Mad Men: “5G”
I’m going to try a different approach for this recap. I want to briefly touch on the account at the center of the episode, using that as a way into the action.
The Account: Liberty Capital Savings
Sterling Cooper’s approach to this account is relatively simple. They want to create a new “Executive Liberty Account” for businessmen who want a private account separate from their families. The client has them switch the name to “Executive Private Account”, but the central purpose remains the same.
The back and forth on the specific wording of the campaign is just part of advertising and easy to ignore, but I think it’s worth exploring. Liberty and privacy are not quite synonyms but they’re treated as such. They carry very different connotations. They invoke almost opposite images. When I think privacy, I think discrete, confined, closed-off. When I think liberty, I think wide-open spaces, freedom of movement. Privacy is a barrier separating the interior from the exterior. Liberty is the blending of the interior and the exterior, the absence of barriers.
The words are conflated in this context. Why?
Three Photos of Don Draper
Don Draper is the creative genius behind these “Executive Private Accounts” which is unsurprising for two reasons. First, he’s the best ad man in Manhattan. Second, it’s exactly the thing for a guy like Don. He’s a private guy who likes to keep the various pieces of his life separate. I’ve talked about the various divisions in Don’s life before, but this episode really dives into them and reveals a lot about his character. There are three key photographs of Draper displaying distinct areas of his life. Let’s look at them.
We begin with Don Draper riding high after receiving an award for his work at Sterling Cooper. The episode’s opening scene ends with the horseshoe on the award coming loose and flipping upside down. Not a good omen.
This aware presents problems for Don. He cares deeply about his career, he desires recognition, but he also wants discretion. This is his dilemma, as he rises in the world, he becomes more exposed. Don has carefully constructed walls between the pieces of his life. He has his mysterious past, his private affair with Midge, his family life, his professional life, his personal life where he smokes cigarettes and stares at passing trains. The more he becomes a public figure, the more fragile these walls become.
This is where the walls begin to crumble. Betty and the family come into the office to take portraits, but Don is gone with his secret younger brother, but Peggy thinks he left to visit his mistress. Oh dear.
This is the moment in the episode where we realize just how many lives Don is balancing. Betty realizes something is amiss and she’s growing tired of occupying only a small part of her husband’s life. It can’t feel fantastic. She’s dissatisfied with the family portrait, something that means a lot to her. Sally looks fat, everyone looks unhappy, and the coloring is off! Betty has all the requisite pieces for the coveted family photo, but something is still wrong with it. A pretty good encapsulation of her anxieties at this point.
Meanwhile, Peggy just found out about Midge and she is implicated in Don’s infidelity. She is trying to hide Don’s infidelity from his family while unknowingly covering for his meeting with Adam. You have the past, professional, domestic, and private lives all colliding, threatening to compromise Don’s divisions.
I may have buried the lede here. Don has a secret little brother!
Adam Whitman sees Don in the newspaper and tracks him down. Through him we learn that Dick Whitman faked his death after the war and started a new life as the Don Draper we all know and detest.
Adam wants a relationship with Don/Dick, but Don wants to escape his past so he pays him off and burns the photo of them. This is how the photos function for Don. (If we wanted to get really literary here, I could bring up DH Lawrence again). These pictures show individual pieces of Don’s life. There’s a photo of him with his boss, accepting an award for work. A photo of him with his family. A photo of him with his brother. They’re separate. This is how Don likes his life, divided into these little pieces that he can treat separately. Midge talks about him “changing gears” when he sees her, being a different person depending on who he’s with.
When people find out Ken Cosgrove is a novelist, everyone but Don seems somewhat jealous. Roger points out that everyone at Sterling Cooper has the first 10 pages of a novel in their desk. Not Don. We see his desk in this episode. No pages. It connects to the photos. It connects to the private banking account. Don doesn’t want to be a novelist because he refuses to form any unifying narrative. He wants everything to be distinct. The parts of his life are just photos. If he doesn’t like one piece of his life he can get rid of it as simply as he took a lighter to the photo of him and his brother. He wants this divided life.
He wants this privacy.
Which leads us back to the account. Don certainly has privacy. Does this privacy grant him liberty or does it prevent it. Don is free to live these separate lives. He can carry on a relationship with Midge independent of his marriage. He can live as Don Draper independent of his past. In this way it certainly seems like he’s achieved some form of liberty. But as we see in this episode, it’s incredibly fragile. As much as he’d like his life to function like a collection of individual photographs, the various segments of his life aren’t truly separate. Adam and Midge and Betty and Peggy and Rachel Menken all live in the same world. He can pretend these pieces of his life are separate, but the threat of their collision looms.
Peter Paul & Kenny
Kenny Cosgrove is a writer! He has two novels and just published a short story in the Atlantic Monthly. This drives Paul Kinsey and Pete Campbell absolutely crazy.
Paul thinks of himself as a creative. He’s obsessed with science fiction, smokes pot, and wrote the short story that Green Book was based on. He often bullied Ken, thought very little of his intelligence. The realization of Ken’s creative superiority is a shock to his system. It’s a humbling moment for him and wonderfully triumphant moment for Cosgrove.
And then there’s Pete. Poor Pete. He doesn’t even want to be a writer! He’s just jealous that Ken is receiving recognition. He’s an account man just like Pete, but he’s also doing something respectable.
“My father reads the damn Atlantic.” — Pete Campbell
“Who is Ken Cosgrove? He’s from Burlington, Vermont. His father is a salesman.” — Pete Campbell
The last episode helps contextualize these lines. Pete’s mind is incapable of explaining Ken’s creative success. Pete is so hung up on his family issues that he tries to rationalize it by talking about Ken’s upbringing. He tries to be a writer because he wants the respect of his father. Using his privilege-poisoned mind, Pete decides that the only way to be published is to use his connections. This eventually leads to him trying to get Trudy to seduce an ex-boyfriend in order to get his mediocre story into the New Yorker. It’s really disgusting and Pete seems to realize it. Again, he doesn’t even care about writing. He just wants daddy’s love.
He could learn a bit from Don. They sort of have the opposite problem. Don completely rejects his past, redefines himself through the work he’s good at. Pete is obsessed with his upbringing, the burden of his family legacy. He’s good at his job, enjoying success in business, has a loving wife, but allows his past to poison every other part of his life. Maybe privacy is liberty for Pete. If Pete could escape the expectant eyes of his father, separate himself from his family name, he could be free to pursue whatever it is he actually cares about. For now, we don’t know what he cares about because his desire to fulfill familial expectations trumps everything else.
Random Thoughts
- Incredibly funny and depressing Betty Draper joke about Don: “Don’t you just hate it when his mouth runs on and on.”
- Ken’s novels sound pretty interesting, especially when you think about them in the context of Don, Pete, and liberty. One is about “A roughneck on an oil rig who has to move to Manhattan because his wife’s mother is sick” and the other is “a woman who’s a widow — she kind of gets stuck with this family farm. No one will help her except this boy.”
- We truly do live in a society.
