Will the truth set Don Draper free?

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 11:50:00 +0000

"Mad Men" is a parable of the constraints of modern life at the height of America's cultural supremacy. Over the course of six seasons, Don Draper and his associates have demonstrated how we, as a country, became better and better at selling a full-color fantasy of the good life to ourselves and to the rest of the world. But in the process, we slowly poisoned our own culture with skin-deep lies about what it takes to be happy. In the workplace and at home, we demanded that our stories look more and more like the idealized stories on TV and the pretty advertisements in our magazines, pumping up our expectations, and intensifying our disappointment in ourselves and those around us. Decades later, dissatisfaction is such an essential aspect of our cultural groundwater that pointing it out either feels hopelessly earnest or downright paranoid. We have become so good at telling pretty stories that we've brainwashed ourselves in the process. Our leaders are those who look the best on TV, who mouth the syrupy jingles that dovetail with the lies we're already telling ourselves, and who cover up their lies with more lies the most efficiently.

The suprisingly hopeful “Mad Men” finale

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 03:59:00 +0000

This season of “Mad Men” made 1968 palpable. It filled viewers with a tremendous sense of uneasy mood, made us paranoid, encouraged us to expect the worst, and, most of all, had us awaiting some climactic, horrifying event — that never arrived, or at least not in the form we expected. 1968 was a year of extraordinary upheaval, but sitting here, more than four decades removed, we know what the people living through it could not: The revolution did not arrive. The center held. The chaos was, ultimately, bound. Sally Draper will be 26 years old in 1980: she is more likely to be a yuppie than a radical — though maybe a feminist too. Change comes, fast and fierce, but not fast or fierce enough to wash everything away. Not fast or fierce enough to wash away a man's past. When the huge, show-changing event the season had been leading up to finally arrived, it was all psychological, not physical. It was not menacing, it was promising. The heavy weight hanging over this season was not 1968, it was Don Draper, and now he's free — or freer than we've ever seen him.

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Will the truth set Don Draper free?

The suprisingly hopeful “Mad Men” finale