Monday, June 24, 2013

In Which Don Draper Shape-Shifts One Last Time


And disappears forever into history

Lindsay Green at Medium.Com has a terrific little theory that begins like this:
Where Don Draper ends, D.B. Cooper begins
I won't deny you the pleasure of reading it for yourself,  it struck me as a very clever postulate which puts a satisfying lit'rary frame around the entire Mad Men saga and gives the frantic energy of 1960s America the same sort of eulogy before burying it under the Nixonland of the 1970s that Hunter Thompson was talking about in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back...
Read it here.

3 comments:

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

I've always loved that "with the right kind of eyes" bit.

Anonymous said...

That was very...very interesting. She may be on to something.
...and she doesn't even point out the most glaring bit of symbolism...him falling in the opening sequence.
The problem is..if Weiner was going to end it that way...he sure wont do it now.

Anonymous said...

I like this theory alot but if you read closely about D.B. Cooper you will see that one of the items he left behind was a clip-on tie. Don Draper would have never worn a clip-on tie.