The True Secret of His Identity

Spider-Man digital art by Mark Ashkenazi 

To discover the true secret of Spider-Man's identity, click here.

Fantômas: An Insolent and Surrealistic Source of the Superhero

Book cover painting by Mikael Eriksson

By Dan Hagen

If you’re tracking the origin of the American superhero genre, you’ll find one path winds inevitably back to Paris.

Much of American popular culture seems to have been anticipated in France decades before, and that includes the costumed supermen who engage in titanic struggles of good versus evil and always narrowly escape the endless fiendish traps that are set for them.

The superhero emerged in the U.S. in the 1930s’ pulp magazines and comic books, a fantasy antidote to the powerlessness and despair experienced by millions during the Great Depression.

But such characters had already captivated the attention of the French public at the turn of the century, although they were often presented not as heroes but as ruthless criminals. The assumption seemed to be that a person who had abilities far above those of the common herd of humanity would use those abilities to exploit that herd. Probably a safe assumption, at that.

It’s useful to remember how very weird the end of the 19^th century must have seemed to the people who experienced it, the press of technological change on society even exceeding what we undergo at the beginning of the 21^st century.

The most famous image of Fantomas

Look at Paris in La Belle Époque, particularly from the 1890s on — the newly electrified City of Lights a beacon to the world; the new telephone breaking the old rules of time and space as effectively as telepathy; a new subway system and the new automobiles permitting fluid movement, shifting identities and new opportunities for criminality. Even flying machines were visible on the horizon.

This juxtaposition of the commonplace and the seemingly fantastic would inform the 1920s artistic movement known as surrealism, the aim of which was to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.” And it’s in that hypnagogic space where we will find the secret lair of the superhero.

“At the founding of their movement, the surrealists drew inspiration from currents of psychological anxiety and social rebellion that ran through certain expressions of mass culture, such as fantastic popular fiction and sensationalist journalism,” wrote Robin Walz in “Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth Century Paris.”

Before World War I, a ruthless, faceless superman called Fantômas schemed, feinted and glided through adventures in 32 serialized novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain and in five Gaumont silent films by the brilliant director Louis Feuillade.

Fantômas particularly caught the fancy of the surrealists, cutting-edge artists like Belgian painter Rene Magritte who created a 1943 homage called “The Backfire” or “Le Retour de Flamme.”

This translates as “The Flame Returns,” essayist David Kalat noted. “Some destructive, primal force has returned. It threatens our end.”

“The picture depicts a masked villain bestride a helpless city: a rather on-the-nose metaphor for the dark times of the day, and the globe-spanning influence of supercriminals like Adolph Hitler.” Magritte knew his fascism-besieged audience would instantly recognize the reference to Fantômas.

Fantômas had predecessors, notably Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail’s 19^th century criminal adventurer-turned-hero Rocambole, who appeared in novels from 1857 to 1869. Another inspiration was Léon Sazie’s Zigomar, a murderous master criminal who bowed Dec. 7, 1909, in a feuilleton or serial in the Paris daily newspaper Le Matin. His symbol of a flaming red “Z” may have inspired Johnston McCulley’s Zorro a decade later.

Fantômas also had arguably even weirder contemporaries like the Nyctalope, a superhero with an artificial heart who could see in the dark. He appeared in novels by Jean de La Hire published between 1911 and 1944 (meaning that the Nyctalope holds the dubious distinction of being the only superhero to finish up collaborating with the Nazis in occupied France).

But it was Fantômas who captured the attention of the public and the avant garde, a shadowy figure who somehow anticipated the sinister, exciting zeitgeist of the new century.

“The narrative trappings of Fantômas were arcane, melodramatic, Belle Epoque schlock — the ‘family circle’ of principal players, the Manichean opposition of good versus evil, the sublimity of overstated rhetoric and the spectator’s total pleasure in riding along for the performance,” Walz wrote.

The pleasures of the novels were not literary. Like the science fiction novels of A.E. Van Vogt and the Arabian Nights tales, the books offered hypnagogic escapism, a sense of wandering through the infra-logical, identity-fluid, symbolic demimonde that we touch between wakefulness and sleep.

