The first episode: the end. How does Draper live this life, these lives? How can this man have a home and family, in the suburbs no less?
Don Draper is at the center of this set piece. He's mysterious, charismatic, and the engine behind Sterling Cooper. His character is so fully human, and yet so empty, that it's frightening: he's everyman, really, because he has no real identity, just the intangible and yet incomplete desire to find one. He is who he has to be when he has to sell something, himself included. Somewhere in one of the later episodes the "Cooper" of the agency says, to this effect: in Japan they have a saying that you are the man you are in the room you're in. And it's true.
This first episode is so brilliant because it is so disquieting at the end. Draper's is not a double life, but a multiple life — having so many sides and angles that at times he becomes a caricature — but never fully. Mostly because Hamm inhabits him like the Spirit inhabits a Pentecostal.
That's what Mad Men is about: living your expected life and yet not fully abandoning the life you want. What you end up with is nothing, which is a high price to pay for nothing.
Every one in Mad Men is bereft of something and yet glutted with something else, and neither makes any sense or can be understood in the summer and fall of 1960.
The women in the show, hens as they're called, accept all this boorish behavior with a subversive, near peevish wish for more; or with a tolerant they're-just-men sort of view. But to think the show as male-centric is to misunderstand it: it's the women who rule this world, if only because they are sexual objects who can say yes or no. Some do; some don't. One who does, early on, is one of the few women with explicit advertising ambitions and she'll later pay a price for her sexual decisions. Or at least she'll be in debt to them; how she pays it back, or whether, will undoubtedly be the subject of one or more of the episodes in season two.
Who we are is our doom. Maybe 1960 isn't so important. Maybe it’s our being human. Maybe it's our desire for love and then new love and then another kind of love. Or more money. Or a recognition from the larger world that escapes us.
We scramble around, looking, seeking, desiring. Maybe, as Draper partly understands in season one's finale, it's right in front of us. Whatever it is, or wherever it resides, its discovery may be too late: we've been through too many women, too much liquor, choked back too many Lucky Strikes.
Article comments
1 - Matt
Great piece Stephen.
2 - Mary K. Williams
You sell the show well Stephen. Nice job.