Fans of AMC’s Mad Men are eagerly awaiting the award winning series’ final season, which is scheduled to air this summer. The success of the program may stem from Matthew Weiner’s ability to imbue the series’ characters with a partial, but developing, understanding of mimetic desire. As high powered Madison Avenue advertisers the characters of Mad Men display an understanding of the mimetic nature of desire. This knowledge of how human beings are wired to desire according to the desire of another is particularly acute in the characters of Don Draper and his apprentice Peggy Olson. One way to frame this tendency in Don and Peggy is to consider how René Girard theorizes an individual’s desire as inevitably patterned on the desire of some other, who acts as a model.

At the core of Girard’s thought is the notion that human beings always desire according to the desire of another. In order to make his theory clear, Girard reworks many of Freud’s (now dated and unfashionable) notions of where desire comes from. In one instance, Girard makes sense of Freud’s conception of the eternal feminine. Within our current understanding of gender, Freud’s theory must be read as sexist. Nonetheless, it offers a starting point to begin thinking about desire. Freud imagines the eternal feminine as the typical woman, who acts disinterested—not seeming to have any use for anyone else. Obviously, such behaviour is not unique to women. Girard’s reading of Freud’s idea allows us to get beyond the assumptions Freud makes. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard explains how this posture—the self-sufficient performance of the coquette—is really non-gender specific. Rather the coquette is a role playable by any subject sufficiently aware of mimetic desire’s dynamics. The strategy of a model of desire like this is to appear to be in love with him or herself. Girard explains:
The coquette knows a lot more about desire than Freud does. She knows very well that desire attracts desire. [...] The coquette seeks to be desired because she needs masculine desires, directed at her, to feed her coquetry and enable her to play her role as coquette. She has no more self-sufficiency than the man who desires her, but the success of her strategy allows her to keep up the appearance of it, since it offers her a form of desire she can copy.

She is not unaffected by mimesis. Indeed, she desires herself according to the desire of the other who desires her. She only pretends not to care. It is easy to see how the gender of the players in these dynamics of desire is only incidental. A male may play the role of coquette as easily as a female. Anyone who strategically makes himself appear inaccessible to exacerbate the curiosity of another is imitating the desire of the other for his by pretending to be interested only in himself. Desire is always imitative. It is always patterned on another’s desire.

In the Season 3 episode entitled, “Love Among the Ruins” the creative team at the Sterling Cooper advertizing agency decide to mimic Anne-Margret Olson’s performance of “Bye Bye Birdie” in an ad for the diet cola, Patio. This scene illustrates the conscious engineering of mimetic desire into advertizing. The ambitious copy-writer Peggy Olson has misgiving about how effective the commercial will be, since to her mind the infantilization of the commercial’s actress will likely attract men rather than the young women the ad is intended to target. The following exchange between Peggy and Don illustrates an assumed and nuanced understanding of coquetry outlined by Girard:
Peggy: Maybe we should be talking about how this [Patio] is better than coffee, or Dexedrine.
Don: It's not about making women feel fat. This is: “Look how happy I am that I drink patio. I'm young and excited and desperate for a man.”
Peggy: I don't mind fantasies but shouldn’t it be a female one.
Don: Peggy, I know you know how this works: Men want her, women want to be her.
Peggy: You think that's true?
Don: It is. I'm sorry if that makes you uncomfortable.
Peggy: Well, you know if we were making a movie or a play we'd be embarrassed to do this. It's phony.
Don: You're not an artist Peggy. You solve problems.

Despite Don’s dismissal, Peggy is suggesting a solution to the problem of inciting desire through a fantasy of self-sufficiency that both men and women share. Peggy is really saying: “In order to direct attention to our product, let’s appeal to everyone’s desire to appear to be, and feel, original and utterly content with their supposedly original choice?” Her questioning and suggestion of a more appropriate female fantasy highlights how desire is a craving for a wholeness of being that seems to appear in the other. Alternately, Don’s understanding of desire is limited to the mimetic dynamics at play in an increasingly dated masculinist vision of the world, where women supposedly base their choices on what men think of them. If Peggy had her way, she may opt to depict a self-sufficient, powerful young woman enjoying the product as part of a full, independent life that doesn’t necessarily require the presence of anyone else. In this version, the logic of Don’s axiom—“Men want her, women want to be her”—would still hold. However, instead of the female viewer imagining a man desiring the actress enlivened by the product, the woman desires herself and bases her choice of product upon her inviolate sense of self-determination. In short, the commercial would present the coquette as an inspirational figure, who pleases herself alone by purchasing the product. Anyone (male or female) who observed such self-contented confidence may feel inclined to model their own “unique” desire upon the actresses. Peggy has an excellent advertizing solution. Don just doesn’t understand it. Why not?

