As with The Sopranos, you knew you weren't going to get an easily explainable end to Mad Men, right? However, at least this time around creator Matthew Weiner gave us a few more options to think about. Actor Jon Hamm (Don Draper) gave a very informative interview to the New York Times yesterday about his character's fate, and his theory of the series finishing shot. NO SPOILERS UNTIL AFTER THE JUMP!
NYT: Those last few moments of the episode... has raised many questions about what it means. Is there a correct answer to that question?
JON HAMM: I think there probably is. But I think, like most stories that we go back to, that it’s a little bit ambiguous. We had talked about this ending for a long time and that was Matt’s image. I was struck by the poetry of it. I didn’t know what his plans were... I just knew that he had this final image in mind.
MORE AFTER THE JUMP! WITH SPOILERS!
SPOILERS AHOY!
Do you have an interpretation of it?
I do. When we find Don in that place [the hippie retreat], and this stranger relates this story of not being heard or seen or understood or appreciated, the resonance for Don was total in that moment. There was a void staring at him. We see him in an incredibly vulnerable place, surrounded by strangers, and he reaches out to the only person he can at that moment, and it’s this stranger.
My take is that, the next day, he wakes up in this beautiful place, and has this serene moment of understanding, and realizes who he is. And who he is, is an advertising man. And so, this thing comes to him. There’s a way to see it in a completely cynical way, and say, “Wow, that’s awful.” But I think that for Don, it represents some kind of understanding and comfort in this incredibly unquiet, uncomfortable life that he has led. There was a little bit of a crumb dropped earlier in the season when Ted says there are three women in every man’s life, and Don says, “You’ve been sitting on that for a while, huh?” There are, not coincidentally, three person to person phone calls that Don makes in this episode, to three women who are important to him for different reasons. You see the slow degeneration of his relationships with those women over the course of those phone calls.
Have you had any opportunity to digest other people’s reactions to the finale?
There’s people saying, oh, it’s so pat, and it’s rom-com-y, or whatever it is. But it’s not the end of anything. The world doesn’t blow up right after the Coke commercial ends. No one is suggesting that Stan and Peggy live happily ever after, or that Joan’s business is a rousing success, or that Roger and Marie come back from Paris together. None of it is done. Matt had said at one point, “I just want my characters to be a little more happy than they were in the beginning,” and I think that’s pretty much true. But these aren’t the last moments of any of these characters’ lives, including Betty. She doesn’t have much time left, but damn if she’s not going to spend it the way she wants to spend it.
This is a really good, illuminating interview, and you should read the rest of it here.
