In the Flesh: Mad Men s1e13 'The Wheel'

‘The Wheel’ is without question the single best-known episode of Mad Men, made famous by the eponymous pitch Don gives to Kodak for their slideshow wheel. It’s a much-analyzed scene, a perennial favorite for cinephiles, and deservedly so. In the space of ninety seconds, with nothing but a few fleeting scenes of Don looking at pictures for setup, we’re thrust into our own memories and held there face-down until we’re drowning in nostalgia. “The pain from an old wound,” Don calls it, quoting a maybe-fictional Greek copywriter, but it’s a fresh wound he’s inflicting on himself. It’s such an intimate and heartfelt pitch that he actually convinces himself he can go home and sweep the family he neglected to concoct this vision off their feet and away to a perfect Thanksgiving. He can’t, of course. They’re already gone by the time he gets home, supplanted by their own smiling photographs.

Elsewhere, ‘The Wheel’ is full of death and loss. Don learns that his half-brother, Adam, hanged himself. Peggy discovers she’s pregnant and suffers a psychological collapse. Betty, alone in the world, beginning to admit to herself that Don is serially unfaithful to her, goes to her nine-year-old neighbor, Glen Bishop (Marten Holden Weiner), for comfort in a deeply moving scene of emotionally stunted confusion and sorrow. Everyone’s looking for what they need everywhere but where they’re supposed to, too afraid to admit that the connections they’ve cultivated are just absences in the shape of relationships. Perhaps most striking is Betty’s friend Francine (Anne Dudek), whose chilling dissociative monologue about poisoning her husband and family at Thanksgiving after discovering his infidelity takes America’s most idyllic image of togetherness and transforms it into an abattoir.

Don’s campaign becomes a kind of ghost haunting America’s empty house. The scene in which an inebriated Don taps Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) to help him workshop the idea casts Harry as a kind of comically sad Phantom of the Opera, slinking through the deserted Sterling Cooper offices in his underwear, a smoking wastebasket under his arm like he’s going around searching for memories to burn. Harry’s anecdote about the cave paintings of Lascaux, specifically the handprints left by their prehistoric artists, has an air of melancholy, and for all his self-effacement when he describes his photography project in which he took pictures of handprints on glass, it’s an elegantly eerie companion piece to his description of Lascaux’s handprints “reaching through the stone.” He’s echoing an echo, creating a facsimile of a facsimile of human contact, a simulation of connection in which layered and repeated absence takes on the appearance of presence. Shadows have power, tremendous power, but no matter how much you press your hand against them, they can never be touched.