Reflections on Season 5 of Mad Men

This season was amazing, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts about it. For such a quiet, nuanced show, it has the ability to throw you for a loop. It is a rare episode that I don’t gasp at least once. Each season has its own theme and this year was the dark side of the American dream. Working in advertising is appealing to our baser instincts, we always tire of what we have and crave the new, the bigger, the more exciting.  As Don so brilliantly said when he approached Dow Chemical to try and get their business, “Because even though success is a reality, its effects are temporary. You’re happy for now because you’re successful for now. But what is happiness? It’s the moment before you need more happiness.” It basically compares the illusory happiness that STUFF gives us with a drug, you always need more of it just to maintain. This was illustrated most beautifully by the Jaguar campaign that was so integral to this season around which evolved so many key incidents and the way the car was compared to a mistress. The whole season was about everyone wanting what they don’t have and not wanting what they do. I will delve in depth into a few of the journeys.

The Ballad of Don and Megan-

Don has been through the ringer this season. At the beginning of the season his marriage to Megan seemed to transform him in a deep way and he was truly happy. He wasn’t interested in cheating on her, she knew all about Dick Whitman, was good with his kids, and was mature and engaged with her feelings. She would not tolerate how Don had been with Betty and he seemed to want nothing more than to rectify the mistakes he had made and be a better husband. But as good as this may seem, it made his work suffer, the one area of his life that he was always KING. Marriage to Don meant that Megan moved from secretary to copywriter, a move which Peggy greeted with not unjustifiable anger. Her struggles to get where she was seemed to just be handed to Don’s chippy and worse, Megan was really good at it. In the end, the life of an ad man was not what she wanted and she quit to pursue her dream of becoming an actor. Don was supportive, if initially unhappy about this as he liked having Megan around the office. Theirs is a relationship that blows hot and cold, and privately they seemed to have a layer of kink thrown in but they seemed perfectly content with it. After Megan left, things started to come unraveled for Don. He purposely sabotaged Ginsberg to make sure his own idea was chosen for an ad campaign instead of letting his idea win on its own merit. His amazing pitch to Jaguar was sullied by Joan’s sacrifice to the company (more on that later), going after the big fish so that the employees wouldn’t have to forge his signature and could have Christmas bonuses, his finding out about Lane then firing him and having the consequences of that on his conscience (again, more on that later). But in the end, after all he had been through the final blow was that the bloom was off the Megan rose and it turned out she had some thorns. When she doesn’t get what she wants, she grows depressed and whiny and is not above stabbing her friends in the back to get it. Her acting career is not coming along as quickly as she likes. As Megan’s visiting mother Marie says to Don when he come home to find his wife drunk and spiteful , “I know it’s hard to watch, but this is what happens when you have an artistic temperament but you are not an artist.” And in her petulant need to get what she wants, she approaches Don to get her a commercial that one of their clients is shooting, a commercial she only knew about from a friend who wanted her to ask Don for her. Don is reluctant as he tells her, “you want to be somebody’s discovery, not somebody’s wife.” In the end, to her it doesn’t matter and Don starts to see her in a new way in that she was just someone’s wife and it didn’t matter to her and he believed it should. I think in a lot of ways, Megan represented for Don something purer than the path that he chose and that drove his love for her and imbued him with a deep admiration for who she was not only as his wife but as a person. Megan's begging Don for the part in the commercial (something that certainly isn’t art and didn’t she consider herself an artist?) shattered that illusion and lowered his opinion of her. Now she was no better than anyone else; no better than Lane or Pete or Don himself. On the commercial set in the final scene, we see Megan in her ridiculous "Beauty" costume so excited for this meaningless gig and that completed the destruction of this false picture he has constructed about who Megan actually was. This, I believe, allowed him to walk away from the fairy tale, quite literally, and into a bar. We don’t know yet it he will succumb and return to his old ways but the signs are there and that smoldering look he used on the beautiful blond who asked for a light is classic Don Draper, philanderer. If Megan is no better than Don, Don no longer has to attempt to live up to her in any way, he is off the hook. When the strains of You Only Live Twice filled the scene, and the montage started it was truly sublime. 

