Chop Wood, Carry Sponsors: MAD MEN Finale

This weekend's TV was momentous with AMC's crown jewel ending at the beginning of the glorious Free to Be You and Me 1970s. Don Draper finally hit bottom and was, as always happens, in the right place at the right time to surrender, and find the heart of the American dream....again. After sneering through the consciousness-raising retreat center, ambling after the niece of his fake wife, the only other person who knows his real name, and like the girl he originally moped after out there, a mother like his own, i.e. fleeing their child like its a needy style-cramping vampire. He's along for the ride but it turns out he's the one who's finally able to rise up and hug a shlemiel in a group therapy session as decade began, a good omen that led immediately to what he had been looking for (unbeknownst to him or us), the perfect Coca-Cola commercial, one that would define the decade itself--it's seamless interweaving of the mainstream popular plastic packaging and post-Aquarius encounter group openness commercialization and open collar freedom, but a freedom beyond the boy's club sexo-alcoholic escapism of the sixties, a freedom that understood no one escapes oneself, and the minute you stop trying, joy comes dropping down like a cartoon anvil. Hugging the shlemiel (Evan Wood) is the first truly free thing he's ever done, to release seven seasons worth of accumulated stress, of the Don Draper mask, the alpha male swagger, collapsing like a globally warmed iceberg and just hugging it out with a guy his total polar opposite, a weak-chinned balding charisma void, the kind I used to be always mean to, fearing if I was nice they'd hang around and try to poach foxes, embarrassing themselves, chasing off foxes and cramp my style by association. Learning to recognize myself in them, to love even them unconditionally, was the biggest surrender I ever had to make, and it's a case of genius casting that he's so forgettable even when talking about how forgettable he is. As an actor though, it's truly extraordinary; there's no maudlin sentiment or whining for attention -- it's not a breakdown but a breakthrough, crying and laughing at the same time.


And just when you thought things were getting kind of wholesome, pure, believing the Aquarius line, it comes in fully with "I'd like to teach the world to sing" extended length commercial, played in full. Watching, transfixed, still moved, I could remember hearing that song everywhere in the 70s as a kid and when I was getting sober in 1998, hanging out in AA just to meet girls and drink free coffee (I told myself). Only gradually feeling the cracks along my walls and barriers. When I could literally hear and feel the iceberg in my soul finally melting enough that it just split and cracked open and dissolved, right in the midst of an AA meeting on a late Friday afternoon, triggered by my self-imposed humiliation over walking in late with squeaky shoes, toxins and sweat, laughter and tears and rose-tinted waves of gratitude all pouring forth like the incoming warm ocean.

The Nordic Aliens bring their universal message

And to the show's credit there were no little montage vignettes woven in during the Coca-Cola commercial, no carousel pics of Betts and Don at the dance, or forward to Roger's third wedding, or Don getting the Clio for the ad. It's not even clear for sure if he came back to McCann and pitched his revelation, or ever went back at all. And that's the genius, for in committing to meditation all that stuff ceases to matter - it's a new day. And to me, of course he did, he pitched the ad, it's his career capstone. Because if he did, then the entire show from beginning to end makes a post-modern socio-historical Guy Debord meets Alcoholics Anonymous kind of sick sense. And it's so glorious to see how the show really understands these kinds of breakthroughs, as of course no actor is worth a damn unless they've already worked through a lot of the same issues - for in the end method acting and this kind deeply emotional 'true' stuff hinges on such unrelenting self-honesty. And that's how fiction ends up being truer than truth.

And most unique to the 70s too, we were all--the entire nation--into that song. We all knew and know all the words, not that there's many. Because irony didn't exist in the popular media; we were too open-hearted and there were too few channels to separate us, no other devices on which to watch things. In the 70s we all had to endure each other's programming and the kids never got first draft choice if my dad was around, but we were always in the same room, seeing the same things. It left us all with a cross-generational water cooler currency woefully missing from today's everybody on their own screen post-nuclear familial structure. That's how that Coke commercial crossed the generations, it bonded the entirety of the nation in its moment.

TV was a shared language in the 70s but it was the EST and therapy groups and encounter sessions that brought us closest. Even if your parents didn't go, some couple they knew did, and the message of openness and being 'perfect in the now' crossed from that couple to your parents and outwards in a loving pink energy ripple effect. Parents knew how to treat us, to not hold on tight or try to align us to their thinking, not to live through us or rathe their worth as humans on what daycare we tested into. They were them and we were us and all were okay. This kind of encounter group wildfire helped prep me for later yoga classes, acid, and eventually AA. Don's encounter group scene's tremendous cathartic power comes from that same wildfire, the time when yoga and meditation were brand new to the west. There was no arguing with the resulting slow burn awakening as the news of inner peace's availability spread (like that 70s Faberge Organics shampoo spot:"tell two friends / and they'll tell two friends / and so on / and so on").

