The people who can't forgive Don anything
There a certain reaction to not just this season but to Mad Men generally that fascinates me. That is the people have no concern for the humanity of the characters.
Perhaps the most telling example this year was when the Lucky Strike crisis in episode 11, "Chinese Wall", where people started speculating that Roger would commit suicide. There was a gleeful undercurrent in what they wrote as if all that mattered to them was the junkie-like thrill of watching dramatic upsets.
Some might say, But these are just fictional characters so who cares if they commit suicide or fall off buildings? They are fictional but if you are going to go to the point of investing your creative energy in watching a show like this, you really need to invest a little humanity in them. Otherwise they become just like video game characters who exist solely so we can mow them down with an imaginary gun.
There are many examples of such reactions but they all turn around the issue of redemption. And nowhere is that more interesting than around Don and Betty. The way people react to the show tells us a lot about what they believe about redemption.
Let's put Dick Whitman on Freud's couch
The most common reaction by far is the psychological one. We see this in the people who keep thinking that Don needs to confront his past. For these people, Don needs overcome his "cowardice" and develop the "courage" to talk about Dick Whitman in order to get "better". They see him as a man in denial who is always on the edge of implosion. See this rather bitter for a positive review in The New Republic for example.
A big part of this is a desire to read Mad Men as a sort of sequel to The Sopranos. Read various communities and comments threads and you see people comparing Don to Tony Soprano over and over again. Anyone who could seriously do such a thing has to have no eye at all for differences. Jack and The Beanstalk and Hamlet are both stories about a man seeking to avenge his father's death but if you start using Jack's character to explain Hamlet's character that tells us more about your inability to understand stories than it tells us about the characters.
The other problem that ought to trouble such people is Weiner's love of the MacGuffin. That is the plot point that is introduced to get people moving in the plot: a mysterious man named MacGuffin was seen at the scene of the crime and everyone started searching for him but, in the course of searching for him, the real story that has nothing to do with MacGuffin comes out. Sometimes the MacGuffin can be an ill-defined ideal that never gets defined. "The Force" is the MacGuffin in the Star Wars movies, courage, a brain a heart are all MacGuffins in The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Kurtz is the MacGuffin in Heart of Darkness and he may well be the very first MacGuffin in fiction because it is very much a modernist thing.
The thing about a MacGuffin is that it seems tremendously important but the more you try and pin down what makes the MacGuffin so important, the less real it gets.
The MacGuffin in Mad Men is Dick Whitman. We keep getting teased with Don's secret "identity" as if it itells us who he really is. As if Dick Whitman exists in Don's core values.
But look back at the four seasons and you'll notice that the Dick Whitman problem just keeps disappearing. It gets raised to sweep the story, and us, along but the actual events always turn on something else. This year was no different. And it should trouble people who want to believe that this stuff is important to see how easily the problem goes away every season. It gets swept up every year and then it's just gone. As Bert Copper says season one, "Who cares?
And if you go back and watch The Sopranos carefully, you'll see that the whole psychoanalysis of Tony is the MacGuffin. In the end it doesn't matter that Tony is seeing a psychologist. Nothing at all turns on it.It is, to borrow Wittgenstein's analogy, like a series of interlinked cogs that turn one another but ultimately aren't attached to anything but themselves.
If there is one thing that Matt Weiner believes it is that you cannot change yourself through self-analysis. Every character who tries this in any drama he is responsible for will fail. Tony fails, Betty fails, Roger fails with his book and Don fails with his notebook and (sorry if this disappoints anyone) but we can already see Sally failing despite Dr. Edna's best efforts. Whatever it is that makes it possible to succeed it is not having the "courage" to look deep down inside us.
Deep inside there is nothing except a nightmare. Don't trouble yourself with the thought that Dick Whitman is important for you too have a heart of darkness and digging your way down to it will do nothing.
One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.That's from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the key phrase her is "... and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing." And I ask you, Do you want to know a secret? Are any of the character's secrets this season worth knowing? Think of "The Suitcase". Both Peggy and Don have secrets that come out: does anything at all turn on the actual secrets themselves? The meaning, and therefor the redemption, if it exists at all, exists in the halo around the story.
So where is redemption for Weiner? I'm not entirely sure but I think we get a powerful hint in Betty for, just as there are people can't forgive Don, there are people who can't stop forgiving Betty not matter what she does and that is the subject for next week.
BTW
The reason Quentin Tarentino, David Lynch and Brian De Palma all fail to satisfy is that no0ne of them have the courage to look beyond the MacGuffin. Watch Twin Peaks and you can see how the show runs out of gas the closer it gets to "Bob". That's because all Lynch has to offer is Bob and Bob, being a MacGuffin, can't actually explain anything.
It's sadder in De Palma's case because he does realize that the MacGuffin can't explain anything but he just cheats by using sad little pomo twists like the end of Femme Fatale to cop out by saying well it's all fiction. That has to worry us in Weiner's case because he used a similar cheat at the end of The Sopranos. Does he have an ending for Mad Men? I'll be honest, I'm not sure I care because with every show I feel I have more right to ownership of Don Draper than Matt Weiner does in the same way that the man in the room has more right to Don Draper than does the corpse rotting in a grave labeled "Dick Whitman" does.
