"Mad Men" -- *Final* Season Official Thread (possible spoilers) (part 2)

The broken coke machine in the previous episode..... Asking Don to fix it ?

I agree.

 

Still a really bad ending.

 

There are those people who watch a TV show and then read recaps, read interviews with the creator/writer of the shows, log onto forums/join Facebook groups to discuss, and then there are the people that watch a show and that's that - no digging after viewing. Possibly, the ending of Mad Men was designed to work both ways - and was left ambiguous on purpose (due to possible legal reasons?), but both endings do work - Don creates the Coke ad/Don has peace finally, the advertising world creates the Coke ad at the end of the decade. What better way to end a TV series about an Ad Agency taking place in the decade of 1960s than with the Coke ad - no matter what the ending?

Though, I am in the camp of Don creating the Coke ad.

 

Absolutely. I was simply saying that Matthew Weiner's interpretation of the ending outside of the text is no more relevant than anyone else's. His remarks don't make one ending more "real" or more valid than another.

And the ambiguous ending was perfect. If they would have spelled it out one way or the other, half of the audience would have been disappointed. This way, we could all be happy with our own interpretation.

 

This.

Frankly, having read the relevant Weiner interview segments, I actually don't even see how he clears up the ambiguity, even though the stories presenting the segments keep saying that he does. Certainly, the possibility that Don could have created the ad is made plausible--but such a plausible possibility is just that: a plausible possibility. If he wanted it to be unambiguous, he could have made it so.

 

>>>>>>Maybe. I do think, tho, that those who feel Don *didnt* create the ad have to answer one question:

If Don didnt create the ad and it has nothing to do with him, what was it doing in the show?

 

It was creating a moment of resonance between the real past, the fictive past, and the present. Let's say the show simply ended where it ended, with Don having a moment of enlightenment at Esalen. The ad could simply have been a way to acknowledge the source of inspiration for the moment that ends the series, and possibly a nostalgic tip of the hat to the industry that inspired the series as a whole. It might also have been put there to get us to think about the role of advertising, our personal definitions of enlightenment, and their possible connections--should it bother us that the image of Don looking so at ease, finally finding himself, resonates so perfectly with a famous product advertisement? Are our very goals of happiness and self-actualization possibly the preconditions for advertising? To the extent that that ad could be seen as a symbolic start to the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s, it could be a fitting end to the show, as well as raising the question of whether the shift from social revolution to personal enlightenment--one possible way of understanding the cultural shift in sensibility from the 60s to the 70s--turned out to be nothing more than what came to be known as "the me decade" that ultimately led to the open celebration of greed and self interest of the 1980s. None of this, by the way, would be inconsistent with Don having devised the ad--but it doesn't in any way require us to think he did.

I absolutely love the ending. Like the show itself, it explores nostalgia--"the pain from an old wound"--with layer upon layer of exquisite ambivalence. Does the Coke ad represent a more innocent time that we have lost? Or does it mark a loss of innocence in and of itself? Is that "innocence" something lost, or was it a creation of the very ad industry we blame for taking it away? (Were the early 60s really more "imnocent"? The show seemed to suggest otherwise). Does turning inward to achieve enlightenment free us from the claws of that industry, or does it fulfill that industry's goal of having us believe we can continually renew and recreate ourselves from scratch?

Whether or not the Don character actually created the ad within the fictional timeline of the show seems pretty much beside the point to me--and, I would suggest, to the creators, or they would have shown him pitching it. To me, the show ends exactly where it does for a reason.

 

Is there a way I can like that response more than once?

 

Even Dylan mentions coca cola in When I Paint my Masterpiece. It was one of the few global consumerism brands at the time and makes so much sense to end the show with

 

Seriously good post NorthNY Mark

 

Thank you!

 

By the way, thinking about the ad brought back some of the lyrics to the jingle, and I suspect that there was a lot of foreshadowing in the last few episodes, at least. People have already pointed out the Coke machine, but beyond that, the connection that first came to mind was between "I'd like to buy the world a home, and furnish it with love" and the image of Don's empty apartment in the wake of his divorce. Then I started to wonder about "apple trees and honeybees and snow white turtle doves": didn't Pete's kid get stung by a bee at an apple orchard? Not sure whether there was any "snow white turtle dove" symbolism--but aren't doves closely related to pigeons, and isn't that what Betty shot from the sky in one of her most iconic moments form the first season?

