A little death behind the eyes.

I admit I did not make it any further than 20 minutes into the pilot the first time around before I decided that yes, I am a bit bored, so why not leave it for another rainy day. I had been rather reluctant to watch the meticulous re-creation of N.Y.'s advertisement industry in the 60s in the first place. Why the past anyway? What I wanted to see was a meticulous depiction of the ad business in N.Y. in 2010. However, as a fellow pop culturaphil reminded me, it's not about the past and even when it is about the past it's actually about the present. And, you can only ignore such a big chunk of pop culture for so long. So, I sat myself down again and finally caught up on MAD MEN.
Yet, even after having watched it all and the series' fourth season finale this past Sunday, I am still not sure what's actually going on, what the series – and the fuss – is about (except for the obvious meticulous part). For it is not about mad men. The pun doesn't work, or rather it ends where it started: on MADison Avenue. These men are not mad, they are complacent. They aren't jumping from the roofs of downtown skyscrapers (as the title sequence suggests) and land in their office chairs. They had already been sitting there, and have continued to do so for the series' past 4 seasons, albeit in different offices - somewhere in between pantyhose campaigns, in between Lucky Strikes, in between drinks, in between marriages, in between secretaries. Yes, there is nothing wrong with that as a plot – or a philosophy (I have written a 'maximum of pleasure, minimum of bullshit' defense for another cable TV ad man, Brian Kinney – forthcoming in CQN # 3). Only why bother if you don't seem to be having any fun, if you couldn't care less?
And Don Draper, leading man, creative hotshot and womanizer (or so he's called), is not having any. Or maybe he is, but you can't really tell as the series' immersion in everything white straight upper middle class 1960ish also applies to its cinematography: it sticks to the kiss&pan-rule, and no taking off of tights during sex.
When Don Draper is not piling up secretaries, wifes, ex-wifes and children like ties (you just buy one after another, more of the same because you like the pattern and one can never have enough accessories for that matter), he is alternating between trying to stay sober enough (or get drunk enough) to come up with one of his hotshot ideas and indulging in introspective swimming. Not that it gets him any further than feeling a bit sorry for himself, a bit alienated from his womanized women, a bit empty. His favorite line in that case: You don't really know who I am! (Yes, he's not Don Draper, and no, he did not kill Don Draper to become him. It's not that bad.)
I have been watching MAD MEN together with the fifth season of DEXTER these past few Mondays: If you want to see a man with truly alienating secrets, try Dexter. Likewise Don, he has also diagnosed himself with being a bit dead behind the eyes. Unlike Don however, he's no longer too complacent about it - as it dawns on him that it doesn't go together well with having some things in your life that you can actually be bothered about.
Watching Don moping around, I find myself reaching that state of mindless cotton wool complacency, too, interrupted only from time to time by pointless rampages towards the screen: Don, come on! Aren't you living in New York in the Sixties? Isn't Andy Warhol sitting in his factory three blocks down the street, re-writing the history of something. Isn't there a revolution underway? Don, come on! Stop impregnating your secretaries and let's go get screen-tested!
But we know how the story ended, I'm only waiting for Don to catch up, too. Don won't have changed the face of anything, his children did. Those children I yelled at him not to have, my parents' generation - I stand corrected (for that part anyway).

// I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
[...]
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
[...]
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.//
(Sharon Olds: I GO BACK TO MAY 1937)

Men, desks, paper dolls.

A little death behind the eyes: Don Draper (MAD MEN), Brian Kinney (QUEER AS FOLK), Dexter Morgan (DEXTER).