Mad Men, page 27
When Henry arrives home, he asks Betty if she has eaten, and looking at Bobby, who picks over his dinner, she says, “I’m not hungry. I was hungry, but now I’m not.” The poor boy bears the brunt of the psychological battering, never looking up from his meatloaf and rice. He twirls his fork through the food, suffering every moment under Betty’s glare and coldness.
After Henry attempts to console Bobby, he asks Betty what happened. She says, “It was a perfect day and he ruined it.” But then she asks Henry if he thinks she is a “good mother,” clearly questioning her earlier conversation with Francine and whether children are the “reward.” If she believes her own rhetoric, then she must feel dissatisfied with her day with her older son. The question hangs in the air as her youngest child, Gene, clings to her bosom and sleeps. If Betty doubts the idea, then her whole world is probably spinning off-kilter. Too old to be a flower child and feeling out of her league with the women’s liberation movement, females in Betty’s generation learned to equate success with motherhood and marriage. In her eyes, she must view her marriage to Don as a failure, even if just subconsciously. Thus, the children hang in the balance—society’s self-worth scale for Betty and others like her that most likely scares her to death.
Betty and the American Century
The word “sheltered” holds many connotations. When applied to the “typical” 1960s housewife, like Betty, it can mean anything from being deliberately ignorant of events taking place to occupying a secondary status to one’s husband, who demands control of the household. She seems like the kind of person that men completely underappreciated because of her looks, thereby forcing her to endure a lifetime of “Oh, honey, you don’t need to worry your pretty little head about that.”
Breaking from this role took courage for women of Betty’s generation (which those viewers who vilified the character should reconsider). While Henry treats Betty so much better than Don did, neither man is a surrogate for her empowerment as an individual. In fact, one could argue that she was a trophy wife for both: arm candy that fulfilled Don’s desire for a beautiful wife to match his handsomeness and the photogenic, educated supporter that would help Henry in his political pursuits, particularly within the housewife/mother demographic.
Betty’s response to Don marrying a much-younger, hip wife is to rebel against her own pretty girl image and privileged youth. Weiner explains, “When her ex-husband, whom she rejected, married a woman 10 years younger than her, that was a crushing blow to her self-esteem” (qtd. in Trachta 2013). As the world around her shifted mightily in the 1960s, Betty responded with her own version of a sit-down strike via a significant weight gain. Consciously or not, she destroyed the beautiful blond bombshell version of herself. Eventually the thrill of the negative attention she receives wears off, though, and she returns to her beautiful shell. Betty does not really understand how to function outside of her flirty blond bombshell persona, so her overweight days are quickly forgotten as she returns to what she knows well.
Since Betty really cannot count on either of her husbands to support her growth, she learns from (often odd) outside sources. Since she uses her sexuality in many of these instances, there is also an accompanying tension. In the premiere of Season 2, Episode 2.1 (“For Those Who Think Young”), viewers get the full Betty experience. Early in the action, she flirts with misguided, burgeoning equestrian Arthur, a much younger, engaged man. Later in the episode, there is a stranger interaction with a rugged mechanic who stops to help Betty when her car breaks down. Almost throwing herself at him but in a coy fashion, she flirts to get his attention and a discount, since she does not have enough cash to cover the bill. In a moment of seeming clarity, but tinged with a notion of “what if,” Betty hands the man the money and he holds onto her hand for several long moments. The gesture seems like an unspoken acknowledgment of what could happen sexually, as well as his understanding of how she used her good looks to her advantage.
Another strange talisman for Betty is Glen Bishop, who we first meet as a neighborhood child, the son of her friend Helen, and then as one of Sally’s confidants. Even as a little boy, Glen possesses special insight about Betty and her needs. The oddity of their partnership is solidified right away in Episode 1.4 (“New Amsterdam”) when the boy asks for a lock of Betty’s hair, which she gives him. Helen discovers the token, which leads to a physical confrontation at the grocery store, when Betty slaps Helen (Episode 1.7, “Red in the Face”). Much of the series, he also has strange relationships with Sally, sometimes acting like an erstwhile boyfriend and others like a big brother. He pivots between trying to impress her and giving her advice for dealing with her disinterested parents.
When Glen appears as an eighteen-year-old young man in Episode 7.10 (“The Forecast”), he forces a confrontation between Sally and Betty as each yearns for his attention. Yet, in the end, it is Betty that the much younger man wants. On his second appearance darkening the Francis door, Betty lets him in, but only so far. Glen pushes and attempts a physical closeness, which causes viewers to experience a moment of “will she or won’t she.” Betty, however, is not Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate. Glen becomes another in a long line of men that Betty draws in and then ultimately rejects.
Instead of skyrockets in flight and afternoon delight, Glen confesses to Betty that he is going to Vietnam, not out of bravery or bravado, as he intonated earlier in front of Sally and his girlfriend, but because he flunked out of college. The flash that spans the potential horrors and possible death that Glen may face is too much for Betty to accept, particularly losing her confidant in such a grisly fashion. Like a person who rethinks her own racism by actually engaging with someone outside her ethnicity, Glen’s precarious situation brings all of Vietnam home to Betty. What she sees on television and hears about the war is suddenly personalized.
