Why does Don come back?
In the Mountain King we saw him in the early romance stage, in the lavender haze, all a-flutter. We also saw him really look at his role in taking down his current life, a brick at a time. But what we didn’t see was him think of Betty, who Betty is now, and realize he was in love with her.
Did we?
Did I miss it?
I believe Don and Betty have love for each other. I always have. And I think his love for Betty was a factor in his going home. But there was also… he needed to go home. He swung free, and it didn’t ease the pain. He looked at Joy, and he didn’t want that. He looked at Roger, and he didn’t want that. Home was the only answer that he could start to feel good about. I don’t think there was ever really a choice for him but to want to go back. Not really.
So he showed up at the stable. Which didn’t work.
And then he wrote the letter.
Although really what worked was what he’d done a few episodes back; he knocked her up.
22 Responses to “The Grand Gesture”
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(Long time lurker, first time poster)
While you're right that the pregnancy had a lot to do with Betty taking Don back, I always got the impression that his letter was what sealed the deal. He comes far closer to apologizing for his affair in the letter than he does at the stable, and it seems like its the first time he communicates with her in a truly honest fashion in a long long time.
Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but those are my two cents.
I think he was just going back to the comforts of home, more than anything. It was what he knew, what he was good at, even if he’d temporarily screwed it up. I don’t know about the love part—see, I’ve always thought that he didn’t truly love Betty. The last scene with Rachel in the pilot convinced me upon second (and third and fourth and fifth…) viewing that he seemed to marry her just out of a need to put his life in order, make it the way it should be according to everyone else. Get married, have kids, the whole shebang. It never occured to me that they could’ve actually been in love, until The Mountain King. That completely confused me, to be honest. Anna says that since he loves her, he doesn’t have to tell her everything. I suppose that just goes completely against my own ideals of love—that you should know each other completely and still manage to love what’s there—so it always seemed false to me. Don needed to go back to his life with Betty, but I don’t see how it was for love. Sure, he says he loves her, and it sounds genuine, but I think he just needs to get back home at this point.
I agree with Estellia, that the letter was what ultimately let him in. Betty was going to eventually make up with him, but she was holding out for a decent apology, and that letter certainly did the trick.
Well the letter really was the grand gesture.
And welcome, Estellia–'bout time you spoke up ; )
I think one of the fundamental points in the conlfict, and which Don doesn't really address until the scene at the stable, is that Betty just wants him to own up to the dishonesty. She's never threatened divorce, she's never said she's not in love with him. She feels entitled to validation.
When he gives the speech about disrespecting her, her response is telling: "It's good to know I'm not crazy." Again, validation.
Although she's not about to let him off the hook, she's getting closer … the letter, and then the pregnancy make it official, but she was going in that direction once he acknowedged his lies.
But it's also important that because she hadn't really taken him back when she learned about the pregnancy, the reconciliation is still a bit coerced. He didn't fully cop to everything, and she didn't fully forgive him. I'm sure Mr. Weiner will have fun exploring how that affects everything going forward.
I dunno; maybe I'm reading more into it than was there, but that last scene at the kitchen table reeked of love to me. Not the "lavender haze" phase of love, but the more mature variety where you acknowledge that this person really is your other half – that he or she is the person you want to be with when the world's about to end.
You choked me up.
That's 'cause you're so happy I finally wrote something.
I just cried those happy tears. Roberta and Deb, back at it again!
My $.02:
From the distance of the West Coast, Don knows what he has done. All of it. The problem is that he's not Freddy: part of him is always on high alert, aware of exactly how others perceive him.
Even in comfort, sitting on the porch with Anna, he could see it: the wreckage of his home after Betty took it apart, looking for evidence of what she knew was true. The look on Rachel's face when she realized she had to greet him, that night of "not feeling a thing" with Bobbie". The look on his own face in the bathroom mirror after Sally decided to leave the room.
