I Don’t Think About You At All: Don Draper's Endless Escape From Himself

As the tenth anniversary of Mad Men's finale approaches, it seems a fitting time to look back on one of television's greatest protagonists: Don Draper. Spoilers throughout.

“The famous 'Escape’ or 'Run away from it all' is an excursion in a trap…a clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald.

On the 7th of June 2007, The Sopranos concluded its eight-year run as arguably the best television show of all time. It paved the way for non-formulaic, character-driven stories and, in its portrayal of Tony Soprano, showed the world that protagonists can be morally ambiguous and behave in a manner that causes you to question if and why you're still rooting for them. When the screen cut to black on 'Made in America', The Sopranos' final episode, those who weren’t checking to see if their TV had broken might’ve wondered how long it’d be until they’d get a fix of prestige drama as potent as the heralded crime show. As it happens, the answer came a little over a month later when ex-The Sopranos writer and executive producer Matthew Weiner and his not-so-new solo venture, Mad Men, aired. Weiner had shopped the pilot script around as early as 2002, and after HBO passed on the chance to develop the project, AMC decided to take a punt, shifting their focus from showcasing classic films to original drama and handing Weiner a significant $3 million budget to make the first episode.

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If The Sopranos is Shakespearean, then Mad Men is The Great American Novel written by John Cheever. The series chronicles the professional and personal lives of advertising executives in the 1960s, and we watch as a sprawling array of characters drink, smoke and philander their way through the decade's upheavals. Amidst this colourful cast of supporting characters, the pilot introduces us to Don Draper, a compelling and complex protagonist of the literary variety who rivals any creation conjured up by Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Faulkner. Played to perfection by the then-unknown John Hamm - an actor of a 1960s sensibility akin to Gregory Peck, James Stewart and William Holden - Draper exudes an air of arresting magnetism from the get-go. He is slick, mysterious and regarded as a genius in his profession. Against the backdrop of Mad Men’s gloriously stylish sets, he can appear to be the perfect man.

As a result, the character has fallen prey to a similar Alphadom glorification that haunts Tony Soprano, Tommy Shelby, Joker, and Patrick Bateman. A quick Google search of ‘Don Draper’ pulls up hundreds of videos and articles that give tips on how to emulate his style, swagger and ‘alpha’ attitude, and some of the most viewed YouTube videos associated with Mad Men bare titles such as, 'Great Scene - Don Draper is a badass', 'Sigma rule / Alpha male / Don Draper', 'Don Draper - Man of Confidence and Success', 'Don Draper is the man', and 'Don Draper is cool'. While it’s hard to blame casual viewers for being attracted to Draper's seemingly effortless charms, he is anything but a role model, despite how cool he looks in a pair of aviators and puffing on a Lucky Strike. Dig a little deeper, and you're soon confronted with a character full of contradictions, and one who continually asks himself the same question as viewers: Who is Don Draper?

Unsurprisingly, it’s a question devoid of an answer. After nearly an hour of watching Don work, drink and fuck his way around Manhattan in Mad Men’s pilot, it isn’t until the episode's final few scenes that we are even introduced to his wife and kids. From the outset, it's clear that Weiner intends to keep us in the dark for as long as possible. Later in the first season, it's revealed that Don Draper is an alias of sorts, a name stolen from a lieutenant he accidentally killed during a stint in the Korean War. The Don Draper we come to know, formally Dick Whitman, is almost caught out in the season's penultimate episode, yet, nothing comes out of it. While a lesser series might enhance the cat-and-mouse aspect of the situation into a focal plotline for the entire show, Weiner decided to let it linger in the background as an early indication and explanation for Don's agitation, evasive personality and desire to escape. It becomes clear that he is not running away from the law, the government or an antagonist seeking to out him - he is running away from himself.

