‘Mad Men,’ A Conversation (Season Four Finale)

By Walter Dellinger

Every Sunday after the newest episode of “Mad Men,” lawyer and Supreme Court advocate Walter Dellinger will host an online dialogue about the show. The participants include literature professor Toril Moi, political science professor David L. Paletz, media expert Evangeline Morphos, and historian Alan Brinkley. Dellinger will post his thoughts shortly after each episode ends at 11 p.m., and the others will add their commentary in the hours and days that follow. Readers are invited to join in with their thoughts in the comments.

Evangeline Morphos

Last season’s final episode was titled “Shut the door, Have a Seat.” Well, as far as I’m concerned, the final episode of this season, had the same “Shut the door…” moment. And this time, I was right there in the room with Peggy and Joan as they dished, and dissed Don Draper’s announcement that he was marrying Megan. Really?!!

“Whatever can be on your mind?” Joan purrs sarcastically as Peggy enters.

“Can you believe it!?” (Peggy and I both sputtered at the same time)

“It happens all the time — they’re just all between marriages.” Joan reminds us wisely.

Never mind that Peggy just saved the company– Don’s marriage proposal has overtaken the entire attention of the firm.

“Well, I learned a long time ago to not get all my satisfaction from this job.” Joan continues. In a suspended moment we believe that’s the right answer. But Peggy correctly breaks the thought with: “That’s bulls—!”

And she’s right. The whole season has been a counterpoint of Don’s personal life and his professional life. As Don spiraled into dark and self-destructive places, we were comforted by the fact that he could manage to salvage his self — his persona — for the job. Although he often came close, he never lost his edge with the job. And that was always a salvation for him, and for the energy of the narrative.

Don Draper — mysterious, sexy, aloof — is a 60s Jay Gatsby. And I don’t like Gatsby’s self-destructive and slavish infatuation with that dip Daisy any more than I like Don’s lapse into ordinariness with his — granted, attractive — Francophone secretary. Are Peggy and I just a little bit jealous?

Faye Miller isn’t any happier about this than the rest of us. When Don calls her to set up a face-to-face meeting to tell her he’s engaged, she correctly pre-empts him. “I’m not going to have some conversation and then have to sit through coffee afterward. Just get to it.”

The final episode seems to be about auditions — Don auditioning for the American Cancer Society, Peggy auditioning for Topaz, Megan auditioning for the role of wife, and Don testing the waters of what it is like to be himself.

Throughout the episode Don has been edging toward an acceptance of himself as both Dick and Don. In fact, when Sally sees the wall he painted in Anna’s bungalow and asks “Who’s Dick?” Don answers “Well, that’s me.”

Faye begins the episode by telling Don: “Maybe, it’s not all about work: maybe that sick feeling will go away if you take your head out of the sand about your past.” “And then what happens?” Don asks. “You’re stuck trying to be a person like the rest of us,” she answers.

Don seems to have emerged from his dark night of the soul having reconciled the duality in himself. He has come out the other end — happy, yes; but ordinary. When Don proposes to Megan he says “I don’t know what it is about you, but…I feel like myself when I’m with you…but the way I always wanted to feel.”

Like Peggy, I’m disappointed Don has settled for personal happiness. I am always more intrigued by the edge he brings to the workplace. Don, Peggy and Pete could always be counted on to put the company first. And the thrill of advertising — the way in which we are constantly manipulated to believe in someone else’s dream — is something Mad Men reminded us was constantly part of our world.

At the beginning of the episode, Ken refuses to pressure his future father-in-law for a meeting with the CEO of Dow Chemical. “I’m not Pete,” he argues. “Cynthia’s my life, my actual life.” But isn’t that what has made Pete such an exciting character for us. He’s the guy who goes to a pitch meeting instead of his wife’s bedside after she’s given birth.

This remarkable show surprised us once again. I was geared up for an explosive ending in which Don’s secret is revealed, etc. The more disturbing surprise — indeed cliffhanger — is that Don may be “a person like the rest of us” after all.

Like Peggy, I’ll be there at Don’s wedding — but I won’t be happy about it. (And I don’t give the marriage more than two years.)

