Plasma Pool

I am not going to talk about Sunday’s episode at length. At this point, I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that I prefer Mad Men as an accumulation of bizarre and poignant moments rather than a show with thematically consistent episodes full of dramatic developments. This is all a complicated way of saying that I loved last week’s episode, “The Good News,” especially the last half when Don returns from L.A. Unfortunately, I was unable to write about it due to a death in the family, and I don’t want to make this week’s piece a rehash of things I loved from that hour. So let me just note that while I still really like the show, it desperately needs some dramatic tension surrounding Don for this season to be a success. That will likely be the topic of next week’s post, barring any huge unforeseen developments.

With that in mind, I’d like to talk about a character who factored into “The Rejected” heavily but has never been talked about at length on Plasma Pool: Pete Campbell, accounts executive.

For me, Pete has always been the show’s most enigmatic character. That may seem like an odd statement given that Don Draper’s whole character is structured as an enigma, but there are key differences between Don and Pete that make the latter much more difficult to pin down. Don, for all his mystery and deadpan stares into the distance, remains a relatively easy character to place into the larger Mad Men world. Yes, it’s often difficult to know just how much the audience is supposed to like him, but his role on the show is simple to explain: his pursuit of the American Dream failed even as he realized every goal he wanted, and he now finds himself in existential limbo. If you don’t agree with that exact description, no matter: my basic point is that we can all agree on his fundamental conflicts and role as protagonist.

The same can be said of other characters, as long as you’re willing to be a bit reductive. Roger is old money and the pseudo-aristocracy with all the arrogance that comes with that status; Joan feels connected to the old way of doing things while still wanting to prove herself as a woman of intellectual worth; Peggy is the innocent young girl becoming a new-guard woman; Betty plays a princess of a wife in public but exhibits just how much that position can rot away at a person’s psyche. I’ll stop here; feel free to assign your own stereotypical roles to other characters in the comments.

Pete is more complicated in a way that suggests Matthew Weiner and Co. don’t really know what to do with him. On one hand, he’s a sort of evolutionary Roger Sterling in that he comes from very old money and has little of the status that comes along with it outside of his mother’s maiden name. He struggles with that legacy, looking to hold onto it — witness the amazing dance with wife Trudy at Roger’s garden party last season — as he also proves himself to be a forward-thinking businessman willing to advertise to specific racial and cultural markets. He wants to succeed in business but has difficulty asserting himself.

In his personal life, he clearly loves his amazingly loyal, creepily proper wife while also feeling some connection to Peggy due to their first-episode tryst and the resulting absent child. He’s drawn to both poles of the ‘60s feminine spectrum but not completely comfortable with either. In a way, Pete walks in both the old and new worlds of Mad Men while not choosing either.

That’s unique on this show. Characters like Joan and Peggy are also caught between two worlds, but they appear to have made their choices about where they want to be, or at least chosen to take one path for the time being. And even when one of these other characters doesn’t make a choice (like Don, who seems unwilling to do anything right now), they show self-awareness about their position. However, Pete usually simply acts with little consideration for how it fits into his larger personal narrative. In “The Rejected,” he wrestles the Vicks Chemical account from his father-in-law not to make any larger personal point, but simply because it suits his career standing. Last season, he neglected to attend Margaret Sterling’s wedding because he didn’t feel like it in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. He wants to be well-liked and respected by his colleagues but ultimately acts rather petulantly and feels like he deserves these things as a birthright. By that description, he’s some sort of hybrid of Biff Loman and Patrick Bateman, except Pete has a relationship with his wife that casts him as far more stable than either of those characters.

To be fair to the show’s creators, Vincent Kartheiser doesn’t help make things any clearer in his portrayal of Pete. On a show where most actors deploy a characteristically modern style that suggests a strong inner life, Kartheiser is far more mannered and stagy. If this worked extremely well, Pete would appear to be awkward and unsure of himself in this world. The problem is that Kartheiser doesn’t always get it right, and it’s often hard to tell how much of the performance is within Pete’s character and how much is Kartheiser struggling with the part. (Note: There are times when this struggle for an actor can be an essential part of a film or show — just look at Summer Phoenix in Arnaud Desplechin’s Esther Kahn for a perfect example.) With the show in its fourth season, this is something you hope would have been worked out already, but Pete remains confusing as played by an actor who seems unsure of himself.

Then again, maybe the problem has to do with context rather than the character himself. Mad Men often calls attention to itself as a show about the transition from one American culture to another. For the most part, characters understand that something is changing and that they can go with it or remain old-fashioned. Pete, though, seems more interested in instant gratification; he likes being part of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce because he’s been accepted, not because he’s part of a cutting-edge team. In other words, he’s not caught between worlds, he just acts in a way that seems right to him with little thought of how it makes him a consistently explicable person.

To put it another way, he’s a difficult character because he acts like a human being, not a character on a series about a particular era in American history. I don’t mean that as an insult to the show, which I still consider to be the best thing on television right now. It’s only meant as a reminder that what we usually want out of entertainment is something far different from what we get in everyday life.