There's a lot here. I think we become emotionally invested in these characters the same way audiences who watched Greek tragedy did, because seeing them fail and fall is cathartic. All of the heroes and heroines of Greek tragedy had a "fatal flaw" -- hubris -- in most cases because they didn't acknowledge Dionysos or their dark side. They only worshipped the lofty Appollo and refused or were unable to see the Dionysian aspect in themselves which we all have because they wanted to believe they were above that. This hubris ultimately results in their downfall. Isn't that what we're seeing here? In Draper's mind Whitman represents that Dionysian half that, rightly or wrongly, he's afraid of and can't face. Its interesting that Freud derived many of his theories from Greek tragedy--Oedipus for example, and many people look to explain Draper and Mad Men in psychological terms.
ReplyDeleteI think your point about Betty is interesting too. In the interview with Weiner that was on the link to Vulture or NY Magazine last week, he described her as "like all our mothers." I don't think so. I think Betty represents Weiner's perception of WASP mothers, I don't believe that Jewish or Italian mothers are or were at all like that especially back in the '60s. But here again, isn't Betty becoming more and more like a 1960's version of Medea?
Last week on the AMC site there was a post about an interview Weiner gave to Rolling Stone Magazine in which he said that Mad Men was about "fulfilling some of his own fantasies" and "destroying his enemies." The author of the post cited the fact that Weiner is a Jewish liberal and, in fact, despises Don Draper. I quote from the post "The tone was set in the series opener when Roger asks Don, 'if there are any Jews that work at the firm?' Don’s reply was, “Not on my watch!” Another insightful exchange was the show’s writing in the scene where comedian Jimmy Barrett says of Don with disdain, “I have been standing behind guys like you (Don) my whole life.” It’s not a reach to believe that Matt Weiner probably feels that way about the “Don Drapers” he has come across in his own life."
I think the key to understanding Mad Men is not in The Sopranos but in Aeschylus.
I've been thinking about this one all day. The Aeschylus comparison is an interesting one. I suspect that this is probably not the way you applied it but I immediately thought that, like Orestes, Don is unquestionably guilty of something but we cannot help but feel that the prescribed punishment is inappropriate.
ReplyDeleteI think one of big challenges when you follow a major work of fiction, and Mad Men is that, is that you have to trust the person who has created it not to play huge tricks on you. If the point of this is ultimately just to destroy Don that would be a giant betrayal of the audience.
Then again, the end of the Sopranos was, in my view, a betrayal.
Still, if the point is that Don is anti-Jewish, how do we explain the relationship with Rachel Mencken and, in particular, how do we explain the conversation where she says she understands him because his experience is something like her experience as a Jew? That would suggest that, rather than hating Don, Weiner might identify with him.
That conversation, if I'm not mistaken, took place in the episode in Season 1 which ends with the folk singer singing "By the Waters of Babylon." The theme of that episode is that all of the characters to some degree are exiles, like the Jews, not where they think they are supposed to be. But that was when Rachel still respected Don, before he revealed his fatal flaw and asked her to run away with him when he was afraid Campbell would expose him.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about Orestes, I'm very familiar with the Oresteia, and O'Neill's reworking of it in Mourning Becomes Electra with all of the psychological overtones, actually wrote a paper about it. Your application is exactly what I had in mind because that is the point of the tragic hero. He is sympathetic, and the audience wants him to succeed because it identifies with him--including his fatal flaw-- he is a symbol of Everyman. So even when he gets caught and the ax falls it always seems disproportionate because the audience is thinking "there but for the grace of God (or the Gods in ancient Greece) go I," which provides the catharsis. The audience knows he has to be punished because the wrathful Gods much exact their retribution, but doesn't want him punished "too much." In Greek tragedy the hero's fatal flaw results in his death. It is only with the advent of Christianity that Redemption becomes a possibility. This hopelessness is also a recurring theme in the plays--and life--of Eugene O'Neill, there is no redemption.
My personal opinion is that because O'Neill lost his faith, or at least professed to, accounts at least in part (along with 20th C. anomie) for why his plays are laden with despair and hopelessness. His own family history of alcohol abuse, his mother's addiction to morphine, and the suicides of his two sons didn't help either. Nonetheless, I think he was a brilliant and prolific playwright who addressed themes no one before had, and completely deserving of the Nobel Prize.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to the Oresteia, Orestes is a tragic hero because we sympathize with him, that's why his unfortunate end is tragic. We don't sympathize with Agamemnon, he's the bad guy who started it all, and he deserves what he gets. With Draper, another clue to his fatal flaw is his last meeting with Dr. Faye, when she tells him to get his head out of the sand about his past. He asks her, "then what happens?" And she says "You'll be a person just like everybody else." Draper doesn't want to be like everybody else, he wants to be above everybody else, I think in part to compensate for the insecurities he acquired growing up as Dick Whitman. That's his hubris, his fatal flaw.