Fantômas was a figure set against, not a literary landscape, but a literary dreamscape, or perhaps nightmarescape. He left an enemy suspended in giant bells, raining blood and gems. He killed another by having her long hair caught in that fiendish new contraption, a washing machine. He left the fingerprints of others by using gloves of human skin. He secreted razor blades inside the shoes for sale in a department store, and replaced the bottles of perfume with bottles of acid. He destroyed everyone on board an ocean liner by releasing plague-infested rats onto the ship. He placed enemies face up on a guillotine, so they could see what was coming.

And yet the dreams and nightmares were somehow those of an era, an age.

“Fantômas exceeded the boundaries of its melodramatic trappings,” Walz said. “Moral restitution was fundamentally denied through the motif of the escape of Fantômas at the end of each episode. All the reader was left with was an endless, yet predictable string of murders, thefts, disguises, pursuits, traps, confrontations, arrests and escape — and not a bit of it plausible.”

My favorite example of that comes from the first of the groundbreaking Fantômas films, in which the supercriminal escapes by leaving his captors holding not the bag but his arms, which turn out to be fake and detachable. Boy, that’s planning ahead.

Yet as laughable as the adventures are at times, they are almost equally unsettling because of the casual way they are peppered with vicious mass murders.

“While the classic British whodunit affirms rational order through the intervention of saintly detectives like Inspector French and Miss Marple, Fantômas tends to undermine any notion of stability or ultimate purpose,” observed Geoffrey O'Brien in the Village Voice. “To sustain the series' open-ended structure, crime must always triumph, and Fantômas is no Robin Hood.

Ernest Moerman's 1937 "Monsieur Fantomas," an homage to the 1913 serial

“With his blend of technical elegance and cruelty … he infects a whole ocean liner with plague — he foreshadows a peculiarly modern type of gratuitous killer. The novels that chart his mythos are themselves amoral: there is no pretense of edification, but rather a frankly perverse fascination with terror and death-dealing. Any possible ethical concerns are further distorted by ambiguity. Both Fantômas and his nemesis, Inspector Juve, spend most of their time in disguise, so that it’s hard to tell who anyone is. The only certainty is that fairly soon another body will fall.”

Walz wrote, “As the series continues, Fantômas’s number of aliases diminishes and increasingly he assumes his role en cagoule, in black tights, cape and cowl.” An evil Batman, in other words.

“Think Batman, and then think what would happen if Batman had no Bruce Wayne,” Kalat wrote. “Fantômas is a fictional identity, a mask, a brand name for crime. But Allain and Souvestre never allow Fantômas to remove that mask, to reveal the man beneath. We get snippets of his back story: we meet his lover, his daughter and his son, we visit his hometown, and we even learn his real name, but none of these fragments adds up to anything substantial.”

All this anticipates the American super hero sagas of much later in the 20^th century — the breathless melodrama, the astounding abilities, the never-ending seesawing battle of criminal and crimefighter, the elaborate death traps, the bizarre gadgets and, especially, the fluidity of the secret identity.

I’ve explored this particular curious convention before, in the essay “The Mystery of the Menacing Mirror Men” and in “The Secret Identity of Don Draper.” I don’t fully know what it means. It’s as mysterious as Fantômas himself. I just know that it means something, it’s uncannily dreamlike and it’s unmistakably there.

Both Fantômas and his archenemy easily assume the identities of others, while the secret of Fantômas’ own “real” identity, if any, is never pierced.

“The characters in Fantômas are not merely ‘disguised’ as someone else,” Walz observed. “For the practical purposes of the novel, they actually have to be someone else.”

Right and wrong, good and evil, order and chaos, forever changing position in an endless, dizzying waltz. Underlining the symbolism, Fantômas and Juve also disguise themselves flawlessly as each other.

That has to raise a psychological and aesthetic question — are we really dealing with two people in opposition here, or with the opposing elements within one person?

“In Jungian psychology, the shadow or ‘shadow aspect’ may refer to (1) the entirety of the unconscious, i.e., everything of which a person is not fully conscious, or (2) an unconscious aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not recognize in itself,” Wikipedia notes. “Because one tends to reject or remain ignorant of the least desirable aspects of one’s personality, the shadow is largely negative. There are, however, positive aspects which may also remain hidden in one’s shadow (especially in people with low self-esteem).

