Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.11 "What Sally Knew" Guest Writer: Corey K. Creekmur | Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory

[The tenth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 6 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication ofMADMEN, MADWORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, andthe 1960s(Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]

"What Sally Knew"

Written by: Corey K. Creekmur (University of Iowa)

“Don, I owe you,” Dr. Arnold Rosen asserts, after nudging his son Mitchell to offer thanks and a handshake to Don Draper for intervening in an attempt to prevent the young man from being drafted into the Vietnam war. Don’s wife Megan, until this moment unaware of his efforts (“It’s not our problem,” he had earlier insisted), adoringly tells him “you are the sweetest man.” However, his daughter Sally, burdened by her new knowledge of her father’s actual motives and deception, immediately announces “you make me sick” before storming out of the room.

The dramatic climax of this eleventh episode in Season 6, titled with deceptive simplicity “Favors,” summarizes an installment of Mad Men tightly organized around the rituals, rewards, and risks of obligation and debt. If Don’s favor to the neighboring Rosen family, which itself requires a favor to Don from his new business partner Ted, succeeds in keeping Mitchell out of the war, does it then matter that, as Sally knows– as does Sylvia and we viewers – that Don’s favor is motivated by his selfish desire to recapture his neighbor’s wife as a sexual conquest? Do the ends justify the means, or must genuine favors be offered in sincere, good faith without the demand of repayment? What is the final balance when calculating the acquisition of admiration from one’s wife and gratitude from one’s neighbor against the simultaneous debit of disgust from one’s daughter and (perhaps) self-loathing from the neighbor’s wife? (Arnold informs Don that “Sylvia sends her gratitude,” adding that “she is overwhelmed,” and unlike him we know to isolate rather than link those closely stated but significantly distinct claims.)

To take another example from the episode, does it matter who actually writes a letter if it gets the job done? Everyone seems to agree, following Ted’s suggestion, that Mitchell’s letter to the Air National Guard declaring his lifelong desire to be a pilot should be written (for convincing effect) by Don and just signed by Mitchell. Will the potential happy result of Mitchell’s protection from the draft justify this (George Bush-like) fraud? (With somewhat heavy-handed irony, the former Dick Whitman had earlier declared that Mitchell” can’t spend the rest of his life on the run.”) Another letter in the episode – written by Sally’s precocious friend Julie to Mitchell and delivered to the Rosens' apartment -- misrepresents Sally’s romantic/sexual interest in the boy, and is on the verge of being successfully retrieved by Sally before it reaches its recipient, but only at the considerable psychic cost of her knowledge of her father’s sexual deception. (These deceptive letters seem to locate Mad Men near the end of a long tradition of narratives centered around forged, misleading, or purloined letters.)

In the latter half of his career, much of Jacques Derrida’s work centered around his demonstration of the impossibility of the pure practice of a number of related concepts, including gift-giving, friendship, and hospitality. These are “impossible” for Derrida (extending Marcel Mauss’s foundational work on the gift) because they become immediately entangled in ever-expanding systems of symbolic debt and obligation. If someone seems to generously offer me a gift or do me a favor, or welcome me into their home, as soon as I recognize these acts as gifts or hospitality I incur their debt, and am obliged to return or repay the favor, which then extends into an ongoing and perhaps unending cycle of reciprocation.

“Favors” serves as a virtual dramatization of the tangles and snares of obligation as it traces, in now-classic Mad Men fashion, the intertwining of the economic, political, and erotic in the lives of its characters. Figured by Roger Sterling’s surprising juggling of Sunkist oranges (“Not all surprises are bad,” he misleadingly informs us at the start of this episode), and suggesting nothing less than an update of the interlocking structure of Arthur Schnitzler’s famous play (and its cinematic adaptations) La Ronde, the structure of the episode weaves together three major instances of such “impossible” exchange and spiraling debt:

Instance #1: Most intricately, Don’s attempt via Ted’s favor to offer his help to the Rosen family entangles Don in obligations to a business partner even as he obligates his neighbors, in an act presented as empathetically parental (as Don weakly claims to Sylvia, who knows better) and vaguely political (“The war is wrong,” Don tells Arnold before they affirm the necessary obligation of patriotic sacrifice in their own, earlier careers as soldiers). Again, the plan also involves what all its participants seem to accept as justifiable fraud, with Don writing a letter that Mitchell only needs to sign.

However, for Sylvia (and the audience), Don’s ulterior motives are obvious, especially given his initial, self-protective claim that Mitchell’s fate was of no concern to the Draper household. The shared secrecy of Don and Sylvia’s affair, previously broken off by her to Don’s notable dismay, can now be revived by Don under the pressure of her newly incurred debt to him. This re-conquest, however, is literally interrupted by Sally (to whom we will return), whose knowledge threatens to expose the self-serving desire behind Don’s ostensibly self-sacrificing act.

Unlike many episodes of Mad Men marking historical location through very precise references (such as the previous week’s television coverage of the late August 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, described on this blog by Caroline Levine), this episode’s less specific but insistent referent is the Vietnam war, and, again, this historical backdrop intertwines with the fortunes of the advertising business as well as the personal (inevitably sexual) lives of its characters. Don risks mixing politics and business when he brings up Mitchell’s situation at an otherwise jovial dinner he attends with two General Motors executives, first centered on discussions of fishing (despite pointed references to the pollution of Lake Erie and a joke by Roger about legendary angler Ernest Hemingway’s suicide at the start of the decade). After Ted has attempted to deflect the discussion by declaring the draft situation of young men “just one of those problems that can’t be solved,” what Don will later call the “temperature” of the GM executives on this matter is clearly registered: attempts to dodge the draft makes one of them “sick.” (Pete had earlier identified GM as “one of the largest defense contractors in the world,” prompting Don’s misguided attempt to exploit their “clout” in Washington.)

