Meet Betty.
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INSIDE
BOOK CONTRIBUTORS
Alex Balk, Smoker
Carol Diehl, Art Critic
Matthew Gallaway , Novelist
Megan Lubaszka, Architect
Angela Serratore, Historian
Tim Siedell, Ad Man
Natasha Simons, Writer
Christina Perry & Derrick Gee, Designers
Dave Wilkie, Ad Man
PALS
September 20, 2010
August 26, 2010
A Freudian Analysis of Ms. Sally Draper
I’m going to wager that when Sally reaches sexual maturity there’s a good chance that she’s going to equate getting slapped around, debased, or humiliated with sexual pleasure.
This is thanks, in part, to Betty’s thwack across young Sally’s face post her slumber party diddle. Also keep in mind that Betty was in her night gown and noticeably flushed from some carnal interactions with her new husband (and Sally’s replacement dad) when she struck Sally. Then in Sally’s bedroom, in the dark, with Sally on the bed coming up to about Betty’s mid section, Betty berates Sally for her solo act and then goes back into the bedroom where Sally’s dad, Don, used to sleep.
So let’s parse this family romance via some primary text by Freud
ON DON AND SALLY AND BETTY
*The little girl is affectionately fixated on the father, who has probably done everything to win her love, and who is thus sowing the seeds of hatred and competition towards the mother, which co-exists with a current of affectionate devotions, and which may have the option of becoming increasingly strong and more clearly conscious, or else provide the impetus for an immoderate reactive bond of love with her.
ON THE GLENN, SALLY, BETTY TRIANGLE
*At about the period I have mentioned (6-8 years old), then, the child’s imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who as a rule, are of higher social standing…The technique used in developing fantasies depend on the ingenuity and the material which the child has at his disposal.
WATCH OUT, BABY GENE
*The loss of the parent’s devoted care, either actually experienced or justly feared the sense that all of one’s possessions will henceforth and for ever have to be shared with the new child, have an awakening effect on the child’s emotional life and its ability to think. The older child manifests unconcealed hostility towards its competitor, expressed in unkind judgements about the newcomer, in the desire that ‘the stork can take him away again’ and the like, and sometimes even in minor attacks on the baby as it lies helplessly in the cradle.
SALLY’S GOING TO HAVE A PUERTO RICAN BOYFRIEND/GIRLFRIEND
*The mother is the subject of the most sexual curiosity… The motive of revenge and retaliation it is, as rule, precisely these neurotic children who were punished by their parents for sexual naughtiness and who now revenge themselves on their parents by means of fantasies of this kind.
If we were consulting Freud, then it’s likely that Sally’s sexual maturity will be delayed or diverted —even perverted- due to Betty’s violent interruption, the arrival of the new baby, Don’s departure, and the delinquent influences of Glenn. Arousal, risk, guilt, shame, pain, abandonment, humiliation at the hands of a fearsome matriarch, Sally or her shrink are going to have sort these things out.
Nevertheless, this is the task put to us all during puberty overcome our childhood sexual traumas and become functioning adults:
*The liberation of individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents s one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that liberation should occur and it maybe presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their having failed in this task.
July 24, 2010
If you are throwing a Mad Men viewing party for the Most Important Night of our Eyes and Soul, you should be asking yourself one question:
WHAT WOULD EMILY POST DO?*
Well, fortunately, the lovely ladies at the Emily Post institute have planned out a whole party for you. Including your manners:
First of all, a hostess must show each of her guests equal and impartial attention. Engrossed in the person she is talking to, she must be able to notice anything amiss that may occur. No matter what goes wrong she must cover it as best as she may, and at the same time cover the fact that she is covering it. To give hectic directions merely accentuates the awkwardness.
Click for more Postian insight! It’s truly lovely.
*Additional questions you can ask yourself: is there anything that could protect these characters from the throes of history? Would Ken Cosgrove make a good boyfriend? If the show depicts the chaotic transition from the Eisenhower era to the counter culture revolution of the 1960’s, what transitional moment are we in? Where is Paul Kinsey?!
June 15, 2010
Here’s a gorgeous clip of Blue Room sung by Perry Cumo.
