mad men

Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner Gets Publicly Analyzed

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner participated in a unique live event last weekend at the Rubin Museum, in which he allowed himself to be psychoanalyzed after viewing pictures from Carl Jung’s The Red Book. He talked a lot about Mad Men! And also about Tiger Woods, for some reason, though it actually does kind of make sense. Some highlights from Flavorwire’s coverage of the event:

On the way characters in dramas never usually change:

“I committed to an endgame scenario that these people might change in some way. That the events of their life would affect them. Which is actually something that you don’t deal with in drama. You can deal with it in a play — at the end of Hamlet, everyone is definitely dealing with some consequences, but in serialized drama, nothing. No one grows. No one changes. They can’t.”

On doors:

“I’m kind of interested in doors; it’s all over the show and it’s all over a lot of my work. I mean, anyone who does drama, it’s one of the greatest things in the world … You get privacy when you close a door. You get turned on when you close a door. Then you open the door, and it’s just instant drama because you just don’t know what’s there.”

On Tiger Woods:


“I was thinking about this with Tiger Woods. I saw this on TV: He’s going to go play in a tournament, and he’s getting back together with his wife. She went to visit him in his sex rehab clinic. And I was like, what happened? Time. All of this could have happened the next day. Nope. Time. Why did that take time? Did anything actually happen? … It’s kind of strange, right?”

… Right! They didn’t have sex-rehab clinics in the mid-sixties (probably), but we can add “the presence of a door” to our Mad Men season-four drinking game now! (The rest of the report is recommended reading as well.)

On the Therapist’s Couch With Mad Men Creator Matthew Weiner [Flavorwire]

Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner Gets Publicly Analyzed