"CHINESEWALL"
Written by Caroline Levine (English, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Chinese Wall” is one of those rich and pivotal episodes that prompt me to want to look back over the whole series. From the beginning, one of the things that I have loved about Mad Men is the way that it makes us long for fulfilling professional work for women. The first season sees the dawning of Peggy’s ambition for challenging, creative labor, which never fades. Later we also see Betty’s hunger for a life as a professional when she has the briefest of stints as a model, and feel Joan’s devastating sense of loss when her work as a script reader comes to an abrupt end.
As events come to a crisis, this episode brilliantly explodes the distinction between love and work, men and women, personal and professional, and in the process it makes it clear that these distinctions were never really there in the first place. Business is love. It is a thirty-year relationship that comes abruptly to an end because it hasn’t gotten enough attention. It is the seduction of clients; it is the wooing of new talent; it involves the constant threat of infidelity and loss; it rests on attentiveness, feeling, intimate knowledge, and contact. At the funeral, one mourner honors the dead man’s wife by thanking her for relinquishing him to the office: “You were there before he made partner, and then you gave him to us.” Another relishes the memory of “going home with Buick.” Work is, as Don says to Faye, “everything to me.”
Mad Men flirts with the idea that this kind of love is best left to women. After all, as SCDP faces its own mortality, what just might save the business is “a woman’s touch.” In one quick and skillful presentation, Peggy dazzles the client by making latex gloves feel romantic. “I didn’t think it was possible,” he says. But of course we know that this skill is not reserved for women. Don has always been at his very best when love is what he is selling. His pitching of the Kodak carousel is one of the great Mad Men scenes, and Peggy deliberately borrows Don’s poetic strategies for Playtex. Advertising routinely draws on sentiment—nostalgia, tenderness, and romance—which means that a woman’s touch is what Don has had all along.
And even Don, who has accused Pete of putting his family first, helplessly confuses work and love when he surrenders himself to Megan at the end. She seduces him with her interest in his business: she claims that she wants to learn about it; she judges people by their work, as he does; and she dismisses “everything else” as “sentimental.” She may be trying to climb the career ladder, as Peggy is accused of doing by sleeping with Don, or she may be mixing ambition with eros. Don is intrigued, but then hesitates, remembering his own rule about office affairs. But Megan insists that “this has nothing to do with work.” That is, Megan’s interest in his work arouses Don’s interest in her; but in order to sleep with her, he must believe that work has nothing to do with it.
Did he fail, as Don claims, because he didn’t care enough for the relationship with Lee Garner, Jr—because he didn’t romance him? Or was he too possessive, as Pete insists, muscling the junior partner out of the relationship? Then there’s Bert’s accusation that Lee Garner, Jr. never took Roger seriously because he never took himself seriously. (I wonder: does Bert mean that Roger has been glib and trivializing, too comic for the serious business of love—or that he has lacked confidence or conviction, tragically ill-equipped for the role of the self-assured lover?) After Joan learns of Roger’s deception, she lights up one of the rare cigarettes of season 4, a gesture of solidarity, it would seem, with Lee Garner, Jr.
And we all know that marriage is not much good for love in Mad Men. The problem with marriage is that it tries to monopolize love, casting itself as love’s proper province. But Mad Men knows that love is just as much at home in the workplace, if not more so. Both Don and Roger know all too well that marriage can exist without love. But can business?