Looking Back at ‘Tomorrowland’: The Mad Men Season Finale
There are two approaches to writing about Mad Men. Number one: this is a serious show about America and I am a serious person so I will think about what it all means. As in:
“Maybe it’s not all about work,” Dr. Miller says to Don Draper at the start of “Tomorrowland,” the end of the latest Mad Men season
The second approach:
Did you not just love it when Peggy stomped into Joanie’s office after getting the news about Don and grabbed a cigarette and vented? She’s mad at Don for stealing her limelight again of course, but was that heartbreak in her face when she realized he was in L-O-V-E? And then there was Betsy’s awesome coat at the end when she was in the house with Don alone. She’s always so put together, even when she’s falling apart!
They’re both correct, which explains the show’s appeal. It’s a thoughtful disquisition on the days before the counterculture began its transformation of the post-war order, and also a soap with exquisite production values.
Also a long sodden hymn to drinking. Oh, we see the blackouts, the barfing, the hangovers, but the show still loves its drinking. When Don finds a bottle in the back of a cabinet in a house he hasn’t lived in for a long time, the audience grins: it’s like he’s a magician who can conjure whiskey out of nowhere! No, he just hid bottles. The iTunes version of the show, for example, always encourages the viewer to download the “Mad Men Cocktail Culture” app for your smartphone. It sounds like Dungeons and Dragons for hipsters. A Level Six Client is attacking your presentation! What do you do? You cast the dice, consult the rules, and it says “go to your office and drink straight liquor.” That’s probably the Cocktail Culture answer for everything, right? Drink, smoke, look good in a Brooks Brother suit with a skinny tie or a chic dress, trade repartee, listen to Brubeck on the stereophonic record player. Be one of those people the hippies killed off. Be swank. Be sharp.
This was the appeal of Mad Men when it premiered — unapologetic daytime substance abuse, old-line patriarchal values with a splash of va-va-voom sexiness, Joanie’s hips ringing back and forth like the toll of the Liberty Bell. The rough beast of Betty Friedan was still slouching towards New Rochelle to be born. Kennedy was alive. The jet-age was blending into the space-age. You could not only smoke, but smoke indoors. Hats and girdles. It was everything we were told was horrible about the past — but they all seemed so adult. Not because they had more freedom, but because they had less. They might not have liked what they had to be, but they knew what was expected.
Naturally, this led to dress-up parties. People got together and wore vintage clothing and drank and enjoyed the show with like-minded fans, just as people got together during Twin Peaks and ate donuts and drank damn-good coffee. If Mad Men was just a primetime soap with campy overtones, this might have made more sense. But it’s like dressing up in Louis XVI-era garments to enjoy a show about the days when the monarchy was dissolved. It’s all fun and games until someone loses a client, or a head. In fact it’s not all fun and games at all.
Or are we giving it too much credit? Look at the characters: A man with a secret past. A dissatisfied wife. A tosspot rich guy. A plucky working gal. It could be Shakespeare; could be a 30s musical. Could be a forgotten novel from 1926 or 1977, a miniseries with Peter Strauss. The characters aren’t new. The plots could be seen as a meandering mess of infidelity and drinking interspersed with vignettes about selling swimsuits. Ordinary. Maybe. But I suspect people will be studying Mad Men long after The Sopranos is considered just another serving of goomba gumbo, and Lost regarded as a long con not even a 300-page wiki can untangle. Three reasons:
1. Don Draper. As played by Jon Hamm, Draper is a throwback archetype — manly, not macho; reticent, confident, with Bond-like skill with the ladies. His life is a series of events built on a lie; he built a new persona out of the bones of a dead man, and clothed it with the things he wanted to become until his new life was as authentic as his old one. He is faithless and stalwart. A drinker but not a drunk. A heel, but not a cruel man. He has a deep instinctive grasp of his profession and the culture in which it thrives, but little insight on himself beyond bleak morning-after reproach.
2. Its setting in the world of advertising, the great collaborative narrative of American culture. You can learn as much about an era from the ads in a magazine as you can from the stories. It’s what we want to have, want to need, want to be — or at least what we think we want. As Don said in the first season:
Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is OK. You are OK.
