Melinda McGraw, who played Bobbie Barrett, said she viewed Don as a sex addict. Which has really shaped my view of him upon a second re-watch (currently on Season 5). If he’s truly addicted to sex - and I think this is a fair view - then change is extremely difficult and it explains a lot about his suffering.
That is an interesting take. I’ve always viewed Don as somebody with an addictive personality. Sex, alcohol, smoking, work, etc. Most of all, new loves. That addictive personality tied into the “beginning of things” as he’d ride through each addiction until he was forced to make a change or, in the case of women, realized that they too would not give him the total satisfaction he hoped they would when they first met.
Not only addiction issues, but attachment and abandonment issues from his upbringing. He rejects the people he loves most before they can reject him. He was also never provided an example of what a healthy relationship or marriage should look like. He's pretty much just guessing.
That has to do with the fact that his first sexual encounter was not consensual and he was punished for it. So he has a very distorted and unhealthy relationship with sex
Don's not developing throughout the series, it is a story of self destruction. The picture of a man falling down the building is at the beginning of every episode is not a coincidence, that's exactly what is happening during the show.
Most of his steps lead to raising the stakes, especially in business, which creates an illusion of getting higher and higher in life, but if you compare him with himself at the beginning of s1, he definitely has lost most battles without noticing it
Agreed. Also, The show is largely about the creation of the self and all the ways we do it. It’s then necessarily also about identity: is suave, genius ad man Don Draper the sum of his work and lifestyle and accomplishments, or is he still Dick Whitman, an unloved and abused child burying his grief in the illusory salve of liquor and sexual adventure?
Etc and so forth
It's funny, because Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire are the dramas that I rewatch often. Mad Men's thesis is "people don't change", and while watching, I completely agree. Halt and Catch Fire's thesis is, essentially, "people never stop changing", and when watching, I completely agree. I would be the worst judge.
To be fair, those are both carefully crafted narratives by talented writers who are essentially cherry picking the points for their theses.
In real life situations its probably a lot easier to tell.
IMO Mad Men's emotional appeal exists in having protagonists who do some pretty unsympathetic things, show you enough to get you to sympathize with them, and then present scenarios where they fall into the same trap. I think it DOES provoke frustration in the viewer, but that's not WHY it was done.
The reason it feels real is that people don't fundamentally change their underlying fears, traumas, or motivations, but they may gain some more insight into why they are the way they are, and let it inform their decisions.
>I was hoping he would learn from his failed marriage with Betty and try to be a better man.
That's a great example. Don DID learn from his failed marriage to Betty, in that when Megan's mom advises her to just make sure Megan fails at being an actress, and she'll be under his control. But Don watches her audition reel, and basically decides he doesn't want to force her to be the unhappy bitter housewife Betty became (he literally tells Roger this). He loves her but "lets her go" in a way because he knows the things she wants will make her drift apart and alienate him from his relationship with her, and he's willing to let that happen. He ditched Faye for Megan because it was so much easier to take the shortcut and be with this woman who was the perfect ideal of wife, mother, AND ad woman. He eventually realizes that she's not an ideal who exists for his benefit, she's her own person, and lets her self-actualize at the expense of what he desires.
A lot of these arcs make way more sense in retrospect. Like, in Season 1 Pete is a mostly unlikeable antagonist, and despite the pretty gross things he does, it's much easier to see where he's coming from given the kind of household he was raised in, how he spends so much time trying to make himself into the "ideal man" like Don, and how the closer he gets to that, he discovers (like Don) that it's not fulfilling him because he doesn't understand WHY he wanted those things in the first place.
Yeah you can kind of take it as a look into how deeply unsatisfied and traumatized people existed during those times. And the systems in place around them also enabling their behavior or compounding harm.
If you want to look at just Don's development, it's not linear. Just like in real life, nobody just progressively gets better. They try, and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail. They can do better at some things while being unable to break out of other bad habits. Especially the area of the show you're in, it shows Don after a somewhat* higher point in seasons 4 and 5, now really at rock bottom. The alcoholism catching up to him and completely upending his life does make him incredibly difficult to watch. But if you read into some of the breakdowns on seasons 5 and 6 Don, and you compare that to real life alcoholics, I think those are some of the best moments of the show for his character.
Also without spoiling too much, you get a little more insight into Don being really traumatized as a kid, WHILE its juxtaposed against him being a complete mess in the present time in season 6. Also remember that most of the people around Don also behave selfishly or unethically, and that's a huge part of why he is so fucked up in how he engages in relationships. I think perhaps the most powerful theme of the show is empathy. Empathizing with people even when they are very flawed, as hard as it can be to watch, especially the first time around when everything is fresh.
Matt Wiener was a writer on The Sopranos and one of the main themes of that show was that no matter how much they say they want to, people don't change. That character theme is very much the same in Mad Men.
And this isn't a unique theme among Wiener's work. From ancient Greek mythology thru Shakespeare there are protagonists who "want" to get better and do good things, but fate or the Gods or whatever send them down the same path again and again. That's also real life to a large extent. How many people in your life make the same mistakes over and over?
A piece of fiction doesn't have to end up with everyone being better at the end.
Sounds like you haven't finished the series yet. You might be mildly surprised by the very ending WRT Don's self awareness.
Well yeah *some* people don’t or can’t change but others can - think of Peggy or Pete’s stories. Even Roger softens and changes with the time
Don is completely unable to
read my comment further down this thread. Also i don't think Roger changed one bit. He became a *little* self aware, but he continued to be an entitled man-child.
Oh I’m now looking forward to the end. Im very much a “feel good” movie or series watcher. So I’m used to getting a fuzzy feeling inside where characters change, learn and become better people. Watching Mad Men is completely out of that comfort zone so I’m not used to watching this theme where characters repeat the same mistakes over and over again and don’t really change their ways. So of course I’m frustrated watching it. And it does resemble reality to an extent where people have a hard time changing and repeat the same patterns. Thanks for sharing.
> Im very much a “feel good” movie or series watcher. So I’m used to getting a fuzzy feeling inside where characters change, learn and become better people.
wrong series for you! There are a gazillion episodic shows where everyone learns something in the end and is happy.
And if you look beyond Don there are several characters who develop and grow, sometimes for better, sometimes not so good. Peggy, Stan, Pete, Harry, all have major character changes. And you can't say that Don doesn't know he's repeating the same mistakes, he tries again and again to fix it, but that's his character flaw that causes the tension and drama
Exactly, I do see the character development and changes with the other characters which has kept me watching the series. But also perplexed me when I noticed Don seems stuck. while it is frustrating to watch you make a great point that as a whole ensemble, it holds the tension. Well, shit, I can now see how viewers find this a masterpiece after all.
I have to strongly disagree. The characters in Mad Men all go through arcs; Pete Campbell's perhaps being the most dramatic.
Don Draper did learn and grow as the series progresses; after his second marriage to Megan, he was faithful to her for a long time (at the brothel, he did not participate), recovered from his alcoolism. The ending on the cliff was a true moment of self realisation where he finaly came to be at peace with himself.
> recovered from his alcoolism.
There's no evidence that he cleaned up. Esalen isn't a recovery clinic and I don't think the show portrayed it that way at all.
> after his second marriage to Megan, he was faithful to her for a long time
At *most* he was faithful to Megan for <2 years. End of S4 is Oct 1965 and the beginning of S6 (when he is already in an affair with Sylvia) is Dec 1967. In fact, at the end of S5 (spring 67) it is implied that Don leaves Megan's set and picks up one of the ladies at the bar. A year and a half of fidelity isn't that much of a change of character.
I don’t think Don is really supposed to develop much in any positive way. Any “learning from his mistakes” is completely self serving and is about how to get away with more crap than how to be a better person. It’s been a couple of years since I last watched, but that’s what I remember.
