Notes on Mad Men: Season 6, episode 1, ’The Doorway’

Although Mad Men creator Matt Weiner always makes a big deal about the year a new season is set in – it’s the first of the many things he asks critics not to reveal, or (presumably) face the wrath of AMC publicity people – the fact that Mad Men season 6 takes place near the end of the LBJ presidency is in some ways incidental to Don Draper’s life, maybe all the characters’ lives. One of the oddities of the show is that as it moves into one of the most familiar and visually distinctive eras of the 20th century, the time period almost becomes less important than it was in the early ’60s, a time we used to think of as almost interchangeable with the previous decade.

So early Don Draper was very clearly a creature of the early ’60s, a man who escaped the pre-urbanized America, used the experience of war to literally change his identity, and spent the ’50s learning to get ahead in the booming consumer society and leading the kind of life that will make him respectable in that society. But now that it’s the late ’60s, and his persona is no longer the essence of what society considers cool, he’s more clearly revealed as a typical man of any time: a guy who had infinite opportunities and possibilities when he was young, and is now going through one hell of a midlife crisis. He’s obsessed with death, nostalgic for a time when it was possible to re-invent himself completely (youth, marriage, rebirth, life after death: these are the things that interest him in this episode). What looked like a show about a particular time – even though it was never really just about that period – has turned out more clearly to be a show about all men in all eras.

In some ways it’s well-trod territory, maybe too much so; it isn’t the first time we’ve heard the story of a middle-aged man who has a good job and a beautiful wife but isn’t satisfied. More than most TV shows, Mad Men aspires to be like a novel, but it shares a problem with a lot of novels, and particularly novels about people who already have a lot of what they want – assuming that their lives are more epic than they really are. But one thing that’s effective about it is that the more Don becomes a man of no particular time, no particular identity, we’re forced to come to grips with the fact that the whole series has been about today, not just a look back at a time gone by. If we ever saw Mad Men as a cautionary look at a less enlightened time, it’s hard to do that now that Don is being revealed as a man out of his time, not a creature of the ’60s.

Of course there are some ideas in the episode that have a specific relevance to the world of the late ’60s, but as usual, they’re subordinate to the universal (even commonplace) personal problems. In his presentation, we see Don flailing to try and come up with an advertising strategy that speaks to a society that is increasingly suspicious of consumerism. His success came in an era when you were selling people on the ability to own things they never owned before, but now that the middle class owns everything, he and Peggy are both trying – with varying degrees of success – to sell people on the idea of experience, rather than ownership: buy this product and you can gain something intangible. (Peggy saves her advertising campaign by taking a bit of footage and coming up with an intangible, scientifically impossible slogan.) That was a big topic in the late ’60s, the idea that people were fed up with prosperity and were searching for something more. Since we haven’t had prosperity in a long time, it’s kind of hard to relate.

But what we can relate to, even if it’s almost as comical as it is serious, is Don’s newfound personal obession with spiritual fulfilment. His presentation is an incoherent mess because he’s using it to deal with the fact that he wants a rebirth, a spiritual awakening, and all the other things people decide they want when going through a crisis. As is then pointed out to him, it sounds a lot like he’s not so much thinking of being reborn as thinking of killing himself. But that’s the problem with reaching out for an intangible something that you can’t define; it’s kind of hard to separate the benign, New Age-y aspects of that longing from a longing for death, the ultimate rebirth and the only completely new experience any of us will ever have. Whether Don really has a death wish, I suppose, will be played out in the next couple of seasons; people have been speculating for a long time about whether he’s the guy who’s falling in the opening titles. But in some ways it works just as well without speculation about the future, interpreting it on an everyday level: when a man accumulates most of what he wants in a physical sense, he starts chasing after the nebulous, unreachable things, even if it makes him look ridiculous or suicidal or both.

That Don wants to re-invent himself but doesn’t know how (and possibly can’t) ties into the most attention-getting gambit of the episode is the decision to begin with several scenes where Don doesn’t say anything, either cutting away before it would become necessary for him to speak, or just letting him observe his wife with that familiar wordless ambiguity. He doesn’t talk until he meets a man serving in Vietnam who asks him what branch of the service he was in. And this scene leads to the midway point of the two-hour episode – which is to say, the place the first part would end if it were split up into two separate hours – when he realizes he’s accidentally switched cigarette lighters with the other man and now doesn’t even have the signifier of the fake identity he adopted in Korea. It all paints a portrait of a guy who, even more than before in the series, is all surface: saying things, doing things, would expose him as empty.

