Mad Men: “The Hobo Code”
The Title: “The Hobo Code”
“On the front gate of every house, there’s a mark. It’s a code just like you heard on the radio.” — Hobo
This episode gives us a nice flashback to a formative experience in little Dick Whitman’s childhood. A “gentleman of the rails” stays with the Whitman family overnight. Dick seems fascinated by the man’s story of leaving his family in New York and living free as a vagabond. We can safely assume this is where Don’s nomadic tendencies are conceived.
The code is significant. It’s a system that allows hobos (to adopt the language of the show) to label houses. Dick’s father cheats the man out of money, and at the end of the episode Little Dick discovers a marking on his house indicating that a dishonest man lives there. He didn’t seem to be having a stellar childhood to begin with, but this seems to mark a key moment for Dick. His father is a dishonest man and he needs to escape.
The Account: Belle Jolie Lipstick
“Mark Your Man.”
Go Peggy! It’s a triumphant episode for Peggy, at least from a professional perspective. She receives some recognition for her work on Belle Jolie and gets to have a drink with the guys. It’s a nice moment, seeing her so proud of her work.
The campaign is interesting. It focuses on giving women the power to choose their shade of lipstick, a unique color they can use to “mark” their man. A few things are worth noting here. Much like the hobo code, the lipstick is being used as a tool to label other people, to communicate something about their identity to the world. The campaign focuses on men. The unique shade isn’t about a woman labeling herself, it’s about her being able to label her man for the rest of the world. We’ll come back to this.
Labels
The hobo code is about labeling others. The Belle Jolie campaign is about labeling others. Everyone is trying to label each other. Everyone is also trying to avoid being labeled.
Don Draper
“You are a productive and reasonable man and in the end completely self interested. It’s strength. We are different, unsentimental about all the people who depend on our hard work.” — Bert Cooper
Bert gives Don a bonus and next thing you know he’s trying to run off to Paris with Midge. It’s a bit perplexing. Why?
Cooper compared himself to Don, called him self interested. This is the only to point to as the cause of Don’s desire to run away.
Don feels himself becoming too close to his coworkers. He’s hiding his identity and wants to keep everyone at a distance. Bert Cooper’s attempt to identify with him is a show of intimacy that he’d cower from. Don doesn’t want to be known, doesn’t want to be labeled. When his boss begins to label him, he tries to escape. This is understandable given our knowledge of Don. Just like the hobo, he doesn’t want to be tied down.
But, in the end, Don doesn’t leave. He returns home, wakes up Bobby, and offers to tell him anything, promising he will never lie to him. On one hand, Don is trying to avoid being labeled, but he also wants to be an honest man for his son (unlike his father). It seems a little counter intuitive, but it can be rationalized. Don wants to reveal himself on his terms, he wants to be in control of his identity. He can tell the truth to Bobby, but that gives him the power to form the narrative. The scary part is when others are deciding who you are.
Pete & Peggy
“I wake up in the morning and I look into Trudy’s eyes and I think ‘we’re supposed to be one person’ but whatever I try… I have all these things going on in my head. She’s just another stranger.” — Pete Campbell
Pete doesn’t feel connected to his wife. There’s a distance he can’t bridge. It’s clearly distressing to him. Much like Don with Bobby, Pete desires connection while simultaneously resisting it.
He sleeps with Peggy again. It’s sort of a show of dominance. He demands she come into the office, he pulls her hair, etc. It seems like a romance is about to start, a relationship that would allow Pete and Peggy to become close to each other.
Nope!
Peggy has a successful day at work, feels confident. At the bar she walks up to Pete and tells him to dance with her. He’s turned off by this and quickly leaves. Relationship over.
Much like the women of her Belle Jolie campaign, Peggy takes the power to make decisions, to be the initiator in her relationship with Pete. Peggy is empowered, but Pete is emasculated. He wants to be in control at all times. He doesn’t like a woman who can mark her man. He doesn’t want to be marked/labeled, because that means he’s no longer in control.
Sal & Midge
Minor characters are doing similar things. Don takes a Polaroid of Midge and accuses her of being in love. She resists this label.
Sal is gay. This has been hinted at since episode one, but is addressed directly here. His desire to resist labels is significantly more understandable. If he’s labeled as gay, he risks his life. It’s 1960 and homosexuality is not met with smiling faces.
Help from Hegel
I had trouble sorting through this episode. You could probably tell. I think Hegel’s philosophy can help us out, though.
However, if I had trouble writing about a Mad Men episode, I’m not going to be the best person to explain the Master-Slave dialectic. So I’ll leave this quote here and suggest doing some further reading!
The master/slave dialectic involves self-consciousness in its attempt to assert its absolute self-sufficiency. Self-consciousness wants to prove that “[it] exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.” So self-consciousness encounters another self-consciousness, and they fight in order to prove that they don’t care about any contingent aspect of themselves and to force one to recognize the other. One self-consciousness ends up winning due to some random, arbitrary factor. That self-consciousness becomes the master and the other becomes the slave. But because they’re not equals anymore, they can’t mutually recognize each other, and so this configuration of consciousness is ultimately insufficient to prove that something is absolute. The master forces the slave to produce all of the goods it will consume, and lives a life of luxury. But in doing so the master becomes weak, complacent, and vegetative. The slave becomes creative because of their productive work, and their face-to-face encounter with death. So, we find out that the slave is really in a superior position in terms of selfhood than the master, despite initial appearances to the contrary.
