by There was a lot of drama involving Don’t Worry Darling’s premiere and postproduction. From Olivia Wilde calling Florence Pugh “Ms. Flo” in a video sent to Shia LeBeouf, to Harry Styles spitting on Chris Pine, Chris Pine looking exhausted by Harry Style’s detailed description of how filming the movie felt like a “movie”, Pugh’s late arrival at Cannes Film Festival in a glamorous purple outfit, and the alleged feud between Wilde and Pugh. Whether this drama was a well-intended theatre to market the movie and increase the audience’s views or not, Olivia Wilde received a harsh backlash from the media that was, quite frankly, misogynistic. People were calling Olivia a bad director and refused to watch her movie because of it, but the movie had not been released then.
This is the audience’s double standard because there are a lot of abusive, pedophilic, and terrible male directors that do not even face half the negative attention Olivia received. Most importantly, even if there was tension or a bad relationship between Olivia and Florence, Florence never gave a public statement regarding it and Olivia still faced negative commotion from fans. However, a lot of actors, both men and women, have given public statements about the violence they endured from specific directors, and not only were they not judged or questioned, but they continued getting a platform to create further films.
Now that the movie has been released, I find it amusing. The screenplay was written by Katie Silberman and based on a story by Carey Van Dyke, Shane Van Dyke, and Silberman. The movie is about the married couple, Alice and Jack Chambers, who live in a luxurious, peaceful, suburban area. This residential place, called Victory Project, was created by Frank, a man who thought he was changing the world and making it better. His main speech towards the Chambers and the rest of the residents like, Bunny, Margaret, Peg, Violet, and Dean was about him trying to revolutionize the way humans live to improve the quality of life.
The married couples live in the1950s, and every woman is a housewife while every man goes to work every day out of the residential area into the dessert. This people live a life that seems very privileged under several conditions, one of them being that housewives must never ask what their husbands do for a living, and no one is allowed cross the dessert and climb the mountain.
The Chambers have a spectacular, romantic, passionate, and erotic life until Alice starts noticing weird things regarding the Victory Project. Shortly after, everything starts to fall apart. Before that, one of the housewives, Margaret, started experiencing paranoic episodes where she would disrupt social gathering amongst the married couples or daily life activities by stating that everyone was being lied to and manipulated. She was treated by everyone, especially Frank and Dr. Collins, as a crazy unstable woman. Alice did not believe anything Margaret said and kept disregarding her as much as everyone else did until she was taking the train and saw an airplane crash into the mountain. Later, she broke the most important rule by stepping into the dessert and climbing the mountain to help the passengers. She then found herself in front of a house with a lot of windows and as soon as she placed her hands on them, she started hallucinating with coordinated ballerinas dancing in geometric and quadrangular forms, then she woke up in her house right after Jack had arrived.
Jack looked clueless about anything that happened and tried to cook something nice for Alice. Then, she started having flashbacks of her hallucinations and felt ill. That is when she started questioning everything, where the eggs and the meat came from, how the houses were built, why would everything shake all the sudden, and she even dared to question if Margaret was right. Was everyone being manipulated by Frank and the Victory Project? Few days later, she tried to go talk to Margaret, but it was too late. Margaret was already on her rooftop determined to slit her throat. This is when Alice realizes something is being hidden from her and the rest of the couples, mainly because guards dressed in red jumpsuits rushed to Margaret and took her to Dr. Collins, who denied Margaret injured herself and everything that Alice witnessed.
Then the Chambers host a dinner party at their house with their neighbors and Frank and his wife, Shelley. At this point, Frank goes to Alice and lets her know he is aware that she crossed the dessert, and that Margaret was right. As a response to Frank’s comments, she challenges him at the table and starts interrupting everyone, including Jack. Eventually, she says everyone is being lied to and manipulated by Frank, but he pulls his uno-reverse card and plays the victim. He calls Alice an ungrateful woman after receiving such a fortunate opportunity to be part of, and he hints (obviously a lie) that they slept together. Everyone at the table is shocked and leaves after Shelley had enough and yelled Alice to stop.
As soon as Alice starts explaining everything to Jack, she becomes delusional and confused between what is real, what is in her mind, and what might be a flashback from her past life. She is seen by Dr. Collins and prescribed medications, but that is still not enough for Jack, so he tricks her into getting into the car and running away, only to be sent to Dr. Collins office to receive electric shocks. Days later, she forgot everything until she started having the flashbacks again. She tried to talk to her best friend Bunny, but she was ignored by her anger at her disobedience.
