Betty Draper Gets Naked! (But January Jones Does it All the Time!)
(Note: The following post is a ‘co-production’ with my long time partner-in-crime, roommate, art historian and avid celebrity gossip, Alaina Smith)
“Dear men of America, I like beer, I like football. I’m probably the most interesting girl you’ll ever meet.”
(January Jones, half-drunk, wrestling the dictaphone away from the the GQ interview man during their cross-country first class flight)
The above photo and quote — from this month’s cover story in GQ Magazine — offer up January Jones as an all-American girl. The type that watches football with you, eats salsa con queso instead of turning up her nose, and likes to chug a beer. She worked at Dairy Queen, is a champion at quarters, and claims she once drank 26 beers in one night (even though she didn’t go to college). When the author tells her that if she can play quarters, she didn’t need to go to college, she replies: “Yeah, I don’t feel like I missed anything. I’m a beer-pong champion! Among my friends, anyway.”
In other words, January Jones is a guys’ girl.
But then came Betty Draper — red lipstick, cinched waist, suburban dissatisfaction and the permanent impression of idealized ’60s womanhood on the Jones star image. While January Jones is the co-ed next door; Betty graduated from the all-girls patrician mainstay Bryn Mawr. January Jones is fresh-faced and open, the kind of girl who is so pretty even girls wouldn’t hate her. As Betty Draper, she assumes a layer of exacting glamour that is stunningly, heartbreaking-ly beautiful. The comparisons to Grace Kelly are inevitable, and not only because the narrative of Mad Men explicitly and repeatedly cultivates them.
But, writes Mark Kirby in her GQ profile, “though [the comparison is] flattering, she mostly finds it uncomfortable.”
Why?
Jones moved to New York just out of high school, finding odd modeling jobs (a bit of backstory that Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner apparently wrote into the Betty character), including one with Abercrombie and Fitch.
January Jones, Abercrombie Style
Jones then moved from modeling to acting — she had bit parts in a dozen films, ranging from Anger Management to Love Actually. She dated fellow model-turned-actor Ashton Kutcher who, according to the profile, told her she would never make it as an actress. She garnered attention in those small roles mostly for her looks — especially from the lad mags. (See photo below, also from GQ, promoting her role in the five-hanky We Are Marshall.)
In the pages of GQ, pre-Betty.
So, on the one hand, she is an Abercrombie girl, a football wife, a beer-drinking midwesterner. In Love Actually, she was literally cast as an “American Angel.” She’s clearly not afraid to take her clothes off … Yet she is now famous for her role in Mad Men, in which her character is a cipher for gender and sexual politics — on a show that is at least 50% about gender and sexual politics.
For Mad Men fans, Betty Draper is as frustrating as she is compelling. Like nearly every character on the show, it’s not that people either love her or hate her — it’s that they feel mixed emotions for her nearly every episode. (We personally feel a near-constant mix of sympathy, dismay, pity, and empathy for her.) The recent GQ profile offers the following summation of Betty:
It’s this impulsive, childish energy that makes Betty Draper so alluring, so intriguing, so threatening—she’s a pre-women’s-lib vessel of confused feminine energy, a libidinous force yearning to escape. When Jones is at her best, it’s raw, frightening, and most of all, seductive: the kind of performance that requires either topflight training or a lot of work.
Most recent press for Mad Men — which has become the thinking-viewer’s ‘must see’ show — has labored to conflate Jones with her character. Like so much of ‘quality television,’ the show is celebrated not only for its acting and writing, but for the way in which it evokes a very specific socio-temporal milieu, whether in the case of The Wire‘s contemporary Baltimore, Deadwood‘s 19th century Midwestern gold rush, or Friday Night Lights‘ working class, football-centric Texas town. Thus, the recent profile in Vanity Fair went behind the scenes of creating Mad Men, and featured its milieu in a gorgeous shoot by Annie Leibowitz.
The shoot was intended to promote Mad Men — which, despite tremendous critical accolades and DVD rentals, would still love a kick in the ratings. Not Jones or her co-star Jon Hamm. The conflation: make America fascinated with the characters, not with the actors themselves. (Jon Hamm has been faced with a similar dilemma: even when he hosts Saturday Night Live, the jokes aren’t about his own star persona (which is rather dull and steady, although he’s tremendously likable — see multiple podcast interviews between him and Sports Guy Bill Simmons) but riff on the persona of Don Draper.
As Annie has previously posted, the television personality functions rather differently than the film star. With film stars, the hope is that the public will have equal interest in a star’s on-screen and off-screen lives/performances. The biggest stars have managed to parlay popular film roles and ‘real life’ choices into a mutually reinforcing message; the private life and the onscreen life are equally valued as sites of ‘truth’ as to the ‘real’ star underneath.
The television star, however, is almost wholly subsumed by her onscreen identity, in part because she’s simply not as visible. But also because she appears as the same character over and over again, sometimes for hundreds of episodes over several years. The Seinfeld curse (the fact that none of the four characters have been able to move on to any particular success) is not an anomaly: see Jennifer Aniston, doomed to play versions of Rachel for the rest of her career.
January Jones, in her first major role, is at risk of being subsumed by Betty Draper. And she — and her publicist, one presumes — are trying their damndest to ensure that she will be able to escape that role when the show ends, if not before.
While the text might reinforce Jones’ preference for beer and football, the GQ shoot, which includes the pictures above, essentially portrays a darker, more risque Betty Draper - Cindy Sherman does Mad Men. This may be the perfect combination for ‘dude America,’ but it’s frustrating to her female (and feminist) fans. Jones herself seems to be aware of this: “What am I even saying?” she says in the profile. “These are just ridiculous sound bites that you’re going to put in the caption next to me being naked.”
Right she is. But that flash of awareness made us want to hear more about what Jones thinks, not only of Betty’s situation, but her own as she attempts to capitalize on the success of this role, and navigate an industry marked by stringent expectations for women and pervasive sexism that remind us a lot of a certain affluent, conservative Ossining household in 1960s America. (Maybe she’ll tell us in Vogue?)
