Mad Men, Season Three, Episode One: Out of Town

Mad Men’s third season begins with Don Draper in the kitchen, standing at his stove late at night. He’s warming up some milk for his pregnant wife Betty, who can’t sleep. It’s the night before his birthday – not Don Draper’s, but Dick Whitman’s. Suddenly he is lost in thought, recalling the circumstances of his, Dick Whitman’s, birth by a common whore. His natural mother dies immediately after delivering him and the midwife brings the baby to Dick’s stepmother, who had miscarried in previous attempts to have a child. A musical motif is playing as we watch this scene. We’ll hear it twice more later in the episode.

The first time the music returns is when Don is with the stewardess in the hallway of the hotel in Baltimore. This time he’s the one being chased. While not quite reluctant, he’s certainly reserved and there's a question about whether he’s really going to go through with it. When the stewardess expresses doubts about whether they should sleep together Don tells her, “It’s my birthday.” Coming from anyone else this would seem like a sleazy plea offered to convince the stewardess to bed down with him - “please sleep with me, it’s my birthday.” Coming from Don Draper it’s a release. He can tell her, a stranger whom he’ll never see again, that it’s his birthday. No one else can know.

The final time the music is heard is in the episode’s final scene, when Don and Betty tell their daughter Sally the circumstances of her own birth. Sally has just found the stewardess’s airline pin in Don’s luggage and assumes it’s a gift. As his betrayed wife puts the pin on Sally, Don is stricken with guilt about his infidelity (a reaction we’ve seen Sally provoke before, in an episode last season when Sally is in the bathroom with Don while he shaves.) At this moment the man with the dual identity he knows exactly what he is – an utter fraud.

As the episode’s initial scene closes, Don scrapes off the skin that has formed on the warm milk and discards it. This is meaningful though I’m not sure in what way. Are the makers of Mad Men saying that Don Draper can shed Dick Whitman as easy as skimming the skin off some milk, or are they saying that the skin, the veneer, the persona that Don Draper has constructed to cover who he really is – Dick Whitman – is starting to come off? As always with Mad Men, they keep you guessing but by the end of the episode I was guessing the latter.

Thus begins Mad Men’s third season and I think I’m getting the overall theme now, if there is one. (Forgive me if this seems like old news to you but I’m a slow learner.) The show about a group of people in the advertising business, whose job it is to construct an identity for the products they sell, is really about the identity we construct for our own selves, the veneer we put on day by day to show the outside world. Don Draper, Betty Draper, Peggy Olsen, Pete Campbell, Sal Romano, now even Joan Holloway, all have built an identity that is at odds, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot, with who they truly are. And so it is with us all. We’ve all got something to hide.

It is, of course, the tension between the constructed identity and the truth that makes Mad Men so compelling. The bombshell this week was the outing of Sal as a homosexual. He is horrified, as well he should have been, that Don knows his secret. In 1963 such news made public would brand him a social outcast and could well cost him his job and his wife. But Don’s reaction is perfect. The man who has spent a lifetime hiding who he really is simply tells Sal, in the context of describing a new ad campaign for London Fog raincoats, “limit your exposure.”

The other main threads were all set ups for future shows. Pete Campbell and Ken Cosgrove are made co-heads of accounts at Sterling Cooper. Their reaction to the news tells us much about the both of them, and sets up some future conflict. The cockamamie decision to make them co-heads is made by the new folks from London who are running the show now at Sterling Cooper. I like it that they make Lane Pryce, the new finance officer, seem to be a decent and reasonable sort, even if the London people are clearly the enemy. The show did the same thing with Duck Philips last year. He was a nice guy, not a stock villain, whose demise came as a result of a character flaw, his problem with the booze. You knew it would end badly for him but it was hard not to feel badly for him once the end finally came.

That said, I don’t think this was one of the show’s more successful episodes, but then I thought the same thing about last year’s season opener and season two turned out to be excellent. We saw little of the woman of the show and I hope this is remedied over the next few episodes. Betty, Peggy, and Joan are in many ways more interesting than some of the male characters. We saw little of Roger Sterling too, another reason the show seemed a bit off. One can’t get enough of Roger Sterling. Otherwise, it took a second viewing before I started to appreciate some of the more subtle aspect of the episode - almost all the show’s episodes benefit from a second viewing. You become aware of things you missed the first time around, like the Dick Whitman musical motif I described above. There is no on-the-nose dialog on Mad Men. People never say what they really mean. It must be teased out and even then it leaves you with questions. That ambiguity is part of what makes the show so fascinating.