Jon Hamm’s Post-Mad Men Persona and Representations of Hegemonic Masculinity

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Jon Hamm’s post-Mad Men persona critically engages contemporary critiques of hegemonic masculinity. In particular, it analyzes Hamm’s cameo roles to argue for a reflective masculine persona that deploys representational, comedic strategies to deconstruct hegemonic masculinity. The meta-commentary sitting across his performances calls for more fluid interpretations of performance and masculinity emerging in persona culture. Hamm’s persona points to a sometimes introspective, sometimes retrospective masculine persona connected to broader cultural patterns of self-scrutiny in popular masculinity that presents itself as progressive. I also align this reflective feature of Hamm’s persona with different contemporary masculinities in media texts that perform a similar kind of ‘taking stock’ and renarrativizations of hegemony.

KEYWORDS:

• Jon Hamm
• masculinity
• persona
• comedy
• toxic masculinity

In 2007, then thirty-six-year-old Jon Hamm emerged out of relative obscurity and skyrocketed to the status of an international sex symbol who bumped President Barack Obama out of first place in Askmen.com’s most influential man of 2008 (Oei 2009). Prior to Hamm’s career-defining role as Don Draper in AMC’s Mad Men (2007-2015), he appeared in secondary roles in US television and film. After Mad Men’s debut, Hamm’s persona became wedded to his character, the smoulderingly hot, advertising creative genius who struggles to adapt to the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and find happiness. Draper’s aloofness and old-school manliness resonated with Mad Men viewers (Morrison 2008, Chiarella 2012). In interviews with Hamm, media press tended to emphasise his sense of humour and bewilderment about his newfound sex icon status (Men’s Fitness 2012, Raphael 2012).

This article focuses on Jon Hamm’s post-Mad Men performances to trace the intersections between Hamm’s persona narrative and coinciding discourses around hegemonic masculinity. Some of Hamm’s roles continue Mad Men’s nostalgia for post-war America in straightforward ways (Marjorie Prime 2017, Nostalgia 2018). His roles in action and drama maintain the hegemonic masculinity of Don Draper as a cool and collected man who seems talented in everything he does (Keeping Up with the Joneses 2016, Baby Driver 2017). However, most of his post-Mad Men roles parody of the hegemonic masculinity so closely associated with the character of Don Draper. Mad Men offers retrospective meditations on both the political shortcomings of baby boom America as well as nostalgia for the look and feel of the period (Author, date). The series recreates and highlights the systemic sexism and racism of post-war white America while also indulging in the lush material culture, aesthetics, and design of the 1950s and 60s. Mad Men invites historically reflective engagements with the trajectory of masculinity and Hamm’s persona indicates a similar project due to its shared cultural context. Some roles directly reference his past role as Don Draper to extend and complicate the series’ revaluation of hegemonic masculinity and others do not. However, the roles Hamm plays both on-screen and off return to the concept of dominant masculinity, which they repeatedly build up and deconstruct. Hamm’s comedic roles are perfectly legible without prior knowledge of Mad Men, but I argue that the network of his various roles and their commentary on masculinity invoke a historically specific reflexive masculinity that intensifies from the 2010s onwards. I’m using Hamm to draw out these broader trends. Post-Mad Men roles belong to more prevalent contemporary persona-driven strategies for engaging hegemonic masculinity by offering a meta-textual critique.

This article uses textual analysis within the theoretical frameworks of persona and masculinity studies. It focuses predominantly on Hamm’s post-Mad Men comedic roles, with some inclusions of relevant dramatic roles. I build on the work of scholars who observe how both popular and scholarly discourse fall into a habit of naming and discussing masculine ‘types’ that reinforce reductive binaries of manliness versus weakness (Connell 1987, 1995, Waling 2019). Hamm’s persona constitutes a network of engagements with dominant representations of masculinity in popular culture. These connections often elude a rigid binary of soft/hard and weak/strong masculinity. They do however tend to question and often parody dominant constructions of ‘successful’ heteronormative masculinity.

My approach does not claim that Hamm, or Hamm’s agent, or his directors necessarily planned this discursive arc for his characters. Hamm’s iconic role as Don Draper persists as a backdrop for the roles that have accrued since Mad Men. While the persona patterns discussed here are not wholly reliant on Hamm’s iconic role as Don Draper, they are certainly connected to the same underlying popular scrutiny of retro-masculinity that has emerged since the 2000s. In drawing these connections, the article maps a cross-textual, persona-driven network shaped by a reflexive, self-identified progressive masculinity in popular culture. This figure invests experimenting with more traditional gender models by directly undercutting them, exaggerating them, exhibiting softer masculine personae, or showing the struggle to maintain and exist within the confines of dominant masculinity.

