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<\/a>\nMad Men<\/i> creator Matthew Weiner has insisted that the show\u2019s ending was planned out years in advance. Now that I\u2019ve seen it, I\u2019m convinced he\u2019s telling the truth\u2014and that he should have come up with something else. It\u2019s not that the Coca-Cola \u201cHilltop Ad\u201d coda is bad<\/i>, necessarily\u2014there\u2019s a certain holistic brilliance to it\u2014but the thinking it evinces, and the \u201cpoint\u201d it\u2019s making, belong to an earlier, simpler conception of the show that Weiner and his cast and crew transcended long ago.<\/p>\n
My complaint is not with the way that Don Draper\u2019s (and Mad Men<\/i>\u2019s) concluding, majestic epiphany was interrupted by the Coke ad\u2014we\u2019ve seen endings be brilliantly interrupted before, sometimes literally (The Sopranos<\/i>; Gravity\u2019s Rainbow; Monty Python and the Holy Grail<\/i>)\u2014or the sudden imposition of a discordant stroke that mars the conclusive, elegiac tone (the elevator bell blotting out the final, soaring note of Radiohead\u2019s OK Computer<\/i>; \u201cHer Majesty\u201d deliberately \u201cruining\u201d the coda of Abbey Road<\/i>). Nor is there anything new or bad about an ending that illustrates that the characters haven\u2019t changed or learned anything (Speed the Plow; The Wolf of Wall Street; Cabaret<\/i>) or that nothing<\/i> has changed (Waiting for Godot<\/i>) or that everything we\u2019ve seen is doomed to repeat (The Godfather<\/i>). The problem is that we\u2019re being asked to understand Don Draper and his world in terms of an advertisement<\/i>, and it\u2019s simply no longer possible or applicable. Yes, it\u2019s terribly clever and profoundly cynical (in a way that seems to uphold the series\u2019 masterful commitment to cleverness and cynicism), but in its final moments, Mad Men<\/i> is forced to retreat from its ambitions; to descend from the unprecedented altitudes it had reached to take refuge in the kind of clever games with ads that it had long since outgrown.<\/p>\n
\u201cWorkplace Dramas\u201d are as old as television, but the post-MTM, Steven Bochco era of serialized \u201cprime-time soaps\u201d brought the jobs themselves<\/i> into the foreground, turning the characters\u2019 actual work product into a parallel track of narrative that provided symbolic, cultural and sociological bass notes that enriched the drama. The attorneys on LA Law<\/i> would spend weeks grappling with rape cases, murder trials and complex lawsuits that served as mirrors for their own character arcs: the legal stories illuminated (and commented upon) the personal stories, and vice versa\u2014the keys to each would be found in the other. And, as with the successes and failures of TV cops, you could keep score at home without getting lost in any ambiguities of artistry or nuance: the \u201cskills\u201d of the fictional lawyers were just manifestations of the puppet strings\u2014they won or lost because their victories and defeats served the story. You knew a detective was good because he caught the criminal; you knew a lawyer was good because he won. (St. Elsewhere<\/i> and ER<\/i> worked the same way: the patients\u2019 recovery rates were an arbitrary index of the fictional doctors\u2019 competence.)<\/p>\n
Mad Men<\/i> wasn\u2019t the first TV show about advertising, but the unusual historical framework, the use of actual American brands, and, most important, the unprecedented direct focus on the actual ad campaigns <\/i>allowed for a seismic innovation in the basic fabric of the \u201cworkplace drama.\u201d These characters were winning and losing and being hired and fired, but it was happening because of artistic<\/i> accomplishments that we could actually experience and evaluate\u2014you didn\u2019t need a medical degree to judge what they were doing, because ads, by definition, can be understood by anyone. A Don Draper pitch (such as his Lucky Strike \u201ctoasted\u201d concept or his triumphant, season-closing \u201cCarousel\u201d monologue for Kodak) was like an LA Law<\/i> closing statement, but vastly more interesting: there were complex aesthetic principles involved\u2014it was art<\/i>, not law or medicine. (The fact that Matt Weiner and his writers were essentially stealing<\/i> those product identities\u2014bending corporate reality to fit his fictional characters\u2019 needs\u2014somehow made it even better: Mad Men<\/i> \u201cexplained\u201d where the iconic catchphrases came from as freely as Pagan myths explained the weather and the stars.) In those early seasons, 1960s advertising (mostly hand-illustrated magazine, newspaper and billboard graphics), when matched up to the characters\u2019 retrograde, Promethean personal achievements, failures, sacrifices and transgressions, seemed like a bottomless well of delight; a Pandora\u2019s Box of sin and seduction that our parents already opened, decades ago, that we were only now being allowed to see.<\/p>\n
And we could read<\/i> the ads\u2014the campaigns themselves were so good that we could actually tell what made Peggy better or worse than Don: the \u201cdueling banjos\u201d moment in Season 6 when they both independently presented Heinz ads was uniquely enthralling because we could actually perceive the characters\u2019 contrasting personalities and creative vision in the work they put on the easels. (Peggy\u2019s ad was better, in my opinion\u2014it showcased her flair for concision and her mastery of declarative syntax\u2014but Don\u2019s was more innovative in the way it omitted the product from the picture, which was of a piece with his absence-obsessed and even suicidally-fixated work that year.) Season 4\u2019s \u201cThe Suitcase\u201d\u2014the exact midpoint of the series, and arguably Mad Men<\/i>\u2019s finest hour\u2014bonded those same two characters together through an unforgettable sleepless night of delayed bereavement (with