Mad Men: "The Strategy"

Spoilers Follow:

Mad Men is the kind of show you contemplate deeply over a glass of scotch and a tome of Nietzsche. It’s chilly and detached and asks you to consider and analyze it seriously and critically.

And yet, it is also a series that is better than just about any other series at creating images and moments that are striking and remarkable and seem to speak for themselves. “The Strategy” features these moments in spades. Don and Peggy dancing. Pete sticking his beer in Trudy’s cake. Don, Peggy and Pete creating an ad-hoc family at Burger Chef. 

These are images that sneak up on you and get stuck in your craw. They cut through the existential chill and burst with intensity of feeling and emotion. 

A lot of this season has felt like it was building to the moment where Don and Peggy reconcile, and it just makes you have all the feels. These are two very fucked up, self-loathing people who forged new identities, and they only find an ease to living life when connecting one-on-one. They find satisfaction in their work and knowing that the other sees them for who they are and still loves and respects them.  And yet they find contentment in almost nothing else and that ruins them time and again; they love the work and they understand one another’s love for the job and their reasons for it. But it somehow is never enough. 

This final season has been plot-heavy, or as plot heavy as such a restrained show as Mad Men can be. Sally discovered Don’s job status in the second episode, Don returned to the agency in the third episode, and now by the sixth, and second-to-last for this first batch of episodes, Don and Peggy seem to have patched things up. 

These were all things that could have played out endlessly on loop but they’ve led to some of Mad Men’s best episodes this season and in some instances the whole run of the series (as I would contend with the excellent “A Day’s Work”). 

Mad Men more than just about any other show has characters who feel all too much like real human beings. Its pace, its tone, how it’s shot, and the way it’s written suggest a verisimilitude or realism. As Matt Zoller Seitz described it: “psychologically well-rounded characters moving through life”. The moments where the show and its characters open up feel so tremendous and potent because they have that quality of those rare instances of connection one experiences in life. 

Back in season two’s “For Those Who Think Young”, Don offered his aspiring protégée Peggy a piece of advice: “You are the product. You feeling something. That's what sells. Not them. Not sex. They can't do what we do and they hate us for it.” Don was referring to the way that the best ads and ad campaigns work, by playing off core, fundamental emotions; the best way to sell this is by having the copy writer place a piece of themselves into the ads. It’s this reason Don’s carousel speech back in “The Wheel” remains so very potent, and why Peggy’s pitch for Burger Chef here is solid but also feels like it’s missing something. The ad becomes superior when Peggy shifts it so it relates to her current experience as a now thirty year old working women who abandoned the potential life of a housewife. 

Back in season four's “The Summer Man” Don wrote into a journal: “We're flawed, because we want so much more. We're ruined, because we get these things, and wish for what we had.” Peggy is regretting the path she has gone down, or as Frank Sinatra croons the “way” she took. Don similarly regrets his actions and here sets right the ship by starting to fix the one relationship, outside of Sally, that truly matters. Don is staring back on the many lives he has lived, literally with his tendency to swap identities. Don states his bone-deep unhappiness to Peggy, “That I never did anything, and that I don't have anyone.”

At its core, Mad Men is a show about connection. Moreover, it’s about how people desperately desire to make connections with others but either often look for it in the wrong places or find themselves unhappy when they get those connections (It's in this way that I personally find that previous Don quote is literal: we the audience are the product and the show represents these very fundamental and hard to accept "truths" of human nature). Another Summer Man journal gem: “People tell you who they are, but we ignore it - because we want them to be who we want them to be.” The sad thing about that series of journal entries back in season four was that it was one of the last instances where Don attempted to be honest with himself and those around him, up until, of course, now. Don would quickly play hobo and marry Megan. That marriage has since crumbled into all but dust. (Another striking image: Megan and Pete’s former beau Bonnie in a plane about to take off towards California and away from shambling relationships). 

Consider how Bob miscalculates what he and Joan both want. Bob is a closeted gay hoping to form an arrangement that will help cover up things for him. With Chevy ditching SC&P, he’s now receiving a job with Buick, but to be a company man will necessarily be helped along with the American ideal of a family; Joan in the process would get a father for her son. Joan denies the offer because she'd rather be unmoored than settle for less than what makes her happy (a very Mad Men thing to yearn for).

Bob’s desire to forge a family, a fake one albeit, ties in with the Burger Chef campaign. The initial ad looked to sell people on a very outdated model of what it meant to have a family, the old, Eisenhower nuclear family. But the sixties have increasingly broken down that ideal standing in as what it means to have a family; the sexual revolution is in swing, the Summer of Love has occurred, divorce rates are on the rise, and feminism has helped break down the way men and women relate. Despite how this family ideal is a lie, (and remember that Don realizing it was a lie back in season four wrecked him, only for him to try and fail to recreate that ideal with Megan), Pete can’t accept Trudy dating other people and wanting to have nothing to do with him, nor his daughter for that matter; that family he once strove for is dead. So is the one Peggy could have had if she kept her child she had with Pete. But she chose a different family.

Now a family can be whoever sits with you at a burger joint. It may be, as Pete notes, more nebulous, but it feels right, and few shows can create moments that feel oh-so-right, so perfect and hauntingly beautiful in their design, like Mad Men; “The Strategy” has countless.