Hamm in the context of Persona studies

Persona studies offers a flexible take on celebrity. A persona is distributed over a collection of public facing performances across many types of media that blur the distinction between a frontstage/illusory and backstage/real self (Barbour et al. 2014, 2017, Marshall 2014, Barbour and Marshall 2015, Moore et al. 2015, Barbour and Moore 2016). Persona studies therefore leaves room for constructions of and slippages between Hamm’s supposedly backstage and frontstage selves, but it also allows for slippages across his roles before and after Mad Men. Persona studies challenges ideas of the self and the text to privilege connections between various performances that identify tensions between the private and public self in different media. For example, in their analysis of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s transmedial persona, Christopher Moore and Kim Barbour argue that each of his social media posts or appearances is ‘effectively a digital object, a node in a network, and each is complete with their own (frequently overlapping) micro-publics and their own parts in the collective identity experience’ (Barbour and Moore 2016, p. 3). The mutability inherent to persona culture shapes textual distribution, or what Moore, Barbour and Lee call a collective dimension of person or meta-collective complex: ‘In each public, the individual is a node, but they are also simultaneously orbiting nodes in other networks. The complex of overlapping of networks, however, can still be thought of as having a central point, which is the user’s persona’ (Barbour et al. 2017, pp. 5–6). Hamm’s persona, the roles it encompasses, and the cultural discourses it intersects with form a networked set of nodes. Each node refers to the nodes around it. In this webbing, the role of Don Draper has particular gravity or weight, with some roles travelling in its orbit. The idea of nodes rather than texts or roles or stars affords a more holistic view of contemporary persona, which spans different contexts of performance and different kinds of media.

While persona studies enables rich discussions of the development of persona in a digital context, it also borrows from foundational understandings of the star text. A star text is the public performances of the self across media texts that are sanctioned by traditional institutional bodies of production (i.e. the film studio). I’m using the word ‘star text’ according to Richard Dyer’s theorisation: the star’s text sits across the films they appear in as well as proximate media texts that construct their on- and off-screen lives and personalities. This larger, more encompassing text is shaped by its cultural context. Dyer writes that an analysis of stars should ‘stress their structural polysemy, that is, the finite multiplicity of meanings and affects they embody and the attempt so to structure them that some meanings and affects are foregrounded, and others are masked or displaced’ (Dyer and McDonald 1998, p. 3). The mutability of Hamm’s persona and its different engagements with his iconic role is particularly suited to millennial persona culture where ‘Millennial audiences seem less concerned with knowing the “real life” of the celebrity – partially because they already know, and partially because they know they will never really know – and are more interested in knowing how celebrities understand their own lives as a constructed performance, and how celebrities “speak back” to their past performances and construct (or do not) continuity within their persona’ (Smith 2017, p. 73). Hamm’s persona in his post-Mad Men career suits the mode of analysis offered by persona studies by virtue of the interconnectedness, cross-referencing, and call backs defining his network.

Hamm’s post-Draper persona contains multiple comedic departures from the hegemonic masculinity that Draper symbolised. Not all performances reference Mad Men, but some do and draw attention to the act of referencing. His character in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015-2019), however, explicitly jeers at his Mad Men status as a sex symbol and hegemonic masculine icon. Indeed, some popular press itself takes note of the parodic and self-reflexive trajectory in the star’s career (Eichner 2018). His comedic role in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt even references a previous, secondary performance before Hamm got his lucky break. This is his collar-tugging appearance on a 1990s television dating game called Blind Date in which male suitors court a woman sitting behind a curtain who must determine her preferred match through conversation alone. Hamm’s noticeable nervousness, awkwardness, and failure to win the date provide a stark contrast to Draper’s notorious promiscuity and prowess. The disparate sexuality of Hamm’s star image and this earlier appearance is the object of humour for television shows that dredge up this embarrassing text. All of this is to say that Hamm’s persona incorporates a wealth of cross-referencing and playful meta-commentary. While many personae announce their departures from previous career-defining roles, this case is less an announced departure so much as a sustained commentary on the fragility of dominant models of masculinity and heteronormative sexuality. Persona studies offers a strong theoretical framework for exploring the interconnectedness of Hamm’s roles and how this set of interrelations constitutes his persona.

Hamm in the context of masculinity in popular culture

Hamm’s roles offer an often playful representation of dominant, heterosexual, cis masculinity. Hamm’s persona coincides with a sustained popular debate and public awareness of a decades-long cultural shift to the far right in the US. This political shift is signalled by the growth various terms and groups: alt right groups, political discussions around a ‘war on women’, Incel groups (short for involuntary celibate), toxic masculinity, pickup culture, and Men’s Rights Activism (MRA). The 2018 appointment of Supreme Court Justice Rob Kavanaugh, despite accusations of sexual assault made against him, further reinforced the entrenchment of toxic and predatory masculinity in government at the highest levels. The convergence of Kavanaugh’s appointment with the MeToo movement, which publicly exposed Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein as serial rapists, also placed gender violence and patriarchal systems of silencing at the centre of public debate. The Trump administration’s far-right reshaping of the Supreme Court and its reversal of the right to abortion in 2022 forecasted further curtailments of reproductive rights, women’s rights, and queer rights. Indeed, the literal revocation of gender rights suggests a movement backwards in time. Popular discussions around historical progress and regress characterise gender discourse of the 2010s and 20s, and comprise the background that contextualises Hamm’s masculine persona, which centres on the comic critique of different forms of masculinity that are couched in this social and political climate.

