Don Draper’s very first pitch -- or at least, his first in Mad Men -- was about happiness. He rhetorically asked Lucky Strike, of all companies, what it was, exactly -- a simple question of enormous complexity. In answering his own question, he merely provided a wealth of material goodies: cars, nylons, cigarettes.
Of course, Don was making a pitch. He was able to sell a preposterously opaque campaign -- “It’s Toasted” -- and not only make it work for the client, but for the entire consumer sphere. It wasn’t real; it was advertising.
But if you think about the first Mad Men season’s narrative alone, consider where it ends: on “The Wheel,” that transcendent carousel pitch, so moving and so resonant in its nostalgia that Don Draper himself all but fell for it. He ran to his family, and envisioned that all-too-happy ending proposed in his speech before being brought back to reality. Advertising doesn’t just work in Mad Men. As Matthew Weiner has reminded again and again -- from a feminizing Jaguar speech to Don’s excruciating Hershey’s confession -- it comes from a place of unimpeachable reality.
Don Draper is a product of American culture. His story is our nation’s fantastical vision of complete reinvention and capitalist success. He built himself from nothing, working his way up the ladder and ditching an identity of hopelessness for one of boundlessness. It’s a process of dreaming and of rapidity, and out of that seeps an element of artificiality. Out of this construction comes a series-long quest for the affirmation of his own happiness, contentment and identity. Each of these ideas are intertwined, yes, but the enduringly fascinating element to Mad Men is the way in which they run parallel, unable to truly ever intersect. Don could be happy with a pitch, but the feeling always wore off. He could be content with Betty, but there was always something more on the outside. And his sense of self, no matter the estimability of his name alone, could never truly be reconciled -- that is, until the sound of a ding and the hint of a smile that would characterize our last moment ever with the man himself.
The trick of the final shot of “Person to Person,” the series finale of Mad Men, is to understand its genuineness in tandem with its cynicism -- which is to say, to understand it as the series has always been. Don’s grin, emerging as he rests in utter peace at the Esalen commune in California, gives way to a dreamy vision of the landmark “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” ad. There are enough markers -- such as when he encounters a girl on the commune identical in appearance to one in the video; the constant mention of the soda throughout the season; his clear intrigue towards the business nature of the New Age culture -- to indicate that, yes, he is its mastermind in the Mad Men universe. For a season in which Don bared himself of both material items and emotional burden, this ostensibly seems like a cheap shot to end it on. He just goes back to the way he is? He learned nothing?
The interpretation is correct in a sense, but within the grander scope of Mad Men it’s far less definitive. It’s a moment when his visions of happiness, fulfillment and identity finally morph into one -- but again, just for a moment. The great lesson is that he was born Dick Whitman, but he is Donald Draper. The promise of the West only led to disillusionment, from Megan to Pete to finally Don. Stripping himself of vanity and his lifetime of deceit only drove him deeper into despair and depression. Why? Doing so wasn’t actually a demonstration of integrity at all. Don is a deceiver. It’s in his blood.
And yet that Coke advertisement -- again, preposterous, selling carbonated sugar-water through the conveyance of concepts as grand and unifying as community and humanity -- is in all of us. It is, through and through, American. Like that Lucky Strike ad, it’s a nonsensical marriage of ideas that nonetheless gives you a feeling. The only difference is what’s being sold. As we entered the ‘60s, cigarettes were a cold comfort, a warm evocation of prosperity and elitism. The accompanying imagery evoked a calculated form of nostalgia -- knowing what we know now, it worked as an unassuming confrontation with historical romanticizing. As Mad Men glided through the decade, deconstructing such myths as it deconstructed Don, it introduced radicalism, counterculture, the end of segregation, the beginnings of LBJ’s “God damned war” -- ideas and realities that collectively were strong enough to wake a whole nation up.
For all his early-series suave and assuredness, Don was a troubled romantic from moment one. As a deliberate embodiment of the American Dream, his emotions, desires, contradictions, beliefs, hopes -- his very being -- could best be expressed through profit-driven companies and their sugary manipulations that were coming to overwhelmingly shape American culture. That seems to be his ultimate epiphany. At Esalen, he’s surrounded by the dawn of a new movement -- a new era. The hippie isn’t quite so fringe anymore. He plainly witnesses this new appropriation of self-centeredness, of wanting, of searching. It’s his new frontier. And thus, when he listens to Leonard, the hapless, lonely Esalen group member who bares his soul, the switch goes off: there he is, the new target, the new “demo.” Don embraces him warmly, and essential to this moment is that the catharsis he feels is true. His identification with this man is palpable, less because of a shared experience -- when Don walked into a room, Don walked into a room -- and more because of a shared essence. There’s a hollowness to Don, a sense of aimlessness. But these are traits that welcomed the empty suit of 1960 Don Draper. Esalen introduces him to the new American need -- and in turn, his own needs. And how better to solve it than to sell its solution? It’s the American way. It’s Don’s way.
As with any piece of fiction, locating a protagonist so emphatically in such dense thematic terrain is quite difficult to pull off. The character’s humanity -- not to mention his idiosyncrasies -- could have easily gotten lost in the shuffle. Mad Men not only understood this, but embraced the challenge. The wistful part of Don, so intrinsic to his overall character, is the very basis of what he represents: he compensates for the illusory nature of nostalgia by creating it -- and selling it -- himself. He has adopted the period’s many facets, ending appropriately with a Kerouac-esque jaunt out West.
