“Don’t Worry, Darling”: Why Can’t Men Just Have Normal Hobbies
I recently re-watched the 2022 thriller, Don’t Worry, Darling, the first feature-length film from director Olivia Wilde. Aside from the glamorous up-dos, impeccable soundtrack and sexy suspense, the film is a bit of a head-scratcher. A new take on the “Stepford Wives” trope originated in Levin’s 1972 novel, adapted for the screen in 1975 and then again starring Nicole Kidman in 2004, Wilde’s foray into the cinematic scene makes a splash with her cautionary tale on obsession with perfection, dystopic virtual reality, and male indoctrination in the modern world.
The film opens on another glorious day in Victory; abbreviated from the longer “Victory Project”, an experimental society reminiscent of the originally intended Epcot Project — Yes, that Epcot, worth a deep-dive from any number of YouTube creators — and no less sinister, the viewer is plunged into a world where gender has clear lines, there is no evident suffering and everyone is seemingly happy. No, really: unlike the 1950s of our timeline, before Roe v. Wade, over-the-coutner birth control and the right to open a bank account without a father or husband’s consent, everyone — women included — seem largely at peace and living happily in Victory. All the economic prosperity, single-family homes, and one-income way of life of yesteryear that seems so far from attainable in the world in which the “DINK” (“dual-income-no-kids”) lifestyle seems aspirational, avocado toast (and definitely not student loans or record home loan interest rates) has been blamed for the slowing of the economy, and kids are the new jag with fewer wheels… By all accounts, this society seems, as Jack puts it, “perfect”. To get by, everyone must simply abide by one rule: not to go “there”, meaning, the top of the center where every husband seems to spend the day working. No, our primary characters, a young childless-by-choice couple Alice and Jack, lead a life of luxury and lots of consensual sex. What could be bad? Like any good dystopia: everything.
Alice, our protagonist housewife, seems to have all of her needs met and then some — on top of keeping a beautiful home in a neighborhood of beautiful homes, she has a full social calendar, seems to truly adore her partner, and has that healthy “fun-in-the-sun, just got my pussy ate on the dining room table” glow. But there’s something not-quite-right about her life in Victory. As Alice goes on about her daily routines, a litany of household chores and dinners intended to remind us of the strict gender roles of heteronormativity, she has evermore frequent flashes of vision and eventual hallucinations. As time goes on, these flashes of surreal images of synchronized dancers in a hoop that melts into an iris and dilated pupil become more vivid and less intervalic until, upon witnessing the suicide of a seemingly schizophrenic neighbor, she begins to lose her grip on reality entirely.
If all of the women in this movie spend most of their time whispering about one another, all of the men seem to idolize Frank
Prior to witnessing the death of her neighbor and being dragged away from the scene by a team of unnamed men in red, Alice violated the one rule of the Victory Project: don’t go “there”. It’s this event that seems to set her into a spiral — coincidence that she shares a name with a famous white-rabbit-following fictional character? After this trauma, she has a growing suspicion of Frank, the CEO/cult-leader/demigod of Victory who gives speeches, spends a lot of time on the phone with mystery voices by his pool with his shirt open and, as any good villain, lives on a hill far away from town. If all of the women in this movie spend most of their time whispering about one another, all of the men seem to idolize Frank — the big man about campus, the cult of personality. At one point, Dean, played by the hilarious Nick Kroll, even says to a newcomer, “you should consider yourself lucky to even be in [Frank’s] presence.”
As the film goes on and the mystery about Frank’s role in Victory deepens alongside Alice’s paranoia, the problems of their way of life seem more and more obvious, and the schism between those that “see it” and those who choose not to seems all the more blatant. Unfortunately for Alice and the sympathetic viewer, she seems evermore alone in her conspiratorial thoughts until, at a dinner party she hosts, she is across the table from Frank who had just confirmed her suspicions of his plot to control the population of Victory. It’s at this point, when all of the guests at the table begin to look at Alice with fear in their eyes, and her husband Jack insists she stop, that the movie could be renamed “Gaslighting 101” as Frank, the narcissist-in-chief, tells her she may be literally “insane”.
After this dinner, Alice and Jack, the couple that is seemingly the most healthy and respectful of one another, diverge. Alice, who is convinced of the reality of the situation and believed by no one, her husband included, pleads with him to disappear from Victory in the middle of the night. Regretfully, he acquiesces and they load the car. Jack seems quiet while Alice declares she has everything they might need to drive through the night. As she gets in the car, Jack staring blankly ahead at the wheel, the ignition not started, she says, “let’s go…baby, let’s go.” His head bowed, he can only say, “I’m sorry” over and over while the men in red approach the passenger side and the reality of the betrayal sets in for Alice. Out of fear, she screams, “I’m sorry, I can be better” which knowing Jack’s complicity in the whole plot, feels even more gut-wrenching on a second viewing.
