(Don't) Worry Darling
November 10, 2022
Writer: Grace Gefsky
Editor: Abigail Peacock
In late September, Olivia Wilde released her widely anticipated psychological thriller, “Don’t Worry Darling.” The film takes place in a seemingly glorious and idealistic 1950s-esque society; a community filled with sunshine, drunken nights, loving marriages, and lifelong friends, until it is revealed that Victory is a utopian world solely controlled by its founder, Frank. In this world, the women are unknowingly imprisoned within the simulation by their husbands, while men leave Victory everyday. When Alice unveils the contorted, restrictive reality of her life, the once harmonic relationships of the universe crumble.
Ultimately, Alice is given the choice to stay in the comfort of Victory or resort back to her stress induced life as a nurse. In the end, she chooses her own life. After seeing this movie, I felt a surge of gratitude for my own independence. I am the poster-child for being indecisive, for letting others make decisions for me, but since seeing this movie, I have made an effort to be more authoritative in my own life.
Uniformity of the feminine sex is reinforced multiple times throughout a day for a woman living in Victory. The wife wakes up each morning to see her husband off to work. Immediately after he leaves, she deep cleans the entire house from top to bottom for him. Her ballet class each afternoon reinforces aspects of control, and the radio she listens to on the bus home contains hidden messages regarding the importance of strict gender roles. The woman’s life is meticulously calculated to manipulate her into desiring traits that sustain the male gaze.
Wilde illustrates female oppression throughout the film by physically confining the female characters. Even when Alice initially ignores her intuitions, her daily routine acts out against her. As she cleans her windows, the walls close in on her: squeezing her body until she struggles to breathe. When Alice goes to dance class, she sees her friend Margaret trapped behind the mirror, violently banging her head into the glass. Wilde’s demonstrations of claustrophobia exhibit the sheer severity of Alice’s (and the rest of the women in Victory’s) confinement and, thus, the simulation’s systemic imbalance. Alice’s own house and personal activities become an inescapable cage. She desperately tries to ignore her own conscience and conform to society’s norms, but it is impossible. Regardless of if she gives in or fights against Victory’s ideologies, she remains a prisoner.
It is obvious that Frank — together with the rest of the men in Victory — believe that women are too dumb to conceptualize their own reality and are, thus, unworthy of cultivating their own basic autonomy. Frank’s innate lack of creativity and diversity to how each “couple” met and where each woman is from indicates how the Victory men view women. Each woman is from Boston, and each couple met when the husband dropped his train ticket in front of the woman at a train station. Perhaps, the men believe the women would be too busy waiting on their every need to consider anything suspicious.
When Alice ultimately confesses her knowledge to her husband, Jack (played by Harry Styles), he breaks his calm, charming character and becomes unbrideledly frustrated. In their real life, Alice was a constantly tired, hardworking surgeon, while Jack was lazy, unemployed, and completely dependent on his girlfriend. So, he cannot grasp why Alice isn’t thanking him for bringing her to Victory considering that, within the simulation, she is free from all stress and work, while he continues to visit and work in the real world. Alice is stunned; it is unfathomable to her that Jack cannot understand her joy in choosing a demanding lifestyle for herself. In the real world, she valued her independence: her liberty to choose her own path.
Ultimately, it is a privilege to live in a society where we have a choice in our own femininity, especially after viewing Wilde’s thriller as it illustrates the opposite. In robbing Victory’s women of the liberty to pursue their own path, she demonstrates the importance of a woman’s cultivation of her own definition of womanhood and her freedom to covet a path to reflect that choice.
