THIS BOOK IS A TIME MACHINE. It goes backwards and forwards through all seven seasons. It takes longtime fans to a place where they ache to go again. It guides new viewers on their first trip to 1960s Madison Avenue. It’s calledMad Men Car ouse l . It lets us think about the show the way a TV critic does. Around and around and back home again, to a place where we know why it’s loved. AVAI LA BL E WH ER E FI NE BO OK S AR E SO LD
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Excerpt From 'Mad Men Carousel' by Matt Zoller Seitz
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7/24/2019 Excerpt From 'Mad Men Carousel' by Matt Zoller Seitz
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” starts with a definition of “Mad Men.” The
white-on-black title screen tells us the term was coined in the late
1950s to describe the advertising executives of Madison Avenue.
After a pause it adds, “They coined it.”
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”1 not only creates a world, sets the gears of a
story in motion, and introduces us to the show’s hero, adman Donald Draper
(Jon Hamm2 )—it tells us that everything on-screen is about control.
Control of money. Control of power. Control of information. Control of
the image.
The tale is told in accordance with the rules of the society in which it
takes place. Screenwriter and series creator Matthew Weiner and director
Alan Taylor are controlling storytellers. They dole out facts about the ad agencySterling Cooper and its employees on their own timetable. Even though we get to
observe intensely private moments, we’re always on the outside looking in. Our
peeks behind the curtain are not comforting. They confirm that the powerful
decide what we see, how we see it, and what that glimpse will cost us.
The portrait of Don is the best example of the way Mad Men reveals itself.
He’s one of the most powerful characters on the show, but we can’t access his
interior. We gather from the shot of his Purple Heart and the sound of bombs
bursting as he drifts into a nap that he’s a veteran, but we don’t know why it’s
1 Matthew Weiner wrote “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” in 1999 as a spec script. At the time, he was
a staff writer on Ted Danson’s sitcom Becker, eager to make the leap into drama. It somehow
crossed David Chase’s desk; as a result, Weiner became a key creative player on The Sopranos,
writing or cowriting a number of seminal episodes (among them “Unidentified Black Males,”
“The Test Dream,” “Kennedy and Heidi,” and “The Blue Comet”). Yet, terrific though Mad Men’s
pilot may be, there are ways in which it’s clearly the work of a less mature writer than the Weiner
beloved by Sopranos fans—it is only the first four episodes, mainly the pilot, that make ironic
jokes at the expense of the era in which it’s set. Such gags seem a bit like showboating by a
writer eager for attention, but they’re forgivable in light of how substantial the episode is as a
whole. Social anthropology is one of Weiner’s main concerns—we’re dropped into this world
and allowed to draw our own conclusions about it, as was generally the case with The Sopranos (at least before Chase began his meta-critique of audience bloodlust).—Andrew Johnston
2 Although this is considered Jon Hamm’s breakthrough role, he’d previously had minor roles on
several TV shows, including Charmed and The Division. He’s since had roles in movies such as
The Town and Clear History , as well as guest roles on several TV shows, including 30 Rock and
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
SEASON 1 / EPISODE 1
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”
Written by Matthew Weiner
Directed by Alan Taylor
It’s Toasted
7/24/2019 Excerpt From 'Mad Men Carousel' by Matt Zoller Seitz
important that we know this. When we get to the end of the episode and learn
that Don has a wife and children and a house in Ossining, New York, 3 it’s a
surprise, based on his behavior.4 But even though we surmise that Don must
not be satisfied at home—otherwise, why would he have a mistress?—his warmsmile at his as-yet-unnamed wife and kids confounds that assumption. Who
is Donald Draper? We don’t know yet. When will we find out? When the show
is ready to tell us. The details aren’t filled in, but are slowly unveiled.
We learn a bit about the show’s central location, Sterling Cooper, a small
but respected ad agency whose fortunes are built mainly around one client,
Lucky Strike cigarettes. We also get a sense of the society that surrounds
Madison Avenue: an upper-middle-class to wealthy social sphere, vigorous and
arrogant, with domestic satellites throughout Manhattan and the tristate area.
It is a world ruled by straight white men who are comfortable giving orders to
black men and to women (in the workplace and in the domestic sphere) and
who admit outsiders selectively, and only for profit. These men are complacent
about being on top. They like for things to be done a certain way, and they explain
what, exactly, that way is, in language that leaves no room for challenge.
There are hints of disquiet and dissatisfaction, mainly in scenes with
the Jewish department store manager Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff 5 ), whose
wealth gives her the power to rattle Don’s sexist assumptions; and Don’s bohe-
mian girlfriend, Midge (Rosemarie DeWitt6 ), who digs Don’s magnetism and
creativity but seems unimpressed by his status. And there are moments here
and there that make easy jokes about antiquated technology and attitudes,
such as when office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks7 ) describes
an IBM Selectric typewriter8 as “simple enough for a woman to use.”