Don\u2019s closest soul-mate Anna Draper as the Schrodinger\u2019s cat in the box he wouldn\u2019t open) that was like John Cassavetes fused with Jack London\u2019s fight-night commentary by way of Edward Hopper, concluding with the creation of the Samsonite ad campaign (\u201cThe Champ\u201d) that entwined all those threads into an unforgettable tapestry of pain, endurance and loss. The Mad Men<\/i> ads were so good that we could even make out the seeds of Ginsberg\u2019s madness in his post-McLuhan \u201ccut-up\u201d approach to selling Sno-Balls (he clearly wasn\u2019t aware that he was thinking of pigs because the brand name reminded him of Orwell\u2019s Animal Farm<\/i>). It was Ginsberg, his creativity already eclipsing Don\u2019s, who contrived the Jaguar tagline about \u201cSomething Beautiful You Can<\/i> Own\u201d while thinking about Megan Draper\u2014one of the last times on Mad Men<\/i> that the ads themselves were integral to the narrative.<\/p>\n
As Mad Men<\/i>\u2019s flawlessly re-created years progressed, so did the show itself\u2014Hitchcock\u2019s world became Kubrick\u2019s world, C. Wright Mills giving way to Tom Wolfe, and Weiner\u2019s drama, remarkably, expanded to fill all of that space. (A lesser show could have stayed with the original Sterling Cooper firm and its scenarios and timeframe the way M*A*S*H<\/i> lingered on an unchanging 4077th for eleven near-identical seasons.) The decade played out, move by move, but on the other side of a scrim, like Hamlet<\/i> occurring offstage during Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead<\/i>, while in the foreground, the half-dozen protagonists grew from cleverly-rendered historical anachronisms into richly detailed, soulful characterizations so indelible that we mourn their departure and imagine their lives in the intervening decades as if they were actual people. In those later seasons, the ads were no longer the focus\u2014Don\u2019s destructive, almost Dadaist \u201cHershey\u201d pitch (at the end of Season 6), in which, essentially, Dick Whitman destroyed Don Draper from within, was the last time we saw him do any real creative work. Like a statue that no longer needed a scaffolding, Mad Men<\/i> had progressed beyond the need for the annotation the ads provided.<\/p>\n
By the end, Mad Men<\/i> was no longer \u201cabout\u201d advertising in anything but the most nominal sense\u2014since, by the 1970s, the techniques and concepts pioneered by advertising had engulfed all of society, media, politics and culture. (Joe McGuinness\u2019 brilliant The Selling of the President 1968<\/i> perhaps best documented that tipping point.) Filmmakers who started out making ads, like Michael Cimino, Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and his brother Tony\u2014whose Top Gun<\/i> made Pauline Kael wonder, \u201cWhat is this commercial selling?\u201d (\u201cIt\u2019s just selling,\u201d she concluded)\u2014began the domination of Hollywood that continues to this day, despite the subsequent influx of music-video-spawned directors like David Fincher\u2026and the folk-music-filled songbook distributed in \u201cChapel\u201d at my Episcopal Summer camp in the 1980s included \u201cI\u2019d Like To Teach The World To Sing\u201d\u2014with the lyrics about Coca-Cola presented as an \u201coptional\u201d verse below the sheet music.<\/p>\n
As Charles Foster Kane\u2019s world of newspaper journalism collapsed around him, replaced by the newsreels that we see chronicling his demise, so Don Draper\u2019s Madison Avenue faded away\u2014an anachronism within a world which we have seen pass him by, witnessing every step, Don reaches the end of his utility as a man and as a protagonist. He may find rebirth, or a Fitzgeraldian \u201cSecond Act,\u201d but none of that has anything to do with the masterful 1971 ad that successfully harnessed post-Sixties proto-Globalist youth sentiment as an armature for selling soda. If, after an intricately-rendered, endlessly protracted Existential breakdown so profound, unsparing and merciless\u2014and so painstakingly wrought from the elements of a story so rich that it fully earns the right to its canvas of the entire 1960s\u2014we are meant to think that Don Draper actually does go back to McCann Erickson to create that Coke ad, then, essentially, we\u2019ve been had\u2014then Mad Men<\/i>\u2019s final brushstroke deliberately erases the overwhelming achievement of the preceding ninety-two hours of film, and we\u2019re back in Season 1, when his vacation slides inspired that \u201cCarousel\u201d ad for Kodak (and we all enjoyed the frisson<\/i> of the psychological\/commercial juxtaposition the way 1987 gallery patrons enjoyed Andy Warhol\u2019s insertion of the Dove Soap logo into Da Vinci\u2019s Last Supper<\/i>). If this flavor of postmodern auto-destruction appeals to you\u2014if you appreciate the cleverness of the punch line\u2014then you got the ending you wanted. But if, like me, you\u2019re unsatisfied, you can mentally trim away the \u201cHilltop\u201d ad, and imagine Matt Weiner\u2019s epic tale ending as it should\u2014with Don Draper\u2019s future unwritten and his Mona Lisa smile fading to black.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner has insisted that the show\u2019s ending was planned out years in advance. Now that I\u2019ve seen it, I\u2019m convinced he\u2019s telling the truth\u2014and that he should have come up with something else. It\u2019s not that the Coca-Cola \u201cHilltop Ad\u201d coda is bad, necessarily\u2014there\u2019s a certain holistic brilliance to it\u2014but the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43594,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43591"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43591"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44519,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43591\/revisions\/44519"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}