Mad Men: notes from the break roomMad MenBitter Betty, humiliation for Don and the Megan-shape hanging in the balance. Are you as hooked as I am?'Do you think I'm a good mother? Then why do they hate me?'
It's a question that we all ask ourselves, isn't it? Only yesterday, my four-year-old was singing "everything is boring/ everything is rubbish when you live with your mum" to the theme tune of The Lego Movie. But seriously, Betty … your kids hate you for the same reason we all hate you. It is because you are horrible. It's all in the accent with her, always has been. From one angle, all you can see is the shitty way that life has treated her, this exquisite appendage, lugged about by a succession of patronising patriarchs. From the other angle, all you can see is how nasty she is, how childish, how she stamps on other people's enthusiasms, how her vanity hamstrings her judgment. They don't contradict one another, these two facts: on the contrary, they are as complementary as two shoes from a pair.
The last time we got full-frontal Bitter Betty, it was when she fired Carla and inadvertently threw Megan into the arms of Don. Here, Megan leaves Don. The message, I think, is this: Don does something terrible to women when he marries them, shrinks their trusting hearts like crisp bags in an oven.
I didn't buy the catalyst event, though: Bobby swapping her sandwich for some sweets, and thereby "ruining the whole day". That moment where she tells him to eat his candy is meant to be sinister and Mommie Dearest-ish – it lacked emotional punch, for me. I could see on paper that Bobby would be destroyed, but I couldn't see it on the screen.
'So, with a clear head, you got up every day and decided you didn't want to be with me?'
Megan didn't leave Don, she sent him packing. The reason she has never fully burst into life as a person, has always been more an amoebic set of needs than a complex individual, is, I think, because we're seeing her as Don sees her. Hubris and booze (which I shall hereafter shorten to bubris) have impaired his once-magisterial ability to inhabit the skin of another; for ages, shapes have been all he can make out. The Megan-shape hangs perfectly in the balance: he could be about to repair that marriage as part of his rehabilitation, or we could never see her again. This counts for "suspense" in my world, though I can see it's not exactly 24.
'I can't say we've missed you'
Of course, the return to the agency was the big news; poor old Roger gamed into offering Don his job back, by the sheer surprise of seeing him when what he was expecting was a sandwich. We've all done it. He probably had low blood sugar.
In the comments last week, someone said how surprising it was that Bertram Cooper turned out to be a bigot. He doubly disgraces himself this week by being the person who's only interested in money. This is a beautiful four-way, in which the people claiming to care only about the bottom line are actually fighting over everything but money, and the person fighting for a friend has the sense to point that out. Something pretty ugly comes out of it, though: a humiliating deal for Don. Biff! No drinking outside client hospitality. Thwack! No one-on-ones with clients. Bash! Always stick to the script. And the sucker punch is that he must answer to Lou, half the man he is. No, a third. No, a quarter! He must answer to a man with, at best, one quarter of his talent, and I'm sure possessing no more than 10% of his imagination. He can't possibly take that. No way. He'll walk out. He'll break something, then walk out. At the very least, he'll … huh. He took it. As an act of atonement? Because he knows he can win this, but only from the inside? Or is it all just a plot requirement, to avert the hassle of having to introduce a whole new agency, a whole new set of legs and shirts and smoking habits?
The future is not coming that fast after all …
I loved the way that the school trip could really have been any era from the 40s on. An acute sideswipe at the trajectory of progress that it hits some people faster than others – young women first, schoolchildren and farmers last.
Lou refers to Don "cooling his heels like Longfellow Deeds" which, if we are to assume he's not anachronistically referring to the Winona Ryder/Adam Sandler 2002 remake, is a reference to Frank Capra's 1936 Mr Deeds Goes to Town. His idea of popular culture is a film that's older than Peggy; or, in other words, he is a tosser and the old world still has some smouldering to do before it bursts into flames.
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