Retrospective on Mad Men (2007-2015) and Mimetic Desire

How it started, how it ended

Here in the present day, it is easy to forget the impact of Mad Men in terms of the pop culture image of the 1960s. The sixties-themed merchandise and period pieces made in the 1990s tended to emphasize Baby Boomer “flower power,” casual dress, and the hippie movement. Even the Austin Powers trilogy had this “groovy, baby!” aesthetic that was never present in the original James Bond franchise and other 1960s spy movies it was parodying (and yes, I'm aware that was part of the humor).

Created by Matthew Weiner and premiering on AMC in 2007, Mad Men eventually got there to the hippie era in the later seasons. However, it was notable for depicting life for the working young adults of the Silent Generation in a decade that started, culturally, like an extension of the 1950s. (The Baby Boomers, like the protagonist's daughter, were kids at the time.) In contrast to hippie culture, it emphasizes the formality and glamor of that decade. Everything looks good. The series is not exactly subtle in its theme that the “good old days” were not actually good: there's the rampant sexual harassment, the cheating and psychological abuse, all the characters’ relationships are a dumpster fire. In some ways, Mad Men is just like a million other period pieces with the cliché of “The midcentury postwar period was conformist and boring! Everyone was dead inside! Everything was a façade!”

But to its credit, the series does manage to steel-man the façade — that’s what makes it stand out from those countless other period pieces with the same general theme. The ad agency workers (at least the ones who weren't being harassed or discriminated against) looked like they were having fun, and they looked good while they were at it. The employees — even the emotionally immature ones — were treated like adults, unlike Office Space where the fakery was of the infantilizing kind. In Mad Men, everyone carries themselves with dignity. The series introduced a younger generation to retro fashion and graphic design.

Protagonist Don Draper (Jon Hamm) personifies the “glamorous and dignified outside, dysfunctional and unfulfilled inside” theme. He is exceptional at his career as an ad man. But “Don Draper” is actually a stolen identity, and he hides his true identity of “Dick Whitman” from both his personal life and his work life at the ad agency. Due to childhood trauma which is revealed over the series, he has a huge Madonna-Whore complex in his dealings with women. In avoiding his true self, Don deceives and dismisses others, doesn’t let anyone get truly close to him, and can have a mean and callous streak.

Deuteragonist Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) proves her mettle in a male-dominated career field, getting accustomed to the ad agency and rising up the ranks with her creative talent as a copywriter. Like Don, she is good at what she does. She is one of the more relatable and sympathetic characters overall, starting as a young underdog and working to the top of her field. Even so, her solid public life conceals an unsatisfying personal life.

Peggy sometimes clashes with Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), the bombshell alpha secretary who wants to use her social connections and feminine wiles to secure a good marriage. Unlike the underdog Peggy, Joan is bold and ambitious to begin with, and actually enjoys playing the game with men. However, her life goals and means are more traditional than Peggy’s. Joan has a secret — for a single woman, she is older than she wants to admit. She feels she has to downplay certain aspects of herself in order to attain the kind of man she considers marriage material.

One of Joan’s paramours is Roger Sterling (John Slattery), who appears to be made for the world of Man Men. An older married guy constantly drinking and womanizing, his life is a theme-park version of the swinging early sixties. Part of this is dealing with the memories from his World War II experiences. Even then, it is a lifestyle that doesn't go with the dignity expected of his age — people view him as fun rather than wise. He has a chivalrous side and he gets some respect as a war veteran, but the tradeoff for his façade of fun is not being taken very seriously.

Don’s wife Betty (January Jones) has some similarities — she is immature, all about the façade, and treated as an ornament rather than someone to be taken seriously. And like Roger, she doesn’t do much to dispel this image. Brought up with the notion that appearance is everything, she likes the fun parts of being an affluent trophy wife, such as going to social events. But inwardly she is stressed out — and outwardly unable to conceal it, often getting into a snit over minor inconveniences. She has unrealistic expectations of perfection, was raised with the idea that beauty and thinness is the measure of her worth, and she says she doesn’t want to get old. And she is saddled with the boring end of Don’s Madonna-Whore complex: while he considers her uninteresting compared to his affairs, he also shoots down her attempts to be interesting herself.

Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) is more obviously narcissistic than Don Draper is — he’s a midwit who insists on being regarded as a literary genius and, in his exploitation of women, crosses lines that Don won’t cross. Slick and smarmy and immature, he thinks he is special, and gets angry when he is treated normally. But he is determined to achieve success, and for this he draws from the redeeming traits that he does have.

In my last essay, I wrote about Joseph Campbell and his well-known influence on narrative structure. Recently I’ve also been getting into another midcentury thinker who also studied old tales from around the world and found narrative patterns that influence people to this day: René Girard, known for his theory of mimetic desire. He has been gaining a surge of general interest since his 2015 death (which he would have found highly ironic I’m sure), but his theories have influenced marketing and advertising for decades. I've seen no evidence that Girard was a specific influence for Mad Men, but the Mimetic Desire theory lines up: the idea that people want things because they imitate what others want — even if it isn’t good for them or for society in general.

Starting with the first episode, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” Man Men’s first advertising subplot is the campaign for the Lucky Strike cigarette company. The general public was starting to become aware that smoking could be unhealthy — how do you design an ad campaign to convince people to do it anyway? In another scene, Don claims even love is a concept invented by ad men like himself.

Whether they are following norms and traditions or trying to prove how modern and freewheeling they are, all the characters conform to some idea of what they ought to want and who they ought to be. Don and Betty Draper, among many other characters, smoke like chimneys and Betty, in general, is really into doing things simply because they are normative and because they fit an image of perfection. Joan views her career as a stepping stone to marriage, because it is the thing to do. Roger has a playboy lifestyle because it is the thing to do. Pete and Peggy have sex just before Pete is to marry another woman, because it is the thing to do. At that point in the story, Peggy in general is resigned to accepting sexual harassment from Pete and other men — but when she half-heartedly hits on Don because it seems the thing to do, he sees right through the act and says it is unnecessary. It’s the start of a strong, platonic business relationship that runs through the whole series.

Peggy gets pregnant from her random one-night stand with Pete, then surrenders the baby for adoption. For choosing career over parenting, she gets some judgment from her traditional religious Catholic family and friends. Don is one of the few people who knows this, and he supports her because, among other things, he is a wanderer at heart and not particularly beholden to tradition.

** Major Spoilers Below **

At the end of the series, we see the difference between what the main characters want (or think they want) and what they actually get.

The most obvious example is Joan Holloway Harris: her marriage doesn’t work out, and even though she becomes a rising star in the company, some of her male colleagues are still disrespectful or worse. But with her mother’s help, she keeps the child fathered by Roger Sterling, and becomes her own boss as an entrepreneur. A single woman succeeding outside the corporate structure — the complete opposite of the life goals she had wanted in the beginning, and yet she shines at the life she actually ends up with.

Roger Sterling himself thoroughly enjoys the emerging youth culture of the 1960s, experimenting with drugs and going through two failed marriages and tons of affairs. But when he disapproves of his daughter taking up an irresponsible lifestyle of her own, he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. In the end, Roger stops trying to pursue the eternal youth he thinks he wants, and settles down with a woman closer to his own age.

Pete Campbell also discovers that what he thought he wanted, was not what he needed. That he was pursuing a shallow vision of who he should be, and after all his cheating and bad behavior, his wife finally got fed up and divorced him. Pete matures, rethinks his life, and convinces his wife that he loves her after all and is ready to give their family a fresh start. They get back together and move to Kansas for Pete’s new job. Will his change of heart stick this time, or will he fall back to his old ways? The redemption arc seems to be real, and Pete finds happiness in spite of himself.

