Seeing Mad Men through its ads: Every week, WIRED takes a look at the latest episode of Mad Men through the lens of the latest media campaign by the staff of the agency formerly known as Sterling Cooper & Partners.
You’d be surprised how much detail goes into creating a perfectly generic person. For Bill Phillips, the researcher tapped to help McCann Erickson’s small army of creative directors determine how best to market Miller Beer’s new diet offering, the ballad of the common man is a veritable aria, and it’s delivered in the unmistakable tones of a Don Draper pitch:
“I’m going to describe a man to you of very specific qualities. He lives in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio: Some call it the heartland, some call it the beer belt. He has some college, makes a good living, but it doesn’t feel like it because he works long hours. He has a lawnmower. Wants a hammock. Bunch of power tools in the garage that he never uses. He loves sports because he used to play ‘em, and he loves dogs because they don’t talk. We all know this man, because there are millions of him. And he drinks beer. Not just any beer — it has to be his brand. The one he drank in college? The one his dad drank? The one that comes in the best bottle, can, tap? It doesn’t matter, because that’s it, and it’s not open for discussion. Now you all know that that’s not true. But how do you get him to open his mind? You better have something more, or in this case, less. And that’s tricky.”
It certainly is for Don Draper himself, a man who knows better than most what it takes to craft the ideal American identity. Don looks around that conference table and sees an undifferentiated mass of brylcream and shirtsleeves, tasked with selling a new product to a similarly undifferentiated mass of men dreaming of their high-school gridiron glory days from the comfort of their imaginary hammocks. His eyes drift to the window, where he watches an airplane drape its contrails across the spire of the Empire State Building. He’d been led to believe he’d be soaring in similar fashion---the “white whale” this mega-agency had been chasing for a decade, finally harpooned and towed in to “bring us up a notch.” Instead, he’s just another sailor, lured on board with praise and promises identical to those used to attract others, crewing a ship that will get where it’s going whether he contributes or not. So---like Major Tom in David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” the song that ends the episode, a character who himself sees his incredible journey boiled down to the brand of shirts he wears---he cuts himself loose, drifting across the country to the midwestern home of Diana, the melancholy waitress in whose dour company he has found some comfort. “She seemed so lost,” he tells her furious ex-husband before wandering off again, allowing a random hitchhiker to set his course. Lost? Sure, but it takes one to know one.
Joan has an even harder time accepting her reduced status as more pluribus than unum at the new office, though things seem fine, even fun, at first. She’s welcomed to work by Libby and Karen, two copywriters who specialize in campaigns targeting women---“If it’s in it, near it, or makes you think about it, we’re on it”---and whose approach to gender politics is connected women’s lib only by the coincidence of one of their names. “It’s not women’s lib, just a bitch session,” says Karen of the weekly girls’ night out to which they invite the newcomer. “We are strictly consciousness-lowering,” Libby jokes, and Joan’s smile practically radiates “I’m gonna like it here.” But by the end of the episode, the boys’-club condescension and harassment she’s subjected to by McCann execs like Dennis and Ferg Donnelly is such that she threatens to sic feminist icon Betty Friedan on the company unless they either put the kibosh on the creeps or cough up the cash she’s owed.
Being seen as part of a fundamentally faceless female horde is awful when it subjects you to undercutting, backstabbing, and grab-assing, but it’s a useful tool to strike fear in the hearts of men who watched said horde march through the streets of New York some 50,000 strong fighting for equal rights and respect---the political equivalent of the muscle her developer boyfriend tells her he’s hired from time to time when dealing with difficult individuals. Unfortunately for Joan, though, she’s fighting fanatics, and she’s forced to accept a buyout rather than endure a potentially ruinous legal battle. The system’s strength lies not just in who it allows to win, but how it permits different losers to lose.
The hour’s third major storyline features two very different characters coming to terms with this same truth. Though Peggy decided to make the move to McCann in hopes that it would be good for her career in the long term, the short term has prevented her from making the move at all. Her new employer screwed up her transition, leaving her with no office and mistaking her for a secretary. So she angrily accuses Roger, her fellow final holdout at the old building, of letting his employees down by selling them out when he sold McCann the firm in the first place. “You get bought, you get sold, you get fired,” he responds unsentimentally.
But their final afternoon in the office is spent in glorious contradiction of his commodified vision of human beings. They pick through the stuff left behind for items of idiosyncratic personal meaning, like the late Bert Cooper’s century-old tentacle-porn print. (The ghost of Bert, the firm’s founding weirdo, earlier put in an even more literal appearance.) They blow off what’s supposed to be Peggy’s first day in the office, getting hammered while he plays the organ and she rollerskates up and down the empty halls. In the end, she takes Roger’s advice when she tells him, “You know I need to make men feel at ease!” He answers, “Who told you that?” Peggy brings the octopus art into McCann to decorate her office, wearing sunglasses indoors and dangling a cigarette from her lips. Perhaps the best way to avoid becoming the kind of person a researcher can pin down is to neither fight nor flee, but say “fuck it.”
