I really enjoyed reading this. I also ended up reading Don's arc as being mostly hopeful - far more hopeful than I anticipated, actually.
I do think there's a rush to emphasize a Walter White/Tony Soprano/Don Draper trinity of Difficult Men. Not just in finales, but I kind of feel like Walter White is Don's total *opposite*
Agreed. I think they make for interesting comparisons because they lie on a spectrum? There are enough commonalities that you can compare, but there's a lot of contrast, too.
I'm glad you enjoyed it! I do think that Don Draper/Tony Soprano/Walter White comparisons are partly a function of how they're all the leads in uber-prestigious character dramas. In terms with what I'm familiar with, I'd sub out Don Draper for Angel every time to make a real Trio of Sociopaths. The same traits that look surface-heroic (Angel is a cute dork and the CHAMPION) on a fantasy-series are pointedly dangerous in a mafia story (Tony exudes Italian bonhomie and it sustains and justifies his brutality
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I think most people WANT Don to have a happier and more moral ending. Why, I don't know.
If I must be brutally honest . . . I hated the ending. I hated it. And it is synonymous to how much I hated how this series ended, especially in regard to the Draper/Francis family dynamic.
I wrote two entries on why I feel that Don HAD a happy(ISH!) and moral(ISH!!!) ending based on a reading of the text. There's little point in repeating what I just said in more detail above. Believing Don came to a good(ish) end satisfies me as a Don-fan, because I find him very lovable for such a dislikable guy. It also serves as a testament to the 1960s reforms. As a bookend, it's very beautiful that the 1960s legacies of more openness, feminism, psychotherapy all played their role in taking power and status from Don- but also played their role in helping Don achieve more important gains like happiness and self-actualization
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Betty Francis' sudden development an extreme case of cancer did not work for me. It seemed to come out of no where. I never understood why Weiner had saddled her with such a quickie death . . . yet, at the same time, allowed Roger Sterling to survive the end of the series. Yes . . . the same Roger Sterling who had suffered two massive heart attacks in one episode. His heart problem never became a major issue again, despite his continuing drinking, whoring and occasional forays into drug use. I find that odd.
Then again, this is the same Matthew Weiner who told television journalists that Betty's main reason for divorcing Don had to do with class. I never understood that. Betty had been aware of Don's working-class origins throughout their marriage. She made that clear in "The Gypsy and the Hobo". When Roger had expressed his suspicions about Don's class origins in "Red in the Face", Betty seemed more interested in the idea of learning more about Don than concerned that he might be working-class. She certainly seemed
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Mad Men isn't a medical probability show. Some people just have terrible luck and die young, even while other people who made worse health decisions skate into old age. Life and death are unfair. And Betty's early death was very unfair and canonically intended as unfair
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Now, I do feel for Don here in his "When was I supposed to tell you? Our first date, our wedding night?" His life story is unbelievably difficult to repeat in 1950s America. It's one thing to be a "lose the farm" Biggest Loser Child during the Great Depression, raised by an abusive father. There's a lot of those in the Silent Generation, even if few made it into upper-crust Manhattan society and into marriages with Betty Hofstadt-types. However, the "bastard son of a whore and her john", "raised in a whorehouse" teenager years, and desertion, and all of the dreadful nuances and consequences of each chapter in Dick Whitman's life would be relationship-killers in that time. However, the $64,000 point is that, despite the difficulty of confessing all of this, it's what's required when you take on the responsibility of courting a wife with the intent of starting a family. Moreover, Betty and Don could have worked through this if their relationship wasn't so poisonous in other areas like Don's philandering or Betty's bitterness and
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Now, I do think class prejudices were in the mix in Betty's emotions. The *dirtiness* of even Don's limited story got to Betty, a way that broke up her "I thought you were a football player who didn't get along with his father" fantasies of Don. Betty did want to get to know Don more deeply- but she decided to create a backstory for him in the absence of solid information and Betty's manufactured backstory was part of her attraction to him.I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. Betty has always suspected that Don came from a poor background. She didn't seem upset about it when Roger expressed his suspicion that Don not only came from a poor background, but possibly rural. And when Don talked about his years living on a poor farm, she simply seemed fascinated. She may have thought he was some football player in his youth, but she was pretty certain that he was working-class
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I spent four paragraphs discussing how Don's deception and capricious emotional distance from Betty was the driving force behind the divorce compared to my one paragraph on the smaller classist issues. You're willfully ignoring the majority of my statements on the topic
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I do think there's a rush to emphasize a Walter White/Tony Soprano/Don Draper trinity of Difficult Men. Not just in finales, but I kind of feel like Walter White is Don's total *opposite*
Agreed. I think they make for interesting comparisons because they lie on a spectrum? There are enough commonalities that you can compare, but there's a lot of contrast, too.
he could be the dark side of CJ Cregg
I DON'T REMEMBER THIS BUT I LOVE IT????
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If I must be brutally honest . . . I hated the ending. I hated it. And it is synonymous to how much I hated how this series ended, especially in regard to the Draper/Francis family dynamic.
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Then again, this is the same Matthew Weiner who told television journalists that Betty's main reason for divorcing Don had to do with class. I never understood that. Betty had been aware of Don's working-class origins throughout their marriage. She made that clear in "The Gypsy and the Hobo". When Roger had expressed his suspicions about Don's class origins in "Red in the Face", Betty seemed more interested in the idea of learning more about Don than concerned that he might be working-class. She certainly seemed ( ... )
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