The ##

The very essence of Don’s job, as the creative director at Sterling Cooper, is creating brands for products—that is, making customers think differently, the way he wants them to. (Notably, at the end of the first season, Don slaps a new description on the Kodak wheel. “It goes backwards, and forwards, and it takes us to a place where we ache to go again,” he said of the simple device. “It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels—around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”) In the sixth episode of the Season 2, called “Maidenform,” Don is tasked with inventing a new campaign for Maidenform, the brassiere company, in light of its rival Playtex’s flashier advertisements. The creative team settles on a two-sided advertisement, depicting two women in their undergarments: one blonde bombshell, representing Marilyn Monroe, the other a dark-haired vixen, or Jacqueline Kennedy. Every woman is either a Jackie or a Marilyn, one character argues—or, at the very least, every woman aspires to be one when they look in the mirror. The advertisement’s twist—its Draperian genius—is that the Jackie and the Marilyn is the same model, simply portrayed in a different color bra. That one small touch makes all the difference. “It’s a very flattering mirror,” Don tells the Maidenform executives, without even a twinge of self-awareness.

In the same week that he forecasts, so perfectly, every woman’s thought process, Don struggles with an identity crisis of his own, perhaps for the first time since his near-panic attack with his mistress, at the end of Season 1. During a Memorial Day party the Drapers attend, all the servicemen in the room are asked to stand, to be honored, and Don obliges. But not long after, he finds an excuse to leave the party and runs off to his new mistress. They make love, passionately, in a New York hotel room; when he creeps up behind her, for the first time, the viewer only sees Don and his mistress in the hotel room’s mirror. “I want the full Don Draper treatment,” she coos. “I wanted it, and I got it, and it’s better than they said.” Don backs off, evidently disturbed by her pillow talk. He asks her to explain itself. “You have lots of fans,” she says. “You have a reputation. Enjoy it.” Instead, Don ties her to the bed and leaves her, half-naked. In the episode’s last scene, he rises in the morning and goes to his bathroom to shave. His daughter, Sally, rushes in to watch him. He lathers his cheeks in shaving cream, and he stares at himself in his multi-paneled shaving mirror. A look of terror very clearly overcomes his face, and he tells Sally to leave the room. He wipes the shaving cream and collapses onto the toilet, fending off a panic attack. 

In an essay like this, there could be a tendency to link such obvious imagery to Lacan’s analysis. A mirror, one might think, must represent the mirror stage, and thus, Don’s inner conflict is inherently Lacanian. This kind of specious rationale is shallow. Still, in this case, it seems obvious that the writers of “Mad Men” are relying, maybe even too heavily, on Lacan’s essay. Just because they’re not entirely subtle about it doesn’t mean that it’s any less valid or open for analysis. 

Twice, in an episode overwhelmingly about image and self-image, Don looks into a mirror, and both times, he finds his reflection repulsive. In fact, this utter alienation—the separation between what he sees and what he wants to see—induces an anxiety attack. Clearly, there is a correlation between these two glances into the mirror. The first time, when he’s with his mistress, Don hears her tell him of his so-called reputation and that his sexual prowess has fans all over town. In a way, it’s representative of the exact Ideal-I Don aspires to; to these women, who know nothing of Dick Whitman, he is fully Don Draper. He might never be closer to attaining the idealized version of himself than he is at that very moment, and yet he storms out of the hotel room, enraged and lonely, because he knows that the “Don Draper treatment” doesn’t exist. It’s an act. This epiphany—or, more appropriately, the resurfacing of this deeply guarded secret—comes back and stares Don in the face in his home, with his daughter in the room. He is not the hero that he pretended to be at the Memorial Day reception, and he is not the person that his precious daughter imagines him to be. He is, instead, a fraud, and the fact that his reputation—which, to him, is fabricated—swirls around New York City is sickening, especially when Don filters it through the lens of Sally. He won’t enjoy his standing, even if it is an image he might have dreamed of as a child, or as a young adult in the war, when he was still Dick Whitman. Only Don knows that living up to this reputation is impossible. That, in turn, paralyzes him.

Tomorrow: The end! An analysis of Don Draper and Lacan and all that in Season 3’s “Seven Twenty Three.” Yay!