Mad Men: The End of an Era of Eras

For those who haven’t watched the Mad Men Season finale–Stop right there! Spoilers ahead….

For years when people asked if I’d watched Mad Men and I’d said no, I was greeted with shock. “You’ll love it,” I was told by colleagues, friends and Jezebel.com. Finally I broke down last Carnival season and spent 4 weeks binge watching the entire series. I was captivated by the costumes, the set, the details, but most importantly by the characters. And the writing! The writing was so complex on so many levels, yet simultaneously natural that I could barely breathe from scene to scene. In a word, it was magic.

In the past few days I’ve spent most of my free time in between work, working-out, a bridal shower and a wedding, picking up where I left off, dancing from year to year with the characters as they grew in and out of the people they would eventually become. I cringed at the sexism and injustice of it all. I laughed at Roger Sterling as he sailed through the era relatively unscathed, but always with the most prolific and hilarious commentary. I cried for Joan who was raped over and over, physically, emotionally and visually by an era for which she was ahead of her time. I cheered for Peggy as she methodically plodded along, one step in front of the other, up the ladder of success, all the while, looking at her feet instead of what lay on the horizon.

And Don. I watched Don too. I watched on helplessly as he followed a shame spiral straight down to the bottom of a bottle, several times, because he felt an overwhelming guilt for a split-second decision he made in his youth that forever affected his entire journey through the prime of his life. With every haphazard turn he fell ass-backwards into wealth and notoriety, despite him constantly self-sabotaging himself at every opportunity. As his career advanced and his fortune amassed, his guilt only mounted.

But you know what? I never fully understood it until the finale episode tonight.

In the last 15 minutes, Don found himself stranded at a retreat in middle-of-nowhere California. After months of running he was trapped, forced to face himself after an entire lifetime of loneliness. It dawns on him that he’d abandoned Peggy without so much as a goodbye, so he calls her out of the blue. She tells him that he can come back to his life. His job would most likely forgive him and he could resume the well-worn path of ass-backwards success he’s been on since the show began. Don doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t believe he is needed or wanted anywhere by anyone. After he hangs up Don doubles over, breathing heavily and for a minute I think this is it: he’s going to drop dead.

He sits on the ground in the dirt–the dirt of his seedy beginnings as the bastard child of a prostitute, who’s father never wanted him and who’s step-mother despised him. He sinks deep into the filth of his whore-house up-bringing and the step-mother who constantly reminded him that his existence was an affront to her every hope and dream. He is consumed by his accidental killing of his superior officer in Korea, and the subsequent desperate decision to assume said officers identity. He killed himself off in hopes of a fresh start and he hates himself for it.

The entire series Don has told others to move past whatever life event was pulling them down. Look forward, Don said to Peggy when she gave birth to a child she never knew she was carrying. You can move past this, he said to the real Mrs. Draper’s niece, Stephanie, as she fled the therapy session inconsolable. But the truth is–those were just words. That was Don legitimizing his actions in Korea. Don never moved past becoming Don Draper. As hard as he tried and as far as he drove, all he ever was, was Dick Whitman.

A man at the retreat spoke the words Don always had trapped inside him but could never get out. The man said he didn’t think anyone ever saw him. He’d go into work and nobody would see him. He’d go home and his wife and kids didn’t see him. He felt that his absence would neither be noted nor missed by anyone in the world. Such were the depths of his loneliness. He gave a beautiful analogy for his life in the form of a dream, comparing himself to an object in a refrigerator. People would open the fridge, the light would go on and they would be glad to see him, but they never chose him. They chose something else, closed the fridge and left him sitting in the dark listening to their laughter from a distance.

Don got up, walked towards the man and embraced him in tears.

It was a moment of revelation. It was a light shone brightly into the depths of Don Draper–so bright that it lit up Dick Whitman. That’s when I got it. As Don Draper grew more and more successful, Dick Whitman felt ignored and worthless in comparison.

Don Draper had a beautiful family. Dick Whitman had a half-brother he abandoned. When he came across Don Draper later in life, Dick threw money at him so he wouldn’t hurt Don’s new life and as a result, his only living relative and the last shred of his former self, committed suicide. He had a father who beat him and a mother who died shortly after giving birth to him, but not before naming him Dick in memorial of her words to his father before he was conceived, “if you get me in trouble, I’ll cut your Dick off”.

Don Draper was at the top of his career, but Dick Whitman had died young in Korea. He would never go on to accomplish all that Don had. And to make matters worse, Don Draper’s real wife was the only person on Earth who knew Dick’s secret and Don couldn’t even have her in his life for fear that she would somehow unravel his web.

Don Draper was in the middle of the laughter, eating and drinking, while Dick Whitman sat in the fridge, waiting for the light to come on and off, knowing that he would never be included in the festivities occurring just outside the door.

Don cried. I cried. It was the moment I’d been waiting for since Don disappeared on that business trip with Pete several seasons ago. Aha! This is what’s really going on. It all of a sudden became crystal clear and for the first time I think I actually understand the enigma that is Don Draper.

The last two or three minutes of the finale we see Don on a cliff, deep in meditation. Ommm….he says, as he sits cross-legged in a clean pair of khakis and a white long sleeve button-down. He looks clean for the first time in the entire episode. His hair is combed in the familiar side-part of the era, and the camera focuses on his lips. At the third utterance of Om, the corner of his lips turn up subtly into a smile. The scene instantly cuts to the classic Coca-Cola ad of the many different hippies singing ‘I’d like to give the world a Coke’ and you know that Don Draper has accepted his past. He isn’t Don Draper, it’s true, but he’s no longer Dick Whitman either. He returns to his true identity as a Mad Man.

I’m not ashamed to tell you that I instantly burst into tears. The poetry of this journey is so much more than I’m telling you. All I can say is, if you haven’t watched Mad Men, you haven’t really lived.

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