Little, perfect, Betty Hofstadt, arguing with dirty squatters in a rat-infested building. As we said earlier, you cant really get a better way of depicting how much society felt like it was in decline to the older generation.
Just as all the intense, eye-popping colors of the Hawaiian interlude indicated heat, so do the greys and blues of this scene indicate cold to us.
This is an illustration of how the way a costume works in a scene can change from scene to scene. This exact outfit looked frumpy and mature when she was standing in the kitchen talking to Sally. And while it still comes across mature here, now it looks utterly refined and expensive on her, in juxtaposition with the squatters, the blues suddenly standing out in her scarf and skirt. Shes uncomfortable in that setting not just because its potentially dangerous, but because her upper-middle class life is laid out on the table for all of them to ridicule.
The creators of Mad Men will often very subtly refer to film and television styles of the period. For instance, the scenes with Megans parents last season were shot and staged like a typical French divorce drama of the period. Betty in Rome referenced Italian neo-realist films. The Christmas Party in the office looked very much like it could have been a scene in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Dons birthday party last season had the flat lighting and laughing background characters of a wacky 60s sitcom. We said at the time that it looked like the kind of party The Monkees would wind up crashing. Anyway, were rambling, but this entire scene reminded us of a whole string of late 60s/early 70s TV movies about how the dirty awful counterculture encroached on suburbia. Endless stories of teenage prostitutes and drug addicts with patient, well-appointed upper-middle class white parents trying desperately to save them from a life of crime or worse, non-conformity. So basically, Bettys standing in for Hope Lange or Eva Marie Saint or Shirley Jones (or some other blonde WASP mom-actress of the period) in some ABC Movie of the Week about a wealthy mother searching for her runaway violinist daughter on the filthy streets of New York.
Another example of a costume doing yeomans work from scene to scene. When Peggy was on the phone with the pastor while wearing this outfit, it was all about her Catholic schoolgirl background. When you put her in a scene with her Zappa-faced boyfriend, who expresses some discomfort with her management style, you can see that these characters are going in different directions. When you have her berating a couple of nerdy, baby-faced copywriters, she comes across well-appointed and confident; even mature in comparison to them.
