Mad Men Finale - Brought to You by Your Sponsor
Last edited Mon May 18, 2015, 04:59 PM - Edit history (3)
I was born in 1960. If I were to compare myself to any of the characters from Matthew Weiner's show that comparison would have to fall somewhere in between Bobby and Gene Draper. Just the same, I felt this drama like it was a reflection of my life. I understood the adults who went 'boom' after having lived through the Great Depression and World War II. I saw the unrest of the 60's manifest not just on television but in front of me through the generational standoff between my Mom and Dad and my older siblings. While our family lived far away from the gleaming towers of NYC, being that our Father was a newspaperman, we were about as savvy as you could get on the High Plains of Texas.
If I wanted to know the meaning of a word, my Mother told me to go look it up in our fat Oxford Dictionary. When I asked my father why a character in a book or film did what they did he would reply "Because that's the way they wrote it." I'm not saying my parents were horrible cynics. I stopped believing in Santa Claus all on my own. I had a respectable period of early fantastical magic. But when I began to ask real questions I got real answers from them. Some of my fondest memories are of Sunday mornings, waiting patiently as I was tossed sections of the local newspaper, only after my folks and my older bothers and sister had finished reading them. My family. We weren't brainiacs. But we were never baffled by bullshit, especially from advertising.
Matthew Weiner is five years younger than me. He's two years younger than Eugene Draper. He was 5 in 1970 - the year his masterwork of a television series comes to a close. I haven't done enough research into his motivation to write about a time he could hardly remember personally, but I do know that 50's-60's Madison Avenue was a hell of a thing and casting Robert Morse (J. Pierpont Finch) was inspired.
From the very first episode of Mad Men I knew I was viewing something different, something better, something that couldn't be summed up in Tweets or blurbs or 120-second segments on the entertainment portion of the nightly news. There's a word that came into the American vernacular during the late 60's or early 70's that has yet to be bested and, when describing Mad Men, that word still suffices: Deep. Mad Men is Deep.
There's a play, written in 1963 by Peter Weiss, called (for short) Marat/Sade. It's a complicated tale involving an insane asylum, the Marquis DeSade, the French Revolution, the Theater of Realism and other stuff. But, in the midst of all the intentional (and unintentional) madness, the protagonist reminds us, by quote: "It's about today".
Today is kind of sad. There will be numerous reviews and comments about the season finale of Mad Men. We'll have the Internet detectives who'll be disappointed that Don Draper didn't turn out to be D.B. Cooper. There will be others who'll lazily bitch at Weiner for giving us "just another ambiguous Sopranos ending!" And, of course, there will be those who refuse to accept loose ends, who then that claim it was Don Draper who came back to McCann-Erickson and personally wrote the most famous Coke ad ever.
None of those people are me. I began laughing, out loud, from the moment Dick Whitman embraced that man in the "rap" session, to his Lotus position on the hill. And my laughter got louder and more hysterical when that image segued into the most famous Coca Cola advertisement in all history.
That moment. That segue, was DEEP. That segue was Sheer. Fucking. Poetry.
That wasn't Don Draper, going to the hilltop to obtain the career-saving pitch that would redeem his ass. That wasn't some fetching plot device to satiate the bro-loving fanboys and girls who think that 'Mr. Master' is the bombigitty. That wasn't your 140-character dream of hipster meet-cute cynicism.
That was Sheer. Fucking. Poetry. That was as old as Euripides.
That camera, fixed on Dick Whitman, with a Cheshire cat grin, evoking OHM, segueing into that fucking Coke commercial. That is...
The artist is saying it doesn't matter. Life, goes on. People love. People live. People die. People suffer and hate and survive and sometimes, people steal life to concentrate it into 60-second ads for ridiculous products. And sometimes, people steal life to create stories that show us who we are. But, in the end, who cares? Don Draper isn't real. He's just made up. Matthew Weiner is telling you to cross your legs and settle in because the thieves are always out there. Be true. Be you. Be MAD.