Not so fast there, Don.  

Last week people were speculating on how Don would negotiate the coming societal changes and statements like this from him aren’t reassuring.  In "The Color Blue," episode 10 of Season 3 of Mad Men, we see more fissures in relationships, as consensual reality and social agreements that have been unquestioned begin to break down. People are beginning to see things quite, quite differently, which means that those who have been in charge of defining reality for their culture are starting to lose power.  By episode’s end, Don will be feted and introduced as a master of the universe, but we won’t get to hear him speak, signaling the time is coming when such men won’t command the audiences they have until now, but instead be increasingly silenced in favor of other, more diverse and youthful voices.


Lane Pryce:  It marks the passage of time. It’s painful, I imagine.
Bert Cooper:  I didn’t get to where I am by dwelling on the past.
Lane:  Well, think of the future. […] Enjoy the fruit of your longevity.
Bert:  You really pour the honey on…then you lick it off.

Bert Cooper in his sleepy old silverback way seems to sense this shift, not wanting to attend Sterling Cooper’s 40th anniversary party which he deems a “funeral,” and not just because all but one of the other founding employees is dead.  He and Roger commiserate about being marginalized in their own company, but only Bert seems to grasp that his lost status isn’t the result of some gross unfairness the way the now always-petulant Roger (who’s beginning to sound a lot like Pete Campbell) seems to.  Instead we read in Bert’s faraway eyes the understanding that a profound change is coming, perhaps because unlike Roger, he’s already lived through such an era during the Depression, having started the firm in 1923, not knowing “the soup was about to hit the fan.”

As well as entitled rich old white guys who call the shots, another dinosaur is also dying off:  The young guy who can get away with drinking, goofing around and literally whacking off, all the while succeeding even though he’s churning out subpar work or stealing other people’s (or at least their lunches).  

We literally see Paul Kinsey’s Achilles heel in this episode, when he (allegedly) comes up with a brilliant idea for a Western Union campaign after talking to the night janitor, only to lose it in a drunken stupor when he fails to write it down.  (I hate it when that happens, too, and for the record, I’m drinking chai while writing this at 1 AM.)

Paul:  No, I had something.  Something incredible but I lost it. I didn’t write it down.
Peggy:  Oh, I hate that.
Paul:  It might have been the best idea I ever had. You know how it is. There was nothing and then there was it and now it’s nothing again. […] You know what the Chinese say?  The faintest ink is the better than the best memory.

Twice he’s upstaged in meetings by Peggy, who takes his ideas and improves them on the spot, looking as sharp and bright as a new penny (maybe because she only drinks Coke when working late) while Paul looks old and slow.  Satisfyingly, given how things all too often still go for women at work, Peggy gets credit for her nimble thinking, winning Don’s approval for taking to heart his admonition to work harder and get better.

Like Bert, Paul senses his obsolescence, his “My god” after Peggy saves the day and brainstorms a campaign off the top of her head signaling his realization that she has the right stuff in a way he no longer does (or, we suspect, never did).

Lane Pryce is yet another man worrying about being “made redundant” (in one way or another) when his London bosses call to say, “Mission Accomplished” and confide that they’re going to put the leaner and meaner Sterling-Cooper back on the market and see how much she will fetch.  Seeing and doing things differently suits Pryce, who has realized that he likes this New World where no one cares about breeding but only action – an attitude which puts him in stark contrast to his wife, who hates the noise and fat ladies in Manhattan and is all too eager to get back to the old sod.

Another husband and wife, Roger and Jane, also suggest a clash of old and new (or at least old and young) although Roger is still sharper than his elderly mother, who confuses Jane with her granddaughter and is befuddled that they’ve gone and moved the whole darn Waldorf-Astoria.

But it is Mad Men’s primary wife and husband who take center stage, even if in separate spotlights.  Both Don and Betty hide and reveal secrets in this episode, albeit unwittingly. (Or would that be un-Dick Whitman-ly?)  Early on, a phone hang up triggers guilty looks from both, as Betty suspects it’s Henry Francis and Don that it’s Suzanne Farrell, and both have to check to see if their love interests are endangering them.

As predicted, Don is deep into his affair with Suzanne and acting like a man in love, not just lust.  Given convenient cover by Conrad Hilton (whose hotels have no doubt launched a thousand affairs and whose wee-small-hours demands now provide an alibi for Don’s nocturnal absences), Don is spending entire nights at Suzanne’s cozy apartment, and seems entranced by her idealism (as well as her long, curly hair).  

But in a telling exchange, we begin to hear the differences that may yet divide them.  Suzanne recounts her delight at an eight-year-old boy in her class who asks,  “How do I know if what I see as blue is the same as it is to you?” When Don asks what she told him, she responds, “The truth.  I don’t know. I never have.” before adding, “But I love that he made me think about that again.”  

Suzanne is portrayed as an open-minded dreamer, as well as a nurturer of the same in others, but when she asks how he’d have answered the same question, Don confesses he’d have said that “My job is about boiling down communication to its essentials and that I know there is a blue that at least 45% of the population sees as the same.”

Don sounds awfully paint-by-numbers (even “crunch-the-numbers”) here, and we realize that context is all.  On Madison Avenue, he’s the hip artistic guy with all the creative ideas, but with Suzanne, he’s the narrow-minded businessman in a fedora who’s always playing the odds and manipulating people into what he needs them to do.   When he comes out with the capper, “The truth is…People may see things differently, but they don’t really want to.” Suzanne wonders, “Do you feel bad about what you do?” only to get a classic Don non-response:  “Nobody feels as good about what they do as you do.” 

