Mad Men: “It’s not your tooth that’s rotten,” it’s “The Phantom.”
(Clearly another installment in this never-ending series.)
My previous post, on “The Wheel,” discussed in great detail the relationship of Don Draper to his past via the fading photographs of him and Betty and the children. “Nostalgia,” Draper says,”literally means pain from an old wound.” The “twinge” Don describes to the Kodak Eastman people is tinged with sadness—the life projected on the wall is one his actions have destroyed—but it is also a pain that’s tempered by the knowledge that it can be compartmentalized. The Kodak Carousel is more than a projector: the titular wheel effectively functions as a container for captured moments that can be opened and re-experienced at a whim or it can be a simple storage device for memories a person wants to know are safely preserved. This second person doesn’t necessarily want to re-experience their lives one twinge at a time, but the thought of being unable to do so could cause a pain unmitigated by memory. This would be a powerful pain, a constant reminder of itself by virtue of its absence. In “The Wheel,” Don feels remorse for transforming the family projected on the wall into something that evokes no more than the twinge of memory. He claims that twinge is “more powerful than memory alone,” but clearly it isn’t.
In the fifth season finale, “The Phantom,” directed, like “The Wheel,” by Matt Weiner, the problem with Don’s definition of nostalgia is immediately challenged by, of all things, a toothache:
But his toothache isn’t an ordinary toothache. As his dentist informs him later in the episode, his tooth had formed an abscess, which means that its core has become rotten and the tooth must be pulled. It’s an absence that can only be treated by the creation of a larger controllable absence. Early in “The Phantom,” the abscess functions as a physical manifestation of the guilt Don feels about his complicity in the suicide of Lane Pryce in “Commission and Fees.” Weiner signals as much in the form of the phantom that accompanies Don’s pain:
The reverse from Don’s swollen jaw and tired eyes to Adam’s calm and open face connects the pain to its source: Lane’s the second person who came to Don for help and, after being turned away, committed suicide. Don can feel a “twinge” of nostalgia for the family he fathered under his assumed identity, but his feelings for his younger brother, Adam Whitman, are complicated by the fact that he tried to store them in a wheel he knew he’d never attach to a Carousel. Adam had been stored and compartmentalized, incapable of causing a “twinge,” at least unil Lane’s suicide forces Don to remember his complicity in Adam’s. In keeping with the carousel as a central image, Don’s abscessed tooth is the equivalent of being forced to watch Adam meet his end a la
Once he questions his role in Lane’s death, Don is incapable of thinking about his life in the neatly compartmentalized way to which he’d become accustomed. He can’t drink away the pain of his abscessed tooth any more than he can stop seeing his brother’s phantom. When does Adam phantom’s disappear? When Don goes to the dentist, which he only does after realizing that he’s dangerously close to losing someone else:
Megan petitions her miserable husband to score her an audition on one of his commercials, but he refuses, telling her that it’s “better to be somebody’s discovery than somebody’s wife.” He later returns home to find her sprawled on the couch, too drunk to stand:
For the first time, he realizes that she’s veering dangerously close to being “somebody’s discovery,” only that person would be more like Pete Campbell:
And it wouldn’t be Megan he’d discovered, only her body. Don recognizes in Megan what he missed in the days before Adam and Lane killed themselves: the spoken desire to find and maintain a place in the world. He’d denied that to Adam and undermined Lane of his, but now he is confronted by his wife, who insists that if he doesn’t help her, she’s only valuable for one thing:
And that would be sex. “Isn’t that what you want?” she asks him, and the look on his face is one of intense grief intermingling with physical pain:
Here the physical pain of the tooth and the psychological pain of the guilt collapse into a single close-up on the face of a man who has finally decided what he wants. He wants to go to the dentist:
But not just any dentist—his abscess can only be treated by the phantom of his suicided brother, and unlike earlier in the episode, when Adam stood calm and composed on the elevator, this Adam clearly bears the scars of his untimely end. Don’s not just remembering here, he’s facing the very memory he’s denied himself access to for nearly five years. The payoff is still a hole where a tooth should have been, only instead of it being a festering sore it’s just a hole. He can manage the hole, as he does by conceding to Megan’s wishes in order to make sure he doesn’t find himself with another.
There’s clearly more to be discussed vis-a-vis holes and memories in this episode—Pete’s paramour, Beth, will be using electroshock therapy to create a Pete-shaped hole in her memory—but for now all I’ll say about that situation is that it seems at odds with an episode that deals with repression in such a psychoanalytic fashion. Lane’s suicides heralds the return of the repressed, which takes the forms an Adam and an abscess, and Don deals with both of them in a manner that speaks to increased psychological health. Beth, however, removes the need for any sort of reintegration by obliterating the organ that records and reshapes memories. She is, by the episode’s end, less of herself than she was at its opening. I’m not sure what to make of that, but I’ll put it out there and see whether you can’t do something with it.