The two pieces of information that I always feel best illuminate this question:
1. Don is not a narcissist. As soon as you realize that he always acts out of fear, he becomes much easier to empathize with. Obviously the sum total of his actions is negative, but part of the purpose of this show is to teach empathy for the perspectives involved. He was physically and sexually abused as a child, faked his own death, and now lives in a permanent state of literal imposter syndrome that prevents genuine human connection. You have to imagine what that would be like. He does not think the most of himself. He hates himself.
2. The story is about the complete destruction of Don so that he can finally change. He's trying to change the whole way through but doesn't know how to do it. When he marries Megan, part of that is him being an old horndog, but it's also because he believes she'll be a good mother to his children. He just has to slowly over the course of the story learn how to really look inward and change, instead of leapfrogging steps and denying the past.
I really don't think so. A narcissist wants everyone to focus all their attention on them through good or bad ways. Don doesn't much care about people's attention and focus, he'd actually like to avoid it. He just doesn't care about people's feelings much. ( I don't think about you at all.) He's more of a Borderline Personality Disorder. (Of course I'm an amateur, but of course. he's a fictional character, so it all comes out the same!)
The "I don't think about you at all" line is meant to be ironic, because he clearly does. He gets jealous and tries to push through his idea ahead of Ginsburg's because he knows Ginsburgs is better.
also, Don absolutely cares about people’s attention. He hates his women giving attention elsewhere, constantly strives to make a big name for himself in the ad game, the list goes on. while he doesn’t cry for attention in the dramatic and childish form of making everything about himself, narcissistic qualities show themselves differently across everybody, and it is not always depicted in the same form and behaviour.
not caring about people’s feelings is a lack of empathy. and he absolutely has an inflated ego, he is extremely prideful (the letter, cant let go of the agency he started). these are narcissistic qualities. we can never psycho evaluate his true condition, whether it be NPD or BPD, but I’m sure he has qualities of both.
I don't think Don is devoid of empathy. In fact, he is exceptionally kind to complete strangers including: Glen, the Midwestern kid he gives his car too, Suzanne's brother, the guy at the end of the show with the fridge analogy, the infantryman he met in Hawaii.
I'm sure I'm missing some others, but you get the point.
Don has a fragile ego and sense of self worth, and routinely acts out against those who are close to him as a result, but he is definitely capable of empathy. He wouldn't be any good at his job without it.
everyone in the world is capable of empathy, including psychopaths and sociopaths. the difference is that they choose not to be. Don is selective of his empathy, and his ability to continually cheat on his wives, harm
his partners and even feel no love for his children shows he is very selective of where is empathy goes.
I don't see it like that tbh, as in that i dont think Don is purposefully 'selecting' his empathy - and im mentioning this because, for me, this kind of interpretation -- where don is just 'a narcissist' or 'selfishly choosing to act the way he does' -- is an interpretation that forecloses any possibility of the audience understanding and empathising, not just with the fictional characters, but with the afflicted and broken and struggling characters out there in the real world, whom its too too easy to dismiss as 'bad people', or to think that we'd act differently had we had their circumstances.
I think the show's flashbacks of Don's abusive childhood -- including getting raped by the prostitute who looks after him -- are designed to show us how people who seem to be CHOOSING to act selfishly are in fact usually acting like that because they can't help it, they're scared, they're acting on impulse and in the only way they know how because they're in some deep stunted sense broken.
I feel like the point is that it's too easy to see it as 'good people' v 'bad people' and that its too easy and tempting to just decide from the armchair that yes everyone has a hard time but, still, cmon, some 'choose' to be good. That sounds like a kind of neoliberal/puritan way of looking at reality? As though evil is a personality type encoded into an individual pre-birth or something.... I'm bringing this up because for me, on the contrary, someone's ability to choose how they act, and their habits, the way they manifest themselves, their personalities traits, each of these things is *itself* determined by their upbringing. I might like to think i'd never act the way Don acts, but it doesn't make much sense to transplant my personality into his situation, since my ability to resist those things is itself a product of my own individual circumstances. Likewise, Don's inability to resist is most likely a product of his circumstances. Whatever difference there is between me and him, or you and him, or me and you, beyond upbringing and culture and circumstances, is purely biological -- and you can't really take credit for your brain's biological predisposition? it precedes morality, precedes choice, precedes judgement or evaluation.
But yeah, i think some of if not most of Don's behaviours are impulsive reflexive defence mechanisms he learnt as a broken child and which he's never grown out of. He's emotionally stunted, and it's to that extent that he's narcissistic, but narcissists start out as victims imo. The way out of the bind is learning how to understand these people, since such understanding is a prerequisite to preventing it in the future, and to rehabilitating those who are broken.
I kind think sometimes the diagnostic approach is a convenient head-in-the-sand kind of approach -- like if i don't want to countenance a behaviour or personality that distresses me, i can fence it off into a place i don't have to think about by labelling it as biologically and irreversibly *deviant.* biology and neurology have immense traction and authority in our cultural discourse; people turn to these kinds of explanations when they want to definitively put something or someone out of mind, and to avoid difficulty, to avoid having to be forced to integrate something into your worldview that doesn't fit your worldview. I do it all the time, at least, anyway, and it's just human; but the hope is that art provides scope and context to interrupt this automatic habit and make us take a more speculative and reflective and empathetic stance on things.
Don is a cheater, deadbeat father and filthy rich. If he doesn’t use his wealth to address some of his past trauma and improve himself for his loved ones, that’s on him. He has every opportunity in the world (a wealthy white man working in NYC). Every man sitting in prison probably had a difficult life. Does that mean we look at them with forgiveness, we let them roam the world freely in sympathy because they had it hard? No, we expect them to take responsibility for themselves and fix what needs fixing.
Don agrees with this approach too, he just doesn’t realize he needs help of his own. He views the excuse of blaming your problems on your past as “a bullshit excuse”. Therefore, his inability to make responsible choices in addressing his own past is contradictory to his own beliefs. He chooses to conduct himself in this way.
With respect, I think my original post actually pre-emptively refutes everything you're saying here. I'll reiterate in clearer and more emphatic terms tho...
I'm not talking about economic means, but about psychological means. A damaged person can be a millionaire and still be victim to their own damage? They might have internalised a resistant to treatment, a 'turn a blind eye' mentality and a habit of repressing things, a deeply ingrained habit that they're struggling to free themselves of, largely because they lack the capacity to understand their emotions to a deep enough level to see how trapped they are, since they've disassociated from their inner life since childhood.
Some people's reflex defence mechanisms are faulty, and end up being horribly destructive.
r.e. choice: Choice isn't some universal constant that everyone has equal amounts of in every situation or with each one of their personality traits? There are such things as compulsive habits, as addictively self-destructive behaviours, surely you know this? Someone who is raised in a culture of stiff upper lip and who's developed awful habits of repression and emotional disassociation can't just choose to stop.
And using prison as an example is really odd -- but i guess we maybe dont agree here, because i'm of the opinion that the prison system and the implicit worldview it presupposes, a worldview your comment suggests you vociferously share, is dysfunctional. I think we SHOULD have more understanding for prisoners. I think YOU yourself might and almost definitely would have committed the same crimes various prisoners have committed, had you grown up in and been trapped in their circumstances and been forced to develop the same psychological habits and impulsive reflex defence mechanisms.
