This thing isn’t a spaceship, it isn’t a time machine, and it isn’t a wheel. It’s a cycle. It’s older than you, even older than me, but both of us are in it now because you came when I called.
Get in here.
I know that you know how this goes. The person berating you right now isn’t really me. He’s alone and he’s hurting and it’s easier for him to do this because he’s drunk. You’ve known this your whole life. It’s why you think you have to work so hard: because when it came right down to it, you had a job to do, and you didn’t do it.
He died, didn’t he? I know what you mean.
This is funny, isn’t it? You standing, me on the floor, like this? You’re so much the way I once was. Look at you. On your birthday. You have no idea, do you, that someone’s dying right here?
Let me buy you dinner. Let’s pretend, for a while, that this is about you.
Here’s something: I was in Korea. You didn’t know that? Well hell, wonder why. Sure I’ll tell you about my dad. My mom too, now that you asked. But not everything. You will never get it all. Understand that.
Sorry, you said something about your dad? Something about sports?
(This guy really doesn’t want to die. Oh my God.
Now where was I? Drunk. But I’m really not drunk enough to do this now. Where the hell did that kid go?)
Well. Thank you for still being here. Sorry I missed on that swing. I really wanted to hit that guy for you. But now that you’re here, make me a drink.
I said make me a drink, and not that this is anything you need to know, but someone really has died, and it’s not that man from a long time ago. It’s the last person in my life I didn’t have to pay to keep me company like this. It’s the last person who …
I’m tired.
…
Holy shit. Morning: I have to do this now. There’s no one else here, there will be no other time, she’s been gone for hours.
What are you still doing here? Stop looking at me. Stop … you’re not going anywhere, are you?
Go away. Go home. This isn’t for you. He’s gone, and now she is too, and you were right, there is no one else in my life, and I don’t know how to do this by myself.
Except that somehow I think the next time I have to, I’ll call for you.
…
Peggy?
Get in here …
21 Responses to “The Cycle”
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Ann B, this is it. You got it so right and perfectly in Don’s/Dick’s voice. Thank you.
What an episode – this is the one you win emmys for. Even Jon Hamm, whose acting has been somewhat wooden this season (probably because the writing has him closed off) was terrrific. Did you catch when he describes Liston’s technique, he illustrates with some of the most awkward looking jabs ever thrown? A perfect preview of the incompetent attempt to throw a punch at Duck later on. Couple of other notes. One, is Duck a drunk because of WWII? A damaged character who never fully recovered, in some ways like Roger, who still carries his scars from that time? Duck was probably, what, 19, 20, when he fought on Okinawa, where the impact of killing was so forceful on him that he kept track of the men he killed? Perhaps that is a subtext in the series this season about the mid-60s workplace, about the damaged WWII vets still out and among the world, pre PTSD diagnoses. As Roger points out in another context, killing someone is the type of thing you use drinking to get over. Two, the writing provided an absolutely brilliant summing up of the cultural and age divide, on which Don is now on the wrong side as he ages. His rejection of both Namath and Clay in the same episode places him firmly on the wrong side of American cultural history, and one wonders if he has now reached the point where he will never again – as he did with Kodak and the Carousel – have his finger right on the pulse of American culture. Stan, Peggy, Joey and Jane’s cousin all see what Namath means, but Don doesn’t. On this, did you note Don’s casual hostility to Clay’s name change, to Ali? A throw away line but one that makes clear Don is part of the establishment, one that the very existence of Ali at that particular time and place will threaten for years to come. And finally, did you catch the look on Pete’s face when Peggy and Trudy walk out together? Although his secret may not be on a par with Don/Dick’s, Pete is now a grown up, in ways he was not in season one, and part of that has been coming to understand that a man often has skeletons that he doesn’t want out there, and Pete now is one of them. The coming around full circle of Bert’s lecturing of him when he tries to unmask Don – that these types of secrets are best left alone and add up to nothing more than “so what” revelations.
Ann B. I love, love, love how you got into Don’s head here. Brilliant, and touching, just like “The Suitcase”. Thank you!
Brilliant Anne B.
I read your piece twice. I still don’t quite understand it. But it seems poetic and rather beautiful.
