Mad Men – The Good News
If Joan Holloway Harris could have seen what’s happened to Don Draper after building a life based on what he thought was expected of him, completely ignoring the many incompatibilities and red flags along the way, perhaps she’d be less anxious to get pregnant (for what we now know would be the third time). “The Good News” illustrated three different positions along the same trajectory: Don goes to California to try to recover from his disintegrating life, only to learn that it’s possible for life to break down even further, Lane Pryce is just starting to cope with a broken marriage, and Joan is doing her best to create a life based on the same model that these two men have so aptly demonstrated.
I didn't realize until making this image, but that chandelier is trying its best to stab Joan's husband
Lane’s failed marriage is useful as a foil for Don’s single man debauchery, but Joan is a more productive comparison for what happened between Betty and Don. Her husband is gone at all hours, he’s joined the army (like both Dick and Don), he treats his wife like a child (when he’s not raping her), and Joan clings to an image of marriage that relies on Hawaiian themed dinners and heating up your husband’s leftovers. Out in California, young people are having sit-ins at Berkeley, smoking grass and discussing politics, but Joan’s image of success is circa 1958, and so it’s almost eerily out-of-place to watch her trying to become a successful working woman while she’s still caught on an outdated image of herself at home. This is where Don has been for the past several seasons – he dates Midge and goes to performance art shows in the Village, and then goes home to his Coca-Cola ad wife. If Joan really understood where Don’s decisions have landed him, I wonder if she’d be able to make another choice?
As for Don, Anna Draper’s impending death seems to leave two paths open to him. Alan Sepinwall commented in his post that Anna is the last person tying Don to Dick Whitman, who can look at him and say, “I know everything about you, and I still love you.” Because of this, he says, Anna’s death will forever bury Dick Whitman, and that whole early part of Don’s life will be gone forever. I suppose that’s possible, but it seems so unlikely based on Don’s track record. Every attempt to squash his former life has led to its inevitable and ever-more-potent reoccurrence. Further, Don’s relationship with Anna may be the last remaining tie to Dick Whitman, but that means she’s also the last remaining witness of Don Draper as a persona instead of a person. When she dies, the last barrier between Don Draper as an act and Don Draper as a man will fall away, and Don will be the person he has made himself into. Even though Betty and Bert Cooper may know about his former life, it’s a very different thing to see it, and unless Betty is somehow able to use Don’s lie in a custody battle, every Dick Whitman-related conflict in Don’s life will totally dissolve.
So these seem to be the two options – Dick Whitman dies, and we discover that he was the only thing holding Don Draper together, or Dick Whitman dies, and Don is finally free to make himself something new. Maybe I’m too hopeful, but if I am, it’s because the episode invites us to be optimistic. This is the first time Mad Man has indulged in a signal of renewal as blatant as the New Year, or telegraphed its shifting times as obviously as “Gentlemen, shall we begin 1965?” and it’s hard not to take that as invitation to look forward. Things may still be bad in New York, but somewhere out there in California, Stephanie’s dancing to the Beatles and seeing the future.
