Mad Men Analysis - Episode 2: Ladies' Room

Episode 2 of the first season of Mad men opens on a cocktail being made and served using egg yolks, and zooms out to show us Roger and Don on a double date with their wives, Mona and Betty. The egg yolk, and eggs on the whole, seem to be primary imagery for this episode. For example, conversation around this dinner table seems to be centered mainly on raising children, later we see Betty drive a yellow-and-white car into a birdbath, and Peggy sports an egg-yolk yellow sweater at the office. A few things come to mind regarding egg imagery: children and babies, the idiom “in order to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs," and “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” Babies and children are closely tied to a woman's "purpose," and they also represent the future. In this episode, women with children are more keenly aware of the future than men are. More significantly, this episode also deals with psychology, one of creator Matthew Weiner's favorite topics. So in this case, the egg may signify cracking open one's head, so to speak, to get a closer look at the mind.

At this dinner, after discussing children, whether or not they were brought up by nannies, and Roger's daughter Margaret’s psychiatry, Betty and Mona excuse themselves to, you guessed it, the Ladies' Room. Here, we see that something is wrong with Betty's hands; they seem to go numb on her and she can't apply her lipstick. Mona kindly offers to do it for her, but instructs Betty not to smile while she puts it on, as it can ruin the look, and has her pat her lips together at the end. To someone like Betty who has been wearing lipstick all her life, this is a very motherly action. We learn that Betty just recently lost her mother, so perhaps parenting is exactly what she's looking for right now. If so, it makes sense that her hands freeze up when she thinks about the future, as it forces someone else to care for her and dote on her the way a mother would.

During dinner, Roger asked Don if he was raised by a nanny, and Don artfully dodged the question. Back at home, with a few vodka gimlets in her system, Betty asks him herself if he ever had a nanny. Don tells her that, of course, he didn't. Later, when they try to fall asleep, Betty lays close to Don's back and asks "Who's in there?" She sleeps with this man, she lives with this man, but she doesn't really know this man. It must be another thing that weighs on her mind.

At the office the next day, we see a whole lot of misogyny occuring. The boys have been asked to create copy for Gillette's new spray-on deodorant, and they all tackle newbie Ken Cosgrove and strip his shirt off of him to spray him down, telling him to "Just pretend it's prom night... you can be the girl." When Don is asked to create ad copy for President Nixon's campaign, Don asks "Why chase a girl that doesn't want to be caught?" And later, when the boys take Peggy and Joan out to lunch, it becomes apparent that there is a bet on to see who can sleep with Peggy first. Pete, of course, is away on his honeymoon in Niagara falls and isn't home to see that he's won. And speaking of Pete, the back of the postcard he sent to the office from his honeymoon says "Greetings from Niagara Falls... the wettest place on earth!" All of this adds up to a very hostile environment for women working at Sterling Cooper. The first cut to the office after Betty and Don in bed shows Joan and Peggy going into the Ladies' Room to talk, and there Peggy sees a secretary crying inconsolably, no doubt due to sexual harassment or being slept with and then tossed aside. 

So what is the significance of the title of this episode? The Ladies' Room represents the only space dedicated to women in the offices of Sterling Cooper. It is a place where confessions occur, it signifies a woman's inner world. A Lady's Room is her mind, a place men keep trying to probe, whether they be Don repeatedly asking what women want out of their advertising, or a Freudian psychiatrist paid to do that very job.

When driving the family car in the neighborhood, Betty spots the new neighbor moving in, a young single mother with her son and baby. Thinking about the idea of having to be alone, or losing a husband like she lost her mother, upsets Betty and causes her hands to freeze up again. This is when she drives the car onto a neighbor's lawn and hits their birdbath. Despite being free to climb all over the seats thanks to a lack of seatbelts at the time, the kids aren't hurt. This doesn't stop Betty from panicking over the fact, not that she could have killed Sally and Bobby, but that Sally could have been left with a disfiguring scar.