Don also knows what he still has to do. Being an adult in the world — even a world you more or less made up — means seeing things through. You can't just start things and start things and start things, like Roger. The temptation to do this is great: Don wanted to stay out West, to restore old cars, to be the original Mr. Draper again. But he knew the universal truth of adulthood: eventually you have to face the consequences of what you've done.
Betty is not only the way back in to Don's life: she is his wife. She's the mother of his (current and future) children. She is his home. That last scene of the season, at the kitchen table, indicates that they're even more: truly partners, each the first and last one the other has to turn to in times of crisis.
That letter Don wrote to Betty was not just necessary, it was true. It was Don acknowledging her value — her integrity — and placing her, perhaps for the first time in their lives, above himself.
A grand gesture, yes. But surprisingly simple too.
I agree with Roberta, by the way: Don loves Betty. It is, ironically, loving Betty that has allowed him to love different kinds of women. Having extended himself as far as he can with Betty, he allows the women themselves to extend him farther; by being strong, self-possessed, and iconoclastic. Rachel and Midge are smart, but so is Betty; Bryn Mawr is not for dummies.
The thing that seals it for me (and for Roberta too, I think) is the opening of 5G; they are relaxed and easy together, they laugh and fit and connect.
We should not discount that Don's psychology is that of Dick Whitman. It probably profoundly affects his views on the importance of building and maintaining a stable home life (even as it also taught him awful lessons about sex, love, honesty, etc.). The turning point in "The Jet Set" is when he sees the estranged husband show up with his son. It seems quite likely to me that Don was/is motivated as much or more by what a split was doing (and would do) to Sally and Bobby as his feelings for Betty.
I agree with Karl, Don's motivation is his kids. He used to love Betty (see flashback) but that was the fantasy. The real day-to-day Betty doesn't really do it for him anymore, but neither does chasing after the fantasy. Let's face it, Betty hasn't exactly made herself very attractive to Don recently, from his perspective. She's been stubbornly refusing to let Don lie to her. Don lives his lies, so this can't be comfortable.
Remember that he writes the letter while looking at his children.
I saw nothing but resignation on both their parts in that final scene when Betty tells Don about the pregnancy. I wasn't even sure whether Betty was going to tell him about the pregnancy or the affair until she did it, and perhaps she didn't know either. That little hand holding was so tentative, so full of the hurt and disappointment of the last year. I guess a lot of people are seeing love there, maybe I'm just more cynical than many of you, but it didn't feel that way to me at all. Perhaps they can get back to the way they used to feel about each other, but they are a looooong long way from it.
So now, Betty & Don are going to be living a newer version of the lie, (that they're still a happy family, still in love) but at least they're constructing the fantasy together. I guess that's a step up.
It's strange that Don loves these progressive women but anytime Betty was assertive or forceful, he shot her down. When she confronts him or when she wore the bikini, he had to humiliate her or cut her down. If Betty was the child, then Don sometimes took on the abusive parent role a little too willingly. These two will always be dysfunctional because they're both running from their own demons that neither one is privy to.
But Betty IS progressive.
She took his house, his kids … then barred the door. She threw him out on the basis of no evidence (using against Don the same gut instinct that had drawn him to Rachel and Midge: this feels right). Betty became her own gatekeeper, starting — almost without really meaning to — a kind of life of her own, without the man she loved, the man who knew her so well.
And the thing is, Don respected Betty's rules. No shower in this house. We were just pretending. He didn't really put up a fight: he left. He recognized her strength as that of an equal.
For me, the Don-misses-Betty moment was the time he sees the Betty mirage at that bar in "The Jet Set". That woman isn't Betty (but then is — and then isn't again — we wonder, too) … but Don is actually SEEING his wife. It's as if a part of him he can't feel yet is missing her, before the rest of the body wakes up to discover what he has lost.
That, for me, was an episode that touched not just the mystery of long marriage, but trauma as well. Whom do I need? What do I feel? What would make this feel better? How far do I have to go to feel, period?
