Men Who Are Mad

Watching "Mad Men" Season 6 on DVD, I can't help but compare the character of Don Draper to a role that the late Peter Sellers played at the end of his career, for which he was nominated for an Oscar: Chance the Gardener aka Chauncey Gardiner from the movie "Being There" directed by Hal Ashby.

The comparison came to mind while watching one of the Season 6 episodes. In one of them, Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) comments that men make their own luck. This is completely in line with the character's ambition: Don Draper used to be Dick Whitman, an uneducated orphan who was raised by his uncle and aunt in a whorehouse. Whitman steals another man's identity during the Korean War and becomes Don Draper. He goes on to unbelievable success in the advertising business and is also successful in every other aspect of his life, especially with women. He is the quintessential self-made man, but his secret past is a constant threat to his carefully crafted persona.

The irony and tragedy of Don Draper is that his new life is entirely hinged upon an almost random twist of fate, an accident that was caused by Whitman that cost the real Don Draper his life. Whitman's only act of determinism was to be shrewd enough to switch dog tags with Draper, and it can be argued that it was less opportunism on Whitman's part than a desperate self-hatred that led him to assume Draper's identity.

Contrast with Chance the Gardener: a middle-aged idiot who has lived his whole life as a servant and whose entire knowledge off the outside world comes from what he has watched on television, Chance is a creature of random luck-- his name even implies this. One day his boss and benefactor simply dies, and Chance is free to leave the manor in which he was raised. Chance becomes Chauncey Gardiner through sheer misunderstanding: he is coughing when he explains to the wife of a businessman who he is, so she hears the name "Chauncey Gardiner" instead of "Chance the Gardener". Oblivious to everything around him, his foolishness is seen as Zen wisdom to nearly everyone he encounters, which leads Chance up the ladder of success, eventually brushing shoulders with Washington D.C.'s political elite.

The two characters have a lot in common: simple-minded common men who somehow transcend their lowly status in America's de facto caste system to become extremely powerful. But the comparison ends there, for while Don Draper mistakenly believes that he is the master of his own destiny, Chance is under no such illusions.

"Mad Men" is set in the past and has a certain level of realism that cedes to a loopy surrealism every now and then as a counter-point, mostly when dealing with the psychedelic cultural transitions occurring in the historical background of the Sixties. "Being There" is supposed to be contemporary and is more satirical than realistic, proudly promoting its absurdist POV up to the very last scene, and yet the film (in light of this day and age's modern cult of personality) seems prescient and relevant.

But more importantly, the evolution of the two characters stem from a mysterious reinvention that occurs for both, what none other than Bob Dylan recently described in an interview with Mikal Gilmore as "transfiguration".

In the September 27 2012 issue of  Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan elaborates on his "transfiguration" in relation to something he read in a book by former Hells Angel President Sonny Barger. Bob Dylan's words are in italics, Mikal Gilmore's words are in bold italics:

See this book? Ever heard of this guy? [Shows me Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, by Sonny Barger.]

Yeah, sure.
He's a Hell's Angel.

He was "the" Hell's Angel.
Look who wrote this book. [Points at coauthors' names, Keith Zimmerman and Kent Zimmerman.] Do those names ring a bell? Do they look familiar? Do they? You wonder, "What's that got to do with me?" But they do look familiar, don't they? And there's two of them there. Aren't there two? One's not enough? Right? [Dylan's now seated, smiling.]

I'm going to refer to this place here. [Opens the book to a dog-eared page.] Read it out loud here. Just read it out loud into your tape recorder.

"One of the early presidents of the Berdoo Hell's Angels was Bobby Zimmerman. On our way home from the 1964 Bass Lake Run, Bobby was riding in his customary spot – front left – when his muffler fell off his bike. Thinking he could go back and retrieve it, Bobby whipped a quick U-turn from the front of the pack. At that same moment, a Richmond Hell's Angel named Jack Egan was hauling ass from the back of the pack toward the front. Egan was on the wrong side of the road, passing a long line of speeding bikes, just as Bobby whipped his U-turn. Jack broadsided poor Bobby and instantly killed him. We dragged Bobby's lifeless body to the side of the road. There was nothing we could do but to send somebody on to town for help." Poor Bobby.

Yeah, poor Bobby. You know what this is called? It's called transfiguration. Have you ever heard of it?

Yes.
Well, you're looking at somebody.

That . . . has been transfigured?
Yeah, absolutely. I'm not like you, am I? I'm not like him, either. I'm not like too many others. I'm only like another person who's been transfigured. How many people like that or like me do you know?

By transfiguration, you mean it in the sense of being transformed? Or do you mean transmigration, when a soul passes into a different body?
Transmigration is not what we are talking about. This is something else. I had a motorcycle accident in 1966.1 already explained to you about new and old. Right? Now, you can put this together any way you want. You can work on it any way you want. Transfiguration: You can go and learn about it from the Catholic Church, you can learn about it in some old mystical books, but it's a real concept. It's happened throughout the ages. Nobody knows who it's happened to, or why. But you get real proof of it here and there. It's not like something you can dream up and think. It's not like conjuring up a reality or like reincarnation – or like when you might think you're somebody from the past but have no proof. It's not anything to do with the past or the future.

