It’s the weirdest thing. She is amazingly good looking in a strictly aesthetic sense, but it’s not a sexual or a sexy good looking. Whatever she’s doing with the character, and not just lately, this is from day one of the show, makes her borderline repellent. She’s bright, but wanders through life like this weird pouty child who can be malicious and nasty as hell if she doesn’t get her way.
For all the talk about how unhappy she is as the objectified perfect house-wife mother what exactly is her alternative self actualizing dream? As the character is written is obvious she gets a HUGE charge from feeling she is pretty and desirable. Other than the Jr League involvement and having an admirer I’m not getting a lot of insight via the way she written into what is going to make her “happy” other than possibly being a model, the acme of objectification.
Beyond this there seems to be the notion that she is childish because all this stuff is being “done” to her, or because of expectations. I disagree, there are plenty of women on then show who deal with the same social expectations as Betty but are not anywhere near as developmentally stunted. The episodes with the divorcee’s weird kid were just creepy. Is she just this otherwise bright and well educated woman who is emotionally retarded? Who knows.
The other character’s husband wife relationships even at their nastiest are somewhat believable, but the Don-Betty relationship (to me) has always felt weird and forced. There’s not scrap of naturalness to it.
She has this fragile, ice princess beauty. Every once in a while she let’s us glimpse behind the mask. My favorite scene with her is when she has the fling in the bar’s office during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The bar tender asks them, what were you two doing in there and she gives them this “what the hell do you think we were doing, dumbass?” look that just nails it.
I think that’s the point of it, actually. Don and Betty aren’t SUPPOSED to be proper fits for one another; they are going through the motions because they are trapped in the conventional vision of what their lives should be like. Don is far more natural with the winsome schoolteacher, or the married woman he was squiring last year, or even Peggy.
My vote would be for Rachel, not Suzanne. Although it’s clear he genuinely goes for Suzanne–thinks of her as a more idealistic and caring person than anyone else in his current life–he reflexively ended the relationship, at least for the time being, when he was in danger of losing Betty and his children.
With Rachel–although he made the offer under the pressure of Pete’s discovery of his identity–he was willing to run away and it was Rachel herself who reminded him about the kids and had to ask, “What kind of man are you?” Rachel was also a much stronger and more interesting character than Suzanne who seems pretty vulnerable and underdeveloped.
That said, there’s a real change in Don’s character since the end of season 2. The scenes of him caring for his infant son seem to reflect an attachment to his family that he wasn’t fully in touch with in the earlier seasons (like when he literally misses them at Thanksgiving after discovering their importance during the “Carousel” presentation at the end of Season 1).
I haven’t got a clue what will happen but I do sense that Don will suffer; will not want to lose his children; will not simply think to himself: well if Betty leaves me now I’m free to move in with Suzanne. This is both a different relationship than the one with Rachel, but also a different man (perhaps a different stage in his life).
You may find this hard to believe, but long long before you were born, school teachers were considered “role models” - from the earliest days of the school marms in the one-room school house. They had to lead what at least looked like blameless lives, even if they fellated farm animals behind closed doors. I remember married schoolteachers had to take leave starting when they began to show their pregnancy. An unmarried schoolteacher knocked up was, of course, fired. An unmarried schoolteacher screwing her kids’ dads may be swell with you as long as she shows up to work on time, but back in the olden days, she wouldn’t even have the brass balls to pull that “it’s my PERSONAL life” shit. She would justifiably be considered a homewrecking whore, who shouldn’t be around the children of the men she screwed, and that would be the end of her teaching career. Hard to believe, but authority figures including teachers were expected to have morals, or a damned good facade of morality.
As for Duck, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again -he is scum, and I hope his liver explodes and he dies alone. He is not a good guy. He is not being written on the show as a good guy. He is an evil old bastard for what he did to that dog, and I will never forget the sheer horror of that cruelty. I truly do wish him an agonizing death.
You first argue that schoolteachers are role models, and then at the end you suggest that the main requirement is not necessarily that they actually be moral, but that they simply maintain the facade of morality. Ben Franklin would love you.
The fact that she has not yet been caught, and that the only people in town who know about her sexual life are her and Don, suggests that she is, in fact, doing a damn good job of maintaining a “facade” of morality. You should be congratulating her on being able to do her job and have a bit on the side.
This is perhaps the sixth outraged reference to Duck and his pooch that I’ve read here. I don’t deny that it was a Bad Thing to do, but the dog is very likely alive and well. No perfectly groomed top breed pooch is going to be loose and uncared for in downtown Manhattan for long. I’m not even an optimist, but someone found and kept that dog. It’s simply not the sort that gets the axe at the pound.
In 1963 there were still school districts around that didn’t allow married women to teach at all. On of my social studies teachers started his career that year and his district had a policy that all female staff were deemed to have resigned upon marriage. That policy was dropped a few years later. Suzanne would’ve been screwed if people found out (though she might have been offered the chance to quitly resign and leave town with a reference if only to avoid an even bigger scandal).