“Contrary to a Freudian conceptualization of shadow, therefore, the Jungian shadow often refers to all that lies outside the light of consciousness, and may be positive or negative. ‘Everyone carries a shadow,’ Jung wrote, ‘and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.’ It may be (in part) one's link to more primitive animal instincts, which are superseded during early childhood by the conscious mind.’”

This Shadow archetype, Jung thought, is the source of the mechanism of psychological projection — of seeing one’s own unperceived faults in others as a way of escaping full realization of them and confrontation with them.

“These projections insulate and cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion between the ego and the real world,” Wikipedia said.  “Jung also believed that ‘in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness — or perhaps because of this — the shadow is the seat of creativity’ so that for some, it may be, ‘the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow ... represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar.’”

Are these mirroring masks the popular culture shadow of Jung’s Shadow, lengthening itself across cultures, nations and centuries — evidence, therefore, that within human nature of all of us, of each us, lurk secret identities, doubles, dark and light?

I don’t know. But I do know this, that the creators of the contemporary iterations of superheroes, in a quest to make the material seemingly more “adult,” increasingly give up the concept of the “secret identity,” and do so at their peril. They may be cutting off one of the deepest wellsprings of dreamlike psychological power that is available to them.

Superheroes, after all, do not derive their vast power from the real, but from the surreal.

Sources: "Crime After Crime", by Geoffrey O'Brien. From the Village Voice, August 18, 1986: review of Fantômas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, New York: William Morrow, 1986

“Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early 20^th Century Paris” by Robin Walz

“Shadowmen: Heroes and Villains of French Pulp Fiction” by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier

“The Long Arm of Fantômas” by David Kalat, an essay in “Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives”

"Fantomas" became a comic-strip serialized the weekly Gavroche during World War II

Whether super hero or a super criminal, it's important that you know how to make a properly bombastic entrance

The Mystery of the Menacing Mirror Men

“The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

        By Dan Hagen

A riddle worthy of the Batman.

From childhood on, I understood with a boy’s instincts why superheroes had to have colorful costumes, dual identities, spectacular powers, formidable foes, fast and fabulous vehicles, even Fortresses of Solitude and Bottled Cities of Kandor (think tree houses and ant farms writ large).

Only two conventions persistently puzzled me — why these perfectly self-contained superheroes bothered with girlfriends, and why they seemed to be constantly confronted by their doubles.

The girlfriend thing eventuall­­­­y resolved itself, but the seemingly weird obsession with doubles continued to puzzle me.

The theme of doubling was especially prevalent in the comics. The double was built right into the concept of most superheroes in the form of the secret identity or “alter ego.” Superman and Clark Kent, Batman and Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker and Spider-Man, always the two who were one.

And then there were the arch-enemies, who always turned out to be, in one way or another, funhouse mirror dark doubles of the hero.

Thus, Lex Luthor is an evil intellectual superman opposed by a heroic physical Superman. The Joker is a cackling costumed sociopath opposed by a grim costumed crime fighter. Dr. Octopus is a mature, many-limbed creature-themed villain opposed by a teenaged hero whose costume suggests a creature with many limbs.

The Thing battles the Thing.

The heroic magician Dr. Strange saves us from the evil magician Baron Mordo, and both were students of the Ancient One. The heroic Norse god Thor shields us from the evil Norse god Loki, and so forth.

Not only the heroes’ enemies but also their allies often mirrored them. Early on, Batman acquired a Robin and Captain Marvel was assisted by Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, various Lieutenants Marvel and whatnot. Superman was echoed in Superboy (literally his younger self) and then in Krypto the Superdog and Supergirl, while Batman met Ace the Bathound, Batwoman, Bat-Girl and Batgirl (two different girls, don’t ask). Hawkgirl, Spider-Woman, the She-Hulk, the Bionic Woman, the Greatest American Heroine, the list is inexhaustible.

The mirror-nature of the archenemies and the alter ego and the sidekicks is obvious, but the comic books didn’t leave the double theme there. They underlined it repeatedly and directly with robot doubles, mirror creatures, clones and various other dopplegangers.

Thus Superman faced any number of literal duplicates, the most prominent of whom was Bizarro. Batman, with his Batmobile and Batplane and Bat Signal, fought Killer Moth, with his Mothmobile and Mothplane and Moth Signal.

