Mad Men’s Hidden Beats: Don Draper, the virus power and the destruction of love
Matthew Weiner’s famous cable
television creation Mad Men debuted
ten years ago (2007) and became an instant hit. It was the perfect nostalgia piece
for its time, as it struck a chord with people of a certain age who could relate
to the cast living through the peak Cold War years of 1960s America. This novel
for television also managed to be about much more than a nostalgia trip. It served
as a gateway to a solid education in social history and psychology, and it served
up some wicked critiques of capitalism, but this went mostly unnoticed by a
large part of the audience.
As the popularity of the show grew, much
of the public attention was focused the superficial aspects of the story, on
the sex appeal of the actors and the details of the technology, fashion and
interior design of the period. The male characters were all recognizable as sexist
rogues, but the more outrageously they trolled the audience, the larger the
female fan base grew. The audience found them sympathetic and complex rather
than black-hat villains. In fact, this seems to be the formula for success in
this genre. One critic wrote that the pillars of the television drama, The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, all indicted America “but
refused to condemn the complex, emotionally crippled men” at the center of the
stories.[i]
In contrast to the popular
conception of Mad Men as a
high-quality period soap opera, it seemed to me that Matthew Weiner always had
a darker view of the world, one in which the ad men of Madison Avenue were on
the same level as the gangsters in The
Sopranos, which Weiner helped write before his success with Mad Men. After all, it is obvious that
he chose to heighten reality by depicting a degree of loutish behavior that
wouldn’t have been found in most offices in 1960. He seemed to be working on a
theme that many filmmakers have mined since The
Godfather: capitalism is gangsterism writ large. Behind their fashions and
the pretty faces, the cast of Mad Men
can be seen as both the victims and vectors of a malicious plague on society. In
Mad Men one can often see an
indictment of mid-century America that is as strong as what came out of the
counter-cultural movement of the time, which was dismissively labelled “beatnik” so that the Russian suffix would
lend an inference of anti-Americanism.
Don Draper actually bears a striking
resemblance to Jack Kerouac, so one could wonder whether the writers
consciously or unconsciously cast the role for this resemblance so that Don
would look like Jack’s evil twin. One took God’s command to go forth in rags to
moan and roll his bones for man, while the other decided to “make something out
of himself” by selling dreams on Madison Avenue.
In one episode (The Hobo Code, S1E8)
Don encounters his lover unannounced and finds himself sharing the evening with
a rival who is a stereotyped 1950s beatnik. They clash in predictable ways,
with the beatnik telling Don he “sells the lie,” and Don telling him to quit
blaming the non-existent “system” and go “make something out of himself.”
Another hint of the cultural
influence of the beats is a minor character is named “Ginsberg,” a name which
is an obvious allusion to the poet Allen Ginsberg, who worked briefly on
Madison Avenue. The Ginsberg character is portrayed cartoonishly as a gifted
creative talent but too mad to fit in with his colleagues. Allen Ginsberg
remained remarkably sane and grounded throughout his life, but the Ginsberg in Mad Men goes truly mad when he decries
the evil forces he perceives to be devouring souls in the agency where he works.
In the final season (Lost Horizon, S7E12) Kerouac’s On the Road finally makes an appearance,
as if the writers had decided to make a belated essential mention of one of
great cultural influences of the late 1950s. At the peak of his success, after
he has made it as an assured millionaire partner in a large firm, Don finally
hits the road to go discover America. The ghost of Bert Cooper, his mentor,
appears beside him in the passenger seat. He’s the man who once gave Don a copy
of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Saying
he never read On the Road, he nonetheless
quotes a line from it: “Whither goest though, America, in thy shiny car in the
night?”
 |
| Left: Jack Kerouac. Right: Jon Hamm as Don Draper |
For Don the road trip will ring
hollow. He is devoid of the innocence, naiveté, poverty and love for America with
which Kerouac journeyed in his late twenties. All he finds at the end of the
road is the inspiration for the next ad campaign that will sweep the nation as
the new decade begins, and that was, after all, the reason he hit the road. He
was stuck for an idea for the Coca Cola account, just as he had been stuck for
an idea for Lucky Strike in episode one. Some viewers believe Don went through
a spiritual transformation at a meditation retreat, but there is no way to know
whether it was authentic or faked. It’s easy to forget you’re watching Jon Hamm
act, so what you see is by definition contrived. There is no way to know it is
not a performance of Don Draper faking satori.
In making the comparison to The Sopranos, one must recall that even Tony’s
band of sociopathic gangsters charmed American audiences. David Chase, Matthew
Weiner and the other writers must have found it darkly amusing that no matter
how hard they tried to make their characters reprehensible, the audience still forgave
them and rooted for them. They must have shrugged as they asked themselves,
“What do we have to do to make you hate these guys? You want it darker?”[ii]
The audience cheered for Tony right
to the end, even after they saw his psychologist finally wake up to the fact
that she had been manipulated for years by a sociopath. The audience felt cheated
when his survival could not be confirmed in the finale. This is why the blank-screen
ambiguous ending of the show was brilliant. It forced the viewers to finally confront
their own wish to see Tony and his family escape the punishment that awaited
them.
