The Reluctant Wife introduced me to Mad Men after she was
addicted to it, so I initially had a kaleidoscopic experience of it – watching episodes
without having seen the previous ones. Kind
of the way we used to watch TV series, when we would fill in what we didn’t see
in the summer in re-runs. That said,
when I did hunker down to binge watching from the beginning, it didn’t
feel that different - we join this story – just as we joined Olive Kitteridge – midstream. And just as
in Olive, this feels like a series of short stories, many of which could stand
on their own – and so it seems to be a show about characters rather than about
plot. We get some information in
flashbacks, but I was as able to pick things up from watching ahead with the
Reluctant Wife almost as effectively as by watching from the beginning – which is
to say that there are big holes in the backstory of this drama. We are, I think, disoriented from the
beginning. Television serials have the
advantage –maybe even the necessity - of doing this – the authors don’t know if
the pilot will be picked up much less how the story will develop across how
many seasons when they write the first episode.
So they, like we, might be meeting a character that is formed – or half
formed, and they may be trying to figure out, as we are, what has gone into the
formation of that character. And this
feels very much like meeting a client as a therapist. Here they are – a fully formed person – and we
will get to know them – to a certain extent together – as they tell – and reconstruct
– and construct their story.
The Reluctant Stepdaughter tells me the word on the internet
is that Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) is a misogynist. I disagree with this (at least in the first
season) and, further, think this is a weirdly feminist series. But I could be biased. Draper bears more than a passing resemblance
to my father, who, like Draper, was incredibly handsome (apparently these
things skip a generation). Donald Draper is the assumed identity of the lead character in this series about advertising men working on Madison Avenue, with the first season taking place during the year after my birth – 1960. During that year, my family moved to Connecticut and my father, like Draper, would commute into the city while my mother stayed home with me in the burbs.
Draper, like
my father, is gone from home a lot – Draper stays over in the city rather than
travel home on the train – ostensibly because he has work to do, but frequently
it is to stay with his mistress. My Dad,
a travelling salesman, was frequently gone for two or three nights in the
middle of the week – and occasionally for longer spells when I was really
little and he was doing international sales.
There was an air of mystery to my Dad’s absences – what was he really doing when he was away for that
time (my fantasies tended to head towards being a spy or something dramatic,
though he could have, from my perspective, been having affairs, who
knows?). In any case, there is more than
a little air of mystery to Don Draper, even from the perspective of the all-knowing
TV camera, as there was for my father. So my denial of Draper's misogynism may be a misplaced effort to deny my father's misogynism and/or to deny that my father, an incurable flirt, was having affairs.
Draper is, on the surface, an impostor because he has
assumed another man’s identity. He is
also an impostor because he is revealed in the very first episode to be
carrying on an affair (or later two or more) while also being apparently
happily married with two kids to Betty Draper (January Jones). He is also, I think, an impostor on a much
deeper and more pervasive level – a socio-culturally saturated level that we
all, to some extent, participate in and that is essential to the culture that
Madison Avenue was (and is) creating for us and delivering to us.
Draper is a Korean War Vet who is working with a boss who is
a WWII vet and supervising boys who have not fought but come straight from
(mostly) Ivy League Colleges. He is
working as the Creative Director at a fictional medium sized ad agency that
handles accounts of brands that we are familiar with. Lucky Strike, the cigarette company, is their biggest
brand and it pays the bulk of the bills.
I grew up with stories about the advertising geniuses behind Lucky
Strike. Their package used to have a Green Background behind the red emblem but, during WWII when so many things were being rationed,
they changed the background to white, advertising that “Lucky Strike green
has gone to war” and somehow they had done their patriotic duty to give up the
green ink in the printing process to slap on tanks and jeeps and thus it was
patriotic, by association, to smoke the cigarette of a patriotic company.
None of this is referred to in the first season. In a later season (I think) Draper comes up
with their next slogan – “Lucky Strike cigarette – It's toasted”, something that
every other cigarette is but that gets them out of the area of asserting that
they are or are not health promoting.
Both “Lucky Strike Green Goes to War” and “Lucky Strike cigarettes – It's toasted”
are lies; and this series is filled with lies of all sorts. (And, based on the attached pictures, the timing of the various campaigns have been changed to fit the needs of the plot - another layer of lying)
The primary lies are the lies that the men are constantly
saying to women to seduce them or to assuage them – to manipulate them into
being what they need them to be at any given moment. It is shocking to observe the nakedness of a
powerfully sexist culture in which the men have all of the power and the women
are seduced by it (apparently because they have no choice, though the three main female protagonists have very different relationships to their assigned femininity). I believe this is a feminist series in part
because it is somewhat realistically portraying (God I hope they are exaggerating
it just a little bit) our recent sexist past – and thus are raising our
consciousness about just how complex but also frankly bad it was for women – but I also think for men. And this is another reason I think it is a
feminist series – because it demonstrates how much better it is for men to work
from a position of balance with empowered partners rather than to flounder
around having to pretend to know-all while being essentially clueless. The documentary RBG about the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg also does a good job articulating how bad it was for women - but does so more directly, by describing sexism and the ways it hurt women (and men) not just showing it and seeming to celebrate it, as this series does.
