Feb 242009
We’ve discussed this quote before: BCD (Bowl-cut Dick) says to the hobo, “Ain’t you heard? I’m a whore child.”
BCD thought the hobo had heard, because everyone had heard. Everyone in his small farming community knew everyone else’s business. Knew that BCD was a whore child. Knew everything.
Keeping secrets turned dark for Don Draper, but at first, it must have seemed glorious. It must have seemed like the coolest game he ever played. No one knew his business unless he told them. Like a magic trick.
Secrecy is Don’s magic trick. How was he to know it would turn on him, like the magic brooms in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice?
13 Responses to “Ain't you heard?”
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After a crabbed childhood in a busybody small town where Dick’s personhood was confined to a slur, Don revels in the anonymous glamor of a big city where he can live whatever life he imagines for himself.
It’s also no coincidence that Don excells at advertising, a business built on imagination, where imagination pays off big.
Don is as much a creation of his own imagination, as any of his campaigns.
It’s the old cliche of sales, Don is selling himself as much as any product.
Unfortunately, Don is a beautifully wrapped package of his own creation, hiding the secrets and shame of Dick.
"You haven't thought this through."
That statement can only be made by someone who has very much thought it through. For a long time, chronically, in every which way.
The blackmail scene between Pete and Don Draper was a glorious display of "dive in and swim according to your instincts, and hope you make it," and one of the most fascinating facets of the Don Draper character.
In a very short time, we went from panicked, heaving shoulder-blades to a driven, cockey-legged plank walk with Pete. He shredded the poor guy!
Don Draper's poverty-honed sensibilities, coupled with an acute intelligence, turned that potential A-bomb right around.
I'll have to remember that!
The other really fun part is when DD DOESN'T get it right.
That's the part where his eyebrows meet the back of his scalp? You know that look?
Well, the brooms do look phallic…
“You haven’t thought this through.â€
That statement can only be made by someone who has very much thought it through. For a long time, chronically, in every which way.
I don't buy it. The line applied ironically to Don (about his entire fake existence) as much as it did to Pete at that moment.
Season 1 showed us how precariously Don's existence remains at every moment, from having to hide from his brother on the train delivering his "corpse" post-Korea to the way he pitches a fit, trying to get Rachel to flee with him when Pete's on to him.
One of the most telling moments is the way he practically shits himself when bothered on the work train, "Dick? Dick Whitman?" His existence is so fragile that being reminded of who he is in a place where it doesn't matter by someone he'll never see again lingers with him all the way to work.
His life is a haunted by a perpetual Damocles's Sword and he knows it.
I'm with Tom on this. I think we've seen over and over again that Don doesn't really think things through. When he says that to Pete, he says it with, not just power, but also recognition. He knows an ill-made plan because he's lived them so long. From having not thought the real Don Draper had family, to having not anticipated the need to change tobacco advertising, to having nothing at all in the "It's Toasted" meeting, Don survives, not by thinking things through, but by thinking on his feet.
Ooh, nice metaphor, Deborah.
@judybrown: "It’s the old cliche of sales, Don is selling himself as much as any product."
Exactly. Just as he tells Peggy during the airline campaign pitch, "You are the product." He leads people to believe what he wants them to about himself in the same way he does with cigarettes or pantyhose or steel. All of his product pitches are stories, and they're almost as elaborate as the story Dick Whitman has made up about a man called Don Draper.
Yep. Don says, “You haven’t thought this through†in no small part because he just heard it from Rachel in response to his desperate escape proposal. And Rachel was as correct about Don as Don was about Pete.
That being said, by the time Don confronted Pete, he had thought it through a bit. He was made to realize fleeing was not practical. His encounter with a crying Peggy in his office reminds him how much he dislikes the arrogant, privilege-fueled behavior of Pete. The final part, iirc, is that it re-occurs to him that Pete's behavior was likely to make him the loser in an exercise of raw office politics. Don was not sure he would win in Cooper's office (hence the nervous cigarette smoking there), but had at least realized this was his best option.
Also, in the larger sense, I'm pretty sure I could buy a very expensive meal if I had a dollar for every time Don has said he doesn't think about things and advises others to do likewise.
These are all great comments, and I think the one who is actually closest to what my point was is Deborah. When I say “thought it through,” I am not referring to the practice of premeditated calculation which evolves into wisdom.
I’m talking about the instincts which most people living a normal life don’t need to develop.
What I am saying is that watching this guy improbably pulling out of disaster after disaster, at the last minute, is possibly one of the most interesting aspects of this series.
That’s all. No need to overthink it, it’s just an opinion. And I didn’t see your former reference to this aspect until after I posted. I’m new, remember?
Don's past also explains why he covered for Peggy. He knows what it's like to have your life defined by one thing, and he didn't want to inflict that on her. I realize that Dick didn't chose who his parents were and Peggy did have a choice in who she had sex with. However, Don sees himself in Peggy. I agree with previous posters on other topics who suspected that Don floated the fat farm story as a cover.
Ret, I think you've got a good point. Why should Peggy be defined by pregnancy? Why should Don be defined by desertion?
I realize that Dick didn’t chose who his parents were and Peggy did have a choice in who she had sex with.>>
However, Peggy had no choice in her pregnancy, which is the shameful secret she's had to hide. An affair at the office, not as much shame would be attached, although that is also a secret.
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Ah, but in the early '60s Peggy would be defined by her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, if it became known.
Don wouldn't be defined by desertion (after all, his mother died) but by his mother's shameful profession, that of prostitute.
Each of which would be so shameful in the 1950s and early '60s as to make them practically pariahs.