A principal of the firm, Sterling, a hard drinker and devoted libertine, suffers palpably and dramatically in the later episodes. (Let's put it this way: he is not the bronco bull rider he thinks he is.) His life passing before him, he cries out how much he loves his family, and he does; he's honest in an upright, expected way. He also loves screwing his secretary. Upon a short-lived recovery he nonetheless evokes one of the rare moments of genuine honesty in Mad Men—that he never regretted a moment with his lover, Red, the blazingly gorgeous office manager Hendricks. It's one of the few honest exchanges between a man and a woman in Mad Men, and it's between a man and his mistress.
You sense in obvious or subtle ways how much these double and triple lives — homosexuality hovers ominously over one of the ad men who, undoubtedly, will battle its repressed destructions in future episodes — suffocates these ad men like a necktie too tightly knotted. They are so "up tight," to use an expression that's a few years off, that you can almost feel their arteries hardening before your eyes.
Plenty of humor exists in Mad Men too, but thankfully it's mostly perverse.
Watching Mad Men you don't know whether to laugh or cringe, and the intent is that you do both. Lives are complicated. And if we believe we're the only ones ever trapped among career, love, desire, hope, fear — well, others have beaten us to it.
It's cringingly funny when Draper's wife, the stunning January Jones, is driving her station wagon, her two kids wallowing in the back seat and an attack of nerves (she's desperately afraid of losing the man she's married to but does not even know) causes her to hit a neighbor's tree, the kids bouncing around the back seat, untethered. Car seats weren't even a distant dream then.
Or when Betty's in the kitchen sharing a smoke with her neighbor friend (everyone smokes in Mad Men) and her daughter runs into the kitchen screaming, with a laundry sack over her head and body. Mom's admonition is not to take it off for fear of suffocation, but to keep the noise down. Times, indeed, have changed; then again, in different ways, ways we can't even comprehend, they are the same.
The brilliance of how hollow this life is is presented over 13 episodes, and yet nowhere more so than in the first.
What you understand about this world you get, like a right uppercut to the gut, at the very end of the first episode. Here's the way it works. The episode opens with Draper consumed over the Lucky Strike campaign. He does not know how to sell a product the country is being warned about (whether he should be selling something that may cause cancer is a preposterous question; it's his job). During what may be the longest work day on record, he smokes, ponders the ad campaign, drinks heavily — if you don't have a bottle of whiskey in your drawer or an actual bar in your office you don't belong in this world — and ruminates over the Lucky client meeting the next day. How does he sell this product? He manages to work in a lovemaking session with a downtown bohemian artist (whose early compatibility with Draper has some larger meaning about the imminent intersection of two different worlds). Then he's back at his office until late, very late, pondering, thinking creatively about Lucky Strikes. And then, suddenly, he's on a train — where is this man going? — to his suburban house in Ossining, to his wife and two kids.
Article comments
1 - Matt
Great piece Stephen.
2 - Mary K. Williams
You sell the show well Stephen. Nice job.