EVERYONE KNOWS how easy it is to hate Betty. She’s temperamental, unfair, childish, a total bitch. But one of Mad Men’s many genius moves is allowing us to stay with Betty and her Francis life even after she’s ostensibly out of Don’s. They’re both victims of the ideological imperatives of the 1950s, implicitly forced to conform to certain ideals that alienate them from their desires and selves, but their victimhood plays out in markedly different ways.
Don, of course, loses his shit. The seemingly interminable spiral of Season Five was all about Don’s inability to hold the pieces of his performance of Don-dom in place. But Betty’s a planner. As Don astutely observed, when their marriage fell apart, she was busy building herself a life raft in the form of Henry Francis. But a life raft isn’t a cruise ship: it may save us from drowning in the despair of our lives, but a life raft can’t take you anywhere. Instead, you’re left floating in the middle of the ocean, slowly wasting away as you search for the glittering shore and salvation.
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