(S P O I L E R S)
In
which every day I make pictures where people appear to be in love. I know what it looks like.
“Freddie: Donald walked around the
village three times and then set it on fire.”
“Abigail Whitman: Dick Whitman, stop
digging holes.”
(If you’re interested in making
this a potentially pleasing interactive experience, click on the link above and
listen to Miles Davis’s version of the Concierto
De Aranjuez while you read this essay.
The beginning of the piece is played by Miles buff Midge when Don first
arrives at her apartment. It’s a great
theme song for this episode: as original composer Joaquin Rodrigo noted, the
first section is intended to transport the listener to another time and place,
while the second section was his way of remembering he and his wife’s honeymoon and
the miscarriage that led to the loss of their first child. And yes, that info is lifted from the
Wikipedia page. So laugh it up former
students.)
By this point of my Sophomore
English curriculum, we had finished The
Great Gatsby and were waist deep in the big muddy of Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. Most people I talk to have never read this
book, although some have read O’Brien’s Vietnam short story collection The Things They Carried. And that’s a shame, because In the Lake of the Woods is a phenomenal
examination of the haunting and cyclical nature of the past, and of the need
for reckonings on a personal and national level, all wrapped up in the guise of
a mystery about a missing woman. It was
both one of the most demanding and rewarding books that I taught in my ten year
teaching career, perhaps the greatest example of my Form=Content stalking horse
that I unloosed on the students. There’s
no real objective indicator of the truth, only various and disparate voices
telling their version of the tale of Vietnam veteran John Wade and his wife Kathy,
their failed run for a Minnesota Senate seat, and the past that they both try
to flee but which ultimately annihilates the fragile construct of their lives. It’s about how Vietnam was just another
example of man’s inability to learn from the past. It’s about fathers and sons, how a lonely boy,
desperate for the love of a tortured, alcoholic father, invents the alternate
persona of the Sorcerer to give him some power over his life…and how that
persona becomes an escape hatch into a mental house of mirrors that delivers
the boy from trauma after trauma, yet ultimately entraps him inside its
furthest depths, frightened, confused, lost, alone.
So yeah, I’m guessing you can see
the strong connections it has with Mad
Men.
Of course, memory and the past
were the twin wraiths that haunted most of this second trimester unit. We focused on three alpha males who are the
very embodiment of the classic American Dream, three men who come from nothing
and through sheer force of will create idealized versions of themselves, alter
egos which allow them to conquer the world…and lose their souls. (For me, one of the key lines in Gatsby comes Nick says “So he invented
just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to
invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” Think about all the complex implications
contained in that one beautiful sentence, and how they apply to these three
men.) And three men who must come to
terms with their troubled pasts if they have any hope of remaining human.
I failed to mention this in the “Ladies
Room” essay, but one of my favorite passages in that Sophomore English course,
and one that applies to Mad Men in
spades, came from the conclusion of The
Bell Jar. In that final scene of the
book, as Esther Greenwood prepares for the interview that might lead to her
release from the hospital she muses:
“We'll act as if all this were a bad
dream."
A
bad dream.
To
the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself
is the bad dream.
A
bad dream.
I
remembered everything.
I
remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco's
diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and
the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty
pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a
gray skull.
Maybe
forgetfulness, like a kind snow, would numb and cover them.
But
they were part of me. They were my landscape.”
Of all the characters we covered
that year, all the ones searching for some greater truth in life, Esther’s
realization is probably the most powerful moment that any of them have. And it’s a sentiment that so many of the
characters in Mad Men struggle to
come to terms with.
“The Hobo Code” is the episode
where, for the first time, we see Don try to make amends with his past,
fleeting as this attempt might be. Of course,
it takes him getting high with Midge’s friends to loosen up his psyche enough
to make this journey. One of the show’s
strengths is how it usually strikes a balance between ’60s cultural references
as indicators of passing time and key plot devices. Don’s drug experience in the village is a
somewhat radical notion for a guy like him, but it’s also a harbinger of the
slowly encroaching drug scene that would soon hit the mainstream.