(While I am in an “I-told-you-so mood” — I would like to point out that early on I called the fact that Joan had kept the baby. )

Walter Dellinger

With Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” playing over the fade to black, Season Four came to an end not with a bang but a whimper. It was, however, not necessarily the worst for being a quieter evening than the spectacular ending of Season Three.

Changes were subtler. There is no new agency, but evolution goes on at SCDP. As we all waited to Don Draper to work his magic and produce the business that saves the agency, it is in fact Peggy Olson who produces the account that will keep the doors open. And she does so while Don is out in la-la land falling in love.

The pivot point of the final episode was pedestrian, but quite revealing: Sally, bickering with Bobby, upends a strawberry milkshake all over the diner breakfast table. Megan calmly and cheerfully wipes it all up and says with a smile that “it’s just milkshake.” Don, accustomed to the Betty Draper-type explosion over spilt milk we have all come to expect, is stunned by Megan’s warm, comforting response. The scene is preceded by Betty’s horrible firing of Carla and immediately followed by Don’s proposal. Don sees in Megan a better version of domestication than he has ever experienced, except with Anna.

As Evangeline suggests, the whole episode is about how all the women react to Don’s engagement and how that reaction is shaped by the roles they are playing in this time of transition for American women. Betty gets the news just as she signals a renewed interest in Don. (She didn’t forget he was coming to the house. She has been posed there in the kitchen, lying in wait for him.) The engagement is a blow for Betty, for whom everything with Henry “is not all perfect” — which seems quite an understatement.

Faye Miller reacts badly, as expected. Peggy’s reaction is the most interesting. She is… I guess the word is … exasperated. It’s not that she wanted Don for herself. She thought that she and Don were all about the business, now he’s running off like a girl in love while she is focused on bringing in the clients.

Will the next season show us a newly domesticated Don Draper? Will Faye Miller be boiling the family bunny on the stove? Will Betty and Henry be making a second trip to Nevada to undo the results of their last trip? Will Peggy continue to drive the agency’s work? Will Pete Campbell and Roger Sterling come to grips with the fact that they have barely acknowledged “office children”? How will the harshness of the second half of the decade of the Sixties affect all concerned?

This felt more like an intermission than a finale. But it left me looking forward to the next act.

Toril Moi

I watched last night’s season finale just after returning from a conference at Harvard honoring the great American philosopher Stanley Cavell. Cavell’s most popular book is called Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981). In this delightful analysis of marriage, and of film, Cavell looks at films like “Bringing Up Baby,” “His Girl Friday,” “The Philadelphia Story,” and “Adam’s Rib,” and asks what it takes to bring a couple that has split up or is on the brink of splitting up back together again. Cavell underlines the importance of conversation in these highly verbal films: equal, free, funny conversation between lovers who in the end stop being afraid of revealing themselves in their words. In a happy marriage both parties delight in keeping their mutual conversation going, since that conversation is at once a source and a sign of their happiness.

Since I had such thoughts in mind as I was watching “Tomorrowland”, I was struck by the lack of conversation in the relationship between Don and Megan. As Walter points out, Don falls in love with Megan because she refuses to cry over spilt milkshake: the scene at the diner table canonizes Megan as a maternal imago for the motherless Don/Dick. That the scene turns on milk just reinforces the point. The episode cuts straight from the milkshake scene to the proposal scene. I want to know whether these two ever talk to one another? How do they talk to one another? And what do they talk about? This is not yet a relationship, it is just sex plus one man’s fantasy about the good mother. When Megan says “I know who you are now”, she doesn’t. She may feel that she has taken in his “spirit” or his “good heart” in some mystic act of communion, but this is not knowledge, this is just her fantasy of a good man.

When Don proposes to Megan, and she happily accepts his proposal, it is fascinating to see what happens next. She picks up the phone and calls her mother in Montreal. Don offers to speak to her, but Megan reminds him that he doesn’t speak French: in the very moment they declare their union, we are explicitly reminded that they are separated by language. In French, Megan tells her mother to get her father to the phone. Don is left thinking that she is only speaking to her mother. By the way, Megan’s French doesn’t have the slightest trace of a Quebecois accent: is this just a mistake, or are we to imagine that she didn’t grow up in Quebec but in France?