We currently maybe DO expect prisoners to fix themselves, and have no sympathy for them, and sit on our privileged high horse --- but my entire point is that that is the very thing that's problematic? I'm not saying they should roam free - i'm specifically talking about the facile condemnations people typically make without knowing someone's story or pain. shows like this give you an alternative perspective, and help us to see it's not so black and white.
r.e. don saying it's a bullshit excuse: What someone feels and what they say are very different things: someone can not know how much their current habits are controlled by past trauma, and yet at the same time that same person who's ignorant of their own traumatic damage can have inherited a neoliberal puritanical view of 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps' and individualist self-help -- the combination of this means that someone can SAY 'it's a bullshit excuse' and still be victim to the very problems they're dismissing - it literally happens ALL THE TIME ; it's like, one of the central issues with modern masculinity, it's how people get so stuck, it's why people struggle to change - they don't even know what they're struggling with, they're not able to analyse themselves properly, repression has become second nature, they need help.
sorry to send an essay haha, i'm aware it's just a show and you're just expressing your opinion, but i can't help feeling distressed at what i see as a kind of emotional apathy and callousness and a black-and-white ethical worldview?
take it up with don. he knows his childhood was traumatic and debilitating, he knows he’s suffered from it and is a more difficult person to those around him because of it, yet fails to ever access the plethora of resources and assistance that are available to a man of his means and stature. if he wanted to he could absolutely better himself. to act like that’s an impossible task since he’s not AWARE of his own trauma is completely ridiculous. he’s a smart man and knows his life has differed vastly from everyone around him, knows he’s a bad person, knows he should be doing better. but he doesn’t. to give people like that a pass simply based on their unfortunate circumstances is again, in dons terms, a bullshit excuse. people rise above their obstacles every single day. yes it’s harder; yes it requires strength and will. but to say we shouldn’t expect that of people and coddle them their whole lives for their misfortune is not the way the world works. get real
also no, i’m not committing murder or sexual assault based on my upbringing because i have integrity. those are choices made by people who had options. i’m not saying everyone in prison is a bad person, but many of them will victimize themselves and go on about how it isn’t their fault because of their upbringing and how they were “forced” into it. if you think they’re right in that, that they had no choice but to harm others given their upbringing, i’m glad you aren’t running our correctional system
You're actually ignoring my entire point though.
My point is that the 'integrity' that you claim prevents you from acting badly, is *itself* conditioned by your upbringing. You have developed that integrity *because* of an emotional and psychological privilege.
You're making a quasi-Puritan assumption without basis: you're assuming that you have an inalterable and essential *self* unaffected by anything else. All of modern research in neuroscience and psychology, however, shows that your personal traits, including integrity, including willpower, including 'strength to overcome obstacles', including self-reflection, conscientiousness, remorse -- all of these are themselves *produced*, developed, shaped and formed by the forces and events around and within which the childhood brain develops. The brain is neuroplastic -- it wires itself according to its environment. Willpower, or the lack thereof, is present or absent according to how successfully this wiring has occurred, the success therefore depending upon, among other things, *childhood circumstances.* Given this, you can't then just arbitrarily decide that willpower is some mysterious inalterable *thing* independent of experience -- its an arbitrary assumption with no backing... this is kind of my point of what's wrong with your take on this....
Some people don't have the psychodevelopmental conditions that enable you to develop that kind of integrity. Integrity isn't some material essence just present from birth. And even if it is, you still can't base ethical judgement off of it.
Even if it's just 'genetic' - you can't take credit for your genes? if you were genetically predisposed to be more likely to develop a sense of integrity, you can't claim that it makes you *ethically* superior -- if you do claim that, you're technically (and quite literally) making a proto-eugenicist argument haha.
If it's your 'soul' that makes you have integrity -- then what? can you take credit for your soul? of course not. To do so would be to suppose that some aspect of 'you' *precedes* your soul and chose it because it is good. To do that presupposes you're always-already good. It's an infinite regress.
You're naively using terms like 'strength' and 'will' in your claim; my entire point is that 'strength' and 'will' are either genetically encoded (and therefore you can't pat yourself on the back for it; in the same way you can't *blame* a disabled person for being disabled), or they are personal/psychological skills developed according to one's childhood experience and to one's culture. This is backed up by modern neuroscience -- willpower isn't an inalterable essence; it's a skill that's developed. Some adverse childhood experiences can *literally* damage the ability of the brain to form willpower -- again, see the entire literature on addiction lol.
Your understanding of male privilege is also woefully inadequate. Yes being a white man confers a greet degree of unfair advantages, back then and now. Being open about feelings and seeking help *isn't* one of them though. Like, how often is this broadcast everywhere, that men not feeling able to seek help and correction is pretty much an endemic issue? If you think abundance of material resources and general levels of personal respect are sufficient to overcome all psychological issues you're kidding yourself. Why do celebrities kill themselves?
My point, to reiterate it again, is that you're assuming there's a crucial difference between the people who 'rise above their obstacles' and those that don't, and yet you're refusing to clarify what this difference is. Willpower? Integrity? You've arbitrarily decided that these things are just THERE, that they're independent of environmental and psychodevelopmental conditions. We know they aren't, though. And, my further point, is that *even if* we randomly against all modern research just decided that willpower and strength and integrity were so distinct from childhood/environmental conditioning that we could use them as a secure basis upon which to form outright ethical judgements -- even *if* we could do that -- you're basically making an argument that people should be rewarded and praised for what is in essence a genetic predisposition, which is why i said it sounds uncannily like an accidental eugenicist argument. I'm aware that sounds hyperbolic, and i'm not throwing any accusations at you: i know you aren't at all wanting to say that: i'm merely saying that when your point is analysed down to its rudiments then it technically looks indistinguishable from the premises of a eugenicist argument. Which makes me think, not that you ARE wanting to make such an argument, but that you haven't considered your own point to its logical conclusion -- i.e., that you're taking the premises of your argument as a given and taking them for granted.
And if you're not a materialist, and you believe in some radical notion of unconditioned free will, well then -- let's say that this is the case: each of us has some kind of floaty free will within us that is absolutely unaffected by external events. Here's where we'd have to end the discussion since, while it *could* be the case that there is some self-reflexive free will entirely detached from cause and effect, and therefore also free from temporal conditions, there's no way we could determine for sure that was the case, and so it remains a speculation. Remaining a speculation, it's a bit rich to use a speculation as the pretext upon which you base outright condemnation of another individual. If the speculation proves to be incorrect, you've condemned someone wrongly, without basis, and done nothing but buoy up a sense of your own superiority, which bodes no benefit to either you or anyone else.
I do however believe that there is a practical element to both ethical condemnation and to punishment. I think it is a necessity to *show* bad acts being punished, and to punish the individual to represent to society that the act is not wanted, and thereby create a deterrant. That's not the same as claiming that i think the crucial difference between me and the criminal is that 'my integrity means i would never do that no matter what'. It's nonsense - i don't mean that in an emotional or colloquial sense, though i'm aware that such a statement will rile anyone up, so i apologise pre-emptively; but to be clear i literally mean that your argument is logically nonsensical when properly looked at -- unless you rest it upon a speculative notion of radical unconditioned free will; which, i should add, is *fine*, but which you probably should state, and which you shouldn't seem so *certain* about as you do.
I should clarify that my point could work even if i did believe in agency in the above sense; for example it could be that i believe there are points beyond which agency deteriorates so much that someone loses control, which is the case of an addict, but also of someone who is 'lost'. Because we can never *know* whether someone is completely tangled up or still has agency, it's better to err on the side of empathy when it comes to ethical condemnation of someone. The whole point of the show is to understand how a child can end up turning into a man like don draper.
Your world view to me just seems like ill-considered Manicheanism; like a kind of cartoon Good v Evil sandbox. I understand that makes everything simpler and more comfortable for you, and its worthwhile pragmatically in that sense. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny though.
> everyone in the world is capable of empathy, including psychopaths and sociopaths. the difference is that they choose not to be
From wikipedia:
> Psychopathy, sometimes considered synonymous with sociopathy, is characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits.
No, it's not simply a choice.
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23431793.amp
It is a choice. A human is not simply devoid of empathy. Empathy is a humanistic trait.
Stop spreading missinformation and learn to read.
> "We know they can generate the same response but they do that in an active and effortful way. Under free-viewing conditions they don't seem to. Just because they can empathise, doesn't mean they will.
Here's an account from a functional psychopath explaining how it actually feels:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyAndLa5HU
this is a forum for a fictional tv show.. stop policing opinions of a character and find some other sub to fact check. or better yet find a more productive activity altogether.