The Perils of Pete Campbell-

I’ll start with the marriage. Trudy knows Pete is unhappy but never addresses it, never seeks to pick up that rock and peer at the squirming unpleasantness beneath. She just always accedes to his wants (or what he thinks he wants) in the hope that it will quell it and that he will continue to provide her with what she needs which is the appearance of a happy marriage. I believe she genuinely loves him but it is a love of what he represents to her rather than a deep soul connection. They are both living a life that society tells them they should want. Instead what they have is the ultimate emptiness of the American dream, all shiny and pretty like that Jaguar on the outside but not built properly on the inside so it just won’t run. Pete in his way loves and cares for Trudy, don’t confuse this with being in love with her as he was never that, but she doesn’t know him at all nor does he seek to share the inner workings of himself with her. She is just another piece of the life he thinks he is supposed to make him happy. He has a nice house in the suburbs, a fancy job in the city, children and a happy homemaker wife waiting at home with a hot dinner on the table. I remember a freshly married season one Pete who was thrilled as he boasted to the other boys in the office of how he would have roast beef waiting for him when he left for the evening. I found it especially compelling when he said to Don as all the partners stared out the window of the empty office building that would soon be an expanded SCDP as Pete says to Don, “I’ll have the same view as you.” Don grunts a reply that signified to me that the view is not all its cracked up to be and Don knows it. But Pete has always been nipping at Don’s heals, wanting what he has and now following the same disastrous course. Pete is a small pathetic excuse for a man, even to the point that Lane Pryce could beat him in fisticuffs and send him home with a black eye and split lip. No one would dare to call Don a “grimy little pimp” although after what Pete Machiavelli’d with Joan the name is appropriate. He can’t even be the master of his own universe at a dinner party with Megan, Don, Kenny and his wife. The sink in the kitchen busts and starts to spray water everywhere. Pete shuffles off to grab the tool box, and Don like a suburban Superman, strips off his shirt climbs underneath and has it fixed before Pete can even return. Once again, Pete slapped in the face with his own ineffectualness and what’s worse it was in his own home in front of his wife. Pete’s character, just like all the others in this show, is complex. He has cheated many times, the first we saw was on the eve of his wedding and he showed up, drunk and desperate on Peggy’s doorstep, who I believe he really loves and should be with as she would make him a better man, she would not tolerate his bad behavior or coddle him the way Trudy does. This complexity of Pete was brought into focus most prominently with his brief affair and obsession with the depressed wife of a fellow train commuter, Beth. He runs into her on the train with her husband, given some excuse as to why she was travelling to New York, Pete is surprised to get a phone call from Beth later that day. She was at the hotel he had tried and failed to get her to meet him at last year, she had to see him, would he come? Angrily, he shows up and she beams that she knew he would despite his protestations, and he said, “Why? Because I’m pathetic?”  After sex, Beth tells him the truth, she is going into hospital to get electroshock to treat her depression, it causes her to lose her memory and she wanted one last time with him before even that was gone. Heartbreakingly, he suggests that they run away to California together, this is the second time this season that running away to golden California is the answer, it represents the new life that so many seem to yearn for. It seems to represent a place of dreams and fresh starts. That is not going to fix what is broken for her though as she would only take her problems with her, she says the treatment works, and leaves a forlorn Pete on the bed, naked in more ways then one. Not content to let things go just yet, he visits Beth after the treatment. Vibrant and cheerful in a flowy pink nighty, she greets him and it quickly becomes clear that the shock had worked and she had no idea who he was. Making up a story about being in the wrong room and he was there to visit a friend, Pete finally stops lying to himself and uses his “friend” to explain his own melancholia. He said his “friend” had cheated on his wife, when Beth asks why, Pete runs down the usual list; he wanted to feel handsome again, blow off steam, needed some adventure. He was tired of the Ford in the garage and wanted to tool around in the Jaguar XJS for a while yadda yadda yadda. What he hadn’t counted on was falling in love and being left brokenhearted. Finally, he gets to the crux of the matter. “He realized everything he had was not right either, and that’s why it had happened at all. And that his life with his family was a temporary bandage on a permanent wound.” He’s finally beginning to realize how lonely he is in his marriage and sleeping around will not fix it. This here is where I think that if things had been different he and Lane could have been friends. They would have bonded over their daddy issues and both were unhappy with the lives they had and the “appropriate” women they married. Trudy is a wonderful woman, sweet and lively, she is just not for Pete and will never make him happy and in the end by pretending and trying to force it he will take away her happiness too, that to me would be the ultimate tragedy. It is testament to how good an actor Vincent Kartheiser is that he makes a character that is so unlikable sympathetic. I feel for him, although I hate to, and hope one day he will find what he is looking for and let’s Trudy free to find someone who deserves her love.