Don sees Midge a couple of times this episode for some nooners, one of them occurring simultaneous to this car crash. He sees she has gotten a TV and is extremely unhappy about it. Midge thinks it has to do with his jealousy, but I think it has a lot more to do with him finding the boundaries of home or domesticity coming too close. Midge mentions loving the program "People Are Funny" and later we hear Don's kids Sally and Bobby watching the same program at home. Anyway, to put Don at ease, Midge tosses the TV out the window. The next time Don visits her, he asks her what women want. "What do women want?" becomes the mantra of this episode when Don expresses disappointment with the boys' copy for the Gillette ad, and says they should be marketing to the women buying the deodorant for their men at the grocery store rather than to the men themselves. When he sees the astronaut/futuristic theme ad design, he imparts that "Some people think of the future and it upsets them." He claims women "want a cowboy, quiet and strong. They watch TV... But they want something else, inside." He clearly has been pondering both Midge and Betty as his marketing audience. In one fun quip later, after giving Peggy a tour of the office, Paul Kinsey imitates Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone, and Peggy doesn't catch the reference. Paul is in disbelief, but Peggy says she doesn't "like science-fiction." So Don was right: Women don't want to see the astronaut imagery. They all fear the future, and the bomb, just like Don said they did.

Midge proves to be an interesting counterpoint to Betty in this episode. For one thing, she is a young and free woman, sleeping with multiple men and with no children to care for. She is less concerned with the future, and self-admittedly "lives in the moment." Don says to her that he can't tell if she has nothing, or everything (in her humble apartment, she is both free to come and go as she pleases, but doesn't have a house or a family), and Midge says "Nothing is everything. Having no worries and no cares means no fear of losing her children, her possessions, her husband to another woman or to death... She has her freedom, and that is everything she could ask for.

Peggy has quite an adventure flirting with Paul Kinsey in this episode, and is flattered to be noticed. Paul even suggests that she could become a female copywriter one day. However, he later shuts her into his office and kisses her a number of times, suggesting they "move the sofa in front of the door." Peggy is upset by this and leaves, claiming there's another man in her life. Back at her desk, we experience a montage of men leering at her as they pass her desk to the tune of "I Can Dream Can't I?" by the Andrews Sisters. Unfortunately for us all, we see her open her desk drawer and carefully re-situate Pete's horribly misogynist postcard to the office, to the lyrics "I can see/ No matter how near you'll be/ You'll never belong to me/ But I can dream, can't I?" Unhappy, Peggy goes to hide out in the Ladies' Room to be alone with her feelings, but there sees yet another sobbing secretary. She looks at herself in the mirror, and re-arranges her frown: There is no way that will be her. She has to rid herself of these feelings for Pete and be realistic to avoid being hurt like all the rest.

Originally, Don is very resistant to Betty seeing a psychiatrist. After all, if Betty is unhappy at home, he is doing something wrong, he is not the perfect husband he is trying to appear to be, and she may get restless and cause him trouble. However, Roger tells Don that psychiatry is like "this year's candy-pink stove. It's just more happiness." Don makes one last attempt to buy Betty's happiness instead. He thinks she is a woman that has everything she could possibly want, but he does buy her a white gold watch in case it was what she was missing. A watch not only sits around the wrist (Don's attempt to soothe her numb hands with jewelry) but it also represents the passage of time, the thing Betty most fears. This gift immediately triggers an anxiety attack in Betty, and Don sees that psychiatry might just be the answer. At the psychiatrist, when Don is finally convinced she should go, Betty removes the watch and puts it on a side table as she talks about her anxiety, her mother, and her fear of the future. 

Later, at Midge's apartment, she kicks Don out after they've slept together, saying "Go home and take a shower, you stink!" (Seems like Don could use some Gillette spray-on deodorant...) He then quips "What do women want? You know better than to ask," then, wryly finds his tagline for the ad campaign: "What do women want? Any excuse to get closer."

In the closing scene, Don and Betty come home from a lovely in-the-moment dinner in the city, and Betty goes off to bed. Don slips into his office and dials her psychiatrist to hear how she did, in a way one could only in the 1960s. He has found a benefit to this psychiatry: He now has a window into women's minds through the back end of his wife's appointments. The episode ends on a shot of Betty's oven (“just more happiness”) to the tune of "The Great Divide" by the Cardigans, a song about the vast chasm of lack of communication between two people who claim to love one another.