WARNING: Complete and utter spoiler alert for anyone who has not seen all four seasons of "Mad Men." If you're a seasoned vet and/or don't care for surprises, then by all means read on!
Okay, this post may seem strangely timed considering the most recent season of "Mad Men" finished airing this time last year, and the new one isn't scheduled to start until next March, but the Muse has struck. I admit it, I literally just started watching this highly esteemed series a couple of weeks ago (hence the need to speak now). I'd never been particularly interested but recently tried it out on a whim--because, hell--I adore pencil skirts and whiskey for breakfast, so what could it hurt? But wow! Where the hell have I been the last four years? I don’t even assume you need to ask how I accomplished the task of watching the as yet entire four seasons in two weeks. It is understood.
So much is said of our tragic hero, aka “Superman determined to self-destruct” Don Draper; he's a character analyst's obvious wet dream, so I’ll leave him to those who really care. The character dynamic that’s got my skirt flipping is the twisted, kinda-sorta-love story between our modest heroine, Peggy Olson, and sickeningly smarmy yet strangely arousing account executive Pete Campbell. This demented relationship is fascinating, considering the breadth of it is comprised almost entirely of a perpetual chain of emotionally loaded gazes and evocative interplay. The very short sexual affair they had (could it even be called romantic?), and the forsaken love child that resulted are such a small part of what we experience of this connection, and yet the exceptional acting and screenwriting come together to deliver a silent anguish which underlies the “Pete and Peggy” story brilliantly. For a pervading and what I would call major storyline, these two have perhaps the least amount of screen time together, yet what space they are given, they fill so beautifully.
We meet them both on Peggy’s first day as Don Draper’s secretary at the prestigious Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency. We are introduced to rich kid turned ambitious young executive, Peter Campbell, as he speaks on the phone to his fiancée, Trudy, about his bachelor party that evening. While the other three office stooges (Ken Cosgrove, Harry Crane, Paul Kinsey) snicker and smoke in the background, Pete reassures Trudy of all the things smug grooms-to-be need to reassure their brides of the night of their bachelor parties. He ends the conversation with an indicatory statement to her: “Of course I love you; I’m giving up my life to be with you, aren’t I?” Haha! Oh, Pete.
Impending nuptials or not, he doesn't curtail his ass hattery with the opposite sex, which is evidenced in his first meeting with the new girl Peggy. In Don's office, he remarks brashly on her dowdy appearance and muses crudely on the potential of her hidden assets, a welcome Peggy finds repulsively warm. After she leaves, Don gives Pete a sweetly succinct scolding. Of course later on Peggy also makes an ass of herself by coming onto Don in thanks for his defense, which he embarrassingly rebuffs.
Later that night we get a peek into the bachelor party, where we witness Pete’s super creepy attempt at finger-raping a random date. A persistent fellow if nothing else, he shows up at Peggy's apartment following the raunchy pre-marital celebrations, drunk and slurring lustfully into her hair. It’s hard to say to what extent I dislike Pete at this point, but Peggy appears to be more decided on the issue and invites him in. This is the last we see of them that night and are left to draw our own conclusions. This turn of events certainly surprised me, as not only is our presumption that Peggy is a callow, careful young prude dashed (although we did see her procure birth control earlier in the episode), but I found myself wondering why an obviously bright and competent girl even gives him the time of day (night). It is understandable that she would be flattered by the attentions of this smooth executive, and I’m all about sexual freedom for Catholic girls in 1960, but our first impression of Pete Campbell is a pretty foul one.
A couple of weeks later, Pete returns from his honeymoon at Niagara Falls ("the wettest place on Earth"). It's obvious that he's glad to be married, as that's the proper thing for a man of his age and means to do (and he gets dinner waiting for him every evening!), but he wastes no time in engaging with Peggy in his distinctly weird way. This largely consists of smoldering her with obsessive gazes across crowded rooms and then going on to rudely enfeeble her, as if she were foolish to even exist because he’s married. He is so plainly projecting his own self-judgment on her, but she plays it cool, and aside from the necessary professional interactions she does a good job at avoiding him. She makes it clear that she will not play into his belittling games.
