Every week, Wired takes a look at the latest episode of Mad Men through the lens of the latest media campaign of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce advertising agency.
A big shiny Clio Award to everyone out there who figured out what Don Draper was really trying to sell, and to whom he was really trying to sell it, before his long dark working-weekend of the soul came to an end. I didn't. I'd taken Don's bargain, and was far too absorbed by the entertainment to notice the message of the ad.
I was entertained by Jim Cutler's Dr. Feelgood and Ken Cosgrove's soft shoe. (Tell me I wasn't the only one hoping he'd say he'd learned it from his father-in-law.) Entertained by Don's lurid Faulknerian flashbacks. (He married a blonde like the woman who deflowered him, then launched an ongoing series of affairs with brunettes like the woman who beat him for it. Oh, Don.) Entertained by the endless asides to '60s occult counterculture: William S. Burroughs's "old William Tell trick" and the I-Ching, Rosemary's Baby and Stan's 666 ideas. Entertained by the big honking brontosaurus bone tossed to all the Peggy-Stan shippers out there. ("You've got a great ass." "Thank you.") Entertained by the brief fake-out that "Grandma Ida" did in fact raise Don Draper -- just not *this *Don Draper.
No, it wasn't until Peggy asked him with borderline horror if he'd been working on Chevy at all that I realized what he had been working on: the ultimate Draper Pitch. The product? Don Draper himself.
It's all right there, in retrospect. In the early stages of Don's drug-fueled descent into himself, he all but comes out and say so. "You have to get me in a room so I can look them in the eye," he insists to Kenny about their next go-round with Chevrolet. "The timbre of my voice is as important as the content." In the moment, though, it sounds like comedy, like the injection eliminated his ability to suppress his own subtext. "I don't know whether I'll be forceful or submissive," he continues (I bet Sylvia Rosen's got a preference there), "but I must be there in the flesh." Since Ken responds in kind -- "You understand that I have no power whatsoever... I'm their favorite toy" -- while tap-dancing, no less, the moment passes.
Slightly more direct is his big rally-the-troops speech to the copy writers. With hindsight he couldn't be talking about Sylvia more clearly if he mentioned her by name: "I know you're all feeling the darkness here today, but there's no reason to give in. No matter what you've heard, this process will not take years. In my heart, I know we cannot be defeated, because there is an answer that will open the door. There is a way around this system. This is a test of our patience and commitment. One great idea can win someone over." Note that one turn of phrase: "There is an answer that will open the door." A few scenes later, Don will stand with his head against Sylvia's door in an endlessly uncomfortable close-up. He hasn't cracked the code, not yet.
Don's quest takes him to the archives, where he plays a game of connect the dots -- birthmarks, to be specific. The birthmark on Sylvia's face is an echo of the one on Amy, the prostitute who took his virginity long ago. Between them stands a beatific mother on an oatmeal ad, serving her grinning little boy a bowlful. "Because you know what he needs," reads Don's tagline from this forgotten campaign. The campaign's forgotten, but the message is one he's apparently embedded in every affair he's had.
Once he's got it all figured out, he writes it down in a fever and pitches it to Peggy and Ginsberg with all the wild-eyed intensity of a street-corner preacher. "If this strategy is successful, it's way bigger than a car," he announces. "It's everything." The strategy is to bypass the quid pro quo of putting up with a brief message from the sponsors in exchange for access to something you like -- the traditional "bargain" of advertising, and of affairs -- since after all, if they decide they don't want the entertainment anymore, the ad will never get through. He's got one sentence, maybe two, to capture her imagination, and he's gonna make it count. (It's a neat callback to Don's Heinz pitch from earlier in the season, predicated on the idea of getting into the audience's headspace rather than simply sitting in front of them inert as they read a magazine.)
"I've got this great message, and it has to do with what holds people together," he explains. "What is that thing that draws them? It's a history. And it may not even be with that person, but it's like a..." He trails off. "Well, it's bigger than that." Don Draper: bigger than Detroit.
But even as he's saying this, history is being used against him. Claiming to be a long-lost relative and taking advantage of his kids' near-total lack of information about who he really is, the burglar known as "Grandma Ida" is steamrolling Sally Draper's natural skepticism and loading up on the spoils of Don's past successes. "I don't want you to shut this door," we hear Don telling "Sylvia" as he rehearses his big speech. "You've gotta get your foot in the door," Ginsberg responds a few minutes later. Grandma Ida's entrance through an unlocked door in the Draper residence proves that they were both right.
And sure enough, when Don finally opens the door himself, practicing his Don Draper Draper Pitch all the while, he walks in a nightmare tableau: the wife he's cheating on, the ex-wife he left, her new husband, his own abandoned children, and a policeman, all explaining to him that his home has been robbed while he was busy crafting the perfect ad for himself. That's all she wrote. He collapses, already knowing in his (broken, at least according to his conversation with amateur cardiologist Wendy Gleason) heart what has happened here. "Sally, I left the door open. It was my fault." When you make yourself the product, you risk being consumed.
So he closes down. He endures a chilly elevator ride with Sylvia, unwilling to give her even the slightest sign of enduring affection. He bows out of continuing to work on Chevy and their absurd three-year plan. "Every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse." That door into history, into Don Draper, is shut.
