Don Draper is in the fetal position, Ted Chaough is blinded by love, and the agency is divided: JD Schraffenberger dives into Mad Men, Season 6, Episode 12.
Don Draper is a big baby. At least that’s what this week’s episode of Mad Men, “The Quality of Mercy,” insists. The show opens with Megan waking to an alarm and a bed sans Don. She sighs heavily and finds Don curled alone on Sally’s bed in a position one can only describe as “fetal,” suggesting that Don is (as we’ve always known him to be) immature, inchoate, still being shaped. The show ends with a similar shot of Don curled on his office couch, Peggy having just left him there alone with the words “You’re a monster” ringing in his ears.
We’ve seen him lying on his back so many times in this series that Don’s fetal curl is conspicuous—and if it’s not conspicuous enough for the casual viewer, the lingering overhead shots framing him should clue everyone in that we should read the image metaphorically.
And then, of course, there’s Rosemary’s Baby. Not only do Don and Megan see the movie, but at the same (adulterously discreet) 5:00 showing, they bump into Peggy and Ted, who are ostensibly doing research for a St. Joseph’s baby aspirin TV ad inspired, for some ungodly reason, by the final scene in Rosemary’s Baby. Back at the office, they make Don perform an almost comic “wah, wah, wah” while pretending to be the baby. “You’re the camera and the baby,” says Ted, to which Don replies, “Should I get down a little lower?” Don is perfectly willing to regress to an infant state, a time when he could be taken care of, when he didn’t have responsibilities, when he didn’t have to be the monster he’s become. He’s even willing to “get down a little lower” if necessary, back into the womb, back where he might be reshaped and reformed.
It’s significant, too, that Don is also the camera here, but not as the usual objectifying male gaze. Instead, his anxious infant gaze lingers on Peggy’s midsection, her womb, as she performs the part of the “beautiful radiant young mother” in the St. Joseph’s ad. We’re reminded, for a second episode in a row, of Peggy’s own child, her own abandoned motherhood. Odds are pretty good, I’d say, that in this season’s finale Peggy’s baby will be making an appearance, bringing with him a bit of monstrosity that both she and Pete (not to mention her current semi-love interest Ted) will have to deal with.
Here’s the thing: babies don’t know any better, right? When they cry (wah, wah, wah), we try to comfort them. We don’t punish them. We don’t blame them for their misdeeds, even if (or maybe because) they are the spawn of Satan. This whole season of Mad Men has been trying to explain (if not excuse) Don’s particular brand of monstrosity—his sex addiction, his alcoholism, and all the complications arising therefrom—linking it directly to his difficult upbringing: his being raised in poverty in a brothel, his being physically and emotionally abused, his being raped. We’re not meant to dismiss Don’s behavior, but we’re at least asked to have a little more sympathy than we otherwise might for a deceitful and unfaithful man like him.
But we do (and should) continue to blame Don. Even if he is a big baby, we still hold him accountable, and he knows this perfectly well. When Betty tells him on the phone that Sally wants to go to a boarding school, he says, “I’ll pay for it all.” Indeed, he will pay for it all, and narratively speaking he must. No mercy.
Great Caesar’s Ghost!
The phrase “quality of mercy” is a quotation from The Merchant of Venice, which we’re meant to read ironically because there’s really no mercy to be found in this episode, but a more apt Shakespearean allusion might be from Julius Caesar, as when Cassius explains to his co-conspirator Casca why the world is changing “to monstrous quality.” This phrase perfectly describes the turmoil of this time in American history, the violence and uncertainty, the ongoing war, the modern fragmentation of identity. This is the turmoil that Nixon capitalizes on in his terrifying anti-crime campaign ad, which Don watches in the beginning of the episode: “This time,” the ad ends, “vote like your whole world depended on it.” The problem is, there is no “whole world” anymore. Everything is broken and monstrous. Nixon proclaims, “We owe it to the decent and law abiding citizens of America to take the offensive.” But like the Vietnam War, there is no true front, there’s no place to take the offensive but within.