Wonder Woman battles the villainous Super Woman

The Incredible Hulk battled his equally incredible duplicate gamma-ray monster the Abomination. Spider-Man fought the evil spider guy Venom, who in turn spawned the evil spider guy Carnage. Green Lantern stood against the renegade Green Lantern Corps member Sinestro. The Flash raced against Reverse Flash. The armored capitalist Iron Man dueled the armored communists Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man.

So why were all these doubles redoubled? The answer has deep roots, I think.

Critic Mark Schorer noted that the Gothic tradition, or what Nathaniel Hawthorne would have called the romance tradition, refers to “...stories that are set in a world where we continually move without transition or warning from the actual into the dream, from the real into the surreal, from the natural into the supernatural.”

That’s a description that neatly fits the comic book superhero stories, which shift constantly from mundane and recognizable urban reality to nightmarish mythological battle zones and back again.

“They are stories whose central concern is with the theme of the Doppleganger, the alter ego, and the supernatural is, in fact, symbolic of the world in which that other self, which we cannot ever confront in the busy social world, exists.

“These are stories generally about lonely, loveless people — or, at any rate, they seem to be lonely because they are loveless — who encounter strange, often offensive creatures with whom they are, in one way or another, trapped and whom they cannot and usually do not wish to escape, for these creatures are their selves, their fate, whom they are helpless to shun." 

Deepak and Gotham Chopra, in their book “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes,” note that the doubling theme can explore the Jungian Shadow or dark side of the personality.

“At one point a dark symbiote latches onto the heroic Spider-Man. The shadow being brings out Spider-Man’s darker impulses, making him arrogant, vengeful and selfish. His iconic red and blue suit even turns black as he literally takes on a shadowy persona. But eventually Spider-Man, through his own awareness, is able to resist these shadow qualities and sheds the symbiote. It then occupies another being and becomes one of Spider-Man's archenemies, known as Venom, forever stalking him and reminding the great superhero of what he could become if he were to give in to his own shadow self.”

So it’s all a metaphor, unconscious but existentially valid. As we journey though life, those of us who are paying attention can’t help but notice that the greatest constraints are invariably those we place on ourselves.

We wonderful creatures, so noble and daring in our dreams, are self-shackled, self-disappointing. Our most persistent recurring foe, the archenemy of our splendid ideals and aspirations, is always the self.
"A man may conquer a million men in battle, but one who conquers himself is, indeed, the greatest of conquerors."
— The Dhammapada

Sources: Introduction to “Selected Writing of Truman Capote,” Modern Library.

This collage by Hugh Fox.

Madness in the Mirror

By Dan Hagen

I didn’t read or watch “American Psycho” for many years, mostly because I find serial killers neither interesting nor palatable. They are human beings who have permitted themselves to devolve into nothing more than a pestilence.

A solipsistic Christian Bale in "American Psycho"

But when I finally did watch the 2000 film starring Christian Bale, I found it to be a fascinating black comedy satire offering insight into the soullessness of what is celebrated in modern American culture.

The characters seethe with envy over objects that are valueless — a business card design, for example — and place no value whatsoever on other human beings.

In place of thought, they engage in pretentious dissertations about pedestrian pop music. They’re the humanoids Howard Beale predicted, trapped in a vacuum without personal identity and gasping for it, frantically grasping at the material trappings of personal identity without acquiring a clue about the nature of the integrity for which they thirst.

In the process, the American bitch goddess Success meets her ultimate and logical fate: cheerful dismemberment.

In hindsight, “American Psycho” virtually predicted the fraud-fueled collapse of Wall Street and the presidential candidacies of both George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, those two spectacularly empty vessels. Too bad the story found nowhere to go, because its satire of American commercial values was as sharp — and potentially as useful — as a scalpel. 

The Secret Identity of Don Draper

Steve Lieber renders "Mad Men" as a newspaper comic strip.

By Dan Hagen

Like my friends Sally Renaud and Paul Beals, I have watched “Mad Men” since the premiere episode, and from those first moments on, it was clear this classy period soap was about American identity, or the lack thereof.

In her “The Talented Miss Highsmith, The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith,” biographer Joan Schenkar noted that, despite Highsmith’s preference for citing famous literary influences, the crime writer’s novels really reflected the work she had done at Marvel Comics (then called Timely) during the 1940s.

