Mad Men #4: The Scientists and Poets of Desire
One place where Mr. and Ms. Viewer still want to sympathize with Don Draper? His professional chops. Not only because he's good, which he still is, but because we want him to be right about why and how we want things. And we want that not only because we're rooting for him, but because we're rooting against the alternative. We don't want focus groups to be final. We want the new idea with the surprise about who we could be.
But we don't want that to be final either. Tonight's conflict -- women want cold cream because they want a man to luxuriate in them; no, they want cold cream because they want to luxuriate in themselves -- points to big desires that aren't simply female but human. We want to trust the science. We want to be predictable enough -- but not too predictable. We want to be unique, but not so unique that we exhaust ourselves. Mere life can never satisfy our longings, even as we long for mere life.
We long to be satisfied. But we also long never to be satisfied. Hence the funny place in our lives of advertising, and the market capitalism behind it. Turning a buck off of these strange, contradictory desires can never be safely described as all virtue or all vice. There are only degrees of reassurance and creepiness, in both directions, slipping us hints about how to judge the scientists and the poets of desire.
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