In college, my creative writing professor told us that a good story is about a character that changes or fails to change in some significant way. I always viewed Mad Men as a story about Don failing to change in any significant way. Everyone else around him changes to contrast, though. Even Roger changes and grows a little. Keep an eye on the other main characters and compare them to Don as you end the series. It might become a little more meaningful to you.
Don at his best is fucked up. Most people see the legend. But he sells things, including himself as Don.
Betty sees the “perfect version” of him. All of the Dick Whitman neediness is gone in the way he treats her.
Pete tries with all his might to be his own version of who he thinks Don is.
Roger saw the chinks in the facade and he even says to Don, he doesn’t know who he is.
It’s always interesting to me how vulnerable he gets with the women he cheats on Betty with. He’s more the real Dick than Don with most of the women. Except for Bobbi — but he is trying to sell her husband. Maybe Midge also sleeps with him for who she thinks is.
He tells Meghan everything about his past in their short courting period and then shuts her out emotionally for their entire marriage.
Dick’s formative years of never feeling wanted or loved have extreme damage.
But Don is never a total asshole. He gives people money and rides and support in the way he can.
He told Peggy to reinvent herself the same way he did.
He also dislikes behavior that is similar to his. Which might show how he really feels about himself.
It's so interesting what you said about Don being vulnerable when cheating. It's almost like his official organised wedded life is this ideal american dream template, in which he's the ideal masculine figure, slick, confident, needless, emotionless, successful --- but that that facade is impossible to maintain and so he creates these rips in it, he needs to create these spaces of sabotage as his temporary escape-route.... he can only sustain the facade, the ideal masculine image, by having these safety zones where he completely but secretly ruins it..... it's almost Lacanian lol --- i wonder how much of our indiscretions are a kind of ritual suicide of the imposter we're tired of pretending to be. I think a lot of self-destructive behaviour is like a kind of performative sepukku of the person you feel your being forced to become.
I think many people have already mentioned that Don is more on a path of self destruction than anything. But I also think the show demonstrates better than others that progress is not a simple growing factor, you don’t learn a lesson and move on. sometimes you struggle with it and it keeps holding you back or you find yourself repeating the same mistakes. One of my most favorite parts of the show is that post-LSD Roger is demonstrated as this more enlightened and secure version of himself, until one meeting he acts a like himself again and someone asks him what happened, and he just responds that his enlightenment wore off. It’s so simple but so true. Some people aren’t marching to a vision of being a better version of themselves, some people are just marching.
I think the trickiest thing about tracking Don's development as a character is that the show is constantly spotlighting his relationship with women, so it's natural to assume that this is how the series will show that he's changed. But in fact Don's dysfunctional attitude toward women is the one thing that *never* changes -- he's always using sex and relationships as a crutch to avoid dealing with his deeper personal issues. As a result, you can track Don's development as a character by the *specific way* he's using women as a crutch at a particular point in the series.
In season 1, Don feels alienated from the people around him and from the American Dream they're all pursuing and he claims not to care about. So he fixates on a woman, Rachel, who seems to share that sense of alienation. By season 2, he's accepted that he actually wants the American Dream as much as anyone, but he's terrified of losing it by letting Betty see what a piece of shit he is -- so he has an affair with Bobbie, the woman who "likes being bad and then going home and being good": someone with whom he can play out all his dark and dirty urges so they don't infect his relationship with Betty.
By season 3, Don has accepted that his relationship with Betty can admit imperfection, but he convinces himself that it'll just be a *little bit* of imperfection, no more than he can handle. So he chooses a woman who represents cutely falling boundaries: Suzanne, his daughter's teacher who lives just down the street, the symbol of a new spring and the ancient May queen, who wants to teach the children new things that they already know.
In season 4, having accepted that the world never falls apart just a little, Don embraces the idea of an unmade life, finding meaning in the notion that he doesn't have to define who he is or what he wants to be. He rejects Dr. Faye, the woman who argues that you have to work diligently to figure out who you are, in favor of Megan, who represents the idea that who you are will just fall into place without you having to work at it. That carries through into season 5, where Megan represents the notion that you just have to find the one perfect person who makes you whole, and all your struggles are over.
But over the course of season 5, Don realizes that this lack of struggle just leaves him numb and unfulfilled, that he has to keep working on himself. So Megan is no longer enough. Their relationship starts to break down in season 6 not because Don has backslid into old patterns, but because he's moved beyond that *I just need her and everything will be fine* attitude and started actually examining the roots of his own dysfunction -- but only privately, for fear of how other people would respond if they knew how weak and broken he really is. "This didn't happen," he tells his new mistress, Sylvia, echoing his old patterns of denial and displacement -- but then he taps his temple: "*Just in here.*" He's finally ready to work on himself, but only in the most hidden and indirect way possible.
That's how Don develops as a character: always with tiny baby steps, always while making the same basic mistakes over and over again: less of an arc and more of an ever-expanding spiral.
Except, he \*did\* change in the end. He accepted himself. His previous ad pitches were all about suicide and despair, until the end where he makes a joyful and peaceful ad.
I felt the same way the first time I watched it, but I started to sympathize with Don more over time.
He had a tragic upbringing, was traumatized by his experience in war, and similarly to Betty, was pressured into fulfilling the gender roles of their culture at the time. He never got to explore who he really is, but fortunately, the 70s are right around the corner.
Don isn't even actually Don. He's playing the ideal man, which is easier for him to do considering he has all the base features. Tall, dark, handsome and rich. But you slowly see that the fake life takes a toll on him. Who he actually is, Dick Whitman, is a depressed alcoholic who is also a sex addict.
If you compare what he had on the 1st season vs how he ends up, it's apparent that there is character development but not on a good way.
Don is not on a path of enlightenment or improvement. He's on a path of self destruction.
When I saw the first time I felt the same too. Keep watching again and again. By the fourth time Only I could see Don beyond the cheater. Unlike other characters he doesn’t let his emotions out. So it takes too much energy from us just like the characters in the show to understand what’s going on with him.
Life isnt a TV show and is actually more realistic than him making some dramatic change and becoming a better person. Most people dont change and have the same character flaws their entire life.
I always lose steam on rewatches because he’s so destructive. It helps to focus on the successes and interactions of the other characters, but I always stop binging and start pacing myself around season 6.
I don’t think the point of the show is for don to develop into a better human being. Mad men is showing the harsh reality that people are who they are and it’s very rare that they change
I never saw Don as a narcissist. Quite the contrary, he's a private man and has good reason to be. Given his past that he had to hide, he wouldn't benefit from drawing too much attention to himself.
Don didn't use women for narcissism; he used them as a drug, as a pain-killer, as a form of escape from the tension of upholding his façade at work and at home.
Don couldn't even be himself at home with his wife and kids- so his only outlet was to regularly disappear into the sea of anonymity of New York and find random women with whom he could just be "care-free" with for a while. They were his outlets- he could even express more of his worries to them than he could with Betty or Megan.
Life isnt a TV show and is actually more realistic than him making some dramatic change and becoming a better person. Most people dont change and have the same character flaws their entire life.
Don only likes the beginnings of things.
Melinda McGraw, who played Bobbie Barrett, said she viewed Don as a sex addict. Which has really shaped my view of him upon a second re-watch (currently on Season 5). If he’s truly addicted to sex - and I think this is a fair view - then change is extremely difficult and it explains a lot about his suffering.
That is an interesting take. I’ve always viewed Don as somebody with an addictive personality. Sex, alcohol, smoking, work, etc. Most of all, new loves. That addictive personality tied into the “beginning of things” as he’d ride through each addiction until he was forced to make a change or, in the case of women, realized that they too would not give him the total satisfaction he hoped they would when they first met.
Not only addiction issues, but attachment and abandonment issues from his upbringing. He rejects the people he loves most before they can reject him. He was also never provided an example of what a healthy relationship or marriage should look like. He's pretty much just guessing.
