I’ve been plagued by jet lag for the past few days, waking up around 4 wide-eyed and unable to roll over and talk in my sleep for hours (like I’d like to). It’s a nice, icy blue time of day–good to catch up on some reading, but even better to do some lonely home viewing. Here are a few of the things I’ve been enjoying at unlikely hours.

1. Breaking Bad — Okay, maybe you shouldn’t watch this at 4 AM: its tone is downright apocalyptic; and it’s more melodramatic than AMC’s other amazing offering, Mad Men. But Breaking Bad is not only engrossing and addicting, it’s pointed and truly modern in a way that fills a void left by The Wire and The Sopranos. The Season 3 premiere might be the best “the way we live now” ever.

2. By Brakhage — I’ve been revisiting these in preparation for the day when I buy Volume Two. Watching Brakhage without the flicker of the projector can be bizarre, but on DVD in the deserted morning it seems perfect: just let yourself zoom in, frame by frame, and watch everything pass and flow. But don’t look at it like a painting: it’s a film.

3. JFK — Why, yes, a healthy dose of epic conspiracy theory before the sun rises is more enjoyable than at night with friends. Paranoia is better in the dawn? Maybe. Don DeLillo in the evening, by the fire; Oliver Stone in the morning, with coffee. Back and to the left.

4. The Silent World — You’ve seen The Life Aquatic. Now spring for the real thing: Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle collaborated on this Oscar winning documentary which seems timelier now more than ever. All the DVD collections of Cousteau’s explorations are also highly recommended.

5. Guy Maddin — All of Guy Maddin’s bizarre and beautiful films are made better by early morning confusion and lightheadedness, especially Archangel and the amazing Careful.

The JFK motorcade, frames before shots are fired.

I’ve been watching Mad Men‘s current season with wide eyes, waiting for Hildy to burst into tears and snot all over Pete Cambell, screaming, “They killed the President!” Sunday night, it happened — and if there was anything surprising about how Weiner and Co. handled the event, it was how straightforward it was: just a bunch of people watching television, like on 9/11.

It made me wonder, most of all, about Mad Men‘s function. There was a point during the episode where Draper tried to tear Betty from the tube: he said something like, “We can’t just watch TV.” But for them — and for us — it’s all they can do. Television provides the only form of connection to the event, television is the experience regardless of the fact that it is “just watching TV.”

Sunday night’s episode was, more than anything, our experience of the JFK assassination. It crept slowly — we may not have even noticed it at first — but then we followed the narrative play by play, up until Lee Harvey Oswald got shot. I, too, now have a memory of being huddled around the television, watching Walter Cronkite take his glasses on and off. And my experience of the JFK assassination — now that I’ve had my experience of the JFK assassination — is perhaps no less valid than Betty Draper’s, both being mediated by the same technology. Furthermore, that technology itself is a device that collapses time, rendering the time past since 1963 silent. The assassination — as evidenced by the primacy of the Zapruder film — has no existence outside of the camera technology, nothing beyond the frame by frame celluloid homicide.

Death at the office.

I used to think that what was wonderful about Mad Men was its ability to portray the 1960s not in terms of “accuracy” or “legitimacy,” but on their own terms: revolving around Weiner and Co.’s thesis about the ’60s. I still think this could be true for the writers of the show. But for us — the audience — Mad Men could serve a different function: one where we relive the ’60s, where we experience the clothes, the cars, the drinking. Pure nostalgia, a nostalgia so earnest we want to shed Joan Hollaway’s tears. And just as the United States formed as a nation in the wake of JFK’s death, we form as a nation, in our mutual desire to hear the news and weep.