How did you feel when Don wolfishly smirked at his next possible sexual conquest? If you’re like me, it was a twinge of disgust, then a rallying sense that “we got our boy back.” While the afternoon of spooning post anxiety attack seemed delightful, it’s Don’s delinquency that enthralls us. Characters with mass appeal win their audiences not by demonstration of their heroic dimensions but through their display of weaknesses and ambiguities. When we get glimpses of nihilistic, fuck-all instinct in our hero, it’s difficult not to feel twitches of worship. Pauline Kael, in an essay on appeal Dean and Brando called this certain kind of charisma “the glamour of delinquency”:

Footnotes of Mad Men: The Delinquent Hero on Hands and Knees

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