Mad Men Analysis - Episode 1: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
The pilot of this show is titled "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" after a song by The Platters. In this song, love is a passionate flame, crooning "when your heart's on fire you must realize/ the smoke gets in your eyes." In other words, love is blind. As the flame of love dies, the smoke gets in your eyes (stings). This title makes a lot of sense for this first episode which deals with relationships between men and women: marriage, affairs, flirtation, etc, setting us up for the episode's plot-twisting final scene. Not only that, but appropriately the client being pitched to in this episode is Lucky Strike cigarettes. Don and his copy-writing cohorts must come up with some snappy copy that will make people want to buy cigarettes when the public consciousness is now concerned with cancer.
This episode opens on Don sitting in a crowded bar writing on a napkin to the tune of "Band of Gold" by Don Cherry, a song about marriage. When a waiter comes to bring Don his drink (an Old-Fashioned, a timeless drink for a timeless man), Don asks him why he chooses to smoke Old Gold cigarettes, and tries to convince him to smoke Lucky Strikes. The relationship of the brand name of the waiter's favorite cigarettes to this song about a wedding band almost suggests the "marriage" of a person to their favorite brand, and that Don is trying to convince him to "cheat" with another brand. Pointedly, everyone in the bar is smoking and having a great time. That said, the waiter acknowledges that everyone knows cigarettes are cancer-causing, especially women because "Women love their magazines," and he admits he smokes even though his wife hates it. This will play into the overall theme of the episode (and the series, to be honest) of marriage, infidelity, and double lives.
Throughout this episode we see Don with a few dark-haired ladies: his advertising artist friend Midge and Rachel Menken of Menken's Department Store. When Don returns to his office after a night spent at Midge's apartment, he changes into a new shirt from a stack of clean white button-downs in his desk drawer; He does this a lot. We know Don is a ladies' man and sleeps around a lot from the beginning. Midge is a fascinating counterpoint to Don. While Don is a buttoned-up professional with perfect suit and hair, Midge is a bohemian. Her outfit, a tied-up men's shirt and black pants, is a lackadaisical parody of Don's businesswear. Don sees himself as an artist and likes to feel himself to be a creative peer of Midge's. While at Midge's, Don asks her, "What's your secret?" He's likely talking less about her ability to make artwork for greeting cards day in and day out, instead wondering generally what secrets she's holding. There's that Mad Men theme: Everyone's got a secret life.
A chunk of this episode focuses on Pete Campbell's impending marriage to his fiancée Trudy. It is hinted that Pete is going to have a prostitute or a stripper at his bachelor party that evening, and all of the men (including Pete) are eager and very vocal about their excitement about the prospect. All of the young men of the office are gossiping and making fun of Pete and the idea of marriage in general, enjoying their time as single men. They make baudy passes at secretaries in the office, and pointedly talk about women in front of Peggy Olsen, a secretary starting her first day at Sterling Cooper. Pete even directly criticizes Peggy to her face, listing her faults. Don is quickly set against Pete as his foil, the older and wiser version of this young college man who thinks he owns the world, whereas Don really does own the world. Don very uncomfortably outlines a portion of Pete's character arc in the very first episode, warning him that if he ruins Peggy's reputation on her first day at work, he'll "die in that corner office, a mid-level executive with a little bit of hair who women go home with out of pity... because no one will like you."
Peggy is wide-eyed and naive in this first episode, in awe of rocketship Joan Holloway, boss of the secretarial pool at Sterling Cooper. Peggy is dressed like a 1950s teenager, set into stark contrast by Joan's tight green wiggle dress and gold pen necklace pointing directly at her ample bosom. When Pete asks Peggy if she is "Amish, or something?" Peggy realizes quickly that she is in a new world, and is going to have to adapt quickly to obtain success. In this episode, she does as Joan urges her and goes to the doctor on her lunch break to be prescribed birth control.
