Mad Men V
Being thick as a post, I had to see the show twice before I got it. Why was Don Draper so determined not to be recognized as someone called Dick, by his own half-brother Adam? Had he committed some terrible crime? I was thinking à la 2007. Watching the show a second time – bless you, AMC, for re-running these fascinating episodes the moment they’re over – I got it. What’s Don Draper’s horrible secret, the one that inspires him to pay his half-brother 1960$5000 cash American to make him “go away”?
It’s in the names. The half-brother is Adam. The step-mother is Abigail. The uncle is Max/Mac. These are the people that Dick, a/k/a “Don Draper,” walked away from over ten years ago, when Adam was an eight year-old boy. Adam and Abigail are popular names today, and they were popular with English (but only English) protestants into the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. In Mid-Century USA, however, they were common only to –
Jews.
Don Draper is Jewish. That’s why nothing about his past is on display. That’s why he can’t have Seth as a half-brother. Is Matthew Wiener going to take the Sopranos formula and use it to etch the far subtler drama of bourgeois American anti-Semitism?
Jon Hamm’s most amazing face – and he turned in many during this episode – is in response to Adam’s pathetic question, “Did you ever miss me?” Don is paralyzed by the horror of having driven such “missing” from his mind with an iron discipline, until the Hallmark answer, “Of course I did,” presents itself to his adman’s brain. Don usually knows what he’s supposed to say right away. The surprise of Adam, a brother whom one ends up (after the third meeting, anyway) thinking that he loved, slows him down.
I may, of course, be wrong as Worcester about all of this. But when I shared my theory with Kathleen, she jumped on it. I’m suddenly wishing that I knew a few chat rooms.