There are many acts of violence and
betrayal in Mad Men that equal those
of The Sopranos for their chilling
horror. They are more psychological and don’t involve the same finality and
“wetness” of gangland murders, but they are equal in their odiousness. Murder
is done through killing someone’s career or driving a person to suicide or
prostitution. A colleague loses his foot in an accident with a riding lawn
mower, on company property, and he is quickly tossed out of the firm because it
wouldn’t look right to have a partner hobbling around with a cane. In another
episode, a woman is finally allowed to become a partner, but only if she
submits, under pressure from her male colleagues, to a client’s demand for a
sexual favor. She agrees. I found all of this just as horrific as Tony
Soprano’s conspiracy to send his nephew’s fiancée to “long-term parking.”
What was Matthew Weiner trying to
say with all this? Was it his intent to engage in a serious critique of
capitalism hidden in a light soap opera, loaded up, ironically, with product
placement for dozens of top American corporations? If he had wanted to say
something generous about advertising, he could have referred to the standard
defense of advertising that states it enables innovation and creates intangible
value which is a “... fine substitute for using up labor or limited resources
in the creation of things.” The advertising business and the desires it creates
are ways of keeping otherwise useless people occupied while minimizing
consumption of resources.[iii]
However, Mad Men makes no attempt at
such an argument. It never misses an opportunity to show characters being
harassed, insulted, abused, seduced and betrayed, and the American public being
sold Nixon, agent orange, alcohol, and tobacco. The cast remains committed to
the pursuit of wealth and acceptance of money from these toxic causes.
In the Coen Brothers film Hail, Caesar, a group of communist
Hollywood writers abduct and blackmail a Hollywood star and explain their
motives to him thus:
We concentrated on getting communist content into
motion pictures. Always in a sub rosa
way, of course. And we were pretty darn successful... Our understanding of the
true workings of history gives us access to the levers of power. Your studio,
for instance, is a pure instrument of capitalism. As such, it expresses the
contradictions of capitalism and can be enlisted to finance its own destruction.
Which is exciting. It can be made to help the little guy... even though its
purpose is to exploit the little guy.[iv]
The authors seem to want to ridicule
these communists for their hypocrisy, but at the same time the Coen Brothers
are saying something serious about the seeds of subversion always being present
in art that is owned and sponsored by the powerful. It would be difficult to
imagine another way artists could insert a lesson about Marxism in a modern
film without it needing to be masked with irony as a quaint historical
throwback. It is a very meta technique that simultaneously treats the topic
with seriousness and ridicule.
It is well known that Hollywood was
infiltrated by communists in the mid-20th century, but what about now? Are the
Coen Brothers subversives, or are they just kidding here? Hail, Caesar is, in fact, loaded with scathing commentary on the contradictions
of capitalism, communism, empire and religion, and it is centered on a
protagonist who must find his way through them while he finds a Joseph for a
Mary and fathoms the implications of the secret he has been told and tempted to
work for—America’s recent deployment of the hydrogen bomb. But don’t worry. It
means nothing. It’s just another wacky comedy from the Coen Brothers.
They say that the secret of a
television series is that the characters never change. A well-conceived pilot
episode lays out everything that will follow for as long as the show may run. A
look back at episode one of Mad Men
shows that Matthew Weiner demonstrated this rule perfectly. If you want to
understand what Don Draper was in the finale, just look at what he was in the
pilot: an adult survivor of a lonely traumatic childhood, a shell-shocked war
veteran, living as an imposter with a dead man’s name. He has consciously made
himself a new identity. He is a walking advertisement for and embodiment of the
great Gatsbyesque American notion of self-re-invention, that you can repeat the past and create a new you,
even though doing so involves total alienation from self and others.
We could “refuse to condemn complex,
emotionally crippled men,” but then we miss the point that Don Draper
represents a malevolent force that should be denounced. He ruins everything he
touches, from the first episode to the last, betraying everyone he brings into his
life. He starts off selling cigarettes and ends by selling high-fructose corn
syrup. In the finale, his “enlightenment” at a meditation retreat at the end of
his road trip consists of no more than the realization that the peace and love scene
is going to be the next big thing. He is then written into reality as creator
of the non-fictitious famous treacle to world peace and racial tolerance: I’d like to buy the world a Coke—a
reassuring bromide of a “balming campaign”
that was dropped on the world at the height of President Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia.
In episode one we see him spend a
night with his lover, a fellow traveler in the advertising business who appears
later as the friend of the beatniks, then much later as a destitute heroin
addict. Don tells her he is struggling to find a way to market cigarettes now
that it is illegal to make health claims about them. He rejects the idea
proposed by a colleague that they should develop a campaign on the notion that people
smoke because of a Freudian death wish. His rude dismissal of the colleague is a
comical demonstration of the sort of denial Freud would love to observe. Every
character in the story is hell-bent on reckless, self-destructive behavior, but
a death wish? Naaah.