Interestingly though, as time goes on, despite Pete’s boorish approach and engorged ego, his tendency toward cruel condescension and that pompous prep school way of speaking, we find ourselves not totally hating him. In fact, we kind of like him. We kind of can’t get enough of him. Wait, how did this happen? How did that rotten first impression fade so quietly into the background? His faults are certainly familiar; we often see them in personalities with his similar WASPy upbringing--and these personalities we're accustomed to despising--but Pete’s character is not despicable or predictable. Instead of simply getting stuck as the “bad guy,” Pete wears his vulnerabilities on his sleeve and showcases his evolving dimensions.
For one, he proves to be damn good at his job, something we weren't so sure of early on. We know that he is scraped from the upper crust of a prominent New York family, and it is assumed that this had a major influence on his initial hiring to Sterling Cooper, but we see that his indefatigable desire to prove his professional worth stems mainly from genuine ambition. Of course, this ambition gets muddled with his deep-seated entitlement issues and dark competitiveness with the one man whom he at once idolizes and abhors: the untouchable Don Draper. Because Pete struggles with the natural truth that he is not Alpha male, the fact that he is really freaking good at acquiring, managing, and appeasing high stock accounts by any means necessary (his smarminess really comes in handy) is essentially overlooked until later on.
In the context of Pete’s aspirations and the troubles that go along with them, Peggy continues to play a major role in his life. Though except for a small handful of tender and pivotal moments, his treatment of her see-saws darkly between cold condescension and white hot desire. Simple psychology tells us that because he struggles for authority in every other part of his life--work, his strained relationship to his own parents as well as dominant in-laws, and even Trudy, who tries to be the perfect submissive housewife but is naturally quite assertive--Pete craves something he can control. Yet for all the power he wishes to have over Peggy, he continually relinquishes his own dominance by soliciting her loving attention for the purposes of therapy more so than romantic exchange. This is evidenced the day Peggy is in his office dropping off some work he’d offered to review (as well as that wonderfully classic moment in season two: “I hate my mother--what do you think of that?”). Clearly removed, he invites her to sit down and listen to him. She does, and he goes on to disclose a fantasy to her, one so primal it’s hard to tell whether she is turned on or terrified. This dynamic is complicated by the fact that he’s got a rifle leaning against the wall next to them (I was almost certain he was going to go on a shooting rampage, and I suspect Peggy was wondering the same thing, though it turns out he was just having a bad week. Whew! Of course he does keep the rifle in his office--good thing he eventually gets promoted!).
A short time later, after much ambiguous build-up, he and Peggy finally have a second sexual encounter. In “The Hobo Code” we find them both heading into the office early one morning. They meet in the elevator where Peggy admits her anxiety over the presentation of her first copywriting project. Pete rebuffs her genuine human-whose-slept-with-human attempt at conversation with his usual cavalier tone (jealous much?). A bit later she finds him staring out the window of his office, intensely absorbed in thought, and he invites her--nay, orders her--to come in and close the door. She is reluctant, and rightly so, considering none of us can tell if he’s going to kiss her or kill her. He does kiss her, and pulls her hair (hot!), and they wind up having a racy quickie on his office couch. Superb.
Afterward they share a last kiss and perhaps the closest they ever come to a romantic moment before he begins expressing chagrin over his unfamiliar and passionless marriage. Peggy sweetly assures him he is “not alone in this,” and leaves just as the rest of the Sterling Cooper employees are arriving.