Pete Campbell |
Draper’s hated enemy – and would be nemesis, but he never
gets the upper hand – is Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser). To me he appears to be an alternate version
of Draper – as is Draper’s boss - Roger Sterling (John Slattery). Pete Campbell is smarmy and comes from old
money. We could almost empathize with
him – he is emasculated by his parents, Draper, his wife and his in-laws in one
episode - if he weren’t simultaneously such a creep. Roger Sterling – the son of one of the two
founding partners – and thus also someone who is born into money and an identity - is also
smarmy, but in a more sophisticated – even debonair way, and there is a sense
that Draper (and we) can learn a thing or two from him. Both of these men’s treatment of women,
however, is despicable. Campbell thinks
he knows what he is doing but he doesn’t have the first idea that what he has
that is of value is not at all what he thinks it is and he lashes out when
others, who actually love him, sometimes in spite of himself, get fed up with
how boorish he can be based on his own lack of self-awareness. Sterling, on the other hand, lives “like a
sailor on shore leave” and believes that the highest compliment he can pay a
woman is to flatter her on her looks. If
there is a shallower character in Television, I haven’t met him.
Roger Sterling |
So Draper is an impostor – like the other men (and many of
the women who are looking for husbands or just liking the attention and the sex
with wealthy men or men who one day may be wealthy), but he is by far the most
authentic impostor on the block. Unlike
Sterling and Campbell, he is generative.
Not only are his ideas creative – indeed, at times, they are
lyrical. But he really gets people. Part of his generativity is with these
people. Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss)
starts the season as his starry eyed Good Catholic Girl Secretary from the Boroughs
and ends as the first female copywriter at the firm since the War. Draper teaches her the craft – in part by
criticizing her, which she is strong enough to hear as useful – and in part by
being genuinely connected with her and concerned about her – supporting her as
she develops into a professional woman.
But Draper is also an engaged and devoted father. He is able to connect with and nurture his children
in a way that his beautiful but neurotic (and looks and self-obsessed) wife
cannot. He is genuinely interested in
his mistresses – and mystified by them – he does not see them as simply a piece
of ass the way that the boors do. And
while Sterling is the chief boor, the other men are all boors of one stripe or
another – with the exception of the well-meaning Harold "Harry" Crane
(Rich Sommer) who gets caught up in an inadvertent romance and presumably tells
on himself leading to a separation from his wife, and the Zen-like partner of
Sterling, Bertram "Bert" Cooper (Robert Morse) who somehow keeps this
ship of loons headed in the right direction.
So what do we make of Don Draper? On the one hand, he is a classic tragic
figure. At the end of the first season,
he is able to land the Kodak account by naming their new “wheel” slide projector
the carousel and describes the carousel, while showing pictures of his
marriage, as a time machine that lets us get on and go back and forth in time,
delivering us back to our doorstep after we have been able to spend some time
in a place called nostalgia, where we are truly loved. This deeply felt presentation gets to the
Kodak representatives, and it even gets to at least one member of his creative
team. It also leads Don to reconsider
staying behind from going to Thanksgiving with his wife’s family – and we see what we
think is that happy ending, only to realize that what we are seeing is his fantasy - perhaps only an intention - and that he
actually returns home too late to join them.
This is a man who would be a happy family figure if only he could
believe his own narrative. What gets in
the way of his doing that?
In addition to being a sentimentalist, Draper is also a
prying man – hiring a psychiatrist/ psychoanalyst to treat his wife and then
talking to the psychoanalyst about the content of the sessions. Now, this is, I hope, fiction. The only time that a therapist – even in 1960
– should talk with a third party about a treatment is with that person’s
permission or if that person is a child and, if the child is over the age of about five,
the therapist should let the child know that they will be talking with the
parents (the law had not yet decided about the issue of a court demanding to
know what had occurred in a treatment in 1960).
So I think this is a poetic fiction that allows us to see the ways in
which Draper is treating his wife as a child – as if she were in treatment with
a child therapist and he needed to care for her as a child. Whether this breaking of a sacred boundary is an accurate depiction of the practice of the day or not (and there
may have been therapists who practiced in this way, I cannot say), it is nice to see his wife discover what he is
doing and using her therapy as a pipeline to communicate to Draper what she can’t
directly say – two can play at this game.
But the point of the therapy is that Don is willing to pay
for it because he feels that his wife is broken and he needs her to reflect who
it is that he would like himself to be – and, while her beauty does that – her inner
insecurities reflect an aspect of himself that, I believe, he cannot
tolerate. He keeps his anxieties and
fears and concerns buried under a surface of self-assuredness and calm and by
staying focused on that surface – on the material goods that he turns into
things that reach deeply into the self – promising to his consumers and to
himself that these things will bring what can only actually be delivered by
human relationships. But those
relationships both draw him in and repulse him.