Over living room cocktails this tune comes on the radio and Betty recalls how much she loved the song in high school, then tries to coax Don into dancing. Don smirks and says Cumo “makes everything sound like Christmas.”
But then he relents, takes Betty’s hand, and serriptiously grabs her ass.
Ah, afternoons with Don!
June 9, 2010
While reeling from the Kennedy killing Betty witnesses the on-camera murder of Harvey Lee Oswald and now, she is onthe verge.
Frantic, she turns to Don hoping some one can make sense of what she just saw or at least share in her despair. No use, Don seems unfazed. He and can only offer her some vague stoicism. Betty’s out the door! She drives to see her boyfriend, the Snug Like a Daddy’s hug Harry Francis. He can’t make sense of it either. Betty says doesn’t know what to do. Maybe see a movie? She tells Francis her favorite movie is ‘Singing in the Rain’
Oh, Betty! What’s there not to love about ‘Singing the Rain’? While Don’s at the art house taking in those mopey black and whites, there’s Betty watching Gene Kelly splash around on MGM lot. I love it!
Kelly, Kelly, Kelly. Look at him. He was a different kind of leading man/dancer than Fred Astaire. Kelly was more adventurous and athethetlic; Brawnier, even. As David film Oracle Thomson put it, ‘As a dancer he is not equal of Astaire. Kelly is balletic, Romantic, and sometimes mannered as a dancer who thinks and feels, where Astaire is a man who dances before he thinks.”
But like all great men, there’s a darkness to Kelly. For me, and for Thomson there is a creeping chill Kelly’s performances (perhaps that’s why he was less successful as a straight leading man). There’s a nascent aggression Kelly that gets blown up on the screen. You can also hear it in his singing voice which was always just a bit strained.
Thomspson wrote of it: “Too often, Kelly’s teeth glared out at us, as the filling for a smile.’
The title song, and the best number in the movie, is set at night; Kelly is alone, for the most part, doing what you would expect. He is impervious to the elements because of his cheerful mood. Beyond the intricacy of the dance, perhaps one of the reasons why that scene is so indelible is because it’s what so many Americans, like Betty, wanted from the movies: a quick respite from the hard rain falling outside, alone, in the dark.
December 4, 2009
Servants!
What an emotionally fraught and ambiguous place they hold in American life! Once the Victorian live-in maid was replaced by the once-a-week cleaning girl of the 1950’s things got even more complicated.
Consider Carla’s role in the Draper household.
Betty never refers to her as a nanny — but as a housekeeper. Not that Betty carries any maternal burden about it, after all, she was raised with a live-in nanny and turned out just fine. She’s just being historically accurate about the role of The Help. Betty, as was common, had no consternation about what bond or influnce Carla was building with the children. Even though Carla just came by in the afternoons, it was she who stepped in multiple times to serve surrogate mother to Sally and Bobby when Betty was striken with (rightly filled) parania and melancholy about Don.
It is Carla who enables Betty is able to 6 ‘divorcation’ in Reno. “To make an omelette you need not only broken eggs ” Joan Didion wrote in her essay on the Women’s Movement, “but someone ‘oppressed’ to break them.” Though she may be one of the unintentional forbearers of the Woman’s movement, it would have been impossible for a woman like Betty leap into emancipation if she didn’t have Carla’s back to do it off of.
The nanny-mommy relationship would grow increasingly tense as black women, after centuries of servitude, were leaving domestic work en masse during the late Sixties.
Luckily for Betty —and Henry Francis— that’s still years away.
December 3, 2009
Given her modeling background, it’s no wonder Betty is big on appearances. Before modeling was a awash with coke-addled tanoerxic teenagers it was industry for ‘nice girls’. Plucky, pretty young ladies who wanted swish around department stores, a local 4H club, and even a small run way show for the newest manufactured styles. If you were lucky enough to be immortalized in advertisement, say for a national soda pop brand, There were some guidelines outlined by a 1958 modeling pamphlet:
What to include in your model-bag:
- half slip
- strapless bra
- dress shields
- extra hose (seamless) black opera pumps
- clean, short white gloves (fabric and string)
- strand of pearls
- pearl choker
- two pairs of earrings
(plain pearl and simple gold) - clean comb, spray net
- scarf to protect hair
Further, the pamphlet echoes Betty’s philosophy that “You’re painting a masterpiece; be sure and hide the strokes.”:
’ Beautiful models and beautiful diamonds are not unlike. Both evolve by perfecting each and every facet so that the whole product or being will shine with brilliance. By giving all the phases of modeling the attention they deserve, you’ll polish every facet of the diamond - and the diamond is, of course, you!’