 Built like a B-52, that’s our Joan-

 Next up is Joan’s visit to the dark side. I absolutely hate hate hate to see Joan cry and she did a lot this season.  Like Pete, at the beginning of the season she is ensconced in an unhappy marriage for different reasons. She is married to a petulant man child, who is a creep that raped Joan before the marriage. To Joan, who still subscribes to a 50’s mentality of marrying well and being able to stop work and stay home to raise a family, Greg the doctor was a huge coup for her. For me, Joan is one of my favorite characters, almost scary in her competence that is never recognized or justly compensated. I remember at the end of season 3 and one of my favorite episodes from which I stole the title of my blog, Joan is the saving grace as Roger and Don and the rest as they jump ship to start their own agency. When she walked through the door I was cheering and smiling from ear to ear. Everything was going to be all right now that Joan was there! The sad thing was Joan understood her predicament. She was able to see Greg for who he was, and I think he disgusted her in his weakness although she loved him and tried so hard to make it work (notwithstanding the vase upside the head), especially because she had just had a new baby. Oops, though, the baby is Roger’s from a one night fling while Greg was away training for the Army. Once again, like Pete and Peggy, Joan should be with Roger. They are great together, but like Greg, he doesn’t know what he has when he has it and treated her terribly and her pride won’t let her relent and like Peggy with Pete, Joan would make Roger a better person. I loved that Joan found the strength to throw out her worthless husband but it is the 3^rd episode from the finale that damn near broke my heart. Everyone who watches this show felt it too, how did it come to this? The whole episode played out against the backdrop of the pitch to Jaguar, the mistress of cars. Slimy fat pig boy, head of the dealers association, and one of the committee who decides which ad agency is chosen basically says to Pete and Kenny that they give him Joan for a night or he will do all in his power to make sure that SCDP is not the agency chosen. Always decent Kenny says ever so politely that that is not going to happen, while Pete, anxious to add to his sins, keeps the door open and becomes the grimy little pimp. His approach to Joan is slimy, her refusal (to her) was final, but her words were twisted by Pete to the partners make it sound like if they paid her enough she would be amenable. Roger is aghast and says he won’t stop it but will not use his money to whore out a woman he loves and esteems. Lane panics only for himself as he realizes that coming up with the money to bribe Joan will uncover his own shenanigans. Cooper, a mostly non-entity this season, will basically go along with what everyone else agrees to. It is only Don who stands up and says NO this is disgusting and he can’t believe Pete would even bring this up. With that he storms out. In the end, Joan who feels abandoned by all the men she works with (as she is told ALL the partners are on board) and thought respected her feels unable to say no. It is Lane who tells her to demand a partnership instead of a payout, which in the end is a good thing, but done for purely selfish reasons. Watching her enter that hotel room was awful, as she turned to have her dress unzipped, her eyes were moist and I kept saying to the TV “Don’t cry Joan, please don’t cry!!!”  A part of who she was died there, a line had been crossed and there was no going back. In the end, she earned a partnership not because she was fully capable and eminently deserving but because of her body. It was made even bitterer by the fact that the agency would have earned the campaign without whoring out Joan but also because Don visits her, unbeknownst to him, after the fact telling her she does not have to do this. He doesn’t want the business this way. Joan is startled as it had been intimated to her that all the partners were on board, sadly she strokes his face and says “you really are one of the good ones, aren’t you?”

