Before Mad Men, Matthew Weiner worked on HBO's The Sopranos, another show that deserves a spot on prestige TV's Mount Rushmore. Despite its undeniable quality and cultural impact, the aspect of The Sopranos that is most often discussed is its ambiguous, open-ended finale. In some ways, I think that endless debate hobbled Weiner when it came time to end Mad Men. If any show would have benefited from an uncertain, unresolved ending, it would have been the realistically irresolute Mad Men. Instead, the show's finale felt closer to something like Friday Night Lights, another accomplished series. FNL ended in a flurry of crowd-pleasing resolutions that assured audiences that the characters they had grown to know and love would all be okay in the end. As a way to end a series, it's not terrible, but as a way to end Mad Men, it rings a little false.
The problem Mad Men was always going to run up against when it came time to end the show was that its protagonist, Don Draper, is an unstoppable force and a finale is an immovable object. Throughout the series, up to and including the finale, Don prescribes endless forward progress. In many ways, the show has followed his lead. Things progress naturally and relentlessly, on-screen and off. Every story that doesn't end in death continues, whether we see it or not. The characters are so complex and full that we believe their lives continue off-screen. When they return years later, like Midge, Don's beatnik girlfriend from the first season, it feels natural. Similarly, characters disappear without closure, just as some people drift out of our lives for good. Faye, once the presumed future Mrs. Draper, disappears just as suddenly as Don marries Megan. Fan-favorite Sal is fired and never returns, while Duck stumbles back over and over. These characters flow in and out of each other's lives in a realistic, arbitrary way, and their lives have followed the same pattern. How can you satisfyingly resolve a show that has so staunchly refused satisfying resolution?
Aspects of the finale felt too neat to feel like real life, to feel like Mad Men. The most obvious example is the resolution of the Peggy/Stan relationship. Their love confession played like a romantic comedy, albeit one of the greatest rom-com love confessions since When Harry Met Sally. The scene is well-written and Elisabeth Moss is terrific in it, but it doesn't feel like a scene from Mad Men. Romance on the show has never played out like this, with unambiguous optimism and finality. In fact, nothing on the show has ever played out like that. The scene and the confirmation of the relationship in general felt like fan-service in the same way that Friday Night Lights used its finale to assure the audience that the Taylors' relationship was strong, or to hint that Tim and Tyra might someday be able to make it work. It's not wrong for a show like FNL where the underlying tone has always been heartwarming and uplifting, but on a more realistic show, like Mad Men, it rings false. As good as the scene was, as charming and as sweet as it was, did the audience really need to see it? We've felt the reality of Stan and Peggy's relationship for some time now. Fans have known where it was headed. If we'd just gotten the final shot of Stan giving Peggy a back rub while she works late, wouldn't we have put it together ourselves? Peggy is the character we root for the most, and it feels good to see her happy, but seeing it happen like this, especially right on the heels of that phone call from Don, doesn't feel organic to the show.
By comparison, Roger and Marie's romantic ending feels a little more real. Peggy's relationship is undoubtedly a victory. All series long, she has been searching for a balance of love and work, a relationship with a partner who will appreciate and support her ambition. Stan checks off everything on her list like he was made-to-order. Roger's relationship with Marie is more complicated. Joan describes it as "messy," and it is. In the course of the finale, we see them struggle with a language barrier and clashing personalities; it's not a perfect relationship by any stretch, but it's still progress for Roger, who has spent the series chasing younger women. Marie is finally an age-appropriate match, and we can feel optimistic about Roger's future with her without feeling like their story ends there. By contrast, Peggy and Stan's story felt cut off, the same way a rom com ends after the music swells and the camera pans out on the big kiss. Roger and Marie's story feels unfinished, which is to say it feels like Mad Men.
