One is hesitant to criticize Mad Men. By now, this portrayal of the fictional 1960s advertising agency Sterling Cooper is easily among the most prestigious shows on television, and it is one of my personal favorites as well, producing a deep and abiding calm in me whenever I sit down to watch. But as I watched the second season unfold week by week, I found myself increasingly uneasy. The plot seemed confusing and even random, especially when compared with the masterful construction of the first season.
But with the third season about to begin on August 16, I decided to rewatch the second season’s episodes in rapid succession — and I now realize that I was wrong. Admittedly, the second season lacks the clear narrative drive of the first, with its gradual revelation of Don Draper’s “identity theft” — his real name is Dick Whitman, and Don Draper a name he stole from a fallen war comrade. Nor does the second season have a breathtaking conclusion to match Don’s pitch for the Kodak Carousel slide projector.
The second season’s principle of organization is more subtle but arguably more interesting as well, focusing on the question of identity. Cycling through all the ways that one can gain and lose one’s identity, the writers don’t so much answer the question of Don Draper’s identity in the second season as displace and complicate it.
When season two begins, several months have past since the events of the first season, and Don is clearly still responding to the emotional consequences of having his deception unmasked and the life he has built under his assumed name jeopardized. His initial response to the trauma of his unmasking is simply to “move forward,” as he says often, without dwelling on the past — an answer that presumes that identity can be readily apprehended and subsequently controlled.
“Moving forward” effectively becomes Don’s life philosophy, and he advises both Peggy, the ambitious secretary-turned-copywriter who finds herself with an unexpected and unwanted child, and Roger Sterling, his partner at the firm and close friend, to follow it. Their results are ambivalent at best: Peggy struggles with the guilt of having pawned off a child on her mother and sister, while Roger is emboldened to seek a divorce that will likely lead to his financial ruin. But this is not surprising, since we had seen in the first season how Don’s attempt to “move forward” and cut his brother out of his life led to his brother’s suicide. Clearly, Don Draper is a dubious source of advice.
The first way he himself “moved forward” had been to come up with a compelling angle on the seemingly unpromising Kodak “Wheel” slide projector. Filling the projector with his own family photos, he delivered a dramatic pitch on the power of memory and nostalgia, renaming the product the “Carousel” to link it to the rhythms of childhood. He sells the slide projector as a “time machine” that can ease the pain of nostalgia, that can bring us “back home again to a place where we know we are loved.” It’s so effective that he himself is taken in by it. The result was more than a professional triumph. The Kodak Carousel pitch seems to provide Don with the content to fill out his newly refurbished, “forward-moving” identity: He can become a real family man, a devoted and faithful husband, a man of integrity. It provides him with a plan for integrating his work and home personae, motivating him to renounce his secret love affairs and to build his career on a foundation of loyalty and trustworthiness.
This approach is built on another of the phrases Don frequently repeats: “What do you want me to say?” It comes up most frequently as a way to defuse conflict with his wife, Betty, but it also reflects his overall self-concept. He doesn’t view himself as a salesman or even strictly as a persuader: He’s ultimately giving people what they want, even if he often has to tell them what they want before giving it to them. His entire “brand identity” as Don Draper is based on a myth of perfect transparency, the idea that others’ needs and desires are clear to him and he can act in such a way that they will see him as one who consistently fulfills their needs.
Already in the first episode of the second season, however, it is becoming clear that seeing and responding to what others want isn’t so easy outside the context of advertising. A romantic night with Betty — who enters the scene in slow motion, as though Don is seeing her for the first time and falling in love all over again — is spoiled by Don’s failure to perform sexually. (Serendipitously, the On Demand version of the episode cut to a commercial for Viagra after this scene.) Meanwhile, at work, his attempts to show loyalty to clients and fellow employees bring him into conflict with his partners in the firm.
Despite the closing drama of the first season, Don’s “ownership” of his assumed name is never seriously threatened in the second. Rather, it is control over what his name will mean, both to himself and others, that is at stake. At work, his new self-concept is first challenged when he is forced to inform a longtime client that Sterling Cooper is dumping them to pursue a bigger client in the same line of business — a move Don fought against unsuccessfully. The longtime client responds that he came to the agency specifically for “Don Draper” and now not only feels betrayed but also embarrassed that he allowed himself to be taken in by Don’s suave delivery. Though Don wanted his personal brand to be based on integrity, “Don Draper” now stands for betrayal.
Also contrary to his new self-concept, he ambivalently takes on a new mistress, seemingly unable to resist her advances. Things reach a crisis point when the mistress tells him that all the many women who have told her about “the Don Draper treatment” were completely right. While she means it to be flirtatious and complimentary, the comment enrages Don, who recognizes that he has again lost control of his name, which circulates freely in gossip. He ties his mistress to the bed and leaves, in a symbolic effort to reassert control. But where he wanted his name to signify devoted family man, “Don Draper” means adultery instead.
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.