You’ll be very happy. ~ Peggy to Don

I’m not happy. ~ Don

Who is Don Draper? ~ Reporter

The opening line of Season 4 of Mad Men is almost too pat – baldly asking what is ostensibly the central question of the series. Finding out Don Draper is actually Dick Whitman – and even what Dick Whitman’s life was like – has not truly answered this question. As Don himself pointed out last season, names are merely labels. Every person has to consider who they really are  -- or else live a life of willed self-ignorance. While others have long pondered who Don really is, as this season begins, we get the first inklings that Don may be considering that question himself.

 The picture may be bigger than the article. ~ Reporter from Ad Age 

This self-inquiry doesn’t come easily, however. Forced into an interview with the premiere trade magazine, Advertising Age, in order to promote the new agency, he is taken aback by this opening question.  “What do men say when you ask that?” he queries the reporter, trying as always to find out what the expected thing is in order to pass socially. Told that they usually say something cute, Don dismisses that approach as well as the idea that he should be expected to talk about himself in the third person (clearly not as accepted a practice among prominent people in 1964 as it is now from even bottom-rung celebrities). “I’m from the Midwest,” he demurs, “We were taught it’s not polite to talk about yourself.”  (An understatement about an upbringing in which self-regard would have been considered a cardinal sin, one of pride.)

I wanted it to be indistinguishable from the movies. I wanted people watching it to say, “What’s happening now?”

~ Don about his style of advertising

Don’s adeptness at camouflage is mirrored in the landmark TV ad that has brought him and his agency to the magazine’s attention: Advertising an utterly mundane product by employing a style that melds into the movie the viewer is watching, so that they don’t know it’s an ad, “at least not for the first 30 seconds” (TV ads were longer back then, as some of us well remember). But while Don knows how to sell Glo-Coat, a product that makes your floors beautiful and glossy, he doesn’t know how to Glo-Coat himself – faced with a reporter who literally hasn’t a leg to stand on (having lost one in Korea), he’s at first unthinkingly confident in his usual dodge-and-weave of evasive responses, but will soon be off-balance and staggering himself.

That question just tied a knot in my brain.  ~ Jantzen client

We’re the scrappy upstart. ~ Pete 

In the meantime, we get a brisk introduction to the new agency, in its snazzy but quite small offices, a contraction from the old Sterling-Cooper digs that’s symbolized by the abbreviated sign, “SCDP” adorning the reception area.  Joan may have her own office (although we find out little of her new responsibilities), but Peggy’s doubled up with a pubescent-looking creative guy, Joey, and the lack of a conference room causes concern until a potential client assumes it’s a deliberately creative approach, because a circle of chairs “demands a conversation.”

“A conversation about why there’s no table,” Don snarks upon hearing this, but a circle that demands a conversation is precisely the formation that he finds himself in – a constellation of near-equals sharing the same fate and behaving in a far more egalitarian manner than in the old agency (it’s especially refreshing to see Harry not only stand up for himself but even angrily challenge the partners). 

But even so, Don remains the center of attention, the nucleus of the new cell. Pete tells him they will beat the bigger agencies because they have him (and seems to actually mean it) and Peggy tries to assure him that “We’re all here because of you -- all we want to do is please you,” but Don seems to find pressure rather than relief in the weight of these remarks. Heavy lies the head that wears the crown, but even heavier is the head that’s expected to come up with most of the brilliant ideas to sell cleaning products (although as usual Peggy proves herself by coming up with a campaign in spontaneous Draperesque fashion and then, upon being complimented by Pete, intoning the Zen-like, “A slogan is nothing when you have a good idea.”)

I thought we were getting on a streak. ~ Pete 

While we’re used to seeing Don effortlessly win clients with ad campaigns he seems to pull out of his fedora at the last possible moment, this season finds him floundering and losing his touch. He’s made one great campaign, but the agency is largely afloat due to key client Lucky Strikes (which means Sal Romano will not be coming back any time soon, to the disappointment of many fans), especially after they lose jai alai from a tearful Hoho the heirheir. While Don used to know how to adroitly challenge clients into accepting more outré and creative campaigns, he stunningly ends up berating the “family-oriented” Jantzen swimwear company execs for not accepting a risqué ad that imposes a banner across a woman’s breasts with the slogan, “So well built, we can’t show you the second floor” – a campaign constructed on an inside joke about the agency’s public image vs. reality, referring to the second floor that SCDP claims to have but which doesn’t actually exist.

After trying to explain that a bikini is “underwear you wear to the beach,” and all that separates it from outright nudity is “the cut and print of the cloth and some kind of gentleman’s agreement,” only to meet stubborn and prudish resistance from his clients, Don seems to realizes that he has lost that cloth of creative persuasion that covered him like armor, making him largely invulnerable to professional failure. Throwing a tantrum more fully realized than any we’ve seen his own children indulge in, Don also throws the clients out of his office, to the horror and disbelief of those old Accounts smoothies, Roger and Pete.

Is that what it takes to change things?  ~ Don’s date, Bethany 

Don’s meltdown makes more sense to us because we get to witness his new bachelor life, which looks as dark and depressing as his tiny apartment with the bunk beds for the kids stuck in an alcove, and Don reduced to shining his shoes in front of the TV at night, stopping to bask in his own reflected glory when the Glo-Coat commercial comes on.  Roger thinks Don’s having so much sex that he doesn’t want to hear about it or “I’d kill myself,” but the reality we see is quite different. Pushed into a blind date with one of Jane’s friends, he endures banalities over an expensive and very buttery dinner of Chicken Kiev, only to fail at buttering up the girl, garnering no more than a brief passionate kiss in the cab (while she nonetheless reports him as “being grabby”).

