Don and the fire
Let’s go all the way back to Out of Town.
The fire alarm goes off. Sal’s looking kind of confused and says “What’s that?” and the bellhop says “fire alarm;” they’re still fussing around with their clothes in the time it takes Don to get out the window and down a floor.
Shelly the stewardess is confused and has to be gotten out of bed and then starts figuring out what to wear.
And Don? Don is UP, Don is MOVING, Don is telling Shelly FORGET YOUR SHOES and Don is OUT THE WINDOW before anyone else has even processed “Fire bad.”
The real Donald Draper burned to death in an explosion caused by a fire accidentally set by Dick Whitman. And Dick watched. Dick is not going to be caught in a fire, and he’s not going to piss himself, and he’s not going to let anyone else get burned. Not ever again.
November 24th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
oooOOOOOoooo! Good one!
November 24th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Wow, that’s a great connection that never occurred to me. I did get the sense that Don was sort of reverting to Dick mode in a crisis — as others have pointed out, you can even hear him slip back into Dick’s accent when he’s telling the stewardess that they need to go — but I didn’t think to connect it to Dick’s “death” in Korea.
It makes me realize that there’s another symbolic line running through the episode in counterpoint to the London Fog/raincoat thread. On the one hand, change and crisis are figured as a deluge from which you need to shield yourself — “It is going to rain,” Don says, and all you can do is “limit your exposure.” Dick himself was born of this kind of crisis, conceived because his father refused to wear a “raincoat” when he slept with a hooker, and adopted by the Whitmans because Abigail created a narrative of selfless charity and divine intervention (“God is giving you a child”) to shield herself from the embarrassment of her husband’s infidelity.
But while Dick was born from the storm (perhaps further symbolized by the milk roiling on the stove during the opening flashback), he died, as you pointed out, in the flames. And in that same moment, Don was born. The other half of himself was forged in the fires of an altogether different kind of crisis — the kind you can’t just hunker down and shield yourself from. If you tried to escape a fire by throwing a raincoat over your shoulders to “limit your exposure,” you’d just end up burning yourself to death.
It’s the kind of crisis that requires you to act, not hide. To escape the supposed fire, Don had to let Dick out instead of repressing him. Which is exactly the sort of crisis the season ultimately presents Don with on a larger scale — PPL and McCann are about to burn his house down, and he can’t just hunker down and let it happen. He has to stop hiding, stop limiting his exposure. He has to free the repressed parts of himself that actually value his work and his coworkers. Because they are the only thing that can save him from the inferno. And unlike the Dick Whitman of 1950s, who “blew himself up” rather than face who he was, the Don Draper of 1963 actually wants to be saved.
(Come to think of it, “Out of Town” actually warned us that this change was coming, that Don’s crisis of water would ultimately become a crisis of fire. Pryce pointed out that “There is no London fog” — that the clouds that shrouded the city were actually “the coal dust from the industrial empire.” In other words, it wasn’t water vapor from the clouds; it was smoke from the fires of London’s furnaces.)
November 24th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Wow, Dev, you took my observation and really ran with it. Bravo.
November 24th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
@2 Dev …“Out of Town” actually warned us that this change was coming, that Don’s crisis of water would ultimately become a crisis of fire.
Good stuff. When you think about it, there have been a few fire references in S3.
For instance, the Vietnamese monk shown setting himself ablaze after Gene’s death at the end of The Arrangements (the fall of an empire).
Of course, there’s the practical joke the boys play on Peggy by having one of the secretaries call about her roomate ad pretending to have been disfigured in a fire.
Also, (and I’m repeating myself from another thread) in The Grown-ups there’s the discussion about the practice of burning Indian brides whose marriage ceremonies aren’t completed. Which seems linked to Don, his marriage crumbling beneath him, who complains more than once about how hot it was in the office (while visibly sweating).
November 24th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Thanks, guys!
Some more fire-related imagery, off the top of my head:
1. In the next episode, Betty complains because Don has brought his overcoat into the bedroom even though it’s “covered in soot.” Which brings us back to the fog-vs.-soot conversation from the premiere — but also connects with the episode’s own story about the destruction of Penn Station: One of the reasons that was apparently given for why the station needed to be torn down was because it was dirty and filled with soot.
2. “That’s your hearth, darling. That’s the soul of your home. People gather around a fire even if there isn’t one.”
3. The whole solar-eclipse storyline in “Seven Twenty Three” seems to illustrate the futility of treating a crisis of fire like a crisis of water. “Limiting your exposure” to the sun doesn’t actually make it go away; blocking out the sun’s light only makes its presence all the more powerful.
November 24th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I always thought the hotel fire alarm scene was pointing back to some awful episode from Dick’s youth, perhaps a barn fire or house fire. Don clearly seemed terrified in the hotel – not his usual cool, controlled self — and the reversion to his farmboy accent was very noticeable.
But the blast in Korea makes a lot of sense, now that you say it.
November 24th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Deb and Dev F,
Wow!
Yes!
November 24th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
@6 Gypsy, Re. the eclipse, there also was this:
Rachel Menken: Is this, like, some solar eclipse? The end of the world? Just do whatever you want?
November 24th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
#4, That wasn’t “one of the secretaries” talking about being disfigured, that was Lois. As in, the same secretary who disfigured Guy. I place the foreshadowing clearly there.
#8, I actually included that quote in my solar eclipse post about Seven Twenty Three (one of my favorite posts I’ve written, actually).
November 25th, 2009 at 1:24 am
What a good connection. I also thought “Wow, he must have been caught in a house fire when he was younger” when *Duh* we actually saw Don’s brush with fire in season one… I feel like I miss the most obvious things sometimes
November 25th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Great observations, EVERYONE! Now, back to the kitchen I go….break is over!