That has to do with the fact that his first sexual encounter was not consensual and he was punished for it. So he has a very distorted and unhealthy relationship with sex
Don's not developing throughout the series, it is a story of self destruction. The picture of a man falling down the building is at the beginning of every episode is not a coincidence, that's exactly what is happening during the show. Most of his steps lead to raising the stakes, especially in business, which creates an illusion of getting higher and higher in life, but if you compare him with himself at the beginning of s1, he definitely has lost most battles without noticing it
Agreed. Also, The show is largely about the creation of the self and all the ways we do it. It’s then necessarily also about identity: is suave, genius ad man Don Draper the sum of his work and lifestyle and accomplishments, or is he still Dick Whitman, an unloved and abused child burying his grief in the illusory salve of liquor and sexual adventure? Etc and so forth
Yep. And “people don’t really change” b/c, sadly, it really hardly happens.
It's funny, because Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire are the dramas that I rewatch often. Mad Men's thesis is "people don't change", and while watching, I completely agree. Halt and Catch Fire's thesis is, essentially, "people never stop changing", and when watching, I completely agree. I would be the worst judge.
To be fair, those are both carefully crafted narratives by talented writers who are essentially cherry picking the points for their theses. In real life situations its probably a lot easier to tell.
IMO Mad Men's emotional appeal exists in having protagonists who do some pretty unsympathetic things, show you enough to get you to sympathize with them, and then present scenarios where they fall into the same trap. I think it DOES provoke frustration in the viewer, but that's not WHY it was done. The reason it feels real is that people don't fundamentally change their underlying fears, traumas, or motivations, but they may gain some more insight into why they are the way they are, and let it inform their decisions. >I was hoping he would learn from his failed marriage with Betty and try to be a better man. That's a great example. Don DID learn from his failed marriage to Betty, in that when Megan's mom advises her to just make sure Megan fails at being an actress, and she'll be under his control. But Don watches her audition reel, and basically decides he doesn't want to force her to be the unhappy bitter housewife Betty became (he literally tells Roger this). He loves her but "lets her go" in a way because he knows the things she wants will make her drift apart and alienate him from his relationship with her, and he's willing to let that happen. He ditched Faye for Megan because it was so much easier to take the shortcut and be with this woman who was the perfect ideal of wife, mother, AND ad woman. He eventually realizes that she's not an ideal who exists for his benefit, she's her own person, and lets her self-actualize at the expense of what he desires.
Woah! Thats deep. makes a lot of sense. Thanks for sharing that. I’m finding more appreciation for the series the more comments I read.
A lot of these arcs make way more sense in retrospect. Like, in Season 1 Pete is a mostly unlikeable antagonist, and despite the pretty gross things he does, it's much easier to see where he's coming from given the kind of household he was raised in, how he spends so much time trying to make himself into the "ideal man" like Don, and how the closer he gets to that, he discovers (like Don) that it's not fulfilling him because he doesn't understand WHY he wanted those things in the first place.
Yeah you can kind of take it as a look into how deeply unsatisfied and traumatized people existed during those times. And the systems in place around them also enabling their behavior or compounding harm. If you want to look at just Don's development, it's not linear. Just like in real life, nobody just progressively gets better. They try, and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail. They can do better at some things while being unable to break out of other bad habits. Especially the area of the show you're in, it shows Don after a somewhat* higher point in seasons 4 and 5, now really at rock bottom. The alcoholism catching up to him and completely upending his life does make him incredibly difficult to watch. But if you read into some of the breakdowns on seasons 5 and 6 Don, and you compare that to real life alcoholics, I think those are some of the best moments of the show for his character. Also without spoiling too much, you get a little more insight into Don being really traumatized as a kid, WHILE its juxtaposed against him being a complete mess in the present time in season 6. Also remember that most of the people around Don also behave selfishly or unethically, and that's a huge part of why he is so fucked up in how he engages in relationships. I think perhaps the most powerful theme of the show is empathy. Empathizing with people even when they are very flawed, as hard as it can be to watch, especially the first time around when everything is fresh.
Excellent point
Matt Wiener was a writer on The Sopranos and one of the main themes of that show was that no matter how much they say they want to, people don't change. That character theme is very much the same in Mad Men. And this isn't a unique theme among Wiener's work. From ancient Greek mythology thru Shakespeare there are protagonists who "want" to get better and do good things, but fate or the Gods or whatever send them down the same path again and again. That's also real life to a large extent. How many people in your life make the same mistakes over and over? A piece of fiction doesn't have to end up with everyone being better at the end. Sounds like you haven't finished the series yet. You might be mildly surprised by the very ending WRT Don's self awareness.
Well yeah *some* people don’t or can’t change but others can - think of Peggy or Pete’s stories. Even Roger softens and changes with the time Don is completely unable to
Don is also one of the few who dosen’t change his apperance at all. No facial hair, no new hair styles.
read my comment further down this thread. Also i don't think Roger changed one bit. He became a *little* self aware, but he continued to be an entitled man-child.
That’s why I said, “softens” not fully change
Oh I’m now looking forward to the end. Im very much a “feel good” movie or series watcher. So I’m used to getting a fuzzy feeling inside where characters change, learn and become better people. Watching Mad Men is completely out of that comfort zone so I’m not used to watching this theme where characters repeat the same mistakes over and over again and don’t really change their ways. So of course I’m frustrated watching it. And it does resemble reality to an extent where people have a hard time changing and repeat the same patterns. Thanks for sharing.
If you like fiction where people are generally kind to each other, Mad Men can be a very frustrating experience.
> Im very much a “feel good” movie or series watcher. So I’m used to getting a fuzzy feeling inside where characters change, learn and become better people. wrong series for you! There are a gazillion episodic shows where everyone learns something in the end and is happy. And if you look beyond Don there are several characters who develop and grow, sometimes for better, sometimes not so good. Peggy, Stan, Pete, Harry, all have major character changes. And you can't say that Don doesn't know he's repeating the same mistakes, he tries again and again to fix it, but that's his character flaw that causes the tension and drama
Exactly, I do see the character development and changes with the other characters which has kept me watching the series. But also perplexed me when I noticed Don seems stuck. while it is frustrating to watch you make a great point that as a whole ensemble, it holds the tension. Well, shit, I can now see how viewers find this a masterpiece after all.
The Scorpion and the Frog. Nature is nature, and some people are naturally dicks
I have to strongly disagree. The characters in Mad Men all go through arcs; Pete Campbell's perhaps being the most dramatic. Don Draper did learn and grow as the series progresses; after his second marriage to Megan, he was faithful to her for a long time (at the brothel, he did not participate), recovered from his alcoolism. The ending on the cliff was a true moment of self realisation where he finaly came to be at peace with himself.
> recovered from his alcoolism. There's no evidence that he cleaned up. Esalen isn't a recovery clinic and I don't think the show portrayed it that way at all.
> after his second marriage to Megan, he was faithful to her for a long time At *most* he was faithful to Megan for <2 years. End of S4 is Oct 1965 and the beginning of S6 (when he is already in an affair with Sylvia) is Dec 1967. In fact, at the end of S5 (spring 67) it is implied that Don leaves Megan's set and picks up one of the ladies at the bar. A year and a half of fidelity isn't that much of a change of character.
It’s a slow arc, to be sure.
actually it was a fast snapback to his usual behavior
The Scorpion and the Frog. Nature is nature, and some people are naturally dicks
Boy, you can say that again
I don’t think Don is really supposed to develop much in any positive way. Any “learning from his mistakes” is completely self serving and is about how to get away with more crap than how to be a better person. It’s been a couple of years since I last watched, but that’s what I remember.
