DON DRAPER: THE MAN’S MAN
By Christopher Daish
“Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness. It’s the smell of a new car. It’s freedom, from fear. It’s a billboard that screams the reassurance that, whatever you’re doing, it’s okay.” – Don Draper
In one of Don Draper’s customarily esoteric asides he addresses what most men feel at some point in their lives. Happiness is a direct byproduct of the upgrades: a sleeker set golf clubs, a sharper set of threads, and the conquests — both in the boardrooms and at the bars. Men are driven by the desire to escape the pervasive sense of fear that haunts them. The highly competitive battlefield that New York City presents drives us to achieve a sense of identity. There is a flight-or-flight nature to this dynamic, we dig our heels in and eek out careers. Or we dissipate into obscurity through addictions and debauchery. Some of us find balance. It is this very struggle that fuels the character of Don Draper in the hit period drama television series, Mad Men, now in it’s sixth season (premiering April 7th, this Sunday).
As founding partner of ad firm Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, Don Draper’s character is loosely based on advertising maverick of the 1950s Draper Daniels who conceived the Marlboro Man campaign. During the 1950s, Madison Avenue was the epicenter of the advertising world, and the “mad men” were ad men who branded the burgeoning needs of capitalism. A glamorous male-dominated industry that harnessed universal societal issues as a means to sell product, it was often what was not said that resonated loudest. These storyboards whimsically played out in the scotch infused boardrooms, while power suits and handshakes served as currency, tomfoolery and chauvinism the gel that held it this cult of masculinity together.
“The genius, the womanizer, the villain, the hero.”
At some stage, every little boy dreams of the freedom bound up in the power of the corporate world. Knowing with great certainty what the future beholds, if only for a minute, makes everything okay. The imposing gray matter begins to clear. But, we’re not all put on earth to be influential innovators and decision makers, for with responsibility comes pressure.
The Don Drapers of this world exist in the spaces less traveled, daydreaming while forging upstream through rush hour, paving those empty Downtown 4AM streets, never alone, always lonely. The genius, the womanizer, the villain, the hero. But Don Draper’s greatest allure for men is that no matter what role we play — window cleaner, mortgage broker, skydiving instructor, barrister, there’s a bit of Don Draper in us all. He is, after all, the ultimate man’s man.
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