“Who is Don Draper?”
The protagonist of Mad Men asks himself this question through all seven seasons of the
show.
Don’s inability to answer indicates the identity crisis at the heart of the story.
It’s highly symbolic that the man we know as Don is not, actually, Don Draper.
Even his name is a lie.
He was born Dick Whitman, but switched dog tags with a dead soldier in the Korean War,
to escape poverty.
“What’s your name?”
“Donald Draper.
But it used to be Dick Whitman.”
Don’s life now appears picture perfect, yet he's haunted by the disparity between
the past that feels shameful to him and the present that feels false.
He lives in fear of being exposed and losing his idealized life,
even though another part of him wants to destroy this whole illusion he works so hard to maintain.
“I’m tired of running.”
As a successful ad man who feels like a fraud, Don embodies the class struggles, masculine
ideals, and self-reinvention that defined 20th century America.
Don Draper represents the American ideal that everyone aspires to be but nobody is.
"People tell you who they are but we ignore it, because we want them to be who we want
them to be."
And all of Mad Men is about Don trying to fuse his two opposing selves.
The opening credits set up the entire show, announcing to us that this is a story about
a man who appears perfect, but feels like he’s dying inside.
We see a man in a beautiful world, who’s helped to create its images of perfection,
but himself feels like a dark shadow against that shiny surface,
and who’s falling deeper and deeper into a pit of despair.
“And it was also kind of confusing when people said they wanted to be him, because
it’s like, really?
I’d like to be the way he appears, but he obviously has a lot of problems.”
Don is the vision of a perfect man: brilliant, successful, handsome, and timeless.
What’s ironic is that he himself also wants to be like Don,
because while he’s succeeded in appearing so utterly confident and assured that he looks
like the ultimate insider to us,
he still feels unworthy.
Show creator Matthew Weiner has said that the show is about
“becoming white.
That’s the definition of success in America—becoming a WASP.
A WASP male"
Even though Don is, of course, already white, Weiner is using “whiteness” here to speak
about
the wealth, inclusion, and respect that is given to those people in the top tier of our
society.
“Being white” in this sense means feeling like an insider, but striving to belong and
attain this status
comes with the cost of concealing parts of ourselves that don’t fit in the mainstream
identity.
Many of the other characters on the show are outsiders in some way who have to erase a
part of themselves to be accepted.
“I’m American.
I’m really not very Jewish.”
The price these characters pay is disowning the things that make them unique or different.
“That family structure, the poverty, the evangelical christian background,
I have done everything I can to cast Don in what I believe as a hero of assimilation.”
Through showing what it takes to assimilate, Mad Men sets out to expose the lie that anyone
can make it in this country
while still maintaining a pristine past and no skeletons in the closet, apart from the
very rare exception,
only someone born white, male and with a lot of privilege even has a chance of living up
to that skeleton-free narrative.
But to rise to a higher social class, almost everyone has to lie, play dirty, or find a
way to work the system.
"I think you're a very important man in a very important agency.
Maybe I am risking my job, but I'd do anything to buy you a drink and hear anything you have
to say."
Don’s also represents a larger truth about 20th century America:
that many of our country’s greatest achievements came from sweeping dark deeds under the rug,
using and abusing others, and changing the narrative to portray ourselves in the best
possible light.
This is why historical events on the show often mirror the state of Don’s own life.
So the end of his marriage to Betty plays out alongside the JFK assassination and the
end of Camelot.
The tumultuous events of 1968 coincide with his slipping back into a cycle of self-destruction.
And the moon landing takes place as Don lets Peggy deliver the Burger Chef pitch in his
place.
Her speech reminds us of Don’s iconic Carousel pitch,
"Nostalgia."
"We can have the connection."
"A deeper bond with the product."
"That we're hungry for."
So the optimism of moon landing is reflected in Don’s encouraging the next generation
and getting a vision of the future through his protegé.
"I wouldn't do this if I didn't know you could."
When a neighbor jokingly asks --
“And who are you supposed to be?”
We understand that they wear figurative masks.
However convincing his persona, he still feels like a fraud, unsure what he is really aspiring
towards.
"I hate to break it to you, but there's no big lie.
There's no system.
The universe is indifferent."
But nobody can be Don, because there is no Don.
Don is an unreliable narrator of his own life.
He conceals his past from everyone, including us.
And so the show that centers on him is also unreliable in its narration.
