Ariel McKee

The Mad Men series finale ends with its protagonist, Don Draper, meditating on a bluff. As the camera gets its final glimpse of Don, the audience sees him advance to a state of mental clarity before the screen cuts to the famous “Hilltop” commercial (better known as “Buy the World a Coke”). The commercial, which first graced television screens in 1971, envisions global unity, as actors with diverse ethnic backgrounds lip-sync in harmony, each with a bottle of Coca-Cola in their hand.

 

The final scene is not typical for Mad Men, a series that follows a 1960s New York advertising agency (along with its many reincarnations) and those who work within it. Despite the emerging cultural movements of the 1960s, Mad Men stays ever-focused on the predominantly white, masculine world of Madison Avenue. The series has multiple threads of narration that emphasize the work and home lives of different characters, but it lends primary focus to Don.

 

Born as Dick Whitman, Don was originally an impoverished Midwesterner who joined the army to escape his troubled youth. Stationed in Korea during the early 1950s, he accidentally kills his commanding officer, the real Donald Draper, in an explosion, which renders the man unrecognizable. Because the real Draper was near the end of his tour of duty, Dick switches their dog tags, thereby assuming Draper’s identity, and earns an honorable discharge— free to start anew. It’s no surprise, then, that Don’s identity, both external and internal, is a mystery throughout the series and is one of the show’s key narrative forces.

 

By applying the theories of Jung to Mad Men’s narrative, the intent of the series finale becomes clearer, as do moments in previous seasons, which at their time of airing seemed highly ambiguous. Specifically, such clarity arises when considering the process of
individuation.

 

In Man and His Symbols, Dr. von Franz defines Jung’s theory of individuation as “the conscious coming-to-terms with one’s own inner center (psychic nucleus) or Self” (137). When a person undergoes the process of individuation, they often hit certain milestones, which appear in the form of archetypes. Archetypes are not actual characters, but rather, Jung argues, “a tendency to form such representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern” (59).

 

After individuals develop their conscious egos in childhood, they will go on to encounter their shadow, followed by the wise old man or woman, and finally the anima or animus, before completely integrating all aspects of their personality into a unified Self (82). Furthermore, the individual will be more receptive to the collective unconscious, which is distinct from the individual’s unconscious, as it is derived from ancestral memory and can be experienced by all of mankind (89).

 

With Jung in mind, Mad Men’s final scene can be viewed as the peak of Don’s individuation, wherein he finally merges, to the best of his ability, Dick Whitman and Don Draper.