Mad Men Episode Commentary: The Doorway

Call me a moralist, but ever since the beginning of Mad Men, I have been waiting to see the likes of Don Draper, Roger Sterling, Pete Campbell, Harry Crane, et al, to finally face a sort of greater reckoning for their profligacy, their greed, their callousness, and their self-absorption. I have been waiting for some dormant yet ubiquitous ordering force to step into the chaos of their unbridled appetites and reinforce a sense of order, a sense that when you choose to dedicate your life to the satisfaction of your own basest drives, there are consequences.

I have been waiting for five seasons to see justice—whether it is Don Giovanni’s Commendatore breaking through the floor of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce or Phillip K. Dick’s Ubik declaring its primacy over Creative’s latest jingle—step in and assert once more a comforting order to the Cosmos.

Needless to say, I have been disappointed. The most notable aspect of this series has been the absence of real consequences for any of these characters’ actions. Don’s narcissism has only deepened as the former lovers pile up, Roger’s free ride through life only seems to become more fun as the 60s really get swinging, Pete Campbell is repaid for his callous lack of manners with the ever-growing esteem and respect of his peers. These mad men stay mad because nobody sets them straight.

That might be changing.

“The Doorway,” the premiere of Mad Men’s sixth season, could begin a long-awaited (at least for me!) settling of metaphysical accounts. First off, this was an episode about Don and Roger, despite the storylines involving Peggy and Betty. We see Don and Roger (Pete sits most of this episode out, as does Joan, another character with sins to atone for, as the pre-show recap of last season told us) at the moment when the tide turns in the tortoise-and-hare race of their self-image and their reality.

Don Draper is not a real person. He created himself from whole cloth one horrible day in Korea in the early 1950s. He exchanged his own broken life for that of a man killed by the carelessness of Dick Whitman, his former self. Lonely, unloved, cowardly, and cracked to his core, Dick Whitman smoothed out that crack with a shiny, coiffed surface, an unflappable façade—the new Don Draper, simultaneously a family man and a libertine, a leader and a loner, a paragon of professional rectitude whose entire existence is a lie.

And until now, he has mostly gotten away with it.

But while vacationing in Hawaii, Don’s incoherence gets laid bare. He meets Private Dinkins, on leave from Vietnam. He is here for a couple days to marry his sweetheart, after which the dutiful Private Dinkins will return to Vietnam to do his duty, whether he likes to or not. He will march back out to the possible death that Dick Whitman simply could not stomach. His only hope: that maybe having a bride to return to will give him something to fight for.

After all, for Private Dinkins, it’s like the inscription on his zippo lighter: “In life, we often have to do things that are just not our bag.”

For someone as amorally self-indulgent as Don Draper, a man who created a new life based upon his own rules, it might as well say “In life, sometimes we have to flap our arms and fly like a bird.”

Don accidentally brings that lighter back to New York with him, and nothing looks the same.

Roger Sterling. For me, no character in this show is more loathsome, less deserving of the good fortune that consistently comes his way, or more indicative of the moral bankruptcy of so much of American life. Don may be a lie, but it is a lie that he worked hard on. Roger is a man who has lived a life of luxury, comfort, and joy, not even a smidgen of which he has earned. His silver hair represents the silver spoon in his mouth. His quick wit and glib demeanor—and the almost universal love given this odious man by Mad Men fans—is a perfect metaphor for the shallowness and vacuity of what America celebrates.

Roger is such a self-deceiving moral halfwit that he cannot even begin to understand what his mother’s death actually means to him, because he never even once took the time to appreciate or even register her love for him. And the only way he can come to understand it is by making her memorial service into a self-indulgent scene, ruining any chance for anyone to achieve closure. Nope, it is all about Roger, and anyone who may have come to pay respects to their friend can get the hell out of his house while he lies down atop their fur coats and pouts.

But then justice showed up. Roger, feeling the hurt of his mother’s death, and after being rejected sexually by his former wife—whom he dumped for his atrocious secretary—whom he in turn discarded a few years later—seeks some solace from his daughter, realizing the connections he has ignored.

And guess what? The lovely girl reminds Roger of the only reason anyone has to care about him: she yokes him for cash.
Contrast these scenes to the less compelling but necessary counterpoints of Betty Francis and Peggy. From where they are, they both grow to a certain extent, taking the initiative to solve a problem that initially seems beyond their depth, and learning something about the world and themselves. Betty is still a frightening semi-sociopath, but she gains some understanding of how she got where she is. Peggy handily deals with a crisis at work, and gains greater esteem from her new boss.

Mad Men has been the story of an extended bachelor party thrown by Roger Sterling and Don Draper for themselves, a costume ball where everybody else shows up as exactly what Roger and Don want them to be, and Roger and Don show up as the ringmasters of their own sex and alcohol-fueled circus. It was a fun party—for them, and not the people they destroyed along the way.

But it looks like it might all be over along with 1967.