It’s difficult to show the creative process on screen — in movies about composers, they’re always pounding away on big black pianos, scowling, hair in their eyes, Creating! Painters frown at canvases and stab with the brush; novelists stare at a typewriter until the ah-hah moment, then it’s clackety-clack until the brilliant work is complete. Mad Men makes it clear advertising is an art form, complete with a performance before the clients, who might as well be European royalty listening to Salieri go on and on. Skyscrapers, jazz, movies, and advertising: American specialties.
3. The era. The show attracted people with the details of the post-war days, and it got so many things right: the fussy messy decor of the Draper’s suburban house, the sleek modernism of the offices, the rococo interiors of the bars and steak houses. It’s pre-rock — or, more accurately, it depicts a time before rock was the default soundtrack for modern life. It’s square: the free-thinkers, with their turtlenecks and BO and reefer parties and talk about civil rights are still confined to hovels in the Village, and while New York affords them the freedom to pretend they’re the vanguard of a new world, they’re just the latest iteration of the bohos who’ve populated the margins of big cities since Rome was founded.
* * *
The season finale showed everything changing, as it always does. Don is getting married. The firm is still shaky. Roger is skating. Joan is pregnant. The worst doesn’t happen; something better still beckons ahead. Everyone trudges along; another year rolls past. But some things do end, and towards the conclusion of the show we find Betty and Don in the empty kitchen of their marital home. Everything has been stripped away except for a box, a bottle, a glass, and each other. Betty has contrived to be present when Don comes to show the house, because she’s having trouble with her husband and wants attention from Don.
“Everything isn’t perfect,” Betty says. It should be and can be but it isn’t.
“Then you’ll move again,” says Don, and he smiles.
There’s the essence of the show: the culture seems solid from our perspective, but this is America, after all. Pick up and go. Change your name. Roll out a new campaign. Fitzgerald be damned, you can have as many acts in your life as you wish. It’s an optimistic idea — but the show ends with a sleepless Don turning to look out the window of his apartment at the empty room across the alley. His unreadable expression suggests he knows someone will walk through that room and he will be tempted again. The curse of plenty; the lure of more, of the next new thing. It’s perfect in Tomorrowland. But it’s never open today.
Also, wasn’t that California diner great? And Meghan’s dresses are so much sexier than Betty’s.
So which 1960s ad agency drank more? Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce or McMahon and Tate?
Thank you James. Your take on pop culture is always fresh and entertaining.
After the show I fell asleep and Don Draper showed up in my dream. I tried to lend him my David Ogilvy book, but he was pretty burned out.
I was in the restaurant business in the early 70′s fresh from college and the 2 or 3 martini lunch was still in vogue and acceptable. Having a drink as a manager with a regular was expected and the cocktail waitress dress code was unashamed and more in tune with the Vegas of today and we guys all wore the coat and tie. Can’t imagine what it was like ten years earlier in the 50s or 60s, but it all went away.
Then as the new age and new story came along that I never forget…the sales manager says to his sales guys and a few, but not many sales gals “If you decide to have a martini at lunch tomorrow make sure it is gin and NOT ever vodka….at least that way when you meet your next client after lunch they will know from your breath you are drunk and not stupid.”
Ever changing, ain’t life a treat.
Yeah, the good old days. Being divorced and under 40 in the 60′s was seriously scandalous. You got re-married as fast as humanly possible, because if you didn’t, as a “divorcee” you were suspect, assumed to be on the prowl (after all, you weren’t a virgin anymore) and not to be left alone near any husbands, and if, god forbid, you owned any black underwear, your social fate was sealed in stone. But, damn did everyone dress well outside the house! Oh, and alcohol and ciggies were consumed in mass quantities, of course, at every occasion. It was a fun decade until about ’68 and guys started to grow their hair long and look like Jesus on purpose. I remember wondering at the ripe old age of about 9 in 1970, when things were going to go back to normal. I figured it can’t stay this way forever, everyone looking like shit, compared to how awesome my Dad still looked in a suit and skinny tie, coming home from work everyday until the age of leisure suits and elvis glasses ruined that. It took till about 1982 for the hair to come off the guys and for them to start looking hot again. Then they all started to get goatees, then just get fat, now fat with shaved heads like gang bangers. I’m really, really not happy with the thick hipster beards and huge black glasses that are starting to show up. I hope it fades away fast. Orthodox Jew is NOT a good fashion look, sorry. Andrew Sullivan, I’m talking to you.
Short hair, clean shaven, suit wearing, aftershave sporting manliness is ever swoon-worthy.