Alice seems normal again, however the opposite of the expected result from the electric shock happened. She remembered how her life was before moving to the Victory Project. The plot twist is revealed, it turns out Alice and Jack lived in a big city, and they struggled financially. Jack was unemployed and on the lookout for opportunities while Alice was a nurse that doubled her shifts to pay the bills. Eventually, Jack heard of the Victory Project and decided to join. The way of becoming part of this simulation was to lay down and through a garment stare into a laser that projected a hypnotic dance of the perfect yet scary choreography. When Alice regained her full consciousness and was aware of her reality, she tells Jack to leave her alone while asking him what he did. Jack hugs her tightly and tells her he did it out of love, that it was not so bad for her because all she had to do was stay home while he had to go through his unfulfilling unbearable job. Whilst trying to get him off her, Alice hit Jack with a glass on the head and accidentally killed him.
Moments later, Bunny let herself into the house after hearing the turmoil and saw Alice covered in blood. She revealed she knew about the simulation all along and that she was there because she could be with her children who died in her real life. She helped Alice and told her to get into the car and escape from the Victory Project through the Victory Headquarters, which is the exit from the simulation. Then, Alice drove and overran the guardians and succeeded at escaping. Finally, she woke up and took a deep breath.
Can this Simulation become a Forthcoming Reality in our World?
The whole concept of Victory Project was to live in a simulation where people can have access to a good living quality with fortunes and luxuries. This reflects how a privileged, not to mention, comfortable lifestyle is difficult to have with today’s economy and system. Things are more and more expensive, especially living expenses, such as rent and mortgages. It is as if nowadays society needed an escape rather than a solution to fix its faults. If, all the sudden, a tech guy invents a simulation where people could enjoy a more pleasurable and easier life, it would be revolutionary and in the interest of many.
Reaching an 8 billion population with a limitless economical system in a planet with limited resources, the invention of a simulation seems like a desperate yet efficient solution. Frank thought Victory Project was the perfect business model, innovative and life-changing for the money and popularity he would gain. Nonetheless, a similar enterprise would be a cruel solution to a cruel world. Ignoring Victory Project’s repression and manipulation, could a simulation solve nowadays economic gap, or would it worsen it? Can humans design a utopia where people could afford a good quality of life with access to opportunities? Or can it be the crave for a utopia from a dystopian world leading into another dystopia? One where the elite, authorities, and powerful individuals can get away with worse things under a better way of controlling the masses? This imagined utopia can end up being one of our biggest dystopian futures where societies can make mistakes based on unsustainable fantasies.
As you can see, this movie offers more than just an entertaining movie-night with popcorn and possibly wine, it rather gives an unsettling thought of the way our world is designed and how humans can easily become corrupt. The message I take from this movie is that maybe some technological solutions that “geniuses” wit can only worsen life into a living hell under the illusion and gaslight of a perfectly functional world.
Jordan Peterson as an Inspiration to Create Frank
Originally, the story is based on internet personality, clinical psychologist, and author, Jordan Peterson. The movie’s antagonist or villain, Frank, was inspired by Peterson and if you pay close attention, it is obvious when Frank says to his male workers “consider the lobster”. This is because in Peterson’s book 12 Rules of Life, his first rule is to “stand up straight with your shoulders back”. In this chapter, Peterson navigates social status from a biological point of view whilst using the example of lobsters and how they organize themselves in hierarchies.
In Interview Magazine, Olivia Wilde explained: we based Chris Pine’s character on this insane man, Jordan Peterson, who is this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community. You know the incels? They’re basically disenfranchised, mostly white men, who believe they are entitled to sex from women. Now, if you don’t know what an incel is, the Oxford dictionary describes it as “a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, typically associated with views that are hostile toward women and men who are sexually active”.
Days later, Peterson took offense of this and cried in an interview with Piers Morgan saying, it’s very difficult to understand how demoralized people are, and certainly many young men are in that category. You get these casual insults, these incels, what do they mean? These men, they don’t know how to make themselves attractive to women who are very picky, and good for them. Women, like, be picky. That’s your gift, man. Demand high standards from your men. Fair enough. But all these men who are alienated, it’s like they’re lonesome and they don’t know what to do and everyone piles abuse on them.
