Season 5: Episode 5 - "Signal 30"
or "The Eternal Suffering of Pete Campbell"
Season 5: Episode 5
“Signal 30”
Written by: Frank Pierson & Matthew Weiner
Directed by: John Slattery
Setting: July - August 1966
Apologies for the week off from Mad World, I just moved to a new state and am appropriately enough suffering through the seven layers of hell known to mortals as the Department of Motor Vehicles. This puts me in the unique position of, for once, relating to and feeling for Pete Campbell as he tries to get his driver’s license in this episode. That is where the sympathy for him begins and ends.
“Signal 30” is one of Mad Men’s greatest episodes in a different way from “The Suitcase.” It felt like triumphant destiny to see Peggy and Don achieve the perfect pitch for Samsonite Suitcases whereas it felt like destruction to see a broken and battered Pete pour his heart out to an uncaring Don.
What makes both episodes so effective is that they are earned. Seeing Pete get both physically and emotionally destroyed was years coming. That payoff alone demanded one of the finest scripts produced for the show by co-writer Frank Peirson who won the Academy Award for writing Dog Day Afternoon (1975).
“Signal 30” destroys the myth of the Norman Mailer brand of 1960s manhood that even the slimiest weasel like Pete Campbell can put on a nice suit and become Don Draper.
Not even Don Draper wants to pretend to be Don Draper.
Pete’s famous final line in the elevator with Don is the ultimate explanation for the failures of these men. Their failure to realize they have everything results in them eventually having nothing.
The only man who truly believes he has more than “nothing” is Vermont’s golden boy Ken Cosgrove who will lie and hide himself but not out of ill motive. He isn’t sneaking back in at 2 am after cheating on his wife, Ken is busy writing under the pen name “Dave Algonquin” despite Roger’s instance that he be fulfilled only by work at SCDP.
Roger’s anger at Ken writing on the side is an extension of his own failure. While it is never stated, it can be inferred that the book of his life’s story “Sterling’s Gold” did not sell well and the success Ken has had writing sci-fi is salt in Roger’s wound. No one is able to enjoy the achievements of another because it simply reminds them that they have failed.
Lane Pryce beats Pete with his fists and yet I find the most humiliating moment to be when Don visits the Campbell home and fixes Pete’s kitchen sink. Pete stands completely emasculated while the wives giggle over the more handsome and successful man who, to top it off, knows good home maintenance.
Even in the success that Lane sees after besting Pete in their fistfight, he ruins it by kissing Joan in a desperate attempt to further prove his masculinity. Each man feels he is not a man unless he is throwing back a gallon of liquor, kissing the most beautiful girl, and punching anyone who infers he is less than the ideal of manhood.
Pete Campbell wants to be Don Draper or at least a masculine figure like the student in his driver’s ed class who naturally flirted with the girl Pete had been desperately attempting to seduce. Don grew up in poverty, forced to learn how to fix appliances to survive whereas Pete had a silver spoon in his mouth. He can never be Don because it took great suffering to create Don Draper (or at least Dick Whitman.) Pete will suffer now and learn nothing from it.
Lane Pryce wants to be American, increasingly at odds with his fellow Brits who he finds stuffy and boring. He is shocked to discover that a British friend, who partied so hard at a brothel that he came home with “chewing gum on his pubis,” actually finds him to be the stuffy and boring one. Lane is a stern and usually polite British man who cannot become American just by trying to be “more of a man.”
Don Draper wants to Dick Whitman again, he just doesn’t know it. Don Draper is a stained name, Pete judges him harshly for not sleeping with a prostitute because of Don’s past as an adulterer. Dick Whitman never did the horrible acts that Don Draper went on to, he died sinless in a ditch in Korea. Don wants another fresh start and is lying to himself that his marriage to Megan can exist without answering for everything he has done. Even the name “Whitman” is now scarred following the Austin, TX tower shooting by Charles Whitman.
These men have failed or feel inadequate in some way.
That does not have to define them or any man.
Learn from failure and become better rather than be defined by torture and suffering. We all have heard the drip of a water faucet.
Did you get up to fix it again or let one defeat define everything good you have?
Don knows that it is not true when Pete tells him he has nothing. What he fears is that he may come to see his life just like Pete does
A man with everything who will choose to have nothing.