The special knowledge of the "browbeat" writer

So today at Slate there’s an awful lot of con­tent con­cern­ing the one thing that every­body there cares an awful lot about, which is Mad Men, and former man­aging edit­or of PEN America (!) David Haglund takes it upon him­self to explain to every­body what “ye-ye” was, and the whole deal with that song what’s-her-nut sings in French, and What It All Means. It’s good to get these ball­park estim­ates con­cern­ing what con­sti­tutes socially accept­able drooler­dom among the Park-Slopey chat­ter­ing classes, I admit, but what caught my eye par­tic­u­larly in Haglund’s very thor­oughly detailed exeges­is was the fol­low­ing pas­sage about one Gillian Hills, who recor­ded the “ori­gin­al” of “that French song:” “In 1966, the year tonight’s Mad Men epis­ode takes place, Hills appeared in Blow-Up, per­haps the quint­es­sen­tial Swinging Sixties film (the movie was a sur­prise hit in the U.S., and helped kill off the Production Code.) She played an aspir­ing mod­el who has a three­some with the lead char­ac­ter, a pho­to­graph­er played by David Hemmings, and anoth­er aspir­ing mod­el, played by Jane Birkin. (Hills sort of reprised this role in A Clockwork Orange, in which her char­ac­ter part­cip­ates, to quote IMDb, ‘in an after­noon sex mara­thon to the music of the William Tell over­ture’ with the prot­ag­on­ist, Alex, and her char­ac­ter­’s best friend.)” 

Letting be the whole “music of the William Tell over­ture” thing (like, as opposed to the “cho­reo­graphy of the William Tell over­ture?”); what cocked my eye­brow on read­ing was the “char­ac­ter­’s best friend” bit. Like, huh? The two girls Alex picks up in the record shop have pre­cisely one line between them, the one about wheth­er “Bratty” (the girl played by Hills, FTR) is gonna pick up a record by “Googly Gogol” or “Johnny Zhivago.” That’s it. There’s no, “If you get Johnny Zhivago, I’m sure you’ll lend it to me, being my best friend and all.” I mean, really, they could have just met, each hav­ing spot­ted the same five-pound-note on the street and agree­ing to coöper­ate and split it by buy­ing an LP each. Or they could be cous­ins, which would make the whole three-way thing that much sick­er. I just think the flat “best friend” declar­a­tion pre­sumes too much. Also, I played the fast-motion sex scene back in step mode, to see if I could catch any inter­ac­tion between the girls that would indic­ate that level of intim­acy, and I still insist that Haglund is reach­ing here.