Sally Draper might end up being Mad Men’s most important character

The early hype surrounding Mad Men, which began its final batch of episodes Sunday, April 5, was steeped in the tired cliché about Don Draper (Jon Hamm) being the kind of man men wanted to be and women wanted to be with.

The show did nothing to fight that perception. That is Don’s silhouette on the couch at the end of the opening credits — and series creator Matt Weiner's notes at the Museum of the Moving Image's Mad Men exhibit indicate that the show began as a character sketch of Don.

But Don's prominence is misleading. The character constantly seems on the precipice of change before backsliding. Much more compelling are characters who are not, as the series begins, already fully formed, the ones who develop in the swirl of historical change.

The most important character in this regard is Don's daughter, Sally Draper, played by Kiernan Shipka, who is growing up in a home that has been broken in a way the previous generations of homes were not and maturing in a society that is providing young girls with unprecedented opportunities to decide for themselves what kind of women they would become.

In other words, Mad Men only seems like the story of Don Draper. The longer the series runs, the more it seems like its concluding chapters just might reveal it has always been the story of his daughter — the one character who may yet escape the gravitational pull of history.

The power of nostalgia

Before we begin, it's important to understand why I've chosen the approach I do below, which involves analyzing Mad Men on a formal level. By "formal," I mean criticism that relates to the form of a work — the images and other elements that make up the overall series.

A formal analysis acknowledges that while the film's plot is crucial to the audience's ability to understand what happens on screen, the images through which that narrative is communicated are just as significant in determining what a film "means."

For instance, consider Mad Men's first-season finale, "The Wheel," directed by Weiner. In it, Don embarks on what is considered one of the character's signature pitches — to Eastman Kodak about its new slide machine, called the Carousel.

In the pitch, he recounts how the old Greek man who taught him the advertising trade said that the most important idea is "new." It "creates an itch" on which "you simply put the product on as a kind of calamine lotion." His description of consumer culture here is literally superficial — the job of the advertiser is to produce, then provide, cures for an itch they themselves have created.

This description is also a perfect one for the character of Don Draper early in the series. Here is a man who often seems to loathe his wife, nonetheless using family photographs to manipulate the emotions of representatives from a camera company.

So potent is his pitch that as he sells this false narrative of his life, he finds himself emotionally moved by the power of his own rhetoric:

This is a sequence of reverse shots — in which, traditionally, the camera "flips" from one person to another both to track a conversation and to register the response of each character to what the other is saying. Here, the shots alternate from Don's head in a static medium close-up to an extreme close-up, shot from Don's first-person perspective, of his family photographs. These reverse shots, then, are unusual because the conversation they track is between Don and his memory of himself.

What is most striking is the juxtaposition of Don's dialogue with his expression on screen. It is entirely unclear what his children represent to him as he delivers this pitch. Are they the painful feeling of nostalgia — or the old wound itself?

Don's rationale for considering childhood and evocations of it as an old wound that continues to cause deep pain decades later is sound, stemming from an upbringing in extreme poverty. But the show also documents the way he and those in his life inflict similar wounds on Sally — a young girl growing up at a tumultuous moment in American history. (Yes, the photo shows both Sally and her younger brother, Bobby, but the show has always focused far more on Sally than Bobby.)

What happened to Don in the past is happening to Sally in the present. As the scene from "The Wheel" demonstrates, the show itself is concerned with wounds and how they're inflicted on the young, who will be most affected by them.

It makes sense, then, to read scenes like the one above as a sort of call to arms, designed to force the audience to pay attention to what is happening to Sally.

Ghosts still haunt the days

Mad Men is deeply concerned with the gulfs between generations and the ways individuals create bridges across those gaps.

Consider Sally's relationship with her grandfather, Eugene (the father of her mother, Betty), who died after spending time living in the Draper household. She formed a bond with him, reading to him from Edward Gibbon's seminal history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Thus does Sally effectively learn how seemingly stable institutions, whose permanence is taken for granted, can fold under the weight of their own rot.

This problem of generational conflict is brought to the foreground in the third-season episode "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency" — which comes two episodes after Eugene's death and one after the birth of his namesake, Sally’s baby brother, Gene. In it, Don walks into Sally's bedroom to the find the light still turned on.

"Daddy, no" Sally says, as he switches it off. "I'm afraid of what's going to happen when you turn off the lights."

Don misreads Sally's concern, assuming she is worried he will leave Betty again (as he briefly did at the end of the show’s second season) at some point in the night. "Don't worry," he tells her, "I'm home now, and nothing can hurt you."

He promises to buy her a nightlight. Which he does:

This is to no great effect, as she is still cowering in fear. Betty also misreads the situation, thinking Sally is jealous of the attention being received by baby Gene. Thus, Betty also tries to buy her daughter some security via a Barbie doll she claims is a gift from the baby.

Sally wants no part of it and tosses the doll out the window, where it is found by Don when he returns home from work. Thinking — again incorrectly — that she must have dropped it while playing, he returns it to her bedroom:

Director Lesli Linka Glatter reverses to a shot of Sally and the nightlight identical to the one above, except this time the girl is actually asleep — and thus the manner in which Don has placed the Barbie doll means that when she awakens it will be staring directly at her:

Little wonder, then, that she screams when she sees it. Don rushes in to comfort her, Betty right behind him, cradling a wailing baby Gene. "Get him out!" Sally screams. "I don't even know what to say," Betty says before storming out.

Sally then explains why she's been so upset — a reason both her parents have misunderstood. "Grandpa Gene — he's not supposed to be here anymore."

"He's not," Don replies. He adds, speaking of the baby, "He's called 'Gene,' he sleeps in his room, he looks just like him, and I bet when he starts talking, he's going to sound just like him too."

