Favors metacommentary: Two out of three ain't bad

Okay, I'm going to have to admit that Hana Rosin is a lot sharper than I gave her credit for. My only excuse is that I was fixated on her particular blind spots but the problem with that is that we all have blind spots. Anyway, she really hit a lot of good points this week.

Let's start here:

Seth, I think you omitted one other important reason why Don does the favor for young Mitchell Rosen: his man-crush on Arnold. Given the way Don fixates on Arnold, I often wonder whether he’s sleeping with Sylvia just to become enmeshed with the good surgeon. 

The psychological insight at work here is called mimesis.  In it we form crushes on people not because we desire them but because we desire to be like them. The most obvious example of this is a child for the parent. Mimesis creates a sort of instant tension because the one experiencing it will see the person they imitate both as an object for imitation ("I want to be like you") and rivalry ("I want to replace you").

If that is really what is at work here, and I hope it is because it would give this season some real meat and purpose, then Don is not attracted to Sylvia in her own light but because he wants to be like Arnold Rosen who is married to Sylvia. This, by the way, is a very male thing. If a man you admire is suddenly attracted to a woman you would not normally find beautiful, you can be sure that you too will suddenly find things about her that are beautiful, not because her beauty wasn't always there but because you hadn't really tried looking for it.

In the eyes of some critics, mimesis explains everything about art and culture. That's overstating it but it is a powerful, and usually neglected force in human life.

I'll carry on with the rest of the paragraph I cite above:

Similarly, at their drunken confessional dinner, Peggy accuses Pete of being in love with Ted. Of course, that’s where the episode stopped being subtle. I can’t tell you how irritated I was at the Benson knee press. It’s always such a letdown when a mystery is solved and the answer is … He’s gay, even if Internet rumors have long abounded. How much more satisfying if the answer had been … nothing, as you wished for last week, Paul, and Benson had remained his thoroughly inscrutable shiny self for the whole of the season. Although I suppose we should have guessed it, since the vibe between Bob and Joan was more Elton John and Marilyn Monroe than Don and Sylvia.

Yesss!!!!! (Not incidentally, how much more satisfactory the drama will be if the root causes of Don Draper turn out to be ... nothing.)

As I was saying last time, the really irritating thing about Bob Benson's sexuality is how it's wrapped up in a nice guy motive and it isn't really, you know, sexual. This was the problem with the sexual roles women used to be offered: whore or the female equivalent of Bob Benson as gay man. I think Rosin would have been able to make her point more forcefully if Benson had been a woman for then the fundamental injustice of it all would have jumped out: all the other male characters on the show are allowed to have raw sexual desire and this guy has to be this neatly dressed, super-polite and thoughtful eunuch who just wants love. That is the way wives and mothers used to be portrayed and it is one of the great victories in a show such as Mad Men that female characters are show to be driven by irrational sexual passions just as men have always been. Why not gay men too?

As I hinted yesterday, I think a gay Pete makes much more sense. He acts like a man denying something about himself to himself would do. I knew a gay guy just like him in the 1980s who similarly overcompensated to the point of getting married and having children.

There were some who saw Bob Benson as a Don-like character and that makes sense if we think of the episode wherein the history of Don's relationship with Roger is revealed and how Don ingratiated himself with Roger. But the problem with that is that it's too narrow. To paraphrase Cary Grant: the force driving Mad Men is that everyone wants to be Don Draper, including Don Draper (a point I will return to).

Okay, now I want to trouble you with a thought that may make you uncomfortable. Here is what Rosin has to say about Don encouraging Sally to become a party to his lies:

As for what Don said, it was surely bad parenting—Sally knows what she saw—but there is something profound about asking a child to collude with you in an obvious lie. (Marjorie Williams addressed this question in her beautiful essay about Santa Claus and dying of cancer.) Contrast Don’s decision to lie with Pete’s to bully his way into what he sees as the truth about his mother and Manolo. Pete refuses to see that “it’s complicated,” as Don tells Sally, so he winds up in a cruel place where he robs his mother of her only comfort, fires Manolo, and sneers at Bob Benson. Sometimes we need our lies—something an ad man understands better than anyone.

