In the penultimate episode of Mad Men, we found out that Betty is going to die. The internal reason for her death is lung cancer, but what is the external reason, the motive of Matthew Weiner, the director and principal writer of this show, for putting this in the story?
In a movie, people die for a reason. In most cases, it is because the person is evil and is getting his just deserts. In a melodrama, someone often has to die in order to bring a domestic conflict to an end. In other cases, the death is for the purpose of tragedy. But the same cannot always be said about a television series. Characters often die because the actor wanted too much money to sign a contract for another season. In other cases, the writers have run out of ideas and need a death to disrupt a static situation and open up new possibilities. Many of the deaths in Mad Men seem to have been for this latter reason, merely to move the story along.
Betty’s death sentence, however, is not like that, because the show is almost over. It cannot be on account of a contract dispute, nor is Weiner looking for a pathway to new stories. Betty’s death must be motivated like that in a movie, for something essential to the story itself, to Mad Men taken in its entirety.
Let us begin by considering some of the other deaths on this show. Bert Cooper was old and died of natural causes without suffering. It was merely the end of a long and happy life. The death of Lane Pryce was grim. He was guilty of embezzlement, although we felt sorry for him nevertheless. But at least his suicide was quick. The death of Pete’s mother as a silly, old woman being pushed overboard by her gigolo lover seems to have been played for laughs. And in general, the deaths in Mad Men have not been excessively depressing.
Betty’s death, on the other hand, will be neither quick nor painless. She is doomed to a year of suffering. Furthermore, Weiner could have given Betty breast cancer or cervical cancer, but he chose lung cancer. Clearly, Betty has been chosen to pay the price for all the smoking not only that she has done during this show, but also the smoking done by others. Smoking can contribute to any cancer, of course, but lung cancer brings smoking to mind more than any other. And it allows Weiner to do penance for making smoking look so glamorous. Having let us see Don Draper, tall, dark, and handsome, light up and look cool on countless occasions, it was unthinkable that this vice, now so despised and demeaned, should go unpunished.
Granted then that Betty is taking the fall, why was she singled out for the sacrifice? Well, of the major characters on this show, she has been the most unpleasant. We haven’t seen that much of Betty in these final seasons, but while she was married to Don, she was a shrew. On several occasions, we saw her being mean to her children. We might dismiss this as understandable, in that she was frustrated being married to an unfaithful husband. But in the second season, culminating in the “The Mountain King,” we see that Betty is not just someone who is irritable and spontaneously takes it out on others. In that season, she does everything she can to get Arthur and Sara Beth together romantically, encouraging each regarding the other, and helping to set up a lunch date, even though Sara Beth is married. When Sara Beth later tells Betty that she and Arthur had sex, and that she feels terrible about it, Betty expresses moral outrage and disgust at her behavior, which absolutely devastates Sara Beth. This was an act of deliberate cruelty. Betty maliciously guided her friend into sin so that she could condemn her for it, inflicting pain on her for the sheer pleasure of making her suffer, a friend who had never done Betty wrong. A lot of the other characters on Mad Men have behaved badly, even atrociously, but none have ever been deliberately cruel just for the fun of it. If anyone deserves to die, it is Betty.
But this raises the question, Why was Betty given such a horrible personality? Weiner could have made Betty a more sympathetic character, letting her be nice to her children. And he did not have to write that stuff about Arthur and Sara Beth at all. Anyone on that show could have been written as mean and cruel, but Weiner picked Betty. It is not enough to say that Betty must die because she was evil. We must now move up to the next level and ask why Betty was made so evil in the first place.
A previous episode ended with Peggy coming on like a badass with attitude to spare. We see her walking down the hall carrying the octopus painting, wearing shades, and with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth. Since she smokes like the rest of them, she could just as easily have been written as being mean and cruel in the early episodes, and then given lung cancer in the end. But that is unthinkable. Even letting Joan get lung cancer would have been out of the question.
Peggy and Joan are two women who, with no college education, have managed to rise in a male dominated industry at a time when discrimination against women was the norm. To have given either of them lung cancer would have looked like punishment for presuming to be equal to men. But Betty has been a housewife in two marriages despite her college education.
Actually, Betty’s degree in anthropology is something merely announced in one of the episodes, and had she not mentioned it, we would never have guessed. It’s not just that Betty never pursued a career in that field. It seems to have had no effect on her at all, much like the art degree that Mrs. Robinson had in The Graduate (1967), which was alluded to in this episode. And her going back to college to get a degree in psychology was apparently just from boredom, since she admits that there was not much point to it. In other words, for all Betty’s education, she still has no aspirations beyond that of being a housewife who lets men dominate her.
This is brought out in the scene where the doctor refuses to give her the diagnosis, insisting that he will speak to her husband. And when he does, the doctor and Henry talk as though Betty is not even in the room. This is a little much. In the late 1960s, my mother went to the doctor by herself for a physical. He told her that her thyroid was enlarged and might be cancerous. She went home and told my father. Then she went back in for tests, by herself, and she and the doctor decided she needed surgery. Then she went back home and told my father. In the end, it turned out to be benign, but the point is that Mad Men sometimes overdoes it in its portrayal of the bad old days (or good old days, depending on your point of view). But in any event, the purpose of the scene was to drive home the way Betty lets men run her life. She even lets Henry take the cigarettes away from her, even though, given her situation, she might just as well smoke two packs a day. She does resist Henry’s attempts to get her to pursue aggressive treatment, but as a rule, she lets men push her around.
Now, if there is one thing that traditionalists and feminists agree on, it is that there is nothing wrong with being a housewife. Their agreement, however, is based on different values. The traditionalist believes that a woman’s place is in the home, where she can be a proper mother to her children. The feminist believes that if a woman chooses to be a housewife, that is a legitimate choice, and what she does deserves to be called “work.”
Notwithstanding this agreement as to the role of housewife being something desirable or at least acceptable, it is clear that the judgment of Matthew Weiner is that women like Peggy and Joan, who succeed in a man’s world, are deserving of reward, whereas women like Betty, housewives who allow themselves to be dominated by men, are deserving of punishment.