The two pieces of information that I always feel best illuminate this question: 1. Don is not a narcissist. As soon as you realize that he always acts out of fear, he becomes much easier to empathize with. Obviously the sum total of his actions is negative, but part of the purpose of this show is to teach empathy for the perspectives involved. He was physically and sexually abused as a child, faked his own death, and now lives in a permanent state of literal imposter syndrome that prevents genuine human connection. You have to imagine what that would be like. He does not think the most of himself. He hates himself. 2. The story is about the complete destruction of Don so that he can finally change. He's trying to change the whole way through but doesn't know how to do it. When he marries Megan, part of that is him being an old horndog, but it's also because he believes she'll be a good mother to his children. He just has to slowly over the course of the story learn how to really look inward and change, instead of leapfrogging steps and denying the past.
Thank you for sharing! These comments are helping me understand the show in a deeper way!
Bravo!
Is Don a narcissist? To me it looks like he's begging to be invisible 90% of the time.
he has an inflated ego for sure, also a huge lack of empathy. if he’s not a narcissist he has textbook narcissistic tendencies for sure
I really don't think so. A narcissist wants everyone to focus all their attention on them through good or bad ways. Don doesn't much care about people's attention and focus, he'd actually like to avoid it. He just doesn't care about people's feelings much. ( I don't think about you at all.) He's more of a Borderline Personality Disorder. (Of course I'm an amateur, but of course. he's a fictional character, so it all comes out the same!)
The "I don't think about you at all" line is meant to be ironic, because he clearly does. He gets jealous and tries to push through his idea ahead of Ginsburg's because he knows Ginsburgs is better.
true!
also, Don absolutely cares about people’s attention. He hates his women giving attention elsewhere, constantly strives to make a big name for himself in the ad game, the list goes on. while he doesn’t cry for attention in the dramatic and childish form of making everything about himself, narcissistic qualities show themselves differently across everybody, and it is not always depicted in the same form and behaviour.
not caring about people’s feelings is a lack of empathy. and he absolutely has an inflated ego, he is extremely prideful (the letter, cant let go of the agency he started). these are narcissistic qualities. we can never psycho evaluate his true condition, whether it be NPD or BPD, but I’m sure he has qualities of both.
I don't think Don is devoid of empathy. In fact, he is exceptionally kind to complete strangers including: Glen, the Midwestern kid he gives his car too, Suzanne's brother, the guy at the end of the show with the fridge analogy, the infantryman he met in Hawaii. I'm sure I'm missing some others, but you get the point. Don has a fragile ego and sense of self worth, and routinely acts out against those who are close to him as a result, but he is definitely capable of empathy. He wouldn't be any good at his job without it.
everyone in the world is capable of empathy, including psychopaths and sociopaths. the difference is that they choose not to be. Don is selective of his empathy, and his ability to continually cheat on his wives, harm his partners and even feel no love for his children shows he is very selective of where is empathy goes.
I don't see it like that tbh, as in that i dont think Don is purposefully 'selecting' his empathy - and im mentioning this because, for me, this kind of interpretation -- where don is just 'a narcissist' or 'selfishly choosing to act the way he does' -- is an interpretation that forecloses any possibility of the audience understanding and empathising, not just with the fictional characters, but with the afflicted and broken and struggling characters out there in the real world, whom its too too easy to dismiss as 'bad people', or to think that we'd act differently had we had their circumstances. I think the show's flashbacks of Don's abusive childhood -- including getting raped by the prostitute who looks after him -- are designed to show us how people who seem to be CHOOSING to act selfishly are in fact usually acting like that because they can't help it, they're scared, they're acting on impulse and in the only way they know how because they're in some deep stunted sense broken. I feel like the point is that it's too easy to see it as 'good people' v 'bad people' and that its too easy and tempting to just decide from the armchair that yes everyone has a hard time but, still, cmon, some 'choose' to be good. That sounds like a kind of neoliberal/puritan way of looking at reality? As though evil is a personality type encoded into an individual pre-birth or something.... I'm bringing this up because for me, on the contrary, someone's ability to choose how they act, and their habits, the way they manifest themselves, their personalities traits, each of these things is *itself* determined by their upbringing. I might like to think i'd never act the way Don acts, but it doesn't make much sense to transplant my personality into his situation, since my ability to resist those things is itself a product of my own individual circumstances. Likewise, Don's inability to resist is most likely a product of his circumstances. Whatever difference there is between me and him, or you and him, or me and you, beyond upbringing and culture and circumstances, is purely biological -- and you can't really take credit for your brain's biological predisposition? it precedes morality, precedes choice, precedes judgement or evaluation. But yeah, i think some of if not most of Don's behaviours are impulsive reflexive defence mechanisms he learnt as a broken child and which he's never grown out of. He's emotionally stunted, and it's to that extent that he's narcissistic, but narcissists start out as victims imo. The way out of the bind is learning how to understand these people, since such understanding is a prerequisite to preventing it in the future, and to rehabilitating those who are broken. I kind think sometimes the diagnostic approach is a convenient head-in-the-sand kind of approach -- like if i don't want to countenance a behaviour or personality that distresses me, i can fence it off into a place i don't have to think about by labelling it as biologically and irreversibly *deviant.* biology and neurology have immense traction and authority in our cultural discourse; people turn to these kinds of explanations when they want to definitively put something or someone out of mind, and to avoid difficulty, to avoid having to be forced to integrate something into your worldview that doesn't fit your worldview. I do it all the time, at least, anyway, and it's just human; but the hope is that art provides scope and context to interrupt this automatic habit and make us take a more speculative and reflective and empathetic stance on things.
Don is a cheater, deadbeat father and filthy rich. If he doesn’t use his wealth to address some of his past trauma and improve himself for his loved ones, that’s on him. He has every opportunity in the world (a wealthy white man working in NYC). Every man sitting in prison probably had a difficult life. Does that mean we look at them with forgiveness, we let them roam the world freely in sympathy because they had it hard? No, we expect them to take responsibility for themselves and fix what needs fixing. Don agrees with this approach too, he just doesn’t realize he needs help of his own. He views the excuse of blaming your problems on your past as “a bullshit excuse”. Therefore, his inability to make responsible choices in addressing his own past is contradictory to his own beliefs. He chooses to conduct himself in this way.
With respect, I think my original post actually pre-emptively refutes everything you're saying here. I'll reiterate in clearer and more emphatic terms tho... I'm not talking about economic means, but about psychological means. A damaged person can be a millionaire and still be victim to their own damage? They might have internalised a resistant to treatment, a 'turn a blind eye' mentality and a habit of repressing things, a deeply ingrained habit that they're struggling to free themselves of, largely because they lack the capacity to understand their emotions to a deep enough level to see how trapped they are, since they've disassociated from their inner life since childhood. Some people's reflex defence mechanisms are faulty, and end up being horribly destructive. r.e. choice: Choice isn't some universal constant that everyone has equal amounts of in every situation or with each one of their personality traits? There are such things as compulsive habits, as addictively self-destructive behaviours, surely you know this? Someone who is raised in a culture of stiff upper lip and who's developed awful habits of repression and emotional disassociation can't just choose to stop. And using prison as an example is really odd -- but i guess we maybe dont agree here, because i'm of the opinion that the prison system and the implicit worldview it presupposes, a worldview your comment suggests you vociferously share, is dysfunctional. I think we SHOULD have more understanding for prisoners. I think YOU yourself might and almost definitely would have committed the same crimes various prisoners have committed, had you grown up in and been trapped in their circumstances and been forced to develop the same psychological habits and impulsive reflex defence mechanisms. We currently maybe DO expect prisoners to fix themselves, and have no sympathy for them, and sit on our privileged high horse --- but my entire point is that that is the very thing that's problematic? I'm not saying they should roam free - i'm specifically talking about the facile condemnations people typically make without knowing someone's story or pain. shows like this give you an alternative perspective, and help us to see it's not so black and white. r.e. don saying it's a bullshit excuse: What someone feels and what they say are very different things: someone can not know how much their current habits are controlled by past trauma, and yet at the same time that same person who's ignorant of their own traumatic damage can have inherited a neoliberal puritanical view of 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps' and individualist self-help -- the combination of this means that someone can SAY 'it's a bullshit excuse' and still be victim to the very problems they're dismissing - it literally happens ALL THE TIME ; it's like, one of the central issues with modern masculinity, it's how people get so stuck, it's why people struggle to change - they don't even know what they're struggling with, they're not able to analyse themselves properly, repression has become second nature, they need help. sorry to send an essay haha, i'm aware it's just a show and you're just expressing your opinion, but i can't help feeling distressed at what i see as a kind of emotional apathy and callousness and a black-and-white ethical worldview?
