Instead of spending some of my summer
further reflecting and writing on the show, as I’d planned, I spent it
recovering from an accident. I’m finally getting back to the wrap-up blog posts
I’ve been thinking about. This fall, I worked on a presentation for an academic
popular culture conference. My topic was masculinity in Mad Men and my focus was on Don. I read him in the context of
Barbara Ehrenreich’s 1983 book, The
Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight of Commitment. Here are some
of those thoughts on just ONE way to understand Don Draper. I'll have more. (In some places, I
borrow from past things I’ve written on this blog.) I’m interested to
know what you think about them. It’s long, just so you know:
In the first episode, Rachel
Menken--who is doubly marginalized in Madison Avenue’s WASP-y patriarchy of
1960 for being both a woman and a Jew—says to Don, “I don’t think I realized it
until this moment, but it must be hard to be a man too.” While I have often
discussed—as have many others--how Mad
Men deals explicitly with the sexism women endured in the 1960s and the
variety of roles that became available for characters like Peggy, Joan, Megan
(and even at the end, Betty) to create as the decade progressed, I haven’t as
often written explicitly about the show’s take on masculinity and the change
the 1960s culture wrought on male identity, yet, it is even more central, if more
subtle. From the series’ very first episode, we see—in Don—a man with a secret
identity: an ad executive in the City with a beatnik girlfriend and the power
to shape the public’s opinions on a deadly product, who also possesses the
idyllic suburban home, beautiful wife, and requisite son and daughter. The
City/Suburbs identity split covers over the deeper Don Draper/Dick Whitman split,
and through seven seasons, we watch our protagonist “don” multiple identities
and ways of performing masculinity. From our first encounter with him in a
close, dark, smoky bar, jotting ideas for how to sell men cigarettes to our
last glimpse of him on an open, sunny Pacific ridge, imagining selling world
harmony and Coca-Cola to a diverse group of young people, the show has offered
numerous takes on manhood.
Writing on the “masculine mystique”
in Mad Men after the series had aired
four seasons, Jeremy Varon (in an essay in the book Mad Men, Mad World) compares the masculine ethic there to that of
Mob movies and TV shows like The
Sopranos, with their move to “school the viewer in the mechanics of a
subculture that dispenses with both the most sacred rules and the quotidian
norms of ‘straight’ society while imposing its own” (260). He reads both The
Mob genre and Mad Men as creating worlds
in which men can indulge in the forbidden just at the boundary of socially
acceptable behavior. He argues that this mirrors a prominent male fantasy in
our own world (261).
As we have seen continuously, most of
the male characters in Mad Men live
out this fantasy, yet in the seasons after Varon published his essay, Don
evolved a great deal in his understanding of himself and his performance of
masculinity. While his was no linear progression—and there are numerous other
possibilities to draw out in future readings--I want to argue in this post that
one way to read Don’s fluctuating masculinity is through the lens of
Ehrenreich’s book, which is a study
of shifts in American masculinity from the post-WWII era through the post-Vietnam
years. She documents a change from a focus on the breadwinner role to a
rebellion against it—most notably through Playboy’s
construction of masculinity as free from all familial and monogamous
commitments--to a more androgynous role for men that emerges out of a reaction
to the extreme violence of the war in Vietnam. I think we can read Don as
embodying each of these roles while also rebelling against each of them. We can
see his constructions of his masculinity and his reactions to what the world
around him imposed through three of his most memorable advertising pitches: the
Kodak Carousel, Jaguar, and Hershey, and speculate about the series’ end focus
on the Hilltop Coca-Cola ad.
Of the “breadwinner”
role, Ehrenreich writes that “by the 1950s and ‘60s psychiatry had developed a
massive weight of theory establishing that marriage—and, within that, the
breadwinner role—was the only normal state for the adult male. Outside lay only
a range of diagnoses, all unflattering” (15). Think poor Sal. In the 1950 bestseller,
The Mature Mind, H. A. Overstreet
describes the scientific and psychological efforts to understand human
maturity. Ehrenreich quotes him: “[T]he person who cannot settle down, who
remains a vocational drifter, or the person who wants the prestige of a certain
type of work but resents the routines that go with it, are immature in their
sense of function” (qtd. on 18). Whom does that sound like? Additionally, in
1953, psychologist R.J. Havighurst laid out eight developmental tasks of early
adulthood that included “selecting a mate,” “learning to live with a marriage
partner,” and “starting a family” (qtd. in Ehrenreich 18). “If adult
masculinity was indistinguishable from the breadwinner role,” Ehrenreich notes,
“then it followed that the man who failed to achieve this role was either not fully
adult or not fully masculine” (20). 1950s diagnoses of “immature” men ranged
from “manifestation of unnatural fixation on the mother” to homosexuality (20).
We see Don continually both trying to live that breadwinner role and transgress
against it.