You better work, Betts!
November 30, 2009
One of the things Don actually admits to, under extreme interrogation by Bobby and extreme alcohol intake, is he likes the movie La Notte! Well, what a svelte cineaste Don is. Notte was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Story of a Love Affair, Blow-Up), it stars a personal favorite actor, and Draper-esque prototype, the above pictured Marcello Mastroianni.
Have you ever read James Joyce’s The Dead? Imagine that, but way more Italian. There’s a focus on memory and the resurgence of the past, on intangible relationships, on wandering through life like sleepwalkers, half alive, half dead. (But keeping with the Italian thing, there’s also some DANCING.) It’s about a man and his wife who engage in flirtations and affairs until the end, when she wakes up one morning and tells him she doesn’t love him anymore. Hmmmmm.
There’s a big party scene where Giovanni, the husband, socializes and gladhands while his wife lingers on the edges of things, there as a trophy, lonely in a crowd of people. The similarity should strike you pretty quickly if you recall Don and Betty at the Kentucky Derby party. It doesn’t end there. Giovanni is a restrained man-child, someone who has everything he could want but can’t manage to connect to the happiness those trappings ostensibly entail. His indecisiveness, his recklessness, and his creative frustration (he is a writer) remind us of our own leading man.
P.S.! As a film history side note, are you interested in why Don loves foreign film so much? Well, I’ll tell you! The educated consumer, middle class, with tendencies toward art, totally gave up on American cinema around the 50s and into the 60s. In short, this is because American 50’s cinema sucked. Badly. It was all gimmicks and wide screen and teenage idols like James Dean romping around — not serious enough for a man of Don’s taste. This is when imports took off, and in particular, Italian cinema boomed. The neo-realist movement, referred to by some as “male weepies”, really got an American audience interested. The French Nouvelle Vague and the British working class “Kitchen Sink” movement was also right around this time, and provided a foreign escape route from the American chaff of the day.
• footnote - by Natasha Simons
November 29, 2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Mad Men Playlist: the haunting theme music from season three, episode five, “The Fog”. This is played during Betty’s surreal dream sequences — to complement the surrealism, this track is a Spanish one! From the Sex and Lucia soundtrack, composed by Alberto Iglesias, it is called Me Voy a Morir de Tanto Amor (I am going to die of too much love). Enjoy these late night jams.
November 27, 2009
Something that caused a bit of a ripple when it occurred in the season 3 premiere was Betty’s dropping the word “lesbian” in relation to little Sally. She tells Don when he returns from his adventure in Baltimore that Sally ‘has taken to his tools like a little lesbian’.
Was the use of this word at all common in those days? Well, taking into account Betty’s background at Bryn Mawr, one of the Seven Sisters rather known for its lesbian proclivities, she probably has some experience knowing lesbians. From this, her rather un-demure comment to Don comes from this background: Betty feels she has the authority to say this, whereas Don doesn’t know as much about it. If you notice, in these areas, Betty grows more decisive and stronger in voice, in this instance and a few others (when she orders food, for example).
As for the use of the word, it isn’t at all unbelievable that it would be flying around at this point.
From commenter Luna in this post:
“Between 1955 and 1969 over 2,000 books were published using lesbianism as a topic, and they were sold in corner drugstores, train stations, bus stops, and newsstands all over the U.S. and Canada. However Most were written by, and almost all were marketed to heterosexual men. Coded words and images were used on the covers. Instead of “lesbian”, terms such as “strange”, “twilight”, “queer”, and “third sex”, were used in the titles, and cover art was invariably salacious.”
Apparently “lezzie” was also the preferred insult, so perhaps Betty was being kind by using the full word?
• footnote - by Natasha Simons
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