A couple of times over the course of this season of Mad Men I claimed that Don Draper (Jon Hamm) didn't have much at stake anymore in continuing to conceal his true identity. Turns out I was wrong. Well, at least half wrong. In my defense, in a key scene of this week's episode, "Hands and Knees" (written by Jonathan Abrahams and Matthew Weiner, and directed by Lynn Shelton), Don confesses his identity switch to Faye (Cara Buono) with very little in the way of repercussions. Don confesses as if speaking into a void, like he's not even cognizant of another person being in the room with him; he's simply saying the words because he can, because he needs to say them, and perhaps the most shocking part of his confession is how easily the words pass from Don to Faye. Faye even seems pleased that Don trusts her with the information, and tries to play the role of caretaker, reassuring Don that everything will be alright. At one point even Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) expresses sentiments similar to Faye's, telling Don that his past isn't really all that scandalous, and that they could ride things out should the truth be revealed.
But for Don, his stakes in not being exposed are still very real, and very high. When Pete's long-gestating North American Aviation account finally comes to fruition and prompts the Department of Defense to run background checks on the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce creative team, Don lapses into full-on panic mode. He sets up a trust fund for Betty (January Jones) and his children, and tells Pete that he only asks for some warning, so that he can escape into a new life should the truth be uncovered. While those in Don's personal life have little reason to hold Don's past against him, it's clear that his desertion in Korea can still land him in jail for a long, long time. Don's building anxiety throughout the episode, culminating in a total breakdown after an encounter with two businessmen Don mistakes for government agents, is another piece of virtuoso acting from Hamm, who continues to make his case for Season Four being his strongest work to date.
But Don's nightmare scenario never materializes. In fact, very little bad happens to Don at all. Instead, it's Pete who bears the brunt of Don's crisis, as he not only has to kill the account he's been working on for years, but then has to accept the blame for doing so in a meeting with the SCDP partners. Pete is rightfully angry, but he nonetheless takes on Don's troubles as his own. He has to do so, because despite Don's claims to the contrary, Pete knows that he can't run the firm without Don Draper. Earlier in the season Pete joined Roger (John Slattery) and Bert (Robert Morse) in encouraging Don to accept his role as the face of SCDP, and now he's trapped, inheriting Don's sins.
"Hands and Knees" is very explicitly focused on the theme of secrets. Not just Don's secret, which he has passed on to Betty, Pete and, now, Faye, but Don's relationship with Faye, Joan's (Christina Hendricks) one-night stand with Roger and her subsequent abortion, Roger's loss of the all-important Lucky Strike account, and Layne's (Jared Harris) familial shame are all being kept under wraps as well.
As usual, Mad Men expresses some of its points through mirrored scenes. Near the beginning of the episode Joan makes a show of talking professionally about work-related matters as she leaves Roger's office after telling him about her pregnancy, while near the end Faye employs the same tactic as she leaves from a meeting with Don. In both cases the women are trying to conceal their respective relationships, though clearly the emotional weight of doing so is drastically different in the two examples. Faye's relationship with Don has been largely positive so far, while Joan is dealing with the prospect of a third abortion (at 35) while her husband is in Vietnam, and Roger refusing any responsibility for the child (beyond paying for its termination).
In the first of another pair of scenes, we see Betty making a point of telling her husband Henry (Christopher Stanley) about the agents who came to the house questioning her about Don. She's unable to tell Henry about Don's secret past, but burdened by the weight of that lie she she wants to ensure that she and Henry are as open with each other as possible. We also see Pete dancing around the same issues with his (very) pregnant wife Trudy (Alison Brie). In a way Pete is even more forthcoming than Betty, by suggesting to Trudy that he is being forced to protect someone else's lies. But he refuses to actually cross the threshold of telling Trudy what that lie is, not because he wishes to conceal something from her, but because he knows that he wouldn't be giving her the truth—he'd just be saddling her with the lie that has become part of his reality. The show is able to present some complex ideas by mirroring these two sets of scenes: fabrications of structural similarity can have drastically different meanings in different contexts, while telling the truth becomes a paradoxical and nebulous thing when starting from a foundation of untruth (as we all, inevitably, are). Has Don entered a new stage of honesty in his relationships by confessing to Faye, or has he simply made his lie her own?
Trudy, in a her maternity nightie, also serves as a contrast to Joan, who we see in the next scene riding the bus alone, returning from the abortion clinic. Joan is a character who Weiner and his team of writers have been especially cruel to, and never has her story been so heartbreaking as here. She consoles a mother (relatively young herself) who has brought her 17-year-old, pregnant daughter to the clinic. The mother asks Joan how old her daughter is, and Joan lies by saying "fifteen." It's a lie, however, that reveals a lot more about Joan than the truth would have. Joan could be talking about herself, the first time she underwent an abortion, or she could be referring to how old her first child would have been, but either way we get the sense that the age fifteen means something to her.
