^^^I’m the same age and remember the décor, fashion and customs of the time well. My parents did not smoke but they had twelve inch monogramed ashtrays they put out for cocktail parties. Almost everyone smoked.
I was sad that the show left the early 60’s because although I was alive that time is such a glamorous mystery to me.
I was in first grade when Kennedy was assassinated and I remember lots of details. My father was an Army Colonel and he was on standby for a couple of days.
I assume as parents of college students we are all roughly of that era. I can tell a lot of the articles about the show are written by younger people who don’t quite get certain things. What seems cheesy now was groovy back then and yes people in 1970 really did talk that way. My parents smoked too and my mother got lung cancer too.
“the idea that Don Draper abandons his quest to find a reason for his own existence to come back to advertising with, as presented, the ultimate sell out, one which trivializes the entire notion of enlightened self-awareness.”
But how would it be self-awareness for Don to undergo a radical transformation? Self-awareness doesn’t mean you become the same gentle hippie as everyone else at the retreat. It means you look in the mirror at the truth. He DID acquire self-awareness – he realized exactly who he is. He’s the white whale. He’s the genius who can understand everyone’s longings and distill them into a cultural moment. He brought a piece of Esalen back to millions of people who will never get to Big Sur. No one else can do what he does, and that is what makes him who he is.
Random reflection - remember when don gazed out at the plane near the Empire State builidng, during the Mccan meeting.
At first I thought that was foreshadowing the DB Cooper plot.
But, now I think it fits in with a bigger, subtle message. I think it was foreshadowing the 9/11 attack, when the financial Capitol of the world would be brought down.
The Mccan meeting showed what had become of the corporate/ military/ political machine, which an unprecedented global -corporate domination ( and, specifically - the war for oil) would lead us into the mess we now have.
Regarding the Coke ad: I think there’s more to it than cynically selling sugar water.
The world-wide appeal of CocaCola was something legendary in that era of “the American century” and American cultural hegemony in the Cold War. Growing up–the same age and almost the same place as Sally Draper–I would see pictures of teeming, tumbledown streets and remote towns in third world countries which all had one thing in common: the iconic CocaCola sign.
A lot of cultural, post-war freight was carried into that ad as well as the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” without the nasty reality of the Vietnam War and brewing conflicts elsewhere that underlaid it in truth. (Something that was also missing from the series.) It was one last moment of optimism in which we could believe that everyone would love us, the way they loved our CocaCola, and that we were really, truly, the good guys.
As Hanna said,
Although I admit it is very, very difficult to imagine him functioning at McCann. I figure that he will be treated differently from everyone else, because, He’s the One.
I used to think that I wrote well, but after 30 years of practicing law, I just write Lawyer. Anyway, how cool would it be to have written/imagined a show that has people spending so much energy on analyzing it!
Lots of private companies have their version of “the One.” Law firms have rainmakers who haven’t billed an hour in years but more than pay for themselves by bringing in businesses. It’s not unbelievable that Don could have a relationship with McCann without the meetings and boxed lunches.
I’m not disappointed with the ending; I’m disappointed with the near unanimous opinion that it is read one way and that way is Don arises to find himself with an idea for a Coke ad. I think Matt Weiner wants us to think that on one level but that there is more, much more to it. I’ve mostly talked about it and won’t repeat myself.
One point I’ll draw out is that reactions to this say a lot about the very culture Weiner was representing. He’s not a fan of advertising; he respects it at some level but he sees the lying and the fake values represented as corrosive. He may be saying “this is what Don Draper really is” but he’s also saying, “Look at yourself and that your belief in a ‘happy ending’ for Don is that he buys even deeper into perverting enlightenment to sell sugar water.” Weiner has said he’s amazed by the Coke ad, that he, in essence, considers it both a high point of advertising and a high point of horror. Buy into that as the heroic ending, as nearly every critic has, and that speaks volumes about what America is: happy endings like in the movies, like in the ads, in which the only substance is the appearance of reality. I haven’t seen any discussion of that in published critical reviews.
