I was seven years old on November 22, 1963, when the news came. It was around 2:30pm and I had just gotten out of second grade in Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. I was walking out the back of the school through the grass field and making a diagonal path toward the sidewalk that led back to my house. The field was downhill from the street and there was a little incline in the final few steps, and it was right there, a few paces from the cement, that I heard it: our President had been shot and killed.
I don’t think about it much anymore, not for years. But I do not think I’m alone among Mad Men watchers in that this season is bringing those days back to me. I don’t have anything to say about that day really. I wanted to set the time, because I want to write about Don and what many viewers are posting about him.
You don’t like him. You don’t approve of his actions. He makes no sense. He is selfish. He’s self-destructive. He is hurting his family.
I don’t understand any of this. What’s clear to me is that Don is damaged.
Imagine this scene: you are driving down the highway and you come across a dog that’s been struck by a car. He can’t move and his injuries are mortal. You would not expect normal behavior from this poor creature, you’d pity him. You might try and put him out if his misery. But you also know that if you got too close, if you tried to console him, pet him, stroke his soft fur, he would likely bite you. This is what I think of when people criticize Don. Or Betty, or Roger even. But I’m writing about Don today.
I believe this because in many ways, I am Bobby and Don is my dad. He was born in 1930 (check) and served in Korea at the age of 21. He was assigned to duty in Japan after that, where he met my Japanese mother, who was a schoolteacher there. They were married in 1955 (check) and I was born the year after. My dad was from the Midwest – hailing from Frankfort, Indiana, about 40 miles from Indianapolis. Don’s from Pennsylvania.
Dad affected the James Dean pompadour, with his brown wavy hair short around the sides and back but the front as long and high as military regulations would allow. He was in the Army throughout my youth, often abroad. He’d go away for eighteen months, come back for six, and leave again. Sometimes we’d move to live with him on a base like Ft. Bragg; sometimes my mother and I would find our own place because he was overseas. Regardless of his physical lodging, he was virtually never present as a parent. Hard-drinking, smoking, he liked clothes and bars and nights out.
He was given to rage and violence on a scale we have never seen Don exhibit. I’ve been thrown across the dining room, clattering into our chrome dinette. I have a scar in my forehead from the time he “accidentally” pushed me into a steam radiator, an incident I am too young to remember. This pattern continued until the early 1970s, when he returned from Viet Nam. Dad was completely broken, on a 90% mental disability. My mother left him after a bad blowup and I didn’t see him again until he died in 1990.
Don suffered abuse as a child and doubtless saw more trauma in Korea. He is walking wounded. I think the damage he’s suffered has resulted in his shutting down emotionally and staying in denial about his past and how much it’s hurt him. Much has been written about his many father figures and how they affect him; those posts have been more in-depth and intelligent than anything I could do here. But seeing the Hilton pitch scene, I saw that once again a father (Connie) expressed his complete disappointment in Don – and then abandoned him again, walking out. Connie’s requirements were impossibly high (“When I say I want the moon, I want the moon!”), and his criticism was brutally clear. What Don does after that – take refuge in the arms of Miss Farrell – is as simple as a child running from an angry father to a loving mother.
What is it about Miss Farrell? Don looks for the different ones. Smart ones. Those who stay on the margins because they see what he sees: it’s all a sham and we’re all impostors. Without a mother in his life, Don may equate refuge with safety and maternal care. It’s only with women who share his sense of outsider-looking-in that he can relax and find comfort.
When Miss Farrell tells him she plans to start her school year with a study unit on Martin Luther King’s speech, she sets herself apart, especially from Betty’s beliefs. When she tells him she knows how their affair will end, she sets herself apart as being candid and holding no illusions. And when she’s frolicking barefoot in the grass or running at night, she affirms herself as a force of nature – Mother Nature.
My father hid his pain in alcohol and dementia. Don hides his in behavior and choices that cause pain to those around him, including himself. To judge him for acting out his pain and seeking to relieve it seems myopic.
Don is not good when he behaves, and he is not bad when he strays. He is a man who is trying to stay on his feet after absorbing some of the toughest body blows life can dish out.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.