When a German psychiatrist sits down with Don in his office to discuss a plan for the pitch to Lucky Strike, she tells Don that they should incorporate the danger of a cigarette into its appeal. According to Sigmund Freud, she says, everyone has a death wish. This German psychiatrist as a stand in for Sigmund Freud give us a lens through which we should be looking at the show. Freudian psychology was also a popular vehicle for Weiner's other show, The Soprano's. Perhaps this Psychologist is a little tip of the hat to that project. Don is the "don" of this show. Later, Don lays on his couch as if he is at a psychiatrist (symbolically, it is in this position that he thinks up his best ideas), and sees a fly buzzing around inside his ceiling light; The fly, and Don, and everyone on the planet, really does have a death wish. This also becomes a recurring theme of Mad Men, foreshadowing a pitch Don makes later in the show that indirectly suggests suicide. Then, the light gently rises on Don's face, and there is Peggy, waking him up for his pitch. Peggy, the future little Angel of Good Copy. Fascinatingly, we see Peggy in this same reclined position, staring at a ceiling light, when she is at her gynecologist examination.
At the pitch to Menken's Department Store, Don is surprised to meet Rachel Menken rather than her father. She is Don's type (or one of his types), a dark-haired whip-smart woman, who looks like Betty, but with Midge’s (or Don's mother's) hair, but initially their introduction does not go as planned. Don and Roger open up with a coupon campaign in, you guessed it, women's magazines ("Women love their magazines!"). Don gets extraordinarily upset that Rachel wants them to advertise her store as expensive, along the line of advertising a cigarette because it is dangerous, because, again, this proves the psychiatrist right and he knows it. Don storms out closely followed by Pete, who tells Don "A man like you I would follow into combat blindfolded, and I wouldn't be the first." Naturally this is very upsetting to Don who, as we all know, is only Don Draper because he escaped the war in cowardice. He is sensitive to the idea of the deathwish because he fears death.
At the pitch for Lucky Strike, Don only has the psychologist's notes on deathwishes to work with, and has to think on his toes to imagine up another idea on the spot. Before he can pitch anything, Pete stands up and tries to pitch the deathwish angle, but thankfully Lee Garner Sr. is incredibly offended by the idea and Don didn't have to take the blame. Anything Don can think up in the moment will look better than Pete's solid but ill-received pitch, again reinforcing their foil roles. In this episode, Don comes up with a real life Lucky Strike ad slogan: "It's Toasted." All cigarettes are toasted, but Lucky Strikes are the only cigarettes to talk about it. All cigarettes cause cancer, but Lucky Strikes' are toasted. Don claims that advertising must reassure people that "You Are OK," the very opposite of the way the deathwish research makes people feel. As he pitches this line, he is actually reassuring himself.
Later, at a private apology dinner with Rachel Menken, Don makes a sidelong deathwish pitch, suggesting that he isn't married because he wants to live life like there's no tomorrow. He is searching in her for some sympathy, some "you are ok" for his guilt about leaving the Army under false pretenses. Rachel doesn't take kindly to Don's suggestion that she might be cut from the same cloth, but nonetheless does find some comradery in his loneliness and nihilism.
That night, after Pete fails to seduce a woman at the strip club and feels glum about his last night as a bachelor, he shows up at Peggy's door to try to sleep with her. Having failed at winning Don's affections earlier, which Peggy thought was a job requirement the way Joan and the girls had been talking, Peggy is open to the idea. At the strip club, Pete was doing doing what he could to reassure himself that women aren't just sleeping with him out of pity, but unfortunately that's exactly what he falls back on by approaching Peggy. He does so reluctantly because he knows she can't and won't say no to him, and Peggy is flattered and determined to succeed at her job.
In a final, Hopper-esque sequence, Don rides the train out of the city and into the rainy suburbs. He arrives at home and we discover his dirty secret: he has a home, a wife, and kids. Whereas the women we've seen Don with so far have been brunettes, his wife Betty is Don's Hitchcock blonde. His family is the picture-perfect image of the 1950s/60s ideal: a wife, two kids (and later, a dog). Because we know through his conversation with Rachel Menken that Don doesn't believe in being in love, we know his family is a prop to him, a way to show himself to be a successful man of his time. Betty is someone he can come home and sleep with because he hasn't yet seduced Rachel Menken. She is the person he is expected to be with, not the person he loves. We know he once believe he loved Betty, but those fires have died, and the smoke has gotten in his eyes, cue the music.