By season 2, most of Mad Men’s mysteries have been solved, and it simply becomes a show about people living, or as Weiner puts it, “an experience of human life.” This novelistic style came with some trepidation and led AMC president Rob Scorcher to comment, “We’re really going to do this? And this slowly?” upon realising the direction Weiner was taking. It was the right call and provided the necessary time to explore Don Draper’s slow unravelling and burgeoning identity crisis, a theme constantly bubbling beneath Mad Men’s polished exterior and its main character facade. Don has created what is in his mind the perfect man and the perfect life: a large house in the suburbs, a red Cadillac, a dog and two kids, white picket fences, and a Grace Kelly-lookalike wife. He is a Jay Gatsby figure of self-invention who has built something that he believes society perceives as success, and consequently becomes trapped in a web of his own deceit.

The greatest irony in Don’s life is how much time he spends creating perfection, both in his private and personal life. He is a workaholic - a creative force who sells his vision of beauty for companies to advertise - yet, despite his entire life revolving around building and maintaining images, he can’t seem to sell the idea of ‘Don Draper’ to himself. No matter how badly he wants to be that man, he's unable to feel worthy enough and is thereby caught up in a lifetime of impostor syndrome. Don’s symptoms of depersonalisation are present throughout the show, further enhanced by the world of fakery and illusions that he lives in and contributes to. In Weiner’s words, he is “a hero of assimilation”. Consistent shots of Don from behind emphasise how little we know about him, and his daughter, Sally, confesses at one point, "I realised I don’t know anything about you". His family are an afterthought; he has brought them into his lie, and they are tied to it forever through his last name.

We meet Don in his 30s, and in the 10 years that pass during Mad Men’s timeframe, we watch the same man make the same mistakes and grapple with the same internal hurdles. While Breaking Bad, a show produced by AMC in the same period presents a Mr Chips to Scarface character arc full of inciting incidents and suspense, Mad Men opts for the opposite approach. The most important events of Don’s life have already happened to him, and from birth, darkness enshrouds itself. His mother, a prostitute, dies during childbirth. He’s left to grow up on a farm with an alcoholic father who he watches die at 10 years old, and is left in the care of a resentful and distant stepmother. As a teenager, he is raped by a prostitute, the catalyst of his sex addiction, and is traumatised during the Korean War after accidentally contributing to the death of his lieutenant. It’s a back story containing enough hardships to fuel a 3-hour Oscar-bait drama, yet it's not our primary focus.

One of the key explanations for Don's affinity for escapism and repression comes in the episode, 'The Hobo Code'. Through flashbacks, we discover that a vagabond stayed at his family home and enlightened a young Don Draper/Dick Whitman on his hobo philosophy. Understandably, it's an alluring outlook to a person of such an upbringing and manifests into a 'ride the rails', Jack Kerouac On The Road-esque yearning in adulthood. It's a desire that culminates in various impulsive decisions stemming from the belief that running away and repressing the past is, if not the best, then the easiest option, and a coping mechanism he offers to Peggy Olson, a newly promoted copywriter at the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency where they work. After she terminates a pregnancy and finds herself in a mental hospital, Don tells her, "It will shock you how much it never happened," advice that mirrors the vagabonds' assurance that "Every day is brand new." In another instance, while attempting to rid himself of his long-lost brother, who presumed Don dead, he claims, “I have a life. And it only goes in one direction: Forward”. In these two iconic lines, we are lent a substantial insight into Don's mountainous, and often narcissistic, efforts to keep trauma at bay. Repeated flashbacks and hallucinations of his past, some of which take place in his own home, highlight that his efforts are ultimately futile as we come to realise that for him, the past is inescapable.

Like many men of the post-war generation, Don takes measures to present a cool, masculine exterior. However, behind the tapered suit and the closed doors of Ossining suburbia, we see a broken man and an empty vessel. Don is unable to face himself and repeatedly turns to self-destruction to avoid his inability to live in the present and confront problems head-on. After his boss, Roger, one of the few relationships he has resembling a friendship, suffers from a heart attack, and the threat of his identity being exposed intensifies in the first season's penultimate episode, Don attempts to convince his mistress Rachel to flee with him. He tells her, "I want to go, and I want you to come with me, and I don't want to come back." It becomes painfully apparent that it's a gesture he has put little thought into, and Rachel, recognising his cowardice more astutely than arguably anyone else in the show, replies, "You don't want to run away with me, you just want to run away." When it comes to fight or flight, Don chooses flight every time. Reliance on alcohol and sex is the primary coping mechanism he turns to in a bid to avoid confronting his inner turmoil, and as a result, finds himself acting on every desire and the wrong side of history. Weiner shows us that the men of the 60s aren’t, as we might imagine when thinking of the period, the men who invented sex and drugs - that already happened in the 50s. In reality, they are too old to be part of the hippie revolution and thus find themselves perpetually stuck between generations and ideologies.

