"Don't Worry Darling" Accidentally Gets Some Things Right
Although nobody involved in the movie seems to realize it
Note: There’s no way to discuss this movie without spoiling the twist ending. So, if you haven’t seen the movie, but you want to, and you don’t want the ending ruined, this is your warning to stop reading now.
Don’t Worry Darling is Stepford Wives meets The Matrix. Instead of replacing their wives with robots, the men imprison them in a simulated reality. The main character, Alice (she goes down the rabbit hole, get it?), spends the whole movie trying to figure out what’s going on in Victory, her picture-perfect, midcentury Palm Springs-meets-Los Alamos community, where all the men work for the same company and all the women are housewives. After lots of interesting ideas lead nowhere, Alice discovers the truth: her loser husband trapped her in this virtual reality because he thought they’d be happier there than in the real world.
As even mainstream reviewers sympathetic to the victimhood narrative have pointed out, the movie has plot holes so distractingly gigantic, it’s almost impossible to overlook them. Doesn’t anyone notice that the imprisoned women are missing in real life? Why is there seemingly no consideration given to the need to keep their unconscious bodies hydrated, fed, or clean? Wouldn’t it be easier to create artificial female characters than to brainwash and reprogram real women? Why are women given medication and shock treatments inside a simulation? Where did the clues (e.g. mysterious airplane crash, empty eggs) that tip off Alice come from? What causes the red-herring of mysterious earthquake tremors that disrupt the poolside lounging and mall shopping of Victory’s imprisoned women? Why does an American character choose to become British inside the simulation?
Setting aside the major script issues, and the bizarre fact that Victory’s cultish leader is somehow supposed to be based on Jordan Peterson, whom the film’s director/supporting actress Olivia Wilde described as “this insane man … a pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community,” the film - albeit unintentionally - makes some valid points.
Gender is real
It's difficult to villify the patriarchy unless you acknowledge that men are men, women are women, and there are differences between them. Thus, for all its woke affectations, Don't Worry Darling is actually a manifesto for old-school, trans-exclusionary feminism.
The filmmakers might argue that this is the result of the regressive ideology espoused by the guy who created the virtual reality. Nonetheless, the premise of the film is that men are scared of women (who apparently represent chaos) and want to control them. That concept is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that both physical and psychological gender are arbitrary constructs.
Real-life wokesters might have a hard time defining what a woman is, but in this movie, the primary requirement of womanhood seems to be simply the anatomy required to look really good in a cocktail dress.
Men want to make women happy
The script for Don't Worry Darling was written by two men, which may be why the film's male characters are more pathetic than villainous. Alice's husband Jack genuinely loves his wife, and exits the simulation every day in order to earn the money necessary to keep Alice plugged into the digital wonderland.
While the film tries to argue that Jack and the other men do this so that they can keep the women under their thumbs, the male characters seem to be motivated by a desire to provide their partners with a better life than the one they can in the real world. From Jack's perspective, he is willing to spend half his life as a wage slave in the dismal abyss of the real world, so that his wife can enjoy a stress- free existence with extensive leisure time and unlimited shopping in Victory.
The movie suggests that not all the women are partnered to their Victory husbands in real life, and that some may actually have been kidnapped. Tugging on that thread would have led the story in a much more interesting direction, but the filmmakers do nothing with it. Notably though, even the men who ostensibly captured and reprogrammed women to serve as their wives in the digital realm appear highly motivated to maintain the illusion of a highly desirable existence.
This is interesting, because it acknowledges something real about men. The average man doesn't want a Stepford wife who just cooks, cleans, and sexually services him. Men strive to make their women happy, and accomplishing that goal is deeply satisfying.
This point is made quite clearly during a scene early in the film, when Jack comes home from a long day at work to find Alice waiting for him with his favorite drink and a delicious dinner on the table. Instead of indulging himself in the pleasures that are offered to him, Jack enthusiastically performs oral sex on his wife.
Do Jack's good intentions redeem him from trapping, deceiving, and gaslighting his wife? No, but they do shed some light on what constitutes a fairly genuine male fantasy. Even though the premise of the simulation is that it offers men “victory” over women, the men don't use that power to become slave drivers, they use it to become generous and considerate breadwinners.
Modern life and technology kinda suck
Another intriguing aspect of the story that goes unexplored by the filmmakers is the idea that the main issue with Victory is not that it's a simulation, but that the women did not consent to being plugged into it. Near the end of the film, Alice discovers that her neighbor, Bunny, knows the truth, and lives in Victory voluntarily. This begs the question, is there anything wrong with that?
