TV Review: Out in the cold

Don Draper grapples with changing world in Mad Men’s final season

Jeffrey Wells, a veteran film critic, recently bemoaned the supposedly unrealistic lack of change to Don Draper’s haircut. “Draper’s hair style hasn’t changed a bit since the very beginning,” Wells wrote on his blog, Hollywood Elsewhere, under a post titled, “This is Getting Ridiculous.”

“Let me make something clear: every single American male who had any give-and-take dealing with the upheavals of the ‘60s grew his hair out to some degree between ’61 and ’69… Even the Draper types (neurotic, alcohol issues, plugged-up) at least grew their sideburns a bit and allowed their hair to lengthen a tad.” 

Wells is an intelligent, passionate film disciple, but his frustration with Draper’s aesthetic stasis indicates a vital misreading not only of the character but of Mad Men as a whole; a misreading that unfortunately echoes many viewers’ frustrations with where creator Matthew Weiner has taken the series over seven years. 

Common complaints overheard: there’s no plot; the show has gotten boring; Don’s misbehavior has become repetitive; the historical reference points are too on the nose. At the heart of these complaints is a literal-mindedness that exemplifies how most people have been conditioned to watch television: with an eye for plot and information made explicit, an unconscious need for conventional dramatic arcs that leaves little room for subtext. The growing dissatisfaction of many ex-fans runs parallel to what’s made Mad Men slowly become the best thing on television.  

For its first three seasons, the show was an especially well-made piece of nostalgia porn, a nighttime soap that, at its worst, appealed to viewers with romanticized, glossy images of un-PC masculinity in the early 1960s. Draper and his fellow ad men drank at work, smoked like chimneys, caroused like libertines and generally treated the women in their lives like shit. As the series progressed, we watched the consequences of Draper’s dishonesty with himself and those around him, combined with seismic cultural shifts, slowly erode his composed façade. 

As things got heavy, the storytelling became novelistic. Weiner shifted gears and began to craft the show as a cerebral mood piece, eschewing plot in favor of cultural and literary allusions, heavy metaphor and seemingly small exchanges loaded with philosophical musings and implicit anxieties about the changing world.  

In the opening episode of the final season, which aired April 13, we first see Draper (Jon Hamm) greeting his wife, Megan (Jessica Pare), in the glaring sunshine of Los Angeles. It’s 1969 and Draper, all pent-up dread and guilt, every bit the Manhattan businessman in full suit and tie, is painfully out of place amongst the khaki shorts and cleavage of the fun-loving Californians. Weiner pulls a fast one by making us believe for a moment that Draper has actually uprooted from New York to join his wife and the newly formed L.A. branch of SC&P. But he’s only visiting. 

At the end of the season prior, Draper finally owned up to his phoniness, acknowledging his secret history as Dick Whitman to his colleagues through an ill-advised confession during a sales pitch to The Hershey Company. He was put on indefinite leave from SC&P, the ad agency he helped found, and the episode’s last scene showed Draper and his children standing in front of the whorehouse from his childhood. “This is where I grew up,” he told them. 

Now, he’s dealing with the fallout from his honesty. He’s still languishing in the purgatory of his forced sabbatical, hopping back and forth between coasts, taking lunch meetings with old colleagues and adversaries, pretending like he still has a significant role at the agency. The tension in his bicoastal marriage to Megan is soon apparent, expressed through color: Megan’s California is all warmth and sunshine, Draper’s New York is cold and overcast. They fight and argue despite their efforts to enjoy their limited time together. On his flight back to New York, Draper finds an intense, almost surreal connection with a widow (Neve Campbell) sitting next to him. We think for a moment this will be the start of a new extramarital affair. But the chronic womanizer does something new: he refuses the widow’s advances.

Back in his penthouse, alone, Draper leaves the sliding glass door of his patio open despite the frigid temperatures. In the last shot of the episode, he’s on the patio in the middle of the night, alone and shivering. He’s out in the cold by choice as Vanilla Fudge sings “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” 

And this seems to be the theme of this final run of episodes, which AMC is gratuitously splitting into two mini-seasons, as it did with Breaking Bad. Don’s career has imploded, his marriage is in tatters, society is leaving him behind. Draper has finally acquiesced to honesty, but he’s still fighting the change. He needs a new haircut; this season will almost certainly give it to him.