What I love about Betty’s depression is that there isn’t a firm reason for it. Many TV shows would say, “Oh, she had a controlling first husband” or “She had a bad relationship with her mother” or “She’s stifled by her life as a housewife.” Mad Men says it’s all of those things, but it also says that there’s something undefined about it. Betty will never be whole. She’s always going to be looking for a magic fix that won’t come, and even Henry—who really does love her unconditionally—is someone she’ll push away in bitterness, just because she doesn’t know many other ways to relate to people. When the series started, it seemed like Betty was going to fill the show’s “housewife becomes feminist” role, but she didn’t really do that. Instead, she increasingly became isolated, both because of things others did to her and things she did herself. She was miserable, and maybe she’ll always be miserable. The show teases us with the idea that she’ll someday become a “better” person, as if that means anything, but I think it’s clear, now, that she won’t, at least by the standards we’d like to put on her. Nothing will ever quite fill the hole. (x)

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“People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.” — Don Draper

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(20/100) » Mad Men

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“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” 1x1
Written by Matthew Weiner 
Directed by Alan Taylor 

Don: Why aren’t you married?
Rachel: Are you asking what’s wrong with me?
Don: It’s just you’re a beautiful, educated woman. Don’t you think getting married and having a family would make you a lot happier than all the headaches that go with fighting people like me?
Rachel: If I weren’t a woman, I would be allowed to ask you the same question. And I suppose if I weren’t a woman I wouldn’t have to choose between putting on an apron and the thrill of making my father’s store what I always thought it should be.
Don: So that’s it? You won’t get married because you think business is a thrill?
Rachel: That, and I have never been in love.
Don: “She won’t get married because she’s never been in love.” I think I wrote that. It was to sell nylons.
Rachel: For a lot of people, love isn’t just a slogan.
Don: Oh, “love”. You mean the big lightning bolt to the heart, where you can’t eat, can’t work, so you run off and get married and make babies.The reason you haven’t felt it is because it doesn’t exist. What you call “love” was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.
Rachel: Is that right?
Don: I’m pretty sure about it. You’re born alone, you die alone, and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.
Rachel: … I don’t think I realized it until this moment, but it must be hard being a man too.

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“I hate to break it to you but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent.”

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