The Wheel
In the season one finale of Mad Men, Don Draper and the viewer face the reality of the situation.
In my opinion, the show’s crowning achievement lies in this episode. Though Season 4’s The Suitcase, season 3’s The Grown Ups, and even the pilot episode come close, The Wheel is Weiner’s best showcase of storytelling and is prominently the reason why Mad Men continues to be my favorite show of all time.
The narrative of season one is an assault on nostalgia. From the closing scene of the pilot (in which it is revealed that Don is an adulterer) to Don’s final pitch to Kodak in the finale, there is a theme that the show’s story is trying to describe: nostalgia can be a cynical lie. The Wheel sticks this landing with an emotional pitch of Kodak’s Carousel and Don’s outright packaging of nostalgia to be sold to the American public.
In ensuing seasons, we will learn WHO Don Draper is, we will learn of the many people in his past and present, we will see his emotional narrative. In the first season, Mad Men sticks with showing us WHAT Don Draper is. That is, what Don represents. If Mad Men is a rumination on America’s faults, Don is a rumination on the fraudulency of the American Dream. In the pilot, Draper is presented as a wildly successful genius advertiser. He is highly regarded by his peers, he is handsome and confident, he is an American business titan. For the first hour, Mad Men presents Don as a master of his time. Advertising is about to enter it’s golden era and the show is seemingly set to make Don the driver of it all. Then, little by little, we pick away at this. Don is an adulterer, Don is an emotionally manipulative father stuck in a cycle of his own upbringing, Don Draper isn’t even his real name.
Draper’s faults are laid bare, you are not supposed to like this man. He is handsome, he is charming, he is confident, he is terrible. This is the true nature of the idea of the American Dream. A sales pitch that has been given to multiple generations. It is confident in itself, but underneath it is a lie. Draper’s success is constantly against the backdrop of what actually made him and who he actually is. For all intents and purposes, Don is the personification of the American Dream. Both in its idealized state and its reality. He is a farm boy, a veteran who rose from poverty to the tallest towers of New York City. He owns a home, a car, and has a beautiful family. But all of that is built on a lie he told once and continues to tell today. Don stole his name from his dead commanding officer so that he could escape Korea and his family. With it, he stole a new life. In that life, he built his dream. His own life was not a successful one. He knows that Dick Whitman would never leave that farm and would die in the same poverty his father did. Don didn’t rise from poverty like the American Dream wants you to believe. He stole an opportunity and squeezed it. The American Dream is less about hard work and talent (though Don/Whitman has those) and more about luck. Whitman could’ve died in Korea instead of the real Don Draper, but he didn’t. Yes, Whitman/Draper built his new life with actual hard work. The success is his own. But without an explosion in Korea and some swapped dog tags, there is no evidence it would’ve happened on merit alone. Whitman abandoning the hand he was dealt for a new life is perhaps the biggest reason he sits in his corner office.
Beyond that, Don is a broken man. Under that confidence and good looks lies a man overrun with sadness and anxiety. Though the first season doesn’t dive into the many nuances of Don’s broken psyche, it shows us he is riddled by the trauma of his past and unable to enjoy his own success. Don is the picture perfect prototype of what the American Dream likes to sell as itself on the outside and what it actually is on the inside.
On top of the very unsubtle packaging of Don’s life as a lie, Don’s continual transgressions and unethical behavior are a commentary on the nostalgia America holds for it’s past and it’s Dream.
In the pilot, we are introduced to the year 1960 in all of it’s glory. The clothing, the décor, the advertising. This is a time Americans like to remember fondly. Baby boomers and their parents will often long for the days when things were cheaper, easier, and made here. But just as it does with Don as it’s main focus, the show peels back this glory to show a country and time full of fault. Women are sexually harassed constantly, you don’t ever see a black man work above the first floor, the executives of Sterling Cooper are entitled, whiny, and constantly cheating on their partners. These are things America likes to push under the rug when it talks about 1960. Mad Men shows them as the key points of life. A lot of the key moving themes throughout the show center around the changing world leaving these men and these societal ills behind, but the arc of season one presents these ills as commonplace and without push back from major characters. It’s not a phony period drama where the main character says “now folks, sexism is wrong I think!” so that we can feel good about the people in this time. These are just regular people and they do regular things within the society they reside. This means sexism, racism, homophobia. Everyone from this time likes to pretend they were the ones that stood up to it but as Mad Men shows with even the strongest of it’s characters, they likely just fell in line.
In The Wheel, the show forces us to confront this attack on nostalgia head on. In Don’s story, his wife’s story, and the pitch to Kodak.
In the episode, Don is recovering from his life nearly falling apart. Rival executive Pete Campbell had revealed his true identity the previous episode and for much of the time, Draper was terrified of the consequences. He runs to his current affair, Rachel Menken, and begs her to run away with him. Begs her to go anywhere but here. She refuses, obviously. Seeing through Don’s plea as not a confession of love but a panic response and explaining to him that that just isn’t how the world works (even though for him, it kinda is). Don eventually escapes the reveal without consequence thanks to Burt Cooper’s first love (money) but is visibly rattled by the ordeal.