It begins the first season by waiting to reveal the information that most stories would divulge
up front,
withholding these big facts in a way that feels almost deceitful.
At the end of the pilot, we’re surprised by the revelation of Don’s suburban family
life,
because no one has referenced his wife, Betty, or their children at all.
It’s as if they’re an afterthought, or the show -- like Don -- has its reasons for
not mentioning them to certain people they’d like to seduce.
And this isn’t the only thing Don’s hiding from us.
Flashbacks reveal his childhood in rural poverty: his prostitute mother died giving birth,
and he was raised by a resentful stepmother, and spent his teenage years in a brothel.
Don’s rise from poverty makes us think of iconic self-made men of the 20th century,
like Lee Iacocca, Sam Walton, and even President Bill Clinton.
But instead of owning that arc, Don denies his past,
"I respected your privacy -- too long.
Open it!"
"No."
so he can’t embrace the empowering nature of the rags to riches story.
The psychic scar of his childhood never goes away,
“Ain’t ya heard?
I’m a whore child.”
and his feelings of inadequacy both motivate his drive for success and make that success
never enough for him.
Don’s professional achievement and marriage to a beautiful, well-off woman like Betty
still don’t make him feel deserving of love.
“What would you do if you were me?
Would you love you?”
“I was surprised that you ever loved me.”
Taking a dead man’s identity was a rebirth for Don, but it was also the symbolic death
of Dick Whitman.
"Who's Dick?"
So the Don we know is hyper-aware of his own mortality,
"I'm living like there's no tomorrow -- because there isn't one."
like when he delivered his own casket to his family.
Don’s closeness to death makes him see deeper into the reality of his culture and his own
unhappiness,
and this inside is a source of his creative power.
His aspirational advertising pitches play on human longings for immortality, affection,
or togetherness.
"It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.
This device isn’t a space ship, it’s a time machine."
Don understands that he’s not really selling products, but deep emotional needs.
"But what is happiness?
It's a moment before you need more happiness."
Yet he is also cynical, well-aware that he’s selling false promises.
“What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.”
These universal human aches can hardly be answered by any garment or cigarette.
And like the man in the opening credits, Don ends up despondent whenever he buys into his
ad rhetoric,
and gives into that impulse to reach for surface-level images of happiness.
Before the series finale, rumors even circulated that Don would commit suicide, mirroring the
credits.
"I mean, are you just gonna kill yourself?"
His Royal Hawaiian Hotel pitch comes across as a suicide wish, exposing an existential
crisis.
“What happened to him?”
“He got off the plane, took a deep breath, shed his skin, and jumped off.”
In the same episode, we see his obsessive preoccupation with death.
When he witnesses his doorman’s heart attack, he responds as if it’s his own near-death
experience.
Yet Don still tries to connect this experience to his ad campaign.
“You must have seen something.”
“I guess there was a light.”
“Was it like hot, tropical sunshine?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you hear the ocean?”
So it’s clear that his creativity is deeply linked to his nihilistic impulses and existential
questioning.
It’s Don’s hiding his past, not the past itself, that poisons everything in his life.
Stealing Don Draper's identity was his ticket to a new life, but the rejection of his own
past isolates him.
“You know Don had nobody at their wedding.
Nobody at all.”
It’s as if he has no past, and this makes his behavior confusing to the people around
him,
because they have no idea where he’s coming from.
Shots of Don from behind emphasize how little we, or anyone else, knows him.
His secrecy makes him a stranger to everyone in his life.
“Then I realized I don’t know anything about you.”
And the original lie at the heart of his relationships makes other lies proliferate,
especially when it comes to sexual affairs.
What’s interesting is that it’s ultimately not his constant infidelity,
but Don’s basic lie about his identity that destroys his marriage to Betty.
“People change their names, Betts.
You did.”
“I did.
I took your name.”
She took the Draper name when they married, so their whole family is a fraud.
“You lied to me every day.
I can’t trust you.
I don’t know who you are.”
He thought he had to lie to create and maintain the perfect family life,
but his duplicity is actually what breaks up the family.
Don’s strategy for dealing with the past is denial and willful forgetting, and he encourages
others to adopt this technique.
“Peggy, listen to me.
Get out of here and move forward.
This never happened.
It will shock you how much it never happened.”
But while putting unpleasant realities out of his mind enables Don to get through the
day, it doesn’t actually work.
“I want to hear your heart.
Oh, I think it’s broken.”
“You can hear that?”