“The comic strip formula of threat/pursuit/fantasy life/alter ego/secret identity was the formula she used in all her work,” Jeanette Winterson noted in the New York Times. “The four-color, six-panel comic strip shaped Patricia Highsmith the crime writer like nothing else — however much she cared to cite Dostoyevsky and Henry James.”

Secret identities, alter egos, mirrored antagonists, melodrama — those themes loom large not only in Highsmith’s work, but in a lot of American popular culture, including “Mad Men.”

Even the name "Don Draper" is a sly nod to the alliterative appellations typical of comic book secret identities — Peter Parker, Billy Batson, Bruce Banner, Clark Kent, Matt Murdoch.

The most fantastic element of the saga — the fact that Don stole the identity of a wealthier, more accomplished dead man during the Korean War and has lived it ever since — is there because it’s central to the series’ theme: that the American advertising industry is dynamic, but fake and inauthentic, because much of American society is just the same.

Almost everybody on the show, and everything they do, is inauthentic, phony, tumbling through the air because they don't know who they really are.

Pete Campbell: “A man like you I'd follow into combat blindfolded, and I wouldn’t be the first. Am I right, buddy?”

Don Draper: “Let's take it a little slower. I don't want to wake up pregnant.”

All the characters in the show, who are in the business of faking reality for the American public, have problems with their identities. Don, the man who completely wiped out his true identity, is merely the most extreme case.

Dashing, deceptive, dauntless Don Draper is so fearful of having his past as the self-hating son of a prostitute revealed that he essentially abandons his hero-worshipping baby brother to suicide to protect that secret identity. The years go on, and we get hints of how that haunts him — his use of a lover’s brother as a substitute, for example, in some pathetic attempt at atonement.

Having that secret identity though, in a way, makes the brusque, cold Don a better man. Without a hint of condescension or judgment, Don can surprise us by befriending people who are in trouble because of their own secrets — pregnant Peggy, homosexual Salvatore. He’s been there, as they say.

Poster by Matt Needle of Needle Design and Illustration

Speaking of judgmental cruelty, how about Peggy’s mother, a selfish biddy who cares far more about a dead holy father than a living daughter? I love the way the show nailed her hateful hypocrisy. She rejects the expensive Admiral TV Peggy bought her, using it as a sharp weapon to hurt her daughter, but then switches it on the moment Peggy’s out of the room.

Sal’s situation reminds me of several I have known in real life, and of how cruel it was for closeted men to marry women to disguise themselves, sometimes even FROM themselves. Kitty’s wonderful, subtle look as she watches her husband do an Ann-Margret dance shows us the scales falling from her eyes, and now she’ll wonder if she’s a person to the man she loves, or only a mask he wears.

What keeps Don Draper up nights, and too well lubricated, is his own rejected past. His humanity grows as he shows his concern for the underdogs — that young, rich fool Sterling Cooper fleeced, his own daughter, Sal, Peggy, even the Germans in World War I.

Again and again, the series returns to its overriding theme of IDENTITY, how elusive it is, how changeable it is and how changeable IT IS NOT.

Pete's self-destructive identity wrecks his new chance at promotion with the inexorability of Greek tragedy. On the other hand, Don, casually playing secret agent for the stews, gives Sal an object lesson in how easy it is to fake your identity.

But Don has paid a terrible price for that ability — he can't really believe in ANY of his identities. He has so “limited his exposure” that he cannot find himself.

It’s a credit to the creator’s sense of drama that as soon as the audience starts admiring Don for some wonderful rescuer impulse he displays, the show shoves the audience off the Sterling Cooper tower into free fall by having Don do something really rotten.

The way Don wooed the reluctant Dr. Miller, won her over, used her, drew her in, got her to surrender her defenses, forced her to compromise her professional ethics and then dumped her in an instant was understandable, given his character. But particularly brutal.

January Jones as Betty Draper

Originally, my favorite character was Don’s primary victim, his cold Hitchcock-blonde wife, Betty, who is forever trapped by her mom's insistence that only beauty matters. I loved it when, defending her children’s dog, she coolly shot down the neighbor's pigeons.

I was grudgingly forced to admit, however, that Betty is one batshit crazy piece of work.

Finally, Betty even made Don’s worst nightmare come true — his terror that if she learned the secret of his identity, he would lose everything he had.

Oh Betty, you bitch.