Joan and Pete have similar victorious moments that still feel open-ended. The Joan we see in the pilot embraces and enforces the patriarchy in a way the Joan of the finale refuses to do. She's grown and deepened as a character, and we leave her stronger and braver, but hungrier. Joan still has obvious desires that remain unfulfilled by the finale. Her relationship with Richard has ended disappointingly, and her business is just beginning, still being run out of her apartment. There are still obvious ways for her to fail and succeed, for her story to continue. Pete, even though he succeeds in rebuilding his family and appears to have renounced his futile ambitions to be the next Don Draper, ends the series on a similar note. He has certainly grown from the petty, jealous, insecure young man we meet in the first season. He can say to Peggy, honestly and cheerfully, that she is more talented than he is. He seems happier and more stable, but he's also uprooting his family, and Trudy has made it clear that she is not forgiving the past, even if she's ready to try for a future. Pete still has a lot of work to do, and nothing about his future feels guaranteed. When he and Peggy have their final scene (perhaps the best farewell scene of the series), they speak of her future professional success as if it's assured and, as an audience, we feel the same way. The only question is if it will really take her until 1980 to become her own boss. When we wonder about these characters, these fake people who have become so real over the course of the series, we won't wonder about Peggy the way we will about Sally or Joan or Pete. We worry about the others in a way we won't worry about Peggy anymore. Peggy got everything she wanted and, on a show that has been so centered on what it means to want, it felt too neat.
Don's finale moment is more complicated, because it can be read several ways. In a finale that largely lacked ambiguity, Don's final moments on the series are perhaps the most open to interpretation. I don't think there is any doubt that Don returns to McCann Erickson and writes the "I want to buy the world a Coke" ad that closes the series. Coke has been dangled in front of Don for seasons, since the first season in fact, and was strongly foreshadowed several times over the course of the final season. The woman manning the desk at the Californian retreat is echoed in the commercial, the repetition of the ribbons and braided pigtails and peasant top as effective as seeing Don's signature. The ambiguity arises in the question of what the ad means to Don.
Mad Men has been, in a lot of ways, a celebration of capitalistic creativity. Don and Peggy are obviously creative, and good at their jobs, but their creativity is still work, and still about making money and being recognized. The art they create is not art for art's sake, and, in fact, the show has little sympathy or patience for idealistic artist types. For Don and Peggy, their work is about consumerism, and when it is successful, it lives at the intersection of emotion and need, desire and necessity. Like the Burger Chef pitch, it's not just about the ideal of motherhood and family-bonding - the children are hungry. In some ways, the final episodes have examined the similarity between Don and Weiner, two creatives who are concerned about their legacy and are trying to create art that functions with the world. The empty SC&P offices felt like a struck set. The way the characters have moved onto new projects feels like a cast going their separate ways at the end of a show's run. Don's work throughout the series has often been about itself, aware of what it's selling and why. How aware is Don's Coke ad? Is he still talking about advertising, about the way he sells people the idea that they can buy a feeling? Is Don's enlightenment real?
Given the tone of the rest of the episode, I would say Don believes he has achieved enlightenment. Some have read the ad as a cynical attempt to package counterculture to sell sugar and call it universal love, and this interpretation is certainly valid, but we see Don make unprecedented personal progress in the finale. He reaches out to those closest to him (Sally, Peggy, Betty) via person-to-person call, where the finale gets its name, a title that reinforces the idea of Don connecting. He is able to break down with each of them in separate ways, to be raw and open, but it isn't until Leonard's confession at the retreat that Don bridges the distance physically. Throughout the series, Don is always telling people to stop crying, to put their feelings aside, to have a drink and move forward. During the course of his walkabout tour of America, he has been slowly unburdening himself of his possessions and his past, confessing not only Don Draper's secrets but Dick Whitman's as well. This hug is a moment between both halves of Don: Dick, the unloved child of a whore, and Don, the man who is obsessed with status. Leonard's breakdown is about the fear that no one sees his value, that he wouldn't recognize love if he received it, and rather than recoiling and attempting to suppress the breakdown, Don/Dick embraces him. He accepts his own fear, and we next see him comfortably still, no longer racing West in a fast car or scattering himself across the country. He sits on the edge of a cliff at the edge of the country, nowhere further to go, smiling easily and uttering an "ohm" that sounds like "home," like finally finding a place he no longer needs to leave. His enlightenment feels real, at least to him.
