The Haunting of Don Draper

Ghosts, references to the gothic and horror, and more generally surreal intrusions of irrationality are surprisingly common in the AMC television series Mad Men (2007–2015). Don Draper is in many ways haunted, most obviously regarding his own past as the impoverished, abused Dick Whitman. Drawing on Avery Gordon’s conception of ghosts as “social figures” whose haunting ways reveal structures apparently removed from everyday life, this article traces the development of an interlocking set of ideas: the haunting of Don Draper née Dick Whitman; the haunting of the mise-en-scène of Mad Men by the now and then of the 1960s; and the social and personal haunting of the white world that the series historicizes so well. These are not layers of meaning but forms of inscription, written through aesthetic choices and gestures of style. Haunted by possibility, Mad Men’s style invites unsettled feeling rather than contemplative knowledge. Like Dick Whitman, the 1960s makes an insistently uncanny return in Mad Men, one that resists logical explanation and ideological certainty. Like Don Draper (John Hamm), Mad Men lives on the stylish threshold between a materially grounded realism and the imaginative room-for-play that Walter Benjamin found in advertising and technologies of reproduction more generally.