Are you ready? Because I want you to pay attention.
This is the beginning of something.
Are you ready? Because I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something.
Freddy Rumsen, Episode 7.1, ‘Time Zones’
In case you needed reminding, this is Freddy Rumsen. He’s opening Mad Men’s final season with a totally electric monologue, straight to camera.
The same Freddy Rumsen who, for six seasons previous, of all the characters on this show who have a drinking problem—read: 99.9% of them—is the only one to actually grasp the nettle and get help. Our first impression of him is clouded by that alcoholism and, as that was the beginning of this thing and as first impressions matter, this is how we (and his peers in the Mad Men-iverse) are wont to view him.
We’re told about Freddy before we meet him in person: Don tells Betty in the show’s second episode that he’s home late because “we had to carry Freddy Rumsen out of Ritazzi’s.” Things don’t improve much for Mr. Rumsen once we’re introduced, as we watch him traipse the line from functioning to unemployed alcoholic; fired after passing out and wetting himself the day before an important Samsonite meeting.
This in mind, Peggy speaks for all of us when she tells him, “wow, Freddy. That is not what I expected.” Freddy’s pitch isn’t just a home run—it’s an end run. Accutron. It’s not a timepiece. It’s a conversation piece.
It’s also not Freddy’s. This we learn at the end of the episode, where it’s revealed that Don—whose own alcoholism has left him without a job—has been feeding Rumsen pitches to go sell freelance. “Do the work, Don,” Freddy chides him later on in the season; ironic, since that’s exactly what Don has been doing, just on the wrong guy. Rumsen is the cypher Dick Whitman needs at that moment because Don Draper has become unpalatable, so why bother fixing him?
Mad Men—like the industry it depicts—is predominantly concerned with the lengths people will go to divert others around them from their own, inconvenient, realities.
Nobody loves Dick Whitman? Fine, I’m Don Draper now.
Lucky Strikes are poisonous? Fine, they’re toasted now.
Food in your teeth, ash on your tie? Fine, you got a Swiss watch now.
Even then, though, these substitutions aren’t enough. You can fool other people into thinking you’re happy but not yourself, not for long. What is happiness anyway, Don asks in season five, but a moment before you need more happiness? You feel hungry even though you already ate. You want a cigarette even though you just smoked.
Segue:
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville (bear with me here) recasts the allure of the American Dream as “the charm of anticipated success.” It’s not hard to see how that also applies to the characters on this show—for a majority of them, it’s literally their job to furnish that anticipation, to ensure that whatever product they’re selling is sufficiently undersized; that some pockmark of the void it’s been bought to fill is left empty. It’s never enough.
Mad Men is a show about those people slowly realising that simply being the ones who manufacture that want isn’t enough to inoculate themselves from feeling it. We sold death for 25 years with Lucky Strike, Roger reminds Don. You know how we did it? We ignored it.
++Next time: People love smoking. Why?++