What Don Draper’s hug means to the changing roles of masculinity.
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Before he gives a hug, he gets a shove. In the final episode of Mad Men, during an Esalen encounter group, Don Draper gets pushed in the chest by an older female, a perhaps deserved rejection for all his anti-social behavior, his advertent or inadvertent rending of the legitimate fabric of society. This pushing him away provides a very economical visual summary of the “You punk!” viewers wanted, at times, to say to Don.
Then later Don gives a hug, one he can’t help but give, to another man. By responding to emotions expressed by Leonard, an Everyman character of Don’s age and race who describes alienation from others to which Don can fully relate, the final Mad Men episode comes to a non-traditional, some might say anti-climactic, ending. There is a car chase, albeit alone against time in the Bonneville Salt Flats; not against another human, and at the beginning rather than the end of the final episode.
But there is a climax to this episode and to the series as a whole: Don Draper kneels to hug another man and allows himself close touching on widely-broadcast television. Evan Arnold, the actor who plays Leonard, says about the scene with Jon Hamm, ” his diaphragm and chest are right against me and heaving, basically …” Discomfiting as this may be, we see Don Draper, the epitome of cool and purveyor of detachment, let us in on his humanness in the form of deep feelings and physical closeness to another man.
But we all should be interested what happens to straight white males, because the way things have been and the way they are changing, what happens to heterosexual white men affects everyone.
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As far as we know, Leonard is heterosexual, given that he describes a wife and children in his litany of people who don’t sufficiently recognize or choose him. Not greatly significant in one respect, this is just another facet of who he happens to be. Yet in another respect Leonard’s sexual orientation is vitally important because white heterosexual males have been positioned for centuries at the top of the social pyramid, and positioned for competition against each other. Women and people of races other than Caucasian may be tired of attending to white male direction, depending on white males for survival, monitoring their needs, or being coaxed to feel sorry for them in any respect, privileged as they have been. But we all should be interested what happens to straight white males, because the way things have been and the way they are changing, what happens to heterosexual white men affects everyone.
Beyond race or sexual orientation, because so many girls and boys look up to their daddies, the emotional health of men is enormously important. In all his attempts at post-divorce counseling or lifestyle changes after leaving my mother, I doubt my father ever reached a level of emotional connection to another man that furthered his own wholeness as a human being. He was successful at business, but emotionally, he died kind of half grown, or half explored. His few male friends, like Don Draper’s, were business associates or barflies. The gates of a heavy mother hegemony in the form of his own mother, then three marriages, colluded toward preventing self-discovery for him.
But Don Draper in Mad Men’s final episode has a better opportunity. In the final episode, he quickly loses all available forms of toxic or sheltering mothering. His daughter, Sally, tells him to snap to reality, ex-wife Betty, in the throes of dying, reminds him that normal for their kids is when he is absent, and protégé Peggy asks him to drop the self-torture for a while, turning him increasingly toward a face to face with himself. Don, it appears, escapes the fate of permanent repression of his feelings. He is left with no mother save perhaps Mother Earth to engage his attention.
We learn from this hug between Don and Leonard that, in contrast to many heterosexual men’s fears, chest-to-chest or belly-to-belly hugging between men doesn’t have to go all the way to the penis.
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It’s hard to tell what effect this will have for Don in the long term. He might continue to register that other people have feelings, and adjust his behavior accordingly. Or he might not. In any case, this watershed man-to-man hug between Don and Leonard, sustained in time and emotion, broadcast far and wide on television at the culmination of a popular series, is and should be compelling. The exchange with Leonard shakes something loose within Don that needs to be shaken loose and rearranged. However flawed the path after this hug is for Don, whether or not it includes a return to intermittent womanizing, or to advertising and a career peak in the form of the famous Coca-Cola Hilltop commercial, some manner of truly seeing another’s pain, and being willing to be seen having one’s own pain, has been initiated for Don, and has the prospect of continuing.
We learn from this hug between Don and Leonard that, in contrast to many heterosexual men’s fears, chest-to-chest or belly-to-belly hugging between men doesn’t have to go all the way to the penis. We learn that the straight white male, who has historically had to keep himself separate, at least in capitalistic pursuits, or risk death or humiliation, can allow his belly to touch another man’s. We learn on a visceral level that touch isn’t always about sex, or escaping through diversions. We learn that feelings. good or bad, are about being present in a given moment.
Mad Men series creator Matthew Weiner points out that people who interpret the ending exclusively with cynicism are “…probably experiencing a lot of life that way, and they’re missing out on something.” Weiner seems to want to promote the idea that despite advertising’s long reach into our lives, some ideas have a purity that transcends commercialism, and to these ideas we should pay attention. Don’s hug with Leonard asks us to consider the importance of emotion, and emotional rapport, in a well-lived male life.