TiVo Times: Who is Don Draper?
Blog by Peter Wild on September 3rd, 2010
From the moment the smooth if slightly dour strings of the opening titles begin, certainly from the moment the mad flurry of drums kick in (you can picture Buddy Rich going at it on the skins while Sammy Davis Jr.smiles over benignly), you can’t help smiling when you watch the opening of Mad Men, even though what you’re watching is a cartoon man, a man in outline, a falling man with all the modern connotations of 9/11, apparently falling to his death against a vivid background of towerblocks and ad campaigns.
Season 4 is well underway in the States and, thankfully, episode 1 is due to air on BBC4 this Wednesday. Season 4 has started and, although much is different, much is also the same. Thank Heavens.
Episode 1 opens with Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm, one of those actors like James Gandolfini who seem to have come from nowhere to assume an incredibly important position in the history of US television) sat opposite a journalist in a swanky restaurant and the journalist is asking, in the way of journalists, ‘Who is Don Draper?’
Regular viewers of the show will know this is a question that has been posed before, albeit perhaps not in such explicit terms. Don Draper does not exist at all. Don Draper is a construct, an identity stolen in the first instance by a young man named Dick Whitman who switched tags with a dead infrantryman in order to assume a new life for himself (and from time to time we are gifted glimpses into the life young Dick wished to escape from, both in flashbacks and as a result of family members, such as his brother who caught up with him in an earlier season). Dick Whitman fashioned Don Draper into an ad man and he became the best of them, perhaps in part as a result of his desire to always create anew the person he was. Along the way, certain others (like Pete, the wiley young sales manager who seems to slip in and out of the viewer’s sympathy) have tried to catch the wisp of smoke that is Don Draper, only for Don Draper, whetever Don Draper is, to elude them once more.
The question, though – ‘Who is Don Draper?’ – has reframed itself this time around, though. We all know who Don Draper is now. His wife Betty ransacked the secret drawer in his study at the end of Season 3. A good few cats have slunk out of the bag. What we witness over the course of the first episode of Season 4 is Don Draper reimagining Don Draper. The vessel has taken him this far, as far as having his name above the door of a new agency – but it is not the name of legend. Not yet. And so Don has to take his overlarge scissors and renew Don, fashioning a legend of Don as a man who isn’t afraid to take risks, who sees the opportunity and leaps for it even in the face of more timid responses from those around him.
Not that Season 4 of Mad Men is a one man show. Mad Men has never been like, say, Nurse Jackie. This isn’t a show in which one bright star shines off a perfectly efficient ensemble cast. In Mad Men, there are many stars. Ask anyone who rates the show. It’s more than likely they’ll have a different favourite. Whether it’s the silver-haired health time bomb Roger Sterling (played by John Slattery most recently seen playing Robert Downey Jr’s dad in grainy-flickery period footage from yesteryear in Iron Man 2), the scene-stealing Joan Holloway (the absolute pin-up of the show, a genuine bombshell played by Christina Hendricks) or Draper’s on-off protege Peggy Olson (played by Elisabeth Moss), Mad Men’s joys are many and varied.
The show has fans who watch simply to lap up the eagle-eyed period detail, debating whether a certain hairstyle or skirt length would have appeared by that point, who chatter online about whether or not the interplay with key historical events (the death of Kennedy, say, or the early flashes of the war in Vietnam) is too heavy or too light. There are even those who find the pace of the show (mannered, at times, willing to let a storyline breathe and take the time required to get where it’s going) to be its most attractive feature, so stoutly refusing to cater to the generation of watchers who want their quick fix now. Certainly, for those who allow Mad Men to travel at the pace it wants to travel at, when the bombs do go off (as they did, for example, at the climax of Season 3 when Don’s marriage seemed to explode before our very eyes) it is all the more satisfying.
What’s more, for those paying attention, the slow pace of the show unravels in the shadow of that title sequence: are we watching the events that lead up to that falling man? Is each episode, each season, a part of that fall? Will all of this end badly? Episode 2 of Season 4 introduces psychometric testing into advertising, Don sitting in on a forum in which a beautiful young psychiatrist attempts to slice open the goose and get at what Don percieves as the golden eggs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he doesn’t react well. The world changes. Will Don Draper – whoever he is – be able to keep up? We’ll all have to watch and find out eh?
