Mad Men: AMC's Brilliant Series and the High Cost of Nothing

[This is a Mad Men Season Two commentary. Season Two begins July 27 at 10:00 pm.on AMC.]

My father, on those gratefully rare and unnerving occasions when he was even around, used to do it, too, like the protean Don Draper (played with great subtly and nuance by Jon Hamm) in Mad Men: take out his Lucky Strikes, shake one out, and tamp either of its unfiltered ends against his Zippo. One, two, three, then magically flip it into his mouth and fire it up. The short and then extended click of the Zippo opening and closing possessed a familiar and yet exotic kind of music.

My father would often speak after his first or second inhale, again like Draper, and the smoke would spurt and kick from his lips like some odd but powerful animation—gauzy Morse Code, as it were, from a magical stunted burning stem. It was a frequent ceremony during every day of my father's short, demented life, and it suggested power and mystery.

Power and mystery: the squat pack itself, white with a red circle, and the words 'It's Toasted,' underneath the brand, in quotation marks no less. Whatever it meant, it had to be a good thing, right? Don Draper, by the way, being an ad man, created that slogan (fictively, of course). Don Draper himself—note his name—is fiction; not only does he create the fictions from which we consume our goods, circa 1960, but he his whole being is fiction. He is, literally, not Don Draper. If there is genius lurking about this wildly addictive show, it's all bundled into the Draper character: he's many beings to many people, and yet he doesn't really exist, or else he exists in a unique way to everyone—depending.

Thanks to Entertainment on Demand I just completed viewing all 13 episodes of Mad Men in two sessions. It was apparently first pitched to HBO, which passed, thankfully. And it ended up, for the better, on AMC. With HBO, its creators may have been less inclined to fill it up with the buttoned down, repressed feel it possesses, and needs. Maybe, on HBO, Mad Men sex would be explicit, who knows?—but the fact that the couplings in Mad Men are merely suggestive gives it the truest kind of eroticism—the kind that promises but never delivers: naked legs intertwined; the tentative fingers walking up woman's slightly raised skirt; brassiere and slip; garter; poodle skirts hemmed teasingly just at the knee.

Residing on AMC requires a presentation standard stricter than HBO's, and it's just that suppressed displeasure of its characters, or perhaps their only shyly revealed hedonism that makes the show work so perfectly. And yet it is one of the most adult television shows ever—every bit as real, harsh, sometimes funny, and intense as HBO's profane and openly violent masterpiece, The Wire. Mad Men's characters are real, even if some are built on caricatures. And its set pieces are stunning: simple and dead-on for the first season's time, 1960, and place, New York, city of dreams.

Not to mention that it is brilliantly acted, notably by Hamm, who is stoically chameleonic in his role as the shadowy creative genius behind Sterling Cooper, his advertising agency. January Jones, as Betty, Draper's frayed-nerves, ferociously insecure Grace Kelly-esque wife, is exquisite. And Kristina Hendricks' Sterling Cooper office manager turn is a strutting, shuffling amalgam of pity, power, and deeply buried empathy for the ad men who are whoring and drinking themselves to oblivion. She knows how to play this man's game, but she chooses to play from the periphery. No character actually says this, but the sway of her ass could alter the course of history

As noted, the first season takes place during 1960, and the election between Kennedy and Nixon becomes increasingly a part of the multiple plots, sexual and occupational, that romp through Mad Men. Draper's firm—these days he'd be called the rainmaker—may or may not be asked to assist in Nixon's campaign. Which was dull work then, political promotion, or at least the ad men think so. But either way, everyone's for Nixon, and that's the way it has to be. Nixon is a direct link to the ebbing social repression of the Eisenhower Administration, if cultural history is to be believed, a time when "proper," actually meant just that. And the ad men of the show are nothing if not proper (read: discreet) in their philanderings and social schemings. Kennedy is something new altogether: youth, perhaps freedom, an easing of the trappings society shackles these ad men with and which they massively drink and fuck themselves out of, if only momentarily. (Note: the one character explicitly not for Nixon is a divorced mother in Betty's neighborhood, which makes her a mystery and a kind of pariah and also one too seductive not to be explored in Season Two.)

Mad Men makes its points and illuminates its characters' lives so perfectly because of the time of its occurrence. We're between repression and what we believe is liberation. It is a great transitional time in our world. A few years earlier Kerouac and Ginsburg began nudging at society's seams with On the Road and Howl, respectively. The floodgates are about to open, say, around 1963, perhaps 1965. But not yet. Elvis is germinating. The Beatles are three years away. The counterculture is perched and ready to make a fool of itself a few years hence.

The seeming irony of Mad Men is that a less stringent outward probity might make for a more contented existence—one that could be lived from beneath the constrictions of a life properly lived in 1960. Sure, there'd still be extramarital couplings, deceit, social climbing. But it would perhaps have shed itself of some of the built in repression and guilt and aorta-glutting acts that weigh so heavily on these Mad Men that it ages them, in certain scenes, literally before our eyes. (Or then again, maybe it's not so ironic; perhaps we are all Mad Men and women at any point in time.)

