When I first had the idea to stop watching sports for a year, I thought a lot about how much of my attention was focused on the games. Each game takes several hours, and I wasn't just watching to see the score. I was keeping track of all kinds of little battles within each evening's war. No matter how many things went right, something, somewhere, was bound to put a damper on the evening. Maybe the Sox and Celtics won, but the Bruins blew one at home. Or maybe the Yankees beat the best team in the league while the Sox barely squeaked by a lesser opponent. Scoring titles, batting championships, MVP races, coach of the year, a staggering amount of things to keep track of and stress out about. And this was amid one of the very most successful runs any city has ever had across multiple sports. It doesn't get any "better" than this.
As I thought all this through, I likened it to watching two films every night, all year long. Like, really getting in to them, film studies style. Looking at what the cinematographer was doing to support the directors choices. Digging in to the motivations each actor was employing to flavor their character just so. Seeing what worked and what didn't, and wondering what was planned and what was discovered. I took a film studies course once and, as it tends to for many of us, it had a profound effect on the way I take in media. That was how I was watching sports. Like a class.
Now that I'm off the Boston team treadmill, I have time to fix my attention elsewhere, and a lot of those film studies tendencies are emerging again. My wife and I have been trying to keep our TV watching to a minimum, so I have much more time to reflect on the things I see, and I'd like to dedicate this week's post to something I have been thinking about a lot. The brilliance of the character names on AMC's great show, Mad Men.
I have long held the belief that if a work of fiction aspires to be truly great, the character names have to reveal something about the personalities you are working with. It can be blatant, like Jack (of all trades) Shepard (herding the flock) on LOST, or more ethereal and whimsy, like Cosmo Kramer. But the name has to work for the character. I don't mean it has to make sense, I mean it literally has to work for, to be employed by, the character, to tell us things that aren't said straight out. The more time I spend with this theory (and, it's been a while now) the more these messages jump out at me. Perhaps they do to you, too. In fact, I'm a bit worried that I'm just patting myself on the back here for something that everyone sees as matter of fact. But when it's as good as it is for Mad Men, I don't want to take it for granted. So fix yourself an Old Fashioned and bear with me, or click away now and come back next week.
Starting at the top, we have a legendary character name in Don Draper. I work pretty freely with homonyms in this game, so at first I thought the trick here was that this was a man who was the origin of the species. Aggressive advertising has so deeply infiltrated our daily lives, and I used to think this was a show about the flawed and devious characters that were around when that dangerous trend started. So following this logic, Don would be a Dawn of man, an origin of a species. More recently, I've fallen even harder for this name. Don has been so many men, so many people in fact, that he wears their personalities like suits. That's how he can so effectively take their points of view and cut to the core of what they want in his famous soliloquies. It's how he can cheat on all the women he has loved without remorse (for the most part). Hell, it's how he can live half his life as a dead man. He takes these people in his mind and "dons" them like a hat. And when he is done with them, he hangs them on the rack.
His last name is no less brilliant, but a bit more blunt. Drapes obscure the ability to see clearly into, or out of, a window, and that is what Don has built his life, and his fortune on. He is a master Draper, blocking our vision of the product, or his true self. Framing it and dressing it up so you don't notice how bad the view actually is. Don Draper. A perfect character name. The whole series is tied up in that single name!
Let's take a look at his buddy, Roger Sterling. He's my favorite character to watch, and in many ways, he's got my favorite name on the show. If you remember, he hasn't arrived at his position by hard work, like just about every other character whose lives we are acquainted with has. He took over for his father, who started the agency with Bert. Roger grew up in this world, and his biggest talent seems to be his ability to schmooze with the elite, when he wants to anyway. It's easy to see from the way he dresses, even in his LSD hippie phase, that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Sterling silver, that is.
He can't escape this reputation, thought at times he does wake up and struggle against it. Often though, he is happy to slide by on his reputation. As the series opens, he is quite content with his place in life and sees little reason to rock the boat. He's a classic yes man, who only becomes uncomfortable with his chosen role when a better, faster, younger yes man enters the picture, in Pete Campbell. The yes man status is what informs his first name, Roger.
Let's not forget the women, who for once are given better, more far reaching arcs than the men on this show. I have to start with Peggy, who is constantly fighting against just that, being pegged as anything anyone wants to hang on her. Joan thinks Peggy is timid as the show opens, but she manages to defeat that stereotype, getting an actual job writing copy. From there, she just keeps on forcing square pegs into round holes all series long. I've not really arrived at anything specific for her last name yet. She abandoned her son, so Olson could refer to that, but I think it's a bit more subtle. I feel like the name was arrived at by smelting "old" and "son" to imply that she is struggling against being marginalized in an old boys club kind of world. She's no less a pioneer than Don is in that way.
And finally we come to Betty. She's the biggest gambler on the show, and she's been that way forever. She bet on her good looks when she left home and moved to New York. She bet on Don, and rode their couple hood to riches and an ideal life. Then when it fell apart, she bet on a politician. As with all gamblers, as the show rounds in to the home stretch, it seems the house is winning, but maybe she'll turn it around. Remember back in the first season, Don even had an odd little nickname for her. He called her "Bets". Don gave her the life she wanted, and he didn't fight her for anything when they split. It should have come as no surprise when essentially the same thing happened with his second wife. They practically telegraphed it when they named her Megan, which sounds an awful lot like "again" to me.
There's plenty more, like how Pete seems like such an empty suit, until he shows he actually has some art to him, like a Warhol Campbell. Or how Bert Cooper's last name is a nod to an actual profession, long since obsolete, but still somehow romantic. Or even how Lane was corralled into a hopeless situation where he payed the ultimate "price". But this is already too long. I don't want to end up spending several hours on it, after all.
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