Hamm’s characters need to be situated against the cultural background of these political movements. Mad Men engaged popular gender discussions from its start as part of a series-long narrative that dismantled hegemonic masculinity and nostalgia for post-war America. Draper’s character arc begins with his unbridled success at work and his idyllic suburban life as the father of two children and husband to an ex-supermodel turned housewife. His early infidelities and struggles with emotional intimacy signal the psychological deterioration of the character in the series, which slowly breaks down the markers of success so central to nostalgic imaginings of boomer America: the suburban home, happy family, job stability, upward mobility, and a well-manicured lawn. Lauren Berlant might call this the ‘good life’, an illusion of stability and flourishing that neoliberalism upholds as being the only dream even if it is unachievable. Responsibilizing individuals for its procurement, neoliberalism makes the good life an impossibility through the disassembly of the welfare state and the diffusion of power across private institutions (Berlant 2011, p. 10). In the context of American neoliberalism, the golden age of the post-war era holds symbolic significance as a period of, yes, backward gender and racial politics, but also an iconic, perhaps the iconic model of the good life. A recurring theme in neoliberal gender culture is the measurement of historical movements and how they may be moving us closer to or farther away from the good life. Each side of the political spectrum participates in this stocktaking exercise.

Mad Men begins deconstructing the good life of its protagonist in the first season, revealing that Draper is not the character’s real name but one he assumed during the Korean War by swapping identities with a dying soldier. Don Draper is Dick Whitman, the son of a sex worker. His father begrudgingly takes him in after the death of his mother. Whitman leaves his poverty-stricken childhood in search of a better life. Draper’s happy life in the suburbs are as fictitious as his name. Later in the series, Draper’s alcoholism, sex addiction, and inability to come to terms with his past compromise his work until he is eventually fired. Draper flees his life in Manhattan to join a spiritual commune on the West coast. The infamously cryptic final scene in Mad Men shows Draper meditating in a group by the ocean. He smiles and the scene cuts to the iconic ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’ commercial, intuiting either that Draper is the one who created it or that he is now buying into the countercultural politics that Coco Cola so expertly manoeuvred to rebrand traditional consumer capitalism as cool. Either way, the ending drags Draper back into the same career in advertising and a life based on lies that destroyed him to begin with.

Mad Men emphasises Don Draper’s patriarchal entitlement through his meaningless bedding of multiple women and movement through a string of empty romantic relationships that ultimately leaves him alone. The narrative of Draper’s masculinity revolves around the struggle to maintain a front of manly control and self-determination that comes with an inability or refusal to deal with emotions. When Mad Men premiered, Draper was upheld as a sex symbol and model for masculine success and stoicism, however the remaining seasons slowly deconstructed this ideal to the embarrassment and fatigue of many fans (Bevan 2019). Because it continues to be Hamm’s most popular and prominent role to date, Draper provides significant and ongoing backdrop in his persona text.

Mad Men’s deconstruction of baby boom era masculinity extends to other characters and events in the series. While Draper may be a misguided and tortured hegemonic masculinity, he is still portrayed as being less harmful than others. Mad Men embeds historical retrospection by highlighting Draper’s disgust at the explicit sexist and racist culture we see in the series’ professional spaces. Don Draper serves as a historical proxy for contemporary audiences through his reactions of disapproval at the behaviour of his colleagues, a sort of reassuring ethical barometer that assures the viewer the series is examining not celebrating post-war bigotry. This form of television gender retrospection is not unique to Mad Men. Hamm’s persona and Mad Men’s gender polemic coincide with a string of nostalgic television shows that focus on the gender politics of the past including Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017), The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (2017), Masters of Sex (2013-2016) and Mindhunter (2017-2019). There is a larger trend of the retrospective scrutiny of past masculinities appearing in television series that focus on the post-war era through to the 1970s.