But how many times have we seen Don reinvent himself only to fall back into his old tricks? Is this another case of reinvention, or is it true self-acceptance, Don finally at peace with both sides of himself? Don has come to California on spiritual quests before, and he has always returned to New York and reverted to the same Don we've known for seven seasons. There is no concrete evidence that this won't happen again. If his enlightenment is read as real (which, given the tone of the rest of the episode, I believe is the case) then it feels overly sentimental and again, not like Mad Men. The hug he shares with Leonard doesn't quite feel real either. It feels like the same ghosts that have haunted Don across the country, a dream-like vision of his own subconscious. In some ways, having this moment with a stranger in a strange place it lowers the stakes of the moment.
Up to this point, Don's biggest moments of vulnerability have felt vividly real, full of real risk and real catharsis. When he tells Betty about Dick Whitman, when he tells Hershey about growing up in a whorehouse, even when he tells a group of veterans about how he accidentally killed the original Don Draper, we are aware of the stakes, of Don's vulnerability and bravery. These confessional moments have been out of place before - an impersonal home office, a professional conference room, a festive fundraiser - but now the setting encourages revelation. It's group therapy: Don's behavior here is accepted, even encouraged. This is the way he is supposed to act in this situation. Something had to happen to Don here, to get him to the Coke ad in a way that made his enlightenment real. Something had to touch him. But, to quote an earlier scene in the episode: does the hug feel honest? It feels honest in the moment, but what makes this moment of understanding and acceptance last outside this room? What's to say that Don will take this new-found emotional openness back to to New York, where this behavior is no longer the norm?
I think the show suggests that he reconciles this in the Coke ad, that he takes this feeling of self-acceptance, this urge to reach out to a stranger, and translates it into a language that sells a product without losing any of the sincerity of the impulse. In the famous Hershey and Kodak pitches, we see how much more comfortable Don is expressing and speaking of affection as a product, an item he can use as shorthand for words he has trouble saying. The tone of the finale, the neatness and optimism of the other stories, suggests that Don is honestly expressing his new outlook through the medium that has always most comfortable to him. It's an interesting choice, and perhaps the most heartwarming ending possible for a character who has spent so much of the show being unable (and often uninterested in even trying) to form connections with the people around him, up to and including his own children.
Peggy and Don are our protagonists, the characters we have spent the most time with, invested the most emotion in, and yes, it feels good to see them succeed, but the neatness of it galls. Peggy arrives on the show looking for a husband and a career, and she leaves with both. Don begins searching for himself and a legacy that will outlast him; he ends the series with both. On his podcast, Hollywood Prospectus, Andy Greenwald pointed out that long-running series often suffer from this same problem, that their pilots and their finales don't feel like part of the same show. So much rides on these two episodes alone that there is almost no way to create them in a way that satisfies everything an audience wants from them.
As a pilot, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" is a fantastic piece of television. We meet characters that we find compelling, we are exposed to an environment we find intriguing, but we are also presented with a twist: Don's family. It sets up the world and the characters, but it reveals information in a way that, looking back, does not feel like Mad Men. The reveal of Don's wife and children is a "gotcha" that the show doesn't repeat. The truth about Don's past comes out slowly, piece by piece, spun out over the course of several seasons. The pilot suffers from the same narrative neatness of the finale, but it doesn't diminish the legacy of Mad Men at all, not least because Mad Men has never been about beginnings and endings. The format of a story demands these things, these set points of reference, but Mad Men, from the second episode of the first season to the thirteenth episode of the seventh, has resisted them. It has been a show about stories that are realer than the format allows.
By adhering to the format, Weiner lost some of the tone, but he has lost none of his legacy. In its middle episodes, on its own terms, Mad Men has been one of the most ambitious, densest, most literary shows of all time. Audiences are inevitably polarized by finales in their immediate wake, but by distancing the tone of the finale from the tone of the show itself, it's possible that Weiner has intentionally separated the two. Perhaps it would have been more satisfying if the show had kept to its ambiguous, complicated tone in its final episode, but it's equally like that it would have suffered the same fate as The Sopranos: reduced to its final moments.
No comments:
Post a Comment