May 30 2012
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divinethedivine replied to your post:divinethedivine replied to your post: MAD MEN: YOU…
It’s a sad face and the only sad face that I have from my Mad Men gifs. I hate that I can’t hate Pete. But somehow I can’t.Oh, I can. That little bitch is repugnant on nearly every level. He’s not Don — a guy who grew up under really different cultural circumstances, and whose sense of how things are is based in the 30’s and 40’s — and who is being forced by changing mores and his own conscience to reassess his assumptions; this little bitch is Peggy’s age, but he wants to be Don and/or Roger, or a heinous combination of Don and Roger, so badly. He has none of their now-outdated sense of what is and should be, none of their actual quality: Don grew up in real poverty, knows how to fix a sink, and was a soldier, as was Roger, who has legitimate charm, even if it is tarnished and based in cultural expectations that no longer apply. Pete is just an ambitious child who thinks he’s playing the big boys’ game, willing to whore out Joan without a second thought.
It’s about moral compass. Don has one and sometimes acts on it, Roger makes a conscious decision to ignore his — but it’s there! But Pete? He has none, and he’ll do anything to get what he imagines in his spiritually impoverished little mind is “ahead”. I loathe him. He is a loathsome little creep, and any redeeming qualities he once had are fading fast.
But, you know how Mad Men is — as much as you hate a character one day, you’ll be sympathising the next. ARGH!
Maybe I have a Pete complex because in general I feel something along those lines for other similar characters, Tommy Mickens from our dear True Blood as an example. But maybe instead of Tommy’s one good step forward and then two bad steps back, Pete seems to think he’s making the right step forward that then turns into a serious misstep in a whole other direction.
But Pete is no Tommy. Tommy is a poor, uneducated victim of serial abuse who doesn’t realise that the world is bigger than his trashy parents told him it was. He wants to be different and better, but he doesn’t know how to be. Pete is a privileged little bitch who, from his first moments on the show has been obsessed with sitting at the big boys’ table and figures he has to do it by climbing over the bodies of the dead. He has treated every women he comes in contact with like total shit from the first moment — Peggy, his wife, the woman he fucks on the side, his daughter by extension, and now he’s made Joan a whore. In my opinion, his rich white boy problems do not incline me to forgive him for a goddamned thing.
The point you make about Don and Roger having sobering life experiences is a good one. But depending on how you use that fact, Pete can become pitiable or pathetic or prurient or perverse (all Ps for Peter!). Combine that lack of experience and an intractable and unloving father and Pete will obviously lack the skills necessary to play with the big boys. I think he actually knows it too.
Pete is all of those things! He definitely lacks the gravitas to play on the same field as the likes of Don. He is so slight in comparison — smarmy and empty. Don has his moments of being a supreme asshole, and in some ways, his sins are more egregious than Pete’s because he knows how wrong he is. Don has a soul and a code, and when he behaves badly, he knows it, and something in him is ashamed. Pete’s only code is whatever gets him ahead. if he feels any shame, it’s short-lived and shallow — like him.
Nor do I think Pete lacks a moral compass. It’s just a poorly developed and deeply repressed one. It’s one that comes back to make him feel the right thing to do too late for it to matter. So rather than feel guilt, he tries to ignore it. He has made himself completely unaware of social norms so he can remain unaware of the mistakes he really knows he’s making.
Every time I almost lose Pete, something happens to make me change my mind. So maybe his ability to do that makes me unable to truly hate him.
(I wish I could write more but I have to shut down for a car trip — looking forward to the response!)
See, I don’t agree that Pete has made himself unaware of social norms. I think he is very aware of social norms, but the norms he has chosen to live by are the ones that are no longer relevant in their rapidly changing world. He still wants to be the big man with a pretty wife and baby in the suburbs and a mistress in the city, whoring, drinking and measuring his cock against the big men of his world. He can’t forgive Don for not being that guy anymore, because he has committed! He doesn’t just want to be successful, he wants to kill his professional “fathers”. Don and Roger have a right to their adjustment periods and their inability to get with the changing times — there’s more to them, and a reason why they are who they are — but Pete has made a choice not to be fair, treat women like human beings, or be moral in his work. He makes the pre-medicated choice be be a dick every morning, as Jason Stackhouse would say. His moral compass only points in the direction of his blind, pretentious ambition.
He doesn’t take steps forward, he just sinks deeper into the slime. He’s a sad character, it’s true, but this thing with Joanie? This has aligned my sensibilities firmly against him.
Love this excoriating analysis of Pete Campbell!
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“ [That’s it.] The lover writes, the believer hears,
The poet mumbles and the painter sees,
Each one, his fated eccentricity,
As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,
Of the skeleton of the ether, the total
Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods
Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one
And the giant ever changing, living in change.
The poet mumbles and the painter sees,
Each one, his fated eccentricity,
As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,
Of the skeleton of the ether, the total
Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods
Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one
And the giant ever changing, living in change.
— Wallace Stevens, from “The Auroras of Autumn” (via the-final-sentence)
(via virgovampire)
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
PJ Harvey - Catherine
“I envy the road
The ground you tread under
I envy the wind
Your hair riding over
I envy the pillow
Your head rests and slumbers
I envy to murderous
Envy your lover
‘Til the light shines on me
I damn to hell every second you breath”
May 28 2012
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unreconstructedfangirl asked: Holy Shit, that Mad Men episode was good. I totally cried. That show amazes me -- it's just so incredibly good on every level. There isn't the boring part and the part you're dying to see -- it's just straight up excellent from start to finish every single week. Anyway. Had to share.
YES! Last night’s episode nearly broke the Internet I think! I sat in stunned silence when the final credits were rolling on the screen…I don’t believe I have loathed Pete more than I did this episode. It was just so damn gut wrenching. Matt Weiner is a genius of a show runner…!
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That was one seriously FUCKING AWESOME episode of Game of Thrones and I am not even a fan!!
May 27 2012
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I think I maybe falling in love with David Foster Wallace.
I love his writing. It’s not easy, but it grips you. And kind of breaks your heart in the end (it might be his own end that breaks the heart, but …).
I came to DFW very very late. I feel a certain amount of trepidation about starting Infinite Jest…but I am saving it for the sabbatical which I am planning on this year.
I have been reading his essays and his short stories. The urgency and the immediacy of his writing really really gets under my skin. And the knowledge of his personal demons adds so much poignancy to the reading experience…
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