Mad Men comes back to AMC on Sunday night, July 25th and brings with it the iconic “man in the gray flannel suit” that we viewers love to try to psychoanalyze. I believe it was Tim Goodman, TV critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, who said two seasons ago that Don Draper, the main character on Mad Men, was the most existential man on television. Although he now has some strong competition from Walter White and Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad, Don remains, for many reasons, the existential champ. He’s a character that Camus or Sartre would have been proud to have created.

Don is a kind of Everyman that Walt and Jesse can never be. Their situations are extreme, beyond the ken of most viewers.

Don Draper is the guy we see every morning on the bus or on the train heading to an office in a suit and tie. The comic strip character Pogo famously said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” We viewers of Mad Men have met Don Draper, and he is us — or he could be us without much of a stretch. We feel it in our bones. He creeps into those dark corners in the locked rooms of our psyches we try to convince ourselves are not there.

He works at a soulless job as an ad man on Madison Avenue, where he essentially lies for a living. He’s married to the most beautiful woman in his time zone and isn’t happy with her. Although the condition was undiagnosed in the early 1960s, when Don’s story is set, we know from our perspective that he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder due to his harrowing experiences in the Korean War. He switched identities with a dead soldier to escape from the physical battlefield only to encounter an even more devastating mental one. He can never again use his real name. Hence he is estranged from his real family — the brother he did encounter committed suicide shortly after their meeting. His moral compass has been compromised, rendered askew as if by ever expanding ripples beyond his control, even though he himself threw the rock into the slimy water that produced those ripples. Don Draper is a walking, talking definition of alienation. Like Camus’ Meursault, he is a stranger to all, even to himself.

In many epic stories about a personal journey, the protagonist must voyage to the “underworld,” as Odysseus did in The Odyssey, to learn something substantial about himself that will help him reach his goal. Don’s business trip to Los Angeles in season two was such a journey. There was even a “Siren scene” at a hotel pool. Odysseus had his crew tie him to the mast of his ship so he could unplug his ears and hear the Sirens singing without being lured to his death. Don has no such crew and is constantly seduced by his own weaknesses. He exited his underworld to return to New York City even more damaged and confused.

Of course we will tune in every Sunday night to see how far Don will sink into his self-made bog of mendacity and infidelity, but we cannot afford to lose hope that he will redeem himself. In many ways, the 1960s shaped the way we are today, and Don Draper is a sojourner to that time who reminds us of that.

(Image via guardian)