I've sort of drifted into this idea of a series of posts on Mad Men while the show is on hiatus. I started with this post and then this one. This, then, is the third in the series.
Let us compare mythologies
Suppose we reverse the myth at the centre of Mad Men?
Imagine that Don Draper survives the explosion in Korea and Dick Whitman dies. Draper takes the body back to Pennsylvania and stays for the funeral. Staying with Dick's family, he realizes that no one cares or ever cared about Dick except for young Adam, who is only a child.
Thinking about this "life that should have been" and his unhappiness with his own life and loveless marriage, he decides to stay a while. He learns as much as he can about Dick Whitman and then, instead of going back to his wife, he burns all his clothes and ID and goes to Illinois and starts living as Dick Whitman.
While there, he works as a used car salesman. A few years later, young Adam, Dick's half brother, hears from someone that his brother Dick (who is supposed to be dead) is in Illinois. Adam goes and discovers Don Draper pretending to be his brother. The two reach an accommodation. Adam also tells Don/Dick that the only other people who might expose him, Abigail and Uncle Mac, are now dead.
Dick moves to New York and begins a double life where he is Dick Whitman in New York City and Don Draper when he goes back to Pennsylvania to visit Adam. He rises to success in advertising and milks his reputation as the poor white trash boy who makes good. He takes great pleasure in correcting people who call him "Richard" and telling them that his birth name was "Dick" and that his mother was a prostitute and all the rest of the Dick Whitman lore he has collected. He gets married to Betty who has no idea he really is Don Draper.
Unfortunately for him, Anna sees his picture in a magazine after he wins an award and tracks him down and confronts him. She wants him to renounce Betty and go back to her. He tries to buy her off and tells her he never loved her. He appears to succeed as she takes the money but she actually goes back to her hotel and commits suicide. Before doing so, she puts the album of their wedding pictures in a box and mails it to Dick and Pete Campbell intercepts that package.
And away we go into the series.
That story might work. It might even be just as successful as the actual Mad Men premise but it would be less arresting and less subversive. Why? Because it would be too familiar. The story I've just made up is one we heard over and over again in the 1960s. It's the story of a person with a comfortable middle class existence who adopts a false personna taken from one of the repressed areas of American culture.
Let me give you some examples:
And it this, and not the living a lie, that really angers some people about him. Don Draper takes the standard mythology of the 1960s and turns it on its head. It's as if Benjamin Braddock had said, "Plastics! That's it, that's the thing I've been looking for to make my life meaningful. Dad, Dad, I have wonderful news. I've found my vocation in life."
This idea of having access to "authenticity" through the persona of some white poor boy or suffering black blues singer was absolutely crucial to a lot of baby boomers. When Albert Goldman wrote a critical biography of Elvis Presley, Greil Marcus didn't just challenge its accuracy, he called the book "cultural genocide". Go read the history of what the Nazis did to Poland and then come back and contemplate that for a while.
Marcus overreacted the way he did because the "authentic identity" of Elvis Presley was a big part of his personal mythology:
Here's the thing, Don Draper, on the other hand, has some real basis in American history. My Grandfather ran away from a dirt poor farm in Quebec to join the Navy and then to become a pilot. Millions of others did this. My Irish grandmother was so poor, her parents had to put her into "service" as a maid at age twelve. She made her way up by whatever means she could and some of those "means" were well onto the dark side. But she did it all not so she could wallow in her repressed identity but so that she could shed her "authentic" accent and culture along the way in order to adopt the identity and values of the WASP family she worked for.
These stories and millions of others like them are stories of real achievement and rising above circumstances. The stories of their rise, including the often dishonest and desperate lies they sometimes lived, ought to be an inspiration to us. The stories of a bunch of spoiled middle class brats who wanted to pretend they were poor folk and blues singers in the 1960s that culminates in a field in Woodstock ought to be a source of shame.
Let us compare mythologies
Suppose we reverse the myth at the centre of Mad Men?
Imagine that Don Draper survives the explosion in Korea and Dick Whitman dies. Draper takes the body back to Pennsylvania and stays for the funeral. Staying with Dick's family, he realizes that no one cares or ever cared about Dick except for young Adam, who is only a child.
Thinking about this "life that should have been" and his unhappiness with his own life and loveless marriage, he decides to stay a while. He learns as much as he can about Dick Whitman and then, instead of going back to his wife, he burns all his clothes and ID and goes to Illinois and starts living as Dick Whitman.
While there, he works as a used car salesman. A few years later, young Adam, Dick's half brother, hears from someone that his brother Dick (who is supposed to be dead) is in Illinois. Adam goes and discovers Don Draper pretending to be his brother. The two reach an accommodation. Adam also tells Don/Dick that the only other people who might expose him, Abigail and Uncle Mac, are now dead.