Another comparison in the movie between Frank and Peterson is when, in his radio program, Frank refers to women as chaos, which Peterson has also done in the past. Although, differently than Frank, Peterson has tried to explain in his seminars or YouTube videos that in mythology, religion or societies, historically speaking, order has been seen as something masculine and chaos as something feminine. He then goes on explaining that birth, change, nature, and creation are all chaotic and attributed to females, while order, on the contrary, has been considered masculine. This last comparison between order and chaos made by Peterson can probably explain the foundations of patriarchy and why, since the beginning of western civilizations, which were spread to the rest of the world, men were considered calmer, more organized, and even more composed than women when that might not be the case.
Personally, I don’t believe Frank and Peterson are the same. Frank seems more repressive and violent than Peterson, although they might share a certain level of conservatism. I think Peterson has tried to question contemporary beliefs on society’s organization and political correctness rather than trying to contribute to a culture that oppresses and controls women, where the only thing they can aspire to is becoming housewives and stay-at-home mothers. Peterson is a great personality to base a villain of, but to me, Frank is more controlling, manipulating, and repressive, and he is not afraid to use his resources or platform to make his perfect world where everyone is how he wants them to be and does exactly what he asks for.
Florence Pugh’s Acting
By now, most people are probably aware of Pugh’s iconic frown, which can be appreciated in the movie, especially when Alice tried to expose Frank during the dinner party she and her husband hosted. Pugh is an outstanding actress, if you’ve seen her in Midsommar or Little Women, odds are you already know that. In this movie, her maddening intent to find out the truth in a repressive community that competes with one another over who is better is contagious. The best example I can think of is her power to integrate the audience into her reality. In a daily basis, I tend to lose my attention and get distracted very easily and sometimes being focused non-stop for an hour and a half or more is unusual for me, yet Pugh’s scenes made me forget who I was, where I was, and what was I doing. Her acting is captivating and when Alice is trying to tell Jack something is off and he disregards her completely, made me feel Alice’s impotence as if I was her at that moment, trying to make a wall come into its senses.
Obviously, this is not Florence’s best performance, but it is one that the public and the media should be complimenting more. Personally, I believe her best scene is when Alice sees Margaret slit her throat standing on the roof. Pugh subtly and powerfully delivers Alice’s shock after experiencing such a traumatic event and then being gaslit into thinking it was part of a hallucination. Florence’s magnific acting can be noted in her neat control over her body, sanding there, perplex with a profound expression of horror in her eyes and mouth as she does an inefficient and hurried intent to save Margaret from a helpless suicide.
Harry Styles Acting
In the other hand, Harry Style’s acting left nothing more but a desire for him to stick to music. No, I’m kidding, that’s harsh. In all honesty, some of Harry’s scenes made me aware that he was an actor instead of a character. He gave me the opposite effect of Pugh’s. I knew who I was, where I was, what was I doing, and it made me cringe. Harry’s acting in Alice and Jack’s fight where he grabs Florence by the arms and screams “our lives!” is difficult to believe. I couldn’t do anything else but focus on Harry’s tense nostrils. Although, being the devil’s advocate, that could have been a directing mistake rather than an acting one. Maybe Olivia should have accompanied Harry on delivering the line and the emotion softly, impactfully, and organically. This is a clear example of the many challenges actors face. When the director’s absence is harming their work, they need to figure out ways on improving by themselves. Nevertheless, some scenes were pretty good. I would argue his best scene is when Jack finally convinces Alice to get in the car to escape, until men in red jumpsuits drag Alice out of the car and take her to a lab where they program her brain once more into forgetting her past, Margaret’s suicide, and all her doubts towards Victory Project’s red flags. Jack was the one who, painfully, misled Alice once again, and we can see a conflicted and explosive husband inside a 1955 astonishing black Ford Thunderbird.
Olivia’s Directing
As I stated before, Wilde’s negative criticism was mainly the result of a misogynistic industry, media and public. And even though I said she should have directed Harry better in his fight with Alice, her directing is terrific and creative. Of course, if you work in Hollywood, you must be creative though. For such a difficult industry to get into, you might as well be top-tier and Wilde is live proof of it. The approach to illustrate how the story transitioned from a passionate love story to an exasperating thriller was authentic and clever. This movie is a dazzling journey as Alice and the audience, together, discover Frank’s intentions might not be softhearted after all. Also, the use of ballerinas dancing to stirring music as a way of enlightening Alice through her hypnosis is amusing.
