They say many times that he is a genius and that various ad agencies are fighting for him, yet he is never working or creating in the series. I think they show him working or having brilliant ideas on what, 3 episodes throughout the series? They do not help the audience to imagine him as a creative genius, not even as a hard worker. He just looks like a good-looking guy in a suit, maybe a good card in public relations, but nothing more.
They build up his aura to great levels, but never deliver.
Other urls found in this thread:
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
he did a couple of good jobs then his talent became a meme and he basically didnt have to work anymore .
Don't worry, user. Someday you'll grow up and see how the world really works. I can tell you stories for days.
- old guy here
Are you joking, or did you just not understand that his job is to generate ideas and that he's brilliant at it because he is literally doing that all day long because he's trapped in a perpetual state of reading between the lines of the world?
Advertising is about manipulating and conning people and he's the best at it because that's what his entire life is
Your post is bullshit anyway because there are numerous instances when he comes up with great pitches
For most of the series he's a creative director and not reponsible for generating ideas anyway. How could you not notice that he isn't a fucking copywriter? He runs the copywriter bullpen and later, is an executive.
That's kind of the point, though. Throughout the series, it's constantly pointed out that he gets WAY more credit than he deserves just because he looks good in a suit and has a good speaking voice.
The whole "Don is a creative genius" thing is kind of the central joke/irony of the series. You're never supposed to forget that the series takes place in the world of ADVERTISING, not film or literature or fine art. By the very nature of his job, he has no creative integrity.
That and he understands better than most what it means to be existentially wanting and is innately attuned to appealing ideas that seem like they might fulfill that want.
Especially love. He doesn't understand love, but he knows how powerful it is to want it and he knows how to package that with a product.
Wow, you mean like a creative director?
>all day long
>either getting drunk with his buddy or fucking a mistress for half the afternoon
t. NEET
>Throughout the series, it's constantly pointed out that he gets WAY more credit than he deserves just because he looks good in a suit and has a good speaking voice.
For his advertising prowess? No way. Sure, it's constantly noted how much people generally fall over themselves due to his looks, but no one in the know doubts that his abilities as an ad man are the real deal. His status is largely a product of his looks/images, no doubt, but his skills are very real. Don't confuse the two.
>he is never working or creating in the series
Uh, did you watch random disparate episodes? He's always working and creating, it's not detailed in a montage but it's there all the time.
Fair enough. But the "fraud" nature of his work as an ad-man is still pretty central to my understanding of the character and the show. Don himself expresses feelings of inadequacy about it at a few points
you're dumb as a bag of rocks OP
Half the time he's drinking it's at work, and ANY time he's with a mistress it's just him trying to self-soothe his mommy issues, which he totally knows and only further lends to his great insight into how people work.
Yes, Don lives a lie in a far more concrete and profound way than most people can relate to and advertising is in many ways about selling lies in the form of appealing mistruths. That only makes the case for why he is genuinely so good at it.
Yeah this is basically my point. He's made for the job.
Weren't you saying he gets more credit than he deserves due to his looks?
It's all meta irony for how the American Dream is one big lie.
It's because he's working in an industry where the lowest common denominator trash is exactly what the client wants. He has no creative spark and a depressive like him will do well writing copy.
There's a line in the 4th season where Don says he "hasn't written more than a paragraph since high school." And yet he is paid handsomely to write for a living. So it's clear he knows how ultimately unimportant his work is and that causes him to sink further into depression
Season 1 has many examples of his creative of genius and is bookended by two of the greatest examples, "It's Toasted" and The Carousel.
The clients love him because he's handsome and charismatic and can sell them an idea, and that's more important than having the best idea
literely who.have u sen the new avenge film?
Yes. But I don't disagree that his work IS good. It's just that the way he sells it is even more important. Throughout the show, you see that it's not enough just to have a good idea, what matters is convincing other people (the client, your own peers/superiors) that your idea is good. Peggy kind of illustrates the other side of this, she works hard and her ideas are often good, but it's a real struggle for her to sell it the way Don does.
He was living off his fame at the time of the series. Thats why he always gets exited when he works on cool stuff, made him feel young and with a direction again.
>he literally stole Peggy's cowboy idea
THATS advertising. Making other peoples ideas your own. And thats what he does, you fucking 12yo no-life-experience mongoloids.
>It's because he's working in an industry where the lowest common denominator trash is exactly what the client wants. He has no creative spark and a depressive like him will do well writing copy.
But the very spark Don has is his ability to recognize and sell the HIGHEST common denominator. He has an innate appreciation of of deeply seated, universal human wants and needs that are always there, but that most poeple just aren't all that attuned to.
