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“Turning creative success into business is your work.  And you failed.” — Bert to Don

Last season’s exhilarating finale showed Don Draper remaking himself once again by forging a new family with the cream of the crop of Sterling Cooper.  Last night’s premiere revealed the strains of shouldering the responsibilities of his new identity as the breadwinner of this new family, as well as that of his old one (Betty and the kids).  But instead of resorting to cowardice as he did in Season One, when he asked Rachel to run away with him, Don decides to “holster up his guns” and adopt a cockiness that befits his new stature as the sun of SCDP.  The premiere suggested the price Don will pay this season for his increasing hubris.

The episode also focused on the work itself, outlining the development of three ad campaigns: Don’s failed Jantzen pitch, his cinematic GloCoat commercial, and Peggy and Pete’s flawed but successful Sugarberry Ham stunt.  (Perhaps Don’s inspiration for the beautiful, vindictive mother in the GloCoat ad was Betty.)  The most interesting ad storyline was Don’s dealings with the rubes from Jantzen, who haplessly wanted to distinguish their “two-piece swimsuits for modest people” (ha) from bikinis.  When Don presented the Jantzen duo with his risqué ad, I wondered if it wasn’t out of spite.  And by the time he walked out of the pitch meeting, he’d only done a fraction of his job: one half of his job is coming up with an ad, and the other half is convincing his clients that his ads are right for them.  Don, letting his arrogance take over, barely bothered to do the latter, and lost the account as a result.

While the power and authority of Bert, Roger, and Lane have considerably diminished, the “scrappy upstarts” Pete, Peggy, and Harry (that sunburnt forehead!) have gained much in status.  Pete now has the job he’d been demanding since the pilot.  Peggy hasn’t lost any ground to Don since last season’s finale, and her sophisticated new business look — a short, bouffant ‘do, professional clothes, a drink in one hand and a smoke in the other — shows she’s completely left behind the Brooklyn frump she was called out as by the truck driver from Season One.  Her relationship with Pete has also normalized despite their strange and tortuous history; they make a much better work-team than they ever did a sex-team.  Harry has also come a long way since being threatened by Bert Cooper to be locked up in the closet in the Season Three finale.

Meanwhile, Don’s personal life — what’s left of it — has taken a few slaps to the face a beating.  He spends Thanksgiving with a prostitute.  The smart, young, calculatingly flirty Bethany (Anna Camp, last seen in True Blood) pities him (correctly) for being a lonely divorcee.  And he has to deal with Betty, who is even worse as an ex-wife than she was as a wife, and is undoubtedly racking up years of future therapy bills for Sally.

Stray observations:

• As usual, Roger had the best one-liners.  My favorite: “One wooden leg.  They’re so cheap they can’t even afford a whole reporter.”  Also, he’s writing a book?
• The second best line of the episode: “I don’t know how you can stand living in that man’s dirt.”
• The new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce offices — all frosted glass, oak, and refined gray with a few flashes of primary colors — are sleek and gorgeous, but claustrophobic (like Don).  And Joan has her own office!
• Betty’s matronly makeover — the new hair, the red printed number at Thanksgiving dinner, the pink tweed suit — as the overcompensating wife of a middle-aged man with two adult children is tragic in its own way.

The ejection of Terry Gross’s Fresh Air from Mississippi public radio over sexual content is lamentable.  Gross is a fine interviewer who is infectiously curious about a great deal of subjects, and has a lovely and soothing voice to boot.  Moreover, Fresh Air is one of the few programs on NPR that doesn’t feel like it is exclusively produced by and aimed at very old people, largely because Gross does bring up the issue of sex quite often, especially when interviewing celebrities.

I first noticed Gross’s rather evident propensity to ask her interviewees about their sex lives in a segment with Lee Daniels, the director of Precious.  Although the segment was ostensibly about Daniels’ career in film, a large part of the interview also delved into the more sensational aspects of Daniels’ private life, such as his homosexuality, his childhood abuse, and his father’s shooting.  These parts of the interview didn’t feel inappropriate for the occasion, exactly, since such experiences are undoubtedly formative, but it did feel exploitative.  To his credit, Daniels seemed at ease discussing these subjects with Gross, but the larger question of why any of this was relevant to his work in Precious and Monster’s Ball (of which he was a producer) remained a mystery.

