Never Seen Mad Men? Here's Why You Should

Mad Men was a stylishly executed, sprawling and sophisticated novel of a show about the historic illusions of American society — the facade of postwar suburban perfection, the ignored injustice of 1960s attitudes toward blacks, gays and women in a society “with justice for all,” and a man who successfully sells lies in a backstabbing profession of lies on Madison Avenue. 

The series’ underlying joke is that the man himself is a lie, and its running theme is the characters’ confused groping toward truth.

The Long and Happy Fall of 'Mad Men'

In July of 2007, Sally Renaud and I decided we were both in the mood for a classy soap opera, and heard about this new show that was starting on AMC July 19. So we agreed to watch it and compare notes the next day. We felt as if we were the only people who’d seen the episode, which we loved — particularly its surprise ending. Because of that, the show felt kind of like our personal possession from the beginning. In October 2008, with Bush’s Wall Street disaster in full swing, I noted in my journal, “The market continues in free fall like Don Draper in the ‘Mad Men’ credits.”

Now, eight years on, the final episode will air this Sunday. Our long fall has been gentle, the view spectacular, and many lives have flashed before our eyes.

'Mad Men' Then, Sad Men Now

Jon Hamm as Don Draper in "Mad Men"

“Real wages have fallen since Don Draper’s heyday, especially for American men and double-especially for the middle-class and working-class white men who were once the bulwarks of the mid-century model of adulthood,” wrote Andrew O’Hehir. “We now live in a culture … of diminished expectations and permanent underemployment, where many or most young people will never be as affluent as their parents. Lifetime job security is an antediluvian delusion, and in many metropolitan areas home ownership is out of reach for all but the rich. It’s just as useless to object to those changes as it is to complain about grownups reading Harry Potter books, but certainly those things were the essential underpinnings of classic adulthood, and without them it’s no surprise to see the old order fading away.” 
“(T)o use Scott’s schema, the old-style masculine adult clearly thought of himself as productive first and foremost, even if (like Don Draper) he was actually a species of cultural parasite. The consumer, on the other hand, is a distinctly childlike figure, a dependent who demands pleasurable stimulus 24/7 from the comforting and/or imprisoning info-bubble around him. ‘The elevation of every individual’s inarguable likes and dislikes over formal critical discourse, the unassailable ascendancy of the fan, has made children of us all,’ Scott writes. ‘We have our favorite toys, books, movies, video games, songs, and we are as apt to turn to them for comfort as for challenge or enlightenment.’”
This same infantilization-by-market is a reason why adult American males now treat real guns as if they were toy guns. 

Mr. Blandings Deconstructs His Dream World

“How was an advertising man ever to suggest to a man of medicine the particular, minute insanities that were his daily tasks? Mr. Blandings thought of the accounts that made up his professional life. Old Supine, A Blend. Mr. Blandings’ task on this account was to find 10,000 different ways of evading the true issue.

“Old Supine, unlike some other products, had a true, definite function, which it would unfailingly perform. This function was to get the consumer into a hyper-normal state: buzzed, crocked, looping, fried, boiled, plastered or stinko, according to the amount ingested and the psycho-physiology of the consumer.

“Could this delightful truth be as much as hinted? Even if there were no Federal Trade Commission, the American mores would revolt at the slightest suggestion.

“In ‘building’ ads for Old Supine, it was Mr. Blandings’ task to take such notions as aroma, flavor, body, color, bouquet, mildness, more mildness, more body, less body and play with them like an 18-month infant in a playpen until some combination satisfying to the client emerged. Good fellowship, gracious living, liberty, equality, fraternity, snobbery, professional success, breadth of experience might also be used in advocacy. But the joys of getting more or less drunk? No.”

In another moment of rueful honesty, Mr. Blandings observed that Old Supine  (“A Blend of the Superfine”) was actually composed of “…75 percent grain alcohol, plus some caramel solution for color, plus a dollop of somebody’s else’s whisky to make it taste like whisky.”

— From “Blanding’s Way” by Eric Hodgins (1950)

'Mad Men:' Feminism Fresh as a Wound

'Mad Men' by Urban Barbarian

By Dan Hagen

The arguments for feminism remain valid but sound tired, except on “Mad Men,” where they’re as fresh as a wound.

I suddenly realized that for some time, the “Mad Men” story line that has most interested me is that of Joan Holloway Harris (Christina Hendricks), the office manager at whatever the name of that newly merged firm of free-falling alcoholics and inventive narcissists will turn out to be.

Joan is the most competent character, surpassing even the agency’s dynamic creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm). After all, when drunken staffers cut off a visitor’s foot with a lawn mower, it’s Joan, not Don or anyone else, who can handle the emergency.

Note that she was absent during the episode “The Crash,” when Dr. Feelgood’s speedy ministrations turned the men in the agency into delusional and/or dangerous loons. Joan had to be offstage at the time, because she’d never have permitted that bullshit.

Although she literally keeps the agency functioning, no-nonsense Joan has to put up with plenty of nonsense, or believes she must. The series underlines the double-edged nature of her statuesque body, which gets her some things easily, and puts other things unfairly out of her reach.

One of the series’ most moving moments was the look on her face when Joan — finally by accident doing some challenging creative work in reviewing television scripts — had the job brusquely snatched away from her by a far less competent man. You can see her contain her aching disappointment, without complaint, as she silently returns to making secretarial assignments.

Joan’s competence provided her an unspoken, reliable bond with Don, who has never tried to sleep with her and respects few others in his profession. But lately, when Don’s high-handedness cost Joan perhaps a million dollars and her chance at real independence, even her patience with him snapped.

From the beginning, her looks and gender have caused the men at the agency to treat Joan with a backhanded indifference bordering on contempt. She was ill used by her backstreet lover Roger Sterling (John Slattery), then by her husband (Samuel Page). Roger thinks he’s paying her the ultimate compliment when he calls her the best piece of ass he’d ever had. Even a damn freelancer feels free to call her a “Shanghai madam” to her face.

The drama makes it clear that here we have a character who feels she must hide the depression and unhappiness that result not from a lack of love, but from a lack of respect.

The situation got worse when the men persuaded Joan to literally prostitute herself to land a client, at the price of a partnership.

You want to slap her pimp partners and ask them what they’re sniggering at. Every one of them is, after all, a whore. In fact, the series makes it pretty clear that the men’s contempt for Joan is laced with self-loathing.

But as a result of that messy business, Joan’s now a partner in the firm, although she hasn’t yet begun to act like one. When and if she does, when and if she discovers and flexes her newfound power, that will indeed be something to see.

Joan is the disrespected central support of a 1960s advertising agency

There, I’ve written 555 words on this topic — more than the 250 words that is the most Don Draper has ever written about anything, as he once ruefully observed.

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.