At the climax of Don’t Worry Darling its heroine, Alice Warren, realises her idyllic fifties suburban life has been a lie, a virtually simulated prison where she and other women have been imprisoned by their husbands, who long for a time before women had jobs or lived for themselves. The metaphor is obvious, both that gender roles are illusions enforced by power, and that many modern straight men want to force women back into “their place” by any means necessary. But the film fails as it misunderstands how these men think and act.
The film’s tradwife matrix is the creation of Frank, the film’s ultimate villain who looms over his little world the whole movie, complete with Big Brother style posters in the dance hall. He is, as director Olivia Wilde has said, inspired by right wing talking head Jordan Peterson, a sort of self-help guru for incels. But at no point was that man on my mind when I saw Frank.
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The man I thought of was Keith Raniere, founder of the infamous NXIVM cult, who, like Frank in the film, enslaved and imprisoned women for years, before being finally caught and imprisoned. Like Frank he’d created his own hidden world to control, because what he wanted to do there was illegal. In our brief view of reality Alice’s husband has her tied to their bed and sedated, and Frank wants to stop Alice escaping at the end because she’ll expose his scheme. But these are things you only need do if your scheme would be threatened by exposure.
The people Wilde wants to critique in this film are not doing anything illegal, at least not obviously, and they don’t feel the need to hide their deeds from the world. The only reason to create your own secluded community is if you feel the world outside cannot provide or will not tolerate what you want, and Frank, like the people the film wants to criticise, wants to bring back the past, or at least what he thinks the past was. But creating your own hermetic world is an admission of defeat, that the wider world has turned its back on you and will never accept you again, and that the best you can expect is a consolation prize.
There’s a telling scene early in Don’t Worry Darling, where Frank takes the stage at a nightclub, grabs the microphone and yells “Who’s world is this?” to chants back of “Ours!” from the men of the crowd. It’s meant to reek of insecurity, as no-one who actually rules the world feels the need to repeat that fact to themselves. But in doing so it exposes the failure of the film. This world is theirs, yes, but by saying this they admit the real one is not and cannot become theirs.
But if there’s anything you can say about the Americans in reality who want to bring back an imagined past it’s that they don’t think they’ve lost. They haven’t. They’re not trying to hide from the world in little hermetic communities but remake that world in their image. They’ve gone into politics and now dominate much of American political life. Abortion is now illegal in many US states because, unlike Frank and co, they didn’t give up.
When Ira Levin created the creepy suburb trope in 1972 with The Stepford Wives he drew on his own childhood in the nineteen-forties, when white Americans fled en masse from cities to segregated suburbs, hiding from what they saw as dangerous, crime-ridden hellscapes. But the decade Levin wrote in was the last time that was the case.
The Stepford Wives (1975)
That decade saw the birth of the Religious Right, a political hydra determined to remake the world in its image. For a century American fundamentalists had secluded themselves from the world to keep themselves pure for Christ’s return, but the Civil Rights Act, second wave feminism and the birth of gay rights punctured their bubble forever. Realising they could no longer hide from the secular world they decided to end it, to make the country what their little world had been. And they are currently succeeding.
The film’s fifties imagery is also dated to the point of toothlessness. Few conservatives today idolise the fifties, most not only being too young to remember them but too young to remember others’ nostalgia for them.
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A modern conservative utopia would look less like Leave it to Beaver and more like Christian TikTok. The creepy suburb imagery was also played out by the turn of the millennium, as the nineties reacted violently to fifties nostalgia after a decade of Happy Days reruns and films like A Christmas Story, skewering it in films like Pleasantville and Far From Heaven. Today “picturesque fifties suburb” is shorthand for “creepy, repressive society”.
American Beauty (1999)
The sort of technology the film’s plot runs on also undermines its relevance. The internet’s made it impossible to seclude yourself from the world, as its news and culture are streamed constantly to your phone, PC and now even your watch. Secluded communities can only exist if they control all information coming in and out, and for the film’s plot to work the husbands have to keep their wives utterly cut off from the outside world, as even the slightest glimpse would destroy the illusion. Part of why real conservatives are trying to crush all cultures besides theirs is that those other cultures always surface in their Twitter feed.
But the film’s ultimate problem is that it assumes its villains’ ideal of domestic life is a thing of the past. There’s an implication throughout that it couldn’t happen openly in its vision of the future, one where progress and equality are not reversed, where men like Frank never gain mainstream political power and their worst crimes occur in secret.
But in some parts of modern America not only is it the reality, but far more extreme versions are the norm. Since the eighties one Christian movement called Quiverfull, boasting around ten thousand American members (compared to seventy in the film’s matrix) has believed and lived its ideal that women have no role in life besides bearing and raising as many children as they can. Families of twelve are common.
Don’t Worry Darling is a film too naïve and optimistic for its moment. It feels like it missed the last six years, which showed us that the greatest threats to our freedom are not hidden under the surface of our society, nor will they be in danger if exposed to the world.
They’re staring us in the face and they want us to know it.
