A Meditation on Mad Men

 "...nostalgia. It's delicate...but potent...in Greek, nostalgia literally means 'the pain from an old wound.' It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone."

Sterling Cooper's creative director Don Draper is pitching his promotional concept to Kodak, a prospective client, for its new product, a wheel-like slide projector. As images of his own young family flash by, one by one, on a projection screen, he continues his inspired dream-spinning:

"This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again."

With these words, words that also echo an aspect of Mad Men's emotional appeal,  the client and everyone else inside the hushed room is in the palm of Draper's hand; he concludes:

"It's not called 'the Wheel." It's called a 'Carousel.' It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again...to a place where we know we are loved."

The carousel whirl that is AMC's Mad Men sweeps the viewer along on the labyrinthine journey of Don Draper, preternaturally savvy and eloquent Madison Avenue dreamweaver, as he and those close to him navigate the dark and white nights of their own souls and that of 1960s America.

Click here to watch Don Draper's entire 'Carousel' pitch

In an early episode, Betty Draper, Don's then-wife, stares at him as he lies sleeping and wonders aloud, "Who are you?"  Betty's late father, Gene, didn't like his son-in-law at all and, in another episode, complains of him, "He has no people. You can't trust a person like that..." Season 4 opened with the question, "Who is Don Draper?" posed to Draper over lunch by a reporter from Advertising Age. Series loyalists learned early on that Draper was once a neglected farm boy whose impoverished family moved from the Midwest to Pennsylvania coal country. While serving in the Korean war he saw a way out of his nowhere-man future and seized the opportunity. In just a few years he would be a rising star on Madison Avenue with the trophy wife, children, Cadillac and suburban Ossining house to certify his status.

Don and Betty Draper at home

Draper's mysterious past and meteoric ascent have inspired comparisons to another iconic fictional character, Jay Gatsby of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It was of Gatsby that Fitzgerald's narrator, Nick, would say, "If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him..." Gatsby, born James Gatz in an upper Midwestern backwater, was based on a character out of ancient fiction named Trimalchio. A freed Roman slave who became wealthy and powerful and was intent on winning over the 1st century crème de la crème, Trimalchio hosted an elaborate but tasteless feast about which the elite laughed behind his back. Gatsby, who made his fortune through confidence schemes and shady connections, was rich but naive, and his grand soirees were attended but scorned by New York's finest.

A man in full

Though, like Gatsby, Don Draper is an arriviste who was once "a penniless young man without a past," no one is laughing at him. By 1960, when Mad Men picks up, the talented and charismatic Mr. Draper has sparked awe and envy throughout the world of advertising. No, at this point, Don Draper is perceived less like the ill-fated Gatsby and perhaps more like a more fortunate young man who fled his roots and re-made himself: Archie Leach of Bristol, England, who made his name in America and of his reinvented self said, "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."

Despite his great success, Draper lives in barely contained turmoil. He wrestles with personal demons and chafes under mounting pressures at work and at home. The very time in which he lives is a jittery age - it is the height of ‘the cold war’ and American culture is in the midst of rapid change.

Soviet missiles in Cuba

It was at just about this time, in 1959, that developmental psychologist/psychoanalyst Erik Erikson coined the term ‘identity crisis,’ a condition of disorientation or role confusion that results from conflicting internal and external experiences, pressures and expectations that can lead to acute anxiety. Though Erikson originally viewed 'identity crisis' as primarily an adolescent experience, its definition expanded to include crises that occur during major life transitions as well as within social structures.

Not too many years earlier, in 1950, sociologist David Riesman had written what became, and remains, the best-selling book ever in the U.S. on sociology. The Lonely Crowd examined America’s social character and described the country’s shift from 19^th century ‘inner-direction’ (behavior internalized early through parents and community) to mid-20^th century ‘other-direction’ (responsiveness to peer groups and the media). Riesman’s theories spoke to concerns of the time regarding the conformity that accompanied the sweeping spread of suburban culture. It was Riesman’s view that the confidence and unity that followed World War II were in part an attempt to deflect cultural despair, and his term ‘the lonely crowd’ entered the mainstream as a description of alienation within an affluent society.

America, perhaps in its adolescence at mid-century and reeling under the weight of too much power, wealth and responsibility too soon, was entering a period of increasing uncertainty and anxiety as the 1960s unfolded. Clearly Don Draper, with his double life and murky past, is guarded and isolated, and most in his professional and personal orbit are perplexed by the changing, often frightening times.

November 22, 1963 at Sterling Cooper

Walter Cronkite reporting for CBS News, November 22, 1963

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner has said that it was during his tenure as a writer on the sitcom Becker that an idea occurred to him for a show set in the ‘60s about someone like himself, “who… had everything and was miserable.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

As Weiner focused on writing the story of a character he thought of as a man who has sold out in some ways but is still trying to find himself, he hired a researcher to investigate the 1960s in detail. According to Weiner, the very first piece of research he received was about the crisis in cigarette advertising in 1960. And so it followed that when we first catch sight of Don Draper in the series opener it is 1960 and he is alone at a table in a cocktail lounge quizzing a black waiter about his brand of cigarettes - Old Gold. Draper is struggling to come up with an ad concept for Sterling Draper’s biggest account, Lucky Strike. The noisy, smoke-filled room is dim and in the background a recording of Don Cherry singing “Band of Gold” plays. The episode tracks the sharp, charming and handsome Mr. Draper through the evening and into a night spent with his commercial artist girlfriend, his next day at the office and his trip home after work to – surprise! – his wife and children in the suburbs.

Since then Don Draper and his family and his colleagues at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (formerly Sterling Cooper) have grappled with the wildly unpredictable 1960s as best they can. Having witnessed everything on the national scene from historic space flights and assassination to the explosion of the civil rights movement and the beginnings of women’s movement, they are at the same time dealing with upheaval in their personal lives.

The 1960s are accurately reflected and exquisitely replicated in Mad Men, and immersion in that glittering and chaotic decade is mesmerizing. But it is the series’ finely drawn, palpably authentic characters, credible story lines and archetypal themes that provide its greatest appeal. Mad Men, to borrow a phrase from Don Draper's Kodak presentation, affords that "rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash."

Season 5 begins...

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Posted by: Tukiyooo A Meditation on Mad Men Updated at : 6:00 AM

Sunday, April 1, 2012