Mad Men typically enjoys dealing with fragmented concepts, identity chief among them, but it also presents its characters' pasts as something concrete and permanent. The past isn't something that drags behind and haunts the characters, rather it's something that is always present alongside them; they are their past. It can take the form of Lane Pryce's violent and maniacally controlling father, or of Pete's obligation to protect the firm by protecting Don's past, or of the child that still lives somewhere inside of Joan, but regardless, the past (both their own and of those who have shaped their world) is their reality. Don can't outrun his history, as he wishes to, because he embodies it. If this episode made one thing clear, it's that Don can never return to a point before his lie began.
Don was a lost kid when he chose not to tell the army that they had mistaken him for the wrong man, much like Joan, who was another lost kid when she terminated her first pregnancy. But Don's fabrications will be with him long after there is any reason for them to be so, and what's more they'll be with Pete, and inevitably his old children, as well. Pete scolds Don for not being able to detach himself from his past, but Pete can't detach himself from Don's past, either.
It's interesting to point out that, beyond his breakdown, and offering Beatles tickets to Sally that he didn't yet have, Don doesn't really do anything this episode. Every step of the way he depends on other people, be they Pete, Faye, Betty, or even Harry Crane (Rich Sommer). They all come through for him, and his situation ends up affecting all of them (minus Harry) more than it does him. Mad Men is a story of how a man makes himself, sure, but perhaps more than that, it's a story of how we make each other.
Other Stuff:
- Sorry, a shorter (and late) piece this week. I'm in the process of moving, and things are hectic to say the least. I will try to make it up to you next week.
- The Drinking Bird makes its triumphant return in the opening shot. Also, Roger demonstrates exemplary workplace efficiency.
- North American Aviation, like Conrad Hilton before them, are focused on the moon. Only, unlike Connie, they actually have the means to get there, as NAA worked extensively on the Apollo program. However, they wound up baring much of the blame for the disastrous fire that killed the crew of Apollo I in 1967. In the aftermath NAA was acquired by Rockwell-Standard and the resulting merger came with an extensive re-branding. It's an irony of history that this account was probably ill-fated anyway, and oddly it would probably serve Pete well to actually follow through on the excuse Don fed him to give NAA, and pursue Martin Marietta as a client instead. (Provided they can keep Don off the security clearance list, this time.)
- This episode is really effective in expressing the 1960s as a stark dichotomy: screaming Beatles fans and the Playboy Club on one hand, the Space Program and Cold War nuclear ballistics on the other.
- In trying to mitigate the damage of the loss of Lucky Strike, Roger rifles through his Rolodex, calling old contacts, at least one of whom turns out to be dead. It's a sign of just how long Roger has been resting on his laurels. I doubt Roger will handle the Lucky Strike situation particularly well, but at least we'll finally see a Roger Sterling that's alive and trying to get something done. It'll be one of the more enjoyable things to watch as the season enters its climactic, post-Lucky-Strike, SCDP-in-crisis home stretch.
- Speaking of Roger, I'm not sure that I'm a fan of his inaudible F-bomb this week. It strikes me like those Hollywood movies where a bunch of English-speaking Americans are playing characters from France or some such place, and we happily suspend our notion of disbelief over the fact that they're not speaking French until some character with a heavy French-accent arrives and calls our attention to it. Or like in The Sound of Music where everybody's speaking English but for some reason they still use the word "Frau." I assume that, were the Mad Men characters not on basic cable, they'd be cursing to high heaven. It hurts my suspension of disbelief to hear Roger so emphatically use the F-word (and have it edited out, yet). Stick with the rules of your own universe, I say.
- I'd like to hear your readings on that final look Don gives Megan (Jessica Pare). In many ways the characters shared an experience this week; they became involved in the same crisis, and both thought their livelihoods were at risk before finishing the episode by reassuring someone else that everything turned out okay. Yet somehow they're referring to entirely different things. Is Don simply trying to view the world from her perspective? Is he lusting after her? Something else?
