“I have big things coming.
You have no idea.”
Pete Campbell is the kind of guy who trades in
a wedding present to buy a rifle instead,
“Same price as a chip 'n' dip!”
who coerces his neighbor’s young au pair into sleeping with him,
"I went to a lot of trouble to solve your dress problem.
And I think I at least deserve to see it on you."
and who -- underneath his clenched, sunny demeanor --
is always seething about something.
“How are you?”
“Not great, Bob!”
He’s got a petulant attitude
“You don’t want me to have what I want.”
and a permanently self-satisfied expression that makes you want to clock him.
In other words, Pete starts out as the most unsympathetic character on Mad Men.
"Wouldn't be a sin for us to see your legs.
And if you pull your waist in a little bit, you might look like a woman."
But over time the desperation that makes him so unlikable
also humanizes him.
“But I don't seem to exist.
No one feels my existence.”
Because behind Pete’s smarmy facade,
there’s a man who feels deeply insecure and powerless.
“Why does it have to be like this?
Why can't I get anything good all at once?”
He wants to make a mark,
“Have you seen these pictures of Earth from space?”
“Of course.”
“Do they make you feel small or insignificant?”
He wants to make a mark, but he can’t seem to break through.
And most of us can probably relate to this more than we’d like to admit.
So as easy as it is to look down on this character,
we have to consider -- what does Pete Campbell reveal about us?
“Please tell me you don’t pity me.”
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When Mad Men starts, Pete is a thorn in Don Draper’s side.
"I think I did something good and you got the compliment for it."
He’s dying for Don’s approval,
“It matters to me that you're impressed.”
which makes Don even more resistant to giving it.
“Let’s take it a little slower.
I don’t want to wake up pregnant.”
The irony is that Pete is like Don in a very fundamental way:
he has a seemingly perfect life which actually makes him miserable.
“I have nothing, Don.”
But unfortunately for him, Pete doesn’t get the consolations
that Don uses to distract himself from that deeper unhappiness.
Pretty every woman on the show swoons over Don,
while Pete can’t even close the deal with the teen girl in his driver’s ed class.
Don exudes smooth confidence and control,
"The greatest thing you have working for you is
not the photo you take or the picture you paint.
It's the imagination of the consumer."
while Pete makes a fool of himself.
Don comes over to Pete’s house for a dinner party
and easily fixes the broken sink that Pete couldn’t figure out.
"The supply was turned all the way up.
It forces the valve."
"But it stopped the leak!"
"That was a coincidence."
And Don usually gets away with things,
while Pete’s indiscretions are always coming out in humiliating ways,
like when the neighbor he sleeps with comes running to his and Trudy's house.
“All I wanted was for you to be discreet.
She lives on our block!”
or when he sees his father-in-law at a brothel.
"Hello."
"Good night."
We talked in our Peggy video about how Peggy embodies the best parts of Don.
Well, Pete seems to embody the worst parts.
Pete’s flaws can’t be romanticized, because they’re not masked by
flawless good looks, creative genius, or charisma.
Don’s tortured persona is alluring;
while Pete's misery just comes across as pathetic.
And Pete’s sins somehow feel worse to us, too,
because, whereas Don had to make his own way,
"Weren't you trying to get a break once?"
Pete’s been handed an easy, privileged life.
“I deserve it.”
“Why?
Because your parents are rich?
Because you went to prep school and have a $5.00 haircut?
You've been given everything.
You've never worked for anything in your life.”
In fact Pete’s good family name is the only reason Sterling Cooper keeps him
around
in Season One.
“We lose him, we lose our entree to Buckley, DKE, the Maidstone Club, the Century Club,
Dartmouth, Gracie Mansion sometimes.
It's a marquee issue for us.”
Even Pete’s infidelities feel sadder and seedier
because Trudy’s an incredibly caring, supportive wife,
and their marriage is much better than what Don has with Betty.
“This becomes a home the minute you walk through that door.”
Yet despite all this, you might argue
that we’re kidding ourselves to feel we’re so above the guy.
Because as show creator Matthew Weiner has said,
"We'd all like to be Don but actually we are all Pete.”
Everybody wants to be Don Draper, but no one really is.
And if you’re trying to be Don but failing, that makes you Pete.
"Why does it always have to be like this?
Why can't I get everything good all at once?"
Pete’s petty immaturity, insecurities, selfishness, and struggles in the rat race
are all things we dislike in others,
"You're a grimy little pimp."
but if we're honest,
they’re behaviors many of us might have to admit to being guilty of.
And this is the uncomfortable way that Pete hits close to home.
He reflects the things we don't like in ourselves.
So our visceral disdain for Pete Campbell is
at least in part a reaction to this unflattering mirror of us onscreen.
"Let me speak to the manager."
"Of the entire store?"
"Of the Republic of Dresses!"
Pete, Don and Roger Sterling represent three different eras of white manhood:
Roger is part of the Greatest Generation that fought in World War II.
"Are you drunk?"
"Pearl Harbor Day.
Show some respect."
Meanwhile, Don and Pete are part of the Silent Generation --
people who were children and teens during the Great Depression and WWII.
As adults, they were known for being career-minded
rather than getting involved in activism.
But even if they're technically part of the same generation,
Don and Pete are almost a decade apart in age,
and there are some key differences between them.
"How old are you, Pete?"
"I just turned 26."
"I bet the whole world looks like one great brassiere strap
just waiting to be snapped."
Don served in the Korean War before becoming a self-made man.