3 The Drapers could plausibly live in any of a number of Westchester commuter suburbs but Ossining
is an homage to John Cheever, who moved there in 1961. According to the exhibit Matthew Weiner’s
Mad Men at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Matthew Weiner opened the first
writers’ meeting of each new season by reading a Cheever short story aloud.—Amy Cook4 It’s also a “Well, of course” moment. Mad Men debuted in 2007, on the heels of the finale of
The Sopranos, one of many cable dramas from the aughts that were built around married men
who got action on the side.—Matt Zoller Seitz
5 Maggie Siff previously had roles on Rescue Me and Law & Order: SVU. She went on to play
Tara Knowles on Sons of Anarchy .
6 Rosemarie DeWitt has had roles in Cinderella Man, Rachel Getting Married, and on Showtime’s
United States of Tara.
7 Christina Hendricks had roles on several TV shows, including ER and Firefly , before taking the
role of Joan Holloway. She’s since been in films such as Drive and John Slattery’s God’s Pocket.
Her Mad Men character Joan shares a first and last name with the heroine of John Cheever’s
short story “Torch Song.”—MZS
8 The IBM Selectric typewriter was not actually introduced until July 1961; it replaced the rib-bon and typebar found in its predecessors with a “typeball.” The Electric’s typeball and ribbon
moved back and forth, but unlike traditional typewriters, the paper stayed in one place, and
the Selectric could print different fonts on the same page. Matthew Weiner has said that he
knew that this was an anachronism, but the more period-correct 1960 models were harder to
come by and repair, and also much louder, which created more sound issues.—RKL
7/24/2019 Excerpt From 'Mad Men Carousel' by Matt Zoller Seitz
Rachel calls Don on his BS, but rather than listen to her and bend to suit
her needs, Don gets his back up. Rachel has punctured Don’s sense of entitle-
ment, and it stings because he’s not used to that. Senior partner Roger Sterling
(John Slattery18
) cautions the room against getting “emotional”—a genderedadjective that in this case seems meant to control Don, by intimating that his
behavior is unmanly. It doesn’t work because Don is in aggrieved mode, ridicul-
ing Rachel’s notion of enticing strangers to visit a store for aspirational reasons.
He is offended by the idea of taking the very illusion upon which American cap-
italism, an institution run by WASP industrialists, was founded, and applying
it to a campaign for a Jewish-owned store whose clientele consists mainly of
immigrants and their descendants. “I’m not gonna let a woman talk to me like
this. This meeting is over,” Don says, and storms out.
He and Rachel find common ground during an amends-making dinner.
She senses that Don feels like an outsider, too, and says there was a silver
lining to that meeting: the chance to hear “all the things I always assumed
people were thinking.” Their conversation is charged with sexual possibility,
but Don’s presumptions dampen it. His end of the conversation is meant to
jam Rachel into an ill-fitting narrative that other women, Joan especially,
wear with pride. Don asks her why she isn’t married, which presumes that
her life as a single professional is a way station on the road to marriage and
motherhood. “If I weren’t a woman I would be allowed to ask you the same
questions, and if I weren’t a woman, I wouldn’t have to choose between
putting on an apron and the thrill of making my father’s store what I always
thought it should be,” she replies. (This is another moment where “Smoke”
condescends to the past.)
The Lucky Strike meeting is also about how language can shape per-
ception and self-perception, and give a person or a company permission to
do as it pleases. Lucky Strike honcho Lee Garner Sr. (John Cullum)19 says the
company is about to get sued for false health claims. [END. 3] Roger, a masterdiplomat, blames “media manipulation” for the industry’s troubles. Lee gripes
about government regulators. His son, Lee Jr. (Darren Pettie), moans that
they might as well be living in Russia. They’re both miffed that they can’t do
business exactly the way they want to. They’re the most entitled people in
an episode filled with entitled people. They crave language that will cripple
constraints, erase them, wipe them out like the Native Americans, who, Lee
Garner Sr. insists, “gave us America, for shit’s sake.”
18 Slattery had roles in several TV shows before Mad Men, including Sex and the City , Desperate
Housewives, and K Street. He has taken more comedic roles since Mad Men, including Wet
Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, which reunites him with Jon Hamm. He also
directed God’s Pocket, costarring Christina Hendricks.
19 Known for Northern Exposure, One Life to Live, and The Day After .
7/24/2019 Excerpt From 'Mad Men Carousel' by Matt Zoller Seitz
So Don comes up with “Lucky Strike: It’s Toasted.”20 Don’s speech jus-
tifying the slogan is the most powerful moment in “Smoke.”21 It reframes all
of the screenplay’s control issues as variants of Freud’s “death wish,” which
Sterling Cooper’s researcher, Gretta (Gordana Rasovich), outlined in a reportthat Don threw away and Pete snuck into his office and stole. Don says that
all advertising is based on one thing: happiness. In the context of “Smoke,”
happiness means the ability to do as you please, without worrying about other
people’s expectations, opinions, rules, or laws. Don tells the Lucky Strike gang
that happiness is not the past; happiness is the future: a promise of something
better than whatever you’ve got right now. Happiness is defined here as finding
a way to give yourself permission to do whatever you’re inclined to do anyway.
