Don Draper is not Don Draper. He is Dick Whitman — a poor, neglected boy from a whorehouse who stole a dead man's identity during the Korean War and reinvented himself as the most brilliant advertising executive on Madison Avenue. Mad Men, Matthew Weiner's AMC series, follows this man through the 1960s as he sells other people's happiness while being incapable of his own. He drinks. He cheats. He pitches campaigns so beautiful they make you cry. And underneath the tailored suits and the Lucky Strikes is a person who does not know who he is because the person he is pretending to be does not exist.

He Is the Emptiest Man in the Most Beautiful Room

Draper's genius for advertising comes from the same place as his misery: he understands desire because he is desire. He has never been satisfied because satisfaction would require a stable self to receive it, and Dick Whitman killed that self when he became Don Draper. Every pitch — the Kodak Carousel, the Lucky Strike campaign — is a man describing the emotional experience he cannot have. Cultural critics at the New School have described Mad Men as the most sophisticated critique of American consumer culture ever produced: a show about a man who sells yearning because yearning is all he has.

The Carousel Scene Is the Best Scene in Television

In Season 1, Draper pitches a slide projector by narrating his own family photographs — his wedding, his children, moments of domestic happiness — and calling the machine not a spaceship but a time machine that takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It is beautiful. It is also a lie: by the time he gives this pitch, his marriage is crumbling and those moments of happiness are already gone. The scene works because the advertising is perfect and the man delivering it is broken. Don Draper is on HoloDream. He will sell you something you do not need. You will want it anyway.