I note as well that I thought it was pretty blunt that Don is being added to McCann’s stable, that he’s there to “bring us up a notch” just as Ted is, that McCann collects talent and Don and Ted are talent. Pete is also talent. Roger back when he had Lucky Strike was talent. McCann doesn’t view Don as “the One”; he’s another talented creative director in a stable full of talented creative directors. This is not a shlock company that needs creative help; it’s more like the Borg absorbing talent or, to be more show-oriented, Peggy’s octopus picture with Don and Ted being extra tentacles added to the body to pleasure the woman that is the metaphoric consumer.
That people see Don as the big hero is part of Weiner’s point: he’s not heroic but we’re made to identify with this lying alcoholic who has abandoned his children in their time of greatest need. I don’t know how Weiner could have been more explicit: his boys are at home literally trying to feed themselves in a dark kitchen while their mother is dying and their father’s reaction is to get drunk and chase yet another stupid, meaningless errand (to return Anna’s ring) to Stephanie. Think about that: he could have given the ring to Stephanie’s mother. He could have mailed it. But he chases off to do this rather than face the reality of what he is and what he’s doing to his own kids. Not a hero. But we’re made to believe he’s the hero and that’s also Weiner’s point: this is what TV can do, this is what advertising can do, see we’ve made a hero out of a louse because he cleans up well. Of course he’s not completely a louse - only Hitler and the like qualify for that - but he’s a louse, a failure, a cad and so on in the important things in life. But to many he’s the hero of the story and the story is about him being a success in advertising so …
I also don’t see any discussion of what it means to be real, a contrast set up explicitly by the unreal situation of a Big Sur type retreat removed from the real world and a Coke ad that claims caramel colored water is “the real thing”, a contrast furthered by the blunt quest for happiness through personal knowledge, which is explicit in this kind of retreat, with the manufactured happiness of buying and drinking Coke. Remember, they often quote early Don Draper as saying advertising is all about happiness. So Weiner is clearly, to me, saying here it is: actual personal growth and a jolt of caffeine delivered to you by the big corporate machine of which Weiner has on record criticized many times.
I was happy with the ending. I loved it. I thought it was bleeping brilliant to have Don sitting there working on his many, many, many problems by no longer running and just being in one place so he can be in one place in his head and to have that contrast with a famous ad that is the ultimate sellout of personal truth to corporate marketing. Maybe he does think of that Coke ad or some other melding of religion and self-awareness with marketing but it doesn’t mean he made the actual ad.
It’s funny but I heard James Carroll speak last night - look him up, former Catholic priest, writer, etc. - and his topic, related to his newest book, was about how religion organizes violence and focuses it as a way to limit it and how that is inextricably bound to the state and its politics. We need to sacrifice and often more sacrifice is needed to give meaning to the sacrifice already made. And sacrifice on the altar of our belief that somehow our conduct is an expression of God’s will, that the God who was originally violent now acts violently through us. He might as well have said the same binding occurs in commerce for Mad Men ends with the same kind of line drawing, us versus them, because you’re either a drinker of Coke, a bringer of perfect harmony in which we all sing the same song of Coke, or you’re on the other side. It’s an inherently religious message: Coke is the real thing that binds us together and if you’re not drinking Coke then you’re not in tune. Read the words:
“I’d like to build the world a home
And furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow-white turtle doves
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I’d like to buy the world a Coke
And keep it company
That’s the real thing”
It’s Coke as God. It’s creation: Coca Cola is going to build us all a home in Eden (the apple trees) and it even references the Flood (the doves) and the Tower of Babel (the perfect harmony). And you join in this joyous creation by swigging bottles of caffeinated caramel colored sugar water. And the negative implication which goes with that: you’re not part of this joyous creation if you don’t. You are, it seems, condemned if you drink Pepsi.
My entire point is that Matt Weiner knows all this. And he intended all this.
Bravo lergnom, brilliant.
You described what disturbed me so much about the finale. How Don was the same self absorbed SOB that he was in the pilot. Not that I didn’t think it was great, it made me think. I didn’t think the finale was as happy as others have said. It was not satisfying but disturbing. But I think that it was meant to be.
