For the last eight months, we’ve wondered how we were going to write about individual Mad Men episodes on this here blog. Naturally, we don’t have much of an answer on the morning of the Season 4 premiere. Slate-style? Straight-up recaps? Some sort of crazy group Gchat-thing that might not even exist? HELP?
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.”
Via Daily Mail:
Surrounded by cheering rugby players, applauded by fellow members of the university netball team, 19-year-old Melissa Fontaine tipped back her head and giggled as fellow drinkers in the Students’ Union bar pulled apart her eyelids and allowed them to pour a shot of vodka into her left eye.
‘Vodka eyeballing’, as it is known in student circles, is the latest drinking craze to sweep through Britain’s universities.
Ever the innovators, college students “everywhere” have found a way to get their buzz on all the quicker: by taking shots of vodka through their eye.
Doctors worry it will lead to blindness. Or drastically improved drunk driving skillz.
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!
How many PBRs did you buy last night? Maybe ten or twelve? What about $250 million worth? That’s how much bro C. Dean Metropoulos bought! Wow, I wish I was partying with that guy!
The Wall Street Journal was nice enough to let us know of this massive transaction of Pabst, and even inform us that this so-called “PBR” stuff is a “beer of choice for a generation of irony-loving hipsters from Portland, Ore., to Manhattan’s Lower East Side.” That’s some crazy shit, Rupert!
But, um, investor guy—didn’t you know that PBR is so over? All the kids are on that Four Loko shit now. Or Icing each other from sun-up to sun-down. Just watch it happen—in a month or two you’ll see that Iron City will become the New PBR, and everyone will get their Bmore on and switch to drinking Natty Boh.
So, bad investment. Nice try, though!
The first season of any television show can be unsettling. It requires several episodes to fully understand the plot, not to mention the characters, and it may take even longer to comprehend what the show is all about. By the penultimate episode of Season 1 of “Mad Men,” it’s evident that Don’s identity is paramount to the narrative. Still, after more than ten episodes, no one can say, for sure, whether Don Draper is really Don Draper.
The climax of the season, therefore, comes in the eleventh episode, “Nixon vs. Kennedy,” in which a box of photographs prompts a showdown between Don, the self-made man who actually became someone else to try to achieve his Ideal-I, and Pete Campbell, the accounts man whose family name is more important than the name of the advertising agency itself. Their backgrounds and upbringings are diametrically opposite. Mistakenly, Pete comes into possession of a collection of snapshots of Don in his youth—as Dick Whitman, for clarity’s sake—sent to Sterling Cooper by Adam Whitman, who had identified his long-lost brother in that newspaper photo. Pete sifts through the photos and learns Don’s secret: that Don Draper, embodiment of everything cool, is a fraud. In the same episode that Richard Nixon concedes the presidential election to John F. Kennedy, Pete confronts Don, who denies the charge. Frazzled, however, Don flees to his mistress and begs her to run away with him. “We’ll go somewhere else—we’ll start over,” he says, whisking a cigarette to his lips. She calls him on his bluff, referring to his father and, eventually, triggering a flashback to Don’s youth, where, finally, we begin to understand how Dick became Don.
A poor boy, born out of wedlock to an alcoholic father and a prostitute, Dick ran away from home and enlisted in the army, bound for Korea. He was not the quarterback of his high school football team, as his wife believed, nor was he a war hero or particularly deserving of the purple heart he stored in his desk at work. Instead, he had stolen the dog tags of Donald F. Draper, his commander who died in a ditch, where Dick had been injured. So Dick assumed his identity and went back to the United States, no longer Dick Whitman but Don Draper—able to carve out a new image for himself, to the outside world, all the while striving for the self-image of Dick he might have formed, long before, in a mirror.
