Anyone Watching A Good Tv Show?

[leviramsey]

And who is Bob Benson?

He is who Tom & Lorenzo thought he was:

After almost an entire season of popping up in the background or suddenly showing up to offer help to various members of the SC&P family, Bob disappointed a whole bunch of people who were hoping he was any of a number of wild things, from Don’s illegitimate son to an actual government spy, by revealing the mundane truth of himself: he’s gay and he’s hot for Pete Campbell.

Or is he?

Well… yes, actually. We look around at many of our fellow reviewers and recappers, as well as the online fans, many of whom are still asking this week if Bob Benson is really gay, and it seems to us that a whole lot of people – possibly most of the ones who watch the show – are kind of missing the point. Despite one of the most open declarations of love and desire ever depicted in the entire 6 seasons of the show, people are theorizing that Bob is anything from a sociopath to someone who’s just putting Pete on, pretending to hit on him in order to further some scheme. To all that we would like to say this: In 1968, homosexuality was a recognized mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. A gay man in 1968 could not only be fired, he could be jailed, institutionalized, subjected to electro-shock therapy and even chemically castrated. The idea that any man in 1968 would pretend to be gay is akin to the idea of someone pretending to be a Jew in Weimar Germany. It just doesn’t scan. The stakes are entirely too high for anyone to fool around with that sort of stuff. It is virtually impossible to conceive of any sane straight person doing such a thing. It’s like pretending to be a pedophile for ulterior motives, in today’s terms. That’s how it would have been seen at the time. Some men tried it to get out of serving in Vietnam, but even then, it wasn’t a common tactic, even with stakes that high. No, as shocking and hard to accept as it may have been, Bob Benson really was hitting on Pete Campbell, and now we’re going to tell you why.

Since there has been an insane amount of wild speculation regarding Bob, we decided to sit down and watch every scene he appeared in, taking notes as to where he was, who he spoke to, and what he said. If anyone wants citations, we can provide them in the comments section.

Here is what we know about Bob Benson: He went to Beloit and then got his MBA from Wharton. He worked in finance for a year, he hated it, and his family has worked for the same financial company for three generations (since this is all so easily checked by the people he told it to – Don and Pete – we’re going on the safe assumption that it’s accurate). He talks about sports or uses sports metaphors frequently. He listens to self-help, power-of-positive-thinking, Dale Carnegie-esque salesman porn and espouses the expected self-help platitudes left and right about being in the right place and being the kind of man he knows he can be. In typical Carnegie style, he goes out of his way to be available and helpful to all people, all the time. He makes a habit of handing out coffee to co-workers; Pete most often. He sent a deli tray to Roger’s mother’s funeral and when Ken reprimanded him for it, he claimed that “It seemed the right thing to do.” He secures a nurse for Pete’s mother. He rescues Joan in the middle of a health crisis and tells her he has “nowhere to go.” He hangs around the creative area frequently, claiming that he loves it down there. We know that he has a fairly good relationship with Stan and a very good one with Ginsberg, to the point that he was the only one able to talk Ginsberg down from whatever mental health crisis he was having.

He hangs around outside Pete’s office frequently. When questioned on it, he claims he loves the light. When we actually see his office, it’s tiny, dark and windowless, which tends to back up his excuse. He visits a whorehouse with Pete and stands outside in the hallway while Pete gets his rocks off. When the prostitute comes out, he offers to pay for Pete. There is no indication he had sex with any of the prostitutes. It’s implied he waited there the whole time. He has happily gone to the store to get Pete toilet paper. He brings Pete up in conversation frequently (“Doesn’t Pete Campbell have a beach house?”) and claims to be very interested in his well-being (“He’s a very generous person and I think he’s going through a rough time.”). He constantly flatters Pete and speaks highly of him. He stays at the office later than most of the employees. He is friendly with a gay man and wasn’t shy about admitting it in the office. He claims that this gay man just nursed his father back to health but he earlier told Ken that his father died. He has developed what looks like a fairly close platonic relationship with Joan (a woman not prone to close platonic relationships); to the point that he jokes about her mother being at the track and thinks nothing of offering to handle Kevin for her. When Joan’s mother tried to suggest a romantic relationship, Joan said knowingly, “He’s not interested.” Joan figured out Sal was gay just by playfully kissing him once. Joan absolutely knows when a man is or isn’t interested in her and she is highly unlikely to admit to her mother that a viable man isn’t interested in her. She once got testy and competitive with her mother over a plumber she admitted she found disgusting – and this was just a couple weeks post-partum.