Very good and entertaining comment until you got to the part about “Orthodox Jew” not being a good fashion look. You might not know that being an Orthodox Jew is not a fashion statement. Not quite sure how you came up with that as an example.
For the reading-impaired, a clarification: “[Notice To Guys Who Are Not Orthodox Jews, But Have Adopted the "Black-Clothes-Bushy-Beard-Thick-Plastic-Rimmed-Glasses" Hipster Style That Somewhat Resembles the Stereotypical Uniform of the Orthodox Jewish Male:] Orthodox Jew is NOT a good fashion look.”
For actual Orthodox Jews, it’s not an option, of course; much less a “fashion look.” But then, we all knew that.
“Stereotypical Uniform of the Orthodox Jewish Male.” Wow! On a roll here, aren’t we??
My profuse apologies. I was thinking of the Haredim/Hasidim, for what it’s worth.
No, *I* don’t like *your* behavior; *you* change to suit *my* personal preferences.
Becks, I’m a guy and I can’t stand neckties, but what you wrote was profound.
Mr. Lileks – thank for this. I don’t dress up for the show but I am enchanted and engrossed by Mad Men in a way that only matches my infatuation with Twin Peaks. I won’t attempt to dissect the show – I am too far out of high school English. How come we were never asked to analyze literature that was as vital to a teenager as this show is to me now in middle age?
There are so many themes in the show but for me, the show is about outsiders and the irrelevance of the past in making your life. And this American idea is being set in a very American decade.
I have a special connection to the setting of Mad Men. My uncle left our hometown in Canada – north of your beloved Fargo, to seek fame and fortune in New York. He spent the sixties (and more) at BBDO – Batten Barton Durstine and Osborn. The name rolled out of my head as I watch episodes of Mad Men, as if my father and I were back in our kitchen discussing my glamorous uncle. I bought the first two seasons for my uncle but I am not sure that his DVD player is hooked up there in Brooklyn. It is just serendipity that Don works with Peter Campbell – my uncle is Dennis Campbell.
Finally, speaking as a Canadian partnered with a woman of French Canadian heritage, I must commend Don on his choice of Megan – she is gorgeous, very sweet and she suggests that there is more to her than meets the eye. But my eye is very well met with her.
Oh and Don/Jon… we are all still searching. I look forward to season 5 and for more Lileks commentary on it. But I am going to be like an old hippie – I will be sort of sad when the sixties finally does come to an end.
I think Mad Men is a throw back to the last generation that women were an essential part of life. Feminism and family courts have reduced women to pure sex objects.Unless things change drastically, this will be the last generation that men with with a promising future get married. Modern women don’t cook, clean or raise kids. A smart young man will get a mistress, knowing it’s way cheaper to pay up front than wait for the letter from Gloria Allred.
ck, a wannabe Shiria practicer, if I have anything to say about it women will NEVER go back to the 60′s. “You could not only smoke, but smoke indoors.” MEN could, women never. I remember my mom sitting at a lunchroom counter savoring her coffee and last cigarette before she got home because “Women don’t smoke on the street.” I remember serving my boss and his clients with coffee made by my own little hands, and savoring the smoke rising from their pipes and cigarettes…..because I couldn’t have a smoke except in the “girls’” restroom. I remember all the bosses having a well-stocked credenza in their offices and driving home half-sloshed. It was quite an era…for men like ck and Don Draper. Don’t get me wrong; I love the show and the fashion, just not the role that women were forced to play.
Smart men understand math. They know it all comes down to the amount of un-negoiated for sex vs. the misery endured to get it.Negoiated for sex is about 2 1/2% better than masturbation, well maybe not that much.
If I wanted to see two Democrats fight, I’d throw a trillion-dollar bill out my window.
That diner was the former Johnnie’s Broiler drive-in in Downey, recently restored and refurbished by Bob’s Big Boy. The former owners tried to tear it down in the middle of the night, to build a car dealership or somesuch, but the neighborhood folks got the city to declare it a landmark, and Bob’s swooped in to make it whole again.
The drive-in was Johnnie’s in its last iteration; but, in the context of the time of the episode, it was still its original Harvey’s Broiler. Just hope that it can survive again.
