P.S. Enjoyed your lighting comments lalelin
This line of reasoning doesn’t make sense. Don’s ultimate decision was that he didn’t like the way that the other guy did business. Your rubric suggests that if Don really valued Betty’s feelings then he would take a job offer that he didn’t want. I wouldn’t want myself to be subject to such a standard; I certainly won’t hold Don to it.
I believe this is much more plausible. Yes, Don’s decision to reject the job offer resulted in this particular rejection, but it wasn’t Don that nixed Betty’s modeling career. Betty did that all on her own, because she couldn’t handle rejection.
No, he didn’t like the way the other guy did business, but he also didn’t like Betty away from her suburban sanctum sanctorum. I think that’s undeniably part of the point of the episode (why else have the dog/pigeon thing take place while she’s busy modeling?).
A different kind of man would have a) recognized Betty’s frustrations beyond simply telling her she’s an angelic mother (a line that goes back to the nineteenth century) and/or b) given her a sense of what was going on and why he was deciding what he decided.
We see the very same impulse in Don to keep his professional decisions entirely to himself over and over again: which is why Roger manipulates him in S3 by telling Betty about the contract–knowing full well that she won’t know and will be pissed off when she finds out.
Did many men in this period do the same thing believing it entirely natural that their wives be kept in ignorance of all business decisions? To be sure, but the show brilliantly illustrations the impact of this separation of spheres on a marriage.
We can of course agree to disagree as people inevitably will about such a complex situation. I don’t say that Betty’s fear of rejection is irrelevant (though it might have taken different form had she learned that she was part of a manipulation concerning Don).
More important, do you believe for a second that a man freaked out by what bathing suit his wife wears at the local swimming pool is really eager for her to be modeling in NYC (knowing what he knows about how such casting decisions are often made)?
Bottom line for me: Don is possessive and likes to keep Betty where he can find her. It is part of who he is.
Things may change interestingly now that she seems determined to no longer honor his absolute right ti privacy.
You’re running trains on parallel tracks here.
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Don didn’t like the idea of Betty working outside the house.
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Don sabotaged Betty’s attempt to go back into modeling.
Evidence for (1) doesn’t constitute evidence for (2). All Don actually did was turn down a job offer. As a result, Betty got canned from one modeling job, something that happens to professional models all the time, not from her career as a model.
Not really ascenray. Anyone who wants to can see that the tracks overlap and were purposely created that way.
Don’s not liking Betty working outside the house leads to her not knowing why she was first singled out and then precipitously fired. She ends by deciding that laundry and childcare are her fate after all. Don’s actions have a great deal to do with her reaching the outcome he desires her to reach even if we can imagine many scenarios in which they talked it over and Don explained why he didn’t want to change jobs and Betty, understanding what had taken place, concluded that she didn’t want to model.
There’s nothing illogical about the overlap I’m proposing; to the contrary, it’s built into the structure of narrative fiction.
You simply don’t buy my interpretation and that’s just fine too.
Perhaps we’ll agree on a another day 
It’s not really a matter of interpretation in the respect that your argument is missing a critical causal link. Motive can’t paper over that gap. The loss of one assignment doesn’t end a modeling career.
And the motive you’re ascribing to Don doesn’t work, because even if all your arguments are true and he wanted to end Betty’s career, he has a much stronger motive in that he didn’t want that job. The existence of this fact drowns any culpability. Don can’t be pinned morally or ethically as having acted with the motive to “keep Betty where he can find her.”
Gosh, ascenray, you are so needlessly stubborn and I suspect we are boring the hell out of other readers.
It need not, but in this case it did. Betty’s lack of confidence is a factor too but so is the state of ignorance and manipulation in which it occurs. How much of her loss of confidence we want to attribute to her ignorance and Don’s manipulation is a matter of interpretation. (Not to mention that a different kind of man might have encouraged Betty to pursue any number of alternative pursuits in response to her boredom or emptiness. But Don isn’t very deeply concerned with Betty’s happiness except for a few nice gestures and turns of phrase–the point of the recent “Rome” episode.)
And where did I say that his not wanting Betty to model was the strongest motive he had for turning down the job. In fact I was quite explicit that it wasn’t.
Really? So if I have four different motives for doing Action X, an act harmful to you, and only the 3rd of my motives has to do with you personally then I have no culpability about the harm done to you? Huh?
Hey if Don were as as concerned with ethical exemplarity as you seem to want him to be–concerned first and foremost to keep himself morally non-culpable–he could have told Betty what was going on and they could have talked their decisions over between them.