"He's just a baby," Don continues. "There's no such thing as ghosts."

That may be literally true, but when Sally's narrative in this episode is isolated, it becomes abundantly clear that there are such things as ghost stories, and Sally has been living one since baby Gene came home from the hospital.

Look at it from her perspective: her brother is a malevolent reincarnation of her dead grandfather who teases her by returning discarded Barbies. Sally's ghost story bridges the generational divide — but it does so in a horrifying fashion. And through her shot choices, Glatter places viewers inside Sally's perspective — literally bringing that ghost story and fear of endless decay to life.

Continuity between Genes is as terrifying as continuity between generations, because it necessarily entails a lack of progress. That Grandpa Gene chose for her to read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire indicates that she is aware of both the inevitability of decline, as well as the necessity of rebirth. (While not evidenced in the title, Gibbon's book tracks the rise of the "Age of Reason" after the Roman Empire's fall.)

From an early age, then, Sally knows everything falls apart, a point only driven home when her parents divorce just a few episodes later.

The only possible future

Being young, Sally is much better positioned to take advantage of cultural and social progress than her father. But progress, the show insists, won’t be easy. Nostalgia for invented pasts lingers, and ghosts can be made to appear at any moment — as one of the opening scenes of "A Little Kiss," the fifth-season premiere, makes plain.

The scene is a mirror image of the ones discussed above, beginning with Sally asleep in bed, sans nightlight:

But instead of Don coming to her, she ends up going to him, after wandering into an unfamiliar hallway in search of a bathroom:

Sally is but a small figure in a large hallway. The detritus in the foreground is visual evidence of the unsettled nature of this space.

When she rattles the handle at the door at the hallway's end, she is met by her father:

As in the earlier episode, this conversation’s stakes are established while Don occupies a doorway — neither in the room nor out of it, merely lingering in between.

Doorways have a special history in film because they are visual representatives of social processes like inclusion and exclusion. The final scene from The Godfather, where one character is literally shut out of a space she cannot occupy, is the most famous example:

In this scene, Don doesn't invite Sally in, and she never asks him to step outside. They just stand there, feet planted firmly on either side of the threshold as they try to create the kind of father-daughter connection they desire but are incapable of bringing into being.

In what is a rare moment for the show, director Jennifer Getzinger hammers home this disconnect by going inside Sally's head to show the audience exactly what she is looking at:

That Sally is staring at the small of her stepmother's back and the curve of her hips is significant. Megan (Jessica Paré), after all, is in that bed because of the rise of second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution.

Don can only profit from these social developments. He can never truly understand them — as his eventually crumbled marriage to Megan will amply demonstrate. Or, put another way, he can purchase an apartment in which he can try to escape history by marrying a modern woman, but unlike his daughter, he can never grow up in one.

As Sally blooms into her own sexual maturity, it’s not difficult to imagine that this image of her naked, sleeping stepmother will function much like the photograph from "The Wheel" does for Don — significantly, another moment in which the show uses a first-person perspective. Only the "pain from an old wound" she will feel will not be born of nostalgia, as her father's was, but of actual pain.

Don is haunted by phantom pains that — through the power of his own pitch — he created to haunt himself, whereas Sally's pain is the direct result of having a father who, instead of connecting with his daughter, bonds with a photograph of her in the middle of an advertising pitch. She’s left on the outside of his life — always looking in.

For Don, the sexual revolution created a larger pool of women to cheat on Betty with, but for Sally, it simply tore her family apart. She can never partake of the false nostalgic narrative that nearly brings tears to Don's own eyes in "The Wheel," because for her, the concept of family has always entailed navigating a society in which institutions are falling like so many Roman empires.

The first true Drapers

The adults in Mad Men defy societal expectations, and as historical television goes, watching them do so is enthralling. But that also relegates the show to a period piece in which established character types are cut adrift in rapidly shifting historical moments. In this vein, the show is at its most purely interesting when it follows the continual self-creation of "Don Draper" by Dick Whitman — the impoverished young man Don grew up as, before stealing the identity of a fallen colleague in the war to assume as his own.

But there is another, even more compelling story here — the story of a young girl who was never cut adrift, because there was never anything to be cut adrift from. From the time she was six, Sally Draper lived in an insecure world of broken marriages and a presidential assassination.

Yet on an even more basic narrative level, Mad Men cannot be a show "about" Don Draper, because the character of "Don Draper" is unwritten and undone as the seasons progress — and in so doing, he lays the ground for his daughter to rise from the ashes.

As the final scene in the final episode of the sixth season, "In Care Of," demonstrates, even Don has given up the pretense of being "Don Draper." He takes his children to visit the whorehouse in which he was raised (as Dick Whitman), effectively demolishing his children's understanding of him.

The scene begins with a series of three-shots:

And one-shots:

The distance between father and children is replicated by director Weiner's decision to shoot them as separate entities, at least at the beginning of the scene.

But just before the episode cuts to black, Weiner uses a two-shot to emphasize the connection between two particular characters:

The rhythm of these edits is quick and conversational, as if these glances constitute a dialogue being tossed back and forth. We can imagine the words that might be said — but they don't need to be. Understanding, in fits and starts, arrives.

Most significantly, the final image is not of Sally staring up in wonder at who Don was, but Don looking down at her in worry about who she will become. "Don Draper" had to invent himself, but that work was done by the time the series began.

Sally doesn't have to try to become a Draper — the life her father stole and invented to become "Don Draper" is hers by birthright, so in a sense, this scene is about the first generation of legitimate Drapers.

These Drapers are the product of divorce and unprecedented historical change, granted, but they are the real article, born in and belonging to a particular historical moment. This is Sally's world, too, and at all times, Mad Men wants us to remember that.