
We have to talk about the nipple. I'm sorry, but this week, there's no way to have a conversation about Mad Men without using the phrase "nipple in a box." Before That Moment in the season-seven episode "The Runaways" — before Ginsberg handed Peggy a tiny gift box containing the bloody, fleshy remains of his recently self-removed right nip — I thought I might focus this essay on Betty's Vietnam argument with Henry, or Don's clearly ambivalent attitude toward his threesome with Megan and Amy from Delaware, or the return of Stephanie, the now-pregnant niece of the late Anna Draper. But then Ginsberg committed an act so gruesome, shocking, and just plain freaky that it was clear it needed to be analyzed in greater depth.
The show has hinted at Ginsberg's mental illness, off and on, for a while. Nevertheless, some viewers may have watched Ginsberg's behavior in this episode and found it a bit extreme, even for someone who's openly eccentric. It's one thing to be kind of a weird loudmouth; it's another to be someone so acutely ill that he hurts himself and needs to be hospitalized. (I'm betting that Ginsberg is forced to remain in the hospital for a little while, allowing Betty to visit him there in a scene that will nod back to the season-two hospital exchange between Don and Peggy.)
The truth is that Mad Men has been hinting at Ginsberg's deteriorating mental stability for some time. Last season, for example, he had a total meltdown before his meeting with Manischewitz, one that involved him quoting Oppenheimer quoting Hindu scripture ("Now I am become death, destroyer of two worlds") and rambling about the transmissions from outer space that were filling his head. Now "outer space" has been replaced with the computers in the SC&P office, which represent something sinister to Michael even if he doesn't realize exactly what.
When we first met Michael in season five, he immediately presented himself as both a very talented creative and a shapeshifter, someone who could seem completely nuts in a job interview with Peggy, then immediately turn on the charming normalcy for Don in another interview. Like Don, Michael was a great idea man and a master of pretending to be someone else. But his ability to throw on alter egos disintegrated at a much more rapid pace than Don's did. It's notable that both Don and Michael recently made scenes at the office by expressing what was really going on inside their heads. The implication: In advertising, the facade needs to stay in place at all times.
Ginsberg also has expressed enough issues regarding homosexuality to make it pretty clear he's a closeted gay man. Those homophobic accusations about Jim Cutler and Lou Avery aren't the first time he's wondered about colleagues being gay. He randomly asked Bob Benson — the only guy able to talk Ginsberg down off his Manischewitz ledge — if he was gay. Then there's his behavior around women. When he went on a date with a school teacher in the season-five episode "Mystery Date" — the same episode in which he shared a very twisted read on the Cinderella fairy tale — Ginsberg became slightly unhinged, admitting to the woman that he had never had sex before. He came on to Peggy in this week's episode in similarly awkward fashion, noting that they needed to reproduce in order to "defeat the computer," even though he didn't really want to have sex with her. Following that up with a confession to Peggy that he's totally fine now and has feelings for her — feelings he can apparently only express by surgically removing a nipple — strongly suggests that Ginsberg is torn up, inside and out, with guilt and shame over his sexuality.
It's the late 1960s, a time when it's supposed to be more acceptable to love freely, to be intimate in whatever way one chooses. But given the influence of his father, who has always wanted Ginsberg to meet a nice girl, and the increasingly stifling atmosphere at SC&P, it's not surprising that Michael feels uncomfortable being fully himself, that he's experiencing a "pressure" that needs to be relieved. It's much, much easier to blame the IBMs for causing that pressure than it is to think it might be coming from Ginsberg's own psyche.
Michael may not have been right about Jim and Lou being gay, but he was right that Jim and Lou are working closely together and may, as Jim once suggested to Ted, attempt to fire every single old Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce employee and start over again. "Get out while you can!" Ginsberg shouted as he was rolled out of the SC&P office on a stretcher after a stricken Peggy called 911. It sounded like the ravings of a, well, mad man. But actually, it might have been a legitimate warning.
Narratively, however, perhaps the biggest reason for Ginsberg's nipple reduction was that it served as a callback to last season's "A Tale of Two Cities," the season-six episode in which Don Draper was in California, went to a party, took a few hits of hashish after an attractive woman promised there was "an extra nipple here" (!!), had a vision of a pregnant Megan, and, eventually, found himself face down in a swimming pool, Sunset Boulevard-style. (That was the same episode, by the way, in which Ginsberg had his Manischewitz freak-out and said to Bob Benson, "Tell me the truth: Are you a homo?" It was also the same episode in which the partners of the newly merged firm decided on its name: Sterling Cooper & Partners, a title that may as well have been The Two Elder Statesmen Who Don't Do That Much & Everybody Else, Jockeying for Position. That would have been kinda long, though.)
Go back and rewatch Don's trippy party experience in that episode. It's stunning how much of it foreshadows the events of "The Runaways." When Don sees Megan, expecting a baby and dressed in headbanded hippie-wear, she closely resembles the way Stephanie looked when she showed up at Don's and Megan's door. When Megan sees Don kissing another woman, she's not angry. "It's cool," she says. "It's California. Everybody shares." Everybody shares — that sounds a lot like what Megan did by offering herself and Amy from Delaware for Don's befuddled bedroom enjoyment.
In that same drug-induced haze, Don asks Megan what she's doing at the party. "I live here," she says. Which, of course, she does now. Then Don sees PFC Dinkins, the soldier he met in Hawaii who gave him that Zippo lighter that said, "In life we often have to do things that are just not our bag." Dinkins tells Don he's dead, at which point Don realizes that's true, at least until Roger pulls him out of the swimming pool and pumps the water out of his lungs.
When Don was basically dead at SC&P after his administrative leave, who was the person who yanked him back to life, even though that life meant having to do things that were just not Don's bag? Yes. That was Roger.
In that same episode, on the flight from L.A. back to New York, Roger tells Don: "My shrink says the job of your life is to know yourself and that, sooner or later, you'll start to love who you are." Which is really the point of all of Mad Men. This show is a journey through the 1960s in which Don finally realizes who he actually is. It turns out that Don isn't Dick Whitman, he's Don Draper — not the man whose identity he assumed, but the suave, perpetually commanding, womanizing, self-involved, brilliant advertising executive that he created and then slowly began to embody.
Despite having to do some things that are not his bag — reporting to Peggy, being the low man on the Burger Chef totem pole — he knows he's still that guy, the one who's there to help Anna's niece and bursts into meetings unannounced to plead his case directly to the gentlemen at Philip Morris. Don Draper is a man who, when he doesn't like what's being said, changes the conversation.
But Michael Ginsberg, a copywriter so gifted that he was once seen as Don 2.0, is not capable of that. When he doesn't like what's being sad, he imagines that he hears things that are even worse. Then he does actual physical damage to himself, adding yet another grisly episode to Mad Men's history of gross-out moments, including the unforgettable lawnmower foot-mauling incident of season three.
If you'll recall, the person who lost his foot in that unfortunate John Deere-related incident was a guy actually named Guy, who had been marked to become the new Lane Pryce post-merger with Puttnam, Powell, and Lowe. As a result of the accident, Lane stayed put and, eventually, played a key role in forming Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, salvaging the core of what Sterling Cooper once was. Given the way Ginsberg's nipple shocker unfolded side-by-side with Don's seemingly triumphant Commander cigarette moment, maybe Matthew Weiner and co. are once again using a grotesque injury to serve as a precursor to the savior of Sterling Cooper circa 1969, the evolution of the agency created by the original mad men with no help from any Cutlers or Averys.
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