What follows is less a television critique than a personal expression of what Mad Men has meant to me and others. It’s partly an appreciation of this show, whose first-run existence is now over, but it’s more an attempt to explain why this show can continue to be such a meaningful vehicle for conveying important life truths, especially to people in their 20s and 30s.
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What is the meaning of Mad Men? An honest answer must begin with an acknowledgment that the response will be — and should be — different for everyone. Many will identify with Don, many others with Peggy, and still others with Joan or Betty, or possibly another more peripheral character from the past eight years.
It’s not as though everyone has to come up with the same realization. However, this larger point needs to be absorbed and wrestled with: Mad Men, despite a largely secular veneer and its undeniably up-front portrait of people behaving badly (and being miserable), is a richly spiritual show. It can offer so much nourishment to so many people who are trying to make sense of their lives… if they’re able to learn to see the right way and look in the right places. This is one of the great paradoxes of the show, the one which best illustrates why it should have a long shelf life on Netflix and the other outlets we use to watch TV shows long after they conclude.
I have my own very specific views about Mad Men‘s ability to reach deep inside me and teach me something profound about life, but I didn’t want those views to stand alone. I asked a fellow Mad Men fan, a Twitter correspondent and online friend named Zach Bloxham, to speak from his heart on why the show captured him on a deeper level.
Here is what Zach wrote:
I was taught about the wages of sin. I was raised in a socially conservative home. On the outside, the character of Don Draper and myself should have very little in common. But the fact I generated such an emotional connection with Mr. Draper is evidence of the power and scope of Matthew Weiner’s art. Mad Men was a catalyst in helping me to compartmentalize what a person does and who a person is. Sure, our actions do give us insight into our character, but the conundrum of mortality is the knowledge that we oftentimes do not know why we do what we do.
Neither does Don.
We glimpse his upbringing and get clues as to why he has a predilection for womanizing. We see his desire to change. We yearn for his success. Yet, he fails. But his problem in this area does not overwhelm his goodness in others.
Even a serial womanizer can love his wife. Even a serial womanizer can be a good father. Even a serial womanizer can be a decent person.
Maybe someday he can overcome his Abrahamic test. Mad Men, of all things, helped me separate the sin from the sinner and made me a better Christian. How’s that for watching the wages of someone embroiled amidst sin?
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I have my own inner truth to share about Mad Men, but what Zach’s insights bring to the surface — as a central discussion point for this show, now and in the future — is that Matthew Weiner’s creation is and always has been (and always will be):
A) complicated as literature and as moral commentary;
B) inconvenient, especially in terms of refusing to give viewers the happy storyline or the tidy, feel-good resolution to any of its complicated problems.
This is essential to understanding why the show matters at a very deep, even spiritual, level. It is essential to any attempt to grasp why, for all the sex and booze and fancy period-piece clothes, the show’s substance is about the action happening inside the minds of its copulating, drinking, physically attractive characters.
If Mad Men could be reduced to a (perhaps-cliched) advertising pitch, it would be something to the effect of, “Come for the debauchery, stay for the inner struggles.” It’s easy to either get hooked on Mad Men‘s soap-operatic elements or, conversely, to be turned off by them and think that this show is a meaningless and endless cycle of putting people through the same familiar and depressing situations with no real changes.
No, it’s deeper than the costumes and the sex, and there’s a purpose to the recurring themes as well. This goes back to the central point of Mad Men: It is a show meant to teach people HOW to see, and WHERE to look for meaning in life. One can’t be open or receptive to important truths and epiphanies without first learning how to see.
The fact that this is Donald F. Draper’s life story is simultaneously central to this discussion and peripheral to it as well.
Here’s the explanation:
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While Mad Men is an ostensibly secular show — with the Father Gill character being an important yet ultimately minor character (season two) within the larger life of the series — one could make a powerful and convincing argument that it is one of the most spiritually-rooted shows we’ve ever seen.
That argument begins and ends with Anna Draper, the saintly — perhaps too-good-to-be-fully-believable — character who knows and loves Don (more precisely, Dick Whitman) in a way no one ever did, or ever will.
In Season 2, Episode 12 — “The Mountain King” — Don confesses the following to Anna on his escape to California:
“I have been watching my life. It’s right there. I keep scratching at it, trying to get into it. I can’t.”