Did you really compare The Sopranos unfavorable to Mad Men? Oh my God, what a load. Mad Men is unwatchable. The Sopranos is the best TV show ever produced in America. Mad Men is nothing more than a retro fitted Dallas, but with smirking and winking about how horrible things used to be, inviting its audience to feel superior to those Cro Magnons of the Kennedy era.
Such a shame you can’t enjoy MAD MEN with the rest of us, over that re-make of THE GODFATHER. Actually there is no comparison and no need to make one. They both speak to their own chunk of eras gone by but recalled with nostalgia. I am always suspicious of the “either/or” argument as there are many ramifications of both.
Agreed. The Soprano’s wasn’t even the best HBO show at the time. How about The Wire.
Was I the only one who thought “Groundhog Day” when the alarm clock started playing “I Got You Babe”? As if Don’s new marriage will be just the same thing all over again.
Nice catch. I’ll bet that was a very intentional anachronistic play by the producers.
I’m a week behind, so I just watched the finale last night. I too thought of Groundhog Day and can’t get “I Got You Babe” out of my head this morning!
I love Mad Men as it is true to the period from the mores to the set designs to the costumes. As a teenager in the 60s I can relate to the dress code, the smoking and drinking, and the attitudes which my parents portrayed. Living through the “revolution” as a college student in the late 60s and early 70s, the Mad Men period now seems as distant as Victoria England.
Clearly, Don Draper is seeking stability amidst the turmoil all around him. I believe Don saw in Megan someone who is discreet (her comment about not crying in an earlier episode), good with kids (a key issue with Don at this stage of his life), unlike Betty composed in minor ordeals (witness her unflappable action during the milkshake spill), intelligent yet subdued and with enough sex appeal to satisfy Don‘s ego and position. This set her apart from Faye who was Don’s equal in intelligence and ambition. Post-feminism, Don would have married Faye but in the mid-60s Megan is the safer choice.
–It’s not just the typical American memory Mad Men shows:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a_time_in_afghanistan
Record stores, Mad Men furniture, and pencil skirts — when Kabul had rock ‘n’ roll, not rockets.
…
But it is important to know that disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable. I want to show Afghanistan’s youth of today how their parents and grandparents really lived.
I started watching Mad Men this year. It seemed very slooooow, until I saw the episode where they threw a fake party for the odious Lucky Strike guy. The next morning, Don and Roger were joking in German accents about how much the Fuhrer enjoyed his birthday party. Clever.
The show isn’t exactly a thrill a minute when you are watching it, but it does stay with you.
I think that there are a few clever hooks that keep us engaged: 1) a mysterious, charismatic, unsympathetic central character; 2) the cool clothes; 3) the way that it makes aging boomers feel morally superior; and 4) characters with serious shades of gray.
Notice also that the younger characters in the office are generally more sympathetic. Another clever sop to the boomers, who remember those thrilling years that they started to rebel against the man.
I think we also look back on a time when we were thin and America ruled the world. Now, we are fat, sloppy and in hock.
Mad Men explained and show arcs telegraphed through history:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2010/08/madison_avenue.html
Is the diner in the last episode the same diner that was in Pulp Fiction? It sure looked like it to me.
I believe the diner used in Pulp Fiction is located on the West-Side of L.A.
Harvey’s was not so much a diner, as a drive-in, with car-hops on roller-skates and the whole-nine-yards: It was a noted “cruise spot” in the day.
–It’s not just the typical American memory Mad Men shows:
foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a_time_in_afghanistan
Record stores, Mad Men furniture, and pencil skirts — when Kabul had rock ‘n’ roll, not rockets.
…
But it is important to know that disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable. I want to show Afghanistan’s youth of today how their parents and grandparents really lived.
I liked this take on the show. What I was struck by in the last episode (and later in all the commentary on the show) is the way that Joan and Peggy reacted to Don’s announcement. They just dismiss Megan as a secretary. Whearas I think the show made it clear that Megan was a substantial figure but in a different way then Faye, Peggy, and Joan. The show has been showing the emergence of a feminist perspective, but season finale struck me as pointing to the ugly side of it. I for one, wish the couple all the best.
How many unhappy women who know that he’s an imposter can Don Draper leave in his wake until there are consequences?
Great post as usual, James. Your take on MM is a lot like Ron Replogle’s, whose written a series of great Mad Men posts. See, e.g., http://www.ronreplogle.com/2010/10/mad-men-annas-bequest.html
The creative revolution had hit advertising by 1964. Creatives were wearing jeans. And the creative had a new, informal feel. The show, Mad Men, is stuck back in the late fifties. Headlines like,”70% of divorces end up in marriage” were commonplace in New York.” “We try harder” had been adopted by Avis Rent-a-car. Next season the show should try to catch up to the times.
Perhaps that explains why Don’s agency is struggling? Seriously, Madmen is really brilliant at the little things.
My alternate take: the creators of Mad Men are laughing themselves silly at their inside joke. The show is about advertising, and they have sold you a load of bull.
They have discovered that if you can just make certain viewers feel like it is 1961, they will sit through absolutely anything, no matter how painfully boring and contrived and cliched. You’ll even get awards.
You just have to convince them — like a roadside sign blaring at them — that it is the early 60s and everything is ok. And they are ok.
I guess sometimes it’s easier to believe that that time didn’t exist (which it did, by the way) — makes our times more bearable.
I find the time frame interesting (1961-65). I hope they don’t fall for Hollywood cliches as we get into the hippy 60s. The lazy writer will have Joan’s husband killed in Vietnam. Or come back a psycho. Or a cripple.
Agreed. There’s a misconception that everyone in the 60s was a hippy. Not true. Most people didn’t even realize what was going on in NY and LA until after the fact when the hippy fashion trend trickled into middle America.
Mad Men is a great show. It’s compelling and well done. And the aesthetics are great — great clothes that are influencing today’s fashion with structured handbags, classy dresses, and skinny ties.
You are correct. Anti-Vietnam war protests were over-reported by the media in a way that made it seem like the entire country was engulfed in riots. Not so.
BTW, it’s hippie, not hippy.
A dissenting view, from someone who was born in 1950. I grew up in the 50s and the 60s and I liked those times. I had a happy childhood and my parents were fairly happy too. Sure, they had their moments of existential doubt and fear, but who doesn’t. Life ain’t easy, folks. I don’t like Mad Men because I don’t think it’s an accurate portrayal of the times. It’s a two-dimensional portrait of one aspect of the times. It’s too grim and for most people in America like wasn’t that grim all the time as it is in Mad Men. People weren’t preoccupied with existential crises. They had them, sure, but they didn’t live them out every hour of every day, as seems to be case in Mad Men. They had their lives to get on with, and they got on with them.
I don’t Lileks’ take on the show either. I know it’s practically heresy to say Lileks isn’t good on some occassions, but there, I said it. His article is overwrought, over-thought nonsense.
Mad Men reminds me of Dragnet. Two laughably lame caricatures of aspects of life in the 50-60s, one dealing with advertising, the other with law enforcement. Cardboard cutouts.
The minutes or hours Lileks spent writing his article are lost to him forever, poor fellow.
And your time spent reading and commenting on it?
I love how Mad Men has the 1960′s down to the smallest detail. In one episode, I spotted someone with one of those round metal picnic coolers with the plaid pattern on the outside. When I saw that cooler I said, “Hey, our family had one of those coolers!”
As a writer who worked in a large agency, I remember the heavy smoking, the carousing, the partying, the long hours, and people coming back from lunch at 3:00 totally sh*t-faced, then working until midnight or all weekend to meet a deadline.
And John Hamm is turning out to be a major talent. This guy is just getting started.
“Smart men understand math. They know it all comes down to the amount of un-negoiated for sex vs. the misery endured to get it. Negoiated for sex [sic] is about 2 1/2% better than masturbation, well maybe not that much.”
This is why “House”, where most of the current dialog between House and Cuddy is about negotiating for sex, has jumped not just the shark, but the Great White.
I will forever be grateful to “Mad Men” for having a gynecologist smoking while performing an exam. Or was the cigarette just afterward? No matter. No question “I Got You, Babe” was an homage to “Groundhog Day” because Don was in bed just like Bill Murray’s character was every day when he heard the song. And it’s all a Groundhog repeat for Don. He’s already tired of his fiancee and is wistful about his wife.
Would love Mr. Lileks to debate Jonah Goldberg, who has snubbed the show. I love the show but some of the dialogue is over the top, and it’s only great acting that can pull it off. I’m thinking, for example, of Roger’s string of slurs against the Japanese that should have sounded as corny as Rickles at a Friars Club roast, but the actor made it seem like he was really angry.