There’s a scene in the finale of season six that embodies everything that’s so right and so wrong with Mad Men. Don Draper, that fathomless enigma of a Madison Avenue copywriting anti-hero, is pitching for the Hershey’s chocolate account. Hershey’s represents that dream combination — an American brand legend that has never really advertised before. So winning this deal really matters.
Draper — as always — is pitch-perfect. Selling products is about telling stories. And the story here is about how good the young Don Draper felt when his Daddy took him into a store and offered to buy him anything he wanted. Naturally he chose a Hershey’s bar. The clients are desperately impressed and on the verge of signing a deal.
Unfortunately, Draper has been drinking heavily before the meeting. Having told the clients what they want to hear, he now tells them the truth: that Hershey’s is a product that doesn’t really need advertising and that his blissful childhood was a lie — he was actually raised a hated child in a whorehouse and whenever he ate Hershey’s it was in misery and alone. The clients make their excuses and leave.
Now it’s a great scene — exquisitely acted, sharply scripted, charged with deep meaning about the nature of advertising — but it’s also a fundamentally dishonest one. Draper is in the throes of an alcohol-enhanced nervous breakdown. In the same episode, we see him lying in the drunk tank, having been picked up by the police for beating up a pastor who tried talking him into temperance. Before the meeting he has a huge slug of whiskey. So what kind of superman is he that he can always look immaculate and glamorous and function perfectly, even while drunk — yet simultaneously blow his career, as required by the exigencies of plot tension, in the next instant?
A typical Mad Men superman is what.
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