Dick moves to New York and begins a double life where he is Dick Whitman in New York City and Don Draper when he goes back to Pennsylvania to visit Adam. He rises to success in advertising and milks his reputation as the poor white trash boy who makes good. He takes great pleasure in correcting people who call him "Richard" and telling them that his birth name was "Dick" and that his mother was a prostitute and all the rest of the Dick Whitman lore he has collected. He gets married to Betty who has no idea he really is Don Draper.
Unfortunately for him, Anna sees his picture in a magazine after he wins an award and tracks him down and confronts him. She wants him to renounce Betty and go back to her. He tries to buy her off and tells her he never loved her. He appears to succeed as she takes the money but she actually goes back to her hotel and commits suicide. Before doing so, she puts the album of their wedding pictures in a box and mails it to Dick and Pete Campbell intercepts that package.
And away we go into the series.
That story might work. It might even be just as successful as the actual Mad Men premise but it would be less arresting and less subversive. Why? Because it would be too familiar. The story I've just made up is one we heard over and over again in the 1960s. It's the story of a person with a comfortable middle class existence who adopts a false personna taken from one of the repressed areas of American culture.
Let me give you some examples:
- Robert Zimmerman is a middle class Jewish kid from Minnesota. He changes his name (and the move from "Robert" to "Bob" is just as important as the one from "Zimmerman" to "Dylan") and he tries to become more authentic by playing folk music rather than rock and roll and acting like he is Woody Guthrie, a man he actually has nothing in common with.
- Michael Phillip Jagger was a middle class kid at the London School of Economics but he really wanted to be a blues singer and completely immersed himself in the culture of poor American blacks.
- Bettye Naomi Goldstein went to Smith and had an active and interesting life in political and cultural circles. As Betty Friedan, however, she pretended to have been a repressed housewife she had never actually been to write The Feminine Mystique.
- Janis Joplin was a white middle-class girl from Port Arthur, Texas who moved to San Francisco and tried to pretend she was a new Bessie Smith.
- Leonard Cohen was a middle class boy from Montreal who went to McGill University and was well-established in the Canadian literary community. As a boy he had dreamed of being a country singer and when the 1960s folk scene popped up, he ran away to New York and Greece to create another sort of persona for himself. (I stole the title for this post from him.)
And it this, and not the living a lie, that really angers some people about him. Don Draper takes the standard mythology of the 1960s and turns it on its head. It's as if Benjamin Braddock had said, "Plastics! That's it, that's the thing I've been looking for to make my life meaningful. Dad, Dad, I have wonderful news. I've found my vocation in life."
This idea of having access to "authenticity" through the persona of some white poor boy or suffering black blues singer was absolutely crucial to a lot of baby boomers. When Albert Goldman wrote a critical biography of Elvis Presley, Greil Marcus didn't just challenge its accuracy, he called the book "cultural genocide". Go read the history of what the Nazis did to Poland and then come back and contemplate that for a while.
Marcus overreacted the way he did because the "authentic identity" of Elvis Presley was a big part of his personal mythology:
But because the book is having its intended impact, and because Elvis Presley is so large a figure, intertwined with the lives of millions of people in ways that have hardly begun to be examined, a good deal is at stake. What is at stake is this: any book that means to separate a people from the sources of its history and its identity, that means to make the past meaningless and the present incomprehensible, is destructive of that people's ability to know itself as a people, to determine the things it might do as a people, and to discover how and why those things might be done. This is precisely the weight of Goldman's book, and it is precisely the weight of the cultural genocide he wishes to enact.There is only one problem with all that: it's just a fable. It's just a lie that Greil Marcus and some others desperately wanted to believe.
Here's the thing, Don Draper, on the other hand, has some real basis in American history. My Grandfather ran away from a dirt poor farm in Quebec to join the Navy and then to become a pilot. Millions of others did this. My Irish grandmother was so poor, her parents had to put her into "service" as a maid at age twelve. She made her way up by whatever means she could and some of those "means" were well onto the dark side. But she did it all not so she could wallow in her repressed identity but so that she could shed her "authentic" accent and culture along the way in order to adopt the identity and values of the WASP family she worked for.
These stories and millions of others like them are stories of real achievement and rising above circumstances. The stories of their rise, including the often dishonest and desperate lies they sometimes lived, ought to be an inspiration to us. The stories of a bunch of spoiled middle class brats who wanted to pretend they were poor folk and blues singers in the 1960s that culminates in a field in Woodstock ought to be a source of shame.
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