Basket of Kisses

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I volunteer with my local Family Shelter, and every winter, we have an all-day “retreat” (we don’t go anywhere) where we get additional intensive training. One of our sessions this year was on suicide prevention and suicidality.

One thing that our instructor (the head of a psychiatric center) mentioned was that being a survivor of suicide—being the immediate relative of someone who commits suicide—is considered a trauma, and such survivors often develop PTSD.

I think this lends additional insight into Don and how most of Seasons 2 & 3 played out, following his discovery that Adam committed suicide at the end of Season 1. He sank and sank, he reacted and he didn’t sleep. He acted like an addict. And finally, when Betty says “Adam,” he jumps like a scared kitten, and then, probably for the first time, weeps.

One more piece of the puzzle.

I was discussing this over lunch: As longtime Basketcases know, I am a huge James Bond fan. I’m not crazy about orchestral soundtracks in general, but I have a collection of the James Bond title songs that I love: It goes from Dr. No (1962) through The World Is Not Enough (1999). I also have a bunch of secondary songs from Bond films, plus covers, plus the title songs from Die Another Day (2002) forward, on various CDs and on my computer. For ages, I’ve been meaning to put all the other songs on a single CD so that I have a complete two-CD collection.

So a few weeks ago, I got my first iPod. Yay me. And I put all my Bond songs on it, under a “Bond” playlist. And what I found was, I still want the CD. I want the tangible object. I want it in my hands.

CDs feel better than intangible songs. You can’t frame a phone call. Telegrams are forever. The faintest ink is better than the strongest memory. A shoebox full of photos will totally bust you when your wife finds it.

Gradually, Dick the Hobo has become Don the Man, and Don the Man kept that shoebox. (He’d have had to keep the other things anyway, the deed to the house and the divorce certificate, but the fact that he had to was part of the process of him becoming Don the Man.) Don the Man is more of a brother than Dick the Hobo ever could be. When Adam first showed up, Don still thought of himself as a hobo, someone who neither had nor needed a brother, but in time, he regretted it. Regretted it enough to call the hotel looking for Adam, and then regretted it more than words can say. Regretted it so much that he offered to help Danny Farrell, just because he reminds Don of Adam (a decision that just has to have repercussions sooner rather than later).

The life of a hobo is full of regrets. You lose your brother and you never forgive yourself. But the life of a stable and rooted man is not without its dangers, and a drawer full of dynamite is one of them. Betty found the dynamite and now we can only wait for the explosion.

“If something happened to you, your sister would never forgive herself.”

It’s a thing people say, isn’t it? “Never forgive herself.” It’s a turn of the phrase.

Not for Don. How is Don? How does he feel? He has never forgiven himself and never will.

When Danny Farrell first appeared on screen, he reminded me of Adam Whitman, and when he spoke with a distinctive nasal tone, the reminder was even more intense. Yet I dismissed it at first. I did not take my own thought seriously, or believe he’d been cast and dressed that way as a purposeful reminder. In fact, I kind of dinged Janie Bryant in my head—’she’s always dressing poor guys in the same jacket.’

Soon enough, though, it was obvious that this was Adam, at least in Don’s eyes. (As an aside, I didn’t get a lot out of the title motif this episode; the conversation about the color blue and the nature of perception seemed obvious, and yet I couldn’t easily relate it to what I was seeing. But in this case, Don’s perception of Danny is far more important than Danny himself.)

“Let me do this for you,” Don says to Suzanne Farrell. And perhaps he believes himself a little. But the truth is, he’s doing it for Danny, and for Adam, not for Suzanne.

Look at that: There’s the brother that never made it. You’ve succeeded and you’ve left your brother behind. This is a narrative that applies equally to Danny and Adam. Does Don love Suzanne? I don’t know, but his feelings for her are deeply cemented by seeing she has not abandoned her sad, ne’er-do-well kid brother.

Don has never forgiven himself, and more to the point, he’s quite clear he never will. He wants nothing so much as the chance to make it right.

Of course, all of that is just Don’s perception. It has nothing to do with the real Danny—to whom he has given his card in a move that is guaranteed to bite him in the ass.

Don Draper: American Airlines is not about the past any more than America is. Ask not about Cuba. Ask not about the bomb; we’re going to the moon. Throw everything out.
Paul Kinsey: Everything?
Don: There is no such thing as American history, only a frontier. That crash happened to somebody else. It’s not about apologies for what happened. It’s about those seven men in the room on Friday, and what airline they are going to be running.
Salvatore Romano: So what does that mean?
Don: Let’s pretend we know what 1963 looks like.
~Three Sundays

That crash happened to someone else.

Bobbie Barrett: I keep forgetting the accident. It was terrible. And it keeps getting stranger.
Peggy Olson: Well, if you’re lucky, it will disappear.
~The New Girl

Don Draper to Adam Whitman, his long lost baby brother: I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.
~5G

Let’s pretend we know what 1963 looks like.

Bobbie Barrett: You have to start living the life of the person you want to be.
~The New Girl

Don Draper: I guess when you try to forget something, you have to forget everything.
~The New Girl

I know we’ve discussed themes throughout Season Two. But I think that as overarching themes go, Reinventing Yourself is a front runner. And sure, it started with Season One, but it seems to have reached beyond the Don/Dick situation. Again and again and again, we’re hearing about it. Vicky introduced herself to Roger as Marty Hasselbach’s wife. Salvatore is a husband. Duck tried to reinvent himself, and is fraying; he knows the old him is still in there, ready to leak out.

And so, with five episodes to go, it will be interesting to see what’s next. Betty has just taken a pretty damned big step.

