Final Arc for Don Draper Meta: Part II
Originally posted by sunclouds33 at Final Arc for Don Draper Meta: Part II
And here's Part II!
IMO, the Coke ad represented the first time that Don was actually IN his ad's head-space to a successful extent. Don discusses that he uses his life to create ads and teaches Peggy, "You are the product. You feeling something. That's what sells." However, the irony is that Don usually twice-removed from his best ads; he observes and longs for the picture in the ads but he's on the outside looking in.
Don used the perfect looking, photogenic Draper family to sell the Kodak wheel- but all with the subtext that Don knows his family and especially, him are not perfect or even whole. Don chained-smoked his way through writing the "Why I'm Quitting Tobacco" NYT letter. Don spent the night rooting for Sonny Liston and disparaging Muhammad Ali- but then, when Ali won, he used that victory to sell Samsonite, comparing Samson suitcases to Ali. He was the divorced dad with limited custody of his kids living in a small Greenwich Village apartment when he produced the "Glo-Coat" ad.
Part of Betty's anger in A Night to Remember is that Don sits and watches how Betty operates as a housewife so he could sell beer using her experience- and then, Don doesn't actually help set up the dinner party for his colleagues but just acts as the anthropologist on Betty's domestic labor (because Betty was forbidden from using her ACTUAL degree in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr). He was orphaned as a little boy after both of his parents died violent, sudden deaths- but he extrapolated to imagine how teenagers could be convinced to not take up smoking if they think about how their parents who nurtured them through childhood, who represent the security and idealism of their childhood could die from lung cancer.
Don comes up with the "Limit your exposure" ad for London Fog IMO somewhat inspired by his good intentions to communicate to Sal that he should be discreet but they will not speak of any bell-hop blow jobs, right when the pin from the flight attendant that he just shtupped in in his over-head compartment heading home to Betty who took him back after Bobbi Barret but on DOUBLE TRIPLE SECRET PROBATION and Sally whose grown into a curious, assertive nine year old who plays with or even breaks Don's suitcase to get closer to her father.
The Jantzen "So well built, we can't even show you the second floor" ad for bikinis is part of Don recapturing his badassery for a bit, and that pre-sages Don's successful second Wall Street Journal interview which demanded Don "show" the reporter "everything" in a poorly built way- i.e. tell a spell-binding corporate machismo "I could either die of boredom or holster up my guns" tale that hits the right border between confiding and total bullshit. "So well built, we can't show you the second floor" is an on-the-nose pun for SCDP lying about their single-floor agency to look more successful. "Within a year, we occupied two floors of the Time Life building." The "Why wait for a man to buy you a fur coat?" ad with Betty Hofstadt as the model drips with irony in how it really didn't operate that way in real life.
Don's ads are contrasted to Peggy's ads. IMO, Peggy's Greatest Hits are much more on the nose for what she's actually living. Peggy physically did not want to be just one of a hundred lipsticks in a box. Peggy has solid reasons why she likes Topaz pantyhose- revolving around their durability. Peggy found that the Relaxicisor gave her an orgasm so that's what she wanted to sell. Then in casting, Peggy stuck to her inner early-seasons "Why can't I be like Joan?" side by casting the beautiful woman for the radio voice and then, Peggy stuck to her also genuinely felt later seasons of, "You don't have to look like Joan to be happy." Peggy likes to feel like she's part of a family without the commitment of having a husband and kids just yet so she wrote exactly that into Burger Chef. And then, you know, sometimes Peggy just thinks it'll be cool if Baked Beans do ballet or you could get ladies to fight over ham in a big public spectacle... Simple as that.
I will say that I find Don's ads more creative and interesting than Peggy's almost all of the time, even though I do totally believe Peggy as commercially successful. Peggy represents the informed, cost-conscious consumer making logical choices about what to purchase- and she plays that as much as she can in her advertising. Don represents the emotional consumer longing for some easy-to-acquire feeling embodied in materialism, but Don actually is that lost, confused consumer merely playing at the authoritative figure who knows what brand of cigarettes or soda will help people. It's literally:
Pete: Don will give authority, you will give emotion.
Peggy: I have authority. And Don has emotion
S6 ironically is when Don's advertising actually more completely embodies his internal life and issues. However, they're all failures of a sort because every ad that Don really puts his stamp on a reflection of his existential angst, depression, and dark moral rot. The funny thing is that I'd argue that there was wit, thought, creativity, facility with language, and memorability to most of Don's S6 ads but they were spectacularly inappropriate. Moral rot makes for great drama and crappy advertising. The "Vacation or Suicide" ad for Sheraton was obviously rejected by the clients and got a, "What? You didn't get your vomiting out of the way at my mother's funeral?" Don playing a low-class used car salesman, like about six months out from being Dick Whitman, to the Jaguar honchos to ensure that he got to keep his national campaign instead of having to down-grade to Herb's strategy which would lower both billings and the prestige of having a car account. Selling a Snowball candy to children with the Devil and "A snowball's chance in hell" just because he's in a "Imma gonna read Dante's Inferno on the beach and glare at Megan" depressed mode. Finally, the Hershey pitch.
The Coke ad is a dream come true for Don in a specific Don-way. He authentically felt a moment of peace and happiness and THAT was the jumping off point for an ad that communicated what Don actually felt then. That's huge and manages to satisfy Don on both important levels that IMO, he'll always need- the existential poetic joy and the calculated, practical business success. He wasn't singing but he was ON a grassy hill top with people of all races and ethnicities here to communicate messages of peace and joy. It's a huge improvement from a number of years where Don derived his inspiration from a longing for what he felt other people had or for the terrible year of the toxic sludge of his actions and self-hate seeped into his pitches and copy and jeopardized his status. Yes, he's selling product. However, he is communicating a real thing feeling.
Moreover, the show expresses through a lot of its characters, but especially Don Draper, that the 1960s were confusing and scary and turbulent. The decade really hurt some and sometimes, the 60s were best represented as a horror movie (The Crash, Mystery Date). But still, the decade should be celebrated as a particularly transformative one for social equality and it should get both a cynical and comforting read that many of the fears that the world and US were ending in the chaos of the '60s were just plain wrong. Embracing psychiatry, expanding rights for Jews, women, blacks, etc., changing technology, stopping the cycle of drafted men heading to high-intensity conflicts based on mass disapproval actually didn't tear American and the capitalism asunder.
Capitalism still thrived through the 1970s and beyond.
IMO, it's downright poetic to see the differences and similarities between Smoke Gets in Your Eyes!Don Draper and Person to Person!Don Draper just as a subject of 1960s history. The first scene and last scene are ultimately Don working on advertising. Don is at a bar in the first ep and he's at a retreat in the last ep- but in both eps, he's actually pretty comforted in his capitalistic way that he has to pay to be at both places because he really gets money changing hands like nothing else. He's working on selling an unhealthy product in both cases. However, it's still progress. I'm drinking a coke as I write this particular paragraph. LOL. Coke is unhealthy but it's not as addictive or as unhealthy as cigarettes and people didn't really know Coca Coca's full health risks in 1970, as opposed to SC's role in actively obfuscating the surgeon general's and AMA's warnings to service Lucky Strike.
In Smoke Gets..., the white bartender gave serious attitude for Don even talking to older black bus boy. In Person to Person, there are people of all races meditating on Big Sur Hilltop. Smoke Gets...'s first scene features the general rules of the show- if you're feeling sad or stressed, you shouldn't talk about it but instead just try to ignore it through daily routine or go to a bar or have sex (if you're a guy). In Person to Person, yes it's an industry, but there's still a development of more wholesome ways to deal with unhappiness instead of just ignoring it or burying it in booze.
