Basket of Kisses

I must’ve been around five or so and sleeping at a friend’s house when we snuck out of our beds and turned on the TV and there it was — the scene in Hitchcock’s The Birds in which the farmer lies on the floor with his eyes pecked out. It remains one of the most quietly terrifying moments I’ve seen on film.

Of course, like everything old Hitch did, there was humor in the exploration of fear. Bird is British slang for “chick” or a young woman. The Birds, in short, was Hitchcock’s exploration of female rage.

Now, given the strong Hitchcockian influence on Mad Men, in this blog’s previous incarnation we hashed out the significance of Don calling Betty Birdie in Season 1, the same season in which she shoots her neighbor’s pigeons when the latter scares the wits out of Sally. Significantly, Don stopped calling Betty Birdie in Season 2. This was the season in which Betty stopped being just a pretty young thing and began to grow into a real woman, one who is willing to take control over her life. And the transformative vehicle for it all was her rage.

It’s pretty much a cliche for me to bring up the fact that rage is one of the taboo emotions. What do we do with it? How do we handle it properly? How can we have an outlet for it without hurting others or going over the edge? It is a terrifying emotion, on many levels, especially for women. In our culture, we seem to divide feelings along gender lines; women get the right to cry and men are allowed to be angry. Real men don’t cry and nice women don’t get mad.

This is the paradigm under which Betty was raised. Be beautiful and perfect. You’re Nordic, remember, don’t let your emotions get to you. When her therapist suggests in Season 1 that Betty is angry at her mother — in one of the few lines he’s given during their scenes together in the entire season–, the remark prompts Betty to declare, “You provoke me!” Not only do good girls not get angry, they most certainly are too well behaved to be angry at Mother.

Hitchcock knows all about being angry with Mother. If Norman Bates’ not around, you can always ask Marnie, another role made famous by Tippi Hedren. (Incidentally, not only is Betty blond and affectless like Tippi, she seems to take a page from her fashion book as well.) Betty is mourning her mother, yes, but she is in denial about how outraged she is about her Mother’s judgmental and controlling gaze. Before she gets mad at Don and at the reality of her life, she has to deal with the mother she carries inside her. The one who taught her that she was supposed to be perfect and beautiful at the expense of her own integrity. The one who taught her to value herself solely on the basis of her looks. The mother who put her in amber, so to speak, by teaching her in one way or another that she was too weak and fragile to make it on her own so she’d better look the other way at her man’s misbehavior so that he could take care of her.

Now, this is not to say that Betty’s mother was a monster. It is impossible for us to judge since we haven’t seen her but in Season 1 she was a palpable if invisible presence in Mad Men and a repressive force over Betty. (Exhibit A, Betty’s somewhat wooden body language and affectless verbal delivery.) But Betty is on simmer. She’s passive. If she feels anything, she keeps it under tight control.

Until the moment when Jimmy breaks through her complacency. The humiliation is too much to bear and suddenly it is undeniable. Jimmy did her a favor, however hateful his manner. She could no longer choose not to see it (after all, she suspected Don’s infidelity back a year before), she was also confronted with the fact that there were other victims. The particularly loathsome way in which Jimmy revealed the truth also made it impossible to run anywhere. In a way, he gave her permission to be as angry as she needed to be. Secondly, he became, in a sense, her ally. It would’ve been easy enough to believe Don when he denied her accusations. But she wasn’t alone. Jimmy had confirmed Don’s infidelity.

Now here’s the thing about anger: it galvanizes you. It tells you when someone has overstepped their boundaries and gives you the power to defend your rights. Your heart beats, the blood pumps through you and you’re compelled to do something, RIGHT NOW. Certainly a scary prospect for someone who has been taught to be passive all her life. It takes Betty a while to learn to cope with her anger productively. In a frightening and still weirdly controlled display of rage, she destroys a chair, spooking her children. She kicks Don out but at first she is also lost, verging on depressed. That depression is useful too. As overindulgent as it may be, this might be the first time in her life in which Betty allows her feelings to dictate her life. Once her kids go to school, there’s nothing else in that house but Betty and her disappointment, her sadness, her grievance, her futility, her numbness… In a way, Betty is sitting a kind of shiva, the Jewish mourning period in which mourners don’t leave the house, cook, clean or even change out of their clothing for seven days.

And this leads us back to what she didn’t allow herself to do in Season 1: go through the process of mourning her mother. Someone once said that if you know that you’re going to fall, find something soft to fall on. And Betty did. In the process, she finally faced the darkest emotions and found her voice and her power.