An und für sich

I wonder if Bert noticed Roger’s thumb depressing the switch hook?  He was sitting behind Roger, and Roger, who was more attentive to the larger audience sitting in front of him, held the telephone slightly behind his body.  Bert’s comments after Roger pretended to hang up the phone were ambiguous.

I’ve asked this before, but the issue has become more pressing.  Seriously, what does Bert Cooper do?  He’s an accounts man, but does he have accounts?  It can’t be that his only job is to trundle around in stocking feet and dispense gnomic wisdom.  He doesn’t have his own office, but does he get a partnership share of the profits?

Don’s only been dating Faye for a couple of episodes and already he’s cheating on her.  On the one hand, sleeping with Megan was in line with the themes of this episode, in which characters repeatedly are asked to prioritize work over families and personal relationships.  When Don demands that Faye hand over confidential professional information, she refuses, and rebukes him for not understanding that what they have together is separate from the “stupid office.”  Megan, by contrast, reassures Don that sleeping with her won’t have any professional repercussions.  She tells him that she judges people based on their work, and that everything else is merely “sentimental.”  At this moment, when SCDP is in a real crisis, Don needs everyone — even his lovers — to put work (or more specifically, his work) before everything else.

On the other hand, it’s hard not to notice that Don has had two primary romantic relationships over the course of four seasons (I mean romantic relationships where no other women have a stronger claim), and both of them have been with blondes.  There was Betty, his wife, and now Faye, his girlfriend.  His extramarital affairs and flings, on the other hand, have almost exclusively been with brunettes.  He cheated on Betty with Midge, Rachel, Bobbie, Joy and Suzanne; and now he cheats on Faye with Megan.  (Bobbie was kind of a redhead, but still.)

The show makes a couple of overt gestures to Hitchcock, and particularly Vertigo (that the title sequence for the series refers to the Saul Bass poster for the film has been much discussed, and at least one character has mentioned Betty Draper’s resemblance to Grace Kelly, another Hitchcock blonde).  In Vertigo, of course, Scotty is alternately bedeviled by a blonde and a brunette.  He first falls in love with Madeleine, the blonde.  After she apparently commits suicide, Scotty meets Judy, a brunette who looks just like Madeleine, and becomes obsessed with turning her into a facsimile of Madeleine.  He convinces Judy to bleach her hair blond and to dress just as Madeleine used to.  The truth, he ultimately learns, is that Madeleine was never a real person — when Scotty first met her, she was Judy secretly dressed up as Madeleine because she had been paid to do so in some complicated scheme.  Then later, after meeting Scotty for the second time and wanting to please him, she overtly dressed up as (Judy secretly dressing up as) Madeleine.

But in Mad Men, the person whose authenticity is in question is Don himself, not any of his women.  Can Don Draper, who is really Dick Whitman secretly dressed up as Don Draper be a real, whole person?

I don’t really know what to make of this, and it seems likely that I’m looking for something that isn’t there — but it’s been nagging at me.  (Then again, I just remembered that one of Don’s flings was with that stewardess, who was blond, so.)

(Cross posted at The Weblog)