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Popular Culture Review
and present become commingled in performance.2 We can find an analog to this
warping in one of the main characters of the series.
1. Don is and isn’t a Dick
Season l ’s “Babylon” begins with the protagonist, Don Draper, taking a
breakfast tray up the stairs to his wife Betty on Mother’s Day. He slips on a toy
left there by one of their children, falls back to the floor at the foot of the stairs,
and hallucinates/remembers the birth of his half brother. The scene does double
duty. It reminds us (with Don) that his present nuclear family is important to
him at least inasmuch as Don’s childhood was by all accounts poor and difficult
(his mother was a prostitute who died during childbirth; his father was abusive,
then died, and he was raised by his step mother and “uncle,” etc.), in contrast to
his present (1960) luxury and apparent contentment. More importantly, though,
this initial gesture in the episode reminds us that Don Draper was Dick
Whitman. “Don Draper” is an identity Dick assumed to get out of the Korean
War and escape his troubled rural home life. Draper is a mask for Whitman and
functions for many of the characters in the series as the prime signifier for
masculine success.
We can, of course, proffer Whitman/Draper as a classic example of the
Lacanian split subject, the subject who is not identical with itself. Indeed, this
seems to work really well since, as Lacan makes clear, “it is of the nature of
each and every signifier not to be able to signify itself’ (Gallagher). That is, the
subject can never find a single signifier by which to fix its identity in the field of
the Other, but is always bom(e) in between, in/by the gap engendered by the
proximity of signifiers in the signifying field. Thus, the Lacanian subject is
always contingent, which is to say castrated, a subject submitting to the
symbolic order. One cannot say that Don Draper is really Dick Whitman—
Draper has a family and a job and success—any more than one could say that
Dick Whitman is dead insofar as he consistently returns in the cinematic scope.
In fact, Dick Whitman is very much alive as that which returns, as repressed
content embroiled in the present (contingent) circumstances because that content
is (re)constructed precisely in/by the present situation. This last distinction is
important, because we are not talking now about Draper’s historical past, but
about the manifestation of that past as it takes hold in the present; that is, as a
symptom. As Slavjo Zizek makes clear, “there is no repression previous to the
return of the repressed; the repressed content does not precede its return in
symptoms, there is no way to conceive it in its purity undistorted by
‘compromises’ that characterize the formation of the symptoms” {Enjoy 14).3
The Dick Whitman we see in the show is not some visiting time traveler, but
something with/in Draper. Draper’s hallucinations, his response to his halfbrother’s visit, etc. happen in the present regardless of what the past might be
like. Put another way, Dick Whitman is obviously on the screen now as a
signifier for a whole host of content Don would like to avoid. And in every
appearance, we return to Don in his present situation with whatever he has
“remembered” hovering above him. Or, rather, he is literally beside himself.