Betty is not so lucky — of the main cast, she is the one who ends up with a bad ending dying of terminal lung cancer. While other characters had good endings getting something other than their mimetic desires, Betty followed the path of vanity laid out for her and wanted to never grow old — and got exactly her wish. Notably, Weiner said this fate was always planned for her, according to Vanity Fair and The Hollywood Reporter. Betty smoked like a chimney — but so did many other characters. She was a narcissistic parent — but so were many other characters. Betty has some traits in common — and also some important differences — with René Girard's mimetic scapegoat. Somebody had to have the bad ending, and Betty pays the price for the ad campaigns denying the dangers of tobacco. Unlike a proper literary scapegoat, Betty is not a pariah, and not persecuted or blamed for society’s ills in-story. However, there was always fan speculation that she was deliberately written to be an unlikeable bad mother to the audience. And even in-story, while Betty is not individually a scapegoat, the plot as a whole highlights the double standards faced by women and mothers as a group. There’s plenty of lust and gluttony to go around in the world of Mad Men, but it’s the women who get judged the most for it.

Peggy Olson has a complex relationship with the double standard. In some of the later episodes, she takes up a relationship with a married man and then acts like she’s the victim when he decides not to leave his wife and children for her after all. “Well aren’t you lucky to have decisions,” she says, and the reviewers at the time swooned over the line like, You go girl! But I have a different interpretation of the scene. Oops, it turns out that the seemingly nice and chivalrous guy who plans to abandon his family out of boredom, is actually a patronizing prick. Surpised Pikachu face! But Peggy chose to date another woman’s husband of her own free will, and copes with the idea that she has no agency... by using the type of line that might work in an ad agency, but not real life. She copes by escaping into a fantasy where a clever zinger explains everything, and that is a low point for her. In the end, though, Peggy realizes she can choose her own happiness. She can tell the difference between reality and fantasy, she can have real love in a healthy relationship at the same time as her career. She is the classic Hero’s Journey archetype of the young protagonist who attains the best of both worlds.

For Donald Draper a.k.a. Dick Whitman, as an older established protagonist, the journey is a bit different — establishing what his legacy is going to be. At the beginning of the series, he thought he had the best of both worlds — a secret wanderlust, with an image of a picture-perfect stable life. Don assumes he can cope with difficulty by changing his external image, or changing his surroundings. But after even his second marriage fails, he is confronted with the idea that his relational problems are from within.

In the last few episodes, Don gets restless and takes a long road trip, unsure whether he will return to the advertising business at all. He loses his possessions and contemplates a new life from scratch again. In the series finale, “Person to Person,” he accompanies a late friend’s niece to a New Age hippie retreat in California. Like Peggy in the first season, the young single woman recently gave birth and doesn’t want to parent the baby — and gets judged by her spiritual community. Turns out the New Agers weren’t much different from the Catholics. The scene goes to show that you can change your surroundings, “move forward,” jettison tradition and try to be part of something new and progressive, but none of that will change basic human nature — any community will have its share of judgment and conflict, and sometimes the judgments have a point. It’s all disillusioning for Don, whom Peggy implores over the phone to return “home” to the ad agency and work for Coca-Cola. But now that Don realizes changing his surroundings won’t fix his problems, he confesses what he has been feeling guilty about, accepts the spiritual community where he is for now, and he connects with one of the other retreat attendees in similar emotional pain.

“The whole last season was the idea that the revolution failed in some way. It was time to deal with what you can control which is yourself. People were turning inward,” [Weiner] said, as quoted in Variety.

In Don's final scene, he joins the hippies meditating at the seaside, and has a profound spiritual experience — then gets the idea for the Coca Cola theme song. A cynical interpretation of the ending is that he’s just a grifter who finds a way to twist an ethereal meditation session into something shallow and commercial. But in a 2015 Hollywood Reporter interview, showrunner Matthew Weiner said he was going for a straightforward happy ending, not something cynical.

My interpretation of the Coca-Cola scene is that Don has given up trying to escape his own life, given up trying to find fulfillment as something totally separate from mundane work and responsibilities. Instead he has accepted the imperfections of human relationships that interweave with spirituality.

Mad Men was famous for its depiction of a decade known for significant social transformation, and of an industry built on mimetic desire in looking to others. And yet, in its own characters and their arcs, the show demonstrates that personal transformation is from within.