I'll come out and say it. I anticipate a happier, more moral ending for Don BECAUSE he apparently went to advertising at McCann. I hear the "This thing you call Enlightenment was invented by guys like me sell Coca Cola" critique and that's partly true. Even as a fan of the soft drink, Coca Cola is unhealthy. Advertising has big-time deception to it.
However, I do take an issue with morally passing judgment on professions key to the modern world whether it's lawyers or businesspeople or major bankers or movie stars or ad men and women. It's honestly so fucking tired how certain professions gets lionized or attacked. As someone who reads circulars to clip coupons and find out about deals, who has an email subscription to a number of companies, who loves television shows paid for by advertising, loves radio stations paid for with ads because I don't have satellite radio in her car, who takes advantage of any time that businesses could remotely subsidize highways or airports with advertising instead of solely relying on individual consumers, who can actually really appreciate product placement done well, I really can't sniff at the profession. Sure, the government should regulate advertising to make sure that claims don't lie or actively dangerous products don't reach children and youth. However as long as we live in a capitalistic system with products, salesmanship is a natural byproduct and actually, it's a pretty benign one at that.
On an individual level, the moral snobbery can just be silly. Peggy didn't compromise herself by moving from secretary to copywriter. Don didn't compromise himself by moving from used car salesman/fur salesman to copywriter just because he represented more industries in the latter. Quaalude induced!Archie Whitman can blab all he wants that he FARMS and Don GROWS BULLSHIT AND HAS HANDS SOFT AS A WOMAN'S but I see no nobility in subsistence level American farming when there are no other options and the farmers were merely trying to ride out the havoc they collectively (and accidentally) wreaked in the central part of the US causing the Dust Bowl. Plus with every passing decade, there were less farmer jobs. Megan moved from copywriting- to acting in a commercial to acting in a soap opera made possible by commercials to just living off of ad money.
The only thing you can do just goes for almost every profession- try to act as decently within it as you can and when you can, take a stand to make things better. In my Roger Sterling essay, I express a thought that it would feel inconsiderate and disingenuous for Don to drop out of McCann immediately after giving the hard sell to Roger and Ted. Maybe I'm fast-forwarding ahead, but, in Don's case, I'm more morally comfortable with him finishing his five year commitment than not partly because he played a major role in placing people at McCann (Peggy, Ted, Meredith, Roger). He pushed for the deal. If he stayed, Meredith would still have her job. Maybe Peggy would be grasping a little less with a powerful ally in her corner. Maybe Jim Hobart's bad mood about Don leaving leaked into his poor treatment of Joan or Joan declined Don's help in the elevator when she thought she could handle it, but would have asked him for help if she struck out with Hobart and was looking at losing half a million bucks.
I think it's a worthwhile debate with merits on both sides. However, IMO, merely selling a company's wares with a pleasing image (absent any egregious falsehoods) on TV and in magazines is far more morally palatable to me than Don making a commitment to Ted that going to McCann is what's best for Creatives like them or Don trying to make a speech to HIS employees and Meredith that this merger was carefully considered and it's the beginning of something...and then, flying the coop in three days in never to return. I have done some soul-searching and some of this is ALL ABOUT ME. I'd rather have commercials than feel jerked around by the Mad Men storyline of "Don Loves Advertising" which came to a head in the first half of S7. LOL.
Still though, getting people to like a particular product feels much smaller despite the numerosity of the world than convincing a not-stable Ted that he shouldn't retire just yet. Broadcasting a pleasing image to sell a product feels much more appropriate than selling merger that you took a lead in orchestrating and not following through. Moreover, I would trust my boss or business partner before a commercial from the TV. There's a necessity for some to play the corporate game, whether you're a tricky attorney or an ad man. However the more intimate you get, the higher the obligation for honesty and concern.
Moreover, like, Joan had a legitimate beef that McCann was an overly hostile environment to her and she couldn't work there anymore. I interpret that as "The sexism of the times, Joan's unusual partner status as someone with a stake in the company but without the creative accomplishments or rolodex of accounts, Joan's expensive contract to finish her five years, McCann's hard-nosed industry greed epitomized in Jim Hobart, and frankly, Joan's personal expectations that she must always be treated like the powerful Queen Bee who snippily lectures others created a perfect storm that forced Joan out of the company."
However, as I stated in my pro-McCann essay, in most ways, they're just a bigger, more organized, more stable, but more rule-heavy and hierarchical version of the different versions of SC. But they're doing the same things. IMO, Creative IS valued at McCann. See the room of Creative Directors, Peggy's and Ted's relative fulfillment there, Jim Hobart's decade long quest to acquire Don even though Don is a headache in terms of organization and obedience, the "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" ad. McCann is not Duck's drunken, "I don't want to indulge Creative. When the economy is good, people will buy things. When it's not, they won't....And that's why corporations will pay us money as an ad agency" or Jim Cutler's "Creative runs secondary to a computer...which any corporation can just buy and place in-house but you know, WE GOT THERE FIRST." McCann's got the stability and money to buy the forward thinking computer, without just accepting a hired hand Creative Director and bulldozing Creative's meeting place. McCann is a proven entity, instead of one man's vision.
Other than Joan's particular plight, a lot of the objection to McCann feels like a resistance to being in an agency where you can't wheel out a secretary's corpse in a slapstick scene, hire a "doctor" to juice people up with speed, drunkenly drive a tractor in the workspace, have a number of fist fights in the office, smoke pot in the middle of the agency, and there's a little less, "I just walked across the hall from my office to another guy's office. Let's celebrate that with a drink."
SC was sexist and created a hostile environment for women throughout its tenure. Joan and Peggy had a special status because they made themselves important over a long period of time. SC worked every account they could get. It was a plot point when Roger refused to work with Honda and he lost or when Don decided that something was just a little too slimey and mean (continuing the relationship with Jaguar, ripping off Pete's Jai Alai friend, turning down all future cigarette business) and Don usually lost those fights in some way. SC had a merger with its rival company just in the interest of getting bigger, and Don got "I'll buy you a drink if you wipe the blood off your mouth" aggressive to get Dow "Vietnam War" Chemical. To paraphrase one of my new favorite shows Silicon Valley (not as good as Mad Men, but does provide wit around the hippest business of 2000s as opposed to the 1960s and the tech world's own sexism, hedonistic excesses, and Tarzan-like business crazy), what is SC but a little version of McCann that wanted to be just as big as McCann when it grows up.
IMO, being in a bigger agency with other Creative Directors could be awesome for Don. If he accepts it with grace, it could be a great way to sate his professional and creative ambitions without the pressure of having to be The Guy at all times. It's not humiliating him i.e. forcing him to start from the bottom at his own company. However, it's not bad for Don to accept the consequences of his actions to become "Well, then you're stuck trying to be a person like the rest of us" in Faye's words with everyone's else's expectations to be sober and professional at all times at work but everyone else's allowances that someone else can take slack. .
Moreover, I do think that Don has room to give Dad-like lectures to Sally of:
Don: So what happened to field hockey?
Sally: If I'm on the yearbook, I won't be a benchwarmer.
Don: Well, can you quit before I buy you cleats and a stick next time?
Sally: I'm going to sell everything.
Don: You know how much Madrid's going to cost?
Sally: I'm not gonna back out of that. I want to go to Spain.
Don: I want to go to Spain.
Like, that's part of parental-stuff. Instructing your kid on the value of a dollar. Sally shouldn't avoid those discussions because her parents are rich. However, you know, between the Cadillac, the million dollar check he wrote to Megan, the millions that he walked away from by ending his contract early, you could buy a lot of hockey cleats and sticks. While Don doesn't have to work at a place that he hates to have room to instruct his kids on the value of money, he doesn't model responsible behavior by leaving the workplace only several days into it i.e. not long enough to confirm that he really hates working there or ahem, he'd really be a benchwarmer with no chance to make the field.