With Sterling, Cooper, and Draper out of the office early that day, the rest of the employees fuck off work early to go out for drinks in honor of the success of Peggy's first campaign (and/or in honor of the bosses fucking off early). At the bar we see Pete in an altogether different mood: he sets himself apart from the merriment and leers disdainfully at a cheerful, dancing Peggy. It’s been a pretty good day for her, what with the office nookie and then the sale of her first copy. She notices him staring at her (like usual--gawd!) and confidently dances over to him. When she invites him to join her, he contemptuously replies “I don’t like you like this.” She is visibly stung and walks away, wiping away a single tear. Pete leaves. As the audience we wonder: he doesn’t like her like what? Happy? Successful? Into him? What is his problem anyway? Is he simply embarrassed and frustrated over his legitimate attraction to her, or is he just a complete asshole who gets off on cruel power trips? It’s more likely that he knows Peggy is not the demure and conformable thing he wanted her to be; an ironic choice as an outlet for his control issues, Peggy is quickly carving out a natural place for herself in the corporate world, and as she becomes more successful, Pete becomes more spiteful but also more captivated. The temptation of her is dangerous to his entire existence. If only he knew how real shit is about to get!
The next morning we see Peggy arriving early for work again, and despite Pete’s callous treatment the day before, she peeks into his office hopefully. She is disappointed when she does not find him there. When he does arrive later that morning, he does not look over to her desk as she obviously anticipates, and it is assumed that they do not have any more significant flirtations for a while. As time goes on, it appears that the small flame Peggy once held for Pete went out that day. We see her sole focus shift to her work, but Pete continues to engage with her, ignorant to remorse and the fact that he totally had his chance. Just as she did immediately after his wedding, Peggy avoids personal involvements with him and keeps her demeanor cool and professional. He is offended by this.
Despite the barbaric ways in which Pete comforts himself at Peggy’s expense, it appears as though he does indeed harbor a secret fidelity to her. This idea manifests later in the season as the curious weight gain she has for a while been exhibiting becomes considerable. While the other guys in the office crack immature jokes, Pete, who has been mostly reserved on the issue, boils over and punches Ken for a particularly tasteless jab. This is significant as the first time we ever see Pete stand up for someone else. Of course, never fully altruistic, Pete is also defending his own pride, as he faces the embarrassing level of intimate trust he has invested in this peculiar woman.
Of course in the season one finale we understand why Peggy has gained so much weight. The baby she gives birth to and subsequently rejects is a monumental development in this gnarled affair, and as season two begins we are dying to see how she handles it. We discover early on that she’s not in any rush to tell Pete. Their connection seems to have cooled off considerably over the last few months, and we become privy to more of their personal developments: the ironic struggle of Pete and Trudy to conceive a child of their own, and the influence Peggy’s guilt-tripping priest (Colin Hanks!) has on the reflection of her substantial past.
The dynamic between Peggy and Pete has already noticeably shifted as she settles into the promotion she received right before she gave birth to the baby she didn't know she was carrying. As Peggy asserts herself as a professional equal on the creative team, she inevitably starts working more closely with account man Pete. Their talents prove to complement each other, and as Peggy distances herself even further from the vision of the timid secretary with whom Pete once cruelly toyed, he starts approaching her with a more sincere interest. Unfortunately for him, she is inexplicably disinterested.