From Bunny's perspective, it's easy to see the appeal. Victory is modeled after planned communities of the 1950s and 1960s. Houses are spacious and comfortable, with modern appliances and attractive furniture. All the neighbors know each other, and enjoy active social lives. Every car is a classic, and anything you want can be purchased and charged to the Victory company account.
In contrast, when the audience finally sees the real world outside the simulation of Victory, it is gray, oppressive, and exhausting. Everyone is absorbed in their screens, endlessly working, struggling to pay bills, disconnected from each other, and generally not having any fun at all.
Given the choice between the fantasy of a low-stress, old-fashioned lifestyle, and the reality of a soul-crushing techno-dystopia, it's not hard to understand why both men and women would choose to spend as much time as possible in Victory.
If Mark Zuckerberg is paying attention, he might want a model his Meta virtual reality more closely on Victory. It's certainly much more appealing than the VR worlds that have been presented to us so far.
Freedom is what you make of it
While Alice inevitably starts feeling smothered by the tedium of household chores and poolside gossip chatter, there doesn't seem to be anything stopping the women from exploring their interests. Maybe Bunny is using her ample free time to write the Great American novel. Who knows? Not the audience, because the film never bothers to explain why the women - even with their memories replaced by fabricated origin stories a la Dark City - would demonstrate a complete absence of ambition.
In the real world, Alice is a doctor (or, given her age and reference to “a 30-hour shift,” probably a medical school resident). The idea that a person of her intellect and capability would be relegated to scrubbing the bathtub and cooking pot roast is presented as central to the theme of Victory's control over women. When Alice confronts Jack about this, he argues that she hated her job, and that now she is free of it.
On one level, of course, this is indefensible coercion. People should be free to choose what they want to do, and not many people - certainly not Jordan Peterson - would argue that women should be prevented from working outside the home.
On another level though, this raises the question of freedom. In the mid-century America that Victory is modeled after, traditional gender roles meant that most women focused on maintaining a household and raising children, while most men worked a 9 to 5 job somewhere fairly close to home. At that time, a single income was sufficient to maintain a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle, so both partners wound up with more leisure time. Dinner, homework, and chores were done by 7:00, so families could routinely enjoy activities such as bowling, neighborhood get-togethers, or going to the movies, on weeknights.
In our current society, we have evolved past such repressive paradigms. Instead, both partners must now serve as wage slave and housekeeper, while children - if there are any - spend most of their time in the care of strangers. Most people work 8:00 to 5:00, with a 30 to 60 minute commute at each end. Every day is a race to the finish line, with both partners trying to take care of everything that needs to be done to maintain a home in the tiny window of time between getting home from work and falling exhausted into bed.
So, really, how free are we? Instead of being oppressed by the patriarchy, we are oppressed by a system that consumes our time and energy, replaces real activity with electronic diversions, undermines our physical and mental health, and tells us that if we don't like it, there's something wrong with us.
People want to escape
Don't Worry Darling tries to be scary by suggesting that men want to kidnap women and keep them out of the workforce, in order to take care of them and make them happy. As terrifying prospects go, that one seems a little thin.
The film's characters are all conventionally attractive, gender-conforming, heterosexual couples. The virtual reality they inhabit is beautifully lit and art-directed. Unlike The Matrix or The 13th Floor, technology only functions as a mechanism of control because it's used that way. As Bunny's presence proves, Victory can be a refuge, rather than a prison.
Every one of us, every day, escape into some kind of virtual reality. Whether it's the ideological echo chamber of social media, the flickering shadows of film and video, or even the pages of a good book, we all need a break from reality.
Yes, a golden cage is still a prison. No sane person would advocate for the violent and deceptive measures depicted in this movie. But there is something about the Victory scenes in Don't Worry Darling that hints at repressed desire. Without realizing it, the filmmakers seem to be yearning for a simpler time: a time when the conventions and values to which they so strenuously object provided, by any metric, a more enjoyable and fulfilling existence.
Don't Worry Darling seems to be intended to make men feel bad about being men. Instead, it just might remind some men who they are, and what they're looking for. Freedom, joy, connection. A sense of being important to a woman you care about. These things have nothing to do with entrapment or deceit.
The men in Victory are weak and wrong, not because they want to make their women happy, but because they resort to subterfuge in order to do so. A real man doesn't trap a woman in a beautiful, imaginary world; he strives to make the real world as beautiful as she can imagine.
Maybe Don't Worry Darling will inspire some men to do just that.
what a beautiful essay, lex
i don't plan to ever see the movie. there's no point, as it couldn't match the depth of your philosophy and vision in interpreting it.
This is great! Especially “As terrifying prospects go, that one seems a little thin”! It’s seems the filmmakers are trying to fight the last war without having been there