Mad Men Season 1: The Impostor Phenomenon as the American Male Experience

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.

Peggy Olson

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.

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.

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