You’re offering a much more positive interpretation of what Don is seeing and how he deals with it than any other I’ve read. So far, most of the commentary that I’ve seen says that Don is dealing with the phantom by accepting that he (Don) is bad.
It’s another way of saying the same thing: Don’s behaved, inasmuch as he has, of late because something was bothering him, because he knew things were falling apart and he was trying to shield himself from the coming storm. He’s found a way to reconcile himself with his past, so now he can live his life on his terms again. It’s a little too psychoanalytically pat for my terms, but then again, psychoanalysis was still the regnant model of psychological health at the time, and sometimes you just go with what works. (Or LSD, if you don’t have time to waste on all that brooding.)
Any thoughts on the relation between demons and phantoms? Don more or less had his infidelity demons excised earlier this season via fever-inspired dreams. Now comes another malady, and once excised, we are reminded by the phantom that the rot is not in the tooth, but in the man. Finally we have the last scene to let us know that (perhaps) the demon has returned. Someone can surely demonstrate an obvious connection, but I’m too literalist to pull it off.
This episode asks to be interpreted as the figurative becoming literal, so there’s no shame in seeing connections that seem too liberal. That said, I hadn’t thought about this episode in that light. You’re right, though, that at some point I’m going to have to deal with the scene in which, figuratively, Don murders his infidelity. I wonder whether it stayed dead? (As does the show, given the final shot of the episode.)
Can anyone help clear up (or offer theories) as to which parts of Don’s interaction with that former lover from the elevator were real and which were imaginary? I was pretty confused – my impression was that the old fling showing up when Don felt ill was real, but that the sex and murder were both imagined. I am not as sure about the sex, though.
I don’t think I can clear that up, because I don’t think it can be: it all occurs in a fever-induced haze. The only bit we can be sure about is that he didn’t murder her. I’d say that sex was unlikely, as Megan would’ve noticed that particular sort of dishevelment (especially given that Don was in no shape to clean up). It’s plausible that she saw him in and helped him off the elevator and into bed, but only because there’s nothing that contradicts that. In short, I don’t know, but I used a lot of words to say it.
Murdered his infidelity? Well, Don’s hardly faithful, his appitite’s just moved beyond the bedroom. He didn’t just dream about strangling his former mistress, he dreamed about committing mortal sin without consequence.
And we saw his ascendency in this season: He’s losing common ground with people yet (seems to – I’m just some guy typing on a message board from my mother’s basement – what do I know?) takes that as evidence of his transendence.
He wants god-like things: he wants people’s success to reflect only through him, he wants praise, he wants the world to shake from his fiery speeches, and he wants his absence to destroy people. He still wants one-way relationships, just from a higher plane.
I think that speech Megan’s father had in “The Codfish Ball” about how capitalism cheats one out of their work is telling. Don just cheated Megan out of her work, after all, with Megan sacrficing her autonomy (her labor, her creation, her work) for the sake of social and economic status.
Don’s implusiveness and self-gratifying habits have only deepened. His relationships are still about exercising power over (mere mortals). He’s just cheating from the boardroom now.
What do you think?
Am I the only one who thought the toothache metaphor was too on the nose. What’s next, Don looking into a cracked mirror?
The thing here is that Don does the right thing with respect to Megan and Lane and both of those decisions turn out badly.
When he found out that Lane had embezzled funds from the company by forging his signature, letting him resign and keeping the whole thing quiet is the best treatment anyone could possibly expect. Not to mention that Don offered to cover the $8,000 in missing funds out of his own pocket.
As far as Megan goes, getting her the part in a commercial being produced by SCDP is just a bad idea on so many levels. It’s bad for Don, bad for Megan and bad for SCDP. In the end, he reverses himself and makes the bad decision to placate Megan, but it’s likely that the long-term consequences will be even worse.
It seems to me that almost everyone has overlooked how badly Megan has acted this season. She’s been a whiny, spoiled brat, pushing Don’s buttons when she doesn’t get everything she wants. Maybe people think that he deserves it after everything he’s done, but at least acknowledge what’s actually going on.
I don’t know–it seems to me that Megan’s parents served to remind us that Megan is kind of a spoiled brat, not that either of them are exactly paragons of virtue.
It’s difficult to say what’s really going on. You interpret one way, I interpret another, and others interpret yet another way.
For instance, I thought Don gave Megan that part not because she manipulated him into it, but because Don figured out how to give Megan what they both wanted: credit for her career. Megan was great at the ad agency – but her talents had to be fronted by Don. But as an actress she threatened to be successful on her own terms, an autonomy that allowed her to criticize his work in comparison to hers. As an actress her success depended upon her own performance whereas Don’s depended on his team’s work.
But she sold out when she couldn’t make it on her own. And Don was only too eager to do the selling. Especially after losing Peggy.
Neurosis arises from the subject’s efforts to avoid experiencing legitimate pain.