Plasma Pool

This essay is part of “Point-Hyperpoint: Mad Men,” a rollicking series of posts devoted to discussing AMC’s drama series. Spoilers abound. To read the entire series, please visit this page. To see all of Plasma Pool’s “Point-Hyperpoint” discussions, please click here.

Before getting into this week’s episode, I’d like to talk about the Hilton family. Every time Chelcie Ross appears as Conrad Hilton, I cannot stop thinking about his great-granddaughter Paris, the universally beloved socialite and sex-tape star. On Mad Men, Conrad stands out as an old-fashioned, no-nonsense man in a business world increasingly involved in a less scrupulous game. After all, he was initially attracted to Don because he was another man willing to get his hands dirty, and that apparent connection has informed their relationship over the last three episodes. You could see Connie’s disappointment on Sunday when Don showed up late to work — how could a man who makes an Old Fashioned from scratch come in after everyone else in the office? What ever happened to an honest day’s work?

We’ve talked a lot over the last few weeks about Mad Men being about the Rise of the Boomers and how it pushed out a lost generation too young to fight in World War II and too old to drop acid with gurus and dropouts. The series depicts the end of a way of life, and if Conrad Hilton represents the embodiment of it, then Paris is the figurehead of what it has become. She’s the ultimate celebrity, a woman-child famous for partying a lot and the voice of a generation who wants nothing more to be seen, preferably in a quantifiable way that may or may not lead to anything other than substanceless recognition. (This is what the adults tell me about my generation, at least. I don’t actually know anyone like this.) It does not strike me as a coincidence that Matthew Weiner and Co. had Don get involved with a Hilton — there are plenty of other wealthy people with name recognition and a need for a good adman that he could have run into behind a bar at a New York country club. The Hilton name signifies something very different in 2009 than it did in 1963, and that dissonance says a lot about the culture shift that informs much of the series.

It’s worth noting that Don isn’t much like the man Connie sees. Don talks about not needing a contract because his word is strong as oak and why can’t we all have a drink and shake hands, but he’s much more interested in the freedom it provides. If he wanted, he could up and leave the advertising industry and New York one day with no legal consequences. Back in Season One, he wanted to run away with Rachel Mencken once it was clear Pete was willing to reveal the Dick Whitman facts to Bert Cooper. With a contract, decisions like that one become much less probable — a legally binding document ties him to the company for a fixed period of time.

This is all bullshit, of course, because the fact is that Don is tied to New York and his family no matter what happens. When Don proposed his plan to Rachel, she mocked it for the half-baked scheme it clearly was; Don wasn’t thinking about very obviously was acting like a little boy. The same applies to his jaunt to LA in Season Two: the possibility was there that he wouldn’t go back, but we all knew that would never happen. Don can’t and won’t run away — he feels too much obligation to his family and has too much of a life in Ossining to ever leave it. No matter how dissatisfied he is now with his life, it was once his dream. And dreams die hard.

I’ve mentioned before that I generally dislike the Dick Whitman plotlines. I typically find them unnecessary to Don’s mental state — why not just make him a poor farmboy named Don Draper who worked his way to the world of Manhattan advertising and found that the dream isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? But the contract business is one situation where I think the Whitman business is wholly necessary, and not just Bert Cooper blackmailed Don into signing it with veiled threats of revealing that information. Don isn’t going to leave his life in advertising or in Ossining, but he still takes comfort in the idea that this life is somehow not real, and that he could go back to being Dick Whitman and go live somewhere else if he really wanted. The contract represents commitment to the Life of Draper, even if just for three years, and that’s a very frightening thought for him.

What he’d really like to do, it seems, is be like the hitchhikers he picks up towards the end of the episode: run around, do drugs, make out, run away from responsibility, etc. Some writers/recappers have suggested that this is Don playing at being Dick Whitman, but I’m not sure any of us really knows what Dick Whitman is at this point in Don’s life. More accurately, this is Don playing at being Not Draper, someone with few commitments who can hallucinate in hotel rooms and go on his merry way. The problem with all this is that he’s never stopped being Don Draper the whole time, and Don Draper can get hit in the back of the head and have his money stolen by teenagers. Even Paris Hilton, the woman with no responsibilities in the world, sometimes has her jewelry stolen.

In his recap of this week’s episode, Alan Sepinwall said that this episode signaled the Death of Dick Whitman. But Dick Whitman’s been dead since he assumed a dead man’s identity in Korea — there is only Don Draper now. The change is that he’s finally had to acknowledge it.