If the central character isn't an anti hero then he's a ...?

The answer is that he's a hero. I'm going to argue that Don Draper is a hero and that we cannot understand him or appreciate his appeal if we don't recognize that. My big challenge in convincing anyone of this is going to be that a lot of people believe that he is an anti hero.

Don Draper is the apotheosis of the antihero. He’s a selfish, self-destructive womanizing drunk who stole another man’s identity, but the character’s elegance and eloquence — coupled with Hamm’s sleek good looks and subtle performance — made it all OK, and typically quite interesting to watch.

On the flip side we have Draper's primary creator Matt Weiner who insists he isn't.

If you watch the video of Matt Weiner at that link you'll come away wondering what exactly an anti hero is. The definition that comes up first when you Google "anti hero" is, "a central character in a story, movie, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes". That's not much help for all heroes have flaws and some of them have a whole lot of flaws such that there are lots of heroes who at least start of lacking conventional heroic attributes. If Achilles isn't a hero then no one is and he spends most of the Iliad sulking in his tent.

What makes a hero a hero is action. He's the guy you can depend on to act effectively when it really matters. That's what makes Achilles a hero despite all his negative qualities and the same is true of Don Draper. Often times, a story will open with someone who seems deeply unconvincing as a hero but whom we find heroic by the end.

Okay, but what is an anti hero then? I think an anti hero is someone whom we we continue to resist accepting as a hero even after the story is over.

But that isn't helping my case much. Lots of people, starting with Robert Rorke quoted above, resist very strongly the notion that Draper is credible as a hero and advance all sorts of reasons for that. In fact, there are no shortage of people who feel a need to dismiss the character completely. He becomes just a peg to hang social criticism on, and mostly male bashing at that.

What I want you to consider is what Weiner doesn't quite get around to saying: that Don Draper is a hero! That he's a man worth emulating.

This requires an esoteric reading of the series. That is to say, it requires us to see a meaning that is in the series that is not merely hidden, that isn't just a "deeper meaning" but is deliberately hidden by writing that appears to say the opposite while laying clues that make it possible to dig out a different meaning. Not da Vinci Code style with all sorts of mysterious symbols and secret codes. That sort of thing can happen, of course, but most esoteric writing is more mundane than that.

Teddy the Greek

To get a grasp on it, imagine that you meet a child who has a villain—a sports figure, a pop star or fictional character. This child asks you if you too fear and dislike their nemesis. Only a jerk would crush the child's worldview but you actually quite admire the character. So you find something affirming to say. Okay, but let's further complicate the problem. The child has a hot older sibling and you want this hot older sibling to know that you're cool; that you don't have any illusions. You need to find a way to say something that will feel genuine and sincere to the child but will be just enough off that the older sibling that they get it.

It's my contention that Mad Men did this all the time. It fed the childish illusions that many want to believe about who the heroes and villains of the 1960s were while making mistakes that more thoughtful people would notice and begin to wonder about. One of these illusions is central to the way we tend to think about the period and that is that any positive aspects we might see in the 1960s and the 1950s before are obliterated by the racism and sexism of the period. Nostalgia, for modern liberals is an illegitimate and distorting emotion to be resisted. This is especially true of any nostalgia for the period before the sexual revolution, the antiwar and civil rights movement and feminism. A show like Mad Men challenges that simply by exiting.

The show's writers face the problem squarely in the final episode of the first season.

There is the rare occasion where the public can be engaged a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job. I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. Teddy told me the most idea in advertising is 'new". Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.  

He also talked about a deeper bond with the product, "nostalgia". It's delicate. But potent. 

Teddy told that , in Greek, nostalgia literally means, "the pain from an old would."

Now, the interesting thing here is that Don reverses the way our era treats these things. For our era, nostalgia is the easy sell. It creates the itch and then you give the people La belle epoque, American Graffiti, Animal House, Happy Days, The Waltons or some other nostalgic entertainment as a sort of calamine lotion and everyone is happy. Everyone except the professor teaching popular culture at the local university. He/she wants you to know that there were problems with that era that should trouble us because she/he doesn't want anyone admiring any of the values of that era. The professor wants you to embrace "new".

And Don Draper represents the past. He never changes. He always embraces a set of old values. They aren't mainstream values of the period to be certain but they are old. They could be loosely described as 'the hobo code". And he creates a nostalgia for a certain kind of man; a man who is secretive, strong and independent; a man who can cut his losses and move on, not without pain but he can and will do it whenever necessary.

That Don represents this challenge is no problem. He can be dismissed. He is easy to hate. The problem is that he is also easy to love and millions did and do.

The hint that there might be something esoteric going on is in the last line where Don gives a definition of nostalgia. It's not just wrong, it's very wrong. "Nostalgia" uses Greek components but it was coined by A German speaker to describe a condition where people were incapacitated by a desire to return home. The Greek words combined to make it literally mean "aching to go home". As conceived by Johannes Hofer, nostalgia means the exact opposite of what Draper says it means: it means a desire to escape a new wound into a safer past.

But this is where it gets interesting. Right from the beginning, nostalgia has been very compelling. Hofer's definition, echoed by the many who criticize it today, makes nostalgia into a childish emotion, an escapist fantasy. Don Draper gives us a more interesting option: that nostalgia isn't about wanting to escape but a way of confronting loss. And the show appears to back this up by giving us to aspects of the man: Don who deals with situations masterfully and Dick who runs. Those who see Don as an anti hero take that "inner Dick" as the real man. Those of us who admire him take the teleological view, that the man Don wants to become is the real man.

If we take this second option, we'll see the way events spin out in the rest of the story different. The common interpretation of the ending of that first season was that Don did such a good job of selling the men from Kodak that he sold himself too and returned home hoping to find the very thing he'd sold others on.

It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone ... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again ... back home again, a place where we know we are loved.

But "a twinge in your heart more powerful than memory alone" isn't real so much as it is religious. "Our hearts are restless Lord until they rest in thee."

Donald Draper did not, as Robert Rorke and many others claim, steal another man's identity. He used his dog tags to get out of the army and he kept up that deception to break ties with his past as Dick Whitman but he does not adapt the identity of the other man. Think of the man who pretends to a famous actor to get sex or who pretends to be someone else so as to apply for a credit card and then leave this other person stuck with the bill. That is what "stealing another man's identity" is. What Donald Draper does is more akin to giving a false name so as not to be arrested.

You may say, "So what, it's still illegal" and that it most certainly is. But it's still important to get a correct grasp on what is happening. Donald Draper is not a assuming another man's identity, he's a man running away from a shameful past. He's running away from "death". We might well say he is running away from sin.

The first man

Why does Adam commit suicide? "Because he finds his brother whom he thought was dead but his brother rejects him." Okay, but why would that dictate suicide? Adam has seen the loss of his mother and his stepfather. He's had to make it on his own and he has managed. Why would he kill himself? It doesn't make sense.

If I'm right, it doesn't make sense because it isn't supposed to make sense.

Adam, at least according to a flashback and I think we should treat these as mythology not history, was named so by his mother "after the first man". If you know your Saint Paul, however, you'll know that there is a second Adam who follows the first Adam and yet existed before him. I'll grant you that's an odd bit of mythology for a Jew such as Matt Weiner to seize upon and yet I think he does just that. Unlike a believer like myself, this mythology is just like any other mythology for Weiner. Adam is important, not as a real character, but for what he represents to Donald Draper, a past he flees but also a loss.

That's all for now.