Two weeks ago, I wrote
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.
Do subsequent episodes of the series support the view that Don Draper is growing alienated from, and perhaps antagonistic towards, the sixties?
Why yes, they do. The best evidence of this comes from last Sunday’s episode, where Don’s wife Megan took him to a new, off-Broadway show. We saw Don and Megan in the audience while the actors onstage mouthed predictable cliches about the hollowness of consumerism and advertising. Don Draper could barely contain his disgust, and afterward he hardly spoke to Megan until he gave her a piece of his mind about Megan’s own sudden departure from the world of advertising.
It turns out that the play the Drapers saw was American Hurrah, “an experimental satire [that] . . . jolted New York theater audiences with its nonlinear exploration of social alienation” when it premiered in November 1966. As usual, the producers of Mad Men deserve enormous credit for getting the details exactly right. We know it is late Autumn 1966 at the time of the episode, and American Hurrah was premiering in New York at this very time.
The fact that that Mad Men chose such an obscure play for the Drapers to attend is also not an accident. They wanted to show Don Draper watching an experimental satire that beat its audience over the head with a countercultural message that was thoroughly representative of the times. They also wanted the audience to see that Don was not amused. And they wanted the episode to end with Don Draper becoming fully re-engaged in his work again, by firing up the troops and leading the charge for Sterling Cooper Draper Price to finally land their first car account (for Jaguar), which would show the rest of Madison Avenue they’ve truly arrived. It’s hard to imagine Draper reacting in a way that’s less compatible with the message of American Hurrah.
It’s also interesting that, once again, Don’s wife Megan is leading him into these strange new worlds. This could be relevant on a couple levels. First, Megan is much younger than Don (I believe she’s 22 and he’s 40), and the “generation gap” in cultural taste that developed in the 1950s had become a small chasm by the mid-60s. Mad Men is demonstrating that Don Draper will remain on one side of this gap: the world of 1940s and early 50s America that he grew up in and remains most comfortable with.
We also know Megan’s father is some kind of Marxist professor who disdains her bourgeois lifestyle and encouraged her to resurrect her acting career. It’s therefore not surprising that when she took his advice, she finds herself exploring quasi-Marxist cultural productions. This may be symbolic of the transmission of radical ideas from the academic to the entertainment realms – in addition, of course, to being a transmission of radical impulses from one generation to the next.
All of which may suggest a new, emerging plot line is taking shape in the series: the generational and cultural conflicts of the 1960s playing out in the Drapers’ marriage. Now that should be interesting.