SEASON 7, EPISODE 4.
(Mild spoilers.) More than anything about this episode, I've been thinking about Lloyd, the IBM reseller. The episode is called The Monolith, and some smart critics have pointed out that the title's reference to the mainframe Lloyd brings to SC&P, along with some inferences to "the dawn of time" and apes, cement the connection with 2001: A Space Odyssey. But I think there's more to it than that. Lloyd is an interesting amalgam of everything having to do with early computer culture and its philosophical underpinnings. Lloyd might possibly, in the 1970s to come, grow out his hair and evolve into a Silicon Valley type, though I judged him more likely to make his nut fast, get out of the game, and do real estate. But I was taken by his incongruous Texas accent. (IBM, where Lloyd had worked, was and is in Armonk, New York.) This is an evident callback to NASA, and to the best-and-brightest hubris of 60s American technology. Lloyd's conversation to Don seals it:
But late in the episode, when Don has been frustrated and hurt (in part because he's been told by Bert that his idea of pitching Lloyd's company is a vain fantasy) and gotten drunk, he tells Lloyd that he talks like a friend but he's not one. As I said, Lloyd is barely a character, and Don in his cups has dramatic leave to ignore Lloyd and react instead to what he represents: The promise of technocratic certainty that died with the Vietnam War, which death was pre-memorialized by 2001. It's understandable Don would be mad about that. In the past few seasons we have seen Don emotionally deconstructed, but he has not really noticed what's happened to him; just last week we saw him sign back up with SC&P when everything in his bardo is telling him to move on. Now that the cost of his doubling-down as a seller of bullshit -- humiliation as a tag-writer for Peggy -- is becoming evident, Don takes it out on his typewriter and his liver, but deep inside he knows what the problem is: His devotion to the bright and shining lie. That's why he turns on Lloyd, who's as chained to that lie as he is. The question is whether he can confront actual people, and the actual lie, the same way.
Roger's commune adventure was a nice counter to Don's: While Don is dealing with late 20th Century futurism, Roger is dealing with late 20th Century recidivism. It was generous to let Roger come as close as he did to understanding Margaret, and cruel (but appropriately cruel) to have him lose it over her infidelity and abandonment of her child -- faults he has laughably little business condemning. As I watched him walk off covered with mud, I realized Roger has been nothing but miserable all season. Maybe Don won't be the first to fall.
Lou and Peggy deserve each other.
UPDATE. Commenter hob raises an interesting demurrer on Lloyd:
Lloyd: The IBM 360 can count more stars in a day than we can in a lifetime.Lloyd is slow-talking and buttoned-down, but he has some idea of the metaphorical significance of computers; he tells Don almost right after he meets him that people are afraid of them because they have "infinite quantities of information" and "human existence is finite." As you may have guessed, Lloyd is so incongruous a character that he barely seems real, and I got the impression he was invented in Matt Weiner's Retro-Zeitgeist Archetype Lab to provoke reactions from Don. And he does. Don is at first attracted to Lloyd, and even dreams about selling him advertising, because Lloyd's excitement about his futuristic profession is attractive to him -- in no small part because Lloyd is butch about it, the way Don is butch about what passes for creativity on Madison Avenue; they're both putting brave movie-star faces on the pathologies of their time.
Don: What man laid on his back counting stars and thought about a number?
Lloyd: (big grin) He probably thought about going to the moon.
But late in the episode, when Don has been frustrated and hurt (in part because he's been told by Bert that his idea of pitching Lloyd's company is a vain fantasy) and gotten drunk, he tells Lloyd that he talks like a friend but he's not one. As I said, Lloyd is barely a character, and Don in his cups has dramatic leave to ignore Lloyd and react instead to what he represents: The promise of technocratic certainty that died with the Vietnam War, which death was pre-memorialized by 2001. It's understandable Don would be mad about that. In the past few seasons we have seen Don emotionally deconstructed, but he has not really noticed what's happened to him; just last week we saw him sign back up with SC&P when everything in his bardo is telling him to move on. Now that the cost of his doubling-down as a seller of bullshit -- humiliation as a tag-writer for Peggy -- is becoming evident, Don takes it out on his typewriter and his liver, but deep inside he knows what the problem is: His devotion to the bright and shining lie. That's why he turns on Lloyd, who's as chained to that lie as he is. The question is whether he can confront actual people, and the actual lie, the same way.
Roger's commune adventure was a nice counter to Don's: While Don is dealing with late 20th Century futurism, Roger is dealing with late 20th Century recidivism. It was generous to let Roger come as close as he did to understanding Margaret, and cruel (but appropriately cruel) to have him lose it over her infidelity and abandonment of her child -- faults he has laughably little business condemning. As I watched him walk off covered with mud, I realized Roger has been nothing but miserable all season. Maybe Don won't be the first to fall.
Lou and Peggy deserve each other.
UPDATE. Commenter hob raises an interesting demurrer on Lloyd:
I don't at all agree that Lloyd "barely seems real", but that's because of my personal experience: he reminds me strongly of a couple of former eccentric bosses who went into the computer industry in the '60s when no one quite knew what that industry was yet. Both of them looked and acted like a cross between middle management and a car dealer— they had this kind of low-key mania, they were always selling the idea of how exciting these magic machines were, but it really was a personal passion. And like this guy, they came out of larger organizations where they thought of themselves as more imaginative than the people around them, even if other people wouldn't exactly consider them wild-eyed bohemians; so it made sense to me that meeting someone like Don, who's clearly a big cheese but has some sort of creative job and is kind of hanging out on the margins, would make Lloyd want to open up and hold forth.Fascinating. It suggests that the evangelism of Jobs, Gates et alia was not as big a stylistic departure as I thought.