“Mad Men” — The Long Weekend
What more could you possibly want out of a television drama? Lasers? A man-eating lion? A man-eating lion who shoots lasers out of his blood-soaked teeth? Perhaps, but I’m pretty content with watching AMC’s Mad Men just the way it is: as a nearly perfect drama of social, political and ultimately human commentary. More after the jump…
This week we saw Don Draper open up about his life for the very first time. Right on the heels of taking Sterling to the hospital after a sex-induced heart attack and laying in the arms of Rachel, the owner of the Fifth Avenue department store the agency is working on rebranding, Don tells her he’s the son of a prostitute and a drunk.
Don is willing to play along with Sterling when it comes to exploiting young women, though he clearly gets no pleasure out of it. The man is obviously far from being a saint, but it raises an interesting question. What is it about Rachel that he finds comforting and familiar that he couldn’t get with Midge or with his own wife? Betty’s role is very much one of a mother, not of a lover. Midge was too different. She was from a different world — a world Don didn’t understand. A lot of his coworkers at Sterling-Cooper are men embracing a previous generation. Midge was about the future. She was about a world that was about to come. Don, interestingly, is the one man who happened to be ‘of the now.’ He knew 1960 was different from the lives men had led during the fifties, but he also failed to completely grasp what was about to happen.
This makes an interesting pairing with Rachel, who is clearly an independent woman like Midge, but who was also still tied down to tradition (in this case, by her father). She’s shares, in a way, the same level of freedom as Don and thus makes her the one person he can feel completely open around.
Sterling has his own set of problems. The sequence in his office with the two aluminum siding girls was brutal in his complete, unwavering desire to objectify. It was uncomfortable in the way season two of the UK-The Office was uncomfortable, though with nothing to laugh at. The girls knew what happening, Don knew what was happening, only Sterling seemed to be oblivious to the tedious sides of his actions. So was the heart-attack and subsequent crying to his wife signs of redemption, of a second chance? It’s to be assumed, though hard to believe. Behaviors don’t change overnight. Just look at Betty’s dad’s desire for the real sugar.
