Studiously Uncool (7)

5G
What actually happens?

Years ago, before fame went to his head, David Suzuki did a brilliant analysis of some film of male baboons posturing. He showed the film and then read us some of the typical analysis done by people show study animal behaviour. These analyses all emphasized the violence of baboon society.

Suzuki, without denying that male baboons are capable of violence, then asked us to look at the film again and ask ourselves, "What actually happens?"



The answer was not violence. The males postured a lot but at no point do they even touch. The violence existed only in our minds and it  as only in our minds because we accepted a lot of nonsense about how social relations between wild animals of the same species was supposed to work. I have thought about that a lot reading how people analyze Don Draper. This analysis for example

 Riotously handsome and successful, Draper is a psychological basket case. He loses Rachel to panicked impulse; he's haunted by his loveless, impoverished childhood; and he lives with no end of blots on his conscience ...

I can understand how someone might want to believe that but I don't see any evidence of him being "a psychological basket case" in what actually happens. I see Don Draper dealing with difficult situations and getting tense about it but I don't see any psychological basket case. I see something that is quite the contrary. I see a kind of determined, laconic hero figure of the sort that we used to see in Gary Cooper.

And Jessica Winter (who wrote the above) need look no further than her own copy to see that she is projecting something onto Don that just isn't there for, as she says only two lines later, Betty is the psychological basket case:

It's Betty, not Don, who lands on the psychiatrist's couch, and who gradually realizes that her life and marriage are an elaborate lie ...

Anyway, on to the show.

The most interesting plot this episode revolves around Adam Whitman. We know already that Don Draper used to be a guy named Dick Whitman but that is all we know.  In this episode, his long-lost half brother named Adam Whitman comes walking into the scene looking and acting like Holden Caulfield. A poor lost boy who is desperately seeking his identity in the older-brother figure he used to look up to.

Don is having nothing of it. He reluctantly arranges to meet Adam at a coffeeshop. The visuals here, BTW, are beautiful. Adam is this lost Salingeresque character and everywhere he interacts with the man he knows as Dick Whitman is right out of film noir. It's a desperate situation and we expect a desperate response from Don.

The conversation in the coffeeshop goes like this:

Don: What do you want from me?

Adam: I don't understand this. You have nothing to say to me? Nothing to ask me? Dick, I thought you were dead and you're right here.

Don: That's not me.

Adam: Can't you even say my name?

Don: Adam, that's not me.

Adam: It is. What happened to you? Why did you do that? Why did you leave me?

Don: I couldn't go back there.

I'll bluntly say that I think this is what the episode is really about: our ability to define ourselves. Don has chosen his new identity. Adam challenges that.

We cut away to some other plot lines for a while and we come back for a nice example of dramatic irony. Adam asks, "I mean, I just want to know. Look at you! Who is Donald Draper?"

The irony is that we are asking the opposite question: "Who was Dick Whitman?" Donald Draper is a guy we know something about. To us, Dick Whitman is the stranger.

And then Adam blunders into dangerous territory. he asks Don if he has a wife and kids. Don doesn't answer but leaves. He has to act and the interesting thing is that we never doubt for a second what his choice will be. The only question on our minds is how he will get rid of Adam.

Liberty for the libertine
I liked that line. It was delivered in response to a proposed new idea for private executive accounts for men. Don takes it badly. He can't see what is wrong with the idea of this sort of privacy. And here we think we can go with our assumptions that the baboons are fighting. Don is this evil, cheating, lying husband after all right?

There is a nice subplot wherein  Peggy overhears a bit of a phone conversation between Don and Midge and then ends up having to cover for Don. It's a crisis too. She goes to Joan for help. Joan's answer is to forget about your emotions and just act. Action is what matters and she is right.

Later, when Joan checks in with Peggy to see how things are going, she makes an astute observation about Don:

"That's his private life. Private! That's how these men are. And it's why we love them."

Peggy says she doesn't love him—an assertion we can reasonably raise doubts about but that's for another day. But Joan is right. We do love him.