Instead of focusing on the death
wish, which couldn’t be consciously acknowledged in an advertisement, Don
finally hits on the idea of gaslighting the consumer, a propaganda technique
used in marketing and politics for all manner of nefarious deception. If no one
can tell the truth about tobacco, it is better to focus attention on anything
else. He tells his clients that everyone else’s tobacco is poisonous, but
“yours is toasted.” All that is necessary is to reassure the consumer and make
him or her feel good. The technique is familiar in President GW Bush, in 2001
after the terror attacks, telling Americans to resume shopping, or in Japan’s
prime minister wanting to host the Olympics to take the nation’s eyes off
tsunami devastation and radioactive fallout northeast of Tokyo. Don pitches to
his clients:
Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do
you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom
from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with
reassurance that whatever you’re doing, it’s OK. You are OK.
Yet who is not OK here? In the next
scene he has drinks with a female client, Rachel, whom he needs to apologize
to, but he manages to insult her further by asking why she is not married. She
answers frankly that she has never been in love, and Don responds, “The reason
you haven’t felt it is because it doesn’t exist. What you call love was
invented by guys like me to sell nylons.” Repeating the alienated,
dead-in-the-midst-of-life misery of Tony Soprano’s mother, he adds, “You live
alone and you die alone.” Rachel reacts with a subdued dismay, and this is a
turn which reveals the subversive heart and power of Matthew Weiner’s tale. She
is reacting with proper horror against Madison Avenue’s “destruction of love in social reality,”
a notion which is straight out of textbooks on socialism, as elaborated in this
passage by Eric Fromm:
Quite clearly the aim
of socialism is man. It is to create a form of production and an organization
of society in which man can overcome alienation from his product, from his
work, from his fellow man, from himself and from nature; in which he can return
to himself and grasp the world with his own powers, thus becoming one with the
world. Socialism for Marx was, as Paul Tillich put it, “a resistance movement
against the destruction of love in social reality.”[v]
Rachel’s determined defense of love
allows her to see through Don. She unmasks him by saying:
“I do know what it feels like to be out of place, to be
disconnected, to see the whole world laid out in front of you, the way other
people live it. There is something about you that tells me you know it, too.”
She’s got him. All he can do is look
down nervously and reply, “I don’t know if that’s true.” She has taken down that
billboard at the side of the road telling him he’s OK. After this meeting he
goes home to his wife and family in the suburbs, and before he can sleep he
goes to his children’s room to watch them sleeping. He just said love doesn’t
exist, so what is he feeling here, or what is he trying to feel or fake here, with his wife standing behind him?
Mad
Men and the other
pillars of television drama are much easier to understand if we get over being
charmed by their sociopathic anti-heroes. If we are going to indict America, then
we must also condemn those who eagerly participate in what is indictable. One
of the writers of Don Draper’s generation, William Burroughs, described the
problem of the age as the “virus power”:
The virus power manifests itself in many ways: in the
construction of nuclear weapons, in practically all existing political systems
which are aimed at curtailing inner freedom, that is, at control. It manifests
itself in the extreme drabness of everyday life in Western countries. It
manifests itself in the ugliness and vulgarity we see on every hand, and of
course, it manifests itself in the actual virus illnesses. On the other hand,
the partisans are everywhere, of all races and nations. A partisan may simply
be defined as any individual who is aware of the enemy, of their methods of
operations, and who is actively engaged in combating the enemy. You must learn
who and what the enemy is, their weapons and methods of operation. The enemy is
in you.[vi]
We don’t condemn the partisan because,
although he is infected and participates in the manifestations of ugliness
which inevitably entrap him, he knows the enemy and is trying to mount a
resistance. Don Draper is not a partisan. He is the unapologetic purveyor of
the enemy’s weapons and methods of operation. The audience could move beyond fetishizing
the gadgets, fashions and seductive charms of such entertainment and learn who
and what the enemy is.
Notes
[i] Jonathan Bernstein, “After
Mad Men and Breaking Bad, what’s next for The Great American Drama?”
The Guardian, August 18, 2015.
[ii] The title track on
Leonard Cohen’s final album You Want it
Darker (is it a declaration, or a question?) seems to be making this same
point about our culture’s tolerance of evil: A million candles burning for the love that never came. You want it
darker.
[iii] Rory Sutherland, “Life
Lessons from an Ad Man,” TED,
July 2009.
[iv] Joel and Ethan Coen
(Directors), Hail, Caesar (Universal
Pictures, 2016).
[v] Eric Fromm, Marx’s Concept Of Socialism (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing,
1961), chapter six.
[vi] Allen Hibbard (Editor), Conversations with William S. Burroughs (University of Mississippi
Press, 2000), 12.
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