The proposal scene also brings up the question of Don’s identity with which the whole season began. Will Don tell Megan the truth? He almost lied to her in the proposal scene, but then changed his mind: first he said that the ring had belonged to someone in his family, then he corrected himself to “someone important to me.” A relationship that begins on a lie is doomed. One that begins with a half-truth may have some hope, but it will take work to get there.

A classical Hollywood remarriage comedy brings the couple to the brink of divorce (”Adam’s Rib”), or even begins after the divorce (”The Philadelphia Story”) and then finds a way to bring the couple together again. This always takes the form of finding a way for the two of them to grow and learn and change, and particularly to learn to trust one another. Will this be the future story arc of Don’s and Megan’s relationship? In the 1940s and 1950s it is usually the woman who has to learn to grow up, to let go of pride and prejudice. Maybe this time, in the 1960s, it will be the man who will have to learn to carry on a conversation with a woman.

I am also fascinated by the pronounced maternal theme in this episode, and the way it brings out the preoccupation with motherhood in the season as a whole. Now we can see that Megan was marked as a maternal presence, and contrasted with Dr. Miller, already in the scene when Sally refuses to leave the office with Betty and falls on the floor: Megan is the only one who hugs and comforts the child. Faye Miller is rejected by Don largely because she doesn’t know how to deal with children. Throughout the season Betty has developed into the incarnation of the lousy mother: when will she see what she is doing to her children? The antidote to Betty’s mothering is the grandmotherly Dr. Edna. It is surely no coincidence that Betty too longs to be analyzed by Dr. Edna: if Betty is a bad mother, it is because she so desperately needs a good mother herself. In every case, we see the woman as mother from the man’s point of view. Henry Francis upbraids Betty, Don looks at Megan, and at Dr. Miller. If this goes on, we risk that next season’s Mad Men will wallow in clichés about motherhood. Finally,as Evangeline rightly suspected, Joan did not have an abortion. What will motherhood do to Joan? And more importantly, what will it do to Mad Men’s depiction of her?

David L. Paletz

What a delightful, happy ending to this season. Don realizes that sweet, caring, sympathetic Megan is the one woman for him, the mother to his children that Betty never could be. He tells her he loves her and proposes marriage. She joyously accepts. At the firm, he announces their engagement to his assembled partners and basks in their warm-hearted congratulations. He telephones bossy Faye and rejects her, albeit with a modicum of pain. He informs Betty who wishes him well and departs for her new house in Rye. It looks like the end of her relationship with Don; it is symbolized by the lingering shot of a bottle and single yellow plastic cup on the counter of their former home. All will be well in Tomorrowland.

Not so fast! The show won’t let us off so easily. For this cynical or at least skeptical viewer, Don’s avowal of love to Megan lacks credibility and is unconvincing, it happens because of an unlikely conjunction of statements and events. Statements that remind Don of the importance of personal life and the pleasures, for a man, of home life: Ken’s “Cynthia’s my life, my actual life” (note that Ken wears brown in contrast to the dark suits of the partners); and Don’s advisor’s question “Don’t you want to go home someday and see a steak on the table?” Events such as Don and Megan being together (because Betty fired Clara) in romantic and sunny California, her warm relationship with his children, her apparent devotion to and admiration for him, and by the convenient availability of the engagement ring.

The happy ending is further undermined, if not destroyed, by what follows Don’s announcement of the engagement. There is the patent insincerity of his colleagues’ (and Betty’s “I’m very happy for you”) congratulations. There is Peggy’s incredulity and post-announcement conversation with Joan (climaxing with their laughter). There is Joan’s telephone conversation with her husband and her comment that men marrying their secretaries “happens all the time.” And, ironically, by Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” that ends the episode.

This undermining culminates in the last scene, which shows Don and Megan in bed together. She is sleeping contentedly. He is awake, his head turned, as the camera movement shows us, looking out of the window. What is keeping him awake? What might he be thinking about? That Megan is not the first woman to have told him in error that she knows who he is, now; that he has not (yet) told her the truth about his past; that Roger married his secretary and regrets it.