The finale begins with Don’s wife Betty getting frustrated by him not wanting to travel to Thanksgiving. He is making up an excuse about work to get out of the long drive. Betty is forced to confront her fears that Don is unfaithful when a friend reveals her husband is calling some woman late at night without her knowledge. Later, she reveals to her therapist she has felt like this for a while. The culture of the 60’s probably gave Don more runway for infidelities (he stays in the city to work some nights) but it is difficult to maintain such acts. Betty feels it in subtle ways, she has no proof but the viewer can see she knows she’s right.
The Draper family is another assault on nostalgia by Weiner. On the front, Betty is the perfect American housewife with Don by her side as the successful New York businessman. If you took their picture with their children, you’d have a Normal Rockwell painting. But Don is an adulterer and a manipulative father and husband, in an earlier episode he gets so drunk he leaves his daughter’s birthday party then returns with a dog as an apology. Betty is also not as she seems. Through an inappropriate relationship with a neighbor boy Glen Bishop, you see that Betty has always been betrayed by the way society treats women. Don’s infidelity (as well as her therapists betrayal in sharing his session notes with Don) has forced her to realize society is making her isolated. It is not appropriate and is often downright creepy, but Betty can only truly open up to Glen. She can’t be candid with Don, she can’t share actual feelings with a therapist, the neighborhood wives would all gossip if she shared any anxieties with them. Betty is a broken person, traumatized by her mother and her modeling days, weighed down by American culture’s expectations, but she cannot show cracks. She must be a housewife, a mother, a friend to her community. The question is presented, has Betty Draper ever really lived a day as herself? Has she ever been allowed to? Has anyone in this show?
In the episode’s climax, Don makes a pitch to Kodak. In this, we have another loop. One of the key workings of Mad Men is it’s ability to keep the show in the same plot loop. There are clients, there is business, there are pitches. Even as the show grows and characters change positions or offices, this is the structured nature. In the pilot’s climax, Don makes a pitch to Lucky Strike cigarettes that showcases both the value and the cynicism of advertising. Cigarettes are under attack after a Reader’s Digest article linking them to cancer and Don spins the narrative by simply refusing to talk about it. So many cigarette brands are trying to cut off the claims or dispute them, Draper says to simply sell your product as it is. “Other cigarettes cause cancer, Lucky Strikes are toasted”.
With season’s close and Kodak, Don shows even more clearly how cynical advertising is. Though he presents his pitch beautifully (and moves Harry Crane to tears), the entire ordeal for the viewer is a cynical look at how easy it is to spin nostalgia. Draper talks about how all good advertising is nostalgia, that it targets the emotion for how potent it is. He then turns on Kodak’s Carousel machine (the product they are hoping to market) and shows a slideshow of his life. Pictures of him and Betty, his kids, his home life. We as viewers know this is all fraudulent. Don is cheating on Betty, he is rarely around for his kids, he is actively refusing to go home right now, he tried to abandon them all a week ago. But, with this pitch, he easily wins over the Kodak executives. Don sells nostalgia through his personal life, the vision of an idealized American family, even though it isn’t at all what his life is. Don even says the line “it takes us to a place where we know we’ve always been” when he himself has never been there.
If the entire season has been Mad Men’s attack on how America feels about it’s past, this is the killing stroke. Through Draper’s pitch, the show brings back it’s primary assault on advertising. This is a cynical play at emotion. Packaging how you feel about your own family and selling it right back to you. Just last episode, Don was willing to throw all of these people away and move. Now, he pitches their love as product. American nostalgia is built on the lie that the nuclear family was the ideal state of being. But through this episode, we see the truth. American culture is just as flawed and broken as Don Draper but here we are in a board room, watching them sell it to us as perfect and loving.
The episode ends with Draper facing the consequences of his earlier actions. Though we initially see him return home just in time to catch his family and surprise them by going along to Thanksgiving, it’s revealed this is a daydream, a desire. Don returns home to a quiet house, his family has left him as he requested. This ultimately foreshadows the ensuing seasons, Don will be left behind by a world he can no longer bend to his will. He asked Betty to go without him, so she did. He realizes he wants to go with them, so he thinks he’ll be able to. But this time, he can’t. There is who Don wants to be and who he believes he is, and then there is reality.
The Wheel and it’s closing scene capture what Don represents. Mad Men is showing America a picture of what it believes itself to be, then flips it around and shows a mirror. It’s obviously a critique of Don in it’s presentation but it also is a critique of all the men we have met in the season and the society they dominate. They’ve believed for a long time that they controlled the world much to the detriment of anyone they came across.
The episode ends with Don sitting on the steps of his quiet home, staring into the distance. Bob Dylan’s song “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” plays, a song about a man trying to convince himself (and his ex-partner) that his choices were right and that there is no use feeling sorry for what happened. The camera shows Don’s solemn face and we close with the thought that maybe Don will realize everything he needs to in order to actually be the hero he wants to be.