 

I do recall that Trudy oddly holding up a shiny red apple in her kitchen at the end of that scene set off my symbolism alarm bells. OMG Red! Coca Cola! The Devil! Temptation! Life with Pete!

 

It made me hungry for fruit.

 

I think most people can't handle ambiguity...which is why some people clung for years to the certainty that Don was going to jump off a building in the last episode, and why many other people were still disappointed with the ending. Hollywood cliche dies hard...

 

As a kid in 1971, I was really devastated by the one-two punch of the Beatles breaking up and Dark Shadows getting cancelled. The completion of Mad Men is probably the closest I have come to re-experiencing that level of pop culture grief. Given the subject matter, the time period, the writing, the characters, the actors, and the attention to detail in sets and clothing, it is probably my favorite TV show ever and certainly my favorite from the post-Sopranos golden era, if we want to call it that.

 

I was but a toddler in 1971 and therefore not directly affected by the things you mention, but I am right there with you in terms of Mad Men! It is probably my favorite show of all time (at least thus far).

 

It's funny, I was 7 in 1971 and I must have seen the Coca Cola ad around that time. I've always, and I mean even from then, formed the opinion that the ad was exploitative and rather out of time even just a year or two after the hippie years. I realise this comment isn't adding much to the thread but the ad for me perfectly sums up certain large corporate entities being slow to react to social change. I found it cringeworthy as I felt those times represent in the ad had passed by then. Cynical young me.

 

That's an interesting perspective. Seeing the original ad, I can sort of see why you would think that way. I think the one I became familiar with was a later, Christmas variation where they sing the song at night, holding candles, in the form of a giant Christmas tree. It didn't have quite as much of a hippy vibe, and the fact that they were holding candles rather than bottles of coke made the product placement aspect somewhat less overt.

 

Actually, the first soft drink ad that I recall having an impact on me was this rather psychedelic 7-Up ad, which of course, in my memory, became even more fantastically trippy than the reality that I can now see again via the magic of Youtube:



Despite that commercial lodging its way into my unconscious, I never became o fan of 7-Up (or Coke, for that matter).

Perhaps Roger helped Don come up with this one!

 

Seeing as how I knew Don was going to create that ad to end the series 20 days before it ended, I saw nothing in the ending to change that opinion.

 

Lol...what is the deal with the hot dog?

 

The famous "Bubbles" commercial for 7-Up was done by Bob Abel & Associates, and was one of the most brilliantly-designed, effects-heavy TV spots ever made. That came out in 1974 and won a ton of awards. A later commercial for Levi's, "Trade Mark" in 1977 was the second-best commercial they ever did. I happened to be in the room when that was being color-corrected at Vidtronics in LA, and my jaw hit the floor the first time I saw it. This was very, very heavy stuff for the 1970s:



To me, the ending of Mad Men is patently obvious, and Weiner has said all along that he wanted to end the show with all the characters a little better off than they were at the beginning (except perhaps for Betty dying), and in the case of Don, I think he's figured out more about the world and how to accept modern times into his previously conservative lifestyle. If Jon Hamm says he believes his character created the Coke commercial, I'm siding with him.

In a way, I think the 1971 Coke "Hilltop" commercial was the antithesis of the high-tech, psychedelic commercials that follows. It's 100% natural, just a helicopter flying over a hill, plus close ups of 100 teenagers singing a song. As much as people today can look on this as being very calculated, cynical, and commercial, I think the commercial meant a lot more to people coming out of the 1960s. Even Matt Weiner has said, "it's the greatest TV commercial ever made," and I think it transcends just selling sugar water, because it's also selling a dream and a lifestyle and a philosophy.

 

As a rabid fan of the show, one who's seen every episode more than once, it's clear to me that Don created the campaign. For seven seasons we watched as he took in the social/cultural vibe of the time and used elements to create his work. If anything, an argument could be made that Weiner didn't trust the audience to get the fact that Draper creates the ad and therefore included far too many clues that only served to rob the ending of its subtlety. I also think that to reserve the right to disagree with Weiner's ending and substitute one of your own choosing is a bit silly. If the author tells you "hey this is how I chose to end my work" you simply have to accept that fact. If Van Gogh paints Sunflowers and says "hey those are sunflowers" I don't think a person would say "na, they're apples."