When I watched the episode, that last moment with Megan seemed to be building on the scenes with Joan and Faye both putting on a short performance for the office when leaving the offices of their respective offices. I was watching the episode online, and at one point accidentally jumped ahead by about six seconds; I skipped from a medium shot of Faye backing out of Don's office, to an identical medium shot of Megan entering the office to drop off the Beatles tickets. Though Megan and Faye are very distinct characters, the mirroring of the two shots (both basically from Don's P.O.V.) suggested that they, at least at that moment, held a similar place in his universe. And then he sees Megan through a doorframe, in her own private space, in what looks to be a private moment, applying make-up, putting on a (sort of) mask. Both she and Faye have had parts of Don's burdens transferred onto them in the episode, and have been privy to the world of his fundamental fears and secrets- – - and then Don, in a rare moment, sees someone else in their own world, as a distinct individual with their own unknown set of worries and secrets, in the midst of preparing to present themselves once more to the public world, as Don forced himself to do in the season premiere.
I read two other quick interpretations, one that suggested that now Don had revealed himself to Faye, he suddenly re-starts a pattern of lusting after someone who's unaware of his real identity, and another which thought that it was Don in a moment of envy at how simple Megan's life was next to the endless complications of his own.
For a five second moment, there's a lot that could be unpacked there.
To me, Megan standing in the doorway putting on her make-up –- a mask for the benefit of others — parallels Don putting his own mask back on as well (the threat of discovery receding for now) and returning to “business as usual.” Though, the "business" ain't what it used to be.
Thank goodness Sally's going to see The Beatles at Shea Stadium.
I also couldn't tell what to make of the Megan shot at the end.
No one has mentioned what I think is the obvious reading, so I'll go ahead and state it: Don doesn't want to see The Beatles; his daughter needs a nurturing figure in her life so she doesn't turn into her mother; Don wants Sally to be happy but not if it means rearranging his life to do it; the only person Don knows who has seemed to be able to connect with Sally is Megan; and Megan is young and the kind of person who would like to see The Beatles. So to me the shot just said, "I should send Sally to the concert with Megan, and then they'll bond (and then Sally won't be my problem)."
Here's the trouble with that reading though: If it happens in the beginning of the episode, it's foreshadowing what's to come later. Straightforward. But at the end it's curious, because Megan is hardly one of the show's perhaps already too numerous "main" characters (it's impossible for the show to focus on any character with any depth at all without entirely leaving out some of their major players). On top of that, Mad Men rarely foreshadows something that would be so, well, trivial and "plotty," if you follow my meaning. This is a series that suggests emotional themes but rarely specific acts. So for this episode to wrap up by suggesting that Megan and Sally are about to become close friends would be a break from the norm, to the point that I doubt my "obvious" reason is even plausible.
I think Duncan's reading that Don might be lusting after someone who doesn't know his secret sounds more like the show in general, and yet that's just not how that scene felt to me. It really was an odd close.
One more thing: I did like the way they handled Don's moment with Faye at the end. The night before, he's tired of all the lies and actually lets someone see the knobs and buttons powering the Great and Powerful Don. Then, once he thinks he's going to get away with it, it's back to "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." Even now, Don cannot escape "who" he is, because he isn't Dick Whitman, just like he isn't Don Draper. He's a lie.
Interesting idea about Megan and Sally, but Sally's problems won't be solved via a nice female "Role Model." She's in love with her father and she wants to make up for what she sees as her mother's betrayal ("You drove him away!")
Don meanwhile certainly ought to connect with Faye, who's a treasure. But at heart he's just a horndog who'd rather bone Megan.
Never forget: John Hamm is deep. Don Draper is shallow.
David: We're actually on the same page. I should have written that Don thinks Sally and Megan are about to become close friends, not that it'll happen or that it will solve the emptiness Sally feels without her dad in her life or the resentment she has for her monster of a mom. One more instance of hoping to keep Sally happy through as little personal effort as possible.
Speaking of Don and Sally, Here's my quick treatment of a Mad Men series finale:
It's the 1970′s. Sally goes to Phoenix for a visit with the now semi-retired Don (selling his share of SCDP has made him quite wealthy).
In her Honda, Sally pulls up to Don’s house. It is surrounded by police cars and a fire truck. A uniformed policeman curtly informs Sally that she needs to go to the station.
At the station, Sally is told that Don’s cleaning lady found his severely charred body in the bedroom. Because of the numerous empty liquor bottles strewn about, police concluded that Don was drunk and fell asleep in bed with a lit cigarette. Unable to make a positive ID, the Phoenix medical examiner, Greg Harris, had to contact the army for Don’s finger prints and dental records.
The last shot shows a puzzled Harris walking into the squad room with a detective in tow carrying a folder. Looking up from the report, the detective says, “Miss Draper, we need to talk.”
PAN TO A HAT SITTING ON ONE OF THE DETECTIVE’S DESKs…FADE OUT