In another segment with Patton Oswalt and Robert Siegel, the star and the writer-director of Big Fan, respectively, Gross asked them about their experiences in strip clubs, both in shooting the movie and otherwise.  (For the record, they seem to be big fans, no pun intended.)  And the disgusting details that emerged from the recent Louis C.K. interview have now made their rounds through the media (poor Louis C.K.).

So is Terry Gross just a monomaniacal sex pervert?  Sure, maybe, who knows.  But the persistence of sex as a subject in her interviews suggests that, like Sigmund Freud, Gross sees a strong connection between one’s sexuality and artistic work.  That is, an artist’s sexuality informs, if not determines, his or her creative output.  As a serious journalist, Gross (probably) isn’t asking her interviewees about their sexual fantasies, insecurities and practices (only) to be voyeuristic, but because she finds those aspects of her interviewees’ lives and psyches to be integral to understanding their art.  This idea of art as the sublimation of sexual desire and unfulfilled libido isn’t the most ridiculous idea in the world, though it’s not a wholly indefensible one, either. Regardless, it is a worldview that decidedly shapes Fresh Air‘s (sexy, sexy) content, and future guests of the show better gird their loins accordingly, or be prepared to tell a good story about them.

Blue Velvet is a film I’ve been afraid of for ten years.  I first heard about it in high school through a friend who invited me several times to watch it with her.  I refused every time, mostly because I didn’t want to see the rape scene she’d told me about, nor a movie that had a rape scene in it.

Well, ha.  If any of you readers out there are fellow cine-scaredy-cats, I can tell you now that there is nothing at all scary about this movie.  Blue Velvet stars Kyle MacLachlan as Jeff, an Ivy League student who returns home to visit his sick dad in the hospital and to run the family hardware store.  He finds a decomposing ear in the field behind his house and brings it to the police station, where a kindly but aloof cop takes it, then tells Jeff to stop thinking about it.  The kindly cop’s daughter, a flirty high-school girl named Becky or Susan Sandy played by Laura Dern, tells Jeff about another case involving a singer implicated in a murder.  Jeff becomes obsessed with the singer, Dorothy (Isabella Rosselini), for basically no reason, sneaking into her apartment, going to her shows, and later being seduced by her.  They have kinky, non-rapey sex that Jeff regrets later.  All the while, he keeps dating, or trying to date, Sandy.

Jeff discovers that Dorothy’s husband and son have been kidnapped by Frank (Dennis Hopper), a psychopath obsessed with blue velvet who blackmails Dorothy into having very uncomfortable, very short (five seconds, tops) sex with him, during which he calls her “mommy” lots and lots of times.  Jeff sees them doing this squick once from inside a closet.  Then he comes back to Dorothy’s apartment at a later time to have sex with her, but is caught by Frank.  Frank takes Dorothy and Jeff for a scary joyride (2 Fast 2 Furious) and beats up Jeff.

By this point, Jeff’s had enough (beatings to his face).  He reports Frank and his accomplice — a crooked cop, it turns out — to Sandy’s father (the kindly cop).  This sets off a series of events, leading to the deaths of Dorothy’s husband and the crooked cop and to Frank coming after Jeff (to kill him this time).  But Jeff outwits Frank and shoots him (whoops, Frank!) from the closet in Dorothy’s apartment where he first saw Frank do it.

The film then ends with an extremely tonally-off celebration of the triumph of white-bread suburban blandness.  All the bad guys are dead, Sandy gets together with Jeff even after finding out about his sex times with Dorothy, Jeff’s dad gets out of the hospital, and Dorothy plays with her toddler son in the park under a very blue sky.  The sun is out, the flowers are in bloom, and no one ever has to have kinky sex ever again, thanks to the cleverness of upper-middle class white people.  The film’s opening shot of a white picket fence behind tall red flowers against a cloudless blue sky recalls the American flag; the repetition of the image near the end of the film signals the bolstering of “the natural order,” the triumph of bourgeois Americana.  It’s all pretty barf-making, and nearly ruined the movie for me, and I have to imagine, for many others as well.

A final note: it must be Kyle MacLachlan’s association with David Lynch (via Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks) in the 80s and early 90s that’s led him to be typecasted for two decades now as a WASPy Jeremy Irons, a worldly, preternaturally poised pervert.  The worldly pervert role is one I enjoy seeing MacLachlan occupy; he never fails to creep me out, but in a quietly seductive way.  Thus it was enjoyable to see MacLachlan in an earlier iteration of this, for while Jeff ends up with the insipid Sandy, he’s also unmistakably a budding pervert, if too young to be an elegant one just yet.