Here is what we surmise about Bob Benson, based on the above: He’s an upper-middle class over-achiever from a family of them but he’s more than likely estranged from them because he’s gay, which partially explains why he doesn’t work for the family firm and also explains why he can be so flexible about whether his father is alive or not. Like a lot of gay men, he is fascinated by people who work in a creative field, even if he’s not creative himself. Like a lot of well-closeted gay men, he is a smooth liar from years of experience; very good at fooling the eye with distractions and cover stories. But because he’s constantly spinning tales he can’t always keep track of them and a close observer can occasionally pick up inconsistencies. Like a lot of over-achieving well-closeted gay men, Bob is operating under “Best Little Boy in the World” syndrome, a term which comes from the seminal coming-out autobiography of the same name, published in 1973, and so well describes a certain type of middle-to-upper-class gay man that it’s considered an honest-to-god measurable syndrome today. Basically, it comes down to this: there is a certain strain of gay men who have an overwhelming urge to be over-achievers in all areas of their lives. In school, they are A-students and members of every club and organization that will have them. They are athletic, scholarly, friendly, and helpful to everyone around them, constantly seeking excellence and popularity in order to deflect any questions as to why he doesn’t date. They are always extremely clean-cut, if not downright conservative in appearance. They quite often stay in school to get advanced degrees because the atmosphere allows them to continue to put off any questions about their personal lives or plans outside their education or careers. After school, they throw themselves into their careers with the same fervency they used to get through school. If a gay man is both a Best Little Boy and estranged from his family, he is more than likely an extremely lonely person; possibly even someone who’s bad at reading personal cues and engaging in emotional intimacy. These types of gay men still exist, but there were far more of them back in the days when staying in the closet was less of a personal choice and more of a necessity.

But Bob’s life doesn’t necessarily have to be one completely without companionship or sex. New York City was (and in many ways still is) one of the best places to be in the country for young gay men with no family ties. There was a burgeoning gay social scene at this time. There almost always had been one in New York City, but in the years following the war, the numbers of detached men and women who migrated to the city and joined what would later come to be called the “gay community” expanded tremendously. This is largely why the Stonewall Riots of 1969 happened when they did; because the gay community finally had the numbers and the communally-fed anger needed to do something about the institutionalized harassment they were receiving from the police.

By the way, the Stonewall Riots will be happening practically in Joan’s backyard. Having lived in the Village the entire decade of the sixties, Joan has probably come across more gay people in her day-to-day life than anyone else in the Mad Men story. It makes perfect sense that she would befriend a good-looking young gay man who works with her.

Anyway, we made a point in our initial review of this episode that Bob comes across “culturally gay,” which is to say, he’s closeted in work and in many areas of his life, but he likely has some form of gay social life, given that he knows Manolo well enough to recommend him for jobs. If you’d like some sense of what this gay social scene was like and how someone like Bob Benson would have fit into it, we highly recommend seeing the film version of “The Boys in the Band.” The play opened off-Broadway in April of 1968 and offers a near-perfect snapshot of bitchy, self-loathing, pre-Stonewall middle-class Manhattan gay male socializing. The entire film is available on YouTube. It’s quite the artifact. We would also highly recommend Edmund White’s “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room is Empty” for an extremely detailed and well-drawn depiction of white gay male life in NYC prior to and around this period.