IMO, it indicates a really happy ending very particular to Don Draper that he was able to enforce his very particular and personal view of Coke's next commercial, forged in his Flakey Cross-Country Road Trip. Moreover, since the Hilltop commercial was a ground-breaking commercial in its corporate showcase of hippie culture, its racially integrated cast as the point of the commercial, and its emphasis on a song over a jingle, Don ended up more on a progressive limb at McCann than at his scrappy little rebellious agency (except for maybe the Why I'm Quitting Tobacco letter which Don wrote and submitted on his own to much partner resentment). As it predictably turns out, there IS a way for Don to have his particular version of artistic integrity at McCann much like there IS a way for Peggy to keep at least some of her accounts by standing up for herself.
Plus, I don't want to go OTT with fanfic here. However with so many Creative Directors in a room, I do think that Don didn't pitch Hilltop to his colleagues by steamrolling or commanding. He wasn't the boss of creative anymore. Maybe there's some amusing plot of Don pulling a fast one where he pretends to agree with McCann's pitch for Coke, and then Coca Cola comes in, and Don pitches his Hilltop commercial to the delight of Coca Cola and to the aggravation of every Creative Director at McCann. However, I don't quite buy that after Jim Hobart would likely put Don on DOUBLE TRIPLE SECRET PROBATION. I do think along with the Mother Sun of the meditation, Don tried playing the Sun in Aesop's fable and it worked.
Don: How do you get them to do what you want them to do?
Faye: Aesop has a fable about the wind and the sun. The wind and sun had this competition to see if they could get a traveler's coat off. So, the wind blows fiercely on him, but the traveler just pulls his coat tighter- But the sun shines down on him, warmer and warmer, and the traveler just takes it off.
Don: And the moral is?
Faye: Kindness, gentleness and persuasion win where force fails.
To try to put Don's unusual ending in perspective, Don's ending is a direct opposite of Walter White's ending. Both guys ran away late in their final seasons. However, Breaking Bad's last ep is ALL ABOUT how Walter comes home and ties up basically every loose end and THEN has the dramatic courtesy to die after that work is done and just a second before the credits go black. Don never goes home on screen; he's across the country from everyone else in his final moment. However, BB shows Walt returning in the desperation that he only has a few days left.
With Don, the process of him making peace and the Coca Cola commercial, IMO, emphasizes that the series won't exactly show Don returning home because Don has a lot more to do than just to tie up loose ends before death. Don has an entire life and the start of another decade ahead of him with interesting curve balls ahead. The last three eps bring up sea-changing possibilities that just didn't exist on the antepenultimate ep of the series. How does Don cope with being his kids' sole living parent? How does Don handle being in McCann, "A More Feared Place Than Vietnam in the 1960s Mad Men'verse"? The Coca Cola ad makes Glo-Coat look like something a kindergartener got up on his mom's fridge in terms of industry acclaim. How much does that change things for him or how much actually stays the same? The Esalen Institute was Don's first time experiencing organized, focused psychotherapy- and there's been a storyline from S1 on that Don doesn't trust therapy (and poisons the well on Betty trusting therapy) even though he probably needs it more than most anyone as in:
Jerry (to George): You really need some help. A regular psychiatrist couldn't even help you. You need to go to, like, Vienna or something. You know what I mean? You need to get involved at the university level, like where Freud studied, and have all those people looking at you and checking up on you. That's the kind of help you need. Not the once-a-week for eighty bucks, no. You need a team. A team of psychiatrists working around the clock, thinking about you, having conferences, observing you like the way they did with the elephant man. That's what I'm talking about, because that's the only way you're going to get better.
ANYWAY, I KID. And as it turns out, on first introduction, therapy brought Don an elusive feeling of healing and happiness that he hadn't encountered before. What does that mean? Does Don make that a part of his lifestyle and becomes psychologically better as he works at therapy or does Don forget about it once he's no longer trapped as Esalen and he has all of his Manhattan distractions or does Don go OTT with the indulgency of therapy to epitomize the silliest and most self-centered aspects of the ME! Decade. It really can go all three ways, although I listed all three from Most Likely to Least Likely in my opinion.
Morally speaking, Felina COULD be the ep where Walter White actually reverses his series-long steady course of "Worse, Worser, WORST!" because everyone knew that it was the last few days of Walt's life. He had some statements and actions he needed to get off his chest on his metaphorical death bed. That's not the case with Don. That almost requires a more ambivalent finale, particularly for a character as unpredictable and ambiguous as Don who screws up and succeeds in merely more vivid, epic, dysfunctional versions than your standard 1960s One Percenter Self Made Guy as opposed to an out-and-out murderous, vicious person like Walt or Tony Soprano.
I like to compare and contrast TV characters as much as anyone- but I do think there's a rush to emphasize a Walter White/Tony Soprano/Don Draper trinity of Difficult Men. Not just in finales, but I kind of feel like Walter White is Don's total *opposite*. Don is hedonistic and enjoys sex and drinking and eating in nice restaurants and expensive clothes. Walter is so straight-laced that he's never even sampled his own product, Skylar cheated on him but he never had sex with anyone else even when they were separated, and his wealth just sits there. Don looks like he comes straight out of Mid-Century Movie Star Heroic Lead Casting but he's a huge physical coward, a bunch of people have beaten him successfully, and he's loathe to participate in violence and generally feels guilty when he tilts that way. Walter looks like a dork- but he's physically fearless and unbelievably viciously violent. Walt was raised to be a law-abiding middle class family man until he reacted to a near-death experience by becoming a criminal. Don was raised to be a bottom-feeder pick-pocket who lived as an unwelcome guest- until he reacted to a near-death experience by becoming a pillar of the community family man on top of a hobo hedonist on top of ... his own version of family man. Walt prefers his kids as babies. Don prefers them as interesting mini-adults.
I find Walt's consistent element of malice pretty absent in most of Don's actions which at their worst combine hot-headedness and selfishness but no real malice. (Except for maybe with Ted in S6) Walt is focused as a creature of tremendous self-discipline who found his pleasure at a late age in the meth business with its elements of violence, chemistry, and gaming the system. Don is irresponsible and has no self-discipline, but instead his brand of success does come from his interest in lots of hobbies, people, items, and media. I would argue that Walt pretended like he was a Gale, primarily interested in the chemistry of producing the product, but he kept the same blue meth. The chemistry of production ultimately didn't get him going like the running the actual business i.e. solving and defeating threats and wanting to be in charge of management. Don acts like he's more interested in the business of advertising and wanting to "build something" and making the executive calls (and that's partly true), but the business-management hardly gets him as excited as the production of pitches and ads.
If we're really looking for similarities, Don is way more of a Jack Donaguey or Barney Stinson (without the protective veneer of comedy and you know, WITH BETTER WRITING) or Don bears similarities to Jimmy McNulty and Adelle DeWitt. Or as I argued before, he could be the dark side of CJ Cregg.
However, I made a bunch of comparisons between Don Draper and Willow Rosenberg. I don't know if it's because they're that similar so much as the poetry and complexities in both characters and how they've captured my attention.
However, Don's and Willow's end with them in lotus position feeling a hippie-dippie connectivity of peace and joy in the glowing light of either Mother Sun's Big Sur sunshine or Slayers' Big Momma's big magic while all along inside, they're cooking up their biggest professional achievement yet really hammered home the similar ways that these two get to me. The bliss and peace on the outside belie the hard-nosed effort on the inside and that dichotomy is belied by Willow and Don doing the "turn an illusion into reality" of their worlds in magic and advertising.