What, you might wonder, is the explanation that Cassius gives Casca for the monstrosities of the world? “Heaven hath infused them with these spirits, / To make them instruments of fear and warning / Unto some monstrous state.” Monstrosity arises from essential spirits completely out of our control. Our own monstrosity is, in Julius Caesar, imposed from above. But where the monster has come from is less important than how it functions here and now: as an omen of fearful things to come. Set aside the anxiety of the Dick Whitman/Don Draper split identity; this is much bigger: the war will never end, all of our politicians will become corrupt, nothing can save us, not our fathers, and not even (perhaps especially) our mothers.
Julius Caesar is also evoked, of course, when Jim and Ted are meeting with Don and Roger (and it’s very much “Jim and Ted” and “Don and Roger,” each pair of men sitting across from each other rather than together around a table.) Jim exclaims “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” when Roger reveals that Sunkist wants SC&P to work on their $8 million TV campaign. Don, of course, had gone behind Ted’s back to arrange this turn of events despite their conciliatory handshake in last week’s episode when Don promised to let Sunkist go in favor of Ocean Spray. But Ted is still upset. He’s worried that their other clients will construe dropping Ocean Spray as a betrayal, “a knife in their back.” It’s really Ted’s back, however, with a conspiratorial knife sticking out of it. (Et tu, Don?) “Forget about giving someone your word,” says Ted, “which obviously doesn’t mean anything to you. How does it look? The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.” Don responds in a calm, seemingly contrite tone, “You’re right. We should work more together. We have to. That’s the message.”
When a character says something like “That’s the message,” we should pay close attention. On the surface Don is saying that the newly named SC&P is not really as cohesive as it sounds; it’s still a collection of different, sometimes disparate and antagonistic parts. Like a malformed Frankensteinian monster, the agency has only been stitched together, not yet truly merged, not yet whole. Don seems to be saying, quite reasonably, that they should all communicate with each other more clearly and effectively so that they might work in concert toward common goals, or as Jim puts it “a more coherent approach to business.” But Don knows that this is impossible; the right hand will never know what the left hand is doing. Earlier in the episode Don is watching an episode of The Three Stooges called “The Brideless Groom,” in which Shemp and Moe are squeezed together in a phone booth trying to make a call. They get hopelessly tangled in the phone cord, and Shemp complains, “Get your hand out of my face.” Moe responds “That ain’t my hand, that’s your hand.” Shemp says, “All right you asked for it,” and then bites his own hand. Don doesn’t laugh because in some ways he can’t stop biting his own hand, over and over and over. (It’s fitting, by the way, that The Three Stooges is interrupted here by a phone ringing, as though Shemp’s call finally gets through; it’s only Harry, though, something of a stooge himself, calling from California to tell Don that Sunkist wants a meeting.)
There is at least one set of hands in this episode that does seem to know what it’s doing. Glen’s friend Rolo claims to have “good hands” as he tries to make out with Sally at Miss Porter’s boarding school. “I’ve been with lots of girls,” he says like a little suave Don Draper. “I know what I’m doing.” But this is too much for Sally, who calls on Glen to defend her honor. Rolo is pummeled by Glen because that’s what you do with skeevy monsters-in-waiting. Sally can’t stifle a smile as she watches this small eruption of violence. On one level, she’s quite pleased that, symbolically at least, her father is being punished. On another, more disturbing level, she is simply enjoying the spectacle of violence before her, a violence that she has learned to control and order, to do her bidding. Sally tells her mother on the car ride home that “My father has never given me anything,” but this isn’t true, of course. He’s given her some of his own manipulative monstrosity. We sympathize with Sally and want her to be okay, but watching her smoke a cigarette next to her mother, gazing coolly, blankly into the distance, we furrow our brows along with Betty.
You’re a Monster
When Ken is shot in Detroit, it’s played (disturbingly) for humor. One of the Chevy men (whom he later calls “fat yahoos in cheap suits”) aims at a bird but swings his rifle around and accidentally shoots Ken in the face. We think Ken might be dead, lying on his back completely still, and then the Chevy man says “Oh shit” before cutting quickly away to Don watching the Nixon ad about the rise in violence and crime in America. This accidental shooting also feels a bit cartoonish or slapsticky, like The Three Stooges, one hand not knowing what the other is doing.