It’s during the flashback to his
childhood (spurred by Don’s reflection in the bathroom mirror, not the last
time in the show’s run that literally facing himself will lead to revelation)
that we finally see as solid of an origin story for our conflicted protagonist
as we’re likely to get (for now.) In it,
we see how Don Draper is an amalgam of three people: Archie Whitman, the hobo,
and young Dick himself. Joseph Culp (the
son of real life ‘60s icon of cool Robert) is such a perfect choice to play
Dick’s father. His imposing physicality,
icy cruelty, and naked self-interest are all traits that young Dick would later
adopt (along with his hairstyle and cigarette smoking technique) to create the
armor of Don Draper. But underneath that
armor is the hobo’s wanderlust that motivates so much of Don’s itinerant
ways. And the fear of young Dick, the scars
of being a dead prostitute’s child in an emotionally distant family still felt
in the Don of 1960. When the hobo
recounts how a wife, kids, and mortgage left him frustrated and sleepless,
until the night that death came to find him and drove him away from the safe
life, it informs so much of what motivates the Don that we’ve come to know (and
calls back to the pilot’s exploration of the Freudian death wish.)
But Don isn’t the only character
in “The Hobo Code” who’s trying to come to terms with their past. And their place in life. Matt Weiner could’ve named this episode “Babylon
Revisited” (yeah, I couldn’t resist), for even though Rachel Menken is absent
from the proceedings, her insights into the dual meaning of “utopia” from
Episode 6 (the good place and the place that cannot be) apply to all of the
main storylines here.
Which is a great jumping off
point for the romance between Pete and Peggy, that biggest of headscratchers
for many viewers. My students were
always perplexed and repulsed by what good girl Peggy sees in weaselly Pete
(although as the years progressed and more of them didn’t like Peggy either,
they just didn’t care as much.) So when
the couple once again get it on at the outset of this episode (to the expertly
timed comic bemusement of the janitor), they didn’t quite know what to
think. Matt Weiner has offered the
easiest motive for the dynamic that exists between these two: each sees the
other as the only one they can relate to in the office. Both are younger employees with good ideas
who are too often condescended to by their older superiors. In Pete, Peggy sees someone who’s dashing in
his own way (yeah, Pete haters, toss your tomatoes at me now), but also a
covertly tender and vulnerable person.
And in Peggy, Pete sees a genuine person, someone who loves him for who
he is, not for the rarified social status from which he comes. In the aftermath of their office tryst, Pete
delivers a touching monologue to Peggy, in which he expresses his frustrations
with the crushing expectations that led him to his marriage, and how despite
his best attempts Trudy seems like a stranger to him. It’s a great, humanizing character moment,
and Vincent Kartheiser really nails it.
And hey, in the end, love is strange sometimes; lasting relationships
are often formed by people who logically don’t make sense together.
(A tip of the hat to “Hobo Code”
director/stalwart tv cinematographer Phil Abraham and his episode DP Steve
Mason for how they assemble this sequence.
Pete is introduced in closeup as he gazes out the window, and when he
swings his chair around to greet Peggy, his framed phot of Trudy is revealed in
the mid-ground of the shot. Cut to the
reverse shot and Pete’s rugby trophy is featured behind him. They end up serving as symbols of his
conflicting impulses, but also reminders of his legacy. And when Pete and Peggy have their
post-coital talk, the infamous hunting rifle from “Red in the Face” is
prominently featured leaning against the wall to the left of the frame, a
clever indicator of Pete’s reinforced masculinity.)
But try as he might, Pete can’t
escape the shackles of his past that easily.