I’m starting with David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, a movie I’ve avoided seeing for ten years.  A quickly brainstormed list for the coming weeks, in no particular order:

• Thirst (by Korean director Chan-wook Park)
• In the Realm of the Senses
• Crash (by David Cronenberg)
• Funny Games (1998)
• The White Ribbon
• Antichrist
• Memories of Murder
• Mother (by Joon-Ho Bong)
• M
• Mysterious Skin
• Carandiru
• Vidas Secas
• Dead Ringers
  

Suggestions of films whose nauseating qualities are compensated by the strength of their narratives are welcome.

The main challenge, lamely dubbed The Cold War (because D.C. and puns, ugh), is for everyone to make a cold dish but in two teams.  Team A will taste and critique Team B’s dishes, then nominate a winner and a loser, and vice versa.  At this point, everyone, but mostly Kenny, goes batshit insane with paranoia, thinking they will be nominated to go home for strategic, rather than tastesthetic, reasons.  Angelo giving Tamesha and Stephen advice on conceptualizing their dishes doesn’t help the tense atmosphere (nor Tamesha and Stephen, it turns out), because everyone hates Angelo, and so assume he’s sabotaging his friends.  For the record, I don’t think this was it at all — I think Angelo’s obvious self-satisfaction came out in the most benevolent way in this episode, by which I mean Angelo wanted to help his friends by telling them what to do.  But for all the whispers about strategy and the middle-schoolish doubts about their places on the popularity totem pole, the only one who actively played the game was the ever-scuzzy Dov Charney Alex (of course), Mr. Hookers and an Eight-Ball himself.

In the end, Tiffany and Kevin were nominated for the win, with Kevin winning his hero Michelle Bernstein’s approval (aww) and a trip to Hawaii (this season’s trip prizes are much better than last season’s cookbooks), while Tamesha and Kenny were slated for elimination.  Tamesha goes home, which is sad, because I’d liked her, especially after she interviewed that she “could probably strangle [Amanda] in a heartbeat,” because sure, we’d all like to strangle Amanda, but we probably couldn’t do it with the clean efficiency and elegant poise Tamesha would’ve brought to the job.

And if there’s going to be any sucking face this season, please let it be between Ed and Tiffany.

This week’s grisly Quickfire involved cooking Maryland blue crabs.  It was a bit hard to watch all of those live animals being sliced in half and put in ovens while they were innocently hobbling around on top of cookware.  For once, the cheftestants weren’t the most confused and bewildered ones in the room.  RIP, crabs (not Angelo’s).  Ed(!) wins the Quickfire and immunity.

The main challenge was pretty boring.  The twelve chefs are supposed to work together as one team, but since they have six dishes to make, they naturally pair up into six teams.  Ed complains about having to work with Alex again, which, who wouldn’t.  There’s a lot of setting-up the rivalry between Angelo and Kenny in the episode, but after Angelo calls his dish “tart and luscious, super sexy” I just wanted Kenny to hit Angelo in the face already.  Oh, and Kevin’s dish falls to the ground, but that’s okay, because he’s going home next week — him or Stephen, who was even more the middle-aged Charlie Brown this week.

Kenny wins the challenge, while the embarrassingly puffed-up Timothy goes home for turnips, which makes sense, because turnips are not things anyone wants to put in their mouth.

–

Food-relatedly, I had the most amazing panini this past weekend at Open Sesame, a Lebanese restaurant in Long Beach, CA.  It consisted of creamy labne, a Lebanese kefir cheese, with tomato, olives, and mint leaves.  Salty perfection!

The main challenge is structured a bit differently this week, with teams of two heading into tournament-style eliminations but in reverse, where the safe cheftestants get to be done for the day, while the losers move on to the next elimination round.  There will also be two eliminations this week.  Spike from Season Four and Mike Yuck and Bryan Voltaggio from Season Six are also at the judges’ table (don’t these people have jobs?).  Tiffany and Timothy win the first round, as do Stephen and Amanda, who sort of resemble a middle-aged Charlie Brown and a loud, over-enunciating Lucy (my God, is she loud).  Dov grumbles because his teammate Ed forgets to put their food on the plates, which I grant is a pretty worthwhile complaint.  But they’re safe in the second round, which, UGH, because Alex’s face and also Ed’s face.  Flirty Angelo and flirty-back Tamesha are also somehow safe with a beef dish that involves kimchi vinaigrette.  Yuckety yuck.  Kelly and Andrea, Arnold and Lynn, and Kenny and Kevin land in the bottom.  In the end, Kelly and Andrea pull through with trips to Europe (for landing fifth place?!), while Kenny and Kevin barely escape Tom Colicchio’s wrath for not having glaze on their short ribs (Meat Rules!  Rules of Meat!), leaving Arnold and Lynn, in a surprise upset, to be sent home.  I am sad.