It is the sort that could get hit by a car out in the Manhattan night. I get why Peggy’s with Duck, he’s something to do and she can be herself there. She’s horrible at picking guys up. When she does, she usually has to lie about her job or her salary or her accomplishments. She’s not looking to be taken care of - and most older men are looking for someone to depend on them. Duck knows about her job and has complimented her on it. Neither of them are looking for anything permanent, and she didn’t know he was a dog murderer. It was working right up until Cronkite got in Duck’s way.
I can’t figure out if the problem with Betty is that the character is a mess, that the writing is bad, or that the acting simply isn’t good. There’s something wrong in an uncompelling, uninteresting way almost every time Betty shows up on screen (the week where she finally confronted Don was the one exception, for me) and it doesn’t make sense. I don’t see “surpressed/desperate housewife,” or “child-woman,” or “injured spouse,” or any of the things I think I’m supposed to be seeing with Betty. All I see is screwed-up mess.
Betty is clearly a screwed up mess, but I think it’s that she’s trying so desperately hard to not show weakness that she doesn’t really let herself show any emotion at all. There are certain things that are Done, and certain things that are Not Done, and Betty Draper knows the difference.
I think the implication that she was caught someplace else, before, based on her comments and those of her brother – she’d had to move to this job, because of sleeping around. That she is doing such a good job of maintaing her facade of respectability further suggests some experience with needing to do so.
This, I think, is the point. Betty herself has no idea what her self-actualizing dream is; she only knows from practical experience what it isn’t, and this is why she’s a screwed-up mess. We’re not supposed to see anything else.
I would go a step further and say that no woman at that time was encouraged to have any kind of self-actualizing dream beyond what Betty already has–and what, from her perspective, Don has screwed up. (The “all of this” that she gestures towards–the house and so forth–when in this episode she blames him for messing it all up.)
Like most women at this time, Betty was raised to think that finding a successful husband to take care of her and her children and provide her with a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle in the burbs was self-actualization. It would be entirely anachronistic to expect her to have any ambitions beyond that. Modeling is the only outside she can imagine and it’s the kind of short-lived role that fits in nicely with eventually getting married and settling down–as she already has.
It was brilliant for Betty’s realization that she doesn’t love Don any more to come while he was trying to comfort her about the JFK assassination. She no longer believes in him as a man who can take care of her because she knows that he is not only a cheater (which she knows that lots of men are) but also a fraud.
For a long time her marriage has been a weird oscillation between Don’s not delivering on the fantasy of the husband who takes care of everything (because his work and his affairs preoccupy him) and his actually delivering on it (as when he straightens out “the arrangements” for Gene’s living with them until his death, dealing with her weak brother).
But it’s one thing to say that Betty no longer believes in Don as her Caretaker and another to say that she doesn’t believe that a man as Caretaker is what life is about for her. So while Betty is now thinking that Henry may well be the better Caretaker of the two (doesn’t he say something like “You know I can make you happy”) she hasn’t begun to look beyond the idea of a male Caretaker as the be all and end all of a woman’s life.
I loved the scene at the wedding where she is the pivot in a triangle that looks towards either of them as the Man who Will Take Her Home.
The sad thing is that there are still plenty of women who think that the center of their lives is a Caretaker man, though we have a lot more reason to wonder at them…
Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was caught in the past.
Ms. Farrell KNOWS she is supposed to be a moral role model for her students, yet she doesn’t care! She is enamored of married father of three Don Draper and has pursued him, and there you are. If she was actually an idealistic, moral young woman, she would not be banging the father of a student. Of COURSE she’s going to hide it, and put up a facade of respectability. She is terrified of being found out, but that doesn’t seem to make any difference.
I think we’re supposed to feel quite sorry for Suzanne–I know I’d feel sorry for her (except that I don’t find her to be a very well-developed character so I don’t think about her as much as I would otherwise).
I can’t feel disposed to congratulate her for having “a bit on the side” because I know that she has to bear all of the risks and the downsides of that. Of course, at some point Suzanne will just find her own guy and become something like Betty and it’s not really clear why it’s taking her so long.
The whole idea of a bit on the side is that it’s a luxury you can enjoy because you’re entitled to the privilege. But the 1960s female schoolteacher wasn’t. The best she could do was to sneak around and hope she wouldn’t get caught–including hoping that the man she was seeing wouldn’t be the one to give her away (remember how she asks Don if she can keep her job now that it’s over?)
But I agree with you mhendo that it also makes no sense to think of her moralistically as some kind of slut or as a bad teacher.
Gosh salinqmind you are awfully demanding of this character. As for as role model goes, Suzanne’s third-graders don’t need to know who she’s sleeping with.
And she didn’t pursue, Don. He pursued her. Yes, there was an attraction between them that he could seize on. And yes, she could have said no. But Don himself knows that he pushed her into it.
At worst she is someone who knew better and yet did something she knew would probably hurt her in the end. And she has been hurt. (Though who knows what else may happen–there may be more to her story in the end or even next season.)
I don’t think that makes her a less idealistic person; though it does make her less than perfect.
There are innumerable books and articles written these days by and about women who are perfectly capable of supporting themselves, and still want “Caretaker Man” (it sounds like an anthropological description) in some form or fashion. Caretaker Man may be an anachronism, but it’s still something a good many fully capable modern women desire.