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Don Draper and the Carousel Pitch---Mad Men The setup: The moment Mad Men became a genuine, certified cultural event came at the end of its first season. After the cautious raves of surprised critics, after Dick Whitman went to Korea and stole Don Draper’s identity so he could start a new life, even after Bert Cooper somersaults away from more than a decade of prestige drama with a 10.0 kiss-off: “Mr. Campbell, who cares?” What finally vaulted Mad Men into the pop consciousness of YouTube clips and breathless texts from friends was Don’s pitch to Kodak, the Carousel speech. The pitch: Don sees the Kodak slide projector as a portable nostalgia generator, and he uses his own memories to sell it, from a story about his first job at a fur company to personal family photographs. “It’s called a carousel. It lets us travel the way a travels, around and around and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.” It’s such a powerful pitch Don and Peggy keep reworking it over the years. Don threw a stone that’s still skipping across the lake. The breakdown: Don’s approach is to exploit a yearning for the simple, happy Norman Rockwell family in his photographs. It works on Harry Crane, who had recently cheated on his wife and rushes out of the room in tears. But there are two little tensions to go with the big one at the end. First, these are photos we’ve never seen. Don and Betty sharing a kiss at midnight isn’t a memory. It’s a fantasy. They’re just models in an ad. Second, that family he’s selling doesn’t really exist. Betty Draper barely knows her husband. Don then races home to catch his family before they leave to go to his in-laws’ to celebrate the ultimate American family holiday, Thanksgiving—but they’re already gone. That’s the central irony of Mad Men. The man selling the American dream goes home to a big, empty house. What’s more, Don knows exactly what he’s doing in that ad campaign, yet it still works on him. He’s both mastermind and mark, artist and salesman, conscious and unconscious. He can manipulate the market, but ultimately he’s just another green void within it. Ryszard |
