**YES. THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS! AND MAGICAL THINKING!**
By Lani
First there’s the whole business of his birthday. In the pilot episode (March 1960), he says he just turned 26, but no one gives him a belated birthday card or throws him a party, so I am assuming he means ‘just’ in a relative sense. His birthday could have been a few months before, in say, December or January... making him a Capricorn.
Capricorns! The Other Chosen People!
Speculations aside, what makes me really convinced that Pete is a Capricorn is Hazel Dixon-Cooper’s Born on a Rotten Day, which I purchase on sale at 15 (the peak of my magical thinking). The chapter on Capricorns reads like a character sketch of all of Pete’s worst traits. To Pete, Mad Men might was well be retitled Pete & Pete (where the second Pete is Pete’s ego, rather than his id as in The Adventures of Pete & Pete). In his mind everything is about Pete and Pete’s slow, bumpy, arduous climb to the top of the socioeconomic mountain. Capricorns are represented by the goat, and every goat wants to be the king of his mountain.
Where as to Don, the whole world looks like one giant whorehouse.
From the first episode we see Pete wants to pretty much Single/White/Female Don’s life away from him, while still looking to Don as a mentor and pseudo-father figure. He’s getting the pretty, rich wife, and he sets out to find himself a mistress and settles upon the naive, new secretary, Peggy. He woos her with sweet-nothings like:
Every Capricorn loves to recite the tale of how he pulled himself up by his bootstraps to get to the position he’s in now. Pete, however, can’t really do that, he’s an well-educated, upper-class WASP. And his mother’s family, the Dyckman’s, just owned Upper Manhattan before the stock-market crash. He mostly just resembles a J.D Salinger (Capricorn, born Jan. 1st) character.
No, we just think you're a phony.
This drive to reach the top is what pits him against Don, who the unofficial head of Sterling Cooper. I go on step further, that Pete attempts to blackmail Don out of jealousy; Don has the “bootstrap” story that Pete longs for. Pete also runs to Bert out of a sense of duty, he thinks he’s doing what’s right. But just as Dixon-Cooper paints it, Pete comes across as “pompous, domineering, social-climber waving Robert’s Rules of Order.”
I want your neck/I want the seat that you sit at /I want your cheque
Pete’s other rival around the Sterling Cooper offices is the fun-loving playboy, Kenny Cosgrove. In season three, under the new British management, both Pete and Kenny are up for the ‘Head of Accounts’ position. Of course, Pete wants the job so god damn bad he can hardly contain himself. Both he and Kenny are given the job, in a twist of weird British mind-play. Then a few episodes later, Pete is demoted, and Kenny, who once tackled a secretary to see what color her panties were, secures the promotion. Kenny is Pete’s foil and most annoying adversary, because Kenny has the ability to treat work “like its the most fun he’s ever had,” which how you gaslight a Capricorn according to Dixon-Cooper.
HAHA! Buisness!
After Pete is demoted, he sulks the rest of the season. He’s frustrated and confesses to Harry: “I have no future here.” This invokes in Pete a kind of flippancy that we haven’t seen in him since he refused to go to the adoption agency with Trudy, losing him the Clearasil account his father-in-law got for him. This time Pete refuses to go to Margaret Sterling’s wedding, held the day after the Kennedy assassination. "It's all just business!"
I look for the news, somebody to abuse/ I look at myself, but its so chancy
/I see things that I don't fancy
Speaking of Pete and Trudy, they seem closer don’t they? Going out and dancing the Charleston together? Fucking adorable. But something still seems off. One would assume they are not doing it on the reg. The second Trudy leaves more than a few hours, Pete goes searching for somewhere to stick his dick and ends up
Cause you'd go silly if she's willing/ Trying so hard to be like the big boys.