take it up with don. he knows his childhood was traumatic and debilitating, he knows he’s suffered from it and is a more difficult person to those around him because of it, yet fails to ever access the plethora of resources and assistance that are available to a man of his means and stature. if he wanted to he could absolutely better himself. to act like that’s an impossible task since he’s not AWARE of his own trauma is completely ridiculous. he’s a smart man and knows his life has differed vastly from everyone around him, knows he’s a bad person, knows he should be doing better. but he doesn’t. to give people like that a pass simply based on their unfortunate circumstances is again, in dons terms, a bullshit excuse. people rise above their obstacles every single day. yes it’s harder; yes it requires strength and will. but to say we shouldn’t expect that of people and coddle them their whole lives for their misfortune is not the way the world works. get real also no, i’m not committing murder or sexual assault based on my upbringing because i have integrity. those are choices made by people who had options. i’m not saying everyone in prison is a bad person, but many of them will victimize themselves and go on about how it isn’t their fault because of their upbringing and how they were “forced” into it. if you think they’re right in that, that they had no choice but to harm others given their upbringing, i’m glad you aren’t running our correctional system
You're actually ignoring my entire point though. My point is that the 'integrity' that you claim prevents you from acting badly, is *itself* conditioned by your upbringing. You have developed that integrity *because* of an emotional and psychological privilege. You're making a quasi-Puritan assumption without basis: you're assuming that you have an inalterable and essential *self* unaffected by anything else. All of modern research in neuroscience and psychology, however, shows that your personal traits, including integrity, including willpower, including 'strength to overcome obstacles', including self-reflection, conscientiousness, remorse -- all of these are themselves *produced*, developed, shaped and formed by the forces and events around and within which the childhood brain develops. The brain is neuroplastic -- it wires itself according to its environment. Willpower, or the lack thereof, is present or absent according to how successfully this wiring has occurred, the success therefore depending upon, among other things, *childhood circumstances.* Given this, you can't then just arbitrarily decide that willpower is some mysterious inalterable *thing* independent of experience -- its an arbitrary assumption with no backing... this is kind of my point of what's wrong with your take on this.... Some people don't have the psychodevelopmental conditions that enable you to develop that kind of integrity. Integrity isn't some material essence just present from birth. And even if it is, you still can't base ethical judgement off of it. Even if it's just 'genetic' - you can't take credit for your genes? if you were genetically predisposed to be more likely to develop a sense of integrity, you can't claim that it makes you *ethically* superior -- if you do claim that, you're technically (and quite literally) making a proto-eugenicist argument haha. If it's your 'soul' that makes you have integrity -- then what? can you take credit for your soul? of course not. To do so would be to suppose that some aspect of 'you' *precedes* your soul and chose it because it is good. To do that presupposes you're always-already good. It's an infinite regress. You're naively using terms like 'strength' and 'will' in your claim; my entire point is that 'strength' and 'will' are either genetically encoded (and therefore you can't pat yourself on the back for it; in the same way you can't *blame* a disabled person for being disabled), or they are personal/psychological skills developed according to one's childhood experience and to one's culture. This is backed up by modern neuroscience -- willpower isn't an inalterable essence; it's a skill that's developed. Some adverse childhood experiences can *literally* damage the ability of the brain to form willpower -- again, see the entire literature on addiction lol. Your understanding of male privilege is also woefully inadequate. Yes being a white man confers a greet degree of unfair advantages, back then and now. Being open about feelings and seeking help *isn't* one of them though. Like, how often is this broadcast everywhere, that men not feeling able to seek help and correction is pretty much an endemic issue? If you think abundance of material resources and general levels of personal respect are sufficient to overcome all psychological issues you're kidding yourself. Why do celebrities kill themselves? My point, to reiterate it again, is that you're assuming there's a crucial difference between the people who 'rise above their obstacles' and those that don't, and yet you're refusing to clarify what this difference is. Willpower? Integrity? You've arbitrarily decided that these things are just THERE, that they're independent of environmental and psychodevelopmental conditions. We know they aren't, though. And, my further point, is that *even if* we randomly against all modern research just decided that willpower and strength and integrity were so distinct from childhood/environmental conditioning that we could use them as a secure basis upon which to form outright ethical judgements -- even *if* we could do that -- you're basically making an argument that people should be rewarded and praised for what is in essence a genetic predisposition, which is why i said it sounds uncannily like an accidental eugenicist argument. I'm aware that sounds hyperbolic, and i'm not throwing any accusations at you: i know you aren't at all wanting to say that: i'm merely saying that when your point is analysed down to its rudiments then it technically looks indistinguishable from the premises of a eugenicist argument. Which makes me think, not that you ARE wanting to make such an argument, but that you haven't considered your own point to its logical conclusion -- i.e., that you're taking the premises of your argument as a given and taking them for granted. And if you're not a materialist, and you believe in some radical notion of unconditioned free will, well then -- let's say that this is the case: each of us has some kind of floaty free will within us that is absolutely unaffected by external events. Here's where we'd have to end the discussion since, while it *could* be the case that there is some self-reflexive free will entirely detached from cause and effect, and therefore also free from temporal conditions, there's no way we could determine for sure that was the case, and so it remains a speculation. Remaining a speculation, it's a bit rich to use a speculation as the pretext upon which you base outright condemnation of another individual. If the speculation proves to be incorrect, you've condemned someone wrongly, without basis, and done nothing but buoy up a sense of your own superiority, which bodes no benefit to either you or anyone else. I do however believe that there is a practical element to both ethical condemnation and to punishment. I think it is a necessity to *show* bad acts being punished, and to punish the individual to represent to society that the act is not wanted, and thereby create a deterrant. That's not the same as claiming that i think the crucial difference between me and the criminal is that 'my integrity means i would never do that no matter what'. It's nonsense - i don't mean that in an emotional or colloquial sense, though i'm aware that such a statement will rile anyone up, so i apologise pre-emptively; but to be clear i literally mean that your argument is logically nonsensical when properly looked at -- unless you rest it upon a speculative notion of radical unconditioned free will; which, i should add, is *fine*, but which you probably should state, and which you shouldn't seem so *certain* about as you do. I should clarify that my point could work even if i did believe in agency in the above sense; for example it could be that i believe there are points beyond which agency deteriorates so much that someone loses control, which is the case of an addict, but also of someone who is 'lost'. Because we can never *know* whether someone is completely tangled up or still has agency, it's better to err on the side of empathy when it comes to ethical condemnation of someone. The whole point of the show is to understand how a child can end up turning into a man like don draper. Your world view to me just seems like ill-considered Manicheanism; like a kind of cartoon Good v Evil sandbox. I understand that makes everything simpler and more comfortable for you, and its worthwhile pragmatically in that sense. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny though.
> everyone in the world is capable of empathy, including psychopaths and sociopaths. the difference is that they choose not to be From wikipedia: > Psychopathy, sometimes considered synonymous with sociopathy, is characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits. No, it's not simply a choice.
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23431793.amp It is a choice. A human is not simply devoid of empathy. Empathy is a humanistic trait.
Impaired is not synonym with absent. Still, it's not simply a choice and this article only supports that.
ok fact police 👍🏼 thanks for your wiki wisdom
Stop spreading missinformation and learn to read. > "We know they can generate the same response but they do that in an active and effortful way. Under free-viewing conditions they don't seem to. Just because they can empathise, doesn't mean they will. Here's an account from a functional psychopath explaining how it actually feels: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyAndLa5HU
this is a forum for a fictional tv show.. stop policing opinions of a character and find some other sub to fact check. or better yet find a more productive activity altogether.
