Basket of Kisses

He is the show, folks. He’s been superb for three seasons, but it was this last one – when the lies caught up with Don Draper – where Hamm separated himself from the pack.

Tim Goodman, San Francisco Chronicle

I can’t remember why I joined the first ranks of Mad Men viewers.  I think it had to do with “The Sopranos” pedigree – that dog always could hunt – but at the time, I was sure one show wouldn’t make much of a difference in my life.  It’s only TV.

Three years on, “only TV” has become an indelible link to what mattered in my parents’ generation and what matters in mine.  It’s built my community here.  And it really is, so often, about one guy.

I didn’t know who any of these people were before the show began; but never having seen him in much else, I feel as if Jon Hamm dropped from the sky, put on the suit, and stepped into the character of Don Draper.  There was no adjustment period.  He didn’t need to grow into the role.  From scene one of Season 1, Jon Hamm has been Don Draper.

It’s as though he is always carrying the map.  We don’t know, and sure as hell Don doesn’t; but Jon seems to.  Leaving the conference room after Rachel Menken gets annoyed with him, in “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, it’s as if he sees himself wondering whether to lock the front door of Sterling Cooper, a few years later.

Later, having fallen down the stairs at the start of “Babylon”, he’s staring at these people from Dick Whitman’s past – and he locks eyes with Dick’s younger self.  He holds the gaze, and loads it.  Here’s the man who will sit at the bottom of those stairs in the last shot of that year.  He’ll bring the characters of Don and Dick together, and show the pain, two years later.  Even as he’s lying there on that floor, we know this is a moment.  We trust him with it.

I doubt any of this is easy for him.  It’s a lot of work in the dark.  In interviews, Jon comes off as happy, but Don is a sinking soul:  a man most at ease when so drunk or high he “can’t feel a thing”.  A man who loves his children, but isn’t with them much.  A guy who picks up strangers on the road at night.  Jon’s in color but Don is a charcoal sketch:  we’ve seen him laugh, what?  Once?

Saying this character is beautifully fractured doesn’t come close.  It’s more true to say that Jon makes the Don Draper kaleidoscope interesting in a way that those who do the window thing can’t.

If Jon Hamm doesn’t win the Golden Globe on Sunday, there is something wrong.  His performance sets him apart from every other nominated actor.  Over three seasons, Jon’s work has shown subtlety and maturity, and as Tim Goodman has said, he carries a show that is a bright example of the same qualities — week after week.  Jon makes the small but necessary moves that make us forget the scene, and make us worry instead about the man alone on the train, or the man at the kitchen table with the shoebox and the angry wife.  These things are not about being a star, they are about storytelling, and he knows how to take us there.

Good luck on Sunday, Jon.  Thank you for three years of beautiful work, for going wherever you have to go to find the dark places.  It was never only TV; it was always personal.  Thank you for always drawing us in.

“Yes.”
“I do.”
“I would.”

When you ask Don even a yes or no question, his answer is precise and enunciated. Never “yep” or “yeah” or “sure.” It has a distinctive ring to it, and it always catches my ear.

“Do you like the movies?”
“I do.”

Careful when he doesn’t have to be careful. Because Don always has to be careful. His life is a performance and he can never break character.

I think if he hadn’t stolen Don Draper’s identity, and kept the name Dick Whitman, this would still be true. This is a performance designed to succeed, designed to put the past far behind. This is a performance about not being the person who said “Ain’t you heard?” and whose father told hillbilly jokes.

Someone asked in comments why Don needed to go to night school (as revealed by Roger in The Color Blue); after all, Don Draper’s identity came with education credentials. He wasn’t going for credentials, he was going to learn. Partially because this is a man with a naturally questing mind, and partially because he needed to speak and act like an educated man, not just have the papers.

The careful and pronounced language is a well-designed part of a carefully calibrated life.

As an art historian, I was struck by the similarities between several scenes in the S3 season finale and some paintings from the Baroque and Modern Periods.

Caravaggio, The Conversion of Saint Paul

(more…)

Jon and I spoke last Tuesday, November 3rd. He is fascinating to speak with; he is so intimate with this character in a way that is hard to imagine. Plus he’s just really, really cool. The voice is smooth, and deliberate and steadying. I was very much put at ease within the first few minutes.

Oh! And also? He spoke to me for so much longer than I expected him to. Extremely generous with his time.

Roberta Lipp: So, you know, as a fan, I want you to not be nervous.

Jon Hamm: Okay.

RL: You know, we’re very big, but, you know, just relax and be yourself.

JH: Can do!

RL: So what are you up to? Where are you right now? Are you making a movie?

