It's the real thing! (Courtesy AMCtv)
It doesn't matter if Don Draper literally is the person
who'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. It really doesn't.
Because whatever Mad Men wants to say about its characters and their fictional lives, in the end, someone co-opted the authentic emotional moments and quest for connection that Don experienced on his new age retreat. And this is the great sin of advertising, as Mad Men has reminded us from the beginning: it takes authentic human emotions, and basic yearnings for contact and happiness, and turns them into a reason you should buy sugar-water.
I recognize that most viewers came away from the ending assuming that Don came back to McCann (as Stan insisted he would), and cynically used his bottoming-out to come up with one of the most loved ads of all time. Ding! Buy our product, and you'll never be left alone, in the dark. You're part of the global sing-a-long. [Two decades later, advertising would seize upon the reverse: buy our mass product to show how unique you are!.]
Maybe that's all there is: Don Draper, shithead to the end, can only use profound and potentially transformative emotional moments as a means of finding new ways to sell things. No learning, no growing, despite the hugging. [And no improved parenting, either.]
Well, Mad Men remains capable of many readings, certainly through the end. Some, below the fold.
Alan Sepinwall:
In the immediate aftermath of watching "Person to Person," I wanted to think that the ad was simply there to underline the genuineness of Don's moment of bliss by showing us what a phony version — produced by the agency and business he traveled thousands of miles to escape — looked like.
And that was mainly because I didn't want the entire series, and in particular Don's cross-country odyssey of self-discovery — during which he gradually shed himself of all the trappings of the life he built by stealing the real Don Draper's identity — to build to him learning nothing besides how to write a better tagline....
If Don really traversed this great land of ours, threw away all the sigils of Don Draper-hood, learned of Betty's impending death and the shaky future of their three children, and finally heard someone articulate his own deepest feelings of unlovability, and he came out the other side having only acquired the inspiration needed to buy his way back into McCann(**) and write that Coke ad — and cutting straight from the look of pure bliss on Don's face to the ad, without giving us hints of anything else he might do upon returning to New York, suggests that this is the only thing that ultimately matters to him — then that is a very cynical and dark take on a man I wanted better from.
Todd VanDerWerff, who predicted the ending:
In "Person to Person," when the characters leap out into the unknown, hoping someone is there to catch them, somebody is always there. That hasn't always been true on this show, but the finale wants to let us know that everybody has their own support net.
Peggy, so far as we can tell, didn't quit McCann to go work with Joan, but she knows all of these people who unquestioningly have her back. Betty might be dying, but she has the support of her daughter and both men she has married. She worries her boys will struggle without a woman in their lives, but she shouldn't, because Sally's right there to make sure Bobby knows how to use a frying pan. Roger creates a financial net for the son he can never legally acknowledge as his own. Pete has his family back, and he's headed for Wichita. And on and on.
Linda Holmes:
This wasn't just a story about Peggy getting a boyfriend; it was a story about Peggy getting free of trying to emotionally connect with Don Draper, which she's been trying to do since the pilot. It was a story about Peggy stepping away from a relationship from which she gets nothing to make room for a relationship from which she gets something. Stan started out as a jerk, but Don stayed a jerk. Learning to stop throwing good emotional money after bad is one of the most important elements of adulthood; despite its cinematic-swoon elements, this was more than met the eye: it wasn't just a story about getting what you've always dreamed of. It was just as much a story about when to give up.
For all the flack shows take for sweet love scenes, the really unearned love scene here would have been Peggy going to get Don and his collapsing into her arms and sobbing and thanking her. That would have been pure romantic fantasy. This was a pair of people who have flirted with each other for years and gotten to be very emotionally intimate – remember, she told Stan about the baby, and she doesn't tell anyone about the baby – finally having head space at the same time. Yes, the structure of the scene made it play like cotton candy, but to be able to make that step, she had to get her foot out of the tar pit that is trying to be friends with Don Draper.
Julia Turner:
Why did Leonard’s tale move Don so? I think the milquetoastery of Leonard is crucial here. Don has long assumed that his dark past, his family, his sins, account for his vast hunger for love. But here’s an office drone in a V-neck who can articulate his precise emotional state with more power than Don has ever pulled off in a pitch. Understanding that his loneliness and lovelornness are universal is, somehow, just what Don needs. (This scene also so flagrantly violates Seinfeld’s “no hugging, no lessons” rule of television that it seems almost intentional.) Finally at peace, Don can stop running, return to New York, live his life, and make a few more ads—including one for Coke.
Matt Zoller Seitz:
Mad Men is the story of a lot of complex, often infuriating characters whose individual stories are all reflected and refracted through the show’s hero. The hero is a man who keeps running away from himself instead of looking inward to try to figure out why he runs. The hero is a man who was abandoned over and over throughout his life. He felt unloved even when he was loved dearly (just like the refrigerator monologist), and spent much of his adult life seeking perverted facsimiles of love, then abusing and betraying the people who gave him real love, because he was so damaged that he couldn’t recognize love as love. He kept thinking about killing himself and then not doing it. He kept blowing up his life whenever it got to be too much and building a new life in the rubble. He kept running away and ending up back where he started because he only liked the beginnings, with their new car smell. He loudly proclaimed that love doesn’t exist and money can buy happiness and you can forget anything and move on. He told himself life was about moving forward and never looking back. He eventually figured out that, as Dick Whitman’s own stepmother said in “The Hobo Code,” life is a horseshoe: “Fat in the middle, open on both ends, and hard all the way through.”
The man described above is Don Draper, and he's Dick Whitman. Both are seeking what the hero described in his Lucky Strikes pitch in the pilot episode, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” He justified an essentially meaningless phrase by saying that all advertising came back to the desire to fill a void and assuage feelings of unhappiness. “A sign on the side of the road screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is okay,” Don concludes. “You are okay.”...
By the final few minutes of Mad Men’s last episode, I think the hero has started to become okay. He’s begun to reinvent himself one more time, not as yet another discretely defined (false) person, but as the two men he always was, in “perfect harmony,” as the Coke ad says. And maybe he’s started to detach from the “positions” on himself that were formed in childhood, and cemented when he didn’t get off that train at his hometown stop in 1950.
That smile wasn’t just about having a clever idea for an ad. It was the real thing.