Studiously Uncool (3)

Ladies Room
This episode will end with a modern song called "the Great Divide" by the Cardigans instead of some vintage selection. Is this the only time this happens? It might be. In any case, it tells us that this episode ended up somewhere it shouldn't have gone. A show whose strength is getting the style right, should not use music that doesn't fit.

And Matt Weiner has no one to blame but himself that it does. He wrote it.

The title is obviously intended to recall Marilyn French's novel The Women's Room. That novel begins, "Mira was hiding in the ladies room." Getting out of the ladies room into the women's room is her first big step into freedom; this thanks to someone has crossed out the word "ladies" in "Ladies Room" and replaced it with "Women's Room." This change is meant to indicate her becoming aware of a change in attitude brought about by the women's movement.

By calling the episode "Ladies Room" we are meant to understand that this show will give us a picture of what things were like before things changed. And therein lies the problem because although the series creators have no problem creating male characters from this era who are admirable and worthy of emulation, they clearly do not want to create any such female characters.

The other problem with taking this particular ideological approach is that it requires the creators to portray Betty Draper as a victim rather than as a independent human being. She must be molded to fit the  Betty Friedan view  that smart college girls who became housewives were being smothered in meaningless lives.

The result isn't a ghastly mistake like the Salvatore Romano character. It's more of a slow moving failure. You just can't like Betty Draper. We're supposed to pity her but we end up laughing at her for being such a feeb.

Caesar Salad
Some restaurants like the one in the opening scene were barely hanging on when I was entering my teens. It was  great to be able to go in with an aged relative and squint and try to imagine what they looked like in the glory days, before the read leather upholstery stared to tear. (I wonder if anyone makes their caesar salad with a raw egg anymore; I wouldn't think the nanny state that New York has become would allow it anymore.)

The style, as always, is pitch perfect here. So are the lame jokes but the conversation about the nannies and "Play Groups" is all post 1980s.

The key development in this scene, however, is that Betty has some sort of problem with her hands that make her unable to put on her lipstick. In her very first substantial appearance, Betty is helpless and insecure.

That mood continues on the car drive home.

At home, Betty asks Don about his childhood and he is evasive.

 After he has gone to sleep, she leans over and says, "Who is in there?" Again, that sounds like something a post-feminist woman brought up on the notion that men keep everything bottled up and can't express their feelings would say. This is sheer laziness, not character development.

Right Guard
There are a few subplots running here but the only one that need concern us here is the need to come up with a campaign to sell Right Guard antiperspirant. It's relevant because, as Don observes, women buy the stuff for men, and so it raises the question, "What do women want?"


Okay, it's a lame old question bound to lead to all sexist nonsense but that is exactly why Matt Weiner wants it to come up.

I laid a divorcée in New York City
And so we find ourselves in the Draper household where Betty's good friend Francine who is the "Millie" to her Laura Petrie". She is trying to convince Betty to stand for the PTA. In the course of this, she mentions that a divorced woman is moving in to the neighbourhood. It was apparently too obvious to have an entire orchestra play an ominous sounding minor chord in the background at this announcement. That was the only cliché too obvious, however. The mixture of forbidden sexuality and stigma associated with this character from here on is really over the top.

Playing spaceman
In the middle of this conversation, we get a quick dose of this series at its very worst. A big part of the problem is, as Benjamin Schwarz has accurately noted, that it falls over itself flattering people who watch the show now. So, for example, because plastic bags now all come with warnings to to let children and pets play with them as they are a "suffocation hazard" and  bags back then did not, we are supposed to believe that when Sally comes in with a dry-cleaning bag over her head that Betty will not see any problem with this.

A bit of autobiography here. I was three years old in 1962. My parents were a few years younger than Don and Betty Draper are supposed to be. My mother was very aware on the threat plastic bags presented as were all other mothers in our neighbourhood. You could argue that it's parents today who are so stupid that they need warning printed on things. That is if we didn't know that the warning is there because of fear of lawsuits. It wouldn't have been hard for Matt Weiner to have researched this point.

But he doesn't want to know. He wants to print the legend so we get an idea of just how unenlightened people were "back then".

Whether he realizes this or not, the primary effect of this is to make Betty Draper look like a ditz.