The interesting question is why viewers cut Betty so little slack for the accurate portrayal of the difficult life of stay-at-home mothers/wives in the 1960s. She is shackled in so many ways. Early in the show, she is stuck with a cheating husband and raising her children; later, she is still childrearing and wound tightly to Henry’s aspirations, but hardly an equal partner like many political couples would publicly enjoy several decades later. Betty’s job—what she trained for her whole life—is to be a trophy wife. She did as she was told by her own female role models and followed the path they devised for her. Yet, she lived up to society’s expectations and found the result lacking.
Unlike the career women on Mad Men, Betty has no independent agency except in exchanging one handsome, wealthy, powerful husband for another. She is not young and aggressive, like Peggy, or a kind of win-at-all-costs striver like Joan. Her path should have been the most recognizable to many Mad Men viewers, which may have elicited some sympathy, but instead she never found solid ground with audiences. Show regulars and critics followed as her life unfolded, but never gave her the benefit of the doubt for acting like a woman of her age, which they seemed to do for just about every other character on the show.
Because Betty’s storyline drew so much condemnation (arguably at the center of most of the criticism related to the show), Weiner’s killing her off at the end seemed either contrived or cruel. Writer Sarah Seltzer explains, “Weiner is killing off Betty to remind us that we care about her, despite all the hate, to prove that we’ve connected with her . . . but what a manipulative thing for the writers to do to the viewers, and to the character. Surely there was a way to make us understand . . . without simply offing her” (2015). One could argue that the insensitivity indicative of the way the character was treated across the series simply continued through to the end, but that does not negate the feeling that Betty Draper (though compelling) could have been better.
Conclusion
Some people think money is our national religion. I think it’s selling, and it’s beautiful, and we do it better than anyone.—Matthew Weiner, 2006
I realized that these people who ran the country were all from these very dark backgrounds, which they had hidden, and that the self-transforming American hero, the Jay Gatsby or the talented Mr. Ripley, still existed.—Matthew Weiner, 2014
Don Draper, 1970. AMC/Photofest ©AMC
Matthew Weiner clearly loves the advertising industry, particularly as it developed over time. He understands the psychological significance of the advertising game and how it helped construct American culture.
Via television, which enabled him to present ninety-two “filmic” episodes, Weiner explored and interrogated advertising’s task as a means of getting at the people who ran the business and lived in the era. The examination then opens the contemporary viewer’s eyes to the current state of advertising and the way daily lives have transformed over the past fifty years.
In a sense, at Mad Men’s core is the chaos of that daily life. Similarly, historian Warren I. Susman spoke of American culture and its multiple dualities as producing “tensions” that “provide both the necessary tensile strength to keep the culture stable and operative and the dynamic force that may ultimately bring about change or complete structural collapse.” These warring factions inherent in Susman’s definition of culture might be most evident in contemporary advertising and its curious grip on the modern world. Few topics exude such intense dichotomies (1984, 288). Mad Men explores these frictions in two ways: by demonstrating the challenges of living in the 1960s and by revealing to the viewer that there is always a large gap between fiction and reality, which is created by the lived past and the re-created historical.
In our modern iteration of advertising, we experience the significance of advertising’s play on life’s tensions. For example, recall the way commercials can bring viewers to tears by exploiting passions on one hand, and then in the very next thirty-second space, be utterly hilarious or completely factual. A spot showing abused puppies and caged kittens in an attempt to solicit donations for an animal shelter may be followed by the randy, middle-aged man playfully interacting with his wife, demonstrating the potency of the latest erectile dysfunction pill. Susman cogently discussed the inherent tensions in contemporary life, which Weiner accentuated on the series.
Mad Men skillfully shows how critical commercials became in the 1960s, not only to pump money into the networks, but in creating programming sponsored by corporate interests. The immediacy of a famous variety show performer directly pitching a product to consumers—looking them right in the face, as if through the screen itself—created a relationship between viewers and sellers of goods and services. One might go so far as to proclaim that the advertising industry—via commercials—taught Americans how to watch television. Susman caught this link, particularly from an emotional viewpoint, explaining that advertisers and their clients could “seize and manipulate all the possible instruments of persuasion the culture provides: symbols, central icons, devices to achieve laughter and those to create tears, rhetorical flourishes of all kinds including the enormously effective use of key words or phrases” (1984, 288).
Mad Men demonstrates how clear-minded (despite the prodigious amounts of alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs consumed) agency leaders were in fulfilling the needs of their corporate clients. Draper and Olson, Mad Men’s dynamic duo, fully understand they are manipulating the viewer’s emotions to sell products or tying a brand to some familiar feeling or impulse.
