The Looks of Men
29
Never Be, such a rapport not only cannot exist, but never has existed except in
the search for it. With S(A), there is something (S) that cannot be accounted for
in the set of all signifiers (the Other, A) and is conspicuous precisely because it
is absent. From this feminine (and apparently Jewish) subject position, exile is
the essential state of things.
4. Babylon
That Don Draper isn’t included among the other men, that he can indeed be
the hero of the story—given that he has lied about his past by taking on the
identity of a dead man, that he has a mistress, and that he’s wooing a third
woman—is made possible in the series because Draper is presented as a man
chasing desire itself, not covering that lack (of an object) with fantasy. In his
scene with Rachel and throughout the series, Draper is interrogating the lack in
the Other qua women, etc. in hopes of coming to terms with the
Whitman/Draper split so that his own past remains there, an efficient but not a
necessary cause for his current conflict. The irony of the show (and of life) is
that his interrogation is what keeps the boat afloat, as it were. The attempt to lay
the past to rest (or to find the signifier) is what keeps it present, reifying lack as
a contemporary, contingent circumstance, not a bad childhood that can be
overcome or a lost utopia that one must find one’s way back to.
In the final scene, Draper has gone to a cafe with his bohemian girlfriend
and one of her other boyfriends. Here, they discuss the commercialization of art
in terms that evoke thoughts of the commercialization of sex. Finally, in order to
both pull the themes of the episode together and to indicate the ambivalences we
have been discussing, there is a performance Psalm 137 from which the episode
takes its name. Over this lament of Jewish exile we are shown Draper framed
in/by the bent arm of his bohemian girlfriend and surrounded (via montage) by
the other women in the episode. We see Betty putting lipstick on their daughter.
We see Rachel arranging men’s ties at her store. And, finally, we see Joan and
Roger leaving the hotel discreetly, separately, and ultimately waiting in silence
at the curb, as far apart as the screen allows. Joan is carrying the bird cage.
By placing Draper in the midst of these women, these visuals—along with
the psalm of exile—precisely indicate Draper’s doubling. On the one hand, he is
the enjoying father that functions as the phallic support for the masculine fantasy
that direct enjoyment (jouissance) is possible (or, for us, that it once was
possible; that we have effectively sacrificed that jouissance is paradoxically
what allows us to enjoy the show). On the other hand, Draper is the signifier for
the not-whole. He is a stranger even to himself, and when he asks Rachel “What
is the difference” between Jews and non-Jews, between women and men, we
have to recognize that Draper is also asking about himself and Dick Whitman,
himself and the other men, etc., and that the only answer is exile. Something is
not accounted for in the symbolic order. And that something is desire. If Don
Draper can be considered at all ethical, he is so insofar as he does not give up on
his desire (settling for simple masculine fantasy) and he is likewise excluded as