Editor’s Note: The following are spoilers for Don’t Worry, Darling.
Welcome to Pobeda, an idyllic landscape of sunshine, palm trees and systemic oppression. In director Olivia Wildelong-awaited thriller Don’t worry dear, the inhabitants of this mysterious 1950s-style city exist in beautiful, twisted harmony. The men leave every day to do top-secret but vital work, while the women do literally everything else. Gender roles in this community are specific. Wives of Victory spend their days cleaning, shopping and, most importantly, asking no questions, their seemingly ideal lifestyle is sealed with an ironclad agreement that they keep their mouths shut. Husbands return home to their adoring wives every evening, ready to have hot sex at the kitchen table while the roast is cooking in the oven.
Throughout the film, we see how, despite the fact that women work hard all day cleaning bathtubs and vacuuming carpets, they always give in to their husbands and should be grateful for the opportunity to support their men. While Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) is presented as a cheerful young woman who enjoys playing the role of caring housewife to her charming husband Jack (Harry Styles), she later begins to see through the cracks of her imagined utopia.
Let’s start with the fact that femininity, obviously, is not a universal model and means something different for everyone. There are women who choose careers outside the home and women who prefer to focus their energies on other things. As we all know, the important thing is that a person has the right to choose how they spend their time, regardless of what others may think. However, within the shimmering walls of Project Victory, the only way to be a woman is to clean, cook, dance, and obey a man. Women have little sense of identity other than that which revolves around being a wife or mother. As this world unfolds around Alice, it becomes apparent that in this fragile, man-made society, things that are often associated with femininity are twisted and distorted, so women are punished whether they believe in fantasies or not.
Femininity as oppression
First, and in keeping with the theme of conformity, every woman in Victory appears to be enrolled in the same dance class. In the first scene of the film, the wives balance cups on their heads and dance for their husbands, who smoke cigarettes and stare at the women with hungry eyes. At first glance, dancing seems like a fun activity, but this illusion is dispelled as soon as we enter the dance studio. While almost every other place in the city is adorned with bright colors and warm light, the ballet studio is cold and brimstone. Most of the women wear black swimsuits in contrast to bright dresses, and their wide smiles are replaced by solemn, focused looks. While dance is usually a way of creativity and self-expression, in Don’t worry dear it is used solely as a form of control. He imposes the ideas of restraint and uniformity that are integral to maintaining the status quo of Victory. Later, when Alice had a vision of her friend Margaret (Kiki Lane) stuck behind a mirror in a dance studio and banging her head against the glass, we see a literal representation of how this space does not free, but limits.
This idea of femininity used for restraint is seen again in the film when Alice is washing the windows and a wall appears behind her, pressing her against the glass. In this scene, the house and its contents are literally being oppressed, effectively suffocating her even as she tries to do her part and clean it up. Also, later in the film, when Alice sees Margaret attempting suicide by slitting her own throat and then falling off the roof, Jack and Dr. Collins (Timothy Simons) to tell Alice that Margaret really fell while cleaning the windows. To reframe the story in this way, Margaret not only suffered while doing work meant for women, but she was blamed for getting hurt while doing it. When Alice questions this and becomes obsessed with finding the truth behind Project Victory, she isn’t just called irrational, she hysterical. Her madness and her femininity are inextricably linked.
misogynistic reality
When we learn near the end of the movie that Project Victory is actually a simulated reality created by founding enthusiast Frank (Chris PineWhen men trap women while they take care of their bodies, this twisted view of femininity finally makes sense. In this twisted paradise, women are punished for not wanting what men think they should, and driven into a fake world where, even as idealized versions of themselves, they still aren’t enough. Victory operates on the assumption that women won’t care—or lack the ability—to question their existence, and its creators didn’t even bother to tell women different backstories or sets of circumstances. All women met their husbands the same way and were from the same cities, and the men behind this never thought that women could understand that there was something sinister at play.
During the deliciously tense dinner scene where these inconsistencies are revealed, Alice’s perpetually pregnant friend Peg (Keith Berlant) vocally hopes her unborn child will be a boy because “girls are difficult,” further reinforcing the idea that women should see themselves as inferior because that’s how their husbands see them. Jack and the rest of the men manipulate and torture their partners (both physically and emotionally) under the deranged appearance that they are doing them a favor because they can’t accept that women’s identities and desires have the same value as their own. . Even when Alice’s best friend Bunny (Olivia Wilde) deliberately participates in Victory to live with simulations of her children dying in the real world, she lives in constant fear, knowing that any failure in the system could cost her her life. children for the second time, and she is under further pressure to comply.
For all these reasons Don’t worry dear reminds us that when women exist only through the eyes of misogynists, they are reduced to nothing more than the sum of their parts. Despite the fact that this fabricated society forces women to accept a certain feminine ideal, this idea of femininity is still degraded, so that even if they obey the rules imposed on them, the women of Victory will never win.
Source: Collider