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 second episode, 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.
Comments
I'm not so sure. It is indeed easy to imagine Draper as a crypto-Jew. He's got that haunted look, and a pervasive secretiveness. And there are frequent clues to that effect: Rachel Menken noting that he has some inscrutably outsider air, or the long pause (in e06) where Rachel slowly doesn't respond when her sister asks over the telephone whether he's Jewish, or even his response to Roger Sterling's question of whether he has ever hired any Jews: "Not on my watch!"
But for me, it seemed inconceivable that his brother Adam would be a Jew. It's not just the red hair. It's his wide-eyed air of middle-American naïf.
Don's flashback in e06 would appear to confirm that his background is not Jewish, but instead something like religious/strict/hick country folk -- the neighbors appeared to be wearing Pennsylvania German- or Mennonite-type garb. And the boy Don says "he ain't my brother." Not since Henry Roth have I heard the word "ain't" come out of a Jewish kid's mouth. (OK, well, maybe the Jewish gangsters in E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate.)
(I was also having trouble imagining someone named Whitman as a Jew, but of course Whitman would be an easy Anglicization of Weissman, so that point is easily invalidated.)
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August 26, 2007 09:17 AM