The Mad Men Season Finale: Moment of Clarity
LatestThe first season or two of Mad Men made drinking all day, womanizing all night, and chain smoking seem really glamorous. But Don Draper doesn’t wear his unhealthy lifestyle as handsomely in 1968 as he did in 1960. Now pasty, puffy, and sweaty, his bloodshot eyes are the windows to someone who is dead inside. It did seem like this season was particularly morbid, leading many to believe that it might end in a violent death—but it ended in a symbolic one. Don Draper is dead. Dick Whitman lives.
The idea of identity has always been at the heart of Mad Men and its antihero Don. Did you know he’s a Gemini? It’s perfectly fitting for someone who operates in his own world of duality. (BTW, Gemini is ruled by Mercury, whose action is to take things apart and put them back together.) There’s been a lot of twin symbolism this season to reflect that, from the colored pencil promo sketches, to Megan’s role on To Have and to Hold, to Don watching The Patty Duke Show (identical cousins!). Lately, he’s been grappling with his true identity. Who is he, really? Don Draper or Dick Whitman?
It’s become very clear that Don is an addict. He’s addicted to sex, which stems from a traumatic childhood that taught him that sex (and not Hersheys) is the currency of affection. And because of that, he drinks. He drinks to forget to feel all his shitty feelings, to numb his guilt. On last night’s episode, his phone call with Sally—in which she reminds him that she walked in on him having sex with the neighbor lady, much like he’d witnessed his pregnant step-mother having sex at the whore house (which really fucked him up, irrevocably)—and was crushed with the guilt of what his actions had done to his daughter, how he didn’t care enough to stop the cycle, how she might end up just like him. It sent him on a tailspin of a bender, where he ditched an important meeting at work and subsequently spent the night in jail.
In the morning, looking as though he’d been through Hell—another theme for this season, which opened with Don reading Dante’s Inferno—he poured all of his liquor down the drain, intending to quit cold turkey. Megan walks in and he tells her, “I realized it’s gotten out of control. I’ve gotten out of control.”
And it looked like he’d tackled the first of the Twelve Steps, by admitting he was powerless when it comes to alcohol and that his life had become unmanageable. Instead of getting himself some help, he believes that he can get his marriage and his life back on track if he could just move to California. All his problems—his kids, his career, his ex-wife—are in New York. Wouldn’t it just be easier to leave?
In AA they call this a “Geographical Cure,” whereby people believe that they can cure their alcoholism by having a “fresh start” somewhere else. But the thing is, wherever you go, there you are. Don can’t escape his problems by moving anymore than Dick could escape his by becoming Don. The only way that Don could ever get better is to get real.