Willow and Don were feeling connected in that moment. The connection is inherent in the "perfect harmony" of the commercial or the jubilant "I can feel them, Buffy. All over. Slayers are awakening everywhere." And yet, we don't know exactly how the newly awakened slayers felt in that moment other than generally "empowered from the montage" or what the other meditators were thinking in that moment. However, as much as the connectivity, it's defining that Willow and Don were "making their own fun" in way that the original authors of the spell (Shadowmen) or the original author of the meditation chant couldn't imagine and would definitely hate.
You can't have a 1960s show or a Wiccans without hippie influences and the final image went straight to the heart of Don's and Willow's attraction to and contempt for hippie-type stuff. Willow and Don share a similar temptation to get the peace, free love and connectivity promised by the hippie lifestyle without tamping down their own exceptionalism and right to individualistically pursue everything by committing to being a communitarian hippie. There is an intoxicating element to the hippie movement which promises that if you're just IN THE MOMENT of peace and bliss and free love, than you're OK, it's all good, you can't do wrong. Willow and Don both know how terrible it is to live with no confidence as children, how exhausting it is to perform confidence but how intoxicating it is to play that role, and eventually, how much radioactive confidence that society all but demands from actually turns people off. The confidence of dillenantedom or hippiedom is a philosophy that promises a glow confidence from within if you just FEEEEL.
However, there exists a breaking point. Don WAS feeling the high of weed and the coziness with Midge in The Hobo Code- but eventually, the drugs wore off, the beatniks were getting cabin fever with all the *togetherness* or whatever and starting attacking Don and his profession. Don tried entertaining himself with taking photos that just proved Midge was in love with another guy, and BOOM, Don was done with the proto-hippie stuff. "You can't leave. I can." Willow was feeling the purity of magic to help lost souls- but at some point, you lose patience with coddling poltergeists causing violence. "Transform your pain. Release your pain...and ah, get over it." "The time for touchy feely communication is over!"
There's a promise of righteous empowerment in the Wicca Group in Hush and the "Why would you deny yourself something you want?' Eurotrash wanderer crowd at the end of S2 that could only come from zen, non-maintream dilettantes. However, while the groups promise empowerment, Don and Willow actually really don't feel empowered in that group relative to elsewhere in life. Willow resented being lectured away from spells and treated like the unwanted outsider on the Wicca group when she was used to being in the leadership of the Scoobies about as much as "You should come with us. My dad likes you. You're beautiful and you don't talk very much" is NOT a compliment to someone like Don who is pretty used to titans of industry being very interested in what he has to say.
And yet, the attraction to the zen free love where everything is cool remains. IMO, that represents a lot of Megan's and Tara's purpose in the narrative. Jeez, I wonder if Willow would have drugged-up hallucinations about a totally hippified glowingly pregnant with Willow's mystical child dream!Tara beaming at her and telling her that she could do whatever she wanted. IMO, Willow would have a cousin of that dream, giving her dream Tara more agency and power ala Restless. However, there's a big element to Willow and Don that they never feel at ease, they always feel the need to perform, acquire, accomplish, or deaden senses. This makes the hippie dream all the more attractive and elusive but also frustrating and antithetical to how they approach the world.
The slayer empowerment spell and Coke ad represent Willow's and Don's kismet moment of blending the hippie lessons while doing their more transformative work for war or economics inside and it works because it's a blend. Willow was not satisfied by just being connected to the world in Beneath You. In Chosen, Willow got to bubbly talk about the connectivity that she felt- but with her as the driver of that connectivity because all along, Willow really did need to be the driver to feel the promised bliss of letting go. In Person to Person, Don did feel a general message of wanting to hug and love and he felt the longing of wanting to furnish a home in love (contrasted to a bare apartment) but Don could only communicate the message in an ad because that's his language. As he said, being charged for something relieves him.
I've analogized Willow's and Don's similar large appetites for not just success but consumption of earthly pleasures and control and adventures and knowledge and love in order to fill up something empty inside that really doubts that they're accepted for who they are. Willow usually tries really hard to put a lid on the selfish excesses because of her commitments to her friends and the world; she sometimes fails. Don makes spurts of effort but he lacks Willow's strength and altruism to follow through like her and his adult world is oriented around him getting his way while the Buffyverse (mystically and humanly) doesn't work like that for Willow. I suppose if we're really looking for analogues, Willow = Sally because I think that's Sally's role in the narrative to show how special the intelligence and wanderlust and imagination and pointed wit and rule-breaking and heck, even flaws and temper can be when it's always tempered by a committed conscience but even more, a commitment to family to ensure lasting goodness and security far afield from the temporary high of charming strangers.
Moreover, I think Person to Person brilliantly communicates the importance and unimportance of the Kismet Moment. Person to Person really leaves me with the impression that Don attained a level of peace and sobriety on the Hilltop and in group therapy with Leonard that he never had before. He had inspiration that served as a highlight for his career. After the hell of S6 and frequently unrewarded Doldrums of Reform(ish) of S7, the group therapy and Coke ad finally feels like a great reward and moreover, a guiding post to be good and happy at the same time. It'll be a defining moment going forward and he'll try to reach for that. The indication that Don did go back to advertising and he did it at McCann where he's one of a hundred Creative Directors in a box is practically meaningful to any post-series fanfic.
However, it's just a guiding moment. Inspiration for one of the best commercials in history hardly ever strikes. Your average group therapy participant doesn't have this epic series finale monologue designed to touch Don's poor emotionally and tobacco damaged heart like Leonard. I can say that Big Sur is LITERALLY the most beautiful place that I've ever been to. It doesn't look like that all over and actually, NYC is about to become its grimiest, most dangerous ugly version of itself in the 1970s and 1980s. The break through is great, but it's got an expiration date of assholic flakiness with every passing day that Don doesn't go out of the refrigerator to the actual people in his life.
IMO, Chosen falls down on communicating the ambiguity where Person to Person succeeded. However, Season 8 excellently carries this idea through to the end with Willow's story. (Although, lol, I'm really sure there's NOT going to be a comic book continuation of Mad Men!) The Chosen spell was the Kismet Moment where no other MAJOR spell felt as perfect and As It Should Be to Willow at the time. It felt like the reward/breakthrough after Willow's own S6 hell and S7 frequently unrewarded Doldroms of Reform. (IMO, "ish" not required enough to add.) However, a person can't do that kind of magic all the time, at least responsibly. There's only so many urgent problems that require a magical solution that transforms the world/ for the better. Moreover on a practical level, creating an Army of Slayers is the epic mystical commitment contrasted with going to McCann to deal with an Army of Mad Men and Mad Women is the realworld commitment.
Season 8 shows the ambiguity inherent in that Willow WANTS to do good and has learned serious lessons but she makes new mistakes with her greater power, founded in her flaws. Ironically, this ambiguity is most present in Willow going on cheating walk-abouts with Aluwyn in a very Don Draper sort of way. On one hand, it's wise for Willow to go on soul searching missions because she's trying to figure out how to manage multiple atomic bombs worth of power in her body. She WAS working on that.
On the other hand, Willow's strength had always been her human/friend connections so the walk-abouts may have been with some good intentions, but they're dangerous. Don, on the other hand, has exhausted his walk-about soul searching allowance. I actually do have lots of tolerance for him leaving Dick Whitman-world, the S2 trip to California, and the end of S7 roadtrip. There is a clean-ness to Don just leaving on an obvious soul-searching walk-about instead of him having one foot in his life and another foot in a mistress's apartment or bar. However, after his kids lost Betty, after this trip introduced total finality on the California Drapers as his family, after he sampled therapy, his allotments of walk-abouts are done.