(I kind of feel like writing a version of this dialogue just to amuse you! We can call it “Shoot: the Sequel”)
I have to wonder at this point if you are or have ever been married or in a serious relationship. If the answer is yes, in some comparable situation would you have liked your partner to conceal from you what Don concealed from Betty?
According to you, because you don’t accept that interpretation of his motive as being relevant–you believe that his not liking the other agency’s mode of recruitment as the only (morally relevant) motive. Fine.
Or maybe we should move this thread to Great Debates? 
P.S. Before someone accuses me of thinking Don wholly to blame for the distance after the Rome trip, I think Betty could have cut him much more slack!
And “need not” is the key. Betty is responsible for her independent decisions, not Don. Don never told her not to do it.
Your assertion is: “Don scuttled Betty’s modeling career,” not “Don is not the ideal emotionally open and supportive husband that many women would desire for themselves.”
You don’t have to say it was the strongest motive. In this case, however, to show that Don rejected the job in order to keep Betty at home, you have to show a “but for” – in fact you have to show two:
- But for Don’s objection to Betty’s modeling career, he would have accepted the job.
- But for Don’s rejection of the job, Betty would have been able to embark on a modeling career.
In this case, you can’t show either. Because:
- His acceptance or rejection of the job depended on his feelings about the job.
- Betty’s potential modeling career did not depend on the existence of this one job. In fact, Betty was given the proofs from the shoot and told that these would make a good addition to her portfolio. For someone who was interested in re-establishing a modeling career, this was a step forward, not a step back.
- There was no certainty that Don’s rejection of the job would necessarily result in Betty’s sacking.
Again, which of those motives creates a “but for” situation?
I don’t want him to have any concerns about ethical exemplarity. It’s a simple fact that Don did not prevent Betty from having a modeling career. Even if it is clear that he wanted to prevent Betty from having a modeling career, he took no action that was effective in ending it. It was Betty’s independent decision not to pursue it, based on her own reluctance to deal with rejection, which she would have to face every day as a working model.
He could have done any number of things, including take a voyage around the world. That doesn’t change the fact that Don’s action did not prevent her from continuing to seek modeling opportunities and that it was Betty’s independent decision not to do so.
Irrelevant. Betty had and still has full agency to pursue a modeling career if that is her wish. Don took no steps that make it impossible for her to do so. In fact, Don told Betty that he would go along with whatever her decision was. Likewise, Don’s concealment of information, regardless of whether it would make for a more ideal relationship with Betty, did not remove from her the agency to make her own decision to continue modeling.
ascenray, You are turning a disgreement about why Betty made a particular decision about modeling into a question of whether she was stripped of any sort of agency with which to make a different decision.
Yes, in theory, she could have made any number of decisions: but in my interpretation, Don’s actions–those she knew of and those she didn’t know of–had a major impact on her making the decision she did make.
The fact that you can insist so strongly about about “Betty’s independent decision” says to me that we have very different views about a) how people in general make decisions, b) how married people in particular make decisions as well as c) how this particular married woman came to this particular decision.
But thank you very much for the spirited discussion.
I never saw Betty ending her modeling “career” as anything other than her not liking being rejected/fired and using a sour grapes excuse of “Well, I wanted to stay home with the kids anyway”. She didn’t end it to please Don or because Don failed to support her enough or whatever, it’s just the princess fantasy ended when she was told “No thanks”. Using the “kids” excuse allowed her to justify to herself why she didn’t want it anyway and got her out of admitting to Don “I got canned from my modeling gig.” she was in it for the selfish motive that she liked the attention and ended it with the selfish motive that it wasn’t going to be all unicorns and starshine.
I don’t say “selfish” to mean she’s a bad person for it but the only person she was worried about was herself.
I thought that was a particularly poor article, to be honest. Has that writer even seen the second and third seasons of the show? Has he ever done anything as plebeian as read a message board? He does read other critics, but that makes his criticism intellectually sterile. You can’t over-intellectualize something that is shooting for emotional resonance; you kill off half the meaning.
I hadn’t realized there were only two episodes left. The office has been neglected and there’s no way to give Peggy or Pete or the others time to deepen their characters in only two hours. I can’t imagine that the show won’t be coming back so I’m afraid we’re going get a lot of cliffhanger endings. How can the series not end with Kennedy at this point? Or with Joan pulling an assassination of her own? 