Letter from 1968

The next day, Ted expresses outrage at Don’s transgression, and links his and Don’s own inter-office rivalry with the war. Demanding that Don “lower his weapons” and “stop the war” (which Don first hears as the absurd demand that he end the Vietnam war), Ted clarifies that they are “on the same damn side” and insists that their final, ritual handshake “is not a handshake of gratitude, it’s a binding contract.” Recalling that entanglement in wars is often itself the result of binding treaties and political (as well as economic) obligations, the brief fantasy that Don Draper might stop the war – if only within his company – comes with Ted’s important reminder that even truces incur outstanding, perhaps unresolvable, debts.

Instance #2: We discover, through scenes of squeamish discomfort, that the great favor Bob has done for Pete, in locating the Spanish male nurse Manolo to tend to Pete’s mother Dorothy, also mounts its own debts. “Oh Peter, he’s a gift to me,” Pete’s mother claims, extending the episode’s emphasis on the structure of obligation gifts establish. Following an early, awkward conversation with Peggy that inadvertently recalls her own sexual history with Pete, Dorothy claims that she and Manolo are passionate lovers as well as patient and nurse. Paralleling Sally’s troubling discovery of her father’s sexual deceptions, Pete recoils with horror at the thought of his mother having a sexual life of any sort (“I don’t even want to think about her brushing her teeth,” he tells Peggy).

When he later confronts Bob, we encounter one of the episode’s major “revelations,” Bob’s indirect intimation of his own attraction to Pete, asserted generally through a discussion concluding that “when it’s true love it doesn’t matter who it is” and more directly through prominent insert shots of Bob’s knee moving to touch Pete’s leg. Pete’s summary decision that he will still give the “degenerate” Manolo a month’s pay even though he finds his mother’s relationship with him “disgusting” seems to also provide his response to Bob as well (yet another rebuff to threats of homosexuality that has characterized the series as a whole). In any case, the network of ongoing obligation that follows from accepting a naively accepted favor is again dramatized by the episode, though Pete, typically (as when he forces a tip into Manolo’s hand earlier), acts as if all debts can be paid in full, and in cash.

Instance #3: More comically, Peggy’s attempt to secure a favor from her co-worker Stan (she calls him in the middle of the night to seek his help removing an injured rat from her apartment) also directs the obligations of friendship towards sexual reward, albeit playfully rather than with the force we assume Don exerts on Sylvia. She offers to “make it worth your while” to Stan, who knows this offer isn’t true (“no you won’t”): he then signals through the professional language of co-workers (“great, I’ll see you Tuesday morning”) rather than the more intimate talk between friends or lovers that he is not alone in his bed, information which doesn’t faze Peggy (“bring her along,” she suggests).

As in her earlier scene with Pete, when their drunken banter noticeably excludes Ted from their play, the debts and obligations Peggy participates in or even offers to incur in this episode rely on the full and shared knowledge of the participants in the negotiation. Pete notes that Peggy “really knows him,” and he and Peggy share awareness of her attraction to Ted and Ted’s to her when he steps away from the table. Peggy and Stan also know where they stand with one another, and thus demands based upon friendship can be casually refused, without apparent repercussions. (Eventually, Peggy will resolve her rat problem by taking on the responsibility of pet ownership: we see her watching television with a new tabby cat, who one presumes understands its own domestic obligations.)

In this complicated fashion, “Favors” culminates in a complex sequence that dramatically displays the interlocking and often contradictory structure of debt, promise, and obligation when Don passively accepts thanks from Arnold and Mitchell, and even adoration from Megan just before Sally declares her disgust with her father. Sally’s ability to enter the Arnold’s apartment itself depended on special favors afforded her by the apartment building’s doorman Jonesy, himself in eternal debt to Dr. Rosen for saving his life earlier this season. Mad Men has previously, somewhat daringly, depicted Sally’s budding sexual knowledge and curiosity, but the cost of knowledge that fully arrives with this episode seems to align her with notable forbears including Henry James’ Maisie and Freud’s Dora, both girls woven into the intricate networks of sexual deception and intimate exchange undertaken by their parents and their lovers.

Sally’s gain in knowledge appears to literally reduce the value of her father, who is noticeably disheveled and distracted throughout the conclusion of the episode, despite what appears to be Sally’s weak acceptance of the obvious lie that he was “comforting” Mrs. Rosen. He otherwise seems to fail in his attempt to reorganize her experience: “I know you think you saw something … it’s very complicated.” Sally in fact seems to know exactly what she saw, and what it means. Despite the gulf that now isolates them, the form of the show emphasizes their affinity: it’s worth recalling that the episode began with Sally and her mother in familiar discord, with Sally taunting “You hate that Daddy supports my dreams” and Betty snidely noting “Your father is a hero.” Even if Sally’s dreams are now nightmarish, and her father’s heroism is lost, Don and Sally are still aligned through symmetrical gestures, him holding his face in his hand in the elevator, and her repeating the gesture in her room (her earlier listening at the door of the Rosen apartment also replicates his action in a previous episode).

Their final encounter has them leaning on opposite sides of the door that now stands shut between them, which remains closed in an episode heretofore structured by doors that open and close at the beginning and end of scenes, serving as spatial and temporal transitions binding together the strands of the entire narrative: these of course include the door Sally entered and through which her father was exposed (in multiple senses) to her. The episode’s final shot, holding for a few seconds on the door Don closes at the end of the hall as Sally’s door remains shut on the left of the screen, participates in Mad Men’s frequent spatialization of many of its most powerful meanings and emotions. The cost of opening those doors for both father and daughter promises to be high as the current season -- and perhaps the 1960s -- come to their conclusions.