And here's Part II!
IMO, the Coke ad represented the first time that Don was actually IN his ad's head-space to a successful extent. Don discusses that he uses his life to create ads and teaches Peggy, "You are the product. You feeling something. That's what sells." However, the irony is that Don usually twice-removed from his best ads; he observes and longs for the picture in the ads but he's on the outside looking in.
Don used the perfect looking, photogenic Draper family to sell the Kodak wheel- but all with the subtext that Don knows his family and especially, him are not perfect or even whole. Don chained-smoked his way through writing the "Why I'm Quitting Tobacco" NYT letter. Don spent the night rooting for Sonny Liston and disparaging Muhammad Ali- but then, when Ali won, he used that victory to sell Samsonite, comparing Samson suitcases to Ali. He was the divorced dad with limited custody of his kids living in a small Greenwich Village apartment when he produced the "Glo-Coat" ad.
Part of Betty's anger in A Night to Remember is that Don sits and watches how Betty operates as a housewife so he could sell beer using her experience- and then, Don doesn't actually help set up the dinner party for his colleagues but just acts as the anthropologist on Betty's domestic labor (because Betty was forbidden from using her ACTUAL degree in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr). He was orphaned as a little boy after both of his parents died violent, sudden deaths- but he extrapolated to imagine how teenagers could be convinced to not take up smoking if they think about how their parents who nurtured them through childhood, who represent the security and idealism of their childhood could die from lung cancer.
Don comes up with the "Limit your exposure" ad for London Fog IMO somewhat inspired by his good intentions to communicate to Sal that he should be discreet but they will not speak of any bell-hop blow jobs, right when the pin from the flight attendant that he just shtupped in in his over-head compartment heading home to Betty who took him back after Bobbi Barret but on DOUBLE TRIPLE SECRET PROBATION and Sally whose grown into a curious, assertive nine year old who plays with or even breaks Don's suitcase to get closer to her father.
The Jantzen "So well built, we can't even show you the second floor" ad for bikinis is part of Don recapturing his badassery for a bit, and that pre-sages Don's successful second Wall Street Journal interview which demanded Don "show" the reporter "everything" in a poorly built way- i.e. tell a spell-binding corporate machismo "I could either die of boredom or holster up my guns" tale that hits the right border between confiding and total bullshit. "So well built, we can't show you the second floor" is an on-the-nose pun for SCDP lying about their single-floor agency to look more successful. "Within a year, we occupied two floors of the Time Life building." The "Why wait for a man to buy you a fur coat?" ad with Betty Hofstadt as the model drips with irony in how it really didn't operate that way in real life.
Don's ads are contrasted to Peggy's ads. IMO, Peggy's Greatest Hits are much more on the nose for what she's actually living. Peggy physically did not want to be just one of a hundred lipsticks in a box. Peggy has solid reasons why she likes Topaz pantyhose- revolving around their durability. Peggy found that the Relaxicisor gave her an orgasm so that's what she wanted to sell. Then in casting, Peggy stuck to her inner early-seasons "Why can't I be like Joan?" side by casting the beautiful woman for the radio voice and then, Peggy stuck to her also genuinely felt later seasons of, "You don't have to look like Joan to be happy." Peggy likes to feel like she's part of a family without the commitment of having a husband and kids just yet so she wrote exactly that into Burger Chef. And then, you know, sometimes Peggy just thinks it'll be cool if Baked Beans do ballet or you could get ladies to fight over ham in a big public spectacle... Simple as that.
I will say that I find Don's ads more creative and interesting than Peggy's almost all of the time, even though I do totally believe Peggy as commercially successful. Peggy represents the informed, cost-conscious consumer making logical choices about what to purchase- and she plays that as much as she can in her advertising. Don represents the emotional consumer longing for some easy-to-acquire feeling embodied in materialism, but Don actually is that lost, confused consumer merely playing at the authoritative figure who knows what brand of cigarettes or soda will help people. It's literally:
Pete: Don will give authority, you will give emotion.
Peggy: I have authority. And Don has emotion
S6 ironically is when Don's advertising actually more completely embodies his internal life and issues. However, they're all failures of a sort because every ad that Don really puts his stamp on a reflection of his existential angst, depression, and dark moral rot. The funny thing is that I'd argue that there was wit, thought, creativity, facility with language, and memorability to most of Don's S6 ads but they were spectacularly inappropriate. Moral rot makes for great drama and crappy advertising. The "Vacation or Suicide" ad for Sheraton was obviously rejected by the clients and got a, "What? You didn't get your vomiting out of the way at my mother's funeral?" Don playing a low-class used car salesman, like about six months out from being Dick Whitman, to the Jaguar honchos to ensure that he got to keep his national campaign instead of having to down-grade to Herb's strategy which would lower both billings and the prestige of having a car account. Selling a Snowball candy to children with the Devil and "A snowball's chance in hell" just because he's in a "Imma gonna read Dante's Inferno on the beach and glare at Megan" depressed mode. Finally, the Hershey pitch.
The Coke ad is a dream come true for Don in a specific Don-way. He authentically felt a moment of peace and happiness and THAT was the jumping off point for an ad that communicated what Don actually felt then. That's huge and manages to satisfy Don on both important levels that IMO, he'll always need- the existential poetic joy and the calculated, practical business success. He wasn't singing but he was ON a grassy hill top with people of all races and ethnicities here to communicate messages of peace and joy. It's a huge improvement from a number of years where Don derived his inspiration from a longing for what he felt other people had or for the terrible year of the toxic sludge of his actions and self-hate seeped into his pitches and copy and jeopardized his status. Yes, he's selling product. However, he is communicating a real thing feeling.
Moreover, the show expresses through a lot of its characters, but especially Don Draper, that the 1960s were confusing and scary and turbulent. The decade really hurt some and sometimes, the 60s were best represented as a horror movie (The Crash, Mystery Date). But still, the decade should be celebrated as a particularly transformative one for social equality and it should get both a cynical and comforting read that many of the fears that the world and US were ending in the chaos of the '60s were just plain wrong. Embracing psychiatry, expanding rights for Jews, women, blacks, etc., changing technology, stopping the cycle of drafted men heading to high-intensity conflicts based on mass disapproval actually didn't tear American and the capitalism asunder.
Capitalism still thrived through the 1970s and beyond.
IMO, it's downright poetic to see the differences and similarities between Smoke Gets in Your Eyes!Don Draper and Person to Person!Don Draper just as a subject of 1960s history. The first scene and last scene are ultimately Don working on advertising. Don is at a bar in the first ep and he's at a retreat in the last ep- but in both eps, he's actually pretty comforted in his capitalistic way that he has to pay to be at both places because he really gets money changing hands like nothing else. He's working on selling an unhealthy product in both cases. However, it's still progress. I'm drinking a coke as I write this particular paragraph. LOL. Coke is unhealthy but it's not as addictive or as unhealthy as cigarettes and people didn't really know Coca Coca's full health risks in 1970, as opposed to SC's role in actively obfuscating the surgeon general's and AMA's warnings to service Lucky Strike.
In Smoke Gets..., the white bartender gave serious attitude for Don even talking to older black bus boy. In Person to Person, there are people of all races meditating on Big Sur Hilltop. Smoke Gets...'s first scene features the general rules of the show- if you're feeling sad or stressed, you shouldn't talk about it but instead just try to ignore it through daily routine or go to a bar or have sex (if you're a guy). In Person to Person, yes it's an industry, but there's still a development of more wholesome ways to deal with unhappiness instead of just ignoring it or burying it in booze.