Real-life events such as the assassination of JFK, the moon landing and the turbulence of 1968 coincide with Don’s various relapses into alcoholism and despair. While Weiner insists that he loves Don, claiming “I’m not trying to punish him,” it often feels as if he deserves it, an opinion the protagonist seems to share. Throughout the series, Don engages in various forms of self-punishment. 'Public Relations', season 4's masterful premiere, begins with a reporter asking Don the recurring and gargantuan question, "Who is Don Draper?" Of course, Don avoids answering. Throughout the season, we see another side to Don, and by that, I mean that we see him at his worst as all his charm and brilliance gradually dissipates. His drinking worsens, his vulnerability increases, and he defers to machoism, enlisting a prostitute in a seemingly last-ditch attempt to slap and choke himself back to reality. Then, just as you think Don might be a lost cause, he turns a corner. He cuts down on the booze, starts a journal, begins to exercise, and writes the infamous ‘Why I'm Quitting Tobacco’ Op-Ed - the zenith of his genius or narcissism, depending on your point of view. He also meets his second wife, Megan Calvet, and for the remainder of the season is well-behaved, loved up and seems to be veering toward some version of happiness and stability.

Of course, this all implodes throughout season 5, and consequently, we see Don hit rock bottom after rock bottom for the remainder of Mad Men. His fresh outlook is replaced with a meteoric dose of misanthropic self-hatred and an intensely renewed desire to escape the persona he has created, reiterating Weiner's ethos that the characters, or more broadly, people, never change. Joseph Brodsky wrote that "One is changed by what one loves," which, if true, makes Weiner's outlook all the more bleak. Toward the end of the final season, Don gets up from a meeting and, without saying a word, heads West to live out his drifter / vagabond fantasies. He bounces from motel to motel in relative obscurity and by the show's conclusion, has found himself at the edge of the world, or America at least, meditating at a cliffside hippie retreat. The first time we see Don is via a shot of the back of his head and the last time we see him he is frontal and smiling, seemingly at peace - yet, we're still not sure what's going on up there. Despite spending 7 seasons, 92 episodes, 72 hours and 58 minutes of our life with this man, we still don’t know him - not really.

In this final scene, we can interpret that Don has achieved some sort of understanding of himself, or the closest he'll ever get to it. Smiling sedately at the camera in a meditative pose, maybe he has finally acknowledged who he is. He'll never be the person he wants to be, and it's probably too late for him to even be a good person, but it seems he recognises he still has a place in society. After the show's events, we can presume he strides back into his office and, on the brink of being fired, pitches the infamous "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" TV advert that we see before the credits roll, thus redeeming himself and pulling off another advertising masterstroke. We can also presume he will go on to hit future rock bottoms and continue his entrenched patterns of behaviour for the remainder of his life.

The characters never change, and Don never changes - something that goes against everything we’re taught is supposed to happen in television or film. “Where’s my arc?” Christopher Moltisanti asks early in The Sopranos, and what both series show us is that most people will never have one - they just live. It's a fact Weiner portrays stunningly through Mad Men's preference for episodic, short story-like narratives and Don's characterisation as a man slowly falling downward rather than developing. Ten years since its finale, Mad Men remains a work of astounding emotional empathy, intelligence, and a perfect portrayal of toxic masculinity - something that's aided its ability to withstand the test of time. Don Draper is a figure who transcends television, and his endless desire to escape himself is one to be looked upon with sympathy, condemnation and every emotion in between.