Home. Don chose home. It was a surprise to me at first, but Betty is home to Don: the idea, the fact, the responsibility, the children, the love … and the price to pay.
Damn, girl. Betty Draper, you are more than a wife: you're a world.
Maybe I'm just really dense, but I do not see all this supposed great love for Betty. I always saw it as him missing home, the idea of the loving wife and children waiting for him there. The reminders of Betty were just reminders of home–he didn't seem to reserve a particular affection for her, just the comforts of their life together. I don't know, maybe it's the lasting effect of having seen season 1 over and over and season 2 only once or twice. And I agree with those who said it's his kids that were more of a motivation than anything–over and over, he went back to them, tried to make up for his faults, promised Bobby he'd never lie to him, etc.
Don certainly bristles at the "L" word. Remember when the car sales man asked "Afraid you'll fall in love?" Don fled like a guilty thing. I still wonder what took him from the lavender haze to "you're born alone, and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on you so you don't forget." That picture of Don Draper is still etched in my mind — even after season 2 and all his supposed remorse and homesickness.
What kind of man with young children would make a remark about there not being a tomorrow. Aren't his children his tomorrow? "I'm living like there's no tomorrow, because there isn't one." Next scene he's at home, gazing lovingly at his kids. Flash forward a few months, and he's pleading Midge to go to Paris with him, then a few months after that, he wants to run away with Rachel forever. Children? So the fuck what. I'll pay for them — they'll be provided for.
I don't know if I buy anything that Don says. Either he doesn't want to be without all "this" or "he's living like there's no tomorrow because there isn't one." Why does he keep going there and back again, there and back? I wish he'd make up his mind.
Hull – You bring up the eternal question, what is happiness? For Don, neither family life or the Jet Set life seem to satisfy him. For many in a committed relationship, there comes a time when a person flirts with Walter Mitty-esque fantasies. Wouldn't it be great if . . . or I wonder what it would be like to . . . Conversely, those that are single often long for the comfort of a stable relationship.
At first I thought Don's return was a bit of a false note. Yet, his yo-yoing is an uniquely human trait. We don't know what the hell we want.
Nearly every character in this show longs for what he/she doesn't have. Run down the list – Betsy, Joan, Roger, Sal, et. al. Peggy is the only character who has defined herself by her own terms and is pursuing her self- (as opposed to societal) happiness. Even that comes at a price, as we are reminded in her final scene with Pete.
My hope for Dick Whitman is that he has learned that he will be miserable without Sally and Bobby. I am still pissed at him for abandoning Adam twice – when he assumed Don's identity and when Adam reappears in his life eight years later. I hold Dick/Don directly responsible for Adam's suicide and there's karmic payback that's due for this. Maybe the one thing he learned from this is that he couldn't just run away anymore without consequences.
Maybe the Rolling Stones were right, "You can't always get what you want. But you find sometimes, you get what you need."
I'm hesitant to judge Don's behavior in season 2 based on his his "living like there's no tomorrow" speech, because I think that's an attitude he's largely moved beyond by the end of season 1. He spent the first season just running from from love and family in the hopes of escaping the pain of his past, but in his "Carousel" presentation he realized that what he was really after was not to escape the past but to redeem it — to embrace the domestic sphere, to give his kids the idealized childhood he had never had and himself the perfect home he had always yearned for. "It's not a spaceship; it's a time machine."
So when Don left Betty and went to L.A., I don't think it was because he didn't love her or want the life she offered; I think it's because he despaired of that life ever working out for him. Because what he was after was the perfect fantasy, not the hard reality. I think he resented Betty for interrupting that fantasy, for insisting that they talk openly about difficult, unpleasant things like his affairs, instead of just navigating around them in an effort to preserve the illusion of domestic perfection. (As she had in season 1, when she revealed her knowledge of his affairs *through a third party*, giving him the chance to make amends without actually having to confess or apologize.)