JH: Yeah, I’m up in Boston right now shooting a film Ben Affleck is directing called The Town, and we are in like the last few weeks of that.

RL: So you went straight from wrapping to Boston; right? Like, you’ve been just not stopping?

JH: Yeah, I think it was kind of an error in judgment, I think, on my part because I was pretty beat by the end of the season and then went right into this. It was a lot of work.

RL: Yeah, I can’t imagine. So you got a few more weeks on that and then you’re going to relax?

JH: Well, I’ve got, you know, Thanksgiving and a couple weeks off, and then I’m going to go into another film that shoots up in Vancouver called Sucker Punch. It’s being directed by a guy named Zack Snyder who directed Watchmen.

RL: That sounds very cool.

JH: Yeah, I think so. I think it will be a good one.

RL: Congratulations just on everything.

JH: Well thank you.

RL: So we’re all freaking out; this is the greatest season. The last two episodes [the Gypsy and the Hobo and the Grownups] were haunting and really –I can’t even pretend to know where this thing is going, I haven’t guessed for weeks, and each episode doesn’t help; you know? It’s just amazing.

JH: Well, you know what, if I could continue by saying,it was sort of the theme and the watchword for the season would be change. And almost all of our characters’ lives; in their professional lives and in their personal lives certainly, we see a lot of things shift.
And, obviously, that’s being paralleled in the world around them, and in the culture around them shifting as well. We’re starting to see the beginnings of that change happen in the 60s in American culture. And, obviously with the events of the last episode with Kennedy’s assassination happening, that’s a pretty big watershed moment for a lot of people, and I think in retrospect for the culture at large.

RL: Yeah. You know, separately from each of the individual storylines, what people have been saying on our site is, “Oh, that’s what it felt like.” He really captured it.”

JH: Well, you know, I think obviously the closest thing that a lot of people have in their lives now is when 9/11 happened, and just sort of that bizarre feeling of what is happening and what is this and what does it all mean and what is the next day going to bring. And I think that there was certainly a parallel with those two situations, but maybe doesn’t have — because we obviously know the benefit of living four years afterwards. And of course you know everything will be all right and people will wake up in the morning, but it’s fundamentally shifted. And we know as people that live in the 21st century that this is only the first and one of many sort of really horrible seismic events to happen in this culture at this time and in a relatively short span. And so, you know, I think obviously there is a parallel between our — it’s disconcerting because we’ve had several, I think, serendipitous parallels politically with our show when we started season one we started in 1960 with the very contended and contentious election between Nixon and Kennedy, and then we’re coming out of an election of Kerry-Bush or Bush-Gore, and there was that whole sort of feeling where fully half of the country was dissatisfied with the results of the election. And then the second season with the Kennedy’s sort of descendant, we had Obama come in, and now it’s strangely similar in certain aspects. So we’ve been really kind of fortunate in having a secondary resonance that has happened with our show and in the culture at large, and I think that that’s enabled people to kind of keep relating personally. (more…)

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.

Let’s talk about Conrad.  For me, Season 3 is all about the Big Guy.

He’s this season’s express train to Dick Whitman.  In S1 it was Adam.  S2 was Anna.  S3 is all about Conrad Nicholson Hilton.

For now, I’m holding onto the presumption that the old coot is for real.  Meaning that he knows what he’s doing with all this father-son jive.  One minute he’s ready to adopt young Dick, and the next he’s holding Don’s head in the toilet.

“What’d you expect … love?”  Can you think of a more loaded question to ask Don Draper?

He didn’t get to be a hotel baron by wasting his time.  So I’m hoping – whether he remains with Don or not – that Connie leads us closer to Dick Whitman.

We already discussed Don’s relationship with Connie Hilton being that of a son and father. And certainly the father/son issues of Wee Small Hours have escaped exactly no one’s perception.

I love how, on the “Inside Mad Men” video on AMC’s site, Matt Weiner says that Don really means it when he thanks Connie. As if we couldn’t tell. Dude, the guy teared up. Jon Hamm was amazing in that scene, and there could be no doubt in the audience that Draper was moved to his core, moved in a way he perhaps had never been before.

And Hamm was equally brilliant when being rejected by Connie. “What do you want, love?” “YES!” Don’s floundering, his longing to have pleased, is so adolescent, so innocent, that it breaks the heart. He performed for Connie in a way he never could for Archie. I imagine he tried, in many, similar ways, for Archie (well, without the art department’s help) when he was a kid. I imagine his continuing need to please an unavailable father fueled his drive to succeed, his creativity, even his charm. But Archie, as we saw in Seven Twenty Three, would never be pleased by Don, and somewhere Don believed he’d given up. Until Connie.

