I was watching old episodes of Mad Men the other day, and came upon a scene that was unexpectedly moving.
It is 1964, and Don Draper, the slick shoot-from-the-hip ad man at the center of the show, is talking with a psychologist who also works in the advertising trade. She is trying to convince him to try her methods, which are based on psychologically modeling the customers. Our hero tells her, dismissively, that their approaches are just too different.
She replies that their methods are really not that dissimilar. “It comes down”, she says “to what we want versus what’s expected of us.”
This stops him cold — because he realizes she has just summed up his life.
And the audience realizes that on some level she is describing our lives as well.
Draper then pays her the ultimate compliment, at least in his terms. He tries, unsuccessfully, to get her to sleep with him.