Draper’s move from dominant masculinity to a more vulnerable and emotional type at the end does not necessarily suggest a strict binary between the two. Similarly, labelling Hamm’s persona as either stoic or emotional potentially falls into oversimplifying masculinity in ways that overlook its nuances. Andrea Waling brings attention to an absence of theorising the fluidity of masculinity (Waling 2019). Waling argues that masculinity continually negotiates its discourse of hegemony and power. Hamm’s Don Draper offers an example of dominant masculinity (Heath 2003, Breu 2005, Malin 2010). However, as the show progresses this more traditional masculinity is deconstructed. The post-Mad Men roles participate in the deconstruction of the strong/weak binary. By performing the simultaneous persistence and failure of the dominant masculine model, Hamm’s roles trouble this binary and foreground its inflexibilities. Other cis hetero-masculine comedic personae offer similarly fraught engagements with hegemonic masculinity that play with the internal contradictions within older, traditional and softer, more emotional masculinity (i.e. Seth Rogan, Paul Rudd, Michael Cera, Danny McBride, Adam DeVine, Zack Galafianakis, Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas, Will Ferrell, Nick Kroll, John C Riley and more). These celebrity personae move back and forth across multiple contradictory performances of masculinity that trouble definitions of masculinity. They appear as enlightened, softer, woke masculinities (i.e. Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas in How Did This Get Made 2010-). They feature ironic performances of retrograde cavemen (i.e. Jason Mantzoukas sometimes assumes an ironic sexism in How did This Get Made 2010). Their roles can include embarrassing failures to perform hegemonic masculinity (i.e. Zach Galafianakis in the Hangover films 2009, 2011, 2013; Jason Mantzoukas in The Good Place 2016-2020). They might also sport a wilful ignorance to acknowledge patriarchal entitlement (i.e. Will Ferrell in Anchorman 2004; Nick Kroll in, The League 2009–15). These personae oscillate between aping bombastic and tone-deaf dominant masculinities and showing softer, vulnerable, feminist men. Hamm is part of a broader cultural trend in masculine personae that show a ludic engagement with masculinity’s contradictions. Granted, a fundamental trait of hegemonic masculinity is that it sees itself as perpetually facing crisis (Cook 1982). We still stand to benefit, however, from understanding how it constructs the crisis of the moment. The perceived crisis of masculinity hinges on how masculinity narrates the history of manhood. The stories that masculine personae tell about masculinity are important and it’s valuable to examine how the multi-nodal aspects of persona culture enable and complicate this gender discourse.

Performing a compromised or failed dominant masculinity does not always carry a resistant polemic and it is important to distinguish between the polemic purported by the text and the gender politics embedded in its representation. In her work on postfeminist fatherhood, Hannah Hamad warns that representations of progressive, emotional, and vulnerable masculinity often contain traditional, heteronormative messages. For example, she identifies a pattern of contemporary television and film depictions of a new model of fatherhood. These narratives focus on fathers who successfully grow from man-child to a new masculine ideal that nevertheless reinstates heteronormativity and its definition of family (Hamad 2013, p. 21). Many of Hamm’s roles contain similar contradictions. The texts discussed here and the texts that Hamad analyses think of themselves as carrying a progressive politics and it is this aspect of self-announcement and performed self-awareness that describes many of Hamm’s roles.

Hamm’s Persona strategies for engaging hegemonic masculinity

Hamm’s post-Mad Men roles contain narrative and performance-based tactics that comment on dominant masculinity. They place Hamm in narrative contexts that prominently figure his performance or underperformance at work. They sometimes undercut Hamm’s sex appeal. They also parody toxic masculinity. His performances range from mentioning his role in Mad Men directly to not including it at all, albeit the persona context of these roles occasionally ropes in the figure of Draper. Success at work is a key feature in representations of hegemonic masculinity, which tends to value workplace composure and performance over emotional connectedness and presence at home. Some of Hamm’s roles challenge this feature of dominant masculinity. The first example directly invokes his role as Don Draper. In The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (2010-2016), Hamm appears in a cameo as himself and plays a subservient, bumbling personal assistant to the series’ villain, an obsequious British media tycoon. Hamm pleads with his employer to allow him to return to the Mad Men set as he tearfully explains that the producers have already written him out of the first few episodes of the new season. His employer tells Hamm to get back to his work as a PA. Hamm appears in a similar seconds-length cameo in Parks and Recreation (2009-2015). He walks in at the end of the second to last season only to be fired on the spot for ‘professional incompetence’. Don Draper is known for his unfailing success and ingenious ideas as a creative director. His famous pitches leave clients and colleagues in awestruck silence and occasionally tears. Yet, the final season shows its hero sobbing in front of clients and begging for his job back. The deconstruction of masculine professionalism features prominently in Mad Men. The very nature of the seconds-length cameos references Don Draper because cameos are brief appearances of stars who are identified with an outside body of work. The fleetingness of Hamm’s appearances points to his fame elsewhere or at least that is the intended reading for a projected audience. The screen writing of these roles privileges an awareness of Hamm’s broader work. Hamm’s post-Draper roles extend this strategic deconstruction of this masculine professional ideal which rests on emotional control, the constant command and admiration of colleagues’ attention, and an unfaltering record of success at work.

Deconstructing the performance of masculine professionalism appears again through the opposite tactic: casting Hamm as men who are uncommonly, almost ridiculously skilled at their jobs. These roles disrupt the ideal of masculine professional performance if not by portraying Hamm as a blundering and weeping mess then by exaggerating his work efficacy and self-control. In Wet Hot American Summer: The First Day of Camp (2015), he plays ‘the Falcon’, a hired assassin commissioned by President Reagan to guard the government secrets hidden at Camp Firewood, a Jewish summer camp. The Falcon’s lethal skillset can only be matched and defeated by the camp chef and war veteran, Gary (played by A.D. Miles). Miles and Hamm’s physical resemblance and almost identical deep, gravelly voices become the object of humour. Through the writing and over-the-top performances by Miles and Hamm, the film exaggerates some of the character tropes of strong, stoic masculinities in the action genre: deep voiced men of few words who always get the job done.