But what I want to talk about is what happened in between the two important interactions in this episode between the son and his surrogate father.

Don fired Sal. (more…)

(Yeah, it’s last week’s episode, but we can totally talk about Seven Twenty Three while I continue to get my write on for Souvenir.)

Fathers and chairs. I’m not the only one who noticed that Conrad Hilton sits in Don’s chair in his office at the beginning of the episode, and Bert Cooper does so at the end. Whoever sits in the chair owns the space; everyone else is a supplicant (that’s not Mad Men, folks, that’s life).

Connie and YodaBert are both father figures to Don; they are both the right age, they both mentor, groom, and promote him (Connie appears to be in that position so far, anyway), and they both kind of see right through him. Bert “knows something” about who Don is, while Don revealed the Dick Whitman side of himself to Connie at first meeting.

The third father in Seven Twenty Three is Archie. And let’s not forget that Archie, too, gets the chair; drunk, drugged Don sits on the edge of the bed, and hallucinates Archie in the seat of power. Every time we’ve ever seen Archibald Whitman, he’s been a malevolent figure, so I think it’s interesting that this time he opens with a joke: A scary joke, to be sure, a joke about rape. Still, he made Don laugh, and we’ve never seen that before. Then he berated Don, painfully, about who he has become, and who he has become is exactly, it seems, who Connie and YodaBert want him to become; someone who grows bullshit.

But there’s a fourth father here, and if we don’t talk about him, we miss a lot of what happens in this episode.

The fourth father is the hobo.

Meeting the hobo as a child was one of the most significant moments in the life of young Bowlcut Dick. The hobo was from New York, Don went to New York. The hobo espoused a philosophy of being a “gentleman of the rails,” and exposed Archie to be a “dishonest man.” (If Bowlcut had been an adult, he might have thought the whole “gentleman of the rails” thing was full of romantic shit, but he was kind of impressionable.)

So here are the four fathers; Connie and Bert at either end, saying “Commit.” Archie in the middle, saying “You’re no good no matter what you do,” and driving Don towards the hobo, who says “RUN!”

The hobo has no chair, and no contract, and a death grip on Don, and ultimately, the hobo is why Don is so defeated when he finally signs.

We open on Don’s bare feet. It appears to be bare feet on concrete, but it’s the Draper kitchen, so that’s not right. The concrete is an echo, perhaps, part of the memory of the day Dick Whitman was born.

The memory begins with the tragic stillbirth of a daughter, then the meeting of Archie and the prostitute, then the birth of Dick Whitman and the death of the nameless prostitute. None of this is precisely memory; maybe he was told some of it, but most or all is probably his imagination; something he has fantasized about for years. Remember, he told Betty in Three Sundays that he fantasized about murdering his father, so it makes sense that, in his mind, his mother had made the same threat, and the midwife echoed it.

Later, we learn it’s Don’s birthday. Although not “Don Draper”’s birthday; Dick Whitman. The driver’s license won’t help, because the driver’s license has the real Don Draper’s birthday. Roberta suggested to me that perhaps this fantasy of his birth circumstances is something Don has every year, but I think it’s tied to the warm milk he makes for his pregnant wife; a wife who is sure she has a daughter, like Abigail had, but Abigail’s died.

And soon Don is again standing barefoot on concrete.

When Don gets home, it’s all there in his suitcase: His adultery, but also his deep love for his daughter. Yet when Sally wants to hear about the day she was born, Don freezes. And Betty is familiar with this freeze; something in Don was standing in a place of primeval terror the day his first child was born, a terror so deep he cannot speak about it, and Betty knows that, and covers for it.

Naked feet, naked as the day you were born, stillbirth, terror, daughters.

Basketcase CPT_Doom: The ironic thing is that, by the end of S1, Don’s fear of exposure is alleviated, and by the end of S2 we see him growing up and seeing his life in a far less idyllic light.

Anna Draper (to Don): It means the only thing keeping you from being happy is the belief that you are alone.

Bertram Cooper: Mr. Campbell, who cares?

You know that thing where you have this one obstacle that if only you could overcome it, your life could be okay?

I break it down into two categories; one being of the it’ll get better once this happens ilk, (Once we get married, Once we can be together, As soon as I get that promotion, When we finally get that little place in Sante Fé), and the other being of the it’ll never really be okay because of this (like for example, My father was carted off to jail when I was 14, or I have a horrible condition and I’m in daily pain, or I have this secret identity and live in fear every day that my past will be exposed and wreck my life). (more…)