As
an infant and child, Dick Whitman was poor, unwanted, unloved, and abused. As
the adult Don Draper, he sought out the love, security, and respectability that
the ideal nuclear family might bring. Yet he is continually anxious, in part
because he knows he is living a deception. As psychologists of his time saw it,
“heterosexual failures and overt homosexuals could only be understood as living
in a state of constant deception. And this was perhaps the most despicable
thing about them: They looked like
men, but they weren’t really men” (Ehrenreich 26). Don walks around during the
early seasons knowing that he is one thing on the outside and another on the
inside. He desires the breadwinner role, yet also feels—with the male novelists
Ehrenreich also cites--that “Adjustment as preached by the psychologists was
not the route to adult masculinity, but to emasculation” (32). How better to
fight against emasculation than to engage in numerous affairs? In the Season
One finale, while his family life is in disarray, he gives his pitch to Kodak
for their Wheel, which he renamed "Carousel."
Recall
all of the nostalgic images Don offers in his heart-rending presentation of
Betty and him as newly-weds, as expectant parents, as happy parents of young Sally
and Bobby, all suggesting that they were blissful and perfectly suited, that he
is the ideal breadwinner. Yet after it was over, after he’d reduced Harry
Crane, of all people—remember the first season when Harry wasn’t quite the
full-of-himself ass he became later on?—to tears, Don slogged home to an empty
house. Betty had taken the kids to her father's for the holiday without him,
and we last see Don sitting on the stairs, alone. The role is a sham. Does that
mean his masculinity is also a sham? Two seasons later, that marriage ends in
divorce after Betty discovers Dick Whitman. But Don’s confession to her begins
a process of letting Dick out little by little. During his Season Four status
as a single man, Don often adopts the Playboy model of masculinity that
Ehrenreich chronicles as one of the rebellions against the breadwinner role.
Yet, as his Don/Dick dichotomy is less rigid, his expression of masculinity at
times is less rigid and conforming too.
In
one of the most powerful—and devastating-for-me-to-watch--episodes, Season
Five’s “The Other Woman,” recall Don creating the Jaguar ad pitch that is a
brilliant argument against the use and commodification of women that is central
both to those in his world and to advertising in his era. Yet Don doesn’t all
of a sudden turn into a feminist activist. He takes this stance after his
partners vote to prostitute his friend and colleague. When Pete first pitches
the idea to Joan, she says, "You're talking about prostitution."
"I'm talking about business--at a very high level," he retorts.
Business=prostitution. But, as I wrote at the time, anyone who thinks that
Joan's transaction is not qualitatively different from any other person's
business transactions (and Matthew Weiner expressed that position in an
interview with Jake Tapper on April 4, 2013: “I don’t know if [Joan having sex
with Herb] was anymore prostituting yourself than Pete telling American
Airlines that his father had died on that plane.” What!?! He did concede that
it was “a tough thing to do.”) has only
to look at her eyes when Herb, the head of the Jaguar dealers' association,
begins to undress her and when he talks to her in bed after they've had sex.
Her eyes glaze over and focus nowhere; she is gone. Only Don--Don Draper, the
frequent user of women extraordinaire--knows different and refuses to
participate in the agency-as-pimp-enterprise. Don—Dick Whitman—who comes from a
woman who sold her body and a man who paid her money for the sex; Don/Dick, who
later lived in a whore house among women who were commodities and watched his
pregnant stepmother prostitute herself for a place for her, her child, and her
step-child to live. He was forged in the oven of objectified, commodified women
and men as consumers of them. And, while aspects of Don’s performance of
masculinity conform to this model, in this instance, he will not have it.
In
the ad pitch, Don develops the tag line that Michael Ginsberg came up with:
"At Last. Something Beautiful You Can Truly Own." He masterfully
speaks truth about desire and how to work with it to sell cars AND critique his
audience at the same time. He opens up talking about beauty: "when deep
beauty is encountered, it arouses deep emotions. Because it creates a
desire--as it is, by nature, unattainable." These beautiful things are
always out of reach. The camera keeps cutting from Don's pitch to the scene of
Joan with Herb in his hotel room the night before. And Don is explicitly targeting
his campaign to those men who lust after just women's bodies. "I thought
about a man of some means, reading Playboy or Esquire and flipping past the
flesh to the shiny, painted curves of this car." At one level, we're
supposed to see Joan as the beautiful "thing" that is desired--like
the car. But, Don is also skewering Herb--whom he hopes he has kept Joan away
from. For Don isn't just talking about beautiful women here. He refers to
"deep beauty." He refers to "deep beauty" in the context of
an ad about Jaguars--a car that he has admitted to others that he doesn't like.
He doesn't think Jaguars are beautiful. And if they do have any beauty, it is
just surface beauty. Joan, on the other hand, has the "deep beauty"
that Don names. And, Don knows that Joan is deeply beautiful. We’ve seen it in
his respectful interactions with her at various points. We saw it in his
defense of her and his pleas not to sleep with Herb--who only sees her surface
beauty. Joan's deep beauty has aroused deep emotions in Don--and they are not
emotions that lead him to try to bed her. He is set apart from the other men in
the episode in this recognition and it is a sign of how much his character has
evolved. He's coming to recognize that women aren't, and shouldn’t be, men’s to
control. And with that, his commitment to the traditional breadwinner role, and
to the Playboy model of use and move on as a form of rebellion, is truly
shaken.