His genius is that the client comes in wanting "HURR DURR JUST FIND SOME WAY OF MENTIONING THE WHEEL IN IT AND IT SHOULD APPEAL TO PEOPLE" and him recognizing that the real thing draw is not the new technology itself, but the painful dichotomy between its novelty and how it traverses the past (i.e. the way we all fluctuate between wanting time to freeze and to march on).
Most people don't think like that. They get it once it's explained to them, but they don't deal in conceptual abstractions the way Don does.
...
Ok. Well yes, Don is well aware of the fact that his looks and public speaking ability are a huge asset. It's one of the few areas of himself where he is actually and truly confident, and he absolutely radiates that in a presentation.
No way around it, some people are just appealing to look at and listen to. He's one of them. Only makes it a more bitter pill to swallow that he's also a genius. Like his neighbor said, "If I looked like you and talked like that, I wouldn't have had to go to med school."
Did you watch the show? When Don becomes a partner with Cutler and Chaugh, they realize he is just a drunk who hardly ever turns up to work.
LMAO
Season 6 was almost entirely about Don being in the midst of a deep depressive episode. His work behavior was more erratic and vindictive than ever. Even then, he was still coming up with brilliant ideas and they knew it. The CGC crew respected Don's ability, they just didn't know they would have to deal with Don's bullshit as well. He was still coming up with brilliant ideas, the merger being one of them. Don't forget that Don also distinguished himself with equally inspired glimmers of genius when it came to the larger business affairs of Sterling Cooper.
A combination of this and the fact that he's literally just a ringer.
You bring him on after everyone's done the grunt work to hit an easy homerun when the bases are loaded. He has maybe 5 or 6 great ideas the whole show but when he comes up with them, they secure the future of the entire agency
Sometimes you make a great thread and no one replies, or only a few people reply. Check the catalog, I'm a genius and have made several of those threads. Not all of them are doing well. Sometimes this is hard to portray.
good discussion lads. I enjoyed reading it.
>You're never supposed to forget that the series takes place in the world of ADVERTISING, not film or literature or fine art. By the very nature of his job, he has no creative integrity.
lol this pretentious fuckwit
Advertising encompasses all three of those artforms, there's as much creativity equired to make a great ad than there is for anything else
he was just a drunk prettyboy with the occasional and short-lived flash of brilliance
Aren't we all?
yeah this
he's the ad business equivalent of a quarterback - everyone else has done the grunt work, all they need is the final catch
but people who have the charisma to consistently deliver that performance are hard to come by, and highly coveted - similar to lots of high level management and banking jobs
they want people who're quick on their toes and who don't crack under pressure - people who can work hard behind the scenes, with only managerial pressure, they are a dime a dozen
Towards the later seasons, he was really coasting on his reputation and his appearance to strangers. None of his clients or rival agencies knew how truly volatile he was. Cutler summed it up pretty well in season 7.
>"You know, Ted and I, whenever we would hear that your agency was involved, we’d always be so intimidated. “What was that man up to?” Such a cloud of mystery. Now that I’ve been backstage, I am deeply unimpressed Don. You’re just a bully and a drunk. A football player in a suit. The most eloquent I’ve ever heard you was when you were blubbering like a little girl about your impoverished childhood."
Based Cutler
>Sure, it's constantly noted how much people generally fall over themselves due to his looks, but no one in the know doubts that his abilities as an ad man are the real deal. His status is largely a product of his looks/images, no doubt, but his skills are very real. Don't confuse the two.
Just watch s1 dumdum. It is said that it is entirely due to his eloquence (after a meeting where the client was not dumb enough to fall in love with him, then get persuaded and at the end, Don says that nothing is certain about the result of a campaign). IT is reminded in s7 with Ted once he moves in with Don and work with him for the time.
fucking normies do not watch this show.
Don is a 40 yo baby who just love to make women cum. And you inability to make women cum is what makes you look up to a retard like Don.
Lel this guy is a peeper. no wonder he is not impressed. He is the smartest of all.
>"If I looked like you and talked like that, I wouldn't have had to go to med school."
so a 20 yo like you agrees that he is not a genius. People will believe anything that an eloquent man says.
mad advertising major
>People will believe anything that an eloquent man says
Too true
did you guys all forget that in s6 and 7 he literally keeps his fat former alcoholic friend fed by creating ideas for him
his prowess might be exaggerated but he's still one of the best creatives in the industry at the time
I'm not sure if this sameposting or three people being willfully ignorant in quick succession.