He is afraid that others will see what is inside of him and run from
him. That is his secret belief - that he is essentially unlovable – and that scares him so much that he avoids exposing himself to others and thus creating the kinds of ties that would bind him securely.
The men in this series are empty shells or experience themselves as being that, and I think it is no accident that
this series took its current form because the Sopranos had established itself
as a popular series, and has the same producer. These men hope that the women will fill
them up, but they end up pursuing vain and empty ends. They are in positions of tremendous privilege,
and they squander that privilege on attending to surface qualities; all of which drive
the great economic engine which is the United States.
I think that what the Madison Avenue Men provided was a
cogent vision of ourselves – one that united us. We were the Marlboro men. We were the ones who knew that “Plop, plop,
Fizz, fizz” would bring relief (so we didn’t have to worry about overindulging –
overfilling ourselves with stuff). The
Madison Avenue men created a dream – the shared collective conscious dream –
that was intended – in a weird kind of parallel to the dreams we dream at night
– to hide the realities of the life we were plunging headlong into – a life of
quickie satisfaction that papered over inequities – if we all can have a
Chevrolet, we all will be equal (and we all want Mom, apple pie, and Chevrolet –
what more could we need?).
Draper needs and wants more than this. I think my father did, too. There was an ongoing joke in my family that
each of his children would one day provide what was missing in our family – one
would give him a castle, one a boat, and one a plane. I think this had to do with his being seen –
and seeing himself – as the guy who provided.
And he wanted to turn the tables on that script. To blow it up. I think Draper likes being the guy who
provides. It gives him a great deal –
and leaves him sorely longing for more.
In the climax to the first season, Draper runs, in a crisis,
to one of his mistresses and offers her what she has wanted – to run away with
him. She recognizes what he is really
doing – that he is not running away with her but running from something and her
calling him a coward for doing that helps him see what he hasn’t to that point –
that the consequences of what he fears are not as terrible as he imagines them
to be. He is able to “man up” and call
the bluff – it happens to be of Pete Campbell – the man who would be his
nemesis. His relationship with this
strong, independent woman helps him be able to be a strong independent man –
but he has to expose the cowardly little boy inside to her – a little boy whose
cowardice contributes to the death of a family member in this first season – in
order to become what he would be. And in
the process of doing this, he is likely to have lost her (I haven’t seen the
second season to know for sure).
My father had a hard time knowing his true value. I don’t think that he was unique in this
regard. I certainly question my value
and the existentialists among us suggest that this is a universal
question. My father carried a secret in his life. Draper carries many. I think we all carry secrets, and they end up dividing us. The psychoanalytic promise is that these secrets, when spoken, can help us begin to heal. I think there is some truth to that. I also think that some divides are wide enough and the secrets big enough that we have to continually rediscover them and inch towards being able to reconcile ourselves with them. And, unfortunately, as I have learned about psychoanalysis, the process is never complete. There is always more to discover.
The consumer society offers us the promise of putting a monetary value on everything and on everyone. In one of the last images of the season, Draper has to let one of his principals know that he has to let him go because there is a competitor of greater value that might be coming on board – something the principal expected of him – though it was something Draper fought against. It is the smarmy Campbell, who uses a grief that he is not mature enough to access to forge a relationship with the new, shinier principal. This is a series that suggests our monetary value – our worth to the company - may not square at all with the value of our actions; we “sell-out” all the time – as individuals and as a society. And this constant selling out leads us to stand on increasingly shifting ground – a flimsy, jerry rigged series of lies that suspends us above what feels like a cracked foundation.
The consumer society offers us the promise of putting a monetary value on everything and on everyone. In one of the last images of the season, Draper has to let one of his principals know that he has to let him go because there is a competitor of greater value that might be coming on board – something the principal expected of him – though it was something Draper fought against. It is the smarmy Campbell, who uses a grief that he is not mature enough to access to forge a relationship with the new, shinier principal. This is a series that suggests our monetary value – our worth to the company - may not square at all with the value of our actions; we “sell-out” all the time – as individuals and as a society. And this constant selling out leads us to stand on increasingly shifting ground – a flimsy, jerry rigged series of lies that suspends us above what feels like a cracked foundation.
I have finished the first season – perhaps I will write
about later seasons, but the first season has a nice contained feeling to it. I expect that in later seasons the initial
focus on gender inequity will expand into racial inequity and the civil rights
movement of the sixties. Meanwhile, I
think that this conservative ad agency will try to continue to manage to
maintain our collective conscious experience (the American Dream) while the
unconscious elements of the world shake, rattle and roll beneath the surface. I continue to find this compelling, if
disquieting, viewing.
To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information. I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...
No comments:
Post a Comment