Because, against a pristine backdrop of sparkling cocktails and smooth jazz and miles of immaculate white carpeting, our handsome leading man is an inveterate commitment-phobe. This deeply unheroic jitteriness at Draper’s core, revealed anew in Season 5 despite his best intentions toward self-domestification, is part of what makes the show so reliably transfixing.

Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, may just as easily be describing Don Draper when he says of Gatsby, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”īut Don Draper is just as sensitive to the terrors of life as he is to its promises. Draper presents a new variation on that oft-revived archetype of self-invented swagger he’s a charismatic but tainted fortune hunter to shame even Jay Gatsby. Since Matthew Weiner’s drama first aired in 2007, its protagonist, Don Draper, has held sway as a sort of American icon of luminous yet condescending masculinity a personification of the fables of high capitalism and the discontents of domestic life and an embodiment of the pleasures and perils of the American dream. My father’s appetite for carnal novelty (and revulsion at domestic imprisonment) comes to mind when contemplating the strange enduring appeal of “Mad Men,” that dazzling, witty, nostalgic, emotional horror story that recently wrapped up its fifth season. “Playing house is hell,” he would murmur darkly, as if the entire history of monogamous love were an elaborate game of make-believe. Any suggestion that he might marry one of his girlfriends was met with an incredulous laugh, followed by a dour look. Even when he appeared to have more than he could handle, he was usually on the lookout for fresh intrigue.

I suspect that he viewed juggling several women at once (while making sure they never found out) as a worthy goal precisely because it was so difficult. When two girlfriends find out about each other, you’ve got trouble.” Presumably two girlfriends would gouge each other’s eyes out, whereas three girlfriends might unpack a picnic lunch of tea sandwiches and cherry wine, lovingly braid one another’s hair and then fall asleep in the sun.īut my father’s approach to such matters was always more sporting than practical. “You can have one girlfriend or three,” my divorced father once told me, offering advice, as usual, that only applied to him.

Christian grey contract