Pete is in-between times -- he came in too late
to get the glory of fighting for his country,
and too early to become a counterculture hippie.
His confusion about how he fits into his times
comes across in his external transformations --
he goes from having a picture perfect marriage
and a preppy style that seems stuck in the 50s,
to being a seedy LA 70s guy with sideburns.
“The city is flat and ugly and the air is brown,
but I love the vibrations.”
“You not only dress like a hippie, you talk like one.”
And internally, he feels in-between too -- he’s constantly anxious to prove himself
and starving for recognition,
"He basically said I cared too much about my clients
and they noticed it.
How could that be bad?"
but he lacks purpose or true direction.
He doesn’t have a specific passion, really,
so he tries to get in on everyone else’s.
He tries to pitch his own idea to a client
to prove that he’s creative like Don.
"I have good ideas.
In fact, I used to carry around a notebook and a pen, just to keep track.
Direct marketing?
I thought of that.
It turned out it already existed, but I arrived at it independently."
And when Ken gets a short story published,
Pete forces Trudy to see her ex-boyfriend who works in publishing
to try to get his own story in print.
“I could have gotten you in The New Yorker or in the Encyclopedia Britannica if I wanted
to.”
“So why didn't you?”
“Why would you do that to me?”
Pete’s burden is heightened because his rich family sees him
as a disappointment,
and can’t understand why he struggles.
“We gave you everything.
We gave you your name.
And what have you done with it?”
But underneath the competitiveness,
Pete’s lonely, and really just looking for some connection;
he has a very human need to be appreciated.
"Did I miss something?"
"No.
Don and I talk all the time when you're not around.
In fact, we're gonna do it right now."
When he loses the fistfight with Lane in Season Five,
he’s not just upset because he wanted to prove himself,
but also because he was hoping deep down
that one of his coworkers would stand up for him.
“This is an office.
We're supposed to be friends.”
At the beginning of the series Pete is stepping into a very adult life
he’s not ready for --
he’s getting married, despite not really wanting to,
“Of course I love you.
I’m giving up my life to be with you, aren’t I?”
and expecting big instant success at work
without really knowing what he’s doing.
"You're good at your job.
Cooper loves you.
What's the hurry?"
"It's been two and a half years."
So, right from the start, we see Pete self-sabotaging
in response to these roles he doesn’t feel equipped for:
he sleeps with Peggy just days before his wedding.
“I’m getting married on Sunday.”
“I heard that.”
“You must think I’m a creep.”
And ironically the more that Pete’s life fits the image of success --
the beautiful/rich wife and kid, good job, big house --
the more dissatisfied he seems.
His move to the suburbs triggers a dark existential crisis.
“Tammy could drown.”
“What is wrong with you?”
“I'm sorry.”
“This doom and gloom, I'm tired of it.”
and he acts out by sleeping with a fellow commuter’s troubled wife.
"We just happened to have the same problem."
It’s as if Pete can’t stand this life because he feels like a fraud,
a child wearing grown-up shoes that don’t fit yet.
Pete needs a lot of time and new, messy experiences --
like working his way up the corporate ladder,
separating from Trudy, and briefly relocating to California --
so that he can gradually become the man he wanted to be at the start.
Pete grows and achieves when he stops trying to make an impression on everyone,
and just buckles down and works hard.
He impresses Don by being ahead of the curve.
“You've been ahead on a lot of things.
Aeronautics, teenagers, the Negro market.
We need you to keep us looking forward.”
And he becomes a true asset to the agency,
much more dependable and high-achieving than someone like Roger.
“You squeezed me off of it, Roger.
You wanted it all to yourself.”
“He would have never let this happen!”
So Pete’s anxious insecurity leads to
what ends up becoming truly impressive about him.
He doesn’t just rest on his laurels like other privileged white men might,
because he has something to prove.
“‘Stable’ is that step backward between successful and failing.”
With his infamous receding hairline,
"Is he going bald?"
Pete’s probably the character who ages most visibly
over the course of Mad Men, but he also matures more than most.
In Season One, one of Pete’s lowest moments is
trying to blackmail Don into promoting him.
“You're not who you say you are, and there's obviously a reason.”
“Come on.”
“I would like you to reconsider my qualifications.”
But in Season Four, we see how much Pete’s grown
when he kills an account with North American Aviation and takes the blame,
all because the account could expose Don as a deserter.
"Well all you had to do was hold their hands and jerk them off.
Is that so hard to do, Campbell?"
By the end of the series he’s no longer an annoying suck-up,
but someone who has the right to be proud of his accomplishments
and who's friendly with his coworkers.
“We both know they're never going to take me seriously over there.”
“They don't know who they're dealing with.”
He’s evolved enough to win Trudy back
and give his family a fresh start in Kansas.
"I want to start over.
And I know I can.
I'm not so dumb any more."
Pete still isn’t quite the hero of this story,
but he's become someone we can respect, appreciate,
and emphasize with.
So if we all have a Pete Campbell in us,
his ending point tells us
that it’s possible to get past those hangups and insecurities
and become more.
Getting the career recognition and personal happiness we crave
is a much harder, messier journey than we might think when we start out,
and along the way it’s easy to wish we could just take a shortcut.
But Pete’s arc teaches us that in the end,
it’s infinitely more rewarding and character-building
to earn that success, fair and square.
“We're not even through half our lives.
And even if we are, we're entitled to more.”
This is Daniel José Older.
Daniel is the New York Times best-selling author
behind the Shadowshaper series, the Bone Street Rumba series and more.
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