Later, Ken, sporting an eyepatch and barely-healed buckshot wounds on his face, tells Pete that he won’t go back to Detroit: “I told them that Cynthia was pregnant, and then they took out to celebrate and they shot me.” He even says that the Chevy men wanted to stop for lunch on the way to the hospital. Once more, as in past episodes, Ken’s pain is a source of humor, but we do get a sense that his baby won’t become a monster, nor will it turn him monstrous. Ken has always been more levelheaded than others at SC&P, especially perhaps Pete, who tells him “Congratulations on the baby” but probably means something closer to “My condolences.” Ken is certainly not monstrous, even if Roger makes fun of him in these terms, calling him “the Cyclops” and saying “Shiver me timbers” when he sees his eyepatch, evoking the abnormally squint-faced Popeye.
Seeing an opportunity to work with Chevy, Pete volunteers to take Ken’s place in Detroit, meaning that he will be working closely with the obsequious Bob Benson, who has become a much more intriguing character in the last two episodes; his subtle knee-nudge come-on with Pete last week is only outdone this week when he drops his mask for a few moments. Pete calls him “sick,” and Bob says “You should watch what you say to people.” Later, Pete learns that Bob is not who he says he is, that his personnel file, as Duck informs him, “might as well be written in steam,” that he’s from West Virginia, that he was “manservant” for a VP at the investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman. Duck says, “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” and Pete responds, “I have,” meaning, of course, Don Draper.
That Bob’s story parallels Don’s is not surprising. What is surprising is that instead of outing Bob as a fraud (not to mention outing him as gay), Pete decides to use Bob, to keep his secret and therefore keep Bob as an ally in the office, someone who will do whatever work is asked of him. “I have learned not to tangle with your kind of animal,” says Pete. And what is Bob’s kind of animal, anyway? He’s not a monster, not yet, at least. But he is a certain kind of baby, like Don, trying to mold himself into a new shape, whether than means having to lie about his past or listening to self-improvement records. The fact that he’s also bilingual, yelling into the phone in Spanish (presumably to Manolo) about how the “snotty bastard” Pete Campbell is “screwing with my future” suggests an even deeper ability to code-switch, or shapeshift. (By the way, Don also speaks Spanish in to a phone in this episode, saying “Adios Harry.”)
The final confrontation, when Peggy calls Don a monster and he goes fetal on the couch, is a result of Don very deftly undermining both Peggy and Ted, who have spent most of the episode laughing together (a little woodenly, if you ask me) as they work on the St. Joseph’s ad. But the ad is over budget, and a representative from the company, Byron, wants a reason. Ted tries to explain that the work is good and is worth the extra money. (Earlier, he told Don that Peggy could “smell the Clio”; in a way, you could say this ad is her “baby.”) But Don interrupts: “I think, Byron, I know what you want to hear.” This is Don’s talent, knowing what people want to hear and manipulating a situation. “It’s a little bit personal,” he says. “In fact, it’s very personal.” No one knows what Don is referring to. Peggy and Ted look worried, like he’s about to reveal their romantic involvement—or at least their desire. Then Don says, “It’s hard for Ted to say, but this was Frank Gleason’s last idea.” Byron declares that Frank was a good man and approves an increase in the budget. Don saves the day! In the process, of course, he’s effectively taken any credit for the ad away from Peggy while also driving a wedge between her and Ted. There is a sense that Don feels at least a tinge of guilt about this. When Peggy leaves his office, a look of subdued horror flashes across his face before he curls up on the couch.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Megan tells Don as the episode opens, “but you’ve got to pull back on the throttle a little bit, honey.” Throughout “The Quality of Mercy,” she gently chides him for drinking too much, telling him to “sleep it off”—such that Don has to sneak some vodka into his Tropicana (not Sunkist!) orange juice in the morning. She is beginning to realize that he truly does “look terrible” (in more ways than one). Things are coming into focus for Megan, and she doesn’t like what she sees. When Rosemary’s Baby ends, she says that the movie was “really, really scary.” She may as well be talking here about her relationship with Don and dealing with his monstrosity.
Read the rest of the Mad Men Season 6 recaps and analyses by great writers like Abigail Rine, Sean Beaudoin, Greg Olear, Matt Norman and more!
Wonderful analysis. Thank you.
“objectifying male gaze”? Totally unnecessary gender war buzzwords.