Just as he slots Betty into dutiful wife-and-mother (and later in this episode, Barbie doll on display) mode, Don makes himself comfortable with Suzanne’s difference by turning her into something too good to be true, reminding me of Gloria Steinem’s famous saying, “A pedestal is as confining as any small space.”  Don expects Betty to look as beautiful as a Grecian statue, while Suzanne has already been put up on the “wonderful woman who loves kids and is trying to save the world” platform.  While Betty is all edges and elbows, we’ve yet to see Suzanne as much more than the soft earth goddess that Don views her as.  She’s so good she even gets a gold star on her face!

Suzanne’s kindheartedness is further on display when her brother Danny shows up, having lost another job due to uncontrolled epilepsy.  In contrast to Suzanne, Danny is refreshingly blunt and clear-eyed about the world.  (You have to like a guy who immediately sizes up Don as “arrogant” because a brother’s arrival messed with his plans to screw Suzanne silly that night.)   

When Suzanne rescues Danny by getting him a menial job, Don offers to drive him to it, only to have Danny demand to be let off so he can slip away rather than clean toilets for a while before he seizes, pisses his pants and gets ostracized and fired once more.   In a move that proves the charge of arrogance, Don tries to give Danny a pep talk (even trotting out the “I’m older and wiser than you” chestnut), but Danny will rightly have none of it:
 
How do I explain this?  I can’t do anything you can do.  Everyone knows sooner or later that there’s something wrong with me.  I am afflicted, OK?  It’s not a question of will – I can’t change that.  

Don is afflicted, too, but the question remains whether his will is enough to change the course of his life – or whether he truly wants it to change, and if so, how.  Earlier, Suzanne has expressed a desire to find Danny a new job “some place safe,” and Danny retorts, “Safe?  Other people are the problem.  Name such a place” – a sentiment that Don would relate to, suggesting they may have more in common than it appears (or than either would like to think).

Danny of course conjures up Don’s lost brother Adam, and before letting Danny go, Don tries to redeem himself for Adam’s suicide, insisting that Danny call if he ever needs help, muttering rather obviously that, “I swore to myself I’d try to do this right once” – a rather contradictory statement from a man with a duplicate identity, who has so far done things wrong, twice.

Meanwhile, Don’s Betty half is in the midst of her own crisis.  Wondering if Henry was the hang up call, she phones to check, causing him to chide her for playing games and telling her to only call him again if she’s serious.  We repeatedly see Betty reading the 1963 best seller, The Group by Mary McCarthy, about a group of 1933 Vassar graduates spurred on to greater independence and more liberal attitudes than their upbringings would otherwise have permitted by having to make their way in the world during the Depression. Perhaps such a tale will inspire Betty to take charge of her own life?

Meanwhile, she has literally found the key to Don Draper.  In a payoff to a small but delicious moment in a recent episode when she hung up the phone in Don’s home office and frustratedly rattled the locked drawer in a way that suggested she tested it every time she happened to be in there, Betty now discovers the key he’d slipped it into his bathrobe pocket late one night and forgotten (because he was interrupted by baby Gene’s crying, a nice symbol of his domestic obligations interfering with his attempts to secret both his cash and his real identity).   

Scarcely believing her luck, Betty hurries to open the Drawer of Mystery.  Strangely, she seems entirely unsurprised and uninterested in the thousands of dollars in cash, instead homing in on the shoebox that Adam gave Don, which she goes through with increasing mystification and then stunned anger.   The family photos literally reveal a side of Don she’s never seen – and a name she’s never heard – but she’s far more interested in the deed to Anna Draper’s house in Long Beach, and then shocked and devastated when she finds Anna and Don’s divorce decree.

Staying up late to confront him, she smokes and drinks furiously, the shoebox sitting in front of her like a gun she plans to point at him, but ironically Don’s philanderings actually save him.  When he’s not home from Suzanne’s by the wee small hours, Betty gives up and puts the box and keys back, saving her Dick & Don denouement for another day.  She does try to beg off from attending the Sterling-Cooper dinner but quickly gives in to Don’s demand that she put on the dog so he can show her off, providing the façade of contented family man to add to the professional accomplishments he is being lauded for.

In yet another example of the social façade that these characters must labor under, Roger gives a speech at the anniversary dinner honoring Don, speaking of the man that we know he’s close to hating in words that ring like mock wedding vows, signaling that their union is now as phony as Don’s marriage:

Let me introduce the man who will stand alongside me for the next 40 years.  Our creative director, partner, father, husband and friend, Donald Draper.

The descending order of those titles is no accident, each one less true than the one before, starting with Don’s job (which he still excels at) to his business partnership (which is profitable but hollow) to his fatherhood (which he’s begun to neglect again after a brief period of interest), to his marriage (which he’s emotionally abandoned) to his status as friend – which he isn’t, to anyone.  The one friend he seemed to have, Roger, has been lost to the very foibles that united them – ambition, alcohol and lechery.  And of course, the final title – the name Don Draper itself – is utterly false.

As Peggy so rightly observed recently, it’s always Don against the world.  But the world that he opposes is changing.  45% of people might agree on the color blue, but what about that other 55%, a silent majority that, like Peggy, is just beginning to find its voice?