Mad Men 6.8: Don Draper Gets A Shot In The Ass
And the results are a sweaty, buzzed-out Benzedrine bust of an episode. With tap-dancing!
Mad Men is in full swing (wink, 1960s joke). Each week we’ll take a look at who’s shilling what to who; follow our recaps here. Obviously, spoilers.
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MAD MEN CLIENT MEETING
6.8: ‘The Crash’
THE PRODUCT:
Chevy. Oatmeal. Loss. Declaration.
THE PITCH:
“I’ve had loss in my life,” a bleary-eyed Peggy lets on to Stan, 30-odd hours of show time into this episode’s mad, bad weekend. “You have to let yourself feel it.” You get it; she’s not really talking to Stan, who lost his cousin, or about Ted, whose partner and friend passed away. Once again, we’re on the sidelines of Don’s wild ride, just waiting for the one idea that will save us all. For a show that’s full of epiphanies and beginnings, could this episode mark the last new leaf to flip?
From day one, Don’s been trying to break through the wall, scribbling on napkins and squinting at life, grasping at a slogan that’s going to solve everything. Did we ever think the problem was creative? It’s been crystal clear for a while — drink after drink, woman after woman, pitch after pitch, rock bottom after rock bottom — that Don’s trying to solve Don, one campaign at a time. Who knew that it’d take a shot of uppers to the ass to get him to a point where he just might realise it himself?
Chevy won’t say yes to one idea, and Don and Ted have run themselves ragged with seven different options in six weeks. Ken spells out the news from on high, with a three-year calendar plan full of deadlines and copy checks: “It’s gotta kick its way up the ladder through all of GM until it gets to God, and then he’s gotta run it past his wife.”
Remember when Don didn’t have a contract? The man can barely make a dinner plan now without getting himself shanghaied en route and losing a week on the other side of the continent. His face goes into over-droop at the prospect of committed effort. So Cutler invites over a quack with a sackful of syringes to help pick up everyone’s spirits, and the crew gurns out the rest of this crazy ep.
THIS IS WHAT THIS EPISODE LOOKS LIKE:
THIS IS WHAT THIS EPISODE SOUNDS LIKE:
“One doesn’t like changing so often, you know?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m not myself you see.”
“I don’t see.”
“There is an answer that will open this door.”
“My mother. No, my first girlfriend!”
“One great idea can win someone over.”
“You have to get me in a room so I can look them in the eye. The timbre of my voice is as important as the content. I don’t know whether I’ll be forceful or submissive. I must be there in the flesh.”
“Does someone love me?”
This episode is called ‘The Crash’. It’s not a super subtle episode.
Don’s feverish exhalation of an idea, stammered to a beleaguered Peggy and a bemused Ginsberg after three sleepless days of breathless fury, warps from the truth of all advertising to the answer to everything to a gasp of hot air. It’s a history, it’s a solution, it’s a gap in a life that Don’s never filled but has remade in the shape of product after product. It’s unattainable. It’s want and need. It’s the reason for unchecked consumerism and the result of un-felt loss. It’s an episode about the ideas of this show, where drugs allow characters to say what we’re all thinking. If it had paused for one second or if the actors hadn’t creamed it, I think we may have understood that the true pay-off to all this entertainment was just a bunch of baloney.
While Don clings to the frayed ends of his scuttled affair to Sylvia, Sally plays surrogate to the kids at Casa De Draper. She’s tucked into the marital bed with a copy of Rosemary’s Baby, certainly not the first character on this show with a penchant for prophesying pulp fiction. Don’s left the back door open, letting an unsettling presence into the house, a thief and vagrant who prowls the rooms (I liked the symbolism of this ransacking random, but what is it about this show that turns all poverty and minorities into pantomime?). After a long, disturbing night, Sally will live with a little darkness in her heart, a seed sewn through her father’s inattentions. Don’s lost past is sinking his present and screwing his future. Is he ever going to let himself feel it?
TAGLINE:
“Do you have any idea what the idea is?”
OLD BUSINESS:
Don finds this old ad. This ad is every ad.
With each episode that fills in the blanks of ‘The Man They Called Whitman’, ‘The Mystery They Call Draper’ falls apart a little further. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe Don’s been as high a functioning mystery as possible and his slow redemption back to the world of the living is going to be a messy, ragged, occasionally dull journey that we just have to live with. Who said emotional progress was pretty, or even free of Depression era whorehouse flashbacks?
NEW BUSINESS:
Peggy and Stan share a moment. It’s very nice, and only partially ruined when he goes and sleeps with some hippy ten minutes later.
ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF MAD MEN:
Pete doesn’t know what else he can do, and Don arrives at an abandoned gas station. I guess it’s time to dig up that old haunted campaign they did for Kodak and try to sell it to Leica. Spooky!
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Matt Roden helps kids tell stories by day at the Sydney Story Factory, and by night assists adults in admitting to stupidity by co-running Confession Booth and TOD Talks. He also illustrates for Junkee; you can find more of his work here – and follow Mad Men with him here.