So when you ask some of your questions, you're asking them to a person who's long dead. You're asking them to a person that doesn't exist. But people make that mistake about me all the time. I've lived through a lot. Have you ever heard of a book called No Man Knows My History? It's about Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. The title could refer to me.

Transfiguration is what allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it. That's how I can still do what I do and write the songs I sing and just keep on moving.

When you say I'm talking to a person that's dead, do you mean the motorcyclist Bobby Zimmerman, or do you mean Bob Dylan?
Bob Dylan's here! You're talking to him.

Then your transfiguration is . . . 
It is whatever it is. I couldn't go back and find Bobby in a million years. Neither could you or anybody else on the face of the Earth. He's gone. If I could, I would go back. I'd like to go back. At this point in time, I would love to go back and find him, put out my hand. And tell him he's got a friend. But I can't. He's gone. He doesn't exist.

OK, so when you speak of transfiguration . . . 
I only know what I told you. You'll have to go and do the work yourself to find out what it's about.

I'm trying to determine whom you've been transfigured from, or as.
I just showed you. Go read the book.

That's who you have in mind? What could the connection to that Bobby Zimmerman be other than name?
I don't have it in mind. I didn't write that book. I didn't make it up. I didn't dream that. I'm not telling you I had a dream last night. Remember the song "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream"? I didn't write that, either.

I'm showing you a book that's been written and published. I mean, look at all the connecting things: motorcycles, Bobby Zimmerman, Keith and Kent Zimmerman, 1964, 1966. And there's more to it than even that. If you went to find this guy's family, you'd find a whole bunch more that connected. I'm just explaining it to you. Go to the grave site.

Whether it is properly called "transfiguration" or "transmigration", one thing is clear: Bob Dylan firmly believes that he switched identities (and perhaps souls) with another person with a similar name, and it saved his life.

With all this on my mind, I also began to read The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band, written by the members of Mötley Crüe and former Rolling Stone writer Neil Strauss. As a fan of rock biographies I must admit that, 50 pages in, the Crüe's exploits have already hooked me in a disarming manner. 

But what really got me is the revelation that Nikki Sixx, born Frank Feranna and named after his father, had his name changed after a falling out with his old man. He claims in the book that there was a musician from Indiana who went by the name Nykki Syxx, and that he basically stole the name and went so far as to legally change it to Nikki Sixx. (He wanted to be Nikki Nine but his musical peers told him that Nine sounded too "new wave" and that Sixx would be more "metal") 

Years later, after Mötley Crüe became world famous, Nikki was channel-surfing in a hotel when he came across a Christian television show that was decrying rock music as Satanism; of course, the Crüe was mentioned because of all the pentagrams and lyrics about the Devil, so he kept watching. Suddenly, the musician formerly known as Nykki Syxx (now known only as "John") is on the TV talking about how Nikki Sixx stole the name and used it to spread the word of Satan. 

Transmigration? Transfiguration? Or an escape from a desolate existence? Only a few pages earlier, Nikki Sixx dished the dirt on his dysfunctional childhood: absentee father, free-spirited mother, little adult supervision, constant traveling and moving, instilling the young Frank Feranna with a restlessness and an uprooted sense of self, and an early predilection for drugs, petty crime, and delinquency.

In short, Nikki Sixx is the rock and roll Don Draper. 

In "Mad Men" Draper is portrayed as suave, clean, well-dressed, attractive... but he's also a huge square. He is not a hippie, a rebel, or even a beatnik-- he is the The Man, he is The Establishment, he is a Class A conformist. He may seem glamorous but he is not cool. In fact, he is the type of person who would disown his own son for wearing eyeliner, lipstick, teased hair and singing songs about decadence. He represents everything that punk, metal, and hip-hop later came to destroy.

But the fictional Don Draper and the very-much-real likes of Bob Dylan and Nikki Sixx have something in common: they all reinvented themselves in some way or another, in a calculated attempt to erase the past. Unlike the fictional Chance the Gardener, however, they are painfully self-conscious of this, and in some way feel that their fate is out of their hands, even as they struggle vainly to assert control. (for all his rock posturing and chaotic pandering, Nikki Sixx comes off in The Dirt as an enormous control freak) 

And if someone like Chance really existed, it would create a cognitive dissonance in the minds of men like Dylan, Sixx, and the Don Drapers of the world that could unravel the handiwork of even the most ambitious status-climber. 

I choose to believe that men like Chance the Gardener exist. And if I may be so bold, I think there are more of them in the world than there are Don Drapers. Not that Don Draper isn't a fascinating character. But he isn't very happy either, and that's because he's had to work so hard for everything in life. Whereas Chance aka Chauncey Gardiner is blissfully unaware that he doesn't fit in, and manages to cruise through this world without a care.