In the episodes leading up to the Mad Men series finale, the show’s foremost character, the ever charismatic and manipulative Don Draper, who also happens to be the embodiment of the mid-twentieth-century advertising man, had been on a whirlwind Jack Kerouac-esque trip across America. Throughout this trip, we watched Don shed his personal possessions: for instance, he gave his car to a rookie con artist and his former wife’s wedding ring to his pseudo niece Stephanie. By the end, all he had was a tattered envelop full of money. By this time, Don had also found himself at a Esalen-like retreat facility in California where he experienced what appeared to be an emotional breakthrough.
Yet, what seemed to be a Buddhist meditation was actually an advertising brainstorm. In the final moments of the series finale, a hippie yogi instructed, “A new day, new ideas, a new you,” while a smile crept over Don’s face. The show then turned to the famous 1971 Coke commercial, officially titled “Hilltop,” but popularly known as “I’d like to Buy the World a Coke”[1] The ad features an ethnically diverse array of young men and women singing together on a picturesque hillside. “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” they chant, “In perfect harmony. I’d like to buy the world a Coke. And keep it company. That’s the real thing.”[2] In the end, Don Draper had doubled down on his role as an exploiter of human emotions. He had found a way to sell gas-filled sugar water by linking it to the ideals of global peace and human connection.[3]
After the series finale aired, several commentators speculated about whether the show should be understood with a sense of optimism or cynicism. For many, the question persisted: Did Don Draper change, or didn’t he? [4] Personally, I am inclined to argue that Don’s final smile was not one of personal growth and enlightenment, but rather a realization that he had just thought up a superb ad that would save his career. My more cynical reading of the episode partly comes from his reaction to Betty’s cancer diagnosis. (Betty is one of his former wives and the mother of his three children.) By the end of the show, Don had failed to return home even though he had found out about Betty’s sickness less than a quarter of the way into the episode. Furthermore, we are led to believe that he went on to make a killer commercial while his young daughter was left to take care of his dying ex-wife.
Those are not the actions of a person who had gone through some sort of spiritual growth. As critics Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez put it, “That wasn’t enlightenment at the end; it was capitalism, grinding ever on.”[5] In other words, the show ended with Don continuing on in the business of commodifying human fears and desires. Thus, it seems that one of the show’s final messages is that there is not a single human emotion that is safe from being pitched, produced, and sold by advertisers like Don Draper.
But, there is more to Mad Men than simply debating the authenticity of a single character’s emotional breakthrough, or lack thereof. Throughout its seven seasons, the show places a narrative-emphasis on advertising that offers a vivid illustration of the changes that reverberated throughout American society in the post-World War II era. As TV critic Maureen Ryan aptly describes it, Mad Men tells the story of why American advertisers had to evolve from the guys who “invented love to sell nylons” into the people who “invented enlightenment to sell Cola.”[6]
To be sure, the cultural significance of advertising is not an exclusively mid-twentieth-century phenomenon. Indeed, the rise of American advertising dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as America evolved from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance. During this time, railroad and telegraph lines penetrated the countryside. Factories multiplied in size and number. And, millions migrated from farm lands to America’s growing cities. From the collapse of Reconstruction to the end of World War I, then, virtually every man, woman, and child in America had to face the consequences of living in a society that was undergoing rapid industrialization, urbanization, as well as transportation and communication revolutions.