The blackly comic Mad Men conclusion is consequentially, unexpectedly open-hearted. It’s an acceptance -- or at least, an amused acknowledgment -- of capitalist deceit and emotional compensation as the way that we live, no matter the new norms we adopt, the new fads we condemn, the new mores that infiltrate our consciousness. There’s a constant: we all want to feel better.
Thus, as Weiner determinedly, choppily writes Don to his great revelation, he surrounds him with swells of romance and reunions. Joan and Roger, Joan and Peggy, Peggy and Pete, Betty and Don, Don and Sally, Don and Peggy -- each of the show’s most dynamic and most resonant pairings have one final chance to share the screen. Peggy finds work and love, an impassioned declaration from Weiner that she truly could have it all. Joan chooses work over love, but she’d never seriously encountered the latter (except, perhaps with Roger), and for the first time had independently achieved fulfillment in the former. Roger matures, ever-so-slightly, by hitching off to Canada with Marie Calvet, in a romance as short as I’m sure it would be entertaining. They all say goodbye to one another, with some reunions progressing like old high school friends awkwardly catching up, and others like lovers -- once ill-suited either due to time or personality -- sharing deep affection and admiration. In “Person to Person,” these characters find themselves, for worse and, more profoundly and impactfully, for better. David Carbonara scores the end montage with a romantic melancholy, as if to say this is it, and they’ll be okay.
In “Time and Life,” Ted told Don that there are three important women in every man’s life. It’s an innocuous line from an inessential character that gradually comes to form the emotional cloud that hovers over “Person to Person.” As far as interactions with the core Mad Men characters -- and there are many -- Don talks to three people in the episode’s entirety (and all on the phone): Sally, his daughter; Betty, his ex-wife and most meaningful lover; and Peggy, his protege who knows him better than anybody. These painfully sad, intensely emotional and undeniably climactic conversations are as despairing as the above-mentioned interactions were optimistic. The only throughline is the sense of finality. His daughter convinces him she’d be better off without him. He loses Betty to a death caused by his greatest and most lasting product. He confesses what he’s lost to Peggy, but what's of value is the permission slip she’s been tasked to verbally sign: “Come home.” He will come home, and with a great new idea at that. But as a central figure, Don finds solace in the product -- his aching for love and his crying out for fulfillment can be patched up only by framing it accordingly.
It’s the magic of selling. At the center of Mad Men was Don, its enigmatic principal with tenuous relationships to all of those around him. But his impact is what each secondary character orbited around, right until the series’ closing minutes. Back in the first season, Don coldly described Pete’s life trajectory, spot-on right to the magnificent hair loss. Pete was consummately unlikable in the show’s early days, if only because he wasn’t interested in making the effort to change that fact. But he escapes Don’s words -- and his own life trajectory -- by running to wholesomeness, with Trudy by his side. Peggy’s enamoration of Don is finally quelled by her sudden realization of love for Stan. Most tragically, Don’s ghost hangs over the final image of Betty, cigarette in-hand, with Sally staking her claim in the parental role behind her. Here, his ex-wife’s expression is mild and muted, her eyes damp with a twinge of regret. But even she, before a cruel twist of fate, found her own, independent form of happiness. She moved beyond him.
But therein lies the stinging cynicism of Mr. Weiner’s conclusion. Don sold -- nay, embodied -- forms of happiness, fulfillment and identity that permeated through his world. His swagger was simply intoxicating -- Peggy aspired to it, Betty fell for it and Pete tried to equal it. Each had to escape his shadow for that chance at what Don calls “happiness.”
And why? Because Don Draper is a myth. Don Draper is a construct. And Don Draper is a product of the American spirit. He knows what happiness looks like -- he’s clear on how to pitch it and sell it, but not how to live it. In “Person to Person,” he looks inward to acknowledge his “miserable life,” to paraphrase the terrifically terrible Lou Avery. He doesn’t see the three women -- not Betty, Peggy, or Sally -- nor anybody else. He doesn’t see California, and he doesn’t see New York. He doesn’t see the ‘60s, and he doesn’t see the ‘70s. He sees two things: New Age America, literally and figuratively, and Coke. He’s clear on the market and the product -- it’s where he finds his peace. He sells what he feels, if only because the two ends of that process are so completely entwined.
Where everyone around him attains meaningful change, Don transcends. He’s always pushing ahead to the point where he can’t stop. The tragic irony is within that conceit, in that glorious moment of meditation. Don has realized his true self, stripping Dick Whitman by expunging his last vestiges. He’s been released by his daughter, his love and his protege. And he may know the art of the sell better than anybody. But he’s just human enough to fall for it. We all are.
Within that definitively American quest is a code: Go on to that next big thing. Never stop. Something better awaits. Don won’t stop, but he probably won’t ever reach anything “better,” either. It’s a world of manufactured ideas and promises, one of which he is a co-creator. He creates these solutions to express his need for them, and in effect meets the greater, encompassing desire for them. It’s a vision brought to life in the tableaux that surrounds Don as we say goodbye -- images of Joan in her new office, Peggy working with Stan by her side, Pete rushing to his new life with Trudy.
But we’re not left with them -- we’re left with Don, coming to terms with himself as the greatest spokesperson of the American Way. He’s the seller, the deceiver, the storyteller, the creator. He is the architect of manipulated feeling -- the feeling we all crave, and that we all succumb to. He’s discovering it from the outside, and experiencing it from within. It’s who he is. He’s been conditioned by the forces of market and product.
It’s a twisted way to see the world. And yet, as Matthew Weiner has demonstrated over seven remarkable years, it’s the only way we know how.