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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