Inherent in Don’s fear of being discovered—his escaping to his mistress, yearning to leave everything behind him, once again—is a prevailing sense of paranoia, an alienation from the world around him. Of course, as Lacan writes, this disconnect is nothing out of the ordinary. “This relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal months,” Lacan argued before referring to the “anatomical incompleteness” of such a notion.” Don manufactured an image of himself, and the closer that image comes to reality—the more he believes himself to be Don Draper, the more he’s reminded that he’s not—the more alienating it is. He knows it’s all a ruse.
It’s foolish to blindly apply Lacan’s thinking to the specific case of Don, as if Lacan’s lecture were gospel or as if every person can pigeonholed into Lacan’s analysis. Still, Don strikes me as a poignant example. He is, at heart, an isolationist. He trusts nobody, implicit in his telling his mistress, a woman he hardly sees outside the bedroom, that she knows more about him than anyone. The fact that Don is never happy—or that no one really knows what happiness is for Don—is more than a product of the cultural era, highlighted by the peril of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the next season. There is something deeper at fault within Don, something that cannot be reconciled as long as he is still Don. When he urges his mistress to run away from him, he’s not running from his secret or his family or Sterling Cooper, but rather, from himself. He’s running to be Dick Whitman again, to give up on the Ideal-I represented by Don Draper. It’s a futile effort, as his mistress reminds him. “I feel sick,” she says.
This rigid paranoia leads Don into challenging Pete to tell Bert Cooper, the namesake of the advertising agency, about Dick Whitman. Perhaps it’s a strategic ploy, but the risks are manifest; Pete is correct, of course. Still, when he shares his theory with Bert—“He is a deserter, at the very least, and who knows what else?” he says—the accusation lingers in the air, heavy with silence. Don lights up a cigarette, nervously. Bert rises from his chair and walks past Don, shocked by the reaction. “Mr. Campbell—who cares?” he says. “Even if this were true, who cares? This country was built and run by worse stories than whatever you imagined to hear.” Pete protests, calling him a fraud and a liar and who-knows-what-else, and while he may be right, Bert won’t hear it. “A man is whatever room he is in, and right now, Donald Draper is in this room, I assure you,” Bert concludes, definitively. That reaction echoes a passerby in a subsequent flashback, in which Don thinks back to the last time he saw his family, from a train. “You’ve got your while life ahead of you,” a woman tells him, thinking that he actually is Don Draper, burdened with telling Dick Whitman’s family of his death. “Forget that boy in the box.”
A child between the ages of six months and eighteen months boasts an “instrumental intelligence” that is no more advanced than a chimpanzee’s. Still, that child, when he looks at himself in the mirror, can “already recognize as such his image,” Jacques Lacan said thirteen years before his 1949 lecture at the International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich, where he used his previous scholarship—particularly, the “conception of the mirror stage”—as a baseline for examining “the formation of the I as we experience it in psychoanalysis.”
In recognizing this imago, the child creates a form that Lacan refers to as the Ideal-I, which “situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone.” That is, the child manufactures a permanent cognitive mode of striving toward this fictionalized construct of himself, one that will serve as the basis for all future identification. It results in a lack—a need to close a gap that cannot be closed, for it is false to begin with—and, further, a dissonance with the Umwelt around this character. The child will try to overcome this separation between himself and what he may see in the mirror—the Ideal-I, an “exteriority… more constituent than constituted”—but of course it cannot be overcome, as it is an ideal form that’s simply not part of the world.
Thus, Lacan argues, the image is a crippling Gestalt: “… by these two aspects of its appearance, [the Gestalt] symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination.” Because the ideal image of the child—a form that can never be attained—is virtual, there is forever a “paranoiac alienation” embodied in the “drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation… to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.” The mirror image interpellates the child—and, as he grows up, the adult—and the impossibility to be fully hailed has everlasting effects. It is paralyzing, and it is inescapable.