So, to the delight of this viewer, Tomorrowland is wide open. Don and Megan may or may not marry. She may become pregnant. There are hints that she is or will become less innocent and docile. See how she urges Don to call Faye with the news of the engagement. Note the way Megan’s friend Camille in California looks at Don as if she knows about Megan’s intentions and his vulnerability; and Megan’s remark about Camille: “My father’s a professor. I think she liked him too much,” indicating the desirability of an older man for a younger woman. Note too the vividly red-orange dress Megan is sporting when she joins the group after Don announces the engagement.

Don could turn to new women. As Faye tells him, he “only likes the beginnings of things.” He could return to Faye, if she will take him back or to other women from his past. When he tells Betty he is engaged, she first thinks of Bethany, before quickly realizing that it must be to his secretary.

There remains the possibility that Don and Betty will reunite. Her relationship with Henry is increasingly fraught. She returns to the house to find him drinking a bottle of beer. She tries to remove it from his grasp but he refuses to let it go. He is right to chastise her for firing Carla but shows no understanding of her condition and concerns (particularly her failure to understand the friendship between Sally and Glenn. How poignant is Glenn’s “I say goodbye to people all the time”?). Henry is more and more critical of and hostile to Betty. “No-one’s ever on your side, Betty” he tells her. He shatters her hope (illusion) that, in leaving Don and marrying him, she had entered into a new life. “There is no fresh start, lives carry on” he says. One can see regret, even desire from Betty for Don in their last scene together in their house, a realization of what she has lost. She is almost flirtatious. But he is too wrapped up in his own pleasure to understand her statement that “Things aren’t perfect.” She means her marriage but he thinks she is referring to the new house and replies “So you’ll move again.”

So much to look forward to. And I’ve not even mentioned the future of the firm, its people, and advertisements. I can hardly wait.

Alan Brinkley

I’ve been travelling over the last two weeks and only last night have I caught up with the last two episodes. But I’ve read all of your posts, and much of what I might have said has already been said better. So rather than repeat what others have said about the events of the last two episodes, I’ll write instead in broader strokes about where I think this extraordinary show stands and where it might be heading.

I think there are two major themes that have run through this last season, and indeed through the entire run of the show. One is the changing role of women, and the other is the struggling identity of Don Draper.

The show has not been particularly good in dealing with some of the most important issues of the mid-1960s. For example, there’s been ­ very little about race and only a few references to the counter culture. But it has been excellent in the way it portrays women. It provides examples of women who, as in The Feminist Mystique, have struggled and failed to find a role in the world (Betty, Midge, to some degree Joan) ­ smart, powerful women who feel trapped and unfulfilled; and it provides examples of women who are moving forward into a feminist world and becoming professionally successful, but are doing so at a price (Peggy and Faye most prominently). In some ways, the show is more about women than about men, and it is one of the great strengths of the show.

And then there is Don Draper, this enigmatic, charismatic, troubled man who, ­ much like some of the troubled women he has known — has not figured out how to create a life for himself outside of his work. His marriage to Betty was a disaster almost from the start. (Remember the terrible moment in the first season when he is supposed to bring Sally’s birthday cake and instead rides off with it into the night because he can’t face his family.) His affairs, both during and after his marriage, have been mostly brief and loveless. He doesn’t know how to build a real relationship with the women who might have been strong partners, ­ for example, Faye. The sudden engagement to Megan is an example of his floundering. We have to wonder whether they will actually marry, but it seems pretty likely that if he does marry, the marriage won’t survive.

The truth is that the only relationship he has had that has meant anything to him was Anna, a woman he truly loved, even if without romance. She was the only person with whom he could share his complicated identity without fear. Don’s effort to construct a new identity as a young man has haunted him throughout his life so far ­ never certain who he is, comfortable only with his professional talents, in and out of brief or failed romances. Evangeline compares him to Gatsby, and I agree. A man constantly seeking his future but drawn ceaselessly into his past.

More on “Mad Men”:

‘Mad Men’ Finale: Should Don Draper and Megan Be Together?

‘Mad Men,’ A Conversation (Season 4, Episode 12)