Mad Men Note: Not that Sally
What ought to have been exciting about this evening’s episode was Don Draper’s loss of the Hilton account — on account, so to speak, of his failure to include the Moon in the range of international destinations for the new Hilton campaign. We knew that some sort of breakup was in the cards, because Don simply isn’t the right adman for a lunatic narcissist. Roger Sterling jabs his finger Donwards and says, “You’re in over your head.” In the generally understood sense of the term, that’s not true; nobody knows better than Don what needs to be done, for Hilton Hotels. But in an absolute sense — where Conrad Hilton, not his business, is the client — it’s true.Â
Can we assume that everybody knows why Sal has to be fired, even though he did nothing wrong? Can we just say that Sal is right when he calls his client-attacker “a bully”? And will the women in the audience please tells their husbands (if they’re cute — the women, I mean!) that this sort of thing happens, or used, until recently, to happen, all the time? And that for it to happen to a man (Sal) is simply a reminder that, where powerful people are concerned,  sex is about power, not pleasure?
I want to close on the opposite of a Come-to-Jesus note. Near the end of the show, Betty confesses to Carla (her black housemaid/nanny) that she is not sure that the Civil Rights drive is a good idea. Maybe people don’t like it, she says. I could hear the snickering, but the sad truth is that Betty is right. “People” don’t like civil rights for black Americans. They don’t like abortion. And they certainluy don’t like gay marriage. Roe v Wade and the Civil Rights Acts were not faits accomplis, but rather shots over the bow. They meant that things were goint to change, not that they had changed. And they still haven’t changed. I doubt that, in a smiliar imbroglio, Sal would be fired today. But that’s because it would be illegal to fire him, not because anybody wanted to keep him on. The civil rights thing still hasn’t taken with the body politic, and if Mad Men reminds viewers that this is so, it will have accomplished a great deal.