Cutler is an account man. He doesn't understand creative. He was literally trying to let a computer do all the work. He doesn't appreciate what creative does because he can't understand it.
Being eloquent and attractive does not take away from the substance of Don's message. The only reason anyone would be saying that his pitches are just stylish, well-packaged bullshit it because the don't understand the nuance of what he's actually saying. That's all three of you retards apparently. Don is an abhorrent person and a joke as a professional, but you're just too dumb to get the show if you can't see the genius of his insights.
>Don is an abhorrent person
he's not that bad overall imo, just a terrible husband and an absentee father and uses women like cocksleeves
other than that he's a pretty solid guy
I'm I literally didn't say that, but you're retarded if you think that his character flaws and alcoholism weren't completely in control in season 6. He clearly still had "it", because he was pitching his shit to Freddy in the beginning of season 7, but he was self-destructive and between Jaguar and Hershey he singlehandedly fucked up 2 accounts. The Chevy merger was a desperation move, but it ultimately made him more expendable.
The negatives outweighed the positives, and Cutler and Ted especially didn't understand Don's "process", and Roger, Bert and the other partners were sick of his rogue act. I never once said Don wasn't great at what he did, but he was only great when he had his head screwed on.
After getting married to Megan Don turns into such a faggot. All he does is prioritize her over his work. And good god does his work get fucking terrible.
>Just think about it. Deeply. Then forget it. And an idea will jump up in your face.
That was Don't writing advice to Peggy in season one. That's how Don works.
don was a god season 1-3 . watch the show it's all where's poochie for those episodes
seeing him decline is fucking tough as he's everyone's goal, everyone's ambition, america's ideal, he's a legend.
don's ultimate and uncontrollable downfall is a heart breaking mess. it's like being english and having to deal with the fall of the british empire, or being from detroit and see the whole industry collapse around you.
it's about how capitlisim can fuck you beyond repair. no can of coke can save you, you just end up being lost in the pathways of others. forever
You could easily substitute Mad Men for Breaking Bad in that diagram.
...
Seriously. Breaking Bad fans were the worst. They thought everything was symbolism.
Cutler really was the most based character on the show.
>That episode where he just watches two people fuck in an office.
What a weird fuck.
There's no way you can say that Don doesn't lose a lot of his aura when the curtain's been lifted, even if the final result is the same.
what episode>? where is it
It's all explained in the show if you watched it.
the episode with the drug used for chevy
happy, content people corrupted by scdp, best characters to introduce late in a series
Even then at the end, when he manages to make peace with himself he manages to turn it into a Coke ad.
How does someone even bother to waste their time making this to fool people? I wouldn't even spend ten minutes trying to look for things that are supposed to be there, and someone out there took the time to make up all this shit.
this
the end is an appraisal of consumerism
>thinking what the writers meant matters
There was never any aura. Don has been exactly what he always was since literally the first episode. It's actually really impressive how consistent his behavior it from start to finish. He displays the same avoidant habits, the same passive aggressive habits, the same morals, and the same intuitive perception of ego motivations at the end as he does in the beginning.
Theres only mystique to him when you're watching it the first time because you don't know him that well yet. In rewatches, a lot of the pleasure is in realizing how well thought and developed he was from the jump. Wiener just really knew he Don Draper was.
And again, I'm talking SOLELY about his ability to glean the finer nuances of human motivation which remains untrammeled from start to finish. That his life and aura fall down around his is a totally separate thing. The novelty of his brilliance may fade for you, but the assurance of it should only get stronger. I mean the show literally ends with him creating one of the most famous ads in history.
Barthe's view don't hold up at all though.
If there's a piece of writing where it's really ambiguously worded and left up to interpretation, that doesn't mean the author doesn't have their own objectively right interpretation of the scene they created. The only time this philosophy is relevant is when it's totally impossible to decipher the author's intent.
Barthe's threroy also isn't fact. It's literally a mindless view on how an author apparently has no control over their work other than though what's presented. Total bs.
Hahano
Lol "where's poochy"
Its also an idea that really crystallized in the 60s in France when there were riots and strikes and repressive police actions against protesters. The death of the author is also referring to the death of authority, where the hippy lefty french intellectuals wanted to say the "author" had no "authority" over the meaning of texts, just our the state and police authorities were big meanies that repressed freedom and truth, ie literally fags saying "you're not my real dad, you can't tell me what to do!"
dude, his entire identity is a marketing ploy that he was constantly developing, his existence revolved around manipulating people and experimenting with different identities, he was never not working on advertising
Breaking Bad writers pandered to their reddit audience unlike any series before, so it's safe to assume the writers and fans are on the same level