The ##

Season 3 of “Mad Men” is bookended by two flashbacks to Don’s youth, both of which are central to his persona as a father and his occupation as an ad man. In the first, a scene that opens the season, Don watches his own birth to a prostitute his father, Arch, had solicited nine months earlier. The second critical flashback occurs in the last episode, as Don relives the night of his father’s death and, subsequently, the unraveling of the modest life he knew.

But it’s a dream-like state—and not a flashback—in the middle of Season 3 that’s most vital to this Lacanian reading of Don Draper. It involves his father and, once again, it calls into question Don’s identity. Loaded up on two pills of Phenobarbital, fed to him by hitchhiking con artists, Don hallucinates that his father is sitting in the corner of his cheap motel room, sipping gently on his moonshine. He tells him a corny joke about hillbillies—something Dick Whitman, if not Don Draper, would find funny—and Don cackles. Then, his tone turns accusatory. “Look at you—you’re a bum, you know that?” he says. “Your hands, they’re as soft as a woman’s. What do you do? What do you make? You grow bullshit.” After short bursts of protest, Don finally has no answer, partly because the Phenobarbital is about to knock him out and partly because he can’t respond to his own festering self-doubt. On the other side of the room, these two kids have taken him for a Cadillac-driving, slick-suited advertising man—Don Draper, in short. His hallucinated father is meant to represent the other end of Don’s identity spectrum. On that side is Dick Whitman, and on the other is the Ideal-I, Don Draper. Some may believe the “bullshit” that Don grows, but he never will, and neither will his father, always there, at least in Don’s imagination, to remind him of the childhood.  

Don wakes up in the morning, face down on the carpet. He runs his hand over his face, where he feels a gash from slamming the floor after he had been knocked out, quite literally, with a one-two punch of drugs and fists. Then, the “Mad Men” writers decide against subtlety. Don staggers over to the motel room’s mirror, and he stares at himself, quickly. For a brief second, there are two people in the room: the man looking into the mirror and the man reflected in the mirror. It’s Dick Whitman and Don Draper, packaged into one. The Ideal-I in the mirror disappears when the character walks away, by himself, ready to explain the malformation of his face. (“Fender-bender,” he explains.) Before he leaves, the camera lingers on the mirror in the room for an extra three seconds, drawing out the obvious symbolism. As always, the mere sight of a mirror isn’t meant to thematize, particularly in a text packed with nuance. Still, the mirror functions as more than the mirror. The fact that it appears as Don struggles with the effects of his greatest branding of all does not make it insignificant, especially as a representation. The mirror is less important than what the mirror represents: namely, the everlasting divide between Dick Whitman and Don Draper.

For one last time in this particular episode—also about the 1963 solar eclipse, which one should only watch by shading his eyes—Don is forced to confront his development into something near his Ideal-I with one of the only people who knows the name Dick Whitman: his boss, Bert Cooper, who ignored his identity question back in Season 1. Bert demands that he signs a contract, and when Don demurs, again, Bert coyly poses a question that penetrates the character to his core: “After all, when it comes down to it, who’s really signing this contract anyway?” Finally, the character has been backed into a corner, threatened by someone more powerful than himself by his crippling secret. In this beautiful, expansive office with his name on it, in the place where he became Don Draper by selling everything else as well as he sold himself, Don is alienated and one-upped, demonstrating the powerful effects of forging a pseudo-identity, one that at least one person will always see as a fraud. With a white bandage blanketing his nose and with his hair just slightly disheveled—he looks unlike Don Draper, shockingly—he picks up the pen and scribbles his signature in black ink: “DONALD F. DRAPER.”