Get me in a room where I have a chance. ~ Don to Pete

It’s hard to say why the Don who was catnip to women for three seasons is suddenly struggling to even cop a feel, unless that old saw about wedding rings making men irresistible is true -- or that like Austin Powers, he’s lost his mojo. (In which case, I guess he needs to go back to 1962 to find it.) Telling his date (an actress who plays wenches and courtesans as a supernumerary at the opera but loves romance and won’t play the wanton woman with Don) that he’s only been to the opera on business “so I didn’t enjoy myself” provides a peek into the extreme constriction of Don’s life, which has been controlled since Korea by his drive to literally make a name for himself.

A clenched hedonist, he takes his pleasure in small measured doses, self-medicating with cigarettes, booze and sex to get himself through the days of hard work. With this episode we get a further glimpse into his well-hidden self-loathing, when the Happy Thanksgiving Hooker comes to visit and gives him precisely what he wants – to be slapped hard while she straddles his body and admonishes him not to tell her what to do. Oh Don, if only you’d told Betty this is what you really wanted, you could have saved your marriage! She even had that great riding outfit with the crop. 

You need to put things back where you found them.

~ Don to his maid, Celia

But Betty has moved on to a new man who she alternately controls and submits to, and the Henry who said he didn’t want Betty to be dependent on anyone but him seems oddly comfortable living in a house that Don is still paying the full freight on, despite his accountant’s urging to push Betty out by so he can sell the place. When Don finally confronts Betty and demands that she move out by their agreed-upon deadline or pay rent, she’s furious, and it’s up to the always-calm Henry to tell her that Don has a point. Betty transparently tries to blame her foot-dragging on not wanting to traumatize her kids with further life changes, but can’t help revealing her true motivation, “He doesn’t get to decide.”

Let me out of here! ~ Child in Glo-Coat ad

 Don’s Glo-Coat ad showing a child in a homemade jail created by chairs hanging upside down on a kitchen table while a mopped floor dries and a sinister mother appears at the door ends with the cheerful reassurance that walking on a freshly mopped floor is no longer a hanging offense. But its vision of two children imprisoned and terrified by their own mother has a real life parallel in how Sally is feeling about her life with newlyweds Henry and Betty Francis.  Having tried to mop the floor with Don but obviously still seething with anger (not helped by Henry having an older man’s less reliable libido), all of Betty’s her worst parenting qualities are on display, including a child-like petulance, as when she tells Sally that Don won’t be sympathetic “when he hears my side of the story,” a statement which makes her sound like Sally’s sibling, not her mother.

She’s a silly woman. Honestly Henry, I don’t know how you can stand living in that man’s dirt.

~ Henry’s mother about Betty.

 Even Henry’s battle-axe of a mother, who clearly has it in for Betty nevertheless correctly warns him that Betty’s children fear her, having witnessed her trying to force-feed Sally at Thanksgiving and then dragging her off and pinching her when Sally understandably gags – leaving us to fear that an eating disorder or other sad manifestation of Sally’s stress and sadness can’t be far off.

Having married largely for spite and a convenient escape, Betty (looking alarmingly like Pat Nixon in her new hairstyle) seems happy with Henry only when he jumps her like a teenager in the car or defends divorce to his mother. Henry may be utterly faithful and consistent, but his sleepy demeanor and resigned deference to Betty, as well as his fixation on mundane details like whether the dog is in the house do not bode well for his maintaining a hold on Betty’s affections. She’s had the first husband who didn’t come home (but when he did, he gave her a good romp) and now she has Mr. Reliable, who eats too much at Thanksgiving and needs to sleep it off rather than respond to his sexy young wife, and who “Yes dear’s” her when she tells him to stay in the room while she talks to her ex. Betty’s made the classic relationship feint of swinging from one extreme to another, rather than learning from her mistakes, and I suspect that Henry as well as her children will be made to pay for her continued unhappiness.

Modest people want to be stimulated too. ~ Don to Jantzen execs

I realized that I had 2 choices:  I could die of boredom or holster up my guns.

~ Don to WSJ reporter on starting a new company.

 Having lived as two different men, not to mention having just wrangled with clients who insist they make not a bikini, but a “two piece bathing suit,” Don is well acquainted with dichotomy and duality. Stark choices mark his life:  Being poor Dick Whitman with a troubled past or up and coming star Don Draper, being unhappily married with kids or a merry bachelor, being wildly successful at work or alienating clients right and left. Now he chooses once again to take control of the narrative, framing it as a gunslinger’s choice to escape that domestic corral of the kitchen chairs and become the new sheriff in town.

After chastising Peggy for her ham-handed PR stunt in hiring some actresses to stage a fight in a market to boost sales and thus retain the client who wants to can them as surely as a Sugarberry ham, and saying he doesn’t do things that dishonest way, Don nonetheless chooses to manipulate the public story to save the agency as well as his own skin.  Given a mulligan to re-tell his tale, this time to a Wall Street Journal reporter, he adds a second story to SCDP on top of the first story, that of its birth in the Pierre Hotel, and assuredly takes the credit when the reporter asks if there is one person behind the agency’s success. 

Stepping into the name on the office wall, a name he appropriated and now chooses to sell, not in order to escape it but instead to finally inhabit it, he chooses to become the man he’s pretended to be – not the real Don Draper who died in Korea, but the Don Draper that Dick Whitman invented, the mythic ad man.  Is he believing his own legend or only pretending?  We suspect the latter, and the lyrics of “Tobacco Road” that rise up with the credits affirm that Don Draper can never really escape Dick Whitman:

I was born in a funk

Mama died and Daddy got drunk

Left me here to die alone in the middle of Tobacco Road

Grew up in a rusty shack

All I had was hanging on my back

Only you know how I loathe this place called Tobacco Road

But it’s home

The only life I’ve ever known