Don and Bruce
by digby
MAD MEN SPOILERS — BE WARNED
I don’t usually write about culture stuff because there are so many people who do it better than I can. But I did want to write a short comment about Mad Men which has been my favorite show for years and its ending is kind of like saying good bye to my own memories in some ways. I’m Sally’s age and related to much of her story, although my family was very different in many important respects. But I never related to her as much as I have these past two weeks to the news that Betty Draper was dying of cancer. Just like Sally, my mother died of cancer at exactly the same age. And like her I grew up in a cloud of smoke and took up the habit myself in my late teens. Why we do such stupid things is a question for the ages. Luckily I quit and haven’t smoked in many, many a moon.
And the central theme of women at work and their roles in the home is obviously something I experienced. I started working during the 70s and I can tell you that not all that much had changed. It was 20 years later before I really saw some progress and even then it took way more effort that it should have to make men treat women decently in the workplace. But just as it’s portrayed in the show you just endure the crap because it was the norm. And they behave that way because it was the norm. Until it isn’t anymore. And then you wonder what in the hell you were thinking.
It’s the story of Don, of course, that fascinates so much, this alpha male with such a huge vulnerability — a secret so big it could destroy him. I always thought that he was a quintessential American archetype, the man who reinvented his life and made something completely different of himself. Whether an immigrant who landed in America and started a successful business or someone who moved out west and settled someplace new, one of the enduring myths of American culture has been the idea that you didn’t have to be the person you were born as. And I always thought that Don Draper may have been the last of that breed. In today’s smaller world can you really ever reinvent yourself, leave the past behind and do what Don always said, “don’t think about it just move forward”? We really do have a “permanent record” now, don’t we?
But Don’s story ended up showing me something I didn’t expect. Of course you can still reinvent yourself. We even have highly developed rituals and processes for doing it which Don never did until the very end: if you admit your sins and have empathy for your fellow man, you can cleanse your spirit and start anew. (I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s certainly something many humans of all cultures believe is true.) He confessed to Peggy when she asked “what have you done Don, that is sooo bad…” (There are echoes in all that of Peggy’s Catholicism and her own unwillingness to “confess” to the priest — but Peggy wasn’t reinventing herself so much as becoming herself.) When Don finally admitted what he’d done, finally felt the pain of another person, he was able to let go and integrate Dick Whitman with Don Draper. And then he went home — to work, where he and Peggy both were their most fully authentic selves.
And the joke is that both of these characters, who are truly two sides of the same coin in many ways, are their most authentic selves in the most inauthentic field in the world: a job in which people like Don and Peggy poach people’s innermost feelings to sell back to them packaged in a shiny new box. Don seeing his consciousness raising meditation at sunrise as the perfect way to sell coke to the youth obsessed love and peace culture of the time says it all. (That movement was co-opted by Madison Avenue so quickly it’s hard to know if it ever really existed. Roger and Mona’s foray into their daughter’s commune showed the darker side before we ever saw the light.)
So was his reinvention real? I don’t know. But I do know that after watching the show last night I idly flipped through the channels and landed on Bruce Jenner who happened to be sitting bathed in light on a Malibu cliff, confessing his secret and talking about how distressed he was at the thought of hurting his kids and how hard he was trying to make the best of it all. And I thought about how torturous it is to have to keep such secrets. Bruce Jenner is a real person doing this unbelievably brave thing: confessing his secrets to the whole world and becoming the person he really is.
And like Don, he’s doing all this in a world that is contrived and unnatural (although advertising can at least claim some artistic pretension) — Reality TV. Is Bruce Jenner the Don Draper of our time?
Anyway, I’ll sure miss the show. But it was time to grow up. Again.
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