No one is “made” to love Don. People despise him - clearly! He has never been lovable, ever.
You sound like you’ve never seen an antihero before, Lergnom. Don isn’t the first and he won’t be the last.
As to Coke is God, just…no. I mean, we are all free to lay whatever rings our bell on this thing - I had a teacher in high school whose stock in trade was a satirical hour-long lecture on symbolism in the Wizard of Oz. As a lifelong atheist who was 10 when the Coke commercial came out, I never - not then and not on Sunday - have felt a religious experience or coercive experience in association with Coke. My word, what next.
Lergnom, while my thinking is more along Snowdog’s lines - Don is an antihero, his quest for meaning and identity does end in him coming up with the Coke ad in a cynical, insightful moment that says a lot about him, the 60s, America and, yes, us - I do pay attention to what you say and how you say it. It’s been a treat reading your thoughts about MM, and other topics.
Matt Weiner speaks about the finale:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mad-men-series-finale-matthew-797302
Thanks Attorneymom, I enjoyed reading that. It sets a few things straight.
Thank you Lergnom for your in depth answer, and I’m glad you were not disappointed in the finale, because you have been such an avid fan, and many of us enjoyed your post Madmen Monday morning reviews.
Thank you Attorney Mother for the link to the Weiner interview!
Here is another link
http://www.ew.com/article/2015/05/21/matthew-weiner-mad-men-wrap-up
From this article
I didn’t see Don as a hero, ever, and I didn’t really think him creating the Coke ad was a happy ending either. I think if he had a moment of clarity, of self-awareness, it was that he was a lying cheating alcoholic bad father ad-man, and why not accept it and run with it instead of trying to fight it?
The whole scene with Leonard, my H was saying, “The beginning of the self-absorbed Me generation”, and when Don started crying and hugging Leonard, he didn’t buy it. He said he’d stopped caring whether Don lived or died many episodes ago. He couldn’t identify with him at all and certainly didn’t see him as any kind of hero.
We were both much more invested in the other characters by the end.
I’m glad we’re seeing more variety in response posts now.
BTW, I’ve been at 2 events where Matt Weiner talked and answered questions. Have heard the former exec producers. Have heard 2 of the directors. They’re all incredibly cagey about meaning, including stuff that was on the air years before. Never really learned anything except they’re all very smart and every aspect of meaning is, in fact, explored and intended though sometimes the layers of meaning develop in the direction and/or acting of an episode. Even about this they were very reticent and Vincent Kartheiser is somewhat unique in noting Pete’s rape scene with the au pair was written differently than how it played, though I suspect they chose not to clue him in on what they were really going to draw out of the scene and that they wanted him to play it as a seduction and the actress to play it otherwise.
I suspect that 10 years from now you’ll find interviews with Weiner in which he’ll say something completely different. Or he’ll say looking back he sees it like this now. And then another interview in which he says something different from that. I think that’s built into him; he’s really not forthcoming. No one could sit in front of a smallish audience for over an hour and not open up more unless that is the person’s nature. Even his body language is that way.
As for anti-hero, I think one of the purposes of the show is that Don is the Man, meaning he’s the authority, he’s the guy who wears the suit even as the world relaxes around him, but he also isn’t because he doesn’t have an Ivy League ring, doesn’t even have a high school diploma. It’s not his name change: people changed their names all the time. Linda McCartney was born Linda Eastman but her father’s actual name was Leopold Epstein. No one cares whether Don is Dick. The big scene where Pete tells Cooper who Don really is and Cooper shuts him down is proof: he could have told anyone he changed his name because he grew up poor, that his mother died and he hated his stepmother, that his father had died, etc. The only part he needed to leave out was the actual ID switch and even then he could have made a different story for a new Donald Draper. Heck, he could have gone to court and simply changed his name, but that wouldn’t have been as interesting as seeing a guy being hollowed out by his secrets and fears. In other words, he’s both an anti-hero and the most conservative version of hero imaginable, the tall guy who could have been played by a perverted Gary Cooper who constantly promises to “take care” of problems and who, in a very 1950’s literary way, is the man in the gray flannel suit or the swimmer of a Cheever story who looks the part on the outside but is ripped apart inside. BTW, I thought they wanted us to think of an older Gary Cooper when they had Don in a leather jacket and then in a flannel shirt, struggling with issues of integrity.
