“I’m not here to tell you about Jesus”: Don Draper and the Death of God

In the first-season episode “The Hobo Code,” which in many ways is the most important of the series, Don Draper is selling Peggy’s copy to a reluctant client. He goes on the offensive, asking them to leave if they aren’t serious about changing their strategy, and along the way he makes an enigmatic statement: “Listen, I’m not here to tell you about Jesus. You already know about Jesus, either he lives in your heart or he doesn’t.” The pitch proves effective, and when Ken Cosgrove mentions how great “the Jesus thing” was (perhaps implicitly asking what it means), Don explains that “sometimes force is actually being requested.” I am probably not alone in finding this explanation, such as it is, less than helpful.

So what does the quote mean? Or better: What role does it play in the episode and the season?

Don Draper the Jew

One of the dominant themes of the first season of Mad Men is Jewishness. In the very first episode, Sterling Cooper is courting the Jewish department store Menken’s, which is trying to convert to a more mainstream luxury format under the leadership of the owner’s daughter, Rachel Menken. When they seek out a Jewish employee to attend the initial meeting, Don joins in with the casual anti-Semitism of the era, declaring that they haven’t hired any Jews “under his watch.” But as the season goes on, the Jewish motifs continue — they try (and ultimately fail) to get the Israeli tourism account, Don takes up with Rachel (at one point using the Israeli tourism connection as a pretext to meet with her), and there are also little touches (such as the delicatessen served to the Lucky Strike representatives who are nervous after Roger’s heart attack, an interesting counterpoint to the shrimp cocktail served at the original Menken’s pitch).

On one level, this is a misdirection. The audience knows Don has a secret, and the writers are luring us into the trap of assuming that Don is a secret Jew — when in reality he is just a poor Southern boy, the orphaned son of a prostitute. But one of the key techniques of Mad Men is to “sublate” apparent misdirections into deeper truths.

On the Mad Men backlash

Fair enough: Mad Men has been on for a long time, and there was bound to be a backlash at some point. What’s interesting to me, though, is the form the backlash has taken. Over and over, people are saying: okay, we get it. The symbolism is heavy-handed. Parallel plots are too elaborately coordinated. Everything is becoming too simplistic. A recent manifestation of the backlash in the New Yorker has claimed that Don Draper is less a character than a “thesis statement.”

In other words, the show is being castigated for remaining true to its original vision and for continuing to explore the same themes it’s always focused on. And again, fair enough: people are allowed to get tired of things. Yet it seems to me that there’s always an underlying demand, an unspoken grievance motivating these complaints. “Yes, yes, we get it, we realize that Don Draper is a terrible fraud, a pure surface whose success is an indictment of the system he operates in — so can you please get back to plotlines that allow us to view him as a charismatic character with real depth?” “Yes, yes, we understand, the system is rigged so that do-nothing old white dudes continue to triumph over more talented young people and particularly women — so now that we’ve acknowledged that, can you give us a fantasy portrayal where Peggy is totally put in charage and succeeds brilliantly?” “Okay, God, we hear you, we know that the advertising milieu is so toxic that even an apparently innocent character is ultimately pulled into the self-centered scheming — but why did you have make Megan seem to be more or less a naturally good person at first and deprive us of the fantasy that everyone is always-already a backstabbing social climber?”

As Gerry Canavan said on Twitter yesterday, Mad Men, like other “high quality” shows, succeeds because its audience doesn’t understand it. They tune in for the suave Don Draper, and they resent being deprived of that fantasy — even though the entire work of the show has always, from day one, been to deprive us of that fantasy. They tune in looking for a soap opera filled with sexy people and elaborate sets (and “fan service” such as more screen time for Peggy or the triumphant return of Sal), and they resent that the show has a moral critique of the milieu it’s documenting. If you really “got it,” you’d either stop watching — or start watching the show differently. As it stands, the backlash seems to be driven by the fact that the show’s viewers simply don’t want to “get it.” And the fact of that paradoxical combination of addiction and resistence makes me wonder if Mad Men will turn out to be the most interesting and artistically successful example of the early 2000s “high quality cable drama” genre.

Early thoughts on rewatching the last season of Mad Men

I’ve only gotten a few episodes into my rewatching of last year’s season of Mad Men, but things are already coming across different to me. I’m even beginning to suspect that some of the things that made it frustrating to watch going forward — the excessive attention to Megan at the expense of Peggy, the pat “thematic” nature of each episode — were features rather than bugs.

One of the overarching themes is that generational transfer is not a clean and simple thing.

Spoiler Alert Thursday: Mad Men, The Phantom

I hated this episode so much.  

Spoiler Alert Thursday: Mad Men, Commissions and Fees

With one episode left in the season, they finally delivered on that long-promised suicide.

Spoiler Alert Thursday: Mad Men, The Other Woman

I found myself far more in agreement with voyou’s take on the most recent episode, than with the one in Kritik.

Spoiler Alert Thursday: Mad Men, Christmas Waltz

Wait, what?

Spoiler Alert Thursday: Mad Men, Dark Shadows

Remember a couple weeks ago, when dbarber, Adam and Dave noted that this season has been weirdly thematic?

Spoiler Alert Thursday: Mad Men, Lady Lazarus

When I saw the title of this episode, I was a little concerned that Betty had committed suicide.