You’re welcome to your opinion. I disagree with you. An intellectual critique is a supplement to the emotional aspect of the experience, not a substitute for it. I can absorb and agree with his intellectual critique without it ruining (or even really changing) my emotional response to the show.
Eh. Despite the Boomer obsession with the Kennedy assassination, that is not thematically a point toward which Mad Men has been progressing. This show has been moving toward the point where counter-culture upends all the societal roles that are straitjacketing these people – Paul’s vapid beatnik wannabee-ness, Peggy’s breaking her gender role, Joan wondering why she’s trapped and unfulfilled, Betty frustrated by being an object of perfection instead of a person with ambitions, and Don/Dick scratching at his life trying to get in.
I suspect the next season’s jump forward will be into the midst of the real British Invasion (which should soothe those Boomers) with the counterculture going mainstream and thereby upsetting all the applecarts at Sterling-Cooper.
Matt Weiner has said he doesn’t plan a “special” Kennedy assassination show. I suspect we’ll see something of the immediate aftermath; Roger’s daughter is scheduled to marry on November 23rd.
As a Boomer, I’d like to say that the Beatles’ arrival had little to do with any counter-culture/counterculture. “Beatlemania” was a big news story–but the band was marketed as cute moptops, not cultural messiahs. (John’s “bigger than Jesus” remark notwithstanding.) The immediate Brit Invasion style was hard-edged Mod; the drug of choice was speed.
I was in high school in '63; things evolved rather quickly, from “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road.” But none of our Mad Men characters are in the prime demographic; most were too old, Sally’s a bit too young. Sterling Cooper is hardly the hippest agency on Mad Ave.
We’ll see changes affecting society that will affect the Mad Men & Women, but I’m hardly watching the show to understand the 60’s; I don’t have to. I just want to see more of those interesting characters. With, I hope, a bit less emphasis on The Drapers of Ossining.
Thanks for interesting link mhendo. Did you perchance see the review published just about when season 3 started in the Chronicle of Higher Education? (Do not have link handy but could probably find it for you if you’re curious…)
Jophiel, I didn’t actually mean that she did it to please Don–but doubtless enough have been said on this old topic.
You must have misunderstood me. Whether or not an intellectual critique has any bearing on your appreciation for the show it’s still only half a critique. Encapsulated by missing the point as spectacularly as the criticism that a television show - gasp - highlights dramatic effects.
And the History Channel didn’t just have a six-hour documentary on the Kennedy assassination.
But as Bridget Burke also said, you’re just wrong if you think The Beatles on Ed Sullivan started the countercounter into mainstream. That wouldn’t start to happen until 1967 and even then it was “look at those crazy kids” for about two more years. There was no, probably just plain no, not even virtually no, mainstream advertising that brought in that culture in 1964.
The years from 1964-1967 were continuations of the Kennedy years for almost everybody in America culturally. The real change were the summer riots that would start in 1964 in places like Rochester. That reality didn’t show up in television, advertising, or offices for decades, though. For women’s rights you do have The Feminine Mystique in 1963, but NOW wasn’t formed until 1966 and Ms. magazine not until 1972.
The 60s didn’t happen the way people today remember them. The only true culture-shaking event for the mainstream until Vietnam in the later part of decade was the Kennedy assassination. The Beatles changed the generation still in school but that’s not who Mad Men is about.
If it weren’t for the kids, the show could do another leap forward and show those effects. They’re such lousy actors that it might be a good idea to replace them but I’m betting that won’t happen. Weiner has to cover five years of microscopic real world changes that people think happened overnight. It’s a tough road ahead of him.
No, it’s not. It’s just a particular type of critique. You don’t like it? Fine. Doesn’t make it incomplete.
Perhaps Betty is the hobo–living on the handouts of others. In the year 2009, we may recognize her contributions to the household (such as they are), but at the time, her work wouldn’t have been seen as “work.” Hoboes have no social or political power. And they are largely invisible to the type of men who work at Sterling Cooper. They might “see” Betty, but only as an accoutrement to Don. They don’t see her as an independent person.
Don would be the gypsy–always gadding around. Gypsies put on costumes and played with appearances, and Dick is playing a character named Don. And Don’s whole life is a sort of costume. Gypsies also were seen as con-men, or at least good at getting money out of people. As is Don.
(Yeah, maybe I’m stretching here…oh well. It’s fun.)
- “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves,” anyone?
This isn’t the first hobo reference on Mad Men. Do you remember the flashback to Dick’s/Don’s childhood, when the hobo came to their farm?