Later, this dialogue unfolds, courtesy of the Basket of Kisses blog from sisters Roberta and Deborah Lipp:
“Don Draper/Dick Whitman: What does it mean?
Anna Draper: It means the only thing keeping you from being happy is the belief that you are alone.
Don Draper/Dick Whitman: What if it’s true?
Anna Draper: Then you can change.
Don Draper/Dick Whitman: People don’t change.
Anna Draper: I think she stands for wisdom. Once you live, you learn things.”
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To anyone who is really wrestling with life problems, especially problems related to one’s sense of self-worth and personal identity — or to anyone who knows someone else who is battling powerful problems related to self-love and self-perception — Mad Men is a great spiritual teacher.
A core tenet of self-knowing, and of understanding how to live with oneself in a bewildering and difficult world, is knowing one’s truest self. This self-knowledge and self-acceptance are cultivated by distinguishing the true self from the shadow self. This process of separating the true self from the shadow self does not mean that one hates the shadow self, only that one learns to identify a false inner voice and distinguish it from an authentic inner voice of truth. One then accepts the shadow self as part of the larger human person, but trusts the true self in any moment of crisis.
This is the key to living an emotionally whole and stable life, learning how to be comfortable enough with oneself to then take risks and express oneself creatively.
Don (Dick Whitman) has never known how to cultivate and live with this inner freedom — it’s been his futile search throughout the show, but Anna was the one person who offered absolute clarity and accuracy in terms of advice. She was the one person who told him the full truth at all times.
She also offered absolute, unconditional love, as shown in this line to Don from season four, before her death:
“I know everything about you, and I still love you.”
That, very simply, is the voice of God. That is what any great spiritual tradition teaches us about the nature of God — a being who knows everything that’s wrong or imperfect about us but still loves us fully, every ounce of us.
The title of the episode in which Anna offers that powerful truth to Don? The Good News.
Matthew Weiner knows a spiritual reference when he sees one.
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Don’s pain — the scars of his past as Dick Whitman, the fear of being known as Dick, his shadow self — prevents him from treating others the way they should be treated. This is what makes him such a jerk on so many occasions. Yet, the repetitive nature of Don’s failures is not cheap or gratuitous. Those repeated failures are meant to show that living life well — honorably, in a spiritually realized and authentic way — is damn hard. Anna offers Don/Dick a Gospel on which he can genuinely and responsibly build a healthy personal identity.
Some of us figure out life at an earlier age, but most of us need to go through many of the same failures — in relationships, work, and self-knowing — before we acquire true wisdom and are able to keep it as a regular guiding element in our lives. Knowing that someone is aware of all our faults and failures and still loves us completely is the best thing we can know — it is proof that we are not alone in this world. It is the message of Mad Men, a show which has always conveyed to viewers that for all the millions of dollars its characters make, and for all the hot sex they have, and for all the nights on the town they experience, with all the finest alcoholic beverages they consume, it’s how they feel on the inside that counts. Usually, it’s not very good… and there’s supreme meaning in that — as a storytelling vehicle, yes, but also as spirituality.
Are these characters at peace? Are they comfortable with themselves and who they are? Do they love themselves fully?
These are the questions of Mad Men, beneath the attractive physical veneer and the lush sets and the fancy costumes of the 1960s. We realize that power, money and sex don’t make one happy inside. Knowing the true self, and accepting everything that’s both good and imperfect about ourselves, makes us content. It’s not the corporate or sexual conquest which makes our lives whole; it’s the not-easy-to-arrive-at combination of self-forgiveness and honest self-love which heals us. The key to life is being honest yet self-forgiving, without the bullshit Dick Whitman received from his mean and nasty father.
If you’re a parent of a 25-year-old who is trying to find his or her way through life, or if you are that 25-year-old, watch Mad Men. It will guide you through rough periods in your life.
It did for me, throughout my 30-something years.
I didn’t even need a therapist, though Doctor Edna (from season four) certainly would have made a great one.
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Mad Men was entertaining. It was attractive to look at. It was stylishly crafted.
It also contained a deep spiritual center which will always give this show relevance for those who want to learn how to look at life, and who want to know where they need to search for meaning amidst so many challenges and inner crises.
