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.

O my, why are we obsessed with Mad Men?! 

Thursday’s Child and I were recently having a lively discussion about Betty Draper and why she’s such an evil bitch on the show. We ask, why do the writers portray her as an entitled spoiled wife who resents her children, as opposed to a sympathetic woman whose “perfect” husband is cheating on her and can’t get it up??? Is it just us? Can we only see a woman who doesn’t work and who feels unsatisfied by her – ostensibly – cushy existence as a nuisance? I mean, Peggy has abandoned her child and we still love her. But that’s probably cause she’s a working girl, smart, and 22. We’d feel differently if we had children, I’m sure…

And the men on the show? Roger Sterling’s quite the cad and we adore him, though Paul – the idealist – did look rather chic in that ascot. And Don, well, the jury’s out on that one but who wants the strong silent type if there is nothing underneath?

A nice little interview from Times Sunday Styles Magazine with Mad Men costume designer Janie Bryant. She talks about her inspiration to become a costume designer, Mad Men clothing styles and the elegance of the period. If you haven’t been watching – you should just relegate yourself to total uncoolness. AMC 10:00 pm on Sundays.

OK, so I have figured it out – I think. The book ends with the sentence “It’s a jungle out there…No…It’s a Lipstick Jungle” (435). We were all kind of wondering what this term actually means and to me, this sentence tells all. The book keeps talking about how NYC is the only place where women can make it in the business world and make something of themselves. And at the end of the book, the three friends come together and they realize what they can count on are other women, and that the men in their lives don’t really matter at all. The men can’t make them happy or sexually satisfy them, or else can only satisfy them sexually and thats all, and their children are important but occupy a very instinctual and self-perpetuating sphere of their lives. New York City is a lipstick jungle because women rule in it – literally at the end of the book the three women are at the top of a skyscraper.

I have my problems with this book for sure but I must admit that these women are liberated in the sense that they can have it all, they have reached the top and the glass ceiling no longer applies. They have come to the point where they have decided that they do not need to rely on men, that men are not the people who change their lives, who save them from sadness or who grant them their Cinderella wish. These women have been taught to expect different things in their lives, they have not succumbed to being the dumb beautiful blond wife that is so often portrayed by the 50’s housewife. They are not ignorant and therefore satisfied by kissing their husband when he comes home for dinner, only to be cheated on (aka Mad Men). They have learned and been taught to expect more of themselves and more of their lives.

On a tangent, we could say that this education and liberation of women has caused the downfall of the family structure as we knew it for several hundred years. It seems that men and women are even more divided now than they ever have been, because they barely need each other anymore, particularly if you take into account artificial insemination etc.

Ultimately, the quotation at the end of this book is silly, but it also has a kind of philosophically Nietzschien quality to it. These women view the world as a place where women (characterized by “lipstick”) dominate. They see it through their own lens and they define its terms. This is a powerful feeling, but one that bears lots of burdens – and as they say, it’s lonely at the top.