Inspirado #1: Mad Men and the “Zou Bisou Bisou” Scene
Welcome to a new regular feature here on Debenblog. As a writer and a human living in the early 21st century (my GOD, that still sounds wrong), I consume a massive amount of media. Not just literature, but movies, music, television, journalism, advertising, news, fake news, blog posts, etc*. I try to filter all of it for further consideration — e.g., When I enjoy advertisement, is it possible I’ve just enjoyed a piece of entertainment, or have I truly played right into someone’s hands? — but if we’re being accurate I’m sure I’m really only considering maybe 60% of what I consume. And I’m looking at maybe half of that 60% in terms of what it might mean to my work as a writer. (Versus my life as a human.) As Liam Rector, the dear, departed creator of the Bennington Writing Seminars, used to say to every incoming class, “I never met a great writer who wasn’t also a great reader.” I think that’s completely true, though Liam also loved movies, so I would add visual storytelling to the mix. But what does that make someone, if no longer strictly a reader? A “consumer”? That’s a lousy word, and it’s already long been co-opted to mean, uh, everyone. I’d love to find a single word that describes what I am when I’m reading or watching or experiencing things. There has to be a word. What is it?
As Phil Donahue used to say, we’re not gonna solve that here. Not right now, anyway. But I do know the word for the stuff I take from all these various components and mash into a fine green paste inside the mortar of my brain, and that word is inspirado. Not the masculine past participle of the Spanish verb meaning “to inspire,” but the made-up Tenacious D noun form meaning “stuff that makes me want to make stuff of my own.” It’s all very clinical, and you can learn about it here. (Although I’d be remiss if I didn’t praise that Spanish verb, as it not only means “to inspire” but “to inhale.” Yes!) Of all the stuff I’m considering from all the stuff I’m consuming, inspirado is the stuff I tuck away in a special drawer for some use later. To put it another way: A wise writing teacher once told me, “When you read, always ask: What would I steal from this?” Inspirado is that: what I’d steal.
My choice for Inspirado #1 is the most recent thing that’s stuck with me. It’s a scene from this past Sunday’s Mad Men, or rather it’s The Scene. Don Draper’s new wife, Megan, throws him a surprise party for a birthday he’d rather not have, and fills it with a crazy mix of people from his work life and people from her (much younger) own life. It’s a great scene, a true set-piece, and it culminates in Megan getting up with the band she’s hired and singing a full-on version of “Zou Bisou Bisou,” which is a kicky French number whose title means “A Little Kiss.” (Which is also the name of the episode, so we’re left to unpack the meaning of this “kiss,” as well as its adjective.) Here’s the performance:
A lot’s already been written about this scene, but I want to take it from a slightly different angle, which is this: The show, until this moment, was not really working for me. I love Mad Men and consider it one of the finest dramas ever made. But the energy in the first 45 minutes of this episode was weird, the dialogue less sharp than what I’d expected, the pacing off. And then this scene came in and gathered up all the floppy balloons and somehow made them fly.
I don’t think this is because of heightened expectations on my part. In fact, it’s a common issue with serialized dramas that Mad Men has been able to avoid until now. With the beginning of a new season in any serialized drama, there are competing agendas: you have to remind your returning viewers of certain things; you have to draw new viewers in; and you have to get your characters in place for the challenges and issues of the episodes to come. Subsequent episodes really only have to concern themselves with that third thing, which is progressing the story. The season premiere is always, therefore, the least natural of any episode in a season. The dialogue’s always going to seem that much flatter and expositional; the situations will feel that much more contrived. (Think I’m being overly picky? Watch the opening scene to Sunday’s show again. “And they call us savages!” is a line that belongs in a shitty network morality episode about race, not this show.) It’s nearly unavoidable, I think — even The Sopranos and The Shield, two of the best serialized dramas of the last ten years, regularly had painful season premieres — and it certainly won’t affect my love of Mad Men.
But it did affect my love of the episode — until the party scene. Then I was 100% in, and the rest of the episode seemed to rise to a whole new level from that point on. It was as if “Zou Bisou Bisou” had grabbed the focus of the show’s producers the way it did everyone at that party. So what’s the Inspirado component here? For me, it’s the way a single, well-constructed scene — and a sharp, empathetic approach to character — can do so much. Another show might have made Megan’s performance awful and embarrassing, a new wife reaching beyond her grasp to impress her older husband and his cynical friends. But the performance was good, so now things get more complicated. Don’s mortified, as you can see from his stricken smile. But everyone else seems to be thinking: Who the hell is this person? And this is what the viewer thinks, too. Last season, all any of us, characters and viewers alike, knew of her was that she was a pretty but somewhat dull secretary in their advertising firm. Now she’s not only married the firm’s leading light, she’s begun working on copy herself, she’s thrown this crazily elaborate party (in a new apartment that was clearly not decorated by Don), and she’s singing and dancing like someone from a movie. It’s the craziest thing she could possibly have done. Again: Who the hell is this person?
(Part of the charm of the “Zou Bisou Bisou” scene is that it feels like a real performance by a real person. There’s a distinct unsteadiness to Megan’s voice that keeps it from feeling “canned,” and so it actually feels to the viewer like someone at a party singing and dancing like someone from a movie. It never takes you out of the scene. Again, other shows would have unquestionably used a polished audio track.)
And so the scene does what the best scenes do, which is that it not only shows characters having complicated effects on each other — look at Don’s face at :09, and Peggy’s faces at :17 and then at 1:55 — but it also forces you to reconsider the character(s) you thought you knew. At the end of the last season, Megan seemed like a bad choice for Don, or at least a safe choice. She seemed, again, none-too-bright and a little shallow — especially when contrasted with the far more capable and interesting Dr. Faye. (And I was, I imagine, among the minority of viewers who thought Megan was the better choice, for Don was clearly choosing her because she was kind and positive and genuinely great with his kids.) But here she’s surprising. And so the scene is surprising, and it jars the whole damn episode into a new focus from there on out, like someone finally bumping the blurry projector.
And that’s the takeaway for me as a writer: When you think you know a character, when you think your reader will know them, force yourself to go deeper and go weirder. People in real life will always surprise you and confound you if you stick around long enough. But in fiction, we don’t have that long. We’re working on borrowed time, the painfully short span of a novel, a story, a play, a movie. Dare your characters to surprise you. What are they hiding? What are their secret talents or unknown perversions? What’s the craziest thing they could possibly do? What’s the worst thing they could possibly do at a particular moment? And — just as important! — how do these things, when unleashed, affect the people around them?
Next: Inspirado #2: Miles Kurosky, Beulah, and their bipolar symphonies to God