That's a good, and very, very profound, point. I know, I know, this particular secret seems and odious one but we need our secrets and having secrets requires lying. For it is complicated especially when we bond especially close to someone. That is obviously going to be true of sexual relationships but also of child-parent ones. Think of the difference between the adult who is still capable of loving their father or mother and the one who hates him or her. The secret to loving her is not to be blind to your parents' sins but to be aware of them and grasp that it is complicated and, therefore, to collude with their lies to some extent. It is the adult or teen who really hates their mother or father who wants to drag every last ugly sin out into the daylight.

Hold that thought, and consider this brilliant insight that gets two thirds of the way home:

Lately I’ve begun to think of the show as operating on two very different planes. One is full of fairytale conflict and Jungian archetypes and Biblical-level dramas. This is the plane on which Don and most of the characters from earlier seasons are trapped. The plot twist that led Sally into her worst Freudian nightmare was straight out of a 17th century play: a purloined letter. (In classic French farce characters are always eavesdropping behind doors and screens.) Meanwhile the original spirit of the show—rooted in a particular moment in American history and moving along with the decade—resides with the newer characters.

That's so true. The worst episodes this season have been the ones that explore the supposedly deep psychological roots of Don's behaviour.  (I'll leave aside the biblical issues for a moment.)

Meanwhile, however, there is the "original spirit of the show". Rosin gets this wrong and does so in a way that is typical of her and her generation. But go back to the first season and you will clearly see that the original spirit of the show is indeed a particular moment in history that has been lost. The show is driven by nostalgia for a particular kind of manliness and, although to a lesser extent and less lovingly, for a certain sort of womanliness.

And here we get to the point that separates people. As I said above, even Don Draper isn't Don Draper but he wants to be. There is an entrenched line of criticism that says that is his great moral failure and that he should embrace authenticity instead. But Don Draper is not an unusual creation. A whole generation of men and women left behind their rural and ethnic roots to become something like him. Think just of actors and singers:

Archie Leach became Cary Grant
Doris Kapplehoff became Doris Day
Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis
Ann-Margret Olsson became simply Ann Margret
Anita Belle Colton became Anita O'Day
Dino Paul Crocetti became Dean Martin
Norma Jean Mortenson became Marilyn Monroe
Allen Stuart Konisberg became Woody Allen

I won't go on but I could. Nowadays performers still change their names but most do so to seem more exotic than their given names would suggest. Al those people above changed their names so as to seem less exotic and to conform to a sort of ideal of all-American virtue. And it wasn't just a new name they sought but a new personality to go with that image. Don Draper too didn't want to be a dick anymore.

Final thought for now: in the opening season, Weiner dropped some heavy biblical hints about Don Draper as a sort of Moses character. Now, if we step back to Rosin again. For her, the most important thing about the show is its portrayal of a moment of historical "progress".

Meanwhile the original spirit of the show—rooted in a particular moment in American history and moving along with the decade—resides with the newer characters.

She cares about where the thing is going. But no one would have watched a show that featured only those newer characters and their progress.  The entire appeal of the show for five seasons was in Don, Roger and Joan. At the same time, we all knew they had to get swept off the stage at some point. And thus the nostalgia: something was gained but something was lost when characters like them disappeared from American life. And one way to handle that dramatically would be to have Don Draper be a sort of Moses character who leads us to the promised land but cannot enter into it because of his own sins.

Unlike Rosin, I miss characters like Don and Roger and think a lot of our current cultural problems would be solved if men were encouraged to adopt characters like theirs again. And I'd have put Bob Benson in with them until he became the rather sad character he became last Sunday night. The central lesson of the show, as I've said many times before, is that who and what you are trying to become is more important than being or trying to be the person you "really are".