Mad Men season 6 premiere captures moral dichotomy

It is the winter of 1967, just months before the My Lai massacre and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the characters of AMC’s Mad Men are haunted by death.

Sunday’s two hour season six premiere sent audiences right back into the height of the Vietnam War. Don Draper, who during Korea assumed the name and identity of a well-off soldier, meets a young soldier on vacation in Hawaii and winds up participating in his wedding. The kid gives him a Zippo lighter inscribed with the words: “OFTEN WE HAVE TO DO THINGS THAT ARE JUST NOT OUR BAG.” By the end of the episode it seems that, apart from giving away a strange bride, death is that inevitable thing that is just not Don Draper’s bag.

Through heavy-handed metaphor, Mad Men’s writers imply that their characters are descending into a kind of hell on earth. The episode opens with a first person shot of a man performing CPR on an unknown victim. It cuts to Don reading Dante’s Inferno on a Hawaiian beach.

But heaven and hell are permanent; the message of the episode is more about the transitory nature of life than the permanence of death. Don’s clients—Hawaiian hotel owners who sponsored his trip—would rather he sell Hawaii as a temporary oasis, rather than as Heaven. They don’t like the fatal connotations of the latter.

Don is, of course, entirely wrapped up in the connotations of image. He is his own walking ad campaign, a construction of signifiers from his phony name to his cigarettes. Told to “be himself” in an office photo shoot, he lights one up behind his desk and uses it to hide his face—brooding.

Photography has unsurprisingly been a motif throughout the series, starting with a campaign to sell the slideshow aid called the Carousel. In this week’s episode, images are put forth as in vain attempts to preserve life indefinitely. Don and Megan present a slideshow for their friends of their happy vacation to Hawaii, but Don looks bored, and several minutes later it is revealed that he has been unfaithful to Megan since their return.

Don seems to revile the permanent, mocking holy matrimony by telling an employee that the word “love” has been devalued in part by domestic life. Don also throws up at the funeral of Roger’s mother. Later, when it is revealed that Don’s doorman was the dying man at the start of the episode, Don begs him to describe what he saw during his heart attack (did you see a sunset?). Does Don dread the permanent because he’s a restless bachelor at heart, or because he is profoundly death-obsessed?

If it’s the latter he’s not the only one. Roger is unfazed by the death of his 90-something mother, and even announces to his analyst that he doesn’t care about anything. Yet he breaks down into tears upon hearing of the death of his shoe-shiner.

Don is also not the only runaway. His story is juxtaposed with that of Betty’s stepdaughter, who apparently has plans to move to California on her own. The mad men have been jolted out of ‘50s complacency, and the squares are seen directly interacting with youths who seek liberation. Perhaps, like Don, they will have to go through a certain kind of violent unrest in order to find a new path. As Don explains to the Hawaiian hotel moguls: “How do you get to heaven? Something terrible has to happen.”

I haven’t devoutly watched the series since season one, but I knew that the biggest cliffhanger was whether Don would cheat on Megan. Spoiler alert: he does! And with Linda Cardillini, no less. Not only that, this new lover was the one that lent him The Inferno. Don has descended back into the hell of infidelity.

War gave Don a new identity and consequently a shot at success, but it also condemned him to a life without truth or loyalty to the “real.” Instead of looking to personal relationships for eternal glory, he looks to the false paradise of a Hawaiian vacation: this is Don’s downfall. Recall that the innermost circle of Dante’s hell is not fire and brimstone, but ice.

Why analyze an hour and a half of television drama? Because there’s not too much else to talk about. Now that we’ve reached the late sixties, fashion among the over-thirties is a hot mess, and this show has always been more of a slow-walking art piece than entertainment.

During Don’s failed pitch meeting with the moguls, one humorously explains to him, “I’m sorry but this is very poetic.” Each episode of Mad Men that I have seen (just the first season and this past episode) contains thematically interweaving storylines that reveal a repressed anxiety. It is not ever difficult to connect those dots, but I hail the show’s creative team for giving audiences some dots to connect. It seems heavy-handed metaphor is still Mad Men’s bag, and to me it ain’t no drag.