HBO’s Random Act of Flyness (2018-) makes a different critique by placing the embedded whiteness of dominant representations of professional masculinity in high relief. Until this point, Hamm’s persona had not addressed the monolithic whiteness of his roles. Mad Men offered meagre attempts to build a critique on race by inserting tokenistic, reflective ‘moments’. One such scene shows the firm executive wearing blackface at his engagement party (Mad Men 2009b). Another episode includes awkward interactions between white admen and the black elevator operator in which a white copywriter asks the operator about what Black people like to see in advertisements (Mad Men 2009a). These scenes always feel like addendums rather than sustained and considered inclusions of the post-war experiences of Americans of colour. Random Act of Flyness however aggressively addresses the whiteness of Hamm’s persona. In ‘White Be Gone’, Hamm plays himself filming a mock advertisement. In the skit, Hamm is the spokesperson for a salve that expunges white thoughts like ‘All Lives Matter’ and ‘I would never live in a country that told a woman what to wear’. The ad stops abruptly in mid-production as Hamm tells the production crew that he can’t continue because he is ‘not fully white’ or at least not as white as his on-screen persona. The director convinces him to continue because white people will trust him because of his ‘stature’ and ‘beige-ness’. Hamm returns to filming, his character explaining there is a “spectrum of whiteness from burning crosses to suspecting your Guatemalan housekeeping of holding a grudge … ‘I am not racist’, is a sign of white thought. The skit renders the imperviousness of white privilege visible. In contrast to other roles, Hamm’s performance in Random Act of Flyness foregrounds the whiteness of Hamm’s persona and, in an ironic inversion of tokenistic castings that hire an actor of colour, Hamm is asked to speak for his race. Whiteness maintains hegemony by subduing its own visibility in public discourse and constructing itself as the default or racially neutral (Dyer 1997). Therefore, critiques of whiteness sometimes simply identify and draw attention to whiteness, albeit this instance of calling out Hamm’s whiteness remains anomalous in his persona as an isolated occurrence.

Many roles challenge the norms of hegemonic masculinity by using tactics of humiliation and a demystification of Hamm’s persona. When he hosted Saturday Night Live, Hamm played himself endorsing a product called Jon Hamm’s John Ham, sheets of scored cured ham in the form of a toilet paper roll that consumers can bring to the bathroom and enjoy while on the toilet (SNL 2008). The commercial includes scenes of Jon Hamm eating John Ham in a bathroom stall. Saturday Night Live is a show organised around the episode-long comedic cameo of a prominent star who is placed in various skits that mock their persona text. I would argue this appearance, like the other cameos, implicitly invokes Draper particularly because Mad Men was still on air at the time. Whatever sexual capital Hamm accrued as a sex symbol is challenged in the skit. Along similar lines, Hamm provides a brief cameo in Barry (2018), a comedy about a hitman turned actor. Hamm plays himself and rings the hitman’s doorbell asking to poop in his house only to be rejected. These brief, gross out humour cameos sit in stark opposition to the earlier seasons of Mad Men in which the character of Draper was aligned with the traits of hegemonic masculinity: collectedness, stoicism, and sexual prowess.

Humiliation of a different kind happens in Web Therapy (2011–2015). Hamm plays Jeb Masters, who seeks therapy because of the unique pressures of his job as the founder of ‘Absolute Last Call’, a phone sex service for elderly women. The therapist, Fiona (played by Lisa Kudrow), inquires what his clients like to hear. Jeb tells her that he talks about ‘coming home from the war’, catching early bird specials, and engaging in dirty talk about finishing their apple sauce. A somewhat cheap and ageist joke, the object of humour here is the provision of sexual services to older women. The role compromises heteronormative definitions of masculine sexual prowess by casting him as a sex worker who specialises in this age group. Together, Barry, Web Therapy (2014), and Saturday Night Light reference and then challenge the Hamm’s status as a sex symbol.

Hamm’s appearances in 30 Rock (2006-2013) also dispel Hamm’s sexual allure in the form of a recurring secondary character. The series’ protagonist is an ambitious comedy writer at NBC, Liz Lemon, who experiences a string of failed relationships while struggling to establish a work/life balance. Hamm plays one of her boyfriends. Drew appears too good to be true: he is a successful, attractive doctor who volunteers for Doctors Without Borders. However, Liz and Drew’s disparate levels of attractiveness lead to problems. Drew lives in ‘the bubble’, a parallel reality for beautiful people in which they are given preferential treatment for being attractive. As a result of living with a continual stream of praise, Drew is convinced he excels at many activities that he is in fact very bad at: he can’t play tennis, he is bad at sex, and he is convinced that he can speak French. Liz dumps him and runs into him later in the series at which point, both of his hands have been replaced by hooks: one was lost in getting off a helicopter in Zimbabwe when he tried to wave to someone he knew and the second was lost in a fireworks accident. The deconstruction of hetero-masculine sexual allure is part of Hamm’s persona even before Mad Men. Hamm has a minor 2002 role in The Gilmore Girls (Gilmore Girls 2002). In the sitcom Hamm’s character plays a dashing millionaire who catches the eye of the protagonist, Lorelei, at an antiques auction. After she goes to great lengths to track down his number and goes out with him, she rejects him for being too boring. Sex appeal or lack thereof is a recurring theme in his persona. Even if it was not a clear theme before Mad Men, the total network of his roles at the moment certainly invites this reading.

