Mad Men and the Jewish Woman

Laurie
Mad Men and the Jewish Woman
Starbucks, September 28, 2008

On the TV show Mad Men, a Jewish woman, Rachel Menken, enters the life of Don Draper, head account executive at the ad agency Sterling Cooper. Stylish, educated, and poised, Rachel runs the department store founded by her father, and she wants to boost it to the next rung—the way Barney’s rose from discount store to emporium of chic. Rachel controls her life, and mysterious, shadowy Don falls for her, although at first he’s nettled and storms away from their initial meeting when she challenges his patronizing understanding of her store. It’s 1960, and he’s uncomfortable taking direction from a Jew, and a female one at that. He doesn’t think she should move out of the ghetto; there are Jewish stores and Jewish ad agencies, he tells her. One of the younger execs refers to her as Molly Goldberg, because it’s the only reference he can summon to dismiss her, and its inappropriateness shows there isn’t yet a category for her. Don’s talent is to recognize and name the next new thing as it takes form, so he can market or destroy it. Ordinarily he would dismiss Rachel, but she’s hired his firm and so he’s forced to look at her and in observing her intelligence and self-possession he sees something that’s missing in him—a belief that you can remake the world rather than conform to it. He feels an impulse to subdue her—clip her power by making her sexually vulnerable. In part it’s because she makes him feel unsteady, and his slipping convictions make him more interesting to himself and to her.

She’s attracted to this man who is smooth and beautiful, and who is in some sort of enigmatic pain. He invites her for a drink, and she meets him. She notes a loose cuff link and chooses an expensive pair from the jewelry case in her store. He leans over to kiss her, and she folds into him without collapsing. He says he’s married, the point being he will fuck her but not risk losing the account by deceiving her. She isn’t interested in a second-helping existence. Again he’s surprised. She says, “What did you expect? For me to run beside your life?” She says she’ll continue with his firm but he must remove himself from the account. The purpose of his seduction has backfired, and he feels done to even though she has acted above board.

He wishes he were her, wishes he had her freedom to pursue his own ideas and desires. And then he realizes he doesn’t know what they are; he figures out what other people want and packages it, but what is he moved by? What does he care about?

At home with his family, he needs to blunt this awareness. At the same time, he’s on the spot to help his wife bring off a Hallmark party for their little girl. They live in a suburban enclave gated off from Jews and other unsettling agents. But Don finds it hard to play the part; his family feels more like a trapping of success than something he’s chosen. While putting together a playhouse for his daughter, he drinks a series of beers and tops them off with shots of liquor. At the party, he chats with a divorcee whose unmarried state marks her as a predator by the other wives. Don and she are just talking, but to interrupt their conversation, Don’s wife sends him to fetch their daughter’s birthday cake. He doesn’t return, rather sits brooding in his car beside the railroad station, wondering what his manhood amounts to.

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There are times when the series feels like watching real life—a strange comment, in that it’s so stylized and hyper real, plus it keeps pointing, didactically, to its devices. Part of the plan is to establish and then perhaps subvert cookie cutter types: the mysterious, emotionally lost ad executive who can chameleon himself this way and that because he lacks a center; the lost, unhappy housewife caught in a Douglas Sirk melodrama; the office queen who rules the other females but refrains from competing in the world of men; the country mouse enduring the station’s of “sex and the single girl” city life and caught between the secretarial pool and the junior execs. In training to become a man, the first time she has power she criticizes an actress she hires for a commercial until the woman flees the studio in tears.

No one is surprising, but they fascinate. As Richard notes, we see them from a child’s-eye view, spying through a keyhole into our parents’ private angst and joy, and the figures remain as inaccessible now as they were then. They are preserved as impenetrable to prolong our romance. What with all the knowledge we’ve collected from psychoanalysis, deconstruction, historicism, and sociology, it’s seldom we can enjoy not knowing. It’s sexy. Eros is the part of life that resists understanding.

Jon Hamm, who plays Don as a gliding muscle, isn’t conventionally macho or else nothing would penetrate him. No one knows his full story, although little by little it’s revealed. In Season One’s final episode, we learn he is born Dick Whittington and enlists in the military during the Korean War. When his commanding officer is killed in an accident and his face destroyed, Don, in a brilliant stroke, exchanges dog tags with the corpse. He doesn’t calculate the consequences. What about the people in the real Draper’s life? Won’t they search for him when he doesn’t return home? The coffin with Draper’s remains is sent back to the Whittingtons, although neither parent is his biologically. The woman who raised him is the wife of his father, a drunk who impregnates his biological mother, a prostitute who dies in child birth. His stepmother, a devout Christian, feels responsibility for the boy, but he’s also a reminder of her husband’s infidelity. After he dies, she takes up with a tight, mean man with no sympathy or love to spare. Dick grows up to feel his only resources are his wits and cunning and that it’s best not to show his hand. When Pete, a junior exec with powerful family ties, tries to blackmail Don by revealing his true identity, Don feels threatened at first and proposes to Rachel they run away. She’s insulted. She can see the future, and it looks like a place they’d regret. Sent away, he gets drunk, returns to his office, falls asleep and the next morning changes into one of the crisp, white laundered shirts he keeps stacked in a desk drawer, and then he tells Sterling, the firm’s owner, the truth. Played by a rotund Bobby Morse, Sterling is a follower of Ayn Rand, prophet of killer individualism whose fictional invention, the architect Roark, might have been cast in Don’s image. Sterling laughs at the revelation in front of Pete. “Who cares? Who cares who he is? No one will care.” He tells Don he is free to fire Pete, although he may prefer to keep him close, since a snake when saved can become fiercely loyal. We know Don won’t fire him; he’s no longer afraid and he’s not vindictive. He doesn’t care about money, really, and he doesn’t believe in the advertising business. He doesn’t believe in anything except his ability to continue, and he loves his children, although he’s not interested in them. He’s focused on sensation as a way to numb pain.

The mesmerizing revelation in the show is Don’s pain. It makes him poignant, and it’s what Rachel and the other, numerous women in his orbit respond to. Charged by his fantasy of flight, he says to Rachel, “You know me. You know everything about me,” searching her lean face for recognition. She shakes her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”