What to make of
the Mad Men finale? Surely I was going to be disappointed considering:
1 finales are usually disappointing (can’t
please everyone), and;
2. Mad
Men, while great, has
been declining since season four.
Regardless of my feelings about the escapades
of Draper and Co. since about three seasons back, I must say that few shows
manage to juggle so many characters this well and sustain my interest for that
long. The complexity that Mad Men reached at its zenith was not
unlike the polyphonic novels of Dostoevsky complete with wacky dream sequences
and the occasionally labored symbol. (“It’s not your tooth that’s rotten” says
the ghost of Adam Whitman to Don Draper.
Yeah, got it.)
But even groundbreaking TV shows have a
tough time sticking the landing. Mad Men is no different. I may be alone in feeling that the Stan
loves Peggy/Peggy loves Stan thing was tacked on (everyone seems to be all
gushy over their romance), but what makes sense when I examine their trajectory
only makes me irked that the seeds of their love were not better sown. They probably belong together but their union was rushed at the end. Not to mention Peggy got her satisfaction from her job,
which seemed a hard won victory, one that she deserved, so why sap energy from
that triumph by making it seem that job satisfaction is not enough and that a
man has to save this tough talking career girl? I call bullshit.
Everyone else,
save for Betty, got moved to a nice place—a sensible marriage for Roger, a
business of Joan’s own and guaranteed financial security for her son, true
corporate power for Pete and a second chance at domestic bliss—but, of course,
we need to talk about Don.
The last thing
Draper did that made me happy was walk out of that fucking room. Once he realized he was a small cog in
a big machine, he split. The function
of this is up for debate, but I saw it as a chance for him to realize that the
manufactured image he had created, and subsequently bought into, was bullshit
of the highest order. Such a realization
could only result in him tearing down his life. And that’s pretty much how things went for the last few
episodes, and while his Kerouacian road trip was hardly exciting, it made
sense. Once he hugged that crying
dude at the feel-good session, I thought, well he’s got his catharsis and now
he’s either going to drop out of society and live among the hippies or he’ll
have found enough peace to return to NYC and search for some kind of happiness
or, at the very least, stability.
That is if he hasn’t pissed away his fortune.
But the final
meditation scene would have it both ways.
He’s in the lotus position voicing the big OHM. And then he envisions the perfect Coke
commercial that’s been dangling before him and us ever since he succumbed to
the McCann acquisition. My first
reaction was surprise. Then
annoyance. So Don imagined that
iconic commercial that has always struck me as the best example of
corporate bullshit cashing in on a social trend. But it makes a lot of sense, actually. Don is not healed. He’s managed to take the lessons of his
time among the hippies and create his masterpiece of Madison Avenue
manipulation. He’s tapped into the
optimism that was fading at the end of the 60s and repackaged it as
possibility, unity, peace, community, love. And fucking Coca-Cola.
Genius.
It seems that
this is the best ending for the show.
Don has grown a little but he’s still thinking of ideas that will
stoke his fragile ego, ideas that validate his meaningless life, ideas to sell
to the public so that they can find transient joy while corporations become richer. Which is fine—Don has always been an apologetic ad man, very
pro-capitalist. And he’s smartly
responded to the beatniks and hippies of the show who have accused him of being
an evil pusher of products. But
that doesn’t mean the beatnik/hippie accusations, as obnoxious as they are,
lack substance. Don, as the vision
of his father tells him, makes bullshit for a living. The show has spent a lot of time portraying Don and Peggy as
proponents of the idea that advertising is art. They have done a pretty good job convincing us, the viewers,
that this is true. But we have
also seen how advertising blends art with kitsch, how the feelings Don and
Peggy skillfully elicit in the clients and, by extension, the public are
facsimiles of something real that work well enough to sell cigarettes and
Coca-Cola but fall short of true art.
The ads are temporary at best and and, at worst, mirror the cultural zeitgeist
in a way that then informs it.
That Coke ad is a classic, one that has become a part of American
culture. That’s how the best ads
work: they replace good songs, good paintings, good books, and good movies as
cultural markers. They look like
art and they stick in your head, but their manipulation is crass. Don and Peggy
talk the talk very well, and they believe it, but really they make bullshit for
a living.
What better
commercial to end on than the 1971 Coke ad with the smiling people atop a
hill? They all look so
perfect. Happy. Multicultural. Harmonious. Phony. Frankly, kind of creepy. Perhaps
I'm a cynic, but that’s how it seems to me: simple ideas about world peace
brought to you by dumb young people whose earnestness would be admirable were
it not brought to you by Coke. The
last image of Don is of that handsome face smiling ear-to-ear in deep
meditation, but the ad— which some have said is there to make us proud of his
ultimate creation—reminds us of who he is and what he does: he makes bullshit.
By the way,
Sally Draper is the hero of the show.
