaking through montage. It took me years to catch on, and now it's what I am most interested in exploring: to have a film comment on itself rather than rely on the more conventional mediators of voice and text. What I like about this approach is that it isn't as locked into one particular meaning as what you typically find with a narrated commentary. There's more room for the viewer to engage with the footage and extract multiple insights.

"The Carousel" video was a major opportunity to shift my approach. Tommaso Toci wrote a great piece on the Carousel scene that was to serve as the video script, but as I tried to adapt it I had trouble visualizing how the narration would flow with the scene. I kept playing the scene over and over trying to figure it out. And then it dawned on me that the scene itself provided the perfect structure: Don Draper selling us an idealized version of his life, from one perfect image and sentiment to the next, just asking to be torn into given everything to the contrary that we've witnessed of him. The clicking of the slidewheel and the momentary lapses of darkness between images suggest holes in his projection of perfection, so I thought: why not make those holes the portals into the dark reality under the projected surface? The clicking sound also reminded me of a soldier stepping on a landmine, bringing the war flashback scene to mind, which of course is the "big bang" event that gave birth to "Don Draper." 

From there it was just a matter of going through every episode of the first four seasons, gathering all the memorable scenes, images and bits of dialogue around Don, and weaving them together around motifs and patterns. I'd recently seen a cool video by Gina Telaroli that does a lot with superimpositions and slow motion, so I played with those techniques, which kind of give a David Lynch quality to the footage, especially the domestic suburbia scenes. The slow motion also has a doting, fetishistic quality to it, slowing images down as if trying to get at their essence.

With Season Five mostly in the can, I have to say that this video works out with Season Four as the endpoint. The proposal scene to Megan from the Season Four finale really brings it full circle with the final image from Don and Betty's wedding in the slide show.

As I mentioned before, I've long held reservations about the degree of centrality Don has in the world of Mad Men, when the women characters are as richly developed but have gotten significantly less screen time. So it's ironic that the most intense and time-consuming video I did for the Mad Men series was on the guy I felt was already overexposed. At the same time I loved the challenge of trying to piece together a coherent picture of who Don Draper is. Working with all the available footage was like playing with the biggest puzzle set of any of the Mad Men characters. Though perhaps with a piece left missing by the show. As Serena says, even Don Draper doesn't know who he is, but of course we keep trying to figure him out. And the finely crafted surfaces, images and lines have everything to do with our being seduced as viewers – in a sense the video is as much about those elements as it is about Don.

JIM EMERSON: Kevin: Yes! It's that idea of getting inside the work itself, and inside your own experience with it, that I find so exciting about this approach, too. And Mad Men is ideal for it because it's so rich and layered. Most shows have a "bible" with all the details about the stories and characters in one place so the writers can consult it. I wonder what form the Mad Men bible is in. Do they have cross-referenced video clips with certain spoken and visual motifs (boxes, hands, doors, hats, etc.)? Tom & Lorenzo (a site I learned that Deborah is familiar with, though I just discovered it a few days ago) noticed that the fur coat Joan wears to her assignation with Herb is the very one Roger gave her back in 1954:

the one that caused her to coo “When I wear it, I’ll always remember the night I got it.” Well, fuck you, Roger Sterling. That’s EXACTLY what this outfit is saying. “You ruined what we had by letting me do this, so I’m ruining what you gave me.” We’d be surprised if she ever wore it again. It’s one of those beautiful costuming moments that takes a sad, horrifying scene and makes it even more so once you realize what she’s wearing.

That's the level of resonant emotional and thematic detail on which this show operates. It repays the closest readings we can give it. I'm also glad to hear that, for you and Deborah and Serena, your process may by necessity be somewhat systematic (so much to keep track of!), but the creative aspect is more instinctual. I love diving in with a few ideas and then seeing where the show takes me.

