My favourite tv series of all time has just come to an end, and I thought it appropriate to bid my farewell to Mr Draper and the rest of the Mad Men (and Women).
There's lots I'd like to say, but first I think Erica Cantoni on Bright Wall/Dark Room said it best:
I have forgotten all the major stories, and yet I could carve in bone my memory of a dozen tiny, quiet scenes:
Betty, sitting in a late-day Roman glow, her hair whipped and molded into a European chignon. Looking so modern it was as if she alone dragged in the backdrop change, inventing the ’60s. As if she’d finally shed the kids like a dead skin or a fire and emerged, victoriously golden. Reborn. How the Italian men hit on her and insulted Don when he approached, as a stranger. Which was perfect, right? Because how long had it been since they’d known each other at all? I’d etch in how he fell back in love, madly so, with Betty for two days. With this restored, empowered version of her. All cold upper class beauty, all superiority, all linguistic-flexing power. Too good for him, which is the key to everything.
I’d etch the repose of Roger’s tired face when he calls Joan late at night, with Jane, the regrettable wife, passed out beside him.
Peggy’s hand on Don’s after Anna dies. This single brief touch a complete swelling orchestra composed to explain the depth of their bond and its tenuousness. How vital and still wildly vulnerable this tie is in the possession of a man so accustomed to scorching any tenderness entrusted to him.
Everything encompassed in the moments Don calls Betty “birdie.” The whole rattling film projection of their courtship and marriage and children and infidelities and lies and second tries and reheated dinners. And the end that Betty pretends comes with the bang of Dick Whitman’s betrayal, and not years of whimpers. Every aching sweetness remains in “birdie,” somehow fossilized and surviving but useless as a mate-less bull.
The literal restraint of the characters—their buttoned-up loneliness. The moments of elegant non-response and suffocated reaction. The things they do not tell each other, the fights they don’t finish, the slaps that aren’t delivered. The communicative release they never allow themselves (even as it might be their salvation).
Sometimes, I find myself watching Mad Men through a sort of fantasy lens, as if it were an underwater ballet. A cold, slow-floating drift of Asian dance and sad, silent theater.
It’s hypnotizing.
There are a few more moments I could add to this carousel: Don and Peggy's slow dance in season 7, Roger's "you're okay" to Don the last time they meet in the series, Peggy's fierce and smug catwalk in season 7 as opposed to the Peggy carrying her box in season 1, not wanting to make a noise, to go unnoticed. And then there are the funny ones: Pete's exclamations ("Hell's bells, Trudy!", "Not great, Bob!"). Freddie playing Mozart with his trousers' zipper. "I'm Peggy Olson and I want to smoke some Marijuana." Bert's "She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper. She's an astronaut."
But really, the beauty of Mad Men comes down to this: it's more about what's not said. There is a distance - between the characters, and between you and the characters - a void you can never even imagine to fill, and that's where the unsaid and unwritten goes to settle and die (or does it ever?). It doesn't die, it lies there and stays suffocated, that "communicative release." You get it at times, you get a brief disruption every now and then, just like Don's breaking in tears in the very last episode, but that's not a change in character--it's rather a piece of the puzzle, where you get to see a side of something that, however, remains puzzling.
Don's distance is the most fascinating aspect of what makes his character what it is, and what makes it one of the best characters in the history of television. It's this distance that allows us to see beyond the contradictions encompassed in the character, and leads us to accept him as a man. Don is despicable, but it's because of his restraint that we can't really see him as such, because it's what makes him hover above all kind of judgement.
I have learnt to love despicable characters, but in the end I really wanted Walter White to die. Don, instead, lives on. Mad Men's "underwater ballet" continues, and it looks a bit like Bert Cooper's farewell dance.
Farewell.