It's the same with Don's mountain retreat moment, as we say in AA, "your own best thinking got you here" - which has about two dozen dual meanings. To be able to commit to a meditation class without smirking, or judging, being able to take instruction from a young hippie kid in the lotus position, to get the message rather than let your ego--like a jealous rival--convince you to hang back and judge the messenger, to sneer at such naked emotional simplicity rather than leave that jealous ego in the dust, to shiver in the naked heat of the sun rather than run back to the iceberg re-freezing warmth of the bar. But looking at the entirety of his seemingly haphazard journey west, we see how every little incident led to this moment, from the invite to the Veteran's fundraiser to giving some snotty thief his car, all step by step, like a careful opponent making sure all his enemy's (i.e. ego's) avenues of escape are blocked before springing the iceberg break coup de grace. If he had his car he would have quit before the miracle (as we say in AA), if the guy speaking had been attractive, or young, or old, or somehow different enough to be either desirable or a threat it wouldn't have worked, if that mopey bitch in that first encounter group hadn't cross-talked about being abandoned by her mom, then his ride wouldn't have bailed, and so forth.

Don was hugging the shlemiel not because he heard, as we say in the rooms, his own story, or recognized the dawning of the commercialization of the Age of Aquarius. But because he saw beyond himself, and knew this person was him, and was Jesus, and the dying Betts, and his children, and whore mother, and brother he drove to suicide, all wrapped into one flag-draped coffin of a rainbow child. But Do is an ad man to his core, and even there in the crucible of surrender, lurks the next gold ring. For him they are inseparable but that's the thing you go into the wilderness of Self but if you don't bring back a present, a souvenir we can use here in the communal house, you just wasted our time telling us about it. We're conditioned to accept that from popular culture, so maybe it doesn't even get our French theory noses in a twist when right after the credits comes a car commercial with Jon Hamm voiceover. The average critic writing about the show doesn't mention that, doesn't see it in the context of the show itself. But any acidhead huckster would note, that's SYNERGY too!


I'd like at this juncture to thank those who got me here. God, my sponsor, my therapist, the makers of Effexor, Wellbutrin, Neurontin, Robert Duvall in The Apostle, and Helen Slater (left), this wizened broad (aptly, her first role was in 1984 as Supergirl!) eyes tired but serene with the gaze of one who's come through the inferno to the light of forgiveness and unconditional love and who brings Don to the point of his. She reminded me of the cool people who kept me coming back to AA in the very very beginning, the ones who barely said a word other than 't'sup?' after the more overt and smiling welcome committees scared me off time and time again. Slater's wizened woman says and does the same things these t'sup people did to keep me coming back and give me the final gentle push through the breakthrough door (see: CinemArchetype 11 - The Wild Wise Woman) rather than trying to drag me through like a stubborn mule.  She comes to him not as a future conquest, or yet another mother on the run from her child (his favorite brand) but as merely a gentle guide who knows, as so many did for me, that anything more than almost nothing was too much. There's a moment before the shlemiel takes the talking chair where she looks and smiles over at Don as if inviting him up but doesn't coax, sensing his inner ice already beginning to break and not wanting to push him. And when he stands up walks over to him she just gives the faintest of smiles, not the 'I made this happen' thing, but the joy of the truly enlightened upon seeing the course of dharma in action and gratitude that they've been blessed with being awake enough to pick up on dharma's plans like it's some kind of subatomic benevolent Dr. Mabuse. That's her gift and as the lighting cues ever so perceptively shift, we realize with her help the episode's stealthily gone from inviting us to sneer along with Don at all the new age claptrap to weeping at being once lost and now found, in the same moving way Clark Gable did in Strange Cargo! Or Billy Bob Thornton in The Apostle!

Helen Slater, showing she always had a way with reticent buds (Supergirl, 1984)

And that's how it happens, to we who have had the terror of death's visit and the post-ghost Scrooge satori, who've walked in late to an AA meeting with super squeaky shoes, and went--in a final cracked dam buckling we can actually hear in our soul. I felt like my older brother ego finally passed the joystick after banging around the same game level for 30 years, and my inner little brother picked it up and effortlessly opened six new levels, including the exit. Freedom. Ugly or old, fat or anorexic who cares you're a child of God. I love all things scrooge satori merry xmas you old building and loan. I love you all as I used to think I loved myself, but only a sick sadist would treat someone he professed to love so harshly as I treated me. "Self-seeking will slip away" is one of the AA Promises that does come true, it's the 'slipping away' part that intrigued me when I'd read them up on the wall, as if it wasn't something done consciously, it just happened on its own, like baby teeth falling out. When the egoic whipping boy construct of self is gone, the collapse of the persona illusion of difference falls soon after. What remains? Only Love. It's what makes a Subaru a Subaru.

So we mustn't think of these events we've seen in Mad Men as fake, or either cynical (the 'Coke Meditations') or sincere.  Having lost both my parents recently and neither one of them much for protracted death scenes (my mom lied to everyone until right up to the last minute, so we wouldn't worry or try to come visit). I also was moved by January Jones' own melting frostiness. She showed in her one telephone scene that her frosty stiffness over the previous seasons was not just because she was a bad actor (and --especially with her wooden acting in X-Men--we wondered). But it all pays off for this one beautiful scene on the phone, the one final moment of these two emblems of the 60s, each accustomed to the social order elevating them by virtue of charismatic superiority, each clinging to the tenets and terms of their social personae until they finally in this moment break and they can surrender to their real feelings (a mirror to the telephone making intimacy possible too in the conclusion of the Peggy arc). But it doesn't matter at all- it still counts, the phone; these moments of redemption are what makes all the bullshit not just necessary but worth enduring. The longer the climb the better the sledding, and what other reason for reaching the top is there? Behold a snowy pale white horse. And the man that snorted it was Death. But first, Coke added life, and was the real thing. And he rode it.