How TV's Most Despicable Character Became Its Most Complex

This right here, the needle drop of Nancy Sinatra's 1966 Bond theme, You Only Live Twice, is a perfect microcosm of the show's themes. Identity, the struggle for American assimilation, and self-acceptance, all filtered through a tragically flawed hero, a man who's driven to extreme ends and reprehensible acts in the name of one thing, the American dream. And yet, Weiner and company do such an amazing job providing context as to his motivations. They just might have created the most complex character in the history of television. Mad Men ran for seven seasons. From 2007 to 2015, the viewing public was completely enraptured by the dark, pulsating morass of conflicting motivations and narratives that was Mad Men. Named after the nickname that Madison Avenue advertising executives were saddled with during the heyday of the advertising boom of the 1950s, Mad Men presented its characters in a morally gray light. The guiding thematic principle of the show, as repeatedly said by its creator Matthew Weiner, is that Mad Men is about the struggle to attain whiteness. It's about the burden of assimilation. For Weiner, whiteness is a stand-in for the American dream, the ideal of an existence in which your racial background, income level, or identity do not inherently prevent you from achieving the American dream. Right in the pilot of the show, the theme is laid bare. The characters of Don Draper and Rachel Minkin connect over their shared experiences as people on the fringes of society. You're born alone, and you die alone, and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. Rachel is a second generation Jewish woman. Don is someone who is from a poor agricultural background. Sure, she's a literal heiress, but both are still outsiders. Eric Edelstein wrote a brilliant piece for IndieWire titled Why Mad Men is All About Being Jewish, in which he writes about the Jewish identity and its inextricable connections to whiteness and yet its definitive history of oppression and alienation within the American context. The characters of Mad Men are constantly put into their own category, away from the suburban safety and financial security of the rest of the upwardly mobile and truly white society. Mad Men tracks these people as they are all systematically crushed by societal expectations and levers of power. Over the course of the show, we see the pressure mount on Don, pushing him to do horrible things in the name of his pursuit. I give you money, you give me ideas. You never say thank you. That's what the money is for. However, we understand why he's doing the things he's doing. We understand his womanizing and alcoholism and betrayals, because we know they're all part of his efforts to convince everyone around him that he truly belongs. However, the show goes one step further. It often interrogates the false premise of the American dream directly into the character's modus operandi. It breaks down just who is even capable of striving for the suburban home, white picket fence, and the 2.5 children, and how those of us who are adjacent to these superficial demarcations of success are more often than not molded by them in a negative way. Take the rest of the afternoon off. We could go to the zoo, see what the animals are up to. Um, I should get back to work. Played by at the time complete unknown John Ham, Draper embodies all of the show's themes. On the surface, he's a tall, good looking white man. He's someone that these mechanisms of power should work for. But just underneath the surface lurks a raging fire of addiction, self-hatred, and supreme compromise. Over the course of the show, Don and many of the supporting cast members must suppress aspects of themselves in attempts to move up the American social hierarchy food chain. Everyone is chasing the false premise of land of the free, home of the brave. But for Don Draper, this vista, perennially out of reach for most, is always going to be a phantom. Anything that flies against the social morals of the day must be suppressed so that the individual can attempt to maximize their participation in the capitalist machine. A machine that has a simple dictum, participate in the exchange of capital. This is thematically why Don Draper is an advertising executive in the show. The medium of advertising was newly invented in the 1960s, and it was fundamentally warping society. You hucksters in your tower created religion of mass consumption. People want to be told what to do. So badly that they'll listen to anyone. Thus, every time Don Draper pitches a new ad campaign, he's constantly attempting to reaffirm his whiteness. So why is Don, someone who on the surface seems to be already white, so hell bent on assimilating with such gusto? Because Don Draper is a facade. It is eventually revealed that the man we know as Don is actually Dick Whitman. During the Korean War, Whitman stole the identity of his commanding officer, Lieutenant Donald Draper, who was killed in an ambush. When he returned to the States after his deployment was over, he reinvented himself under the persona of Don Draper. He knew he had to do this in order to escape his predestined life of crushing poverty. This is just one of the ways people attempted to remold themselves into an idea of what America wants, layered throughout Mad Men. Don Draper is a mask. He's not a real person. He's a performative character that Dick Whitman embodies in order to increase his likelihood of being upwardly mobile. And tragically, he's also a persona that exacts a heavy price. The cost of becoming Don Draper manifests in every aspect of his life. He's a serial cheater, an alcoholic, a chain smoker. He's constantly looking for ways of relieving the internal conflict of living a life, literally, as someone else. This duality of Don Draper is what is represented in the season 5, episode 13, closing shot perfectly. In this season finale, titled The Phantom, Don is struggling with the realities of being someone who constantly lies and is incapable of a monogamous relationship. Over the course of the episode, he's working to put Megan in an advertising commercial. We see him watching her reel and debating if she should get the opportunity. In many ways, Don sees Megan as uncompromised. She's an artist. She's unsullied by the capitalist machine, like him. But he knows she needs help to move up in the world. Later in the episode, he has a reunion with Peggy in a theater and utters the fateful line. That's what happens when you help someone. They succeed and move on. Ultimately, this is what Don is worried about with Megan. His previous marriage couldn't live up to the expectations of our society. And he's come into grips with the fact that his relationship with Megan is going to go the exact same route. Only he's going to be the architect of his demise. He's going to help Megan get this role. And it's going to be their undoing because she, too, inhabits personas that are not always genuine. See you at home? I promise. Is their love real? Or has Megan been playing the part of the person Don wanted to fall in love with this entire time? In the key visual metaphor in the episode, Don is watching Megan preen and be pampered by makeup artists in preparation for the shoot. She says, I know I love you. And he just watches her. He knows what is happening. They're moving in opposite directions. They're each living their version of cultural assimilation. As he walks into the darkness of the set and Nancy Sinatra's You Only Live Twice starts to play, we understand that Don is a man of two worlds. The chorus of the song lilts, you only live twice, or so it seems. One life for yourself and one for your dreams. As Don sits at a bar in the closing shots of the episode, smoking, the Sinatra song soars. Don thought that he could have a life with Megan, a real marriage. Unlike how he lived with Betty. But when he's approached by a random woman at the bar, his commitment to infidelity, duplicity, and duality is reaffirmed in one simple look. Don Draper isn't a cookie cutter protagonist. He's not a hero. In many ways, he's an anti-villain. He's someone who's molded by the extreme pressures of his day. Someone who's perennially searching and rarely finding. Someone whose job is to codify the world around him into a simple, quickly sellable soundbite. The greatest thing you have working for you is not the photo you take or the picture you paint. It's the imagination of the consumer. But is completely adrift in an ocean of self. In many ways, Don Draper is the quintessential American protagonist. Someone whose history is founded on a lie and is simultaneously attempting to perpetuate and participate in the existing levers of power. And tragically, someone who's being actively exploited and harmed by those exact same mechanisms that he's hoping to one day enjoy the fruits of. In the final scene of the series, in the episode, Person to Person, Don attends a meditation session in California. Something the rigid and internally conflicted Draper of seasons past never would have done. As we pan up to his face, we see a slight smile grace his lips. And we know for the first time in the seven seasons the show has been on the air, Don is in harmony with himself. He's stopped lying to himself about the dual personas. He's constantly toggling back and forth between. He's given up his quest for assimilation. He's accepted that it was a fool's errand. For this moment, he's whole. Well, that's it for this episode of Nerdstalgic. Do you think we'll ever get a sequel to Mad Men? Let us know in the comments below. And as always, please like, comment, and subscribe to stay up to date with everything Nerdstalgic.