Good job, Culture Vulture.
I’d say your Lacanian analysis of the newest episode of Mad Men was pretty strong. You did miss out on an interesting aberration in the psychoanalytic schema, that being Bettie Draper.
This woman has no mirror, no ‘Ideal-I’, as Lacan puts it in his impossibly dense treatise on “The Mirror Stage”. She represents aesthetic perfection. For this reason, she has no ideal to strive towards or to imitate.
Lacan cites that a baby’s physical coordination comes from the mimicry of her reflection. This is both necessary and problematic; the ego is formed from the mirror but is therefore based on a tenuous, superficial inversion. As human beings mature, they use other human beings as both mirrors and as ego-Ideals – something to imitate. Bettie seems never to have matured past the preliminary mirror-stage, and has perhaps never gone through it at all.
She fondly remembers her days as a fashion model, wishing to return. She still sees herself as the model, the “Ideal”. In fact, Bettie sees the model on the Playtex campaign as an ersatz version of herself, not the other way around. The creators of the show exemplify this with the bikini scene. Even to viewers, Bettie is prettier and slimmer than the women modeling the suits at the Country Club. Because she has no suitable mirror, she has no way to establish her ego (false or not) in her reality. She is clumsy and uncoordinated, like a baby pre mirror-stage.
This reminds me of a story by Henry James called “The Real Thing”. A middle aged couple representing the ideal of English Gentry come to an artist to work as models. Past their prime, Ascot-going years, they cannot get employment anywhere because they are woefully unqualified. The artist is at first thrilled to have such perfect models for his illustrations on English nobility, but discovers that these models are too perfect for the job. The drawings come out awkward and monstrous. On the other hand, the drawings he produces from his short, non-descript, even ugly, models come out marvelously.
The artist cannot imitate perfection from an ‘Ideal’ form. The canvas – another sort of mirror – is a poor duplication for the ‘Real-Thing’. Yet, the ‘Real Thing’ or the ‘Ideal’ has little use in real life. The couple is reduced to making tea for the artist and his models. Likewise, Bettie Draper is reduced to making breakfast for her husband and children.