In
Barbara Ehrenreich’s schema, a shift in masculinity occurred again in the U.S.
in the late 1960s as the war in Vietnam and opposition to it were engaging
citizens in ideological battles. She paints with a broad brush, but for
segments of the culture, this rings true: “The war discredited American foreign
policy even in the eyes of our Western allies; within America, it discredited
the style of aggressive masculinity kept fervently alive by two decades of Cold
War anticommunism” (105). Dick Whitman went off to fight in one of the Cold War
police actions. His Don Draper was born out of the violence of war. In the last
two seasons, we see Don experiment with performing the more androgynous
expressions of masculinity Ehrenreich points to, including vulnerability,
honest expression of “non-masculine” emotions, and stepping into the world of
counter-cultural spirituality, in which he is able to merge disparate parts of
himself: a feeling, happier, more androgynous man looking for peace, with the
artful crafter of images into advertisements that commodify the experiences
that shape him.
In
the finale to Season Six, Don starts out giving a pitch to Hershey's that is
full of nostalgia and a false image of his childhood. The candy is "the
childhood symbol of love," Don lies. But then Don looks over at Ted
Chaough, the partner who had just confessed to Don his need and desire to start
over with his family--for his kids—wanting to be a better father. And there's
Don, bullshitting about his own father, his family life in disarray again as
his daughter continually rejects him. Don glances down at his hands that start
to shake and--tells the truth. Which is also a touching story. He tells all of
them sitting at the table--three of his partners and the candy execs--that he
was an orphan raised in a whore house; that he was unwanted and unloved; that
the closest he got to feeling wanted was when one of the "girls" let
him go through her johns' pockets while she was with them and root out the
change; and, that Hershey's candy bars made him feel "like a normal
kid...It was the only sweet thing in my life." Making himself emotionally
vulnerable (traditionally feminine?) in this way loses Don his place in the
firm, but gains him a stronger sense of self and relationship with his
children, particularly Sally. It’s Thanksgiving again, like the timing of the
Carousel ad, but, unlike the first season's Thanksgiving, Don doesn't spend
this one alone. He's with his children. And begins their day with some
truth-telling to them too with a visit back to where so much of his emotional
damage occurred. He's taken the steps to move into a more (in traditional
terms) “feminized” expression of his masculinity.
Skipping
ahead to the series finale: Don heads to California, gets dragged to an Esalen
retreat by Stephanie, is abandoned there by her, whereupon he suffers something
of a breakdown. He makes his second “person-to-person” call to Peggy. She tells
him, "You can come home," but he doesn't know where that might be.
Mystified and worried, Peggy asks him "What did you ever do that was so
bad?" Part of his confession centers on his worries over masculine
identity: "I took another man's name and made nothing of it," Don
tells Peggy as he cries. While Peggy and Don have long had a relationship in
which each cares for the other, in this instance, Don is reduced to (again in
traditional gender terms) a feminine mess of emotion uncontained, while Peggy
plays the traditional masculine role of reason and support (though she’s also
clearly frightened for him.) Though he initially scorns the retreat for its
elements of hokum, Don finds his truth in the story of the very ordinary man
who feels invisible: "It's like no one cares that I'm gone" has
always been Dick Whitman's fear, born of having been a child who no one wanted
to be there. As Don moves toward this stranger and hugs him, then goes out to
view the ocean and sit contentedly in meditation, I argue that he has reached
this more androgynous identity of which Ehrenreich writes. As he apparently
imagines the Hilltop ad and we watch the “real thing,” he sees young men
representing a range of masculine expressions: with varied hair lengths, they
are clad in everything from Don’s more typical suit and tie, to t-shirts to
brightly-colored African print shirts to Nehru jackets. They are interspersed
with a diverse group of women. Is he moving toward a greater blurring of gender
binaries? Though the ending raises a number of fascinating questions, it seems
that, in part, it is about holding what can be seen as binary opposites
together in one space: the ad is both idealistic and happy AND it commodifies
the yearnings of the sixties movements. Don (since Weiner has publicly stated
his intention that Don be seen as the creator of the Coke ad, I’ll remove the
sense of ambiguity that I originally wrote) expressed in this ad the truth that
the violent, warring world could use a little harmony. And with that
truth, enmeshed in and inseparable from the pathos of world peace, the big lie
that Coca-Cola is "the real thing.” As he becomes more androgynous, as he
is better able to bring together the masculine and feminine sides of his self,
as he is merging the Dick/Don duality, he seems also able to use his artistic
side to bring together his new insights about self and world AND go back to the
self who is the consummate ad man.
Thoughts?
