This marvelously tense scene—from the season's penultimate episode, titled "Nixon vs. Kennedy"—is Mad Men in a nutshell. (The AMC series has its second-season premiere on July 27; the complete first cycle of 13 episodes is now out on DVD and Blu-ray disc from Lionsgate.) The televised Nixon-Kennedy debates are generally acknowledged as the moment when image overtook content and began supplanting it; for the hard-drinking, impeccably tailored men and women who populate the randy, smoke-filled offices of Sterling Cooper, the self is a performance, adjusted according to the demands of The Room. Context is everything. Everyone leads at least a double life. (For the men, juggling a wife and mistress is practically a job requirement.) Denial is enormously useful. (One character was pregnant all season and didn't know it.) But it's the dashing über-WASP Don Draper—né Dick Whitman, son of a prostitute, orphan of the Depression—who most fully embodies the idea of the self as a brand that can be revamped on the whims of the market, without remorse or apology. He is what he does. (And why is Donald Draper in this room? Because he generates revenue.)
Draper's underlings see him as an enigmatic superhero. ("No one's ever lifted that rock," says one junior staffer. "He could be Batman for all we know.") He's a swami of the sell, able to bring grown men to tears with his pitch for the Kodak Carousel slide projector, which he fills with happy photos of his unhappy family. Draper is a stoic, obnoxiously so. "Mourning is just extended self-pity," he tells his wife, Betty (January Jones), a Grace Kelly look-alike who is grieving for her mother. He's a cynic, or wants to be. "What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons," he tells his client Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff), with whom he is in love. (Rachel is a Jewish businesswoman, and thus a doubly exotic specimen within the sexist, anti-Semitic country club that is Sterling Cooper.)
Comments