“I can’t hear anything.
I think it’s broken.”
Flashback scenes early in the show are often set in Don’s house, demonstrating how his
secret history disrupts his new life.
And when his brother, Adam, just wants to be a part of his life, Don can’t face this.
“You thought I was dead.
Just go back to thinking that.”
He is single-minded in moving forward with his life,
“I have a life, and it only goes in one direction: forward.”
but we start to see that he’s really standing still.
He hasn’t dealt with the ramifications of his past, so he keeps falling into the same
patterns of self-destructive behavior,
and reenacting the trauma of his childhood.
Sexual shame causes Don to seek out women like the prostitute who coerced him into bed
when he was a teenager,
and to go from one relationship to the next.
“I know the holidays are hard in your situation, but don’t worry.
You’ll be married again in a year.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry.
I always forget.
Nobody wants to think they’re a type.”
The young PFC’s lighter that he brings home from Hawaii in season six reminds him of taking
Lt. Draper’s dog tags.
Try as he might, he can’t get rid of the lighter,
“Rosa found this in the garbage.”
just like he can’t escape the consequences of his actions during the Korean War.
The song in the season five finale, Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice,”
reminds us of Don’s two identities, as well as his endless repetitions of the same mistakes.
Don’s self-imposed amnesia and his repetition of the same behavior again is meant to symbolize
the U.S.’s relationship to its past,
"More and more everyday about Vietnam.
Hope it's not another Korea."
and how denying painful or traumatic events in our history just leads to them resurfacing
in unexpected ways.
“How long are you going to go on like this?"
Mad Men shows us that acceptance of the past -- not denial -- is what allows people to
heal.
The scene where Betty confronts Don about his identity occurs in the dark,
visualizing his secrecy and fear of being exposed.
But once she unlocks Don’s private desk drawer and pulls out his childhood photos,
Betty brings his past into the light, and it’s never fully hidden again.
As the show goes on, Don’s friendship with Anna Draper offers unconditional love and
support,
"I know everything about you.
And I still love you."
and he begins to open himself up to other meaningful connections.
After his divorce, he reveals his true identity early in new romantic relationships.
Yet just admitting the literal truth of his past doesn’t mean that he’s honestly confronting
the inadequacy and deceitful habits that he’s developed to cope over the years.
After he starts an appropriate relationship with Dr. Faye, it’s not long before he dumps
her for his secretary, Megan,
and gives into old habits by cheating on her as well.
He finally hits rock bottom when his daughter, Sally, walks in on him having sex with a neighbor.
This moment kicks off a deeper period of self-reflection,
“You make me sick.”
leading Don to reveal his past during a business meeting.
“I was an orphan.
I grew up in Pennsylvania, in a whorehouse.”
Even though it’s a messy, inappropriate time to confess, this scene represents Don
ripping off the band-aid
and bringing his old self into his ad-man world.
He’s finally coming clean, even taking his children to see his dilapidated childhood
home.
By season seven, Don stops denying his history and torturing himself for things that can’t
be undone.
As Don meditates in the last scene of the show, the warm sunlight mirrors his smile.
Compared to the darkness when Betty confronted him about in season three,
this light tells us that Don has found an inner peace that wasn’t possible
when everyone around him was in the dark about who he was.
The identity crisis and the central question of the show “Who is Don Draper”
is really an examination of America’s identity in the later part of the 20th century, and
a call to action to us.
Mad Men emphasizes that alcohol and sex, and old-school denial, can’t heal trauma.
The only way forward is acknowledging the past -- whether that’s our personal past
or shared cultural history.
“I don’t know if Don Draper can change, but I think that there is a point where the
act of just admitting who you are is a big change.”
Don’s journey is about more than admitting his real name is Dick Whitman -- because by
the end of the show,
he’s not just Dick anymore, just like he’s not only Don Draper.
He’s a true self-made man.
When he calls the three most important women in his life in the series finale,
he’s reaching out for an honest connection that he once denied himself.
And episode title, “Person to Person,” tells us that Don is finally baring his true
self to the people he loves.
Don is implied to be the creator of the famous “Hilltop” Coca-Cola ad,
and for the first time his creativity comes from a unified place, instead of longing and
deep sadness.
He’s finally reconciled the suave Don Draper with the ashamed Dick Wittman.
The result is advertising at its best: hopeful, aspirational, painting a beautiful vision
of the future that confirms
there's hope for this new Don after all.