(Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]

"The Working Day"

Among the major characters, “Time Zones” left Don Draper looking terrible and alone on his freezing New York City balcony, while simultaneously across town Peggy Olson broke down in her lonely apartment. Back at the office, an overworked and one-eyed Ken Cosgrove complained that he doesn’t even have time to take a crap, and for all of her efforts for the firm, Joan Harris is again reminded that she isn’t the boss. Only Pete Campbell in Los Angeles (feeling good vibrations, unlike everyone else) and Roger Sterling in New York seemed to be having some fun at the tail end of the 1960s, Pete by comically assimilating to a California lifestyle (Don cluelessly calls him a hippie), and Roger by fully indulging in the last gasp of the free love movement. Don – previously suave and smartly dressed – now seems fully out of time and place, arriving in LA (in an homage to Benjamin Braddock’s return home from school at the start of[1967]) in a suit and hat (a hat! in 1969!) that now render him entirely uncool, especially in contrast to Megan’s trendy mini-dress. Perhaps the most telling evidence of a drastic shift in the energies of’s final season is marked later in the episode when Don chooses work over sex; moreover, across the entire episode, all the characters are eating more than they are drinking, like never before.

Indeed, following the example of Don’s sexual restraint (and pathetic monitoring of his alcohol intake by marking his bottles), it’s back to work for everyone in the subsequent episode entitled “A Day’s Work.” But in this episode nothing works. In “ The Working Day ,” Chapter 10 of Marx examines the unique temporality developed in the history of capitalism, which redefined time itself in terms of the value to be derived from the control of (and class struggle over) concepts like the working day and work week, which increasingly and precisely monitored time devoted to labor. However, in the struggles between capital (for a longer working day) and labor (for a shorter working day), it was persistently revealed that the length of “the working day” was a mutable, contested entity that, in Marx’s words , “fluctuates within boundaries both physical and social.” While “A Day’s Work” hardly dramatizes the sort of historical class struggles (appearing for the first time in, as David Harvey has noted ) Marx accumulates in his chapter, it does consistently demonstrate the instability and even failure of the regulation of time by business -- or, later, education, when Don’s daughter Sally is at risk of violating school curfews and deadlines. “A Day’s Work” derives its title from the idiomatic expression “It’s all in a day’s work,” which usually summarizes with mild resignation the mundane, typical activity of any particular form of labor. Dramas such as(or comedies such as, for that matter), although largely set in work spaces, in fact rarely dramatize “a day’s work,” or work per se, especially in its most tedious forms. Such narratives are instead organized to feature the moments when unusual achievement, celebration, tension, conflict, or scandal disrupt quotidian, repetitive patterns of work.has of course often centered on such moments, and while “A Day’s Work” doesn’t shift its focus to, say, the anti-drama of a character stocking a supply cabinet or typing up a budget report, it does turn our attention to the relatively ordinary ways in which work doesn’t always, well, work.

On the whole, “A Day’s Work” is organized as a series of mishaps, missent and misread messages, faulty communications technology, wasted energy, and unproductive labor. (We are even told, in passing, that despite Don’s dramatic pitch last season, “Ogilvy signed Hershey.”) Beginning with Peggy mistaking herself as the recipient of a dozen red roses actually sent to her secretary Shirley (“an honest mistake,” Dawn allows, but one that will be hard to fix), a semi-comic tone links a collection of frustrating events that conclude with Peggy’s outburst declaring the entire day an unproductive waste. After a brief moment of delight (“Look at you, every inch a girl,” Stan notes), Peggy decides in disgust that the flowers are from the spurned Ted in California, and she sends a message through Ted’s secretary rejecting what she thinks are his unwanted advances in the coded language of a failed business deal: “I relayed his message to the client … the business is gone.” Another comic sequence cuts smoothly between Pete and Ted in California and the executive board in New York even as their own telecommunications technology falters and breaks their link apart. New York and California are out of synch: California can hear New York but New York thinks it can’t. A follow-up communication, avoiding the troublesome “gizmo,” between Pete and Roger on the phone leads to Roger hanging up as Pete rambles on before his secretary informs him he has been “disconnected.” Pete’s frustration about being undermined regarding the contract he is signing in Los Angeles results in him petulantly declaring to Ted that “we’re not talking anymore; from now on, we’ll both pretend that I’m in New York.” Further extending the day’s confusion of business and romance, Bonnie Whiteside, Pete’s real estate agent girlfriend, informs him that her business trumps his desire: the houses she attempts to sell are her work spaces, not the spots for sexual assignations that Pete takes them for, a point she emphasizes by telling Pete to return the sign he took off the front lawn of one of her properties to dissuade customers, who ring the doorbell and receive her attention anyway.





Despite this comic tone, the eventual result of these mishaps is visible, painful frustration and self-awareness of the limits of control for many of the main characters. Pete wonders if he is in some sort of heaven, hell, or limbo since it seems “no one feels my existence.” Peggy’s day (which begins with a cruel joke, that this Valentine’s Day includes her scheduled plans to “masturbate gloomily”) descends from a comic misunderstanding to an outburst that baldy exposes her petty jealously over her secretary’s engagement (an event that seems to continue the intensifying degradation of the character from the previous episode, surely to the dismay of her many fans). A brief shot of Peggy grimacing in private embarrassment at her own outburst is almost too painful to watch. Even Don, often seemingly the master of his (self-created) identity, acknowledges to Sally that his unclear status, which he hopes to somehow fix, “is kind of up to them.” Only Pete’s girlfriend Bonnie finds a “thrill” in the fact that “our fortunes are in other people’s hands.” The entire episode is an ironically, tightly organized demonstration of the feeling of the increased loss of control.



These more existential displacements of identity (always central to the story of Don Draper, of course), and especially the undermining of agency and control, are extended via an absurd sequence of inefficient, unproductive reorganization within the work place on this single work day: Joan is asked three times, by Lou (in sexist terms), Bert Cooper (for pointedly racist reasons), and Peggy (selfishly), to “shuffle” the secretarial staff, including the two African American secretaries Dawn and Shirley, who clearly recognize their own semi-invisibility and racialized interchangeability in the white-dominated office by playfully calling one another each other’s names when they meet in the break room. Eventually, it seems, Joan herself, after rearranging the staff, will relocate after Jim Cutler, recognizing that she holds two jobs, invites her to move upstairs as an “account man.” (Dawn lands in Joan’s private office, to her apparent satisfaction, concluding her day of unnecessary relocations: she will also continue to work for Don.) Even if a few of these shifts lead to happy results, most again simply underline a structural instability and hierarchy in the business (or in capitalism more broadly) that is beyond almost everyone’s control. Even Roger Sterling, when asked by Joan if he disagrees with her literal elevation to a higher position, affirms that his view “doesn’t matter.”