Lane has left the building-

 For me, this was the absolute biggest gut punch of the season. It was not unexpected that someone would die as the whole season leading up to Lane’s demise was a danse macabre. There were the Speck murders, the Whitman shootings, Pete’s depression, the escalation in Vietnam, the race riots, a very evident shotgun being toted about, Betty’s cancer scare and a million other things that was a pall over everything and everyone. It was going to happen, the only question was whom and how.  Turns out it is the delightful Jared Harris, whom I have had to watch die on Fringe too. He’s not having a very good year; all I know is that I will miss him on this. At the end of season 3, when Lane was instrumental in freeing Cooper, Draper and Price from their old agency so they could form the new one, everyone got rich, except Lane. Because his English reserve and stiff upper lip kept him from asking for what he deserved and it is coming back to bite him in the ass in a big way as the season opens. His British taxes are due and he cannot cover them. Instead of doing the big boy thing and talking to the partners and asking for a loan (here again this inherent fear of the British of any sort of embarrassment) Lane decides to take a loan out on future business on his own and forge a check to himself hoping that he can pay it back before anyone notices. Also, seeing his relationship with his father, a sorry excuse for a man who has no compunction beating his grown son so just imagine what is was like when he was a child, that Lane lost the ability to stand up for himself in anyway. This is evident in his marriage too, as he has no backbone and can’t make any decisions and his wife definitely wears the pants. As we see later, even though she does love him, she has absolutely no respect for him. More than anything, Lane aspires to be American. He wants the freedom that everyone around him seems to have but has no idea how to get it. The biggest compliment for him came at the beginning of his sad last episode. He gets offered an unelected position as Head of the Fiscal Control Committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Knowing what he has done, he says he appreciates the offer but posits that there must be someone more deserving. But, unknowingly, the man who offers uses the one surefire bait to fish Lane in, “For those of us at the 4As, everything about you is American.” He shares the news with his wife and the partners, proud of his accomplishment finally feeling that some of the life he wants for himself is happening. So when his theft is found out and Don is faced with dealing with it, you know it is going to be just awful. And it is, it really is. When faced with what he has done by a saddened but resolute Don, he at first denies, obfuscates and then collapses and seems to shrink into himself. The SHAME of what he has done diminishes him. Lane begs Don for a second chance, that the money was his, what will he tell his wife and son, that Don has no idea “how the rest of us live.” It is painful watching Don in this, he so wants to be the good guy that Joan told him he was but he just can’t let this go. Lane will have to leave but Don says he can write his own exit and leave with grace, start over, Don will cover the losses and no one else need ever know. Trying to help, he tells Lane, “I’ve started over a lot, this is the worst part.” But Lane is no Don, and starting over is not in his nature. All he can see is that he is a failure and even worse that he is embarrassed and shamed.  A broken man leaves Don’s office, a man who at this point in his life, cannot change. His life has almost burned itself out. Returning home that evening drunk to a proud wife who wants him to take her dinner and she has a surprise, a Jaguar that she wrote a check for (a check just like the one he forged) because he never treats himself or celebrates his successes. He looks at this beautiful car, sees the business that he brought to the agency, it is a symbol of everything that he will never have/never be and makes him throw up. This is where I think that his decision was made. His first attempt at suicide was in this beautiful car, although I think this would have been awfully cruel to his wife, but as with its reputation it would not start. He returns to the office late Saturday night, writes something on the typewriter, and is not found until Monday morning by an extremely distraught Joan hanging behind his office door. What did he type? A boilerplate resignation letter, a final slap in the face to Don who feels every bit of it. In a very sad ending to a beloved character, I think the saddest was the epitaph given to him by his wife. Don visits Rebecca Pryce with a check for 50 thousand dollars. The agency had received quite a bit more as a death benefit but he wanted her to have it. Rebecca lashes out, says he is doing nothing but trying to make himself feel better and how dare he try to mold Lane, “You had no right to fill a man like that with ambition!” Poor Lane, unappreciated in life and in death, only Don really seems to feel it along with Joan, the closest thing he had to friends.

Don is the heart of the show. He is the thread that was woven through all the other stories. I have missed more than I could include here about him and others, there was just so many other jewels in this season that I just can’t cover them all. Peggy finally leaving SCDP with a hand kiss that caused me to get misty, and getting to go on a business trip that had at the other end a room with an amazing view of a motor court parking lot and 2 dogs getting it on. But she had never looked happier. Roger’s LSD trip and how beautifully he and his wife ended their marriage, although trust him to go back and spoil it later.  A beautiful bar room scene with Don and Joan. Harry’s return with a terrible script in hand wearing the robes of the Hari Krishna’s and so much more. I was surprised when reading the boards that so many did not like this season, I felt it was one of the most complex and I enjoyed it plenty. I have a feeling that next season will be 69/70. Woodstock, Manson, the moon landing, Kent State, all of these will be the shifting currents running behind the show and I can’t wait!