Popular discussions of gender since the 2010s have named and theorised trends, all of which heavily emphasise historical progress and regress as part of their self-identification and origin story: postfeminism, wokeness, feminist men, toxic masculinity, trad, incel, alt right, cis. Much of the new terminology for talking about gender invests in placing contemporary gender in a longer historical trajectory. Hamm’s more comic persona tends to appear in texts that position themselves as left-leaning. Of course, this kind of progressive masculine persona is not specific to Hamm. Alongside Ryan Gosling and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jon Hamm joins an increasing number of cis male sex symbols in self-identifying publicly as male feminists (Moore 2016, Feasey 2017, Werft 2017). Shelley Cobb writes about the emergence of the male celebrity feminist in the postfeminist era public sphere that ‘eschews political action for the sake of positive images’ (Cobb 2015, p. 136). These celebrity figures, Cobb argues, are defined by their support of gender equality, their attractiveness, and a ‘decidedly unmacho heterosexuality’ off-screen (Cobb 2015, p. 136). Hamm’s performance of softer, oftentimes failing masculinities question hegemonic masculinity, however they could be seen as participating in the same aesthetic of political wokeness that Cobb argues has little substance.

If Hamm’s persona does not lean into the portrayal of unattractiveness and weakness, it makes a similar move in parodying toxic masculinity. This presents another persona strategy for commenting on hegemonic gender models. In Tag (2018), Hamm plays a secondary character, Bob, who participates in a four-man game of tag that he and his friends have been playing since childhood. Bob is wealthy, arrogant, and caddish. He is also accused of being a selfish lover, another instance of desexualising Hamm’s persona. Bob’s over-confidence winds up being his downfall in the film as his physical and sexual prowess are repeatedly undercut. In the first scene, he tries to escape being tagged by throwing an office chair through a floor-to-ceiling window. The chair ricochets and hits him the face knocking him out thus losing him the game. Hamm plays a more repugnant character in Bridesmaids (2011), as the main protagonist’s friend with benefits. He booty calls Annie at all hours of the night and then kicks her out of bed saying, ‘I really want you to leave but I don’t know how to say it without sounding like a dick’. He refers to her in mixed company as ‘fuck buddy’ and crassly suggests she take a nap in his lap when he’s driving. While there are overlaps between this character and others that undercut Jon/Don’s sex appeal, it belongs in the group of texts that comment, in some way, on toxic masculinity. Characters like Ted in Bridesmaids and the other roles allude to toxic masculine culture in their failed braggadocio and sexual narcissism.

The neologism of toxic masculinity emerged with the hard political turns to the right mentioned before. In its more dangerous forms, toxic masculinity describes more extremist movements that argue for treating women as reproductive capital. The emergence of Men’s Rights Activism and Incel groups emerged online around a belief that straight men are entitled to intimate partners. Women therefore should be equally redistributed as social, sexual, reproductive capital. Echoing this, Men’s Rights Activist Jordan Peterson argues for a system of enforced monogamy that would redistribute cis women across straight men (Bowles 2018). Other subsects of Men’s Rights Activism similarly reduce women to a sexual resource that men are entitled to control and use at will. Roosh V believes that rape should be legalised on private property as the only way to discourage women from placing themselves in unsafe circumstances (Roosh 2015). In a sense, various versions of masculinity, progressive and toxic alike, engage in their own form of historical retrospection. Whether it’s Roosh V or Hamm’s comic roles, each presents a reflection on history to arrive at different conclusions. In this cultural context, some of Hamm’s characters belong to an emerging cultural awareness around toxic masculine sexuality from its quotidian to more extreme forms.

One episode of Black Mirror focuses on a sexually predatory toxic masculinity. The series offers single-episode teleplays on a technologically dystopic future. In ‘White Christmas’, Hamm plays an affable cellmate who recounts the crime he committed (Black Mirror 2014). He was a dating advice expert who, through a network of surveillance cameras and live feeds, virtually coaches his clients while they pick up women at bars. Other clients can join the live stream as sexual voyeurs. When one woman murders her date on the live stream, the dating service and its sexual abuse are found out and prosecuted. Hamm’s character in Black Mirror offers the deeply dystopic futuristic version of toxic masculinity. It pontificates that pickup culture intensifies with the development of surveillance platforms which enable increased collusion among attackers. This character thus invites a different kind of historical commentary, one that imagines a possible and terrifying future. The role also participates in the same project as the comedies of making a meta-commentary on the sexual allure of Hamm. However, in this case, Hamm’s persona’s attractiveness and sexual ‘game’ turn from being playfully challenged to being aligned with a sexually predatory toxic masculinity.