The idea that Bob might be socializing and having some form of gay life, however limited that may be by today’s standards, sets him drastically apart from the show’s other notable gay male character, Sal Romano, who was such a deeply entrenched good Italian Catholic boy that he was living with his mother and apparently a virgin (he ran like hell from that Belle Jolie guy like he was on fire) well into his middle age. We think it’s safe to say that Sal had no gay friends and had never set foot in a gay bar in his life.

This doesn’t seem to be referred to much anymore, but back in the Sal Romano days, you frequently heard reviewers and recappers talk about how obviously gay he was and how hard it was sometimes to believe that no one around him ever suspected. For our parts, we weren’t particularly happy with the famous scene where his wife Kitty figured it out, arguing that no man who had been as deeply closeted as Sal would ever start camping it up in front of his wife like that so freely and un-self-consciously. He is a very fondly remembered character but the one consistent criticism leveled at him was that they may have oversold the gayness in his mannerisms and speech a bit too much. However, since this was a period where men like Charles Nelson Reilly, Paul Lynde and even Liberace could get millions of people to not question their heterosexuality (although plenty of people did), we don’t think it was completely out of the realm of possibility. Anyway, our point is, looking over the whole Bob Benson storyline, we get the distinct impression that he was designed to correct that “mistake.” He was deliberately designed to throw the viewer off and not immediately get them to guess that he was gay, in total opposition to Sal, who loudly signaled his gayness to the 21st Century audience the first time he opened his mouth.

Bob also serves to allow the show to continue its examination of the changing status of gays, much in the same way Dawn replaced Carla, the Drapers’ maid in Ossining, who was the primary African-American character on the show for the first three years. This change in character illustrated the ways in which African-American visibility and interactions with middle-class whites changed; as they moved from the servant class to the professional class. Many fans of the show have clamored for Sal’s return but we have never been among them. Sal’s story, such as it is, is done. The likelihood of a man of his generation leaving his wife and coming out of the closet in middle age is almost nil. If Mad Men truly wanted to examine the changing status of gays, even if it’s done in a very limited way (as with Dawn) then they were going to have to introduce a new, younger gay character to the cast. For a time, Peggy’s friend Joyce seemed to be the likely candidate to fill the role (and a likely candidate to actually be at a place like the Stonewall in 1969), but she was limited as a character in a lot of ways and can’t provide the stark contrast that someone like Bob can. And cute gay Kurt, who gave Peggy her first makeover, was a casualty of the SC crackup and never seen again.

As for why Bob would ever fall for, or be attracted to Pete, we don’t even think it rates a question. A succession of very attractive women of varying degrees of intelligence and sanity have gotten it on with Pete; from Trudy to Peggy to Beth Dawes, to that model he followed home, to that crazy neighbor lady who broke up his marriage. In fact, if you want to be a little crude about it, Pete’s probably the Number 3 swordsman on the show, behind Don and Roger. He hasn’t done badly for himself at all and he’s not nearly as unattractive to certain people in the story as he is to us, the viewers. Bob doesn’t know all the various ways in which Pete has been an utter shit the last 6 seasons, from raping that nanny to shitting all over Peggy’s self-esteem, to petulantly blowing up his marriage because he was mad at his Father-in-law. To Bob Benson, Pete is a fussy, droll, highly emotional, well-dressed, slightly effete, old-money WASP who left his wife, frets over his mother, and just recently started smoking pot. It’s the Niles Crane effect. Combine that with his being a junior partner at the agency, and he becomes irresistible to a go-getting guy like Bob. Making his move now – even after hearing him use the word “degenerate” – made a certain amount of sense to him, even if it didn’t to the audience.

