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.

Sunday’s Mad Men was mostly about conflicts between what you want and what you get, both sexually and professionally. This is one of the series’ dominant themes, but “Wee Small Hours” managed to mine some new ground while also acknowledging that they have covered most of this before.

Not surprisingly, Don controlled most of the episode this week. The Hilton account has proven to be difficult, but he clearly enjoys the challenge. On most occasions, Don seems to coast through his job, plucking brilliant ad campaigns out of thin air, sometimes right before meetings with clients. But Connie Hilton makes him work for it, and while that sometimes involves showing up to work at 5 AM, it also might prove more satisfying in the end. Essentially, Hilton’s challenging Don to prove that he’s still the same man who was born on a farm, regardless of whether or not he’s changed his name.

The flipside of this challenge is that it’s possible to disappoint the client. When Connie complains about the campaign Don produces not involving the moon, it’s the first time we’ve ever seen a client unhappy with something done directly by Don. In Connie’s eyes, he’s not a golden boy, just someone whose job it is to help him bring America to the world and cosmos. Don wants to be loved, but Connie will not love him — if anything, he’s more like his father than any other person in Don’s life.

Connie’s desires are also notable, because he’s the one person on the show to have so much money that he actually can get what he wants every time he wants it. His singular sense of purpose is unnerving — what kind of man wishes his family didn’t exist so he could work more? Does he overcompensate for his unhappiness at home by staying in the office? You can imagine him staying up at night, thinking of ways to keep a towel hot on the moon. In TV terms, Hilton is most similar to Deadwood’s gold-hungry George Hearst, a man hellbent on getting what he wants at any costs. Let’s just hope Connie doesn’t try to kill Harry Crane right after he talks to his dog.

So Don’s unhappy at work and typically uninterested by everything happening on Bullet Park Rd. We all know what that means: time to have an affair! At this point, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Don wants to cheat or that he’d be attracted to a hot, independent brunette interested in things other than puppy dogs and ice cream. It’s also tough to say it’s about the thrill of the chase, because he doesn’t seduce Miss Farrell so much as bed her by sheer force of will. As he says at her apartment, it should be enough that he wants her. There’s no logic — it’s all about satisfaction, the one thing that he can’t get at work.

Why does this hold our interest as viewers? It should be clear by now that Don isn’t going to stay faithful to Betty, and it’s not as if this represents a new path for him. Instead, it illuminates a different reason for his infidelity — dissatisfaction at work makes him stray, whereas before we assumed it was always related to problems at home.

Salvatore, on the other hand, had the opportunity to get professional and sexual satisfaction at the same time, except he turned it down and got neither. Salvatore’s one of the most tragic characters on the show, a tremendously talented art director whose sexual orientation threatens his life at home and work. His refusals of sex have always been seen in terms of what they would do to his career, as if his job were the one thing maintaining his sanity. Now that’s gone, and he’s hanging out in parks (I assume it was Central Park, at least) and having sex with random men. It’s what he wanted, in a way, but he gets it in the most depressing way possible. He can presumably get another job, but who knows what happens to his psyche.

Then there’s Betty, who I hesitate to include in this group because it’s so difficult to know what she wants even when she says she wants something. It’s common to think of Don as the biggest enigma on Mad Men, but Betty is far more confusing for viewers; she’s so rarely self-aware that dream sequences might provide the best insight into her mind. Betty likes the idea of having an affair with Henry Francis, I suppose, but she also never fully commits to it and doesn’t understand basic adultery protocol like not seeing each other too much in the married woman’s home. It’s easy to think she broke off her meetings with Henry because she wants to be a good mother, but I’m not convinced that any of these desires can be given primacy over others in the broad sense of her life. It’s more likely that she was just acting on momentary impulses again, not sure of what she really wants beyond the moment. And while that might be difficult to explain or fit into standard discussions of fictional characters, it makes her the most realistic and fascinating character on the series.