SYMBOLS. Cast in metal, spun in cloth, or graven in stone; raised in the names of gods and prophecies and bastard dreams; black, white, cross, crescent, nothing and everything…symbols promise truth and transcendence, freedom and eternal life. But the reality is they often come to little more than a compression of fables. An easy minimalism of tired lies.

Maybe our problem is that we put too much stock in what symbols meant to their makers instead of what they mean to us. Maybe the real power of symbols lies not in projection but in reflection, their ability to let us see our own lives through new eyes, to let us love people and things better than we otherwise could, better sometimes than they deserve.

Sure, that love might come after the fact. These things or people might be gone long before we understand what they were, let alone see them reflected in something else. But we can love them, or at least their memories, just the same…

The Man Who Loves Children

In seven hours Mad Men will end its run as one of most acclaimed shows in American television history, perhaps the single series most emblematic of the Golden Age of Television as we’ve come to call it. Airing on AMC instead of a major network, Mad Men has been able to deal with the realities of Postwar America in a way that more heavily censored, commercially-oriented shows haven’t. The show is just plain big, sprawling and ambitious in a way that fits its focus, America.

As far as I’m concerned, you can have The Sopranos and Breaking Bad (the other two members of the Golden Age Triumvirate). In terms of scope—of addressing the past, present, and future not just of America but of humanity—Mad Men has no equal. Rather than the titillation of mobsters and meth labs, Mad Men is held together by quiet heartbreaks and small, painful victories, the dialogue of its writers and the acting chops of a stellar cast led by John Hamm as Don Draper.

In Mad Men’s leading man, Hamm and Writer/Creator Matt Weiner have constructed a character at once overblown and understated, symbolic and deeply realistic, a man who lies with the ease of a born grifter but sometimes gives us truths profound enough to still all other thought, realizations spoken with the philosophical depth and unflinching clarity of the tired God of some doomed universe. A God who in spite of all he knows still carries a few measures of hope. This from Season 6, Episode 5 (“The Flood”):

“I never wanted to be the man who loves children, but…from the moment they’re born…that baby comes out, and you act proud and excited, hand out cigars…but you don’t feel anything, especially if you had a difficult childhood. You want to love them, but you don’t. And the fact that you’re faking that feeling makes you wonder if your father had the same problem. Then they get older, and you see them do something, and you feel that feeling that you’ve been pretending to have. You feel like your heart is going to explode.”

Or this from Season 6, Episode 13 (“In Care Of”):

“I was an orphan. I grew up in Pennsylvania, in a whorehouse. I read about Milton Hershey and his school in Torn Up Magazine, or some other crap the girls left by the toilet, and I read that some orphans had a different life there. I could picture it. I dreamed of it—being wanted. Because the woman who was forced to raise me would look at me every day like she wished I would disappear. The closest I got to being wanted was with a girl who made me go through her johns’ pockets while they screwed. If I collected more than a dollar, she’d buy me Hershey bar, and I would eat it alone in my room with great ceremony. [choking up] Feeling like a normal kid. It said “sweet” on the package. It was the only sweet thing in my life.”

There’s wisdom in Don’s soliloquies, but also damage. Maybe the saddest thing about his character being that like many abused children Don becomes his own abuser, the pain dealt to him by the people he should have been able to love and trust eventually coming from his own hand.

Oh, Don Draper may look good. He may seem like a sort of advertising James Bond—women want him, men want to be him—but he’s also an inveterate drunk, well on his way to the grave. The shakes, boozing in the morning, vomiting in public. Don’s ageing fast, as drunks do no matter how handsome or beautiful, his charm wearing thin as the liquor and smokes (and secrets and lies) take their toll.

Father

My father’s been dead nearly a decade, but he’s still not really gone. The people who shape our lives never are.

Like Don Draper, my dad was an alcoholic. Though he wasn’t an exact contemporary of Don’s, I can’t help but think of my old man as I watch Mad Men. He lived through that same era—spent the buoyant Fifties and the turbulent Sixties conscious of what it meant to be an adult in America, intensely aware of it in a way I’ll never be, no matter how much I think about it. And I do. I want to understand.

The Kennedys, MLK, and Malcolm. Selma and the Summer of Love. The Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam. The Cuban Missiles Crisis and Berlin. Elvis and the Beatles. Warhol and Pollock. The race for space. Understated elegance and psychedelic excess. Sometimes it seems like the whole of America history existed in those two decades just before I did; as if all the mysteries of the world are balled up in a reality I know but will never really see.