Though, I can’t blame Trudy. I wouldn’t want to sleep with a guy who never told me he loved me either. Sure Pete’s got close to saying the three little words, but he never gets it quite right. This is typical Capricorn behavior according to Dixon-Cooper too, “he may forget himself and choke out an, ‘I love you.’ Even if he marries you, he probably won’t say it again. He will figure that if he made it legal and allowed you to... stay home and wait on him, that’s proof enough.” The bad news for Trudy, is that Dixon-Cooper also says that Capricorns often marry for life.
She's your baby now/You can't keep her
Pete leads a life of “do as I say, not as a I do” which Dixon-Cooper calls the motto of the Capricorn male. He expects “loyalty and blind devotion” and so far Trudy’s been more than happy to give just that. She shows up with sandwiches and wears nice dresses to the Christmas Party and all around looks the part of the perfect wife. But honestly, honestly, I can’t wait to see her undoing.
ATTN: 'Chop chop, Joey!' is the new 'Hells Bells, Trudy!'
As clueless as Pete is to Trudy’s pain (which is probably just lots of boredom) he’s even more clueless to any of Peggy’s suffering. (To be fair, for a long time Peggy herself was oblivious to Peggy’s suffering). But at the end of season two when she and Pete have that little chit-chat and he’s all like, “You have it so easy!” To which we all responded: WAT?! Are you high Pete? ... No, he’s just being a Capricorn again, “He’s condescending and completely oblivious to anyone's feelings but his own.”
She's no angel/He's no saint/
They're all covered up in white wash and grease paint
Pete is the “oppressed white man” because the only problems he can sympathise with or even see are his own. He can’t see that Peggy has infinitely more problems as the only woman copywriter at a huge advertising agency. He was just as oblivious to her pregnancy as she was and he doesn’t realize the repercussions of the situations effect on Peggy. When he cries, all I see in his tears are: Why can’t the good things all come at once? Why couldn’t my baby come out of my own wife?
Accidents will happen/ We only hit & run/
I don't want to hear it cause/I know what I've done
And as much as Pete says he loves Peggy and thinks she’s perfect, I don’t buy it. At least not fully. Pete is too much about Pete. He’s too worried about his own bag to even stop to thinking about carrying someone else’s. Pete tells Peggy this partially because deep down, he really does mean it. Capricorns have a tendency to deny themselves emotions, to channel them all inwardly. There’s so much intensity between Pete and Peggy because Pete is unable to express his emotions. (Let’s face it, Peggy and the rest of the characters are pretty unable to express their feelings too. Mad Men takes place in the ‘Swinging 60s’, but emotionally it’s characters are stuck in the Repressed 50s).
See that girl/Watch that scene/ NOT digging the dancing queen.
Pete’s other motivation for confessing his undying love to Peggy, I believe, is to pacify another coworker that he views as a rival. Pete is intimidated by Peggy. (He turns her off in the one moment where she’s feeling free to express herself as a woman--when she’s doing the twist. And what does she get? “I don’t like you like this.”) She’s a woman with power, not just as a creative, talented copywriter either. She has the power to black mail Pete the way he tried to black mail Don. And, if she was less naive, living in the present day, she probably would have blackmailed him--or at least sued him for sexual harassment.
Despite, or maybe because of all his baggage and flaws, Pete Campbell continues to be one of the best written characters on TV. Whether or not he’s Mad Men’s villain is up for debate, but he does utter the basic-cable show’s only, “fuck you.” The greatest thing Matthew Wiener achieves on Mad Men is commenting on today's society by using the past. Pete Campbell is the archetypal "that guy." That guy who's always has a smirk on his face. That guy that brags about his great-grandfather to impress people. That guy who is oblivious to everyone else and to the fact that no one really likes him. Pete Campbell is a proto-bro of sorts, the worst kind of bro: the kind of bro that has no bros, bro! And Vincent Kartheiser portrays Pete so well, that it disgusts and reviles (Kartheiser himself is pretty fucking weird too). I will watch the show, until Pete is the headcheese of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. And I will relate to him on a closer level than most, because, I too am a Capricorn.
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