A fond farewell to my favorite Louis Vuitton Bag, no thanks to Old Beast Lynn, who apparently has no idea how to cook pasta.  Here’s hoping she’s better at teaching how to do it than she is at actually doing it.

That last point is usually a fairly difficult one to remember, because usually the kind of people who win are the ones who make or star in stupid shit like A Beautiful Mind and Crash. This year, though, in light of Stewart’s comments above, and probably because I have no idea whether the nominated pictures are any good, the Oscars — which I have not watched in probably ten years — were strangely riveting, especially when the people I totally did not expect to win did, e.g. Marion Cotillard (so pretty!), Tilda Swinton (so scary!), Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová (more on her later), and Diablo Cody. I was particularly fascinated by Cody’s walk upstage, as she clearly did not expect to win and wore a really slutty sheer leopard-print dress with a crotch-length slit in the front seemingly as a fuck-you to Le Academie for not giving her the screenwriting prize. But, caught off-guard by her win, Cody wound up crying and babbling and finally forcing herself off-stage — a poignantly genuine moment in an event devoted to the celebration of fiction and falseness.

I can’t/won’t comment on whether Stewart did a good job, but he did earn an even bigger place in my heart by bringing Markéta Irglová, whose speech was abruptly cut off by her own Best Original Song, back on stage to finish her thanks. Adorable video below and also here.

Korean poster of 3-Iron.

Here’s a must-see list of the Korean New Wave since 2000, all available on DVD.

1. The Host (2006). The most popular film in Korean cinematic history is a monster movie with killer SFX that’s as hilarious, poignant, and politically engaging as it is scary. A trio of grown-up misfit siblings — an alcoholic ex-activist, a perennially silver-medaled professional archer, and a mildly mentally handicapped retarded food-stand owner — attempt to rescue the food-stand owner’s daughter from a sea monster that lives in Seoul’s Han River. Think Godzilla meets Little Miss Sunshine.

2. Oldboy (2003). The second installment of Park Chan-wook’s so-called “revenge trilogy” starts with the Kafkaesque imprisonment of a middle-aged man in a 1-bed apartment for ten years. Just as inexplicably as he was imprisoned, he is suddenly released, then taunted by the man who imprisoned him to find and take revenge on him. Violent, absurd, and melodramatic, it’s Tarantino with a heart.

3. 3-Iron (2004). 3-Iron, or “Empty Houses” per the Korean title, is a nearly wordless 1.5-hour vignette by director Kim Ki-Duk, the most talented auteur working in South Korea today. A drifter who wanders through strangers’ empty homes chances upon a battered housewife in her ultra-chic, ultra-alienating mansion. She leaves with the drifter to play (silent) house with him in others’ empty homes, but her husband won’t stop searching for her to drag her back to their (his) house.

4. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (2003). Another Kim Ki-Duk masterpiece, Spring takes place on a hut-on-a-raft Buddhist monastery that floats in the center of a lake deep in the forest. A boy-monk, a man-monk, and their pet chicken live in this monastery, their lives governed by the sacred prohibitions against sex, speech, and contact with the outside world (a kind of Buddhism virtually unknown in America). When a girl comes to live with them for a year or so, the now-teenage-monk goes crazy (of course), and it’s bye-bye-Buddhism time (for a while).

5. Peppermint Candy (2000). Possibly the most “Korean” of all the movies on this list, Candy‘s first scenes feature a not-young, not-old man on the verge of suicide. The rest of the movie reveals in reverse chronology the series of moral compromises, emasculating humiliations, and occasional personal triumphs he has suffered. Many of these relate to the militarization of Korean society in the 1980s (one deploring scene shows the protagonist as a rookie officer peer-pressured into unlawfully torturing a suspect) and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s (the protagonist loses his job, and his wife divorces him in response). If Forrest Gump exemplifies American optimism and naivete, Candy stands as a testament to the force of social and institutional fatalism.