A Spoiler-Filled Don’t Worry Darling FAQ
So, you’ve just seen Don’t Worry Darling, and you’re either very satisfied, mildly confused, or frothing at the mouth with rage. You might have a few questions, and I’m here to help. If you haven’t watched Don’t Worry Darling yet then do not keep reading this article. I’m warning you. Proceed at your own risk. I am not responsible for ruining the viewing experience of anyone who’s eye wanders past the following promotional image.
Q: So the whole thing was a dream?
A: Kinda. What sets this story apart is that it was a shared dream. In a typical dream narrative we’re entirely in the protagonist’s head, but in Don’t Worry Darling we’re experiencing Alice’s horror at being trapped inside Frank’s dream, his idealized utopia. This is particularly scary for Alice because she is inside the synthesized world of a man whose idea of “a utopian society” is a regressive 50s nightmarescape where wives simplify the lives of their husbands through repression and blind obedience. Basically, Frank designed an “ideal” virtual society and then created a brainwashing/virtual reality machine that allowed others to live there with him, for a fee of course.
Q: Do all of the men know that Victory is a simulation?
A: Yes, for practical reasons. The women are meant to be brainwashed to the point where they forget the real world entirely, as this makes them easier to control and ensures that they will not want to leave. The men, on the other hand, need to travel between the real world and the simulation because they need to pay Frank in real, non-simulated money. The one exception (that we know of) is Bunny, who made a mutual decision with her husband to enter the simulation. More on that later.
Q: So is this movie about how Olivia Wilde hates men?
A: No, she’s not anti-man. She’s anti-brainwashing. Frank is attempting to brainwash Alice into accepting his nightmare utopia, but first he had to brainwash Jack. Flashback Jack is emasculated by his unemployment, disturbed by the fact that Alice is the household’s sole breadwinner and that she’s working so hard to provide for them. Society has told him that he, as the man in the relationship, needs to be the provider, the protector. Frank’s solution is tantalizing because it turns Jack into the hero, the guy who saves the damsel in distress from a life of stress and exhaustion. It just happens to have the side effects of making Jack seem like he has his shit together, and turning Alice into the “ideal” wife who spends all day cooking and cleaning and all night doing, you know, sex stuff (which she was too tired to even think about doing after 30 hours working in a hospital). The only way to make this dream a reality is to take away Alice’s autonomy, but Jack has been brainwashed to the point that he genuinely thinks that he is working in Alice’s best interests, that he knows what is right for her. Or at least that’s what he tells himself.
Q: Does this have anything to do with why Jordan Peterson was crying during that interview?
A: Yes, and if you haven’t seen that video I will post it here, because it is fascinating. Recently, Olivia Wilde revealed that she based Chris Pine’s character on author/“philosopher” Jordan Peterson, calling him a “pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community.” This caused Jordan to weep during an appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored, speaking of all of those “disenfranchised young men,” who are “alienated [and] lonesome and don’t know what to do.” Basically, what the film is saying is that people who are sad and desperate are in need of answers, and they will take them anywhere they can find them. That makes them vulnerable to people like Frank, like Jordan, who offer solutions that comfort them, simplify their situation and absolve them of blame.
Q: So this is a movie about how awful incels are?
A: Partially, but more accurately it’s a movie about bullshit. The film is careful to show that this desperate need for validation and security isn’t only an incel problem. Bunny willingly agreed to enter the simulation because her children had died and she wanted a chance to be with them again. The point is that people who are in pain are easy to manipulate, and they will happily chow down on a feast of bullshit just to feel whole again, if only for a moment. If you know how to sound like you have the answers, these people are more likely to take your word for it because they are not thinking clearly.
Q: Why was Harry Styles so bad in this movie?
A: I didn’t think he was bad at all. I’d heard the negative criticism of his performance before my viewing, so I watched him very intently, and I always saw the emotional reality of the character in his face. He seemed like he was actually listening and reacting to Florence Pugh in their scenes together, and his line readings never felt artificial to me. Though I guess this is a matter of opinion, so if you thought he was bad maybe he just didn’t meet your personal definition of “good acting.” Everybody’s definition is different, you know.
Q: Why didn’t anything in the movie make sense?
A: It all made sense, especially when you consider the fact that Alice is an unreliable narrator who is (A) Under a tremendous amount of pressure and stress and (B) is caught in the middle of a mental battle between two planes of existence. Alice has been effectively brainwashed, but a deeply repressed part of her still remembers, represented by the song she keeps humming to herself. There’s a part of her that knows the horrible truth, that this ideal world isn’t real, and that discