Don Draper does some awful things. Just about every character on Mad Men has, with perhaps Joan being the closest to an exception. As the show evolved, each character ends up having an arc, and ends transformed.
Don’s character, to me, represents something I think about often. A person who’s suffered and experienced tragedies, and how they live from there.
It’s hard to explain sometimes how much childhood trauma changes a person. There’s baselines for people’s psychology, and trauma can move a person from their baseline. If that trauma happens as a child, the move from the baseline can get wired into you. The adaptations and behaviors you learn to survive end up embedded deep in your nervous system. If it ends up in your amygdala, then you may not even be fully conscious of what’s happening to you sometimes.
I wonder, sometimes, how many day dreaming children and adults are dissociating because they’re experiencing an uncontrollable memory.
With Don Draper, whether it was fully intentional or not, his behavior has reasonable psychological roots. Attachment issues from losing his mom. The trauma of his dad’s death. Poverty. Living in a brothel. Being molested – but never seeing it that way because the woman was young and beautiful – and in his era (and even to the audience) he wasn’t a child.
He struggled with these problems. He never seeks psychotherapy. He abuses his wife emotionally, and through infidelity. The same with his second wife. He cuts his brother out of his life, instead of helping him, and he takes his life. Later, he reacts as any reasonable business man would to Lane Pryce’s lapse of judgement, cuts the man from his life, and then Lane kills himself. He competes with his own staff. He descends into alcoholism, showing that the drinking on the show wasn’t just set dressing, but a sign of deeper emotional problems.
And then, he gets to season 7. His second marriage crumbles. But he seeks to help people, and actually does. He connects. He lets go of his resentments, and gets to something selfless, for him at least. He sees a stranger crying in a sharing circle while he’s at a retreat. He’s alone, his surrogate niece has left him. And Don, the selfish man who abused so many people, walks across the room to embrace a stranger to ease his pain.
Every thinkpiece that I recall about the ending of the show focused on the cynicism of the “Buy the World a Coke” ad; they made that the front and center of a debate about crass-commercialism versus earnest feeling.
And, to me, they all missed the point. Don of Seasons 1-7 never would have thought of that ad. That’s part of the metapoint of the last episode of Season 6 – his confessional to Hershey about what those candy bars means to him was disconnected from people. “Buy the World a Coke” was a worldwide sensation – it actually did mean something to people because the world felt loke it was ending to so many people. Whether it’s a commercial is besides the point – it helped regular people around the world feel connected. The sentiment, not sentimentality, is why it’s never been replicated. No one outside of that moment in time can truly connect with it, because we’re so far removed from those times.
And that’s the last episode. Don, who drives people away, has found real connection with the people around him. And he’s able to find it with strangers, too, by allowing himself to be the decent, generous person he’s been working so hard to suppress with sociopathic hedonism, he’s connected to the people around him.
Mad Men gets lumped in with the golden age of TV shows about villains. But to do this misses the show, because in the end, the man in the grey suit thar Don was lost. The man who won was Dick Whitman, changed for the better.