Mad Men: Season 3

As Donald Draper spins, so do the other bodies in his proximity. And if rhetoric is the show’s orbit, can Donald Draper be accused of making the weaker argument appear the stronger?

The following are facts in the case against Donald Draper:

• He deserts the army by using tragedy to his advantage.
• He often mistreats co-workers by leveraging his power over them.
• Has multiple affairs and deceives his wife repeatedly.
• Is self-righteously indignant about his wife deceiving him.
• Often treats Betty as though she might be real.
• Abandons his brother to protect his self-image.
• Makes a mistake of judgement, repents and repeats.
• “This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened."

I don’t know about you, but these allegations remind me stridently of Tony Soprano. But because the last season of The Sopranos was bad (and season five was fine at best), the last memories I have of Tony is as a cartoonish embodiment of the duality of man housed in a violent pork sandwich. Donald Draper is not a much better man than Tony was (a matter of degrees, not kind), but he’s more disturbing because he’s much more like we are: a working man who thinks his intellect can outmaneuver his Soul. And Mad Men 3 is a portrait of that man running into the limits of his sophistry.

At the conclusion of Season 3, I see that Donald Draper is much closer to who I am than I allowed myself to admit. This made watching the show easy to "get into" (climb inside?) because of my tendency to believe a good liar, but harder to see the ways in which Donald and I are similar archetypes because I was seduced by the art.

In Blue Velvet, Frank Booth tells young Jeffery “You’re just like me,” after which Jeffery punches him, just as Tony Soprano would. In Mad Men, Donald Draper only has his words and his thoughts and his mastery over them, and unlike life in the mob, words can’t be whacked. Instead, they turn into stories that don’t go away. And this one’s a heartbreaker; not because Donald Draper tells a sad story, but because he often can’t tell the different between where his story ends and truth begins.

But I’m not a cynic and Donald is starting a new ad agency, finally making something that exists, that everybody can confirm exists. I ache thinking about the cruelty and deception that awaits us, but hope that the idea of an honest rhetorician is something less mythical than Tony Soprano or the claim against the sophisits. A-

Koko: Best post in a long time, Slothrop. This is wonderful stuff. Also, why am I so small?

Slothrop: Koko: "Even dwarves started small." And these two additional thoughts: The highlight of season 3 goes to the clever adaptation of Chekov–– "If you introduce a mini-tractor into Act I, you had better be sure it mutilates someone's leg by the end of Act IV."

And regarding stories, the Buddhist folks remind us that we suffer not because it rains, but because of the stories we tell ourselves about the rain. This is ultimately why I think Don Draper is in a harder to escape prison than is Tony Soprano––he's an immaculate story teller and therefore the prison of suffering he's constructed is much less obvious than are Tony's primal transgressions.