"The Executive’s Death"

The opening title sequence of Mad Men features a business executive—that is, a man in a business suit carrying a briefcase—falling from a height, past skyscrapers and billboards. The executive is presumably Don Draper (the main character), though it could apply to a range of men at Sterling Cooper.

This image reminds me of one of Bly's early, and most compelling, poems. “The Executive's Death” was written in the same time period that Mad Men takes place. In his poem, Bly addresses some of the same issues that the show does. The act of falling is a key ingredient in the poem; in Bly’s piece, the executive dies.

Here is a portion of the poem:

Merchants have multiplied more than the stars of heaven.
Half the population are like the long grasshoppers
That sleep in the bushes in the cool of the day;
The sound of their wings is heard at noon, muffled, near the earth.
The crane handler dies; the taxi driver dies, slumped over
In his taxi. Meanwhile high in the air an executive
Walks on cool floors, and suddenly falls.
Dying, he dreams he is lost in a snowbound mountain
On which he crashed, carried at night by great machines.
As he lies on the wintry slope, cut off and dying,
A pine stump talks to him of Goethe and Jesus ...

- The Light Around the Body (Harper & Row: New York, 1967), pg. 3.