The core of “Mad Men” has always been religious: Advertising man Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) original sin, akin to Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience, involved his stealing the identity of another man. Neptunian themes of deceit and fuzzy identity merged with other ways to “Neptune out” – through drugs, alcohol, sex, as well as […]
Archetypes: Television: Review: ‘Mad Men’ Series Finale (2015): Priest, Penance, Confessor, Confessee
May 18, 2015 by
Archetypes: Television: ‘Mad Men’: Don Draper, Addictions and the Priest
May 17, 2015 by
The addiction-centric archetypes associated with “Mad Men”’s Don Draper (Jon Hamm) have been consistent over the series’ seven-season run. In the pilot, viewers learned that Don drank, smoked and was unfaithful. Over several dozen episodes, they realized those habits – booze, cigarettes and sex – were embedded in the man’s sinews. And that these activities […]
Archetypes: Film: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Brings On the Matriarchy and the Feminine (2015)
May 16, 2015 by
The great balancing act in Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t the circus-like, high-pole-dipping soldiers swooping down onto enemy vehicles like birds of prey, or the astounding center of gravity that keeps racing rigs and trucks from keeling over onto desert sands out of sheer momentum. The real equilibrium here is the propulsive paean director and […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015)
May 16, 2015 by
At the beginning of the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, Peter “Star Lord” Quill (Chris Pratt) spots and snatches a lizard, and then uses it to simulate a microphone. In the first moments of Max Max: Fury Road, Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), eyes a two-headed one and gobbles it whole, the creatures’ tail, in a […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Good Kill’ (2015)
May 12, 2015 by
Is military killing easier to rationalize when it’s done with a joystick? That’s the question at the heart of Good Kill, which looks at how drone warfare affects a group of military fighting the Taliban from crate-like structures in the Las Vegas desert. Written and directed by Andrew Niccol, the film, which screened at the […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Pitch Perfect 2’ (2015)
May 11, 2015 by
Although Pitch Perfect 2, like its predecessor, is about the Bellas, a girls-only a cappella college singing group, the franchise’s archetype is not the singer. The archetypal honor goes to the misfit, carried primarily by Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson), whose Aussie roots, larger proportions and clumsiness brand her as unique. She’s a Uranian outlier, despite […]
Archetypes: Television: Review: ‘Mad Men’ (2015): ‘The Archetypal Significance of Betty Draper’s Death’
May 11, 2015 by
‘Mad Men’’s penultimate episode was titled “The Milk and Honey Route,” evoking a place or time where the sweetness of creation coalesces into a destination of fragrant bounty. Instead, the x-ray of Betty Draper’s (January Jones) aggressive, terminal lung cancer only suggested piles of gray, foul-smelling cigarette ashes contaminating the notion of paradise. Archetypally, though, […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Slow West’ (2015)
May 11, 2015 by
Just about the only purity and innocence you’ll see in Slow West are the breathtakingly pristine natural vistas of this country in 1870 – mountains, rivers, fields and day-and-midnight-blue skies – and Jay Cavendish, a lovestruck teen from Scotland who’s traveling through “the baking heart of America” to locate the woman he fell for in […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Hot Pursuit’ (2015)
May 7, 2015 by
On the surface, Hot Pursuit is about an uptight law enforcement agent shepherding an unwilling witness to court to testify against a drug lord. Archetypally, it’s a joust between by-the-book, tightly coiled Cooper (Reese Witherspoon) and renegade Colombian hottie Daniella (Sofia Vergara). Given that one woman intensely colors inside the lines and the other doesn’t […]
Archetypes: Television: Review: ‘Mad Men’: Peggy Takes Back Her Projections
May 4, 2015 by
Last night’s episode of “Mad Men” was aptly titled “Lost Horizon.” Visually conjuring up an inability to pinpoint where the sky ends and the sea begins, the image is about fuzziness which, when applied to the lives of this series’ characters, amounts to an existential blur. But from what just transpired in this episode, that’s […]
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