Alice is taken away to an unknown location and undergoes something which looks like a kind of shock therapy to “reset” her disposition. She has visions of a different life, one of messier hair, intimate moments with a jack who looks less perfect, untrimmed and acne-scarred — an imperfect but happier life. In an echo of the present, Real Jack says to Real Alice “I’m sorry” in reference to having lost his job. “It’s okay,” she says, “I’ll take an extra shift”. He buries his head in shame.
She returns home in the same car she was dragged out of, this time Jack taking her delicately by the hand, the big band music more uproarious than we’ve heard since the opening of the film; everything seems as it was prior to her outburst. Alice is greeted by her friend Bunny, the chain-smoking mother of two next door played by director Wilde, declaring, “wow, you look sensational!” In the background is a homemade banner with childish handwriting scrawling, “Welcome Home Miss Alice”, implying a deep sense of community. Jack touches Alice’s lower lip in soft affection and, like a war flashback, we see the un-groomed jack performing the same gesture — Alice pulls away and looks at him with mistrust. In a flash she returns to the vacantly pleasant expression of someone who’s been heavily sedated, a common treatment for housewife “hysteria” at the time period evoked. Reprogrammed-Alice returns to her friends, her husband and her daily routines. As the montage from earlier in the film repeats, an off-camera voice repeats the montra: “there is beauty in control, there is grace in symmetry, we move as one.”
At this point we learn the entire truth of the situation. Alice, upon hearing Jack humming a familiar song while looking for a record, is sent into a spiral. The camera follows a scraggly-haired Jack down a dark, dingy apartment hallway. He glances over his shoulder as if paranoid that anyone should find out what he’s been hiding for what seems like months if not years of horror. He enters the apartment, darker somehow than the hallway, eats something out of a can among other opened-but-not-discarded receptacles, and slinks to his bedroom. We find an emaciated Alice in bed, restrained with psych ward-grade straps, and some kind of canopy apparatus projecting the images of synchronized dancers above her, her eyes held open by monocle devices, presumably to hypnotize the user and project images. Jack crawls into bed beside her, applies his device, and enters the “Victory Project.”
Along with Jack, we re-enter Victory where Alice collapses and Jack attempts to calm her saying, “you’re having another episode.” This time, Alice doesn’t try to defend her sanity: she simply turns to look at him and asks, “what did you do?” Realizing he can no longer lie to her, he tries to defend his choice to plug them both into the matrix first accusing her, “you hated working”, then of himself: “I have to leave here [to work] everyday and I fucking hate every minute of it… you get to stay here and be happy.” “You’re happy,” he says, while Alice looks at him through tears. He tries to hold her while she begins to have a panic attack saying, “I can’t breathe, get off me”. She eventually defends herself, bludgening Jack with a rocks glass, and blacks out. She awakes to her friend Bunny who discovers her passed out with Jack’s body on top of her, covered in blood.
“Is being plugged-in a necessary condition to happiness?”
Just like the essential freedoms enshrined in American society, the right to pursue happiness, everyone in this movie is trying to “get theirs”. Jack and the men like him are trying to achieve some escape from their presumably miserable lives outside of the Victory Project, some of the women even consent to be there, determined to live out a fantasy of a life they could never have in the real world. Bunny has virtual kids, she says, because “[in Victory] they’re alive. Here I didn’t lose them. Here I can keep them.” In a world where tech billionaires seem to want us wearing $3,500 skigoggles and a virtual workstation has become the new “work-from-home”, Wilde’s film seems to beg the question: Is being plugged-in a necessary condition to happiness?
Real Jack is, by all accounts, a miserable S.O.B. Despite dreamy flashback sequences of a happy, but imperfect life together, he simply can’t seem to cope. He feels like a failure for not holding down a job next to his partner Alice, a seemingly successful and content M.D. Instead of facing his problems, he finds himself in a wormhole of anonymous internet voices talking about “order” in “chaos” — an all too common escape for the emasculated males of the modern world. He joins Victory for his own reasons and forces Alice to be at his side. It seems he wouldn’t be happy to just live out his fantasy as a hobby — submitting his female partner to his fantasy world in which he is the sole breadwinner and entirely dependent on him, down to her real-life vital needs of an IV drip and sponge-delivered hydration, are necessary to his idea of a “perfect” life. It’s with this in mind that he decides to join the Victory Project — a fantasy land for male losers to become a part of something bigger than themselves, to feel connection and power, despite hyper-capitalist isolation and misery. Rather than attempt to address the real problems that plague their lives — their hatred of work, their sense of failure in the face of a modern society in which women can be valued for more than their fuckable lips and talents in the kitchen — they center their value on a bygone, sharia-law way of life; one in which all their needs are taken care of in exchange for cooperation. The only catch: none of it is real.
So is the feminist Get Out worth a watch? Yes and no. Yes, if you have a friend or partner who somehow doesn’t see the problems with capitalism/anti-feminism today. No, if you’re not feeling like seeing a dystopia in post orange-cheeto-man times (I can’t type his name because my computer autocorrects to a toilet emoji). Overall I give it 9 out of 10 Stepfords for originality of take and for Harry Styles’s foray into the cinematic genre.