What I noticed most in the season premiere of “Mad Men” was a window. Specifically, the window in Don Draper’s apartment in New York City. It cuts across the wall of his living room in a way that casts the abode in an almost reverse-Caravaggio effect. The bright backdrop nearly casts Don entirely, although not completely, in shadow. That hint of the exterior, that bare glimpse of The Ad Man Formerly Known as Dick Whitman, gives shape and form to the episode itself, “Public Relations.”

More after the jump.

As the show pushes another year into the future (to Thanksgiving, 1964), the world is growing ever smaller, more aligned with the world as we know it today than ever before. Once content to exist outside of the public eye, Don’s literally put his name into the spotlight by forming the new agency Sterling, Cooper, Draper, and Pryce. But his mistake is in thinking that such a move means that the rules as he’s known it up until that point would stay the same. The age of privacy is falling down around him, and, as per usual, Don’s a bit slow on the uptake at realizing that the continental drift of culture can have seismic repercussions.

“We are all here because of you. We all want to please you.” Peggy Olson tells him near the end of this initial hour of Season 4, and it harkens back to the makeshift family formed with their new business venture that stood so much in contrast with the shattered family in upstate New York City. Don lost his flesh and blood but gained a new set of people dependent upon him, an ever-growing brood that now takes up space in the Time-Warner Building. There’s no division of family life and business life: they are intertwined, and it’s his actions that affect them equally. It’s not longer an affair that can bring down the house, however: it’s a bad interview.

Don wants the glory of the position but none of the games that come along with being in the public eye. As such, he stands in for the myriad of entertainers, politicians, and celebrities that want to exploit the press without having to actual indulge them. The Advertising Age reporter calls him a “handsome cipher,” an apt metaphor if one looks at his silhouetted self in his apartment. But being a hollow vessel doesn’t work in a society increasingly seeking to invade the private life of its public personalities. In the wake of JFK’s assassination, societal impulses have turned away from ignoring the heretofore unspeakable and towards looking them dead in the eye and naming them.

Case in point: Don goes out on a date with a woman named Bethany, a friend of Roger Sterling’s wife Jane. Almost immediately, she brings up the subject of Don’s divorce in order to get it out of the way. In seasons past (which is to say, earlier in the decade), such a topic would have hung in the air not unlike unpleasant perfume. But both the act of divorce and the discussion of it is more commonplace. “That’s what’s happened to this country. Everyone has two Thanksgivings to go to,” notes Henry Francis’ mother. People are bolder, in speech, action, and attire.

The latter forms the advertising aspect of the episode, as Jantzen hires the small firm to give a “tasteful” ad to an ever-increasingly risqué clientele. Much in the way that Don is obstinate towards the need to placate the press as much as put forth a good product, the folks from Jantzen don’t quite understand that their product and their moral position aren’t exactly tenable. Both sides are clinging to outdated models. Don’s semi-solution in his year with the new firm has been to put himself into his work: literally. Look at the young cowboy in the Glo-Coat commercial: he’s a stand-in for Don himself, trapped in a corner by the shiny surface produced by the product. He’s hiding behind the veneer of everyone’s projection of who he is, all of them unaware that this swinging single is only getting action from a prostitute he pays to slap him during sex. He can’t let the reporter from Advertising Age in any more than he can let Roger, Peggy, or anyone else at the firm in. It’s like the second floor of their agency: it’s something that is powerful only in the mind of the beholder, not his/her eyes.

On top of that, he’s unable to face Betty, the one person who knows his true identity better than anyone else. So he’s let Henry and her stay in their house weeks after the lawyer-mandated leave date. Again: he’s clinging to a past that no longer exists. The house still looks the same (save for a new headboard in the bedroom), but even when Don sits in his familiar couch, it’s still a foreign place to him. When she and Henry return late from some weekend sexcapades, Don finally snaps and demands that she leave. It’s this step that allows him to finally play ball with the press. So what does he do? He reinvents the myth of Don Draper.

I found this last sequence mesmerizing, not only because it was fun to hear Don give his version of the events in the Season 3 finale, but because it resonates so much with the mythmaking that occurs when people use the press to their advantage. Roger urges that Don let these reports in, but all Don does is give them the best version of who he actually is. It’s a risky move, but one better than being, in Don’s words, “comfortable and dead.” If some actual truth gets into these stories, then fine. But really, the interviews are advertising in and of themselves. Basically, he did everything but say, “I’ve decided to take my talents to the Time-Warner Building.”

And 1964, along with we viewers at home, will all be witnesses.

A few other thoughts about the season premiere of “Mad Men”…

*** Loved the Pete/Peggy storyline, which was both funny (“My objective was to get the ham!”) as well as a great example of how this pair is ahead of the curve on advertising trends. Don might find them tacky, but that’s as much to do with his adherence to the rules of advertising as well as the fact that it was successful. Elizabeth Moss also did great work at subtly suggesting the growth of Peggy’s skills over the past year, both in terms of posture, her ability to stand up to Don, and to incur flashes of his ethereal inspiration in creating slogans.

*** Absolutely no appearance by anyone left behind at the old Sterling Cooper this week. I assume they’ll rectify this situation before long, and I feel their presence might be overloaded an episode that already had a lot of heavy lifting to do. Still, I missed Ken and Paul and the rest of the Mad Men Misfit Toys.

*** I’m trying really, really, really hard not to spend 500 words bashing Betty Draper, because clearly her awfulness at this point is intentional. She thought she would be happy without Don, living in her Barbie Mansion with the Gene/Don hybrid that is Henry. Instead, it’s just as unfulfilling, and she’s taking it out on Sally’s scalp, which is a fine line between writing a character as insufferable, and a character actually BEING insufferable. Given the pace of “Mad Men,” I worry I won’t care when the show actually gives her the comeuppance she desperately needs. (For his part, I’m not sure Henry’s getting what he thought he would out of this arrangement, either. One gets the sense that sex isn’t exactly what Merriam-Webster would define as “frequent” in that household, and I’m not sure he married Betty for her warmth and conversational skills.)

*** From characters I loathe to those I love: Joanie! You bet she’s got her own office, which seems strategically placed at the heart of the new agency. Not sure if Greg’s in Vietnam just yet, but she certainly seemed in her element as one of the crucial cogs in the new machine. (However, as Mo Ryan noted in this week’s podcast, her office is makeshift, with doors on two sides. Still, progress. Yes?)

*** I don’t recall anyone in the show calling Horace Cook Jr. “Ho Ho” before, but damn that made me giggle, along with Roger’s desire to have Don carve his holiday turkey that year. Also? Harry Crane’s skin responds to sunlight in much the same way as mine: very badly.

*** I know I’m immature, but all I could think about during the ham subplot was this SNL sketch.

*** Best line of the episode: “Believe me Henry, EVERYONE thinks this is temporary.”

What did you think of the “Mad Men” premiere? Leave your thoughts below!