Mad Men: How Midge in ‘SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES’ Shaped Don’s Love Life
The Don journey begins with Midge
Mad Men’s Don Draper is best defined by his messy love life, affairs, wives and all. For a show purportedly about advertising, Don’s story is told more through his bedrooms than his campaigns. The fandoms continue to debate the best, worst, most significant and so on of the Draper partners. The pilot (widely believed to be one of the best in prestige TV) set us up for a certain kind of protagonist – the dashing, ubercool ad man with a bohemian girlfriend and ended with the kicker of a wife & kids in the suburbs. And it all began with Midge.
The foundational impact of Midge
Midge Daniels was such a significant part of the world-building of Mad Men in its pilot. The tone of the show changed after that episode. Some of that is explained away as a long time gap between making the pilot & the rest of the show. Many creative choices changed (including writing Joan Harris to be a bigger role – and what a remarkable change that was!). The show’s brilliance lies in that we didn’t notice Midge fade away into Don’s murky past. We never really see the same kind of banter and easy camaraderie again in any of Don’s sexcapades as we do between him and Midge Daniels.
A conversation on the Mad Men subreddit suggested that Don & Midge have been involved for around five years. Doesn’t that sound too long for Don to have been loyal to any woman? None of his future affairs last more than a few months. He begins cheating on his second wife Megan within a year of their marriage.
That marriage also begins as his cheating on his girlfriend Faye whom he has to have been seeing for less than a year. There may have been other dalliances since he got married to Betty and before the pilot. But there is never any reference to them. And Don is just a different person with Midge than he is ever with anyone else (wives included).
There’s a youthful frivolity about his Season 1 scenes with Midge. He jokes that they should get married. She retorts
“Do you think I’d make a good ex-wife?”
She knows that he’s already married and stably so. Midge isn’t callous. There’s a realism about her that is able to navigate a relationship with a traditional, married man while still staying independent, free-spirited and very much her own woman. This is acknowledged when she tells Don in another episode,
“Don’t speak to me about her. It makes me feel cruel.”
Midge doesn’t sound jealous of Betty; she sounds pitying. Given how much mutual respect there is (at least in Season 1) between Don and Midge, I’d wager that they knew each other a long time and eventually they evolved in different directions. It is a kind of “You’re not cool anymore but I’ll indulge you” approach that Midge takes. She holds the power in that relationship.
Did Midge change how Don would behave in future relationships?
The episode ‘Babylon’ serves as a tour of the deeper lives of the female characters of Mad Men. It’s also where we first meet Roy, one of Midge’s bohemian friends. Eventually Roy will become the personification of the lifestyle that Midge chooses over Don.
Don has already met Rachel by this point but they have decided not to engage romantically. The episode ‘The Hobo Code’ cuts between Don’s childhood conversation with a hobo and his evening with Midge’s friends. Both are parallel tracks showing Don yearning for freedom and feeling left out, rejected, trapped.
This is where Don & Midge part ways, after a dick-waving contest with Roy. This suggests that Don would have continued with Midge had he felt even remotely wanted by her. It also indicates that he does not actually love Rachel, a fact that she realises when she tells him,
“You don’t want to run away with me. You just want to run away.”
It was never about Rachel, Betty or Midge (or any other woman). Midge is the only one who seems to understand that and accept it without trying to reform him or endure his abuse.
When we see Midge again, she’s an impoverished drug addict being pimped out by her husband. Don gives her money and walks away. It feels like a vindication rather than a loving gesture. He knows fully well giving her money in that state ensures she’ll be dead of an overdose very soon. The pilot where we first meet Midge is titled ‘Smoke gets in your eyes’ and it is bookended by this episode where we see her last, aptly titled ‘Blowing smoke’.
In all his affairs afterwards, Don maintains the upper hand in leaving the woman. Midge is the only one that leaves him without so much as a care. There is a studied cruelty in how Don approaches relationships therafter, right from the rape/counter-rape of Bobbie Barret to cheating on Faye after making her commit an unprofessional act to the sleaziness of typing up Catholic housewife/best friend’s wife Sylvia. It’s never again the laughter and genuine appreciation that we see with Midge. Did Midge Daniels break Don Draper?
When did Midge & Don really begin?
A Mad Men fan theory says that Betty was pregnant when they got married. It’s mostly rooted in the scene where Don & Betty answer different things to his question,
“How long have you been together?”
Even a lesser show would need a good reason to script and film that particular conversation. Since it is Mad Men, we read liberally into what the underlying messages are.
There’s a starry-eyedness in the flashback where he is telling his best friend Anna about proposing to Betty. I can easily see Don rushing into what he thinks is the perfect life with a Grace Kelly lookalike girlfriend. Finally, finally his life makes sense! The show is about Don’s rapid disillusionment when he realises he has no clue how to live that happy life. We also know that his trauma may give him a completely different understanding of the role sex plays in relationships. He sees them as power equations and transactions, not commitments of love.
Don’s oldest child Sally is around five years old in the pilot. Going back to the maths of Don & Midge, it would suggest that they started sleeping together shortly around the time Sally was born. It seems quite plausible for Don to drift into an easy sexual give-and-take with the free-spirited Midge. Don’s Madonna/whore complex is strong – he blows up over Betty wearing a bikini at home while Midge wears a baby tee and no bra, and sleeps with other people. To his mind, Midge isn’t the kind of woman he’d ever marry and she knows it too which is why they both joke about it.
It’s even probable to me that he was sleeping with Midge even before Betty and saw no reason to stop. Perhaps Don just drifted away trying monogamy for a while and then drifted back into Midge’s orbit.
That’s why Rachel confuses him so much. She is as openly intelligent as Midge and just as socially acceptable as Betty (rich, albeit Jewish rather than WASP). In a desperate bid, he wants to run away with her. Only in his later affairs when he’s gotten more used to his philandering side does he get calculated about what he promises and does.
So, I believe Midge was the first real relationship Don had. She may well have set the tone for Don’s downfall through his sexual journey. What if Don’s downfall wasn’t only about deliberate bad choices, but about losing the one relationship that accepted him for who he was? Imagine what Mad Men would have been had Don stayed with Midge?
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If you’re a fan, you might like to read my other Mad Men posts too.
Also read: Why Don Draper’s first girlfriend may be his most important.