A principal of the firm, Sterling, a hard drinker and devoted libertine suffers palpably and dramatically in the later episodes. (Let's put it this way: he is not the bronco bull rider he thinks he is.) His life passing before him, he cries out how much he loves his family, and he does; he's honest in an upright, expected way. He also loves screwing his secretary. Upon a short lived recovery he nonetheless evokes one of the rare moments of genuine honesty in Mad Men—that he never regretted a moment with his lover, Red, the blazingly gorgeous office manager Hendricks. It's one of the few honest exchanges between a man and a woman in Mad Men, and it's between a man and his mistress.

You sense in obvious or subtle ways how much these double and triple lives—homosexuality hovers ominously over one of the ad men who, undoubtedly, will battle its repressed destructions in future episodes—suffocates these ad men like a neck tie too tightly knotted. They are so "up tight," to use an expression that's a few years off, that you can almost feel their arteries hardening before your eyes.

Plenty of humor exists in Mad Men too, but thankfully it's mostly perverse.

Watching Mad Men you don't know whether to laugh or cringe, and the intent is that you do both. Lives are complicated. And if we believe we're the only ones ever trapped among career, love, desire, hope, fear—well, others have beaten us to it.

It's cringingly funny when Draper's wife, the stunning January Jones, is driving her station wagon, her two kids wallowing in the back seat and an attack of nerves (she's desperately afraid of losing the man she's married to but does not even know) causes her to hit a neighbor's tree, the kids bouncing around the back seat, unthethered. Car seats weren't even a distant dream then.

Or when Betty's in the kitchen sharing a smoke with her neighbor friend (everyone smokes in Mad Men) and her daughter runs into the kitchen screaming, with a laundry sack over her head and body. Mom's admonition is not to take it off for fear of suffocation, but to keep the noise down. Times, indeed, have changed; then again, in different ways, ways we can't even comprehend, they are the same.

The brilliance of how hollow this life is is presented over 13 episodes, and yet nowhere more so than in the first.

What you understand about this world you get, like a right uppercut to the gut, at the very end of the first episode. Here's the way it works. The episode opens with Draper consumed over the Lucky Strike campaign. He does not know how to sell a product the country is being warned about (whether he should be selling something that may cause cancer is a preposterous question; it's his job). During what may be the longest work day on record, he smokes, ponders the ad campaign, drinks heavily—if you don't have a bottle of whiskey in your drawer or an actual bar in your office you don't belong in this world—and ruminates over the Lucky client meeting the next day. How does he sell this product? He manages to work in a lovemaking session with a downtown bohemian artist (whose early compatibility with Draper has some larger meaning about the imminent intersection of two different worlds). Then he's back at his office until late, very late, pondering, thinking creatively about Lucky Strikes. And then, suddenly, he's on a train—where is this man going?—to his suburban house in Ossining, to his wife and two kids.

The first episode: the end. How does Draper live this life, these lives? How can this man have a home and family, in the suburbs no less?

Don Draper is at the center of this set piece. He's mysterious, charismatic, and the engine behind Sterling Cooper. His character is so fully human, and yet so empty, that it's frightening: he's everyman, really, because he has no real identity, just the intangible and yet incomplete desire to find one. He is who he has to be when he has to sell something, himself included. Some where in one of the later episodes the "Cooper" of the agency says, to this effect: in Japan they have a saying that you are the man you are in the room you're in. And it's true.

This first episode is so brilliant because it is so disquieting at the end. Draper's is not a double life, but a multiple life—having so many sides and angles that at times he becomes a caricature—but never fully. Mostly because Hamm inhabits him like the Spirit inhabits a Pentecostal.

That's what Mad Men is about: living your expected life and yet not fully abandoning the life you want. What you end up with is nothing, which is a high price to pay for nothing.

Every one in Mad Men is bereft of something and yet glutted with something else, and neither makes any sense or can be understood in the summer and fall of 1960.

The women in the show, hens as they're called, accept all this boorish behavior with a subversive, near peevish wish for more; or with a tolerant they're-just-men sort of view. But to think the show is male-centric is to misunderstand it: it's the women who rule this world, if only because they are sexual objects who can say yes or no. Some do; some don't. One who does, early on, is one of the few women with explicit advertising ambitions and she'll later pay a price for her sexual decisions. Or at least she'll be in debt to them: how she pays it back, or whether, will undoubtedly be the subject of one or more of the episodes in Season Two.

Who we are is our doom. Maybe 1960 isn't so important. Maybe it’s our being human. Maybe it's our desire for love and then new love and then another kind of love. Or more money. Or a recognition from the larger world that escapes us.

We scramble around, looking, seeking, desiring. Maybe, as Draper partly understands in Season Two's finale, it's right in front of us. Whatever it is, or wherever it resides, its discovery may be too late: we've been through too many women, too much liquor, choked back too many Lucky Strikes.

We've got a campaign to put together for Clearasil, we're tired, sad even, because nothing's come to us yet. Just exactly what is Clearasil all about, what are its hidden seductions.

That'll have to wait; it's off to catch the 7:52 to Ossining.