The most pointed critique of toxic masculinity and most explicit reference to Hamm’s role as Don Draper comes in the form of Hamm’s performance as Reverend Wayne Gary Wayne in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015-). The sitcom follows the recuperative adventures of Kimmy, who was kidnapped alongside three other women and held in an underground bunker by the Reverend for fifteen years. The Reverend convinces his teenage victims the world had ended. While the women are underground, the Reverend forces them to work in shifts to manually turn a crank that, unknown to them, powers his rumpus room on the other side of the wall. The rec room needs power for its juke box, cocktail blender, and arcade games. After the captives are freed and the Reverend goes to prison, they discover a VHS tape that reveals his rumpus room activities: practicing karate, forays into being a singer-songwriter, filming a commercial for his DJ services, dry humping furniture, and auditioning for The Apprentice where he makes a direct appeal to Donald Trump (The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt 2015). The Reverend parodies toxic masculinity in this comic iteration of the sexual predator he plays in Black Mirror. The Reverend makes explicit references to Trump era toxic masculinity in the form of direct references and quotations of Trump’s statements. The character offers a particularly rich example of self-reflexive post-Mad Men masculinity in the setting of millennial toxic masculinity culture.

The series later includes an episode-length parody of a Netflix-style true crime documentary titled ‘Party Monster: Scratching the Surface’ (The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt 2018). The documentary follows DJ Fingablast’s search for Wayne’s DJ persona, DJ Slizzard. VHS footage of early DJ Slizzard shows him working a wedding gig in a Hawaiian shirt, cargo pants, and a see-through visor, while giving life advice to the ten-year-old Fingablast: ‘Try to get the limbo line to come to you because then you can see up stuff’. Fingablast discovers Slizzard is really Wayne Gary Wayne, the Reverend. The two DJs seek out the advice of a men’s rights activist to argue for the unjust imprisonment of Wayne. The activist, Fingablast, and Wayne claim that the women’s testimony is fraudulent on the basis that their attractiveness levels were incommensurate with Wayne’s standards. The line between parody and reality disturbingly blurs when Wayne directly quotes President Trump’s denials of accusations of sexual harassment as his own: ‘You look at her and you tell me. I don’t think so. She would not be my first choice I can tell you’. Echoing prominent pickup artists and incel pedagogues, the men’s rights activist claims that ‘what he [Wayne] is accused of shouldn’t be illegal’. The mockumentary ends with Fingablast arguing that Slizzard/Wayne’s case is the product of a nationwide conspiracy that seeks to subjugate straight white masculinity. The episode’s frequent mentions of Trump allude to the toxic masculinity emboldened by Trump’s gender culture. The mockumentary also includes the early footage of Jon Hamm when he failed to procure a date in the 1990s dating show. The Reverend is the clearest illustration of how Hamm’s persona launches a pointed critique at hegemonic masculinity, more specifically millennial toxic masculinity.

At a broader level, the stand-alone episode mocks a recent genre of television that centres on violent toxic masculinity. The episode’s Netflix-documentary aesthetics and the Reverend’s claims of being victimised by the ‘system’ call to mind a string of popular true crime series produced and released by Netflix in the late teens. These include Death on the Staircase (2005-2018), Making a Murderer (2015-2018), and The Jinx (2015). These documentaries cast scepticism on criminal cases that involve men accused and/or convicted of murdering women. While The Jinx concludes with a clear resolution that the protagonist is guilty of the crime, this group of texts participates in a larger media moment that vehemently defends men accused of crimes against women and instead deflects attention and blame onto juridical systems. This is not to say that the men in these series are guilty. But the genre focuses on the absolution of men convicted of rape/murders of women. The women in their stories are treated as forms of narrative capital or collateral in service of a detailed scrutiny of police investigation and legal procedures. The series never mention the larger context of gender violence. This genre, regardless of the ‘truth’ behind the cases, is part of a toxic masculine culture that sees men as persecuted and women as property.

‘Party Monster’ mocks the format of these male-centric documentaries which build sympathy for the suspects and participate in a pronounced pattern in gender violence media: the elision of female victims in favour of a sensationalised fixation on the acts done and the men who presumably did not do them. The mockumentary emphasises toxic masculinity and its victimhood rhetoric. It also levies a gender critique against binge-worthy, platform-driven crime documentaries that fetishise crimes against women. Hamm has played a variety of roles that parody the sexual politics of toxic masculinity. When viewed in the context of broader discussions around masculinity, Hamm’s persona shows patterns of a self-reflexive, meta-textual reflection on the past forms of traditional masculinity and their transformations in the present.

I want to end with the character Hamm plays in Rant Plus (2022). The action adventure is a sequel to the 1986 original, Top Gun, which launched Tom Cruise’s career and became a cultural touchstone of the 1980s. Neither the original nor the sequel are comedies, albeit they share an unconsciously camp and queer cult following that began with the original. However, I feel this performance cements the argument that recurring themes around hegemonic masculinity are quite entrenched in Hamm’s post-Mad Men persona. The sequel continues the same themes of retrospective masculinity that have become so much a part of the arc of Hamm’s career. Hamm’s persona consistently foregrounds masculinity as a point of discussion and reflection. Top Gun: Maverick belongs in this discussion as the most recent illustration of the different semblances of and engagements with dominant masculinity in Hamm’s career.