She wrecked the car and she was sad; And so afraid that I'd be mad, but what the heck
 And if that doesn't make her seem like a ditz, how about wrecking the car? Betty is driving and her hands start to freeze up. She has the kids in the car with her and is letting Bobby climb all over the seats.

Her response? She becomes totally self absorbed. She is going twenty-five miles an hour on a quiet residential street! The brake pedal still works and her hands are hardly preventing her from using it. Instead she helplessly stares at her hands until she has an accident.

She is rapidly becoming one of those people "that things happen to" in our minds. It's increasingly less clear that she has any personality or brains of her own.

The camera cuts to New York long enough to establish that Don is in bed with Midge and therefore unable to come rushing home at this time of emergency. Problem is that both Don and Midge are captivating, interesting people and not feebs like Betty is. All this scene does is make us sympathetic to Don for cheating on her.

A fate worse than death
But Don does come home to a stupid discussion about whether Betty should see a psychiatrist. This scene must have been intended to show us how backwards Don is not to see the glories of modern psychiatric medicine or something. All it does is to show us that for Betty, everything is about her.

It gets worse when the next night rolls around and Betty spends her dinner conversation not trying to convince Don to let her go to a psychiatrist but manipulating him to let her to go. Her trump card is that she thinks Sally has a bruise on her face and that got her thinking that it might have been worse. It might have been a scar.

Betty Draper says that a permanent scar on a girl's face would be worse than dying!

And this is the woman whom we will soon find out is supposed to have gone to Bryn Mawr. Quite frankly the college should sue the show for giving the impression that anyone this ditzy ever got into Bryn Mawr never mind graduated from the place.

Don, meanwhile, is establishing his Neanderthal credentials by trying to get Betty over it by buying her jewellery.

 Some time later he takes Betty to the psychiatrist and, while she is with him, he goes to see Midge.

And then he takes Betty to dinner, drives her home and, this is the part that is really supposed to be powerful, calls the psychiatrist who violates Betty's privacy by discussing her case with Don as if she were a child not a wife.

Did such things ever happen? I have no idea. Probably. But we're not doing social history here. The series is too sloppy with the facts to do any kind of history credibly in any case. The problem here is that all this feministically correct stuff has made Betty Draper an unattractive character.

On the other side of the equation, neither Don Draper nor Roger Sterling are convincing as the chauvinist boors they are supposed to be. At one point, Don asks Roger what women want and he says "Who cares." This, of course, is the punch line from an anti-feminist joke from the 1980s (the opening was, "How do tell if a woman has really had an orgasm?") and we are supposed to catch that echo. But it isn't like Roger. He does care. We may not like the way he cares, but care he does.

And Don isn't a guy to treat his wife like a child either.

Both have all sorts of other negative qualities but these ones don't fit them.

Part of the reason for this is that both are individuals and are not boxed in by being made to represent typical characters of the era nor are they intended to justify feminist ideology. As Fitzgerald says, "Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing." And that's Betty Draper, an attempt to create a type that ends up as a big nothing. And we hold her responsible for what she has become, not the men around her.

Yes, it would have helped had they found a better actress to play her. January Jones is a very convincing ex-model because that only requires posing;  anything else is beyond her. But even a real actress wouldn't have helped enough.

Looking around the web I see that a lot of people hate her and that a few have set themselves up to defend her. They don't need to defend her though; they defend the ideology her "type" is supposed to justify.

Look, let's suppose that the fact that women were oppressed really was entirely men's fault. If that were the case, what could women do about it? Because if we did it, what is to prevent us from doing it again? Any feminism worth its salt has to accept that women bear some responsibility for their plight.

And it has to be more responsibility than just having failed to realize what they wanted and failed in having made it clear to men what they wanted. If your freedom is dependent on others, you aren't free. A credible Betty Draper has to be a Betty Draper who is somewhat responsible for her plight. This one isn't.

Naturally enough, our sympathy transferred to Joan Holloway and Peggy Olson rather than this ditz—sorry but it's what she is.

And Betty is a mirror image of Pete Campbell. Campbell likes to think of himself as a calculating Machiavellian but keeps being reminded that he s really soft at the centre. Betty Draper comes across as soft and vulnerable. Until you know her (and she apparently does not know herself) and it becomes obvious that this woman is a self-absorbed, cruel, calculating, manipulative boor.

She doesn't just look like Princess Grace.

If you are joining me here, this series starts here.

The next post in the series is here.