MM@M Season 1 Wrap Up

Right at this moment, you're either gearing up for the Season 3 finale of Mad Men, you're seasons behind on DVD, or you've never seen an episode. No matter your situation I hope you got something from this "Mad Men at the Movies" series which looked at the movies referenced on the series. We'll deal with seasons 2&3 later. As you read this I am at a fab Mad Men party.

The last two episodes of the season 1 have no movie love. But in "Nixon vs. Kennedy" the jaded Don Draper we know (Jon Hamm) flashes back to meeting the original Don Draper (Troy Ruptash) who is unimpressed with the then naive young man.

Don Draper to Don Draper: What misconception travelled down the road and made you want to be here... a movie?

Deliciously dizzying it is. A television series that loves the movies disses the cinema's great capacity to lie while simultaneously revealing the backstory plot that's the stuff of cinematic cliché: hidden pasts, assumed identities and personal reinvention. I'm not going to stretch and say that the original Don Draper is the movies and he's about to be wiped out by the new Don Draper who is television and that television is borrowing all its glory from the cinema which it desperately longs to be. I'm not going to stretch and say that.

But it does tie me in analytical knots, this show. And for that I love it as much as Peggy loves praise, Betty loves beauty, Joanie loves men, Sterling loves money and Don loves the movies.

Previously: Gidget, Wizard of Oz, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Natalie Wood, Joan Crawford in The Best of Everything, Marty, Grace Kelly, The Apartment and A Place in the Sun