The answer may lie in Don’s past, which exemplifies a simpler structure of mimetic desire. Don Draper was born Dick Whitman. He grew up on the margins of society—the bastard orphan of a rural prostitute. This origin is a far cry from Dick’s current position high above Manhattan, where he makes big deals, rendezvous with mistresses, and takes the train home to an initially happy, suburban family. Dick is living the American Dream. However, the shadow of how he rose from such low origins haunts him. Two flashbacks, in episode twelve of Season 1, explain how.

As a young man with few prospects Dick volunteers for service during the Korean War. When his cynical and inquisitive commanding officer asks if poverty, or the movies, were the motivating factors in his choice to enlist, Dick replies, “I just wanted to leave.” His reluctance to explain himself is indicative of his shame at his origins. His admission that he wanted to get away betrays his desire for another way of being that would save him from his ignominious heritage. Dick’s commanding officer is named Don Draper. He explains that he is an engineer, boasting of his immanent discharge from the Army and good future prospects saying, “I'm supposed to be building swimming pools not latrines.” Draper has everything Dick aspires to. Soon, he will be free to capitalize on an education, career, and social position that Dick can only dream of. In the brief moments of their initial meeting, Draper models a desire for the American Dream to the searching Dick Whitman. Draper has everything and Dick has nothing. It is no surprise that, when an accidental explosion kills Draper, Dick quickly switches dog-tags with his corpse, appropriating his identity. Whitman lets his old-self die and becomes in name and rank, Donald Draper. After recovering from the wounds he sustains in the explosion, he is released from service with a Purple Heart. As a decorated, veteran and former officer, Dick-turned-Don experiences the consummation of his mediated desire. It is because of his history that, the new Don—the advertiser—understands what it is to model desire on the other enough to appropriate their being. Dick desired according to the desire of the original Don enough to not have scruples about stealing his identity, which is perhaps as close to the essence of selfhood as it is possible to get.

In contrast to advertiser-Don’s wealth of (what Girard terms) metaphysical being, his appropriated aura of self-sufficiency, Peggy initially appears impoverished. She begins her career as a female secretary. In nineteen sixties America, she is superior only to the African Americans who clean the office and operate the elevator. Because of this, Peggy understands what it is to have models mediating her desire for success and acknowledgement. She recognizes Don’s fullness of being. In Season 3, Episode 5 when the male power structure of the agency again discourages her attempts at professional progress, Peggy in a fit of frustration tells Don how she sees things: “I look at you and I think; ‘I want what he has’. You have everything and so much of it.” Don is shocked at her candour, since Peggy is simultaneously revealing that her ambitions are modeled on his and that she resents his complicity in the chauvinism that limits her. Thus, Peggy’s desiring-self relates to Don in the way that Dick Whitman once related to the real Don Draper.

In light of his history, Don’s rejection of Peggy’s suggestion of female fantasy follows from the structure of desire reflects his own experience of triangular desire. In Don’s scenario there is a subject who desires according to a model, who in turn sets his desire on an object, which the subject subsequently pursues. In this configuration desire is still essentially triangular with a subject, model, and object. For Don it is the only way desire works—recall his formula “Men want her, women want to be her.” According to Girard, Don’s sketch of desire’s basic pathway is accurate. Don even understands how ultimately desire wishes to appropriate the being of its model. Nonetheless, Peggy takes the logic of desire further than Don by identifying the power of the coquette, who makes him or herself both the mediator and the object that the mimetically desiring subject patterns her behaviour upon. In their own ways Don and Peggy are struggling toward a clearer understanding of how the consumers they attempt to fascinate, and even they themselves, desire according to the desire of another. In the coming season it will be interesting to see how far they get.

Author Ben Barber is a student of literary and pedagogical theory at the University of Victoria, Canada. He joined COV&R in 2008 at the UCLA Riverside conference and attended COV&R again in 2009, where he earned The Raymond Schwager Memorial Award for his paper entitled, “Missionary Colonialism’s Double Bind and the Resulting Postcolonial Crisis in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” He has recently prepared a paper entitled “The Rum Diary: An Introduction to Hunter S. Thompson’s Esthetic Evolution,” which will appear in the 2010 fall issue of Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology. His current interests include comparative research into the theory of Slavoj Žižek and René Girard; the life and work of Hunter S. Thompson; and the novels of Cormac McCarthy. Ben is looking ahead to graduate work, which will consider modernist and contemporary literature alongside Mimetic Theory and Generative Anthropology.