What Went Wrong in “Don’t Worry Darling”

 

This piece will contain spoilers so seriously be forewarned

Sometimes I’m cooking dinner in my cute little house dress in my starter home for my upper-middle-class husband and I wonder if I am in a hetero-patriarchal simulation of life. Like, even if I got to marry the boyband hunk of my dreams and live in a super sleek house in a neighborhood of equally attractive and well-off people, would it still secretly be a sterile nightmare?

Okay, I loved this movie, enough to take the time to write a think piece on it, but in spite of the striking cinematography, visuals, and gender politics, there was something lacking in the movie.

You don’t need me to tell you that this movie fell apart in the third act but I can tell you why. The plot twist of the story (again SPOILERS SPOILER SPOILERS) where we find out that this is a simulation in an online community where the majority of the women are held against their will and put into a comatose state is a poor analogy for the patriarchal society that this movie is supposed to be commenting on. You can find these living arrangements in the real world (Saturday will be the 4th wedding I’ve been to in 6 weeks) but the underpinnings of them are a far cry from kidnapping and mind control.

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Willing Participants

I know I’m not the only one who was watching this movie and thinking this is kinda sexy and they don’t have it too bad. Literally, if that were real life and not a simulation, people work their whole lives to achieve a life like that. Some people love their jobs working 60 hrs a week but you certainly don’t have to kidnap a chick to find someone who is willing to keep the house. If you were someone like me who watched hours and hours of podcasters like Kevin Samuels (before he Cinco’d his last de Mayo) you would know that every day he had a half dozen women calling in to have him rate them to see if they were worthy of such a life. Considering the fact that a misogynistic podcast is the secret big bad of this movie (which is a funny thing to type unironically) it’s worth pointing out that the patriarchy is not only held up by the domination of men but also by the willing participants of women who want to align themselves with the benefits available to them in a patriarchal society.

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The World Outside:

If you got a fuller picture of the world outside of their little suburb it would be clear why willing participants would not be hard to come by. In the real world, all of the dizzying housework and mind fuck misogyny usually just also includes work for most women. For a lot of women being a sexual object does not inherently result in the benefits of food, shelter, and luxury. This doesn’t mean that the trophy wife isn’t oppressed but it is worth asking where does the food come from. Someone was working and many of those laborers were women. This is really my personal take, but if someone in the simulation had left, seen the world outside where poverty, insecurity, and violence as well as misogyny are commonplace without the protection of class, and then returned knowingly it would have been more accurate than to have given blanket ignorance to the women of Victory. This movie is missing a class analysis really bad and it’s part of why the third-act plot twist is almost bad enough to ruin the movie.

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Real Mind Control

All behavior is learned behavior so if you see an outcome in society, it has been produced through culture and reinforced through a lifetime of interactions. Babies aren’t born blue and pink to know what boys and girls are supposed to like, this stuff is taught implicitly and explicitly with ‘boys don’t cry’ or ‘that’s not lady like’. It is so much more poignant to realize that your entire life has included modules of domestic housewife training that you have participated in so thoroughly that you don’t even remember when it started or know if it’s what you really want. It wasn’t one bad man hypnotizing you but a whole society that rewards certain behaviors, appearances, and people while punishing others in a way that conditions people who could be anything in the world to be a specific outcome. I grew up believing that women were created to be helpers to men and to submit to their husbands and God and I was not alone. My mother had us pray for our future husbands on the way to school every day, I went to purity balls and I was expected to stay at my father’s house with him as my head until I was married and under the leadership of my husband. We said these things in unambiguous terms throughout my entire life. Even if you were fortunate enough to not have such a stringent upbringing, the media around us inundates us with sexualized images of women, we basically use porn to sell hamburgers and perfume. To our perceptions of ourselves especially as we are growing up and developing expectations of ourselves and the world around us it does not matter that they are fake, it does not matter if they are edited and unattainable or exploitative we are conditioned to want it, and want to be like it. This is so much more of a compelling source of mind control than forced sedation and brainwashing. The way the programming is portrayed in the film really centers the blame on a handful of extremists and not a collective effort of society to produce the desired outcome of submissive and breedable females.

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Making a cult of podcast bros the secret villain of the movie really undermined the gender critiques of the movie. It left out any class analysis of gender oppression, understated the society-wide nature of conditioning gender norms, and entirely removed the agency of 90% of the female cast. Maybe there was some allegorical point in the twist they decided on but I sure can’t see it. Feel free to tell me if I missed anything below in the comments, I’m dying to hear other people’s take on this film.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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