Monday Morning Mad Men: Some Very Poor Decisions Recently

"I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."

-- HAL 9000

As always, Monday morning finds two or three internet's full of speculation, gripes and theorizing about Sunday's episode of Mad Men.

What is kind of odd is that as of this writing I find only one mention of the extended callback to the "2001: A Space Odyssey"-theme for last week's episode, including a almost shot-for-shot recreation of the "HAL reading lip's" scene in the pod bay.

So with the way left open for amateurs, let me dive right in (spoilers!) and say that Michael Ginsberg is HAL.

And yet while this is clearly what the camera POV is telling us, that doesn't make a damn bit of sense does it? After all, HAL was a computer and Ginsberg is a "creative" who rails against the encroachment of computers. They are diametric opposites, so how can they be stand-ins for each other?

Well, I have a theory...

You see, Sam Adams at The Rolling Stone writes that HAL went mad because --

...a machine that, given a semblance of human consciousness, develops some of the less admirable, more primitive human emotions: jealousy, fear, anger, and the urge to defend itself all costs.

-- but that isn't entirely true.

/brief aside/

One of the great joys of 2001 is that it doesn't explain everything. Along with the origins and purposes of the monoliths, and what exactly the Space Fetus is up to, the "why" behind HAL's descent into homicidal insanity is never explained.   Like Mad Men, 2001 gave us plenty of tantalizing clues, but also plenty of opacity, which together make for a mesmerizing mystery with lots of open space for speculating about what we are looking at without ever really being able to see the whole picture.

That is, until someone made the dubious decision to make a sequel (from the late Roger Ebert) --

...

All those years ago, when "2001: A Space Odyssey" was first released, I began my review with a few lines from a poem by e.e. cummings:

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

That was my response to the people who said they couldn't understand "2001," that it made no sense and that it was one long exercise in self-indulgence by Stanley Kubrick, who had sent a man to the stars, only to abandon him inside some sort of extraterrestrial hotel room. I felt that the poetry of "2001" was precisely in its mystery, and that to explain everything was to ruin everything -- like the little boy who cut open his drum to see what made it bang.

...

[2010: The Year We Make Contact] is, in short, a movie that tries to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. There were times when I almost wanted to cover my ears. Did I really want to know (a) why HAL 9000 disobeyed Dave's orders? or (b) the real reason for the Discovery's original mission? or (c) what the monoliths were trying to tell us?...

-- in which we learn that HAL lost his digital marbles because it:

...was told to lie - by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesn't know how.

/end of brief aside/

Because the mission demanded that the computer that ran the ship be an intelligent, self-aware entity, capable of creative thought and independent action, rather than a mere computer. But unbeknownst to the carbon-based crew members, HAL had been programmed with two, inviolable directives which it could not reconcile -- process all mission data honestly and without error ("No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.")...and deliberately lie to the crew about the true nature of that mission.

HAL was incapable of doing both, which caused it to become very subtly unhinged, leaving Discovery's non-frozen human crew -- Bowman and Poole -- sailing alone through interplanetary space cut off from any possibility of help from Earth, at the mercy of a computer whose judgment they began to suspect they could no longer trust.

As they calmly gamed out this terrify prospect away from HAL's omnipresent microphones, they did not realize that they were still in range of HAL's omnipresent microphones or that HAL could read lips, and as soon as they revealed their plans, HAL laid plans of its own. But HAL did not murder for "... jealousy, fear, anger, [or] the urge to defend itself all costs." HAL calmly killed (most of) the crew because that is what its mission profile demanded: the mission had to be completed, but the act of shutting HAL down threatened that mission and therefor, logically, ending that threat as quickly and efficiency as possible superseded all other considerations.

And the slowly enveloping, agonizing, Tantalus insanity which comes from feeling trapped between two irreconcilable imperatives is the landscape in which every creature in the Mad Men bestiary lives and dies.  So while the casualty this week was Micheal Ginsberg, it is a fate that no one will escape.

These are skilled artists, working at the top of their craft not to create a Mona Lisa, but clever, sparkly visual snares to gull consumer into buying shit they do not need. These are gifted writers, using the power of the words they command not to create Notes from the Underground, but ear-worms to separate rubes from their dough. These are brilliant amateur psychologists, tapping the deepest human emotion for shabbiest commercial  reasons.  This is a world full of dilettante proto-hipster "creatives" who work every day to find newer and better ways to serve The Establishment and sell Nixon, Vietnam, Dow Chemical and rapacious consumerism to their fellow Americans by using their art to tell grubby little lies.

Those who have mastered the art of complete, emotional and spiritual compartmentalization thrive in the world of Sterling, Cooper & Partners either because they get off on the pure, ruthless Randite pleasure of it, or because they can glide agnostically above it all, or because their shallowness and mediocrity insulates them from any awareness that anything is amiss in the first place.  

But for those who are too sensitive or finely tuned to thrive as the apex predators in an American where every aspect of life is ever-more aggressively divided against itself?  Those are the ones who will crack up, turn on, drop out or find some other big, marble hydrotherapy console to heave through the grated window of their personal locked ward.