And as to the question of whether a closeted gay man would do what Bob did, risking what he’s risking, we’d just answer with: they did. Gay men did, in fact, do this sort of thing and do, in fact, still do this sort of thing; risking the closet based on very deep infatuations (or even dangerous obsessions) or just an obsessively close reading of another man to see if he’s sending out signals. It was insanely risky on his part, but you can read the stories of countless men in Bob’s generation who fell in love with bosses or dorm roommates or teachers and eventually either made a successful move or made a fool of themselves – or worse. It looks and sounds crazy to us in this day and age, but like we said, Bob is almost certainly extremely stunted emotionally and very bad at intimacy. He’s all surface because he’s spent his entire life being all surface in order to deflect questions.

In addition, you have to remember that culturally gay people at this time had virtually no way of picking up on normal romantic and sexual cues. It was actually illegal for gay people to socialize with each other, which is at least partially why so many gay male assignations at the time happened in back alleys and tea rooms and why complicated signaling like Polari and the hanky code were used to communicate everything from sexual position and act preferences to basic gay social concepts (“butch,” “drag,” and “queen” are all Polari slang). Having never really been taught how to read whether a man is interested in them, many gay men of this period suffered serious crushes on the straight men around them and totally misunderstood any forms of friendliness or affection as sexual attraction. Also: while the camera lingered on their knees in this scene, such moves were in fact very common among gay men in order to non-verbally signal to each other that they were like-minded (like toe-tapping in tea rooms). They worked and were devised because it was something that was quite easy to deflect or ignore if signals got misread. People bump their knees all the time, right? No big deal. Pete obviously picked up on it, but it never quite goes so far that he needs to leap out of his seat in disgust. This move was very much part of the gay male playbook of the day, which was almost entirely about trying to figure out just who the hell around you was also gay and reaching out to them in a way that didn’t get you killed or arrested.

There is some question as to whether or not Pete reacted with as much repugnance as one might have assumed, which is notable since his mother tells him outright that he’s unlovable and here’s this person he likes and relies on declaring their love for him. We’ve delved enough into the personal politics of this scene. We’ll leave it to others to theorize as to whether Pete might be open to the idea of something less heterosexual in his life.

There. That’s what we see when we look at the story of Bob Benson, knowing what we know about gay men of this period. He’s not a sociopath or even a schemer of any great note. He’s an obsessively go-getting, emotionally damaged gay Golden Boy type who has lousy taste in men and is so bad at social cues that he’ll declare his love for someone who’s currently worrying that his mother has been raped. This doesn’t preclude Bob from doing something nefarious down the line in the story, nor does it totally negate the idea that he’s bisexual or not entirely gay (which is how Matthew Weiner coyly put it - “not gay, necessarily” – in the “Inside Mad Men” video this week, but he has a history of being not entirely trustworthy when talking about ongoing storylines).

We tend to believe that he’s gay, though; because bisexual men in 1968 were for the most part not hanging around in gay bars or socializing with gay men in that way. Again: the stakes were too high for anyone who had options outside gay life at this time. If anything, bisexual men were even more furtive about their same-sex attractions than gay men were. The only non-gay people who surfaced in the scene at this time were motherly fag hags (of which Joan, by the way, would make a near perfect example). Anyway, we don’t predict where the story of Bob is going, but we’re fairly sure we’re close to knowing what his story has been so far. If you have the episodes DVR’d, we recommend fast-forwarding through everything and watching just the Bob Benson scenes, one right after another. It all becomes a lot clearer and a whole lot less ominous than many theories would have you believe. He’s been infatuated with Pete all season.

[leviramsey]

Of personal interest, a cousin of mine works for the firm that Bob Benson's family worked for and which Bob left, Brown Brothers Harriman; his father, in turn, is the character I've always identified with Pete (and I likewise identified my father with Ken, though that might be shifting to Bob Benson, if only because the age is a lot closer).

[CVByrne]

Surely the amount of series a show runs for is irrelevant, its the amount of shows. So if Game of Thrones were to run for 7 series (8 seems more likely), or 70/80 shows, it is in Battestar Galactica territory (73 episodes), a show which CV tells us he loves?

