Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.12 "Baby Blue" Guest Writer: Jeremy Varon | Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory

[The eleventh 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]

"Baby Blue"*

Written by: Jeremy Varon (The New School)

In a rare and, perhaps, unique bookending of an episode by near-identical images, “Quality of Mercy,” the penultimate episode of Season 6, begins and ends with Don curled up in the fetal position. The first, besotted pose (in the children’s room in his apartment, no less) is prompted by his visceral shame at Sally’s recent sight of him bedding his neighbor’s wife and sense of the cascade of disasters that could follow. Alcohol, as for countless drunks, is a powerful tool for Don, used by him to humiliate rivals (Ted Chough melting on the margarine campaign), loosen the loins of desiring women (Betty and the bottle before their cabin tryst), and craft his suave persona as a man of both mystery and mastery. But it also can be his one true companion in moments like these of exquisite misery, whose promise is a certain numbness by day (now begun with a furtive nip) and oblivion by night: the desperate salve for those times when one can’t cope with the mess made of one’s life and wishes to have never been born.

In the episode’s closing, Peggy’s admonition that he is a “monster” (a reprise of Sally’s stinging line the he makes her “sick”) for what she perceives as a betrayal of her and Ted lands him curled on the couch. No doorways or passages or choice-points connoting possibilities for threshold crossing and transition. Instead, a defeated image of total inertia seeking the repose of the womb, before the trauma of birth and fall from grace.

In between, we see Don, in a moment of surprising compliance during Peggy and Ted’s mock baby aspirin pitch, playing the part of the wailing infant. The ad playfully reverses the chilling plotline of the contemporary film Rosemary’s Baby, which depicts the birth of a modern-day devil. In the face of a conspiracy of well-meaning codgers, the baby in the ad has a white-light experience, at last comforted by a “beautiful, radiant young mother” a la Jesus’s Mary. (In the film, a creepy coven descends on the little hellion.) The Christianizing logic is re-enforced by the ad’s closing line: “You don’t need anyone’s help but St Joseph’s.” The namesake of a famous aspirin brand for children, St Joseph is of course Mary’s husband.

But the genealogical and psychic truth of Don aligns him with the film, not the ad, ingeniously reversing the reversal and suggesting another, still more damning image of him: that he, like Rosemary’s baby, is hell spawn, born of a whore unavailable to comfort him and raised in the peculiar coven of a brothel mixing desire, libido, profit, and sin. Put otherwise, his unnatural birth is a tainted, not an immaculate one, sealing his damnation at his pre-natal origin and the inescapability of the curse of his very existence.

This intensely dark episode (whose signal moment of “comic” relief is Kent Cosgrove getting shot on a hunting trip, Dick Cheney style) is a poignant follow-up to its precursor (in which Sally walks in on the scene of Don “comforting Mrs. Rosen”). Its chief virtue is to directly engage, and not avoid, the implications of Sally’s hideous, taboo-smashing revelation for Don’s well-being and perhaps his mortal soul.

Things had been looking up for Don, in fact or at least in interpretation. A prior post in this series by Todd McGowan argued that the ways in which Don haphazardly confronts his trauma can be generative of ethical action. As proof: his mental and emotional revisiting of his sexual initiation by a prostitute (and the beating he took), amidst his tormented moping over an ended affair, spurred him to denounce the corporate whoring of his ad agency for auto accounts. Last week’s post by Corey Creekmur, exploring the ambiguities and burdens of favors, asked whether the right thing is diminished by being done for the wrong reason and questioned the possibility of the purity of any intention or conduct.

“The Quality of Mercy,” by contrast, suggests that Don is neither reducible to nor redeemable as simply a creature of a capacious, even all-encompassing moral gray zone. Just as Sally, we learn, does not believe his shaky lie of having merely comforted a friend, and Don cannot glibly move on unencumbered by self-loathing, so we should not be seduced by a rendering of Don as some everyman, defined by a necessary admixture (albeit hyperbolic) of good and bad, right and wrong living. Rather, we see again a familiar image of him as a man (now cast as anti-Christ) who resists, or refuses, or is incapable of grace. Of course, Don is neither pure evil nor simply good-and-evil; if only one, and not both, he would have grown uninteresting long ago as either an object of easy disavowal or comfortable identification. Yoking our gaze back toward evil, the episode thus reanimates the central, characterological tension of the entire show sacrificed in much of the current season as Don slithered too effortlessly through his continued perfidy, at too low a cost.

Trained on images of birth, repetition, and outright regression — and unencumbered by strained or inventive references to “the times” — “Quality of Mercy,” despite the ironic citation from Portia’s speech in The Merchant of Venice which the title entails, thus felt like a return to the show’s origins or essence, with Don and his agony once more at the ineluctable center. Each subplot was tightly organized around Don’s epic swoon, whether Sally’s desperate bid for escape to boarding school, or Bob Benson’s emergence as a Don doppelganger, whose evident dark side puts Don’s in relief with the additive of a queer spin. As a Mad Men devotee and professional historian of the 1960s, I find myself appropriately fascinated and repulsed by this Don Draper optic. That is, since I am often critical of the show’s engagement with history, this return to a resonant Don-centrism gave me great comfort (whatever the episode’s wrenching particulars).

For example, who could not love the way that Don’s jealousy, after running into Ted and Peggy at the movies, leads him to break the promise he had made for a ceasefire. Don looked surprised when Ted called him out as a belligerent; but the two shook hands man to man. The look on Ted’s face when Jim Cutler coolly dismisses collegiality in favor of the bigger deal—Sunkist versus Ocean Spray—harked back to Pete’s crestfallen mien back in Season 1 when Bert Cooper told him that Don’s private secrets were nobody’s business but his own. That is what Pete means when he tells Duck that he has seen this kind of subterfuge before.

Likewise, who would not marvel at Don’s savvy in undermining Peggy’s chance for a Clio and a new romance in a single stroke? Monster, indeed! That there is more than a grain of truth in Don’s reply—Ted’s “not that virtuous,” he tells her, “He’s just in love with you”—does not make his demonic coup de maître any less jaw-dropping. And who could possibly complain that Don’s comeuppance from Sally—her refusal to see him and her exit to boarding school—arrives in an episode that aired on Father’s Day?

But the episode was also, alas, a stark reminder of Mad Men’s own persisting curse: that to remain true to its characters and logic it must perpetually restage resistance to change, regressive fantasies of impossible return, enduring capture by trauma, moral dissolution, and the unavailability of redemption (even as the characters occasionally experience salutary triumphs and modest versions of inner growth). In this capacity, and even as it revives its signature dynamics, it risks attrition of interest by both excess of the familiar and aggressive ante-upping — of being the dramatic cousin of Curb Your Enthusiasm (and now Veep) whose characters perpetually bumble into cringe-worthy, comic scenarios of escalating absurdity and narrowing plausibility, losing the humor along the way.

In “Quality of Mercy” Mad Men saved itself by getting back to basics with an exquisitely arrayed psychological and moral disaster. But a point may come when we are so inured to the wreckage that it no longer incites the horror, pity, and simple curiosity it once did. As that point threatens approach we might ask if Mad Men can show a new kind of mercy to then save itself from itself.

*The editors of Mad Men, Mad World and contributor Jeremy Varon want to take this opportunity to congratulate Phil Abraham, the director of this episode (and of "The Better Half") as well as a co-contributor to the volume.