Weiner does not flinch from presenting the business in this fashion, actually regaling in the creativity, whether it occurs like a bolt out of the blue or by difficult bouts of research and brainstorming. David Strutton and David G. Taylor pick up on Draper’s relevance to the business today and its timelessness, saying, “Prominent behaviors and ideas—particularly those associated with managing creativity, client or prospective client relationships, and leadership decision-making processes within the agency—appear timeless in their relevance and practical significance” (2011, 469). The beauty Weiner mentions in the chapter epigraph is clearly a motivating tenet of Mad Men—one might even conclude that the series is a love story to the advertising industry.
Mad Age
“Mad age” is an apt title for an era that seemed always teetering on the contrasting ideas between reality and illusion. On one hand, for example, American economic prowess in the postwar years gave the nation unprecedented wealth and power. Between 1945 and 1970, gross national product expanded from $212 billion to $900 billion. From this perspective, U.S. corporations created a production and sales juggernaut, despite the occasional weak moment, that every other nation on earth would envy.
Yet, on closer inspection, so much of the nation’s wealth remained in the hands of the lucky few—similar to today’s economic disparity. The lowest 20 percent of the population continued to wallow, if not in abject poverty, at least in a relentless struggle to achieve some semblance of a healthy, productive existence. The illusion of America as a democratic bastion is offset by the realism of people at the bottom of the economic system, futilely clinging to life in an organism gamed against them.
Looking back at the role of the mass media in maintaining an aura of American dominance, Edward P. Morgan explains, “The mass media are capitalist institutions that not only produce our diversionary media culture but help to keep serious discussion of capitalism outside the common ground of mainstream discourse and therefore off the political agenda” (2010, 8). So while we trumpet a free press, that force is determining how we interpret the news and how those engaged with media outlets challenge or defend the status quo. In the sixties, the creation of an “us versus them” mentality regarding race, antiwar activism, and women’s rights essentially deflected people’s attention from the root cause of the antipathy: capitalism’s relentless creation of economic inequality.
This mentality plays a starring role on Mad Men, seeping noisily in to question the traditional family dynamic. At the dining room table—or increasingly in overly lit, high-gloss booths at Burger Chef, as imagined in Peggy and Don’s campaign for the fast-food chain—fathers who fought in World War II and Korea sat in amazement as their sons and daughters renounced the foundational ideas their dads had served to preserve. Morgan points out: “Between a sense of hopeful empowerment and a sense of feeling helpless in the history of the times, ideological backlash against and commercial exploitation of sixties’ social movements were becoming more pronounced” (9). Mad Men makes use of the contradictions between capitalism and democratic values. However, the program usually portrays the divergence in starker personal challenges based on differences between the generations rather than the capitalist system. This makes sense for a dramatic television series, but raises questions about how viewers will interpret the interpretation.
The paradoxes between democracy and capitalism continue to haunt American society today and tightly tie the 1960s to the contemporary world. In the Mad Age, however, this contradiction (although supremely significant) stood as one of many inconsistencies. Even though race relations, antiwar activism, and the battle for women’s rights may have been the primary focus of the mass media to divert people’s attention away from capitalism, these challenges existed and created situations that many people felt were outside the bounds for a democratic society.
From a casual perspective, Mad Men might seem like a love letter to the advertising industry and the corporate world that increasingly came to dominate the cultural landscape. Weiner adorns Sterling Cooper with beautiful and interesting characters. He repeatedly demonstrates Don’s heroism in the business realm, even when his personal life is shattered. This reading focuses on the pretty drapes and not the bones of the series. Assessing the show’s relation to capitalism, one might deduce that Weiner views the corporate world with disdain. According to writer J. M. Tyree, Draper “becomes a cultural metonym for the inherent tolerance embedded in American capitalism but also its cruel utilitarianism—all are welcome to consume and be exploited, to be self-made and self-unmade” (2010, 35). From this view, Don is handsome but full of wickedness that points to the moral and ethical corruption at home in corporate America.
As a history-based series, Mad Men must balance its own incongruities as a depiction of life in the 1960s with its reality as a television program aired in the twenty-first century. As a result, the program worked in the challenges of the 1960s as the characters experienced them as part of the ongoing plot (though critics argued that Weiner might have pushed this notion to explore greater depths). Simultaneously, the characters and action must be presented in a manner that will be supported by corporate advertisers and viewed by audiences. As such, Weiner is a historian re-creating the past, but also an entertainer who must be responsible to the network, production house, and other partners in the studio system, including the actors themselves, who take large risks committing to a new series.
As a form of entertainment, the energy of a television series is that it provides an avenue for enabling audiences to feel that they “know” the characters, thus the fictional pain they experience is more genuine. Even a character as generally disliked as Betty Draper provides ample opportunity for today’s viewers to understand the ennui of the 1960s housewife, trapped by social norms and the economic system.
Alternatively, when she learns that her young confidant Glen Bishop is about to ship out to Vietnam because he flunked out of college and cannot face his stepfather, the look on Betty’s face that reveals the fear that the boy might die does more to convey the horrors of the war in Southeast Asia than scenes of blood and gore (Episode 7.10, “The Forecast”). She is awoken to the potential ending for an enlisted soldier in Vietnam on a personal level, like real-life Americans who might have tacitly supported the nation’s involvement, until the war touched them in their own homes, neighborhoods, or towns.