And can we talk briefly about the brilliance of writing ‘ask not’ into Don’s ’speech’? Because when you’re feeling strong, when you’re feeling, I don’t know, epic, you naturally draw upon the words of one of the great speeches in recent history.

(And here’s part 1.)

for I have sinned. It’s been two weeks since my last confession.

This is how Peggy’s sister, Anita, begins her confession. She then admits to taking money at the laundromat and also taking the Lord’s name in vain. Anita then pauses, seems to ponder what she wants to say next, and then speaks again, hesitantly at first:

And I’m … I’m so angry, father … I’m so angry at my little sister. She’s causing my mother so much pain … She had a child out of wedlock. She seduced a married man. It’s a terrible sin, and she acts like it didn’t even happen. And I hate her for it. I feel so guilty about it … but everybody keeps falling all over themselves, trying to help her, and she goes on like nothing happened. Nothing at all.

So much there. In very few words a volume of subtext, pain, accusation, revenge, jealousy, and denial.

(more…)

(Krecths – Yiddish for groans or sighs of frustration.)

Hello, everyone. I am MarlyK, aka Eme Kah. I used to post in the old home of Basket of Kisses before the Lovely Lipp Sisters moved us to this groovy place. I’ve been missing in action but now that everything has mellowed out, I’m back.

In fact, one of the reasons that I haven’t been posting as much is due to a problem that came up at work. It damn nearly cost me my job but it also inspired this entry. You see, up until that crisis arose, I hadn’t realized the ways in which work can become a psychological battlefield. Duh. I could’ve just watched every single episode of Mad Men.

The most obvious example is Don and Pete’s relationship. Supposedly, they’re antagonists. So when Pete approached Don upon learning that his father died in the plane crash, I was surprised. Would he really do that? I thought. And then I realized: Yes. Because at the heart of Pete’s anger at Don is his own rage at his father. From the beginning, Pete has cast Don as a father substitute. He seeks his approval. He wants him to like him. He EXPECTS Don to support him in his rise to the top. Don, of course, wants no part of this. Don senses that Pete wants something more from him and rejects him, as is Don’s m.o. even toward those who have a legitimate emotional claim on him. Pete is setting himself up by choosing a father substitute who will reject him and then acting out in such a destructive way as to further alienate that man. He is recreating his own relationship with his father: a man who withholds affection and rains disapproval and contempt upon him. We see how this plays out–over and over again– in Pete’s relationship with other men. Even when he’s right (and he often IS right about advertising trends), those male authority figures roll their eyes and incite his rage. We’ve all had experiences in which someone treated us with contempt, so we know the rage that can build up from that. Pete’s has been building up since he was in diapers. (more…)

(Inspired by a post of Roberta’s.)

He is raised by “two sorry people.” His father, a drunk, dies when he is quite small, and his mother and step-father pretty much suck. But there’s an older brother, and maybe that older brother is the whole world to him. People hate Dick, call him names, but maybe that makes his love more fervent.

But Dick is much older, and as older siblings will do, he leaves home and joins the Army.

Then word comes that Dick has been killed in Korea. How much that must hurt. And he waits at the train, lost and afraid, for the casket to come home. But a strange thing happens: He sees Dick on the train. No one believes him, and maybe it’s the disbelief as much as the death that breaks him. I suspect he was always a sort of wan child, never as strong as Dick, and maybe the notion that perhaps he’s crazy, plus the death of the only person he knew who wasn’t “sorry,” just took the life out of him.

His mother dies of cancer, his stepfather dies too, and he’s young, alone, with a farm he doesn’t want, probably can’t pay whatever debt the farm has, let alone whatever the medical bills may be. With no real hope, he ends up pushing a broom in New York City, without even a real home.

Then he finds Dick. Now there’s hope. Now there’s the chance that this life holds the possibility of love and family.

When Dick pushes him away, Adam’s life ends. It’s some months before he actually finishes it, but he died that night. He was done. The last thread of hope in him was that he’d seen Dick on the train, and that thread was cut.

Watched 5G last night (director commentary was terrific!) …

While watching the diner scene between Don and Adam, I was wondering whether Don had ever played this scene out in his mind.  Did he think he’d never see Adam ever again?  Did he bury the past so deeply that Adam’s appearance was a total shock?

But he seemed to have the $5000 ready just for this occasion, which would indicate that he had made plans for this happening.  Hard to imagine he’d have that kind of money lying around the house for no reason at all.  So does this mean he was just executing a plan?

When you suppress something so big for so long, can you really have the presence of mind to plan for contingencies, or do you dive in head-first, making no allowances?

Was Don following an internal script, or was he improvising?

As promised:

In 1960 Don/Dick is 33. So Dick is born in/around 1927.

According to NvK script, Adam is 10 and Dick is 23. Thirteen year split. And so Adam is born in 1940. Which makes him 20 in 1960 when we meet him? Seriously? That guy is supposed to be 20?

Adam is eight years old when he saw Dick on the train. (“I was only eight but I knew it was you.”) Which meant Don was 21. Okay, check.

The photo of Dick and Adam in 1944; so Adam was four and Dick was 17.

According to AMC’s synopsis, Adam is 25. Which is plausible, from the casting.

But if Adam was born in 1940 he couldn’t have been eight when he saw Don on the train, because that would have set it in 1948, and it had to be between 1950 and 1953.

Okay and also? That same, tragically haircutted actor who plays young Dick does not look 13. And yet there he is when his baby brother is born. And his father is already dead. (more…)

Where have we heard that before?

Nixon vs Kennedy. Rachel to Don, when he wants them to run away together. Don to Pete, when he attempts blackmail. You haven’t thought this through. You haven’t thought this through.

In the Wheel, Don learns that Adam has hung himself. (more…)