Others have noted that the episode, structured as four separate vignettes about four important characters, is partly about whether re-invention is possible and (a regular question on shows in the mold of The Sopranos) whether people can fundamentally change. But another question that can be read into the episode, at least at the margins, is whether the world really changes except in a superficial way. Normally we think that the world changed extraordinarily in the ’60s, but in the Mad Men world, many of the biggest changes are at the margins anyway (race, for example, is famous for being mostly a sideline thing; characters don’t even talk about it at parties as much as real people did). The Mad Men world is one where things change cosmetically: the appearance of some of the characters, the clothes, the colours, some of the office rituals. But the fundamentals remain more or less the same, so that last season they revealed that though a lot had changed since 1960, the character of Joan could still only get ahead by selling herself, just in exchange for a partnership rather than a marriage. And to some extent the show is about how normally and traditionally life goes on for people even in the “turbulent” late ’60s.

You usually need a character to bring the theme up verbally, and in this case it falls to Roger, in a scenes with the psychiatrist, to express the fear that no one is ever going to have a really new experience. But the sense that nothing has really changed is all over the stories in various little ways. Don, the veteran of one pointless war, meets someone currently fighting in another pointless war, who predicts that someday he’ll be where Don is now.

Even the two other stories suggest that not a whole lot has changed since the show began. Peggy’s story is built around a routine on The Tonight Show where a comic makes jokes about soldiers in Vietnam cutting off people’s ears. (I assume someone has already checked to find out if this is a real thing from a real show that Phyllis Diller guest hosted. Update: Ah, there we go. The name of the comedian was Milt Kamen, and the show being referred to aired right near the end of 1967.) She seems shocked that a comic could reduce atrocities to bland late-night comedy fodder, but no one around her seems to think that the jokes aren’t funny, and the vignette suggests the power of television to turn everything, no matter what happens in the world, into the same kind of traditional middlebrow mass-market comedy; the power of television, which it really did have, to make us feel like living in 1968 was little different from living in 1960.

Meanwhile, Betty’s story raises the question of whether opportunities for women have really expanded much since 1960, or if the basic choices open to a woman are still pretty much what they were when she was young – play by the rules of society or disappear completely.

(I actually like Betty as a character, maybe because everyone on the show treats her with such contempt. But in any case, she’s not exactly a bird in a gilded cage, looking at the opportunities she missed out on, or watching women’s rights advance without her; she understands that the plight of a 15 year-old girl without world-class talent to get her a career is still what it was when she was young, and everything – even the ratty-living bohemians – is not all that different from when she was young.)

I don’t want to go too far with this interpretation, since it runs the risk of turning into a contrarian “Mad Men says nothing has really changed since 1960″ reading. Of course the idea of social change is built into the show. That’s one thing that keeps people watching and on edge about what’s going to happen even in episodes where not a whole lot seems to happen: we know that we’re getting deeper and deeper into the ’60s, and now we know that Nixon’s victory may play in the background the way Nixon’s loss played in the first season. Waiting for historical events to occur and make some kind of impact on the characters supplies so much built-in suspense that Weiner can afford to be so laid-back with his plotting.

Still, I think one advantage Mad Men has over a lot of ’60s stories is that it’s aware that “the sixties,” in the big stereotypical sense, never happened for a lot of people, or didn’t happen in the same way for the same people. The characters are a bit insular, keeping their heads down and doing their things, with their era as almost an incidental thing, a companion to the way they live, an influence on their fashion, or something that gives shape to their middle-age crises. But just as the world of 1960 wasn’t as different from ours as we probably thought it was, the world of 1968 hasn’t changed the basics of what people do: working women still deal with the pitfalls of being working women, people change their clothes and their hair as a substitute for changing their lives, and affluent middle-aged guys have a lot of time on their hands to think about water and bright lights and take trips to Hawaii.