“You’re Not Don Draper”

Don Draper Means Adultery

Betty ultimately learns of the affair and kicks Don out of the house. When Betty’s father has a stroke, though, they briefly reconcile, with Betty initiating sex, but she then insists that he must leave again, claiming they were merely playing at being a couple for the sake of her family—implicitly including their more private performance as well. Thus Don’s attempt to shore up his identity as a family man is shown to have completely failed, and even the very idea of what it means to be a family man is called into question: If an apparently spontaneous act of intimacy can be retroactively declared mere “acting,” then how could one ever establish when it is sincere? This is the most radical manifestation of the core problem that Don keeps running up against—no matter how hard he tries to “move forward” in an act of will to redefine his identity, he can’t control the ways that others see and define him.

His entire strategy in ruins, Don decides to do what he initially planned when a co-worker threatened to expose him—run away to California. His escape begins under the auspices of a Sterling Cooper business trip, but he soon drops everything to follow a seductive young woman and her bizarre cadre of jet-setting European friends in an attempt to disappear completely. Relying on his native charm and good looks rather than his reputation, Don is welcome to join them for as long as he likes, opening up the possibility of his simply becoming “no one”—no job, no family, no obligations, but also no real purpose in life.

Ultimately, Don rejects the invitation to disappear, and at that point, his options seem to be exhausted. The traditional American ways of establishing identity—whether inheriting a distinguished family name or “making a name for himself” through visible accomplishments—are not available for him. Unlike the jet-setters, he isn’t an aristocrat who can coast on his father’s good name. He also isn’t the “self-made man” he seems, having piggy-backed on the real Don Draper’s years of military service, which entitled him to free college education. Whatever reputation he makes through his hard work and integrity accrues to a name that can never really be “his,” as the danger that his deception will be revealed always threatens to invalidate it all. And, as his tenuous identity begins to disintegrate, he knows from hard experience what starting from scratch would cost those he loves.

At this juncture, with seemingly no options, Don decides to visit the wife of the real Don Draper. A series of flashbacks establish their previous relationship and show how she came to freely “give” him the name he had stolen, and Don’s arrival at her house in the show’s present—and his heartfelt confession to her that he has ruined his life—reveals his conviction that he needed to retroactively earn the right to her gift through his achievements in business and family life. Yet it is clear that the real Mrs. Draper has no intention of judging him; she receives him graciously, enjoys his company for as long as he wants to stay, then sends him off graciously when he leaves.

What Don ultimately receives from her is absolution, emphasized in a symbolic baptism scene in which he walks into the ocean. Overcoming the idea that his identity is entirely under his control, he experiences a renewed determination to “move forward” as Don Draper—this time acknowledging all the history and failure that name now implies for himself and those he loves—and do his best to repair the damage he’s done. On his return to New York, he finds himself exceedingly wealthy, thanks to Sterling Cooper’s sale to a larger agency, and finds Betty willing to take him back, thanks to her pregnancy. Both these developments underline the theme of grace, as neither has anything to do with Don’s own actions, or at least his intentions. The question the season leaves us with is whether Don can embrace these gratuitous opportunities, just as he once embraced the gratuitous opportunity to become Don Draper in the first place.

Don’s journey in the second season shows that identity, unlike a brand, is not something that one can simply receive or build, nor is it something one can throw away or change at will. Our actions affect our identity—often decisively, as Don’s example dramatically illustrates—yet identity is only effective insofar as it ties us to others, opening us up to social forces that no individual can fully master. In the end, Betty is right that even the most intimate performances of our life are done for the sake of an audience. Yet that doesn’t make them “only” performances; rather, it infinitely increases the stakes of the way we form and perform our identities.

Don experienced his identity as Dick Whitman as a burden, and by the end of the second season he experiences his identity as Don Draper as a gift rather than as property he can horde and control. His name thus comes to designate an authentic, socially contextualized self rather than a brand he can deploy strategically. To use another Draperism—and, incidentally, to contradict the assumptions of the American Dream that reached its quintessence in the era Mad Men lovingly recreates—he learns that “it’s not about” his own internal attitude or stance toward his identity, because his identity isn’t solely his. It isn’t simply about him. A meaningful identity comes not from forgetting all previous ties in an act of willful self-assertion but from respecting the ties identity creates, the demands for attention and care that it entails—or at least, if one can no longer live with those ties and demands, counting the costs of breaking with one’s identity and knowing that the damage can never be fully contained.

It remains to be seen whether Don has fully absorbed this lesson. The second season’s ending is promising, though: In place of the Kodak Carousel pitch that, for all its eloquence and beauty, remained a fantasy that could not supplant the empty house Don came home to find, the second season ends with Don silently reaching out to touch his wife in her moment of need. At least for a moment, “it’s not about” saying what she “wants to hear,” it’s not about the perfect life that his perfectly understated words construct for himself and his clients. It’s about a simple, unglamorous encounter between two imperfect, lost, and unfaithful people who find themselves, despite their best efforts to the contrary, tied to one another.