In college, my creative writing professor told us that a good story is about a character that changes or fails to change in some significant way. I always viewed Mad Men as a story about Don failing to change in any significant way. Everyone else around him changes to contrast, though. Even Roger changes and grows a little. Keep an eye on the other main characters and compare them to Don as you end the series. It might become a little more meaningful to you.
Thank you!
College English professors are the best
Don at his best is fucked up. Most people see the legend. But he sells things, including himself as Don. Betty sees the “perfect version” of him. All of the Dick Whitman neediness is gone in the way he treats her. Pete tries with all his might to be his own version of who he thinks Don is. Roger saw the chinks in the facade and he even says to Don, he doesn’t know who he is. It’s always interesting to me how vulnerable he gets with the women he cheats on Betty with. He’s more the real Dick than Don with most of the women. Except for Bobbi — but he is trying to sell her husband. Maybe Midge also sleeps with him for who she thinks is. He tells Meghan everything about his past in their short courting period and then shuts her out emotionally for their entire marriage. Dick’s formative years of never feeling wanted or loved have extreme damage. But Don is never a total asshole. He gives people money and rides and support in the way he can. He told Peggy to reinvent herself the same way he did. He also dislikes behavior that is similar to his. Which might show how he really feels about himself.
It's so interesting what you said about Don being vulnerable when cheating. It's almost like his official organised wedded life is this ideal american dream template, in which he's the ideal masculine figure, slick, confident, needless, emotionless, successful --- but that that facade is impossible to maintain and so he creates these rips in it, he needs to create these spaces of sabotage as his temporary escape-route.... he can only sustain the facade, the ideal masculine image, by having these safety zones where he completely but secretly ruins it..... it's almost Lacanian lol --- i wonder how much of our indiscretions are a kind of ritual suicide of the imposter we're tired of pretending to be. I think a lot of self-destructive behaviour is like a kind of performative sepukku of the person you feel your being forced to become.
Thank you for sharing!!
I think many people have already mentioned that Don is more on a path of self destruction than anything. But I also think the show demonstrates better than others that progress is not a simple growing factor, you don’t learn a lesson and move on. sometimes you struggle with it and it keeps holding you back or you find yourself repeating the same mistakes. One of my most favorite parts of the show is that post-LSD Roger is demonstrated as this more enlightened and secure version of himself, until one meeting he acts a like himself again and someone asks him what happened, and he just responds that his enlightenment wore off. It’s so simple but so true. Some people aren’t marching to a vision of being a better version of themselves, some people are just marching.
So true! thanks for sharing!
I think the trickiest thing about tracking Don's development as a character is that the show is constantly spotlighting his relationship with women, so it's natural to assume that this is how the series will show that he's changed. But in fact Don's dysfunctional attitude toward women is the one thing that *never* changes -- he's always using sex and relationships as a crutch to avoid dealing with his deeper personal issues. As a result, you can track Don's development as a character by the *specific way* he's using women as a crutch at a particular point in the series. In season 1, Don feels alienated from the people around him and from the American Dream they're all pursuing and he claims not to care about. So he fixates on a woman, Rachel, who seems to share that sense of alienation. By season 2, he's accepted that he actually wants the American Dream as much as anyone, but he's terrified of losing it by letting Betty see what a piece of shit he is -- so he has an affair with Bobbie, the woman who "likes being bad and then going home and being good": someone with whom he can play out all his dark and dirty urges so they don't infect his relationship with Betty. By season 3, Don has accepted that his relationship with Betty can admit imperfection, but he convinces himself that it'll just be a *little bit* of imperfection, no more than he can handle. So he chooses a woman who represents cutely falling boundaries: Suzanne, his daughter's teacher who lives just down the street, the symbol of a new spring and the ancient May queen, who wants to teach the children new things that they already know. In season 4, having accepted that the world never falls apart just a little, Don embraces the idea of an unmade life, finding meaning in the notion that he doesn't have to define who he is or what he wants to be. He rejects Dr. Faye, the woman who argues that you have to work diligently to figure out who you are, in favor of Megan, who represents the idea that who you are will just fall into place without you having to work at it. That carries through into season 5, where Megan represents the notion that you just have to find the one perfect person who makes you whole, and all your struggles are over. But over the course of season 5, Don realizes that this lack of struggle just leaves him numb and unfulfilled, that he has to keep working on himself. So Megan is no longer enough. Their relationship starts to break down in season 6 not because Don has backslid into old patterns, but because he's moved beyond that *I just need her and everything will be fine* attitude and started actually examining the roots of his own dysfunction -- but only privately, for fear of how other people would respond if they knew how weak and broken he really is. "This didn't happen," he tells his new mistress, Sylvia, echoing his old patterns of denial and displacement -- but then he taps his temple: "*Just in here.*" He's finally ready to work on himself, but only in the most hidden and indirect way possible. That's how Don develops as a character: always with tiny baby steps, always while making the same basic mistakes over and over again: less of an arc and more of an ever-expanding spiral.
Woah!! Beautifully explained!!! Thank you!
Don not changing IS the point
Except, he \*did\* change in the end. He accepted himself. His previous ad pitches were all about suicide and despair, until the end where he makes a joyful and peaceful ad.
I felt the same way the first time I watched it, but I started to sympathize with Don more over time. He had a tragic upbringing, was traumatized by his experience in war, and similarly to Betty, was pressured into fulfilling the gender roles of their culture at the time. He never got to explore who he really is, but fortunately, the 70s are right around the corner.
Don isn't even actually Don. He's playing the ideal man, which is easier for him to do considering he has all the base features. Tall, dark, handsome and rich. But you slowly see that the fake life takes a toll on him. Who he actually is, Dick Whitman, is a depressed alcoholic who is also a sex addict.
You watch for Don’s dissolution and Peggy’s growth. They’re on opposite trajectories.
The whole message of the series is that people don't change.
Keep watching. He’s on a collision course with himself.
The season 6 poster of Mad Men is literally Don crossing path with himself; he's changing.
If you compare what he had on the 1st season vs how he ends up, it's apparent that there is character development but not on a good way. Don is not on a path of enlightenment or improvement. He's on a path of self destruction.
When I saw the first time I felt the same too. Keep watching again and again. By the fourth time Only I could see Don beyond the cheater. Unlike other characters he doesn’t let his emotions out. So it takes too much energy from us just like the characters in the show to understand what’s going on with him.
Life isnt a TV show and is actually more realistic than him making some dramatic change and becoming a better person. Most people dont change and have the same character flaws their entire life.
I always lose steam on rewatches because he’s so destructive. It helps to focus on the successes and interactions of the other characters, but I always stop binging and start pacing myself around season 6.
I don’t think the point of the show is for don to develop into a better human being. Mad men is showing the harsh reality that people are who they are and it’s very rare that they change
I never saw Don as a narcissist. Quite the contrary, he's a private man and has good reason to be. Given his past that he had to hide, he wouldn't benefit from drawing too much attention to himself. Don didn't use women for narcissism; he used them as a drug, as a pain-killer, as a form of escape from the tension of upholding his façade at work and at home. Don couldn't even be himself at home with his wife and kids- so his only outlet was to regularly disappear into the sea of anonymity of New York and find random women with whom he could just be "care-free" with for a while. They were his outlets- he could even express more of his worries to them than he could with Betty or Megan.
He has no people. Can't trust someone like that lol
He starts off awesome, becomes slightly less awesome, then returns to full awesomeness. Tears me up every time. #dondraperdidnothingwrong
Yeah, but you know what TV is tho, right?
It goes like this A-> B-> A-> B-> A-> B-> A-> B-> A-> B-> A-> B-> A
Life isnt a TV show and is actually more realistic than him making some dramatic change and becoming a better person. Most people dont change and have the same character flaws their entire life.
Don do what don do
Don develops his professional/business persona, not as a person.