IT WAS one of the seminal defining moments of Mad Men and the mysterious Don Draper’s story; a candid look into the character’s genius and history at-once, and this particular Okey-in-the-Big-City marketing genuis’s ability to tap his personal life — a house of cards built on lies — to sell emotive and imaginative affects in his accounts’ products.
And in actuality, the entire series is about selling lies, with Draper’s identity seemingly a larger commentary on marketing and how we lead our lives in small slices of similar deceptions, but employing such little pieces of truth as it to be indistinguishable from fabrication, or the bringing of our larger story to the table, everywhere it is we go; and this scene was typifying of it.
It was the perfect bow for season one with Don Draper or, really, Dick Whitman: marketing man who came from out of nowhere to become a creative big shot as someone else, talking about the marketing of himself in the subtextual; speaking on moving from the actual man he was (Whitman) into the idealized man he wanted to be (Draper), when just coming off of the battlefield in Korea; talking about his grand deception and the cost of it all; the lies being weaved with lies.