And this taciturn, laconic, private behaviour is why we love them. No one wants to hear some man go on about his feelings. Draper is a nice update of the traditional American male hero. I don't think his creators imagined we would love him quite as much as we do but we do love him.

Men love him. He topped Askmen's poll of the 49 most influential men of 2009. (Beating out Obama, which is another subject to come back too.) And women love him, even women who don't much like the implications of their loving him.

Peter the pimp
Of course, it's a lot easier to love Don when the competitition is Peter Campbell who gets his wife to approach an old lover in an attempt to get a short story published. He tells her, "You said you do anything for me."

Later, when he complains about the fact that he is only going to be published in Boy's Life she says she could have gotten him the New Yorker or better, he says, "Why didn't you."

I only mention this because reading other people on this episode, I am stunned at the unwillingness I see to face the blunt facts here. Pete wanted Trudy to have sex with her ex in order to get him published. There is no doubt about it. Peter Campbell is a sleazy pimp of a man.

Tapping a Maple on a Cold Vermont Morning
That is the title of a short story that Ken Cosgrove gets published in the Atlantic. Everyone calls it "the Atlantic Monthly" which strikes me as odd. Magazines were a big part of the culture back then, people wouldn't need to be told.

Anyway, if we freeze the frame where Don holds the copy, we can read the "about the writer" blurb that goes with the story.

A graduate of Columbia University, Kenneth Cosgrove has lived in New York for most of his life. Working for the advertising firm of Sterling Cooper puts Mr Cosgrove in a unique position to observe and study the trends that that shape America today. This is the his first story to appear in The Atlantic.

It's odd, don't you think, that a man who is in a unique position to observe the trends that shape America today, is off in Robert Frost land writing about tapping Maple trees on a cold Vermont March morning? Why yes, Jules, you're right that is odd and it even says he has lived in New York most of his life.

This story of Cosgrove's is about authenticity, or at least about what passes for authenticity. It inspires enough jealousy in Paul and Pete that we learn that they too have written stories about being authentically male.

Stories that have absolutely nothing to do with the way the lives they actually live.

High noon
And so Don deals with it. He calls up Adam and arranges to meet him. He won't even tell him where he is coming from. We see Don sitting in his home office and getting ready to put something from his locked desk drawer in his briefcase. What? A gun maybe?

When he gets to the apartment hotel where Adam is living (again, a classic film noir setting, we almost expect to pass Robert Mitchum in the hall) it immediately becomes clear that he and Adam have completely opposed views about how this is going to work out. Adam is thrilled, he is finally going to get to pal around with the big brother he never had (not unlike Obama and his search for the father he never had BTW).

Don tries to cut it short. "Adam, listen to me. I have a life and it only goes in one direction, forward."

Adam tries to miss this by changing the subject. 

Things get sinister. We hear Don confirming what he already knows: that there is no one left who can connect him with Dick Whitman but Adam. If this was a film noir, he'd next pull out a gun and shoot Adam and then go through the room to make sure there was nothing connecting him to the scene and leave.

Instead he pulls out some cash. "Adam that is five thousand dollars. Make your own life."

According to the CPI inflation calculator that's $36,761 dollars worth of spending power. That's pretty generous. It's not what Adam wants, which he says more than once but it's hard to see why he couldn't go do something with it.

Back to my pal Jessica Winters to wrap up. Here she is being scathing about the era portrayed in the show:

... 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.

There is a little confusion here. Don Draper is not an über-WASP. He is born white trash, classic Scotch-Irish. The WASP is Roger Sterling who gives him a  job in advertising.

But it's the bit about the revamped self that intrigues me. "He is what he does." Well, yes he is. You have a problem with that?

In our world we are all presented with a series of identities. You want to be a prep? You can buy teh accessories that go with that set of roles. You want to be an alternative culture type? Hey, there is already a huge industry waiting to serve you. You want to be Don Draper? Well, everything he wears, everything he uses was already on the market before the first show as even written.

But those accessories won't make you him. He is is what he does. Performance matters. The man is a collection of virtues and no matter what the elites keep trying to tell us, we like those virtues.

If you are joining me here, this series starts here.

The next post in the series is here.