“Mad Men” Water Cooler – “Lady Lazarus”

Mad Men Water Cooler – “Lady Lazarus”

Welcome to this week’s edition of our “Mad Men” Water Cooler! Beyond this point, spoilers be waiting, so if you read on, beware, beware …

Often a recap talks about the events of an episode, without addressing all that comes before – in this case, the title. “Lady Lazarus” was the title of last night’s “Mad Men,” raising some interesting questions about the significance of episode titles and who “Lady Lazarus” might be…

Some of the episode titles have been fairly straight-forward this season of “Mad Men” – “Signal 30” was the title of a red-pavement driver’s education movie, and much of the episode took place in a driver’s ed class. “Tea Leaves” looked toward the future, and featured a wandering medium who read tea leaves at a posh hotel.

“Lady Lazarus,” however, requires a bit of interpretation. The title references the Sylvia Plath poem of the same name, and contains some of her most famous lines, including, “Dying/Is an art, like everything else/I do it exceptionally well,” and “Out of the ash I rise/with my red hair/and I eat men like air.”

The poem contains themes of oppression, reincarnation and performance – the unnamed speaker can project a convincing front, no matter the situation. She can be a smiling woman, or convince you of her death so keenly that you believe it to be real.

So why choose “Lady Lazarus” for this episode’s title? The performance aspect could certainly apply to Megan Draper – after all, we’ve been reminded all season that she used to be quite the actress, and in this episode she finally stopped pretending that she wanted to be a copywriter (like everything else, she does it exceptionally well) and left SCDP to pursue her dreams of the stage. It begs the question, was she ever interested in copywriting, or was it a means of getting close to Don? Now that one mask has fallen, will we really start to see the real Megan?

Or is it Howard’s unsuspecting wife, Beth (played hauntingly by Alexis Bledel – Rory Gilmore, how you’ve grown!). Pete’s inability to figure her out echoes the many faces of Lady Lazarus; nothing about this woman is what it seems. And for some reason that I myself can’t quite explain, the lines “A cake of soap /A wedding ring, /A gold filling” remind me of Beth. She presents so many faces to the world that if you took it all away, only those tangibles remain. And what do those things really tell you about a woman?

Sound off in the comments, readers – who was Lady Lazarus to you? If you haven’t read the Sylvia Plath poem, here it is – let us know your thoughts in the comments below!