Because this cognitive dissonance is rooted in an image—after all, the mirror stage doesn’t exist without a mirror, or at least the idea of it—it only makes sense that this Lacanian interpretation boasts a visual element. The relationship between the ego and the Ideal-I exists in relation to an image; one does, after all, think in images. Consequently, when thinking about Lacan in congruence with films or visual-based media, there are several means that are more frequent than others. The flashback, for example, serves as an avenue to explore younger iterations of the same character, events that might have shaped an adult in striving toward the inaccessible Ideal-I. (In this technique, Lacan draws inspiration from Freud, particularly in his concept of the uncanny.)
Of course, there are other ways for anyone to re-live the mirror stage, and photographs are the most commonplace. After all, quite literally, the mirror reflects what stares into it. Through photographs—the older, the better—anyone can be reminded of the life he used to envision for himself, the Ideal-I formed all those years ago, when the individual, someone like Don Draper, was quite firmly in the mirror stage and still susceptible to the onslaught of its lifelong effects.
Tomorrow: An analysis of Don Draper’s Ideal-I in Season 1’s “Nixon vs. Kennedy.”
Don Draper, the impossibly cool protagonist of “Mad Men,” is, in some ways, what every 1960s advertising executive wished to be. His movie-star looks might have made Marilyn Monroe melt, and the fact that he dresses the part—crisp white shirt, custom-fitted gray suit, skinny black tie, adorned with a barely-peeking pocket square—announces, whenever he walks into a room, that Don Draper is present. His jet black hair is never out of place. When he yanks a Lucky Strike cigarette from the carton and draws it to his mouth, he looks as if he could be the advertisement. When he pours himself an Old-Fashioned, he makes everyone around him want to find some rye whiskey, as well. He prefers silence to talking, even though his tenor is rough yet clear, perfect for his position. He has money but doesn’t flaunt it, and he has a gorgeous, blonde wife whom he only flaunts on his terms. He is quiet but not aloof, mysterious but not indifferent, demanding but not uncompassionate. Even his name—Donald F. Draper—is well-suited for the door of his expansive, corner office. It sounds dignified and refined, as it should; he looks that way, too. From the very first episode of the television series—there have been thirty-nine so far—this is the way Don is portrayed to pretty much everyone in his world. In the first season’s fifth episode, Don wins an advertising award and, the next week, he appears, wearing a resplendent tuxedo and bowtie, in Advertising Age. That black-and-white photo, in short, is Don Draper, ideally depicted.
Of course, the complexity of Don Draper as a character is that he is not, in fact, Don Draper—not by appearance, really, and certainly not by name. Almost halfway into the first season of “Mad Men,” the appeal of Don is his wonderfully charming machismo; he is Don Draper, and that’s enough. Since then, though, the nuance in his character is that he is nothing of the sort, and it’s the Advertising Age photo that triggers the gradual shattering of his essential façade to the outside world.
Still basking in the afterglow of the media attention, Don receives a visit, in the Madison Avenue headquarters of Sterling Cooper, from Adam Whitman, a man claiming to be Don’s brother. The unscheduled appointment is jarring and rather disorienting, not simply because we realize we haven’t heard anything about this figure’s family, but also because Don, the unflappable paragon of polish, appears too rattled for this stranger to actually be a stranger. He is much more than that, as we begin to learn as the show progresses.
He is the brother of Dick Whitman, the person that became Don Draper. He is the link to the past for this Dick-Don hybrid, the first and, ultimately, most important reminder that Don Draper is not some sort of glamorous superman but rather a manufactured product, sold with Don’s greatest advertising campaign of all. He is the impetus for digging up more about Dick’s childhood—really, the entire existence of the Dick Whitman that became Don Draper. It is that process of discovery—of peeling past the pocket square and cigarette carton and bottle of rye to figure out Don Draper’s true identity—that serves as the brilliant undertow for the show, the driving force that makes it succeed. Because while there’s no character more viscerally appealing as Don Draper, there’s also no one more mysteriously intriguing than Dick Whitman. It’s this attempt at reconciliation between two divergent identities that defines him.
