Mad Men: What Does It All Mean?

In my last post I did some ruminating about Mad Men’s final episode; now I want to go back and look at the series as a whole (as best as I can remember all seven seasons, or 92 episodes). What are we supposed to take away after spending seven years our lives (and ten of theirs) with Don, Roger, Peggy, Pete, Megan, and even Harry Crane?

The key to the series, and the opening line to season four, was, “Who is Don Draper?” His real name is Dick Whitman, but as Shakespeare said, “What up with that?” (I’m paraphrasing).  Are the two names Jekyll and Hyde, with Don the respectable façade and Dick the womanizing, inattentive father who disappears from work for weeks at a time?  Or is Dick Whitman the honest young man raised in a brothel and Don Draper his rascally nemesis?  The joke, I suspect, is that they are not two sides of the same coin, they are the coin.

In the final episode Don listed his sins to Peggy Olsen and included that he had taken another man’s name and made nothing of it.  But what was the real Don Draper doing with his name that was so special?  If he had had the life Don created, with a successful career, nuclear family, and numerous friends, then it wouldn’t have been so easy for Dick Whitman to step into that life.  Dick Whitman stepped into an empty vessel and made it his own, and did a far better job of being Don Draper than Don Draper ever did.

The final episode seems to suggest that Dick Whitman’s tragic flaw was his greatest strength, the advice he doled out a couple of times early in the show’s run.  In Season one’s episode “5G” he tells his brother that his “life only moves in one direction.  Forward.”  In the first episode of Season two he tells Peggy Olsen, who is suffering from shock and probably extreme post-partum depression, “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”  That advice helped Peggy become the driven career woman she had to be to survive in a man’s world.  It helped Don Draper become a legend in the advertising world, always looking for a way to advance like a pawn traversing a chessboard until it gets promoted to something greater.

But does it also explain Don’s flaws?  Does he sleep with so many women because he won’t regret it later because he’s looking forward?  Does he hop into a convertible driven by a cute blonde while at a conference and not come back to work for weeks because he knows the firm will take him back because he’s Don Draper?  Is Peggy married to her job because she is too driven to settle for any man?

But if he looked back, what would Don Draper see?  His life as Dick Whitman wasn't a picnic.  Would he have been a better father if he had pondered his relationship with his father?  Unlikely.  Would he have been more faithful to Betty if he spent nights pondering his upbringing in a brothel?  I doubt it.  Stephanie Draper said she thought he was wrong about looking forward, but on balance it seems to do more good than harm.

What other themes can we take away from the Series Mad Men?  Other than the fact that it sucked to be a woman in the 1960’s? Mad Men seems to demonstrate the truth of a line from the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven: “Deserves got nothing to do with it.”

Don and Roger smoke like chimneys, but Betty gets cancer.  Pete Campbell was a sniveling, self-entitled creep, but he ends up with the thing that eluded Don Draper, a happy nuclear family.  Joan Holloway Harris is a warm, loving, spectacular woman who gravitates to men who are small minded and incapable of appreciating her (my favorite fantasy about the future for the Mad Men characters is that when Don returns to McCann/Erickson he and Joan get together, realize they are both gorgeous people who are lousy at relationships, and invent the phrase “friends with benefits”).

The only character who seemingly gets what they deserve (unless Harry Crane catches a social disease for some starlet) is Peggy Olsen, who succeeds at work and ends up with strapping Stan Rizzo in her life.  But Peggy was always the outlier, the one character who persevered and managed to achieve what she set out to do despite whatever obstacles male chauvinism put in her way.  Maybe the trait that makes Peggy unique is her focus on looking forward. And by the way, a partnership with her and Joan would have either taken over the world or resulted in a murder/suicide.

I think one of the best things about Mad Men is that it defied easy categorizing and psychoanalysis.  What was driving Don Draper to succeed at work, yet take off when he felt like it?  Why did he feel the need to cheat on his gorgeous wife (and so often with so many women)? There are no easy answers; there is no “Rosebud” that explains everything.  Don Draper, to use an anachronistic reference, is a Rubik’s Cube that can’t be solved.  That's why he's one of the most fascinating television characters of all time.