Mad Men - Why did Don Draper become such a creep?

This may not get me any points with parents, but I have been watching Mad Men with my teenaged daughter for the last few years. This past week, we finally caught up, and now we have to wait until next year to see how the series ends. For my daughter, it has been an excellent way to painlessly learn about the sixties. I have enjoyed the chance to pause the show and help  her with the back story on political events like the Kennedy assassination, and the first Moon walk. It’s not often a teenager actually wants to talk to a parent about history, so this has been a great experience for both of us.

However, when it comes to explaining the social mores of the 1960s, that has been tougher. Throughout Mad Men, there has been a conscientious effort to portray the habits of the age accurately. Most characters smoke, women are treated by the men as playthings or second-class citizens, blacks are invisible or servants, drinking and driving is normal. They get all these details right, although my father tells me few people kept that many bottles of booze at the office. But in season six, the series decided to shift its focus to the love lives of its characters, which quickly became the tale of their endless affairs. At this point, the series seemed to become an unrealistic soap opera. It was an odd turn for a show that had tried so hard to seem plausible, and of course, I needed to explain it to my daughter.

Mad Men and the Inferno

Dante's Inferno, art by Gustave Dore

So here’s what I told her. At the start of season six, the lead character, dashing Don Draper, is seen reading Dante’s Inferno. For those of you who skipped classic lit, The Inferno is the epic poem of Dante’s guided tour of hell.  Don is reading the book on his honeymoon. He has just married Megan, his beautiful secretary, who seems to be everything he ever wanted. Megan is a twenty-something dark beauty, a bit exotic (a French Canadian, would-be actress), and fully subservient to Don, at least at first. It is a marriage of the beautiful people. Don has always yearned to be connected to the Bohemian lifestyle of the sixties, and Megan is already there. Divorce wasn’t common in the sixties, but it did happen, so this much I can explain to my daughter. But the reading of Dante on his honeymoon? Don is obviously not going to stay in heaven for long.

Without giving much away, it is fair to say that for the rest of the season, Don descends into a personal hell defined by drink and adulteries of various kinds. Don has a perfect wife at home, but he spends his time seeking out new sexual adventures everywhere he goes. Other characters do this as well. For this season, it seems like men can have sex with anyone they want, whenever they want. Don’s prince charming becomes a thoroughly unlikeable character, as he cheats and lies to everyone, at home and at work. The adulteries are wanton, and happen so often that the show becomes strangely unrealistic, and even annoying. Don takes ridiculous risks, as though he could never get caught. The core of the series, the actual writing of advertising campaigns, took a backseat in this season, much to the umbrage of many critics and viewers. So why did the writers of Mad Men turn it into a soap opera in season six?

Don Draper, the Perfect Consumer

The key, I explained to my daughter,  is that Don’s character in season six is no longer a real person, but a symbol: he has become the perfect consumer. Throughout the series, Don has written ads about desire – for the perfect family life, for adventure, for escape. But in this season, he leads his personal life just like the perfect consumer is meant to shop. Don’s love life becomes based on whatever he cannot or should not have. If a woman is attractive, and belongs to someone else, he wants her. But once he gets her, he consumes her, then moves on to the next new thing. He has affairs with no thought for the consequences, or for getting caught. In real life he would have been discovered ages ago. But in this season he is not playing a real person, he is playing the consumer of goods which are built to be used and replaced.

It is a brilliant parable of consumerism, because at the root, Don is playing us. We are all consumers, buying products made somewhere far away in conditions we ignore, and we don’t really want to know what happens to our stuff when we throw it away. The rise in global temperatures is also the story of the rise of worldwide consumerism, as we demand more and more stuff to keep us happy. Wisely, Mad Men  reminds us that this consumerism is not just about the world we ignore, but can also be very personal. In season six, Don’s ex-wife Bets, the Barbie-like one, gets overweight for no apparent reason. In season seven, Don’s company vies for a fast food contract. This is where we really become the victims of the consumerist ethic. In the 1960s, only 15 percent of Americans were obese; by the 2000s, it had more than doubled. This explosion is obesity started in the 1980s, and tracks very well with the rise in consumption of fast food, an industry made possible and popular by wall to wall advertising. With junk food, we are the perfect consumer, both the cause and the effect.

In season seven, Don Draper comes out of hell to some extent, but Mad Men  is subtly suggesting that the rest of us are still there. Will he fully escape the inferno? Dante did – in the last instalment of his Divine Comedy,  he ends up in heaven with his perfect lover, Beatrice. It remains to be seen if Don will be fully redeemed and find lasting love and inner security. In case you are wondering, I did share all of this with my daughter. To my relief, she is still watching, now aware that even television can have multiple layers of meaning, the mark of any great art.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto. www.milton2.tv