And I agree that much of the show is about the immorality or fallen state of the world and that Don’s amorality combined with his very traditional morality represents that tension which is perfectly represented in the Coke ad. I remember when that came out. I’m Bobby’s age. It was a beautiful ad with fantastic lyrics and we all would look forward to seeing it - but Coke didn’t run it much and changed it quickly, both to shorten it and make the ad less flower-childish. Matt Weiner is a little younger and my guess is he may have seen the ad but more remembers it as something from the prior generation, from the 1960’s kids’ lives. I’m sure he loves it in a similar way that I do and I’m sure he sees in it a vast depth of meanings.
Last, I think Mad Men is heavily influenced by 2 things. One is Judaism, because nearly every episode in this very WASPy show reeks of Jewish ideas, and the other is Matt’s personal struggles. He’s spoken of how his life and career didn’t go well, how much he depended on his wife working to feed them, and he’s opened up just a tiny bit about how badly he felt. My own view is that actual talent often takes a while to brew, but his first writing credits don’t occur until he’s over 30 and it wasn’t until even later that he got anywhere important. In typical fashion, he says it took having a family to force him to write but he hides so much that’s clearly only the tip of the iceberg. I think that struggle, that internal journey, that grappling with “I could make money doing x but I have this inside me to do y”, that basic “responsible” versus “irresponsible” and the like all directly infuse Mad Men, not only through Don but also often feckless Roger and Joan’s struggles with man or job, etc. I see it in Pete: Weiner’s father was a neurosurgeon who chaired the dept at USC and Weiner went to fancy private school in LA and Wesleyan, so he was privileged but making his own way in show business just as Pete needs to make his way in advertising.
I’ve probably mentioned it before but Weiner is surely aware of the poem in the Reform Jewish prayerbook of his youth (by Rabbi Alvin Fine). It was often said right before kaddish and often said at funerals. I think of it as the underlying structure of the show:
Birth is a beginning and death a destination;
But life is a journey.
A going, a growing from stage to stage:
From childhood to maturity and youth to old age.
From innocence to awareness and ignorance to knowing;
From foolishness to discretion and then perhaps, to wisdom.
From weakness to strength or strength to weakness and often back again.
From health to sickness and back we pray, to health again.
From offense to forgiveness, from loneliness to love,
From joy to gratitude, from pain to compassion.
From grief to understanding, from fear to faith;
From defeat to defeat to defeat, until, looking backward or ahead:
We see that victory lies not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the journey, stage by stage, a sacred pilgrimage.
Birth is a beginning and death a destination;
But life is a journey, a sacred pilgrimage,
Made stage by stage…To life everlasting.
Love the poem.
PBS is showing a docu “1971”
Which is about local philadlehia residents who broke in to the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania
It’s fascinating to watch this, now 40 years later and listen to the perpetrators tell their own story.
It’s a reminder of Madmen’s era - close up and personal, and real !
I was stunned by Don Oming and then the coke ad. It did not fit for me and I did not think that Don did that ad. I actually wondered if he became a bit of a bum. Wandering here and there.
I watched the ending again…the guy running the meditation session said something that fit the plot perfectly…something like “you.are leaving the past behind…for new ideas and a new you.” People haven’t acknowledged what a heavy burden his past was…mother a prostitute, etc. This made him dark, cynical, and his ad camaign s often tapped into injjjdnt the. Idealistic nostalgia that must have been his refuge growing up when his mind needed to escape the sordid present. But once all that was finally behind him!! BAM!!! The most uplifting commercial ever.
Note: from my phone I can’t erase "injjjdnt’’…who designs these things??
A friend sent me this: Matt Weiner’s wish list for the finale. It’s interesting to see how long the list was and how many items were addressed:
https://twitter.com/Breznican/status/604110676538171393/photo/1