You may have heard about a little controversy from the latest episode of Mad Men. The firm of Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Price had a client who wanted to capture the “adolescent joy” of their product (Chevalier Blanc cologne) by having a Beatles-esque song for their ad. Creative head honcho Don Draper was surprised by the song his team settled on and admitted he didn’t know “what was going on out there” musically. At the end of the episode, Don’s wife Megan gave him a copy of the Beatles’ recently-released Revolver and pointed him to a song to listen to, before leaving their luxe, high-rise apartment. Don put the album on the turntable and the swirling drone of “Tomorrow Never Knows” filled the room, followed by John Lennon singing “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream/It is not dying…” Draper listens for a while until he decides he’s heard enough, then lifts the arm of the turntable in a gesture that is equal parts boredom and disgust. The episode ends with Don Draper alone in his expansive, well appointed living room.
Some fans of the show thought the scene was ridiculous, claiming that any high-powered ad man would have been hip to The Beatles in 1966 and would not have been alienated by a little psychedelia. I think this critique misses the forest for the trees so completely that it can’t even see the single sapling it is fixated on. The end of last Sunday’s Mad Men is probably a taste of things to come and – at the risk of sounding absurdly grandiose – might even be an inflection point for the series.
To explain why, let me submit that the over-riding theme of Mad Men is the eclipse of WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) culture and, by extension, the eroding dominance of the WASP establishment. Those who follow the show know it starts just before the Nixon-Kennedy election, when the decade we now know as “the sixties” still hadn’t begun. The account execs and creatives running the agency are thoroughly 1950s, upper crust WASP creatures, a blend of macho swagger and Ivy League polish. They live in a world of three martini lunches that often begin well before noon, immaculately tailored suits, New Yorker stories, and impossibly witty repartee. At the same time, the ad men are often bigoted, petty, and insecure, and their consciences are rarely troubled by the steady stream of extramarital affairs they enjoy with the girls at the office.
The creators of Mad Men clearly believe this insular WASP world had to be opened up, and the social and political changes of the 60s soon made that happen. However, the show is ambivalent about what was lost, since the upper crust WASP culture depicted by Mad Men was more refined, elegant, confident and (in some ways at least) intelligent than what came afterwards. Nevertheless, as the seasons go on, there’s little doubt that this world is giving way to the cultural changes roiling the 1960s. This is symbolized by the agency’s World War II-era senior partners (Roger Sterling and Bert Cooper) losing power and confidence as the years go by, a process that may have reached an apogee two weeks ago when Roger Sterling – of all people – takes LSD with his recently wed trophy wife. Their acid trip together leads Roger to calmly propose divorce, a “victory” for the chaotic countercultural tides over established institutions.
Of course, Don Draper’s story is central to Mad Men, and in many ways he’s a catalyst for the changes that take place within the agency. More importantly, he’s a chameleon, with a remarkable ability to reinvent himself (literally) and adapt to whatever circumstances he encounters. The risk of being a chameleon is that you don’t have an independent identity of your own, but we know enough of Draper’s bizarre journey to realize there’s more to him than what others see. This is one way that Don Draper differs from Jay Gatsby, a fictional character he’s sometimes compared to (another is that Don Draper’s success is earned from participating in America’s legitimate, capitalist economy).
Draper has now come to an interesting point in his life. The current season began with him turning 40, a symbolic birthday when youth is definitively left behind and middle age begins. And the middle-aged Donald Draper is in a very good place: rich, successful, admired, with a new wife who, from all appearances, is the first woman he’s truly loved. He is living the American Dream and thoroughly vested in it. At the same time, he’s young enough to be building his business, marriage, and growing reputation in philanthropic and public causes for the future.
In Mad Men’s cast of characters, Don is poised professionally and culturally between Roger and Peggy Olsen, his secretary in the first season who becomes the agency’s first female “ad man.” A kind of cultural inheritance is transmitted among these characters; it’s no accident that Don’s mentor was Roger, and Peggy’s mentor is Don. It’s also no mistake that Roger is old, tired, looking backward and irrelevant in the emerging America (he’s already written his memoirs, but they were rejected for publication), while Peggy – a young career woman making her way in a man’s world, smoking pot at work, and (in her mother’s words) “living in sin” with an underground journalist – practically embodies the cultural changes taking place in the sixties. Don is exactly mid-way between the two, thoroughly ensconced in the upper echelons of society but still navigating his way forward, and upward, in the world.
How would such an individual react to “Tomorrow Never Knows”? Probably not very positively. Contra Ann Powers, there is a huge gap between “Paint it Black” or “Wild Thing” and the closing tune on Revolver. The first two songs may dip a toe into “psychedelic weirdness,” but “Tomorrow Never Knows” pushes you into the pool headfirst. Moreover, the other two songs were hits while “Tomorrow Never Knows” received no airplay at the time on commercial radio. It probably was played on the underground radio stations emerging in 1966, but Don Draper has never been a bohemian, and at this point in the series his tastes are more mainstream than ever. “Tomorrow Never Knows” would have sounded very strange and shocking to his ears, and the lyrics – all that business about surrendering to the void and knowing the meaning of within – may have been downright offensive. As faithful viewers of Mad Men know, Don Draper is extremely familiar with his inner depths and has resisted the urge to surrender to the void. He struggled mightily to get where he is, and he’s pretty satisfied being there. The last thing he needs to do right now is dissolve into nothingness in a tripped-out effort to attain cosmic bliss.
Given Draper’s personal story arc, it’s not at all surprising that his gut reaction to this strange new music is to reject it. And it’s extremely significant that he is rejecting the Beatles, who more than any other band created the soundtrack for the 60s, and whose own evolution from cheerful innocent moptops to long-haired countercultural rebels almost exactly parallels the decade’s social changes. It’s also noteworthy that the year is 1966, almost exactly halfway in the Beatle’s unprecedented commercial and artistic odyssey between 1962 and 1970. The Beatles, like Don Draper, are right in the middle of their journey, and they’re leading the charge towards the full flowering and eventual crack-up of the psychedelic era that takes place at the end of the decade.
But Don Draper isn’t going to follow them there – at least not in his heart. That’s why he lifted the arm on that turntable and took refuge in the quiet and comfort of his luxury apartment. Don Draper, the maverick ad man, does not like the emerging cultural trends of his era, but this puts him in a tricky position since his job requires him to be culturally relevant.
This conflict obviously opens a whole new range of dramatic possibilities that could create a significant departure for the series. Until now, the world that existed at the beginning of Mad Men has slowly been giving way to “the sixties.” Will Don Draper, and perhaps others, begin to mount resistance? If so, look for future episodes that show Draper increasingly conflicted by – even antagonistic towards – the times he’s living through.