Bye Bye, Birdie: On Mad Men’s Final Bow
It ended not with a bang, not with a whisper, but with a song and a little Zen. The series finale of Mad Men eschewed the contemporary loose threads we have come to expect from series finales nowadays – unsettling open endings left to interpretation that we have perhaps learned to thrive on, the thrill of speculation a little like standing at the edge of something, not knowing what’s below.
The lives of the main characters so many of us loved (or loathed) were not left dangling like the laces of a frustrated child’s shoes. Nor were the delicately woven tapestries of their relationships, their careers, their lives, ripped haphazardly apart just for show a la the Dexter series finale. (A moment of silence for that show, please.)
It’s hard not to start with Joan. Played by Christina Hendricks, who seriously must be one of the curviest women in the world, the fiery, driven Joan was subjected to endless sexist bullshit throughout every season of the show, and she met it with determination and grit. Raped by her husband, forced to essentially sell herself to a client for the good of her company and driven away when she wanted more for herself, Joan never quit. The show ends as she begins her own business from her own home – a business which, judging by the handful of people she already employs and the ringing phones, is likely to succeed. Suck it, patriarchy.
Peggy Olson and her coworker, Stan, finally end up together. Since they first crossed paths, they’ve done nothing but alternate between spitting fire at each other and quietly sharing the most secret parts of themselves. In that way, they make a classic romantic pair – think Moonstruck, Beauty and the Beast, 10 Things I Hate About You, etc etc. Refreshingly, they are also equally matched as ruthlessly career driven, creative thinkers. A true power couple.
Even Pete got a happy ending, and he’s the weasel of the bunch. (God save Trudy, his ex-wife/soon to be wife again.)
And then there is the dapper and delightfully deviant Don Draper. (Shut up, everyone loves alliteration.) Many expected that he wouldn’t survive the episode. Perhaps the opening credits, in which his silhouette has fallen from a skyscraper before every episode of every season, might have ingrained that idea in their minds. Surprisingly, though, he didn’t die.
Don, on yet another bender/flight from reality, ends up in California where he meets up with Stephanie (who is the niece of Anna Draper, the widow whose dead husband’s name Don stole to start a new life for himself, in case you forgot). He gives her a family heirloom engagement ring and generally gets all weird and semi-stalkerish – in other words, the way he usually gets when he is lonely. To deflect or maybe try to fix him, Stephanie takes him on a hippie retreat. She runs away after an unsavory exchange with another retreat-goer, leaving Don there alone. He then makes a phone call to Peggy suggesting he is on the precipice of suicide. “Here it comes,” probably at least 2/3 of us thought. “He’s dead.”
And then a hippie woman came and took him to group therapy. And it worked.
And he finally, finally gets to create an ad for Coke. The ending hints that he created one of the most famous commercials ever made – not just for Coke, but period.
So no, it was not Don we had to say goodbye to. It was Betty.
As we learned in the second-to-last episode, Betty has severe lung cancer and just months to live. While everyone gets their happy endings, Betty is quietly left to die, still smoking cigarettes, still stubborn, yet finally acquiescing her throne to her daughter Sally, who patiently teaches her younger brother to cook a simple meal. It seems unfitting for such a vibrant character, and a little unfair in light of everyone else’s happy(ish) endings.
Betty has been one of the most simultaneously abused and vilified characters on the show. While she was totally dragged through hell by Don for the first few seasons as he cheated on her, then essentially spied on her by conspiring with her therapist (who she needed BECAUSE DON WAS CHEATING ON HER), she was at the same time depicted as ruthless, often cruel, and occasionally creepy.
She treated her children, at first, with what seemed to be a lack of care, but perhaps by the end of the show turned out to be tough love designed to prevent them from ending up where she did. She’s been thin, then fat, then thin again. She has been divorced and remarried and even cheated on her current husband with her ex. She has been kind, she has been terrible. She has seduced a boy. She has spurned many men. She has been a homemaker, but not a career woman. And what did that get her, by the show’s end? Just death?
Recall an early episode in Season One entitled “Shoot.” In that episode, Don and Betty cross paths with Jim Hobart, the head of McCann Erickson – the company Don eventually works for by the show’s end. Jim gives his business card to Betty, suggesting that she model for a Coca-Cola campaign, and he offers Don a job. Betty models for an ad, but is fired when Don turns down the job. It was her one shot at getting back into working – or at least, that’s the feeling the episode elicited.
It seems a tragedy that Betty didn’t get much air time in the finale, let alone this season, and that it is Don who in the end scores the big Coke ad. Reflecting later, however, it seems that final scene in which the ad aired was a hearkening back to “Shoot,” and thereby, to one of Betty’s most complex and intriguing moments. And perhaps in doing so, the show was acknowledging Birdie’s tragedy, and her triumph.
After all, she gets to die after having become something far from what she was to begin with – sure of herself. And with her youthful beauty, her greatest source of pride, intact, to boot.