I'll come out and say it. I anticipate a happier, more moral ending for Don BECAUSE he apparently went to advertising at McCann. I hear the "This thing you call Enlightenment was invented by guys like me sell Coca Cola" critique and that's partly true. Even as a fan of the soft drink, Coca Cola is unhealthy. Advertising has big-time deception to it.
However, I do take an issue with morally passing judgment on professions key to the modern world whether it's lawyers or businesspeople or major bankers or movie stars or ad men and women. It's honestly so fucking tired how certain professions gets lionized or attacked. As someone who reads circulars to clip coupons and find out about deals, who has an email subscription to a number of companies, who loves television shows paid for by advertising, loves radio stations paid for with ads because I don't have satellite radio in her car, who takes advantage of any time that businesses could remotely subsidize highways or airports with advertising instead of solely relying on individual consumers, who can actually really appreciate product placement done well, I really can't sniff at the profession. Sure, the government should regulate advertising to make sure that claims don't lie or actively dangerous products don't reach children and youth. However as long as we live in a capitalistic system with products, salesmanship is a natural byproduct and actually, it's a pretty benign one at that.
On an individual level, the moral snobbery can just be silly. Peggy didn't compromise herself by moving from secretary to copywriter. Don didn't compromise himself by moving from used car salesman/fur salesman to copywriter just because he represented more industries in the latter. Quaalude induced!Archie Whitman can blab all he wants that he FARMS and Don GROWS BULLSHIT AND HAS HANDS SOFT AS A WOMAN'S but I see no nobility in subsistence level American farming when there are no other options and the farmers were merely trying to ride out the havoc they collectively (and accidentally) wreaked in the central part of the US causing the Dust Bowl. Plus with every passing decade, there were less farmer jobs. Megan moved from copywriting- to acting in a commercial to acting in a soap opera made possible by commercials to just living off of ad money.
The only thing you can do just goes for almost every profession- try to act as decently within it as you can and when you can, take a stand to make things better. In my Roger Sterling essay, I express a thought that it would feel inconsiderate and disingenuous for Don to drop out of McCann immediately after giving the hard sell to Roger and Ted. Maybe I'm fast-forwarding ahead, but, in Don's case, I'm more morally comfortable with him finishing his five year commitment than not partly because he played a major role in placing people at McCann (Peggy, Ted, Meredith, Roger). He pushed for the deal. If he stayed, Meredith would still have her job. Maybe Peggy would be grasping a little less with a powerful ally in her corner. Maybe Jim Hobart's bad mood about Don leaving leaked into his poor treatment of Joan or Joan declined Don's help in the elevator when she thought she could handle it, but would have asked him for help if she struck out with Hobart and was looking at losing half a million bucks.
I think it's a worthwhile debate with merits on both sides. However, IMO, merely selling a company's wares with a pleasing image (absent any egregious falsehoods) on TV and in magazines is far more morally palatable to me than Don making a commitment to Ted that going to McCann is what's best for Creatives like them or Don trying to make a speech to HIS employees and Meredith that this merger was carefully considered and it's the beginning of something...and then, flying the coop in three days in never to return. I have done some soul-searching and some of this is ALL ABOUT ME. I'd rather have commercials than feel jerked around by the Mad Men storyline of "Don Loves Advertising" which came to a head in the first half of S7. LOL.
Still though, getting people to like a particular product feels much smaller despite the numerosity of the world than convincing a not-stable Ted that he shouldn't retire just yet. Broadcasting a pleasing image to sell a product feels much more appropriate than selling merger that you took a lead in orchestrating and not following through. Moreover, I would trust my boss or business partner before a commercial from the TV. There's a necessity for some to play the corporate game, whether you're a tricky attorney or an ad man. However the more intimate you get, the higher the obligation for honesty and concern.
Moreover, like, Joan had a legitimate beef that McCann was an overly hostile environment to her and she couldn't work there anymore. I interpret that as "The sexism of the times, Joan's unusual partner status as someone with a stake in the company but without the creative accomplishments or rolodex of accounts, Joan's expensive contract to finish her five years, McCann's hard-nosed industry greed epitomized in Jim Hobart, and frankly, Joan's personal expectations that she must always be treated like the powerful Queen Bee who snippily lectures others created a perfect storm that forced Joan out of the company."
However, as I stated in my pro-McCann essay, in most ways, they're just a bigger, more organized, more stable, but more rule-heavy and hierarchical version of the different versions of SC. But they're doing the same things. IMO, Creative IS valued at McCann. See the room of Creative Directors, Peggy's and Ted's relative fulfillment there, Jim Hobart's decade long quest to acquire Don even though Don is a headache in terms of organization and obedience, the "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" ad. McCann is not Duck's drunken, "I don't want to indulge Creative. When the economy is good, people will buy things. When it's not, they won't....And that's why corporations will pay us money as an ad agency" or Jim Cutler's "Creative runs secondary to a computer...which any corporation can just buy and place in-house but you know, WE GOT THERE FIRST." McCann's got the stability and money to buy the forward thinking computer, without just accepting a hired hand Creative Director and bulldozing Creative's meeting place. McCann is a proven entity, instead of one man's vision.
Other than Joan's particular plight, a lot of the objection to McCann feels like a resistance to being in an agency where you can't wheel out a secretary's corpse in a slapstick scene, hire a "doctor" to juice people up with speed, drunkenly drive a tractor in the workspace, have a number of fist fights in the office, smoke pot in the middle of the agency, and there's a little less, "I just walked across the hall from my office to another guy's office. Let's celebrate that with a drink."
SC was sexist and created a hostile environment for women throughout its tenure. Joan and Peggy had a special status because they made themselves important over a long period of time. SC worked every account they could get. It was a plot point when Roger refused to work with Honda and he lost or when Don decided that something was just a little too slimey and mean (continuing the relationship with Jaguar, ripping off Pete's Jai Alai friend, turning down all future cigarette business) and Don usually lost those fights in some way. SC had a merger with its rival company just in the interest of getting bigger, and Don got "I'll buy you a drink if you wipe the blood off your mouth" aggressive to get Dow "Vietnam War" Chemical. To paraphrase one of my new favorite shows Silicon Valley (not as good as Mad Men, but does provide wit around the hippest business of 2000s as opposed to the 1960s and the tech world's own sexism, hedonistic excesses, and Tarzan-like business crazy), what is SC but a little version of McCann that wanted to be just as big as McCann when it grows up.
IMO, being in a bigger agency with other Creative Directors could be awesome for Don. If he accepts it with grace, it could be a great way to sate his professional and creative ambitions without the pressure of having to be The Guy at all times. It's not humiliating him i.e. forcing him to start from the bottom at his own company. However, it's not bad for Don to accept the consequences of his actions to become "Well, then you're stuck trying to be a person like the rest of us" in Faye's words with everyone's else's expectations to be sober and professional at all times at work but everyone else's allowances that someone else can take slack. .
Moreover, I do think that Don has room to give Dad-like lectures to Sally of:
Don: So what happened to field hockey?
Sally: If I'm on the yearbook, I won't be a benchwarmer.
Don: Well, can you quit before I buy you cleats and a stick next time?
Sally: I'm going to sell everything.
Don: You know how much Madrid's going to cost?
Sally: I'm not gonna back out of that. I want to go to Spain.
Don: I want to go to Spain.
Like, that's part of parental-stuff. Instructing your kid on the value of a dollar. Sally shouldn't avoid those discussions because her parents are rich. However, you know, between the Cadillac, the million dollar check he wrote to Megan, the millions that he walked away from by ending his contract early, you could buy a lot of hockey cleats and sticks. While Don doesn't have to work at a place that he hates to have room to instruct his kids on the value of money, he doesn't model responsible behavior by leaving the workplace only several days into it i.e. not long enough to confirm that he really hates working there or ahem, he'd really be a benchwarmer with no chance to make the field.
