In the Flesh: Mad Men s1e03 'The Marriage of Figaro'

A bathroom isn’t a bathroom. A gift isn’t a gift. A house isn’t a house. ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ is where Mad Men becomes Mad Men, a house of smoke and mirrors, a labyrinth of doors and windows leading nowhere, to nothing. At his daughter’s birthday party after being turned down by department store manager Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff), ad man Don Draper (Jon Hamm) drinks too much and starts to see the cracks in the fantasy of his Fitzgeraldian suburban life. Creeping through his own home with an AMPEX video recorder raised to his eye, shoulders hunched, observing the small domestic dramas of his party guests, the little lies and contradictions, Don resembles nothing so much as a slasher searching for a victim until he stumbles across two neighbors, both with spouses in another room, having an intimate moment. He straightens, mouth falling open, stricken by their ardent body language, the tenderness of their attraction. The emotional remove provided by the camera becomes suddenly unbearable.

Six-year-old Sally (Kiernan Shipka) and her guests act out adulthood in the playhouse Don built for her, chirping little half-understood tidbits of suburban misery like “I like sleeping on the couch!”, “you’re pulling my hair”, and “I don’t like your tone”, gesturing at the self-reproducing nature of the suburbs, a project of procreative isolation which in due time will atomize America into a nation of paranoid strangers. Like the third generation of Rachel Menken’s dogs, their names written into the store’s bylaws, the suburbs seek to iterate without changing, to preserve something already gone by pulling a simplistic facade over the complex reality beneath. So much of Mad Men is about this exact species of destructive nostalgia, an attachment to the past so strong that it forecloses on all possible futures. The dog Don brings Silly after his long dark night of the soul isn’t really a gift for her, it’s a sad little shadow of Rachel’s childhood, an anti-gift, a thing representing his loss, his desire.

And opposite Don, just as conscious of the cruelty and artifice of her surroundings but constrained by social roles Don has never spared so much as a thought, Betty Draper (January Jones) watches everything fall apart in slow motion. Her husband disappears. Her guests snipe and bicker. She has to accept help from the neighborhood pariah, Helen Bishop (Darby Stanchfield). It’s clear the stresses of the day are pulling at her, but she can’t up stakes and run. She can’t say “fuck it” and vanish into the night to ponder over her own sadness. Instead she has to play host for both of them while swallowing the indignity of being stood up by her own husband in front of their neighbors. “I don’t even know what to say,” she says stiffly as her children fall all over Don and the dog that night, and it’s true in more ways than one. There are no words that can unpick her misery.