*Every week, Wired takes a look at the latest episode of *Mad Men through the lens of the latest media campaign of the Sterling Cooper & Partners advertising agency.
Peggy Olson and Ted Chaough created a monster. They knew that's what Rosemary's baby is, right? They ought to, considering how many times they'd seen the movie. Yet there they go, casting Don Draper as the infernal infant around which their entire budget-busting St. Joseph's ad revolves. "Waah waah waah," meet "Hail Satan!"
Don's instinct about Peggy and Ted's creepy commercial was likely correct: It's really, really weird to use a movie about the birth of the Antichrist to sell baby aspirin. But the two star-crossed creatives are so drunk on their delight with one another that they can't see it, while the St. Joseph's exec, skittish though he might be about the budget, is dazzled enough by its pop-culture sparkle to at least give it the go-ahead at a drastically reduced price. So, even though we learned several seasons back via the Pepsi/Bye Bye Birdie debacle that ads based on movies rarely recapture their magic, it's full-steam-ahead into Polanski-land. Don's subsequent actions seem to say, "You want a horror movie? You got it."
"You have to feel the conspiracy," Peggy says by way of justifying the commercial's relatively sprawling cast and its resultant residuals bonanza. But Don is a conspiracy of one, and his systematic assault on the campaign, Ted's sense of security at the agency, and (most crucially) the relationship between Ted and Peggy -- his resentment of which set the whole thing in motion; if Don can't have something on the side with a woman he loves, no one can -- is as darkly impressive as any Draper pitch. The climax was his ghoulish resurrection of Frank Gleason, which both saved their idea and irrevocably tainted it for them. Evil genius, worthy of any coven. Perverse genius, too: Don uses Peggy and Ted's love for one another as a weakness to exploit, then uses Ted's love for Frank the same way. Twisting something noble into something ugly is classic Lucifer, man.
But who knows? Maybe you can scare people into buying baby products. Fear sells, as Dick Nixon would tell you, with his ad portraying hippies and radicals as ravening zombie hordes. (Which would first hit the screen just a month before Nixon's election, with George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead.) And Mad Men itself has been setting its audience on edge all season long, between Ken Cosgrove's Faces of Death, Bob Benson's potential to be a serial killer in training, "Grandma Ida's" home invasion, and, of course, multiple references to *Rosemary's Baby: *Sally reads it in one episode, while Megan dresses in a t-shirt worn by the murdered wife of its director in another. That's to say nothing of the litany of world-historical violence, from Vietnam to Mai '68, MLK to RFK.
Like in any good horror movie, it gets to the point where you're jumping at shadows. Will Sally be horribly hazed by boarding school girls gone bad? Will Glen reveal himself as some kind of vampiric predator, invited by his victims to come in through the window? Well, no, it's mostly just harmless hijinks, and Sally's overnighter interview goes great. But when an episode starts with a man getting shot in the face and is peppered with references to one of the greatest horror films ever made, people get nervous.
Elsewhere at the agency, the tragedy of Dick Whitman repeats itself as the farce of Bob Benson, as the genial glad-hander and Pete Campbell admirer is revealed to be a bumpkin con-man cut from the Draperchrist's cloth. (Apparently he even pulled Don's George Costanza-esque trick of bullshitting his way into having been hired.) Like John Cassavetes in Rosemary, Pete decides to use the evil he uncovers for his own ends. Bob becomes Pete's pet monster, a weapon he can deploy against his frienemies throughout SC&P. As Pete tells Duck Phillips, he's seen this monster movie before, and he knows it doesn't have a happy ending for the people who come after the beast with torches and pitchforks. If only Pete had seen Don at home, curled up in the fetal position like some grotesque overgrown infant, he'd realize it doesn't end well for the monster, either.