But for all the fun it is watching them happily muse over Clearasil slogans, what we've all been waiting for is the outstanding scene of confession at the end of the second season. It is heartbreakingly perfect. In the thick of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pete invites Peggy once again into his office (this is one very charged room!) to confess what we've gathered throughout this season but weren’t sure he’d ever admit: that he loves her and wants to be with her somehow. (As I’ve gone back and re-watched that scene [like, 100 times], I can’t help but chuckle at Pete’s line “you never let me talk about what I want to talk about.” It seems a deluded lie considering his narcissistic tendencies, but at the same time it is true that Peggy has emotionally distanced herself so much from him that whether he’s asking her what she did for Memorial Day weekend or intimating his deep-rooted Mommy & Daddy issues, Peggy makes herself increasingly unavailable to him.) But Pete is blindsided when Peggy stops him to make her own painful confession: that for the last two years she’s been hiding the fact that not only did she become pregnant by him, but she gave birth to and immediately gave up the baby he fathered. With no bells and whistles, excuses or explanations, she delivers this electrifyingly straightforward message: “You got me pregnant, I had a baby, and I gave it away." (She even repeats it! Oy!) After 13 agonizing episodes of allusions and ambiguous flashbacks, this is the first time she acknowledges the experience out loud, so this is a great cathartic moment for both her character and us, the aching audience. Needless to say, this is not at all the response Pete was hoping for--indeed it was not even on his worst case scenario list--but there it is. With one last heartening hand on his shoulder, she leaves him alone to fumble in the bleakness of this proclamation. A single tear rolls beautifully down his cheek. I think keeping that shot on Pete for just a second or two longer would have made that moment even more powerful.
As season three begins to churn along, we witness many things happening at Sterling Cooper, but we see very little interaction between Pete and Peggy. It seems as though they are really living parallel lives which may only flourish if they temporarily refrain from intersection. In the aftermath of a painfully life-altering affair, it is interesting that they become equally intent on building their careers, and they both do it extremely well. As most everyone else at Sterling Cooper begins to crumble or totally check out for one reason or another, Pete and Peggy use this time of great soreness as a gestation period for the development of their specialties.
For a season with much more explicit focus on their respective careers than their romantic past, one eye is gracefully kept on the periphery of their powerful story. We finally plug back into the general mood of their relationship in the fifth episode when they are duped into a shared lunch meeting with Duck Phillips, who wants to lure them both away from Sterling Cooper. When Pete arrives he is clearly disturbed to be confronted with Peggy’s presence, a discomfort compounded by Duck’s audacious offer. He storms out shortly after arriving. Peggy stays, not so sure of her opposition to Duck’s proposal.
Later, Pete approaches Peggy upon seeing her emerge from Don’s office. He asks if she mentioned Duck’s proposition to Don, to which she ultimately replies “it’s my decision, Pete.” He sourly retorts, “your decisions affect me.” This is an obvious reference to their history, and she literally walks away from it. Could things get any more painfully awkward between these two?
In the next episode we get one more quick peek into their story, and that is when Lois the lummox shreds British hot shot Guy McKendrick’s foot with the John Deere at the office party (Ken is agreeably idiotic for bringing a riding lawn mower into an office full of drunks, but Jesus Christ, Lois, seriously!). Peggy rushes over with Pete immediately behind her. Upon seeing the masticated foot, she faints, and Pete catches her. A few shots later we see her come to and stand up, and they realize each other very briefly, but sweetly, in each other’s arms.
That is really the extent of their interaction in season three, but I believe that fact in itself speaks volumes. Paraphrasing Vincent Kartheiser himself (the actor who plays Pete) from a 2009 TV Guide interview, noticing just as much what doesn't happen as what does is a poignant approach to this portrayal of the year after Peggy’s momentous confession. Of course, as an emotionally invested audience we desperately want catharsis through confrontation. We want realization of what happened and to witness their emotional processes, but the truth of the matter is that the absence of reaction to each other is part of their respective processes. Their relationship has gone into tense hibernation after such a weighty admission, and they are both undoubtedly soaking in a cocktail of all the yuckiest emotions. Pete just doesn’t trust Peggy as he did so intimately before; perhaps this is a significant catalyst which brings him closer to his own wife.
As season three comes to a close, the changes that have occurred in both characters are unrivaled elsewhere on the show. They have both matured incredibly, and it’s no question that much of that is attributed to the heaviness of their shared experience. Pete has been humbled, crushed by the magnitude of Peggy's disclosure, and he has lost much of his frat boy smugness, something he replaces with palpable talent. The power games have long since ended, and the penetrating looks have given way to awkward indicators of the pain in which he simply flounders. Peggy the stoic continues to feed the fire of her own transformation, and she so naturally avoids backpedaling for even a second on the fast track to career success.