IMO, it indicates a really happy ending very particular to Don Draper that he was able to enforce his very particular and personal view of Coke's next commercial, forged in his Flakey Cross-Country Road Trip. Moreover, since the Hilltop commercial was a ground-breaking commercial in its corporate showcase of hippie culture, its racially integrated cast as the point of the commercial, and its emphasis on a song over a jingle, Don ended up more on a progressive limb at McCann than at his scrappy little rebellious agency (except for maybe the Why I'm Quitting Tobacco letter which Don wrote and submitted on his own to much partner resentment). As it predictably turns out, there IS a way for Don to have his particular version of artistic integrity at McCann much like there IS a way for Peggy to keep at least some of her accounts by standing up for herself.
Plus, I don't want to go OTT with fanfic here. However with so many Creative Directors in a room, I do think that Don didn't pitch Hilltop to his colleagues by steamrolling or commanding. He wasn't the boss of creative anymore. Maybe there's some amusing plot of Don pulling a fast one where he pretends to agree with McCann's pitch for Coke, and then Coca Cola comes in, and Don pitches his Hilltop commercial to the delight of Coca Cola and to the aggravation of every Creative Director at McCann. However, I don't quite buy that after Jim Hobart would likely put Don on DOUBLE TRIPLE SECRET PROBATION. I do think along with the Mother Sun of the meditation, Don tried playing the Sun in Aesop's fable and it worked.
Don: How do you get them to do what you want them to do?
Faye: Aesop has a fable about the wind and the sun. The wind and sun had this competition to see if they could get a traveler's coat off. So, the wind blows fiercely on him, but the traveler just pulls his coat tighter- But the sun shines down on him, warmer and warmer, and the traveler just takes it off.
Don: And the moral is?
Faye: Kindness, gentleness and persuasion win where force fails.
To try to put Don's unusual ending in perspective, Don's ending is a direct opposite of Walter White's ending. Both guys ran away late in their final seasons. However, Breaking Bad's last ep is ALL ABOUT how Walter comes home and ties up basically every loose end and THEN has the dramatic courtesy to die after that work is done and just a second before the credits go black. Don never goes home on screen; he's across the country from everyone else in his final moment. However, BB shows Walt returning in the desperation that he only has a few days left.
With Don, the process of him making peace and the Coca Cola commercial, IMO, emphasizes that the series won't exactly show Don returning home because Don has a lot more to do than just to tie up loose ends before death. Don has an entire life and the start of another decade ahead of him with interesting curve balls ahead. The last three eps bring up sea-changing possibilities that just didn't exist on the antepenultimate ep of the series. How does Don cope with being his kids' sole living parent? How does Don handle being in McCann, "A More Feared Place Than Vietnam in the 1960s Mad Men'verse"? The Coca Cola ad makes Glo-Coat look like something a kindergartener got up on his mom's fridge in terms of industry acclaim. How much does that change things for him or how much actually stays the same? The Esalen Institute was Don's first time experiencing organized, focused psychotherapy- and there's been a storyline from S1 on that Don doesn't trust therapy (and poisons the well on Betty trusting therapy) even though he probably needs it more than most anyone as in:
Jerry (to George): You really need some help. A regular psychiatrist couldn't even help you. You need to go to, like, Vienna or something. You know what I mean? You need to get involved at the university level, like where Freud studied, and have all those people looking at you and checking up on you. That's the kind of help you need. Not the once-a-week for eighty bucks, no. You need a team. A team of psychiatrists working around the clock, thinking about you, having conferences, observing you like the way they did with the elephant man. That's what I'm talking about, because that's the only way you're going to get better.
ANYWAY, I KID. And as it turns out, on first introduction, therapy brought Don an elusive feeling of healing and happiness that he hadn't encountered before. What does that mean? Does Don make that a part of his lifestyle and becomes psychologically better as he works at therapy or does Don forget about it once he's no longer trapped as Esalen and he has all of his Manhattan distractions or does Don go OTT with the indulgency of therapy to epitomize the silliest and most self-centered aspects of the ME! Decade. It really can go all three ways, although I listed all three from Most Likely to Least Likely in my opinion.
Morally speaking, Felina COULD be the ep where Walter White actually reverses his series-long steady course of "Worse, Worser, WORST!" because everyone knew that it was the last few days of Walt's life. He had some statements and actions he needed to get off his chest on his metaphorical death bed. That's not the case with Don. That almost requires a more ambivalent finale, particularly for a character as unpredictable and ambiguous as Don who screws up and succeeds in merely more vivid, epic, dysfunctional versions than your standard 1960s One Percenter Self Made Guy as opposed to an out-and-out murderous, vicious person like Walt or Tony Soprano.
I like to compare and contrast TV characters as much as anyone- but I do think there's a rush to emphasize a Walter White/Tony Soprano/Don Draper trinity of Difficult Men. Not just in finales, but I kind of feel like Walter White is Don's total *opposite*. Don is hedonistic and enjoys sex and drinking and eating in nice restaurants and expensive clothes. Walter is so straight-laced that he's never even sampled his own product, Skylar cheated on him but he never had sex with anyone else even when they were separated, and his wealth just sits there. Don looks like he comes straight out of Mid-Century Movie Star Heroic Lead Casting but he's a huge physical coward, a bunch of people have beaten him successfully, and he's loathe to participate in violence and generally feels guilty when he tilts that way. Walter looks like a dork- but he's physically fearless and unbelievably viciously violent. Walt was raised to be a law-abiding middle class family man until he reacted to a near-death experience by becoming a criminal. Don was raised to be a bottom-feeder pick-pocket who lived as an unwelcome guest- until he reacted to a near-death experience by becoming a pillar of the community family man on top of a hobo hedonist on top of ... his own version of family man. Walt prefers his kids as babies. Don prefers them as interesting mini-adults.
I find Walt's consistent element of malice pretty absent in most of Don's actions which at their worst combine hot-headedness and selfishness but no real malice. (Except for maybe with Ted in S6) Walt is focused as a creature of tremendous self-discipline who found his pleasure at a late age in the meth business with its elements of violence, chemistry, and gaming the system. Don is irresponsible and has no self-discipline, but instead his brand of success does come from his interest in lots of hobbies, people, items, and media. I would argue that Walt pretended like he was a Gale, primarily interested in the chemistry of producing the product, but he kept the same blue meth. The chemistry of production ultimately didn't get him going like the running the actual business i.e. solving and defeating threats and wanting to be in charge of management. Don acts like he's more interested in the business of advertising and wanting to "build something" and making the executive calls (and that's partly true), but the business-management hardly gets him as excited as the production of pitches and ads.
If we're really looking for similarities, Don is way more of a Jack Donaguey or Barney Stinson (without the protective veneer of comedy and you know, WITH BETTER WRITING) or Don bears similarities to Jimmy McNulty and Adelle DeWitt. Or as I argued before, he could be the dark side of CJ Cregg.
However, I made a bunch of comparisons between Don Draper and Willow Rosenberg. I don't know if it's because they're that similar so much as the poetry and complexities in both characters and how they've captured my attention.
However, Don's and Willow's end with them in lotus position feeling a hippie-dippie connectivity of peace and joy in the glowing light of either Mother Sun's Big Sur sunshine or Slayers' Big Momma's big magic while all along inside, they're cooking up their biggest professional achievement yet really hammered home the similar ways that these two get to me. The bliss and peace on the outside belie the hard-nosed effort on the inside and that dichotomy is belied by Willow and Don doing the "turn an illusion into reality" of their worlds in magic and advertising.
Willow and Don were feeling connected in that moment. The connection is inherent in the "perfect harmony" of the commercial or the jubilant "I can feel them, Buffy. All over. Slayers are awakening everywhere." And yet, we don't know exactly how the newly awakened slayers felt in that moment other than generally "empowered from the montage" or what the other meditators were thinking in that moment. However, as much as the connectivity, it's defining that Willow and Don were "making their own fun" in way that the original authors of the spell (Shadowmen) or the original author of the meditation chant couldn't imagine and would definitely hate.
You can't have a 1960s show or a Wiccans without hippie influences and the final image went straight to the heart of Don's and Willow's attraction to and contempt for hippie-type stuff. Willow and Don share a similar temptation to get the peace, free love and connectivity promised by the hippie lifestyle without tamping down their own exceptionalism and right to individualistically pursue everything by committing to being a communitarian hippie. There is an intoxicating element to the hippie movement which promises that if you're just IN THE MOMENT of peace and bliss and free love, than you're OK, it's all good, you can't do wrong. Willow and Don both know how terrible it is to live with no confidence as children, how exhausting it is to perform confidence but how intoxicating it is to play that role, and eventually, how much radioactive confidence that society all but demands from actually turns people off. The confidence of dillenantedom or hippiedom is a philosophy that promises a glow confidence from within if you just FEEEEL.
However, there exists a breaking point. Don WAS feeling the high of weed and the coziness with Midge in The Hobo Code- but eventually, the drugs wore off, the beatniks were getting cabin fever with all the *togetherness* or whatever and starting attacking Don and his profession. Don tried entertaining himself with taking photos that just proved Midge was in love with another guy, and BOOM, Don was done with the proto-hippie stuff. "You can't leave. I can." Willow was feeling the purity of magic to help lost souls- but at some point, you lose patience with coddling poltergeists causing violence. "Transform your pain. Release your pain...and ah, get over it." "The time for touchy feely communication is over!"
There's a promise of righteous empowerment in the Wicca Group in Hush and the "Why would you deny yourself something you want?' Eurotrash wanderer crowd at the end of S2 that could only come from zen, non-maintream dilettantes. However, while the groups promise empowerment, Don and Willow actually really don't feel empowered in that group relative to elsewhere in life. Willow resented being lectured away from spells and treated like the unwanted outsider on the Wicca group when she was used to being in the leadership of the Scoobies about as much as "You should come with us. My dad likes you. You're beautiful and you don't talk very much" is NOT a compliment to someone like Don who is pretty used to titans of industry being very interested in what he has to say.
And yet, the attraction to the zen free love where everything is cool remains. IMO, that represents a lot of Megan's and Tara's purpose in the narrative. Jeez, I wonder if Willow would have drugged-up hallucinations about a totally hippified glowingly pregnant with Willow's mystical child dream!Tara beaming at her and telling her that she could do whatever she wanted. IMO, Willow would have a cousin of that dream, giving her dream Tara more agency and power ala Restless. However, there's a big element to Willow and Don that they never feel at ease, they always feel the need to perform, acquire, accomplish, or deaden senses. This makes the hippie dream all the more attractive and elusive but also frustrating and antithetical to how they approach the world.
The slayer empowerment spell and Coke ad represent Willow's and Don's kismet moment of blending the hippie lessons while doing their more transformative work for war or economics inside and it works because it's a blend. Willow was not satisfied by just being connected to the world in Beneath You. In Chosen, Willow got to bubbly talk about the connectivity that she felt- but with her as the driver of that connectivity because all along, Willow really did need to be the driver to feel the promised bliss of letting go. In Person to Person, Don did feel a general message of wanting to hug and love and he felt the longing of wanting to furnish a home in love (contrasted to a bare apartment) but Don could only communicate the message in an ad because that's his language. As he said, being charged for something relieves him.
I've analogized Willow's and Don's similar large appetites for not just success but consumption of earthly pleasures and control and adventures and knowledge and love in order to fill up something empty inside that really doubts that they're accepted for who they are. Willow usually tries really hard to put a lid on the selfish excesses because of her commitments to her friends and the world; she sometimes fails. Don makes spurts of effort but he lacks Willow's strength and altruism to follow through like her and his adult world is oriented around him getting his way while the Buffyverse (mystically and humanly) doesn't work like that for Willow. I suppose if we're really looking for analogues, Willow = Sally because I think that's Sally's role in the narrative to show how special the intelligence and wanderlust and imagination and pointed wit and rule-breaking and heck, even flaws and temper can be when it's always tempered by a committed conscience but even more, a commitment to family to ensure lasting goodness and security far afield from the temporary high of charming strangers.
Moreover, I think Person to Person brilliantly communicates the importance and unimportance of the Kismet Moment. Person to Person really leaves me with the impression that Don attained a level of peace and sobriety on the Hilltop and in group therapy with Leonard that he never had before. He had inspiration that served as a highlight for his career. After the hell of S6 and frequently unrewarded Doldrums of Reform(ish) of S7, the group therapy and Coke ad finally feels like a great reward and moreover, a guiding post to be good and happy at the same time. It'll be a defining moment going forward and he'll try to reach for that. The indication that Don did go back to advertising and he did it at McCann where he's one of a hundred Creative Directors in a box is practically meaningful to any post-series fanfic.
However, it's just a guiding moment. Inspiration for one of the best commercials in history hardly ever strikes. Your average group therapy participant doesn't have this epic series finale monologue designed to touch Don's poor emotionally and tobacco damaged heart like Leonard. I can say that Big Sur is LITERALLY the most beautiful place that I've ever been to. It doesn't look like that all over and actually, NYC is about to become its grimiest, most dangerous ugly version of itself in the 1970s and 1980s. The break through is great, but it's got an expiration date of assholic flakiness with every passing day that Don doesn't go out of the refrigerator to the actual people in his life.
IMO, Chosen falls down on communicating the ambiguity where Person to Person succeeded. However, Season 8 excellently carries this idea through to the end with Willow's story. (Although, lol, I'm really sure there's NOT going to be a comic book continuation of Mad Men!) The Chosen spell was the Kismet Moment where no other MAJOR spell felt as perfect and As It Should Be to Willow at the time. It felt like the reward/breakthrough after Willow's own S6 hell and S7 frequently unrewarded Doldroms of Reform. (IMO, "ish" not required enough to add.) However, a person can't do that kind of magic all the time, at least responsibly. There's only so many urgent problems that require a magical solution that transforms the world/ for the better. Moreover on a practical level, creating an Army of Slayers is the epic mystical commitment contrasted with going to McCann to deal with an Army of Mad Men and Mad Women is the realworld commitment.
Season 8 shows the ambiguity inherent in that Willow WANTS to do good and has learned serious lessons but she makes new mistakes with her greater power, founded in her flaws. Ironically, this ambiguity is most present in Willow going on cheating walk-abouts with Aluwyn in a very Don Draper sort of way. On one hand, it's wise for Willow to go on soul searching missions because she's trying to figure out how to manage multiple atomic bombs worth of power in her body. She WAS working on that.
On the other hand, Willow's strength had always been her human/friend connections so the walk-abouts may have been with some good intentions, but they're dangerous. Don, on the other hand, has exhausted his walk-about soul searching allowance. I actually do have lots of tolerance for him leaving Dick Whitman-world, the S2 trip to California, and the end of S7 roadtrip. There is a clean-ness to Don just leaving on an obvious soul-searching walk-about instead of him having one foot in his life and another foot in a mistress's apartment or bar. However, after his kids lost Betty, after this trip introduced total finality on the California Drapers as his family, after he sampled therapy, his allotments of walk-abouts are done.