On Mad Men And Morality
For some reason, I’ve become convinced that there’s some kind of… not higher morality, but different morality, at play for fans of AMC’s Mad Men (Which is, of course, everyone with taste, right? Spoilers for the third season will follow, so be warned, for once). What’s been sticking to my mind since the finale of the most recent season is the feeling that the show is actually more supportive and/or sympathetic towards Don than Betty in the break-up of their marriage. And, I mean, sure; Don’s the more charismatic of the two – That’s his entire thing, he’s the guy that Men Want To Be and Women Want To Be With, the guy who makes everyone feel at ease (Well, almost everyone, and the whole “Don loses his touch” theme of the season was fascinating, even if it meandered and seemed to get lost a couple of times along the way), so of course we like him more, but I was constantly struck by the way that, even though we felt sympathy for Betty, it was hard to feel empathy with her. There was something… unlikable, in a way, about the character, even moreso as the season progressed this year, that kind of fascinates me. Don’t get me wrong, I think she is a great character (and became much stronger this year, what with everything that happened and the choices she made), but I never, ever found her a character that it was easy to like. And that sticks in my head.
It seems… I don’t know, subversive, somehow, that Don comes across as, maybe not the victim, but certainly the more sympathetic of the two when he and Betty split up. The show seems to be trying to sell Don’s line (that he may even believe) that the marriage broke up because of Betty, which… just isn’t true. It’s not even that Don had had affairs in the past, but that this season we saw Betty unable to do the same thing because of her marriage, which, surely, is “the right thing”? The decision to end the marriage because she didn’t love Don anymore is, again, “the right thing” – so why does it seem like Don has been abused, somehow? Why does Don seem like the wronged party?
The best I can figure out is that the show, and the show’s audience – or maybe I’m projecting, perhaps – seems to be promoting the idea of emotional honesty over… duty, perhaps, or a fictionalized sense of self and/or proprietariness. Don may have cheated on his wife, may have lied about his past, but he was always being true to what he wanted and who he was, whereas Betty was more concerned with an idea of how things were supposed to be. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but I definitely got the impression, as we saw Betty fly to Reno with the man who wanted to marry her once she was divorced, cut in with scenes of Don having to start his life over almost entirely, that we were supposed to feel that Don was the person we were to feel more for (Especially when we saw that Betty had forced Don to move out of the family home and then left the children there with their maid while she moved to Reno to get a divorce, which was just… odd). And I really want to know why that is.
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