When Peggy asks him to dance at P.J. Clarke’s late in the episode, he
icily dismisses her with “I don’t like you like this.” It’s a rebuke with many implications, and as
crushing as it is for Peggy, it’s also a very sad moment for Pete. Like Don, he’s lost in the nether regions
between what he wants and what he’s supposed to want.
And speaking of characters stuck
between desire and expected desire, there’s Sal Romano. There are fairly strong implications in the
pilot episode that Sal is gay, but it’s only in this episode that his taboo leanings
are finally confirmed during his meeting with Belle Jolie rep. Elliot. Sal’s a fairly interesting character, in that
most of his overall arc is defined by his suppressed homosexuality, and the
consequences that its revelation holds.
Modern viewers might look at Bryan Batt’s performance and see the overt
femininity (and wonder how no one at Sterling Cooper sees it), but we’re also
dealing with an era not that far removed from metrosexual leading men like Cary
Grant…and closeted gay leading men like Rock Hudson. In a show with such a large ensemble cast, it’s
difficult to fully develop every character, so Sal invariably suffers a bit in
this department. But all credit to Batt
for creating such a sympathetic, conflicted, fully formed person in the limited
screen time he’s given.
In the grand scheme of utopian
desires, we ultimately land back on Don and his doomed relationship with Midge. It’s interesting to view his progression in
this episode through the lens of Bert Cooper’s Ayn Rand fixation. He rewards Don with a check for $2,500,
commendation for their purported shared sense of complete self-interest and
lack of sentimentality for those who depend on their hard work. Jon Hamm sells the subtle pangs of guilt that
flash across Don’s face as Cooper utters these words, but he also rushes out to
indulge these selfish tendencies by taking Midge on an impromptu trip to
Paris. He wants to reinforce the power
of his base desires, but he’s still haunted by the past that created these
desires. When Midge refuses to go with
him, and he signs away his bonus check to her (“Buy yourself a car”), it’s the
second time this season that he’s tried to buy another character’s happiness on
his way out the door. Chase after a life
with her he might, but it’s here that he finally comes to terms with the fact
that they’ll never exist in the same world.
And when he returns home, the Randian superman image falls apart, as he
promises Bobby that he’ll never lie to him.
(Despite Don’s attempts to redeem himself throughout the series by
connection with Bobby, it’s with conflicted daughter Sally that he forms his
most lasting bond. Now, this could be
because Kiernan Shipka has played Sally throughout, while Bobby has been
portrayed by four different actors. But
that’s another discussion.)
It’s one of the fleeting moments
during this season when we see the real Dick Whitman. But, of course, the lies wouldn’t stop there. His moment with Bobby is touching, but the
final shot of the episode tells the greater story. Once again, we see Don from the rear, this
time as he enters his office. The sounds
of the office become deafening, and we finish with a close up of the name “Donald
Draper” on his closed office door, as much the mark of a dishonest man as the
hobo’s scrawl on Archie Whitman’s front gate.
To finish, a few loose ends:
*With the exception of a brief
cameo in Season 4, this is the last that we’ll see of the lovely, vivacious
Rosemarie DeWitt as Midge. As I noted in
one of the first episodes, she’s such a great minor character, and it’s sad
that her time on the show was so limited.
*Elliot’s reference, early in the
episode, to meeting Robert Mitchum is no throwaway line. Legendary tough guy Mitchum (a spiritual
forefather of Don Draper) rode the rails as a drifter and hobo in his younger
years. During that time, he acquired a
fondness for marijuana, which led to a famous bust at the height of his fame.
*Best reaction of the
episode? Ken Cosgrove’s befuddled double
take at Don’s “I’m not here to tell you about Jesus” line in the Belle Jolie
meeting.
*”Ken, you will realize in your private
life that at a certain point seduction is over and force is actually being
requested.” (Don)
*”We’re going to get high and
listen to Miles.” (Roy, in a line reading that always gets me for how comically
pretentious it makes him sound. Kudos to
Ian Bohen for making Roy just a bit of a jackass.)
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