 

Very weird point of view, I can't get to grips with it. 

 

Game of Thrones ep 10 was everything I expected, setting the tone for series 4. I was happy enough with it. 

 

 

It's a rather simple point.

 

Battlestar Galactica had 13, 20, 20, 20 so we got plenty of episodes per year running from approx Sep to March each year and had the whole thing was done in 4 years. Only getting say 10 episodes per year for 7/8 years is minimizing the amount of time you have with the show per year and dragging it on and on. 

 

The less space between episodes and seasons the better. Which is why I said the Netflix model is the dream model, get the entire series available to you to watch and there you go. 

[dont_do_it_doug.]

 

Surely the amount of series a show runs for is irrelevant, its the amount of shows. So if Game of Thrones were to run for 7 series (8 seems more likely), or 70/80 shows, it is in Battestar Galactica territory (73 episodes), a show which CV tells us he loves?

 

Very weird point of view, I can't get to grips with it. 

 

Game of Thrones ep 10 was everything I expected, setting the tone for series 4. I was happy enough with it. 

 

 

It's a rather simple point.

 

Battlestar Galactica had 13, 20, 20, 20 so we got plenty of episodes per year running from approx Sep to March each year and had the whole thing was done in 4 years. Only getting say 10 episodes per year for 7/8 years is minimizing the amount of time you have with the show per year and dragging it on and on. 

 

The less space between episodes and seasons the better. Which is why I said the Netflix model is the dream model, get the entire series available to you to watch and there you go. 

 

 

Which would be a fair point except every production is different. A show on the scale of GOT simply cannot manage it's time or it's budget in such a way as to churn out 20 episode seasons. But they have a story to tell un-compromised, as it should be. A story which just so happens to be as long/short as Battlestar Galactica.

 

You could exert some patience and watch it back to back in 4/5 years time. 

[maqroll]

The last episode of GoT was bound to be somewhat anti-climactic...sucks we have to wait 10 months for more, the show is like crack.

 

Looking more and more like all the rivals south of the Wall will have to unite to battle the White Walkers...

[Houlston]

Love John Ralphio on Parks and Rec almost as much as Ron Swanson. The first episode last night is an absolute peach, so many characters at their best. Fabulous,

[CVByrne]

Ron Swanson is my hero. 

[GarethRDR]

[Milfner]

This Game of Thrones GIF is making me chuckle

 

[Houlston]

Hannibal 

[hogso]

Secret Life of the Cat was reaaaaaally good. Seeing one them washing whilst wearing a camera just cracked me up.

[Milfner]

There's a follow up on it tomorrow night too. I really enjoyed it, would love to be able to tag one onto my cats and see the shit they get up to.

[Stevo985]

Damn, I wanted to watch that. I'll catch it on iPlayer

[CVByrne]

We've two cats back in my family home in Dublin. The Captain & Ratikins. 

 

Anyway they are merciless, ruthlessly efficient killers. Our back garden is littered with the dead animals they have killed. Spring is the worst they slaughter young birds wholesale. One time the pair of them tackled a Seagull. 

 

I'd love to get cameras on them. 

Edited June 14, 2013 by CVByrne

[GarethRDR]

Reminds me of this...

 

[CVByrne]

 

Brilliant. I thought most kills were left as presents. but only a 1/4 

 

 

Evolution. Ya gotta love it. Total killing machines. 

[mikeyp102]

Anyone seen that dates on channel four? Don't really know what to make of it, but that girl who played Mia is a stunner

[Houlston]

She's in GoT

[rjw63]

Just discovered that Sibel Kekilli, who plays Tyrion Lannisters bit of crumpet in Game of Thrones, is a former porno star

 

PM me if you want links to some of her rather excellent former work

[dont_do_it_doug.]

Anyone seen that dates on channel four? Don't really know what to make of it, but that girl who played Mia is a stunner

 

Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter.