La Cosa Waspa

With one and a half seasons behind it, and its themes better understood than some of the crabbier initial reviews anticipated, Kyle Smith weighs in on AMC’s Mad Men:

When Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), a ferrety young colleague of Don’s, finds out Don’s secret and informs the head of the firm, he is angrily brushed off. It’s Pete who comes off looking bad, just as it seems unwise for Don’s wife Betty (the fetching January Jones) to talk to a shrink. Mad Men’s rule is omerta in a station wagon, La Cosa Waspa.

Perhaps Don’s finest hour came in Season One when his friend and boss Roger, felled by a heart attack during an office tryst, was being carried to an ambulance. Half-conscious, Roger moaned his new inamorata’s name. Don grabbed him by the hair, slapped him in the chops and said, “Mona. Your wife’s name is Mona.” Can men ever have been this manly?

When Don meets beatniks, he spends the evening getting high with his suit jacket on. Yet it’s not the fraudulent philanderer but the beardy coffeehouse revolutionaries who are ridiculous. Ironic or no, the show makes the case for repression that has seldom been heard in popular culture since Gary Cooper hung up his spurs: straighten your tie, stash your problems in the bottom drawer, pour another gimlet and carry on.

Along with Robert Morse’s classic “A man is whatever room he is in” motif, the scene with the beatniks that Kyle mentions above ends on one of my favorite Mad Men moments.

Draper starts to leave in a huff. (If he waited a minute and a huff he’d be Groucho Marx of course.) But the cops are investigating a domestic disturbance in the apartment next door, and the beatniks (and Draper, if I recall correctly) have consumed a fair amount of cannabis and other substances that only way-out bebop cats like Gil Evans and Dave Brubeck would ever touch. So one of the proto-hippies tells Don that he can’t leave–the cops are still outside.

“You can’t”, Draper tersely replies, putting on his suit jacket, buttoning the collar of his Paul Stuart shirt, straightening his narrow New Frontier tie, and donning his Lock & Co. Trilby.

For those of us who put our emphasis on the bourgeois half of David Brooks’ Bobos In Paradise equation, it was a tremendous little moment.