If you haven’t seen the episode, feel free to read this. No real spoilers ahead.
As someone who knows a little too much about the subject, I’ve been eagerly awaiting Mad Men’s portrayal of the Kennedy assassination. And when it came, on Sunday night, I thought the episode was beautifully done. But I found myself less intrigued by the portrayal of the event itself than by how the writers used the assassination to advance the one of the show’s main themes: that white, middle-class American women suffered from the feminine mystique in the 1960s, and they weren’t going to take it anymore. In Mad Men’s universe, John Kennedy died Sunday night, but Betty Draper is just starting to live.
The writers have dropped hints throughout the season that the show would address the assassination: the brief shot of Margaret Sterling’s wedding announcement, with its portentous date; the eerie recreation of the Zapruder film with the John Deere accident in episode 6; the frequent references to dates as the episodes moved through 1963, with November always looming in the distance. And, when the event finally came, the show handled it with grace and intelligence. I loved the way that Walter Cronkite came on the television set in the background, with the volume on low, as Peter and Harry discussed office politics, completely oblivious to the news, and the sudden emphasis on TV, as everyone gravitated to sets throughout the episode. Overall, there was the general sense of tragedy, loss, and confusion, especially after Oswald’s murder. “What is going on?” both Don and Betty ask, separately.
But the story of Betty’s gradual awakening was integrated with the narrative of the assassination in a way that brought home to me why so many women like this show. I know a lot of men who despise it; they see a loathsome main character, Don Draper, who lies and cheats on his wife; they see pervasive misogyny, and it makes them feel uncomfortable and depressed.
Many women, though, understand and empathize with how the female characters are objectified and mistreated. But at the same time, we know that, while sexism has hardly disappeared, women have a lot more options and, yes, a lot more power than they did in 1963. As the show moves through the early 1960s, the anger builds, but the opportunities unfold. We know where this story is going, and we like the ending.
16 comments
November 3, 2009 at 4:27 pm
kid bitzer
no real spoilers?!?!
you tell me that kennedy gets assassinated, and you don’t think that’s a spoiler?
fine. no point even watching the 60’s now. whole damned decade is ruined for me now.
November 3, 2009 at 6:22 pm
jacobus
“We know where this story is going, and we like the ending.”
Do you? I mean the plural you. Because everywhere I read about how women are getting less and less happy.
v. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-buckingham/whats-happening-to-womens_b_289511.html
November 3, 2009 at 6:35 pm
andrew
you tell me that kennedy gets assassinated, and you don’t think that’s a spoiler?
Well, she didn’t say who did it.
November 3, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Charlieford
My kids watch Mad Men. One of them listens to Kings of Leon, too. And they seem to think getting a nose ring is pretty radical.
November 3, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Ben Alpers
It will be interesting to see where Betty Draper goes next. It’s at least possible that she’s headed in Henry Francis’s direction…and that’s not exactly emancipation. Here’s hoping that she’s not going to say “no” only to Don.
November 3, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Jason B.
I’m a little interested in watching MM, but I feel like I’m getting more out of watching the cultural response to the show–seeing how people’s preferences are expressed in their interpretations of what happens each week.
It’s breathless!
November 3, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Urk
I love that show, the only thing I watch on TV intentionally besides baseball.
I think that Don does what he’s supposed to for me: I walk a tightrope between liking him and being horrified by him. I’ve spent alot of this season hoping he was really changing. and maybe he is, but too little, too late buddy. His responses to Betty’s reaction to the assassination are all of a piece: take a pill, hide it from the kids, everything will be alright, trust me. Beyond all reason (especially given that he doesn’t deserve it and also doesn’t exist) I want it to work out for him, but there’s no reason for her to put up with that shit.
And, regarding the pervasive misogyny (and in earlier episodes and even a little this season, publicly acceptable racism) that’s the point isn’t it? That the 50s were not “Happy Days”? In the past two years I’ve sometimes advised my students to watch the show to get a (simplified) take on the differences that the sixties made, especially in women’s lives. And I do this because many of them seem to take those differences entirely for granted.
One thing that I’m curious is when or if the show starts dealing with race to anything like the degree it deals with gender (roles.) for these past three seasons, the overbearing whiteness of the milieu, with black characters only in tightly proscribed lower stations, has been exactly right for portraying the world it portrays. But that’s going to change at some point, and I’m curious to see what happens next year.
November 4, 2009 at 1:58 am
dave
I think it’ll have to stop being about the early 60s if you want the racial dynamic to change.
November 4, 2009 at 8:44 am
ME
Are you sure we’re supposed to be horrified by Don Draper? Because I’m pretty sure there’s a sizable contingent of people (based on the comments on the Facebook Mad Men page) who see him as a latter day man’s man . . . Marlon Brando or something. You know, the kind of men that were around back then and aren’t around anymore. And the lying and cheating are part of the “mystique”. Top comment for me right now is, “Don, when Betty kicks you to the curb, I’ll be there; I have experience with lying, cheating scoundrels, but none of them as gorgeous as you!”
November 4, 2009 at 10:21 am
Kathy
That’s why the show is so polarizing. Does it glorify sexism, or does it expose it? I like it because it directly engages gender (and, to a much lesser extent, race and sexuality) in a specific time and place in US history. But I know some intelligent people who believe that the show enables viewers to indulge in vicarious misogyny.
November 4, 2009 at 10:47 am
Urk
“I think it’ll have to stop being about the early 60s if you want the racial dynamic to change.”
Well, it probably will stop being about the early 60s pretty soon. There’s a jump of over a year between the end of the first season (Thanksgiving 1960) and the beginning of the second (around Valentine’s Day 1962.) There’s a jump of about 6 months between the end of season 2 and the beginning of season 3. If the show follows this pattern it runs out of early 60s pretty quick.
I understand that the racial dynamic is part of the period, and that showing us that is part of its value. But it’s not taking place in a “timeless” version of the early 60s, it’s moving through the decade at a pretty decent clip. Now it could be that Weiner has found the meaty part of the decade for the show and he slows things down, so it takes longer to get to get to say March 7th, 1965, or August 11th that same year. But barring cancellation it will get there and I’m curious to see how it deals with both signal events and a (slowly, painfully) changing dynamic.
I don’t expect race to take the place of gender, which is really in the show’s wheelhouse, but I expect that if it retains the kind of quality it’s shown so far it will have to deal with it to a greater extent.
November 4, 2009 at 3:52 pm
mr earl
I think they may have gone a little too far in trying to humanize Draper by making him “complilcated.” Hell, not only is he not what he says he is, lately we find out he’s not even *who* he says he is. He invented himself.
And what, pray tell, was the point of the Conrad Hilton business? If any? Certainly the quality is still high, but it’s not too far to the slippery slope that leads to Who Shot JR?
November 4, 2009 at 4:25 pm
bitchphd
The thing I like about Draper’s back story is that it rings so true to me of how things were dealt with back in the day. My family had some weirdo stuff like that happen over a few generations: drug addictions, alcoholism, a plane crash, a war, a suicide, a baby thrown in the trash. None of it was ever talked about until I was in my 30s and made a point of sitting down with my grandmother (by marriage) to ask her about family history. It seems crazy and soap-operaish in the show, but in the days before birth control and when parents often lied to adopted children about being adopted, his story is fairly plausible, really.
November 4, 2009 at 5:23 pm
ben
As Yoshida Kenko put it in his mighty Tsurezuregusa,
November 5, 2009 at 6:58 am
ME
More succinctly, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”
November 5, 2009 at 8:52 am
ben
So predictable.