The reality he confronts in "The Jet Set" is that his illusion is untenable. Reality is always going to intrude. That's the subtext of the MIRV presentation: It's another slide show, like his "Carousel" speech, but this time the message is "It's not a spaceship; it's *total nuclear destruction*." Don's life doesn't go around and back again like a carousel, returning him to everything he loves; it goes around and back again like a missile, his dark past thundering back to earth to *destroy* everything he loves.
And that's what the jet-setters represent too — his hobo past come back to destroy him. It's not a coincidence that at least one of the cities they mention in their word game is also visible on the MIRV map of nuclear destruction. The jet-setters are like a the bomb that goes off in one city after another, leaving nothing but chaos behind. And that's what Don fears he is too — he fears that he's Joy's brother, turning his son into another neglected whore-child, and that he's Joy's father, turning his daughter into another value-challenged whore.
So, again, when he runs off to be with Anna, I don't think it's because he doesn't love Betty or his family. I think it's because he believes they'll be better off without him. He can't protect them from the darkness of his past. It looms over them like the threat of nuclear destruction as long as he is around.
And what Don finally realizes in "The Mountain King" is that this darkness isn't actually the end of the world. He thinks back to his history with Anna — the polio-stricken woman who is damaged goods but *still okay*, the woman who broke apart his illusion of being Don Draper, only to help rebuild it stronger than ever. (Just like the reconditioned hot-rods at which he marvels.) That's the essence of her tarot reading, too:
"It's the end of the world!"
"It's the *resurrection*!"
Where he sees only destruction, she sees the promise of something better on the other side.
And that, I think, is why he returns to his family. Not because he's figured out how to love or care about them — because he's done both all along — but because he's realized that, no, he can't have the perfect, idealized family, but *that's okay*. They'll have problems — he'll *cause* some of those problems — but the problems won't destroy them. And they'll emerge stronger than ever because they had the courage to face them.
Which is why it's so meaningful that he returns home not to the fantasy world he imagined at the end of "The Carousel" — children cheering, wife overjoyed — but to a reluctant Betty and an unplanned pregnancy. It's not the perfect life he'd hoped for, but now, finally, he's willing to embrace it anyway.
I have always thought Don loved Betty, and MW even said so on one of the first season commentaries.
I just go back to Betty realizing that the problem lies in Don. That's not to say she's perfect, or doesn't share in the faults — fault lines, really — in the marriage, but the biggest issue is that Don is missing something, damaged in some way that is not conducive to marital bliss.
Don is a dreamer. A hobo at heart. He wants to settle down, but always thinks there's something better over the hill. It's not that he doesn't like where he is, or what it has, but he won't commit to it — which helps with the Duck Phillips of the world. It's not that he doesn't love Betty, but every woman is another mystery to explore.
Love can't fix people. I know this, because Oprah told me. Don's infidelities are not proof that he's out of love with his wife, but rather that he's searching for fulfillment and looking in all the wrong places.
Love doesn't make people adept at relationships. You can love someone and still withhold from them what they need — or vice versa. You can love someone and make huge mistakes.
I think of the scene where Don calls Betty to talk about Roger. People have said that her reaction drove him to Rachel, but what I see are two people who need each other, but are unable to say so. I think of Betty's pain at her mother being usurped as no less real that Don's worry over Roger — and they failed each other. It has nothing to do with a lack of love.
Don loves Betty, but he doesn't trust her with his secrets. I'm not just talking about Dick Whitman, but about desires and wants that are not Ozzy and Harriet. Until he gets there — until they both get there — they're screwed.
No one person can be all things, but until those needs are on the table, shared, there's no chance of getting even in the same ballpark.
That never stops being funny.
Is anyone else seeing Don Draper in Gov. Mark Sanford? No? Okay. Back to work…
#20 @hullaballo,
I see Mark Sanford as a Don Draper want-to-be…
"If Betty was the child, then Don sometimes took on the abusive parent role a little too willingly."
Why equate Betty with childish behavior and Don as an adult? He has proven on many occasions that he can be a very childish man.