Of course by the beginning of season four another huge development is under way; with the sudden overtake of PPL, and therefore Sterling Cooper, by advertising giant McCann-Erickson, the best and brightest of Sterling Cooper have literally flown in the night to branch off and become Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. In the first episode of the new season, we see Pete and Peggy seemingly getting along swimmingly, even hatching a silly (and effective!) marketing scheme together. The awkwardness and anger in season three seems to have given way to a mournful acceptance.
In episode four, "The Rejected," we get one last big gulp of what is now an intoxicating memory of Pete and Peggy. Early in the episode we learn Pete's wife Trudy is finally pregnant, something Peggy learns secondhand when she is asked to sign a congratulatory card. She immediately goes to him with her good wishes, and the thoughtful evocativeness with which he thanks her reminds us that neither have forgotten what once was or what might have been. She then retreats to her office to decompress and bang her head on her desk. C'est la vie, Peggy.
It is the gut-wrenching scene at the end of the episode which, with no dialogue between them, says so much. You know the one! As Peggy heads out to lunch with her new circle of bohemian friends, Pete stands in the lobby with his own circle of powerhouse businessmen. She walks past them and through the glass lobby door, and as her giddy group waits for the elevator, her eyes wander wistfully over to where Pete stands on the other side. Charming and cheerful in his dream role, he lands upon her gaze. After so much pain and awkwardness, they realize they are in precisely the right place, reveling shamelessly in one long, knowing look. The contrast of the diverging lives they are living immediately next to each other is astounding and reflected perfectly in this shot. We understand they’ve made their decisions, they’ve made their sacrifices, and now as they make this cathartic connection in remembrance of what was, they are finally content to go forward. Pete smiles humbly while I cry like a fucking baby.
So is this the end? It appears as such. There is a single shot a few episodes later when Pete gives a speculatively worrisome look as Peggy and a heavily pregnant Trudy emerge from the ladies' room together--as any man probably would upon seeing his wife and former mistress together--but that is ultimately the icing on the salty Pete and Peggy cake. I don't know what Matthew Weiner has in store for season five, but as much as I hate to admit it, this seems like an appropriate time to put these two out of their misery. I find the haunting sadness that is the backbone of all of their scenes thrilling, but realistically, we do have to believe their wounds are healing. Of course there will always be that haunting sadness, because if for no other reason, the fact that Peggy had a full-term child, a child that is still out there somewhere, cannot ultimately be forgotten. At the same time they are not going to get together and go looking for him. Neither will they have a religious revelation and begin living in plural marriage (although this would make for some excellent soapy fan fiction). Their history is too heavy to ever go merrily back, and after "The Rejected" we understand there is little reason to ever want to.
Of course, emotional crab that I am, I still want to see them specifically acknowledge the baby. Is that too idealistic and crazy?! Aside from the confession they have failed to have an actual conversation about it (Pete didn't exactly get to dialogue with her in his state of shock), which is something I for one desperately need. I could believably see it happening, for one reason or another, perhaps as the hippie movement really blows up and freedom, love, and honesty are the name of the game. Perhaps Pete is in danger of getting drafted to Vietnam, and he and Peggy are somehow in another Cuban Missile-like situation where they are faced with their mortality (although intelligent, married men with children were not a high priority for the draft). Maybe they collaborate on a wildly successful campaign, and in a whirlwind of high-spirited celebrations, they find themselves in a reflective mood (aka they get really drunk and have it out).
Clearly I'm not ready to totally snuff out the Pete and Peggy fire, but regardless of what is in store for them, I have certainly enjoyed every provocative second thus far. For a relationship whose progression has relied much more on subtext than dialogue, the story has been told so very effectively. Congratulations, Matt Weiner, you've got another Maddict on your golden hands!
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