I'd like to return to one thing Kevin mentioned earlier, about Joan's famous "orientation tour" for Peggy — which is also our introduction to the world of Sterling Cooper and "Mad Men." The series has been criticized from the beginning for trying to score modern feminist points by overplaying the sexism, but I don't see it that way at all. What may seem "over the top" to 21st century sensibilities was just taken for granted in the 1950s and 1960s. When Joan says, "Don't be intimidated by all this technology. The men who designed it made it so simple that even a woman can use it," she's echoing any number of popular advertising campaigns from the '40s and '50s. This kind of thinking (in the era when "women drivers" were routinely ridiculed on television, for example) was so common that it spawned parody ad campaigns — including the recent one for a British oven cleaning product, Oven Pride," that was accused of reverse-sexism: "So easy, even a man can do it." And by 1968, Virginia Slims cigarettes were marketed to women with the slogan: "You've come a long way, baby" — which, in some ways, is just as condescending as "even a woman can do it."

But about Peggy in the first season: Deborah is quite perceptive about her response to the post-party garbage in the office, and we've seen how she's grown, gained confidence, loosened up (especially in Season 4, when she broadened her social circle to include Village pals like Joyce and Abe). She was so eerie (Elisabeth Moss has talked about how deeply strange Peggy was at first, which is what she found so compelling about the role) that I actually wondered if maybe she was mentally ill when we first met her. Maybe the show should really be called "Mad Women" — because the men tend to drive them mad, one way or another.) She was almost zombie-like at times (not unlike Betty). And that added to the suspense when she put her trembling hand on Don's after her first day. Look at her eyes, unfocused and blank. Now we know that she was terrified, unsure of who she was and what was expected of her, and she did wind up institutionalized for a while. And I've always loved that about Peggy. You can never be entirely sure you're reading her correctly or completely, because there's such a gap between how she sees herself and how others see her and how she presents herself. Which makes her the perfect counterpoint to both Betty and Don. None of them are who they seem, but for different reasons.

Serena: Your extensive knowledge and grasp of the show are absolutely evident in your work. I hadn't heard that about "What do you want me to say?" but I think you get to the heart of it. I found an interview with Matthew Weiner on the AMC web site, and he said:

A: Well, when Don says, "What do you want to hear?" or "What do you want me to say?", that's on purpose. I feel like that's the ultimate thing for Don to say. But Peggy saying "Maybe this is my time" is the kind of line that should only happen once. Q: Why is that the ultimate Don line? A: Because he's being kind, but still being honest. I think it's a great way of dissolving a conflict in a powerful way. He's basically maintaining control, but at the same time submitting.

As you say, so much of the show centers around the differences between the internal person and the external person. It's all about what we now call "spin" — which is essentially what advertising is, too. And everything is a performance, from your job to your most intimate relationships to your clothes and your apartment. The integrity and authenticity of the performance varies from situation to situation, moment to moment, but there's always a (self-)awareness that it is a performance. As Weiner said in the same interview, he thinks Don is basically a "good person" (whatever that means), and echoes what Megan told him in bed in "Tomorrowland": "I feel like the theme of the show, when it's over, is that it's hard to be a person. You should try to be a good person, but you will fail, all of the time."

Now that two of the major characters are gone (one obviously for good), I really hope the series will develop Dawn more fully. You recall that Season 5 was delayed because of costs, and there was talk about cutting some prominent characters to keep costs down (good god, who's next? Ken? Pete?), but it seems downright odd that they've done so little with Dawn. In some cases they actually seem to be shooting around her. You know where she sits, but they don't show her. Surely the actress Teyonah Parris is not that expensive! The scene in Peggy's apartment was perfectly played (with Peggy hesitating over her purse just long enough to realize how it must look to Dawn; and Dawn, who'd been sleeping in the office, noticing Peggy's awkward hesitation) — and there's got to be somewhere to go with that. MLK was killed in 1968, so maybe the show will use that, as it used the Cuban Missile Crisis and the deaths of JFK and Marilyn Monroe. I think Dawn has great possibilities…

Jim Emerson is the founding editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com and runs the Scanners blog.

Serena Bramble is a film editor currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Teledramatic Arts and Technology from Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing, she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.

Deborah Lipp is the co-owner of Basket of Kisses, whose motto is "smart discussion about smart television." She is the author of six books, including "The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book."

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.