I found my allegiance shifting from Strange Betty to Plucky Peggy. Peggy is fearless and forthright. She knows why she does the things she does, even if they turn out to have been experimental mistakes, while Betty doesn't seem to know why she does anything she does. Peggy has the most authentic identity of anyone on the show.

And Betty's hostile indifference to her daughter is also hard to forgive. After all, we know from Sally's reading of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” to Grandpa Gene that she's one smart little cookie, but, because she isn't pretty-perfect enough to suit Betty’s standard, Betty finds nothing to like about her.

I think the book was a cheeky reference to the 1960s social upheavals that these characters started experiencing on Roger Sterling’s daughter's wedding day. Interesting that Don seemed to be the only one unsettled by Roger's blackface performance. And can those Campbells Charleston!

Note how Betty always (only?) seems to come alive when some man indicates desire for her, even when she’s in an advanced state of pregnancy. Is that all she has — seeking response to her primary value, which is her own beauty?

Note Grandpa Gene’s revelation that Betty was fat as a little girl, and badgered by her mother for it. Sally represents not so much Betty’s daughter as her own rejected childhood self, before “perfection” set in. “I just want everything to be perfect.”

Megan, the new wife for whom Don dumped the doctor, is not Betty. In fact, other than in looks, she’s Betty's opposite — warm where Betty is cold, a nurturing caregiver where Betty is a perpetual Daddy’s Princess child. Don will probably wreck this with his self-hatred, too, but this time he’ll be hurting a complete innocent, and sabotaging his own best chance at happiness with an ax — a fact even Don Draper, with his easily discarded conscience, may have a hard time evading.

I liked the role-reversal symbolism there for a moment. Betty, the child-woman, alone in her child-bed, abandoned now. Don, once abandoned and alone, facing in the opposite direction in bed, with a young woman he loves, who loves him.

“I just want everything to be perfect,” says Betty Draper — as if that’s a small thing to ask, instead of an impossible thing.

Jon Hamm as Don Draper

But the show has had its perfect moments — one whole perfect episode, in fact, perhaps the best ever aired on American television (“Shut the Door, Have a Seat”).

Halloween night, 1963, was also perfect. That traditional laughing swirl of disguise and darkness was the moment when the mask was finally pulled from Don Draper’s face, and he was forced to confront the price he made his brother pay for his own disguise, for his secret identity.

A neighbor, handing out treats to the costumed kids, jokingly asks Don who he's supposed to be, and the camera focuses on Don's face. Then the end credits supply a surprisingly clear answer: the song “Where is Love?” from the musical “Oliver!”

Hidden inside Don is an abandoned orphan, lonely and afraid, who doesn’t really understand the world or his place in it.
Incidental intelligence, May 28, 2012: Last night’s episode’s of Mad Men, The Other Woman, was one of the top three, I’d say — a thematic rumination on prostitution in all its forms, from the generalized (the way their entire industry prostitutes creative talent) to the uncomfortably specific, and on the sometimes-surprising ways all this reveals character. 
I love the way Weiner so shamelessly works a theme. Peggy’s departure was also prostitution-related, because Don unfeelingly TREATED her as if she were a prostitute, literally throwing money contemptuously into her face.

In its fifth season, this show is as good as it ever was, and that’s awfully damn good.
June 24, 2013: At the end of season six, Don Draper uses one of his famous advertising pitches as the occasion to finally tell the truth about himself to the world. The man of illusion in the profession of illusion finally gets real, whole. He's starting to crawl out of the deep pit toward the light of truth. “Don has tried everything to be different, to feel different, but the one thing he has never tried is to be himself — to be Dick Whitman,” Willa Paskin wrote. “His colleagues fire him, because to them, his Hershey speech seems like bad behavior from an uncontrolled, asshole alcoholic, but we know better, that Don, for the first time, is really trying something new. Megan is done with him, and the season ends with him taking his own children to see where he grew up, to see who he is, an honesty he’s never shared before. Remember Sally saying after the home invasion that she realized she didn’t know anything about her father? With the one look she gives him in the final scene, you can see how powerful his finally sharing really is.”

The over-aching theme of the series is emerging. It will be the journey of Don Draper, a successful man of lies in a world of lies, toward truth.
Don, who thinks of himself as a writer, once lamented that he'd never written anything longer than 250 words. Will he now write a book exposing Madison Avenue? His agency has given him both the time and the motivation.