Ripped off from another commenter: “It;s the circle of drunk…”
Wonderful. May I share with my Facebook posse?
@lee jr. jr. is Duck a drunk because of WWII?
It is interesting to note that Duck isn’t just a WWII vet, but a veteran of Okinawa, one of the fiercest and most brutal battles in the war. In general the South Pacific, as I understand it, was a far more brutal place in general to fight than in Europe (the Holocaust and related brutality was aimed at the occupied territories, the German army fought a relatively conventional war), so it would make sense that Duck’s problems started there.
It would also complete the parallels among Roger, Duck and Don – all of whom are drinking far too much and all of whom are not dealing with the horrors of their past but drinking to forget them. For Don, of course, the horror was not the war, as brutal as the real Draper’s death was, but the abuse and neglect he faced as the whore’s child in the Whitman household. How horrifying is it to see your brutal father die in front of you, only to be left with a woman who can barely stand you, but then your “replacement father” makes it clear he is ready to abandon you at a moment’s notice? Does anyone wonder why Don has issues?
And I was really touched by Peggy’s gentleness in trying to deal with Duck. “I suspect you’ve been drinking.” “Well, you’re wrong,” as the ice clinks in the background, loud enough for her to hear. I have to wonder, since the last time we saw Peggy and Duck together was the Kennedy assassination, whether she broke it off because he started drinking again. I could certainly see the assassination being a trigger for a renewed binging, ending in his firing from Gray and his embarassment at the Clio’s.
Nice work, Anne B. I just love this blog!
Thanks all.
So here was one that was just a no-brainer to me — the normally-silent guy who’s suddenly voluble because he is channeling someone else.
I saw so much in Don’s behavior, in “The Suitcase”, flowing from the tipping point of realizing that Anna was slipping away — and being where he was (NYC, not California), how he was (kind of a mess), meant that he would not make that call.
So he went to anger and loss and his model for both: dear old Archibald Whitman. Berating, bullheaded, full-of-moonshine Archie.
I don’t know how Don knows that Peggy can handle a drunk dad, but he knows. And she can.
This is not a good thing. As hopeful as the last scene was for Don, there was someone else in the room too.
I really hope I got that across.
In the ladies’ room, Peggy explains she isn’t going to the match because she doesn’t like sports whereas Trudy is more than happy to tag along. Trudy explains that she always watched when she was a little girl b/c her father “loves blood sport”. Then, when she reaches Pete, she announces, “I want a rare steak & I want to see those two men pound each other”, replete with a girlish eagerness (even a little squeal). These two lines serve as an exquisite counterpoint to Peggy’s later revelation that when she was 10 years old, she was the single witness to her father’s early death, via heart attack, while he was watching a boxing match, further cementing their bond & giving this drowning, broken man a much needed life raft. For the first time, Don has the the good sense to grab hold to someone who truly understands him as much as Anna did. With Anna gone, will Dick let go?
“then your “replacement father” makes it clear he is ready to abandon you at a moment’s notice?”
“Everyone thinks this is temporary.” Yet another thread connecting Henry to Uncle Mac.
Picking up on CPT; it seems all along that, at least as far as Peggy is concerned, Duck has acted as a kind of dark dopple-ganger for Don (even his odd nickname sounds like a mix of Don/Dick). The suitcase seemed to bring this theme to a sharp point by showing Duck – another older, part father-figure, part mentor part love object-articulate a lot of the sub-text between Don and Peggy. Duck, not Don came right out and said “I really need to see you tonight” – though Don clearly felt it just as strongly. Duck is also desperate to have the kind of autonomy that Don achieved by having his own firm. They are also twinned by that ever-present tinkling of ice in a high-ball, but with Duck a slightly older, and perhaps ominously for Don, further developed version of the dissipated bigwig.
That Peggy repeatedly chose Don against all other options shows, perhaps that there is something more redeemable at the core of Don – at least if we can accept Peggy’s on-going Madonna association at face value.
#7, joyjoy,
Sorry to overlook your request. Please share as you like!
#11, Nothing Elegant:
Nice catches. I also noticed the opposition of Trudy’s girlish glee (there are few other terms for it) with Peggy’s unhappy fate, that night. And all through those two women’s lives, I suspect.