Mad Men centres on reflecting upon the time that has passed between the period it depicts and the present. Rant Plus (2022) is a dramatically different text from the comedies with a similar meta-narrative result. The film is narratively organised around its own self-awareness and nostalgia as a sequel. With thirty-six years separating the two films, it pays particular attention to historical transformations in masculinity. Hamm plays Cyclone, a Vice Admiral who enlists the best pilot, Maverick (played by Tom Cruise), to train a group of cadets for an impossible mission. The film is peppered with allusions to Cyclone and Maverick’s old age. The cadets tease them for being ‘fossils’ and ‘relics’ who are ‘headed for extinction’. These barbs against Maverick’s age also refer to his older hegemonic masculinity, antiauthoritarianism, and reckless style of flying. In the end, this masculinity proves victorious through the successful completion of the mission despite the team’s inferior weaponry. Maverick reminds us that it’s the pilot, not the plane. The film pays homage to famous scenes from the original by re-enacting them almost exactly. These tributes connect the two films while also denoting how times have changed. For example, the sequel emphasises the inclusion of a female cadet. The message however is that dominant masculinity remains intact despite change. The film is about ageing dominant masculinity that nevertheless proves itself superior.

While both Cylcone and Maverick are ‘old’ masculinities, Clyclone plays more of a company man who follows the rules and preaches caution. Cyclone follows conservative plans while Maverick counters with more aggressive and macho tactics. Even Hamm’s interviews on his role in Top Gun emphasise the shortsightedness of the character he plays. The same interviews also incorporate Hamm’s own alignments with a less macho, softer masculinity. Hamm’s expresses relief at getting a cool call sign, ‘Cyclone’, and he’s also grateful for not having to go up in the planes because he was worried of throwing up (Late Night with Seth Meyers 2022, Rant Plus 2022, Today: Sunday Sitdown with Wille Geist 2022). Hamm talks about his nostalgia for the original film. He mentions how much the film shaped his adolescent ideas of cool masculinity and makes subtle allusions to Cruise’s more macho masculinity as the man who called the shots and ran the production. He also reflects upon how the fictional characters in the film have changed with age (Late Night with Seth Meyers 2022). Hamm’s next role is another nostalgic role. He plays Chevy Chase’s lead character in the sequel of the 1985 original, Fletch (Today: Sunday Sitdown with Wille Geist 2022). Hamm’s off-screen performances tend to figure him as just your average kinda guy who suddenly found himself at the centre of so much media attention (Yoon and Men’s Fitness 2012, Raphael 2012, Late Night with Seth Meyers 2022, Rant Plus 2022, Today: Sunday Sitdown with Wille Geist 2022). This is another role in the persona’s conflicted masculinity: the befuddled grateful star, the self-destructive brilliant adman, and the comic performances of soft masculinity, failing masculinity, macho hard masculinity and toxic masculinity. The various masculinities in Hamm’s persona are unified by self-reflection, a looking inward and looking backward, even if this looking ends with reinforcing dominant gender norms as Top Gun: Maverick does.

Conclusion

This article provides one model for how celebrity personae change and adapt after iconic roles, particularly ones as politically and socially charged as Don Draper. Hamm’s persona also traces discussions of hegemonic masculinity in media texts that portray masculinity as self-aware, progressive, and invested in historical reflection that eschews the past. These texts tend to focus on the ideological historical arc of older or retrograde forms of masculinity. Setting his roles and appearances in cultural context, I’ve argued that his persona narrative repeatedly questions hegemonic masculinity in a variety of ways. His roles tend to be masculinities that are vulnerable, embarrassing, unsexy, unachievable, illusory, and unsustainable, and these sit in the topography of popular debates around masculinity.

Building and deconstructing various masculinities, Hamm’s persona is engaged with the meta-commentary on the historical trajectory of hegemonic masculinity that figures prominently in contemporary popular culture and popular memory. These performances happen at a ‘rich’ moment in American masculinity’s history marked by a swing to the far right and with a splintering of definitions and labels. Various masculinities appear across Hamm’s filmography that identify the labour of retrospection as central to definitions of masculinity in contemporary debate: Were things better in the past? How can we restore the past? Are we moving backwards? Why didn’t I recognise sexism and racism back then when I saw it? Did I do something wrong? Am I sorry? Mad Men itself encouraged historical reflection upon the past as an avenue for studying the present and its might-be future. As a collection of performances across different media, on-screen and off, post-Mad Men Hamm invites a sometimes ludic, sometimes dark reckoning with the gendered past.

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Alex Bevan

Alex Bevan is a Senior Lecturer in at the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. Her book, The Aesthetics of Nostalgic TV studies the aesthetic politics and creative process behind the television production design and art direction of nostalgic programs. Her areas of expertise are representations of space, gender violence, and television history. She publishes in Convergence, Cinema Journal, Adaptation and Feminist Media Studies, among others.