Before these socioeconomic developments, American society had emphasized the value of frugality and hard work. As scholar Warren Susman explains it, in the earlier culture of scarcity, America was primarily a producing society that exhibited hardly any superfluous commercial activity because its inhabitants had very little leisure time.[7] The economic expansion of the 1890s, however, pushed the country into an economy of plenty, which subsequently placed an emphasis on buying and spending. Whereas before America’s cultural forms had stressed the worth of one’s “character,” primarily in terms of displaying personal discipline and emotional self-restraint, the new national lexicon of abundance began to accentuate the importance of one’s “personality.” As historian T.J. Jackson Lears describes, in the expanding capitalist economy it became increasingly important to be amusing, outgoing, and popular. Moreover, the acquisition of material goods became a primary route for cultivating a sociable and fascinating personality.[8]
Advertisers played an essential role in the creation of this new logic of living. Before diving into this point, it’s important to note that the move from a producing to a consuming society was not an entirely smooth transition. Historian Roland Marchand, for instance, explains that for many Americans the expanding economy meant the loss of community and individual control. To alleviate these fears, advertisers developed a social paradigm based on pleasure, external appearances, and achievement through consumption. In the late nineteenth century, moreover, admen started to rebrand themselves as modern professionals in an attempt to move away from earlier stereotypes of the devious traveling salesmen. As Marchand contends, these self-proclaimed “consumption engineers” envisioned themselves as apostles of modernity whose cultural mission was to encourage mass consumption for the purposes of counteracting overproduction. To promote consumption, advertisers constructed narratives that depicted mass-produced products as the keys to exclusiveness, security, and leisure. In the end, advertisers successfully sold the emerging consumer culture to the American public by creating images and scenarios that appealed to human emotions and social fantasies.[9]
Mad Men tells an important chunk of the story that is the history of American advertising. From its earliest episodes, the series consistently calls attention to the sexism, racism, and classism that pervaded the WASP-y-boys’ club of the mid-twentieth century advertising world. The first season, for instance, also prominently features a Coke ad. That ad portrays Betty as the embodiment of domestic bliss. In the ad, Betty, a Grace Kelly look-a-like, plays a wife who is handing her husband a Coke while he enjoys a picnic with their two obedient children. Ultimately, the ad encapsulates the immediate post-World War II emphasis on the traditionally ordered family’s adherence to male leadership and female subordination.[10]
What is most striking is the contrast between the entirely white, protestant, traditional world of this first Coke ad and the heterogeneous world of the Coke ad that closed out the series. As the series details throughout its seven seasons, the social justice movements of the mid-to-late 1960s moved the dominant cultural consensus away from the uniformity of the post-war years towards the pluralism that would pervade the late-twentieth-century cultural ethos. Certainly, the WASP-y-boys’ club of the advertising industry had not vanished by the series end. But, that club was increasingly losing ground to a new pluralistic national identity. Furthermore, according to the show’s narrative, several members of the old boys’ club were able to reinvent themselves in order to take advantage of the new cultural trends.
Don Draper, of course, is the most glaring example of these adjustments. By the show’s end, Don had refashioned himself once more. In the process, he had come to better appreciate the growing cultural concern with spiritual growth and enlightenment. And, ultimately, he was able to use this newfound understanding to sell a product. Nonetheless, even with the show’s cynical tone there is a optimistic thread woven into its thematic fabric. To this point, Mad Men illustrates how the tremendous changes that transpired over the course of the 1960s pushed America into becoming a more pluralistic society. Capitalism and the exploitation of human emotions might be grinding on by the show’s end, but they are doing so in a far more open and accepting society.
—Rebecca DeWolf, PhD
[1] Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez, “Mad Men: Person to Person,” Tom & Lorenzo, 18 May 2015, http://tomandlorenzo.com/2015/05/mad-men-person-to-person/.
[2] Ted Ryan, “The Making of I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke,” Coca Cola Journey, 1 January 2012, http://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/coke-lore-hilltop-story.
[3] “Person to Person,” Mad Men, produced by Matthew Weiner, aired 17 May 2015.
[4] See “Mad Men: A New Day, a New You,” The Atlantic, 8 May 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/mad-men-series-finale-recap/393494/.
[5] Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez, “Mad Men: Person to Person.”
[6] Maureen Ryan, “Mad Men’ Finale: What Was Awesome, What Was Frustrating, and Why It’s Hard to Let Go,” Huffington Post, 18 May 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/18/mad-men-finale_n_7303870.html.
[7] Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Random House, 1973).
[8] T.J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
[9] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (University of California Press, 1986).
[10] “Shoot,” Mad Men, produced by Matthew Weiner, aired 13 September 2007.