Land of Smoke and Mirrors

An Analysis of Mad Men’s Pilot Episode[1]

A well-dressed man sits alone at a small table in a smoke-filled bar, scribbling furiously on a napkin. The music (Don Cherry’s 1955 hit Band of Gold) and the surroundings let us know we’re somewhere in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s. From the way he’s scribbling and his pensive stare we know we’re looking at a man with a problem. An African-American waiter comes to his table and our business man asks him for a light. As he takes his first draw on the cigarette, the smoke hits his eyes and he squints, commenting on the waiter’s brand of choice – Old Gold. Our businessman is a Lucky Strike man. He asks him: “Why do you smoke Old Gold?” Why else? Habit. After a moment of conversation Lucky Strike and Old Gold share a joke and the waiter walks off, leaving our apparent hero to consider the crowd, all laughing, all drinking – all smoking. He frowns at them as if they hold the answer to all of his problems.

Over the next few scenes we are introduced to our well-dressed protagonist. He’s Don Draper, (John Hamm) a high-flying advertising executive. His spacious corner office, complete with a much frequented wet-bar, provides a base for a range of interactions with the characters we will come to know throughout the series. Here in the offices of Sterling Cooper Don forms one of the two principle lenses through which we are shown Mad Men’s world of the 1960s. When there’s a problem, everyone looks to Don for the answer. He is the brains behind Sterling Cooper; his name may not be on the building, but in this world he is the true master.

The other viewpoint comes in the form of a young woman, sublimely played by Elizabeth Moss, who joins the company steno pool for her first assignment as Don’s personal assistant. Through Peggy Olson we see this world in another way – that of a working woman prior to the advent of second wave feminism. She is openly leered at, and made the butt of sexual jokes. Her induction to the world, by Joan, (Christina Hendricks) the savvy top dog of the steno pool, is eye opening: she is told with the right moves she may be able to move to the city, but of course her best case career ambition is that she could find herself a husband and move to the country. But Peggy’s just not that kind of girl; you can see the desire to do right and fit in to this world – clashing against raw intelligence and ambition – just beneath the surface of her pale blue eyes.

When a junior account executive named Pete Campbell makes unseemly advances towards her it is Don who comes to her rescue. Here we see a defining moment for both characters: Don is not a man to suffer fools gladly, and puts Campbell in his place with devastating effectiveness. Campbell is young, eager and brash – all of which will get him into trouble if he doesn’t watch out. Don is at the top and rising still – Campbell at 26 is reasonably accomplished. He wants Don’s job, yet he still looks up to him and seeks to emulate his success. If Don is the hero then perhaps Campbell is the villain of the piece. But Mad Men is too clever, too inventive and too complex to make things so easy for us.

Indeed the show is made up of characters displaying startling complexity. We are shown snippets of their motivations, and the genius of the show is not what we are shown, but rather what is held back. We, the audience, are given the rare treat of being allowed to make up our own minds about what we are seeing. We must puzzle out what’s being said in the silences between the conversations. This is not a show that panders to its audience. I recently watched a talk[2] which said the secret to great writing is showing that 2 + 2 = 4, rather than simply showing you 4. Mad Men not only does that, but takes the idea a little further – it gives us information in fractions and leaves the final tally to us. It is a show seemingly designed for the DVD era in that it actually improves over multiple viewings. As the season progresses you realise there is so much going on beneath the surface. That’s not just in the interactions between the characters, or Don’s murky past, but also the show’s running commentary on the society of the sixties in America, and the implied reflection on the society of today. But most of that is just hinted at in this episode, and a disturbing final twist, which is sure to leave us wanting more (also adding new meaning to the song that played us in), gives us one last bit of perspective we lacked. And we realise that Don Draper may not be the hero we wanted him to be after all.

[1] ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, Mad Men, Season 1 Episode 1 (AMC, 2007) [television programme].

[2] Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story , (TED, Feb 2012), <http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_stanton_the_clues_to_a_great_story.html>, accessed 16.08.2013.