The “Smoke” of the episode title is not just tobacco smoke; it is a wreath
that obscures the inevitable facts of change, of loss or absence of control, of
decline, of death. Smoke is the hair dye, the makeup, the camera face, the good
side. It is the slogan, the homily, the maxim, the song lyric, the home-team
motto, the billboard slogan that tells us who we are so that we don’t have to
wonder.
Is Don smoke? Is he mirrors? What is his story? How did he get to be so
persuasive?
The first time we see him, we’re looking at the back of his head. Don is
introduced with a camera move that tracks from screen right to screen left
through a crowded, smoky bar,22 then pushes in to find him sitting alone in a red
booth: a broad-shouldered man in a dark suit. Subsequent shots reveal a circa-
1960 “dreamboat” type along the lines of Rock Hudson or Kirk Douglas. His hair
looks Brylcreemed. There’s an empty glass in front of him. He’s scribbling notes:
Brand name. Freedom. Conversion. Lucky Strike. Old Gold. He stays seated as he
interviews a busboy (Henry Afro-Bradley) about his smoking habits. We never
see Don from head to toe in this scene, only in close-up. How tall is he? What
kind of shoes is he wearing? Does he carry a briefcase? We don’t know.
20 It’s Toasted was in fact adopted as the Lucky Strike slogan in 1917, and remains on its packag-
ing as of this writing—it refers to the heating process, distinct from sun-drying. The slogan’s
origins are debated, with credit going to either the advertising agency Lord & Thomas or
Percival S. Hill, a then-former president of the American Tobacco Company.—Lily Puckett
21 A Jewish-owned department store says it wants to change its image, only to be pitched a
campaign that reinforces its existing image, and when the manager balks, the point man for
the account appeals to patriarchal authority: the manager’s father, who owns the store. We
see language being shaped in response to language: Don’s Lucky Strike pitch, which is essen-
tially meaningless, takes the piss out of the federal government’s rules against claiming thatsmoking is approved by doctors. Don wins over the client’s reps by telling them that advertis-
ing appeals to the consumer’s desire to be told that he can go where he wants, and do what he
wants, and reinvent himself when he wants, and not to worry, because in the end, he’s going
to be okay.—MZS
22 According to the script, Don is drinking at the “Knick Knack Bar.”—AC
7/24/2019 Excerpt From 'Mad Men Carousel' by Matt Zoller Seitz
In the next scene, he’s introduced in a slightly blurry profile close-up,
knocking on Midge’s door. When Midge opens the door, the camera stays on that
angle, so that for the second time in “Smoke,” we’re looking at the back of Don’s
head. Finally, there’s a cut to a wide shot of Don entering Midge’s apartment. It’sthe first time that we see all of him. The glimpse lasts a few seconds, and then
again we’re looking at the back of his head. We see his face briefly as he crosses
Midge’s threshold, then he closes the door, shutting us out. Inside the apartment,
the camera gives us a long look at Midge’s face, but Don remains a foreground
blur, seen mostly from the back. When we finally get our first glimpse of Don from
head to toe, it’s in the same frame with Midge, who is also pictured in totality;
in the next scene, they’re both naked (under sheets), and Don immediately gets
up and starts putting his clothes (his work uniform) back on.
In the bar scene, we learned nothing about Don except that he’s prob-
ably in advertising and that he’s concerned about how to sell cigarettes at a
time when the government is cracking down on the tobacco industry. In the
scene with Midge, the talk is mainly about work (she’s an illustrator, and they
seem bonded by their creativity), with fuzzy detours into their relationship.
Throughout the rest of the episode, it’s work, work, work and words, words,
words. Don chooses his words carefully, to sell pitches to clients and his image
to colleagues. He rarely reveals more than he wants to.
Is Don as selfish, cold, and reactionary as he seems?
His scenes with Rachel suggest otherwise. And his final scene with
Peggy very nearly confirms it.
Peggy thanks her new boss for sticking up for her with Pete Campbell,
and nervously places her hand on top of his. What little we’ve learned about
Peggy makes us think that this is anathema to her. She’s only doing it because
it’s the kind of thing that Joan advised her to do.
Descriptions of Don’s previous relationships with secretaries suggest
that his removal of Peggy’s hand is also a break from tradition. “First of all, Peggy,” he says, “I’m your boss, not your boyfriend. Second
of all, if you ever let Pete Campbell go through my trash again you won’t be
able to find a job selling sandwiches in Penn Station.”
Peggy apologizes for letting Pete in, then assures Don that she’s “not
that kind of girl.”
Don’s boss mask falls—but only for an instant.
“Of course,” he says. “Go home, put your curlers in. Get a fresh start