The former has a doting “Daddy,” who — fan of blood sport or not — has always protected and cared for her, and probably always will. The latter simply doesn’t. In fact, the roles are reversed for Peggy, from childhood on.
Poor breadwinner Pegs. How does she see herself?
Great post, Anne B. One thing, you did not address Don’s thoughts when he saw Anna ghost but you did get me thinking about. Anna was carrying a suitcase and the fact that the suitcase could represent emotional baggage has already been brought up in another post’s comments but I wonder, who’s suitcase is she carrying? Could it be Don’s? Anna knew Dick Whitman but she is also the only one who knew the real Don Drapper. That fact could make Don’s guilt about taking over Don Drapper’s life even more painful. Anna never judged Don but we know that did not keep Don from judging himself.
Anna has Don’s suitcase, and smiling, turns and walks away with it. Does Anna’s death finally allow Dick/Don to merge the old him (Dick) with the new him (Don) to create a better Don? Only Matt Weiner know the answer to that question. I just I thought the morning after Don looked more at peace with himself than he has in a long time.
#15 peregrina, true. I left that part out.
Anna was an apparition, not part of the interplay between the two people who kept reaching, battling, returning (Don and Peggy). She appeared to Don alone. Peggy had no idea she was ever there: and she was in no way a target of his rage, in no way internal to him at all.
With this piece, I was really going more to an old script that plays out — from one generatiion to another, on and on and on.
I almost called it “Did Your Daddy Get Mad?” (after little Bobby’s line, in Three Sundays). But there was a part of me that just couldn’t. Just can’t make that connection, from Hurt Don to Hurt Bobby, just yet. I know that’s what happens, but still.
I want to believe the cycle breaks. But we have to break it. No one else’s action, even death, can do it. It’s each of us deciding to do things differently with others from the way things were done to us.
It’s up to Don. Lots of ways he can go, still: but the first, certainly one of them, has to be to his kids.
Has to be.
Anne B.-Of course, now that you explained I see it. I don’t know if Don can break the cycle but I am sure that Bobby has a better chance of doing so. Bobby is part of a generation that redefined how to be a father- one who would not stand by and do nothing when his wife slapped their daughter and one who would not make a date on the night his children were visiting. At this point Don is Sonny Liston and Bobby is Muhammad Ali. I’m betting on Bobby.
Wow, Anne B.–what a sobering (sorry!) alternative to my relatively optimistic view of Don’s internal journey in “The Suitcase.” Not that I thought all would be sweetness and light after this, but …. I have to admit, your view is more accurate. Aargh–Don has a longer road ahead of him than I wanted to see.
CPT – a very good point abouth the decision to put Duck on Okinawa, as it is interesting to note that the writers have placed both WWII vets – Duck and Roger – in the Pacific theater. From a meta media perspective, placing either in the European theatre would have immediately moved t he characters into cliche territory. Service in Normandy immediately brings Tom Hanks to mind, Battle of the Bulge brings to mind the Band of Bros, and so on; the subject has simply been covered, and well, too many times on a broad screen; that picture is filled in. But by placing them both in the Pacific, the writers avoid having the viewers fill in these characters by referring back internally to these existing archetypes, and instead allow them to place Duck and Roger in their own context in the environment in which they served. The brutality of the Pacific islands campaign, combined with its recent coverage in the mass market medium – Flags of our Fathers, etc – allows the writers to communicate the horrors in these characters’ backstories, without invoking already existing cliches.
Anne B. channeling Draper, marvelous! And, as Lee Jr., jr. picks up, we also have a a back story developing of WWII vets [the old, soon to be superseded by the new] having difficulty adapting to the new [and perhaps not better ....] world –
Roger, angry at the loss of his glory days [doing business with Honda]
Freddy, a war hero [remember Roger noting Freddy's 'eventful' war experience, killing multiple Germans, and Freddy saying it was a long time ago?], dealing with alcoholism?
Duck, probably a Marine Lt. on Okinawa, falling apart and channeling his rage toward Don?
Its a thickly-layered, beautifully filmed & acted drama, which Anne B. and others here enrich with their insights.
Love Child – good addition. I forgot about Freddy.