"NOSTALGIA, IT'S DELICATE, BUT POTENT." It's November 1960, and ad writer Don Draper (Jon Hamm), in the first-season finale of Mad Men, is pitching a room of Kodak executives on a campaign for their new slide projector. He's loaded the carousel with his family pictures, a poignant gesture because of what we know about him: not only does he cheat on his wife-prolifically-but he also hides his true identity from her and the rest of the world. Born Dick Whitman and orphaned as a boy, he went to Korea, swiped the dog tags of a fallen soldier (the real Draper), abandoned his dirt-poor relatives and rose to the heights of swellegant, three-martini Wasp success on Madison Avenue. In some ways, Don's life is as phony as a stock photograph. Unloved as a child, he may never know how to love, though he's learned the gestures. Yet looking at his compromised memories, he wells up, and so do we, even as we know we're being sold. The Kodak suits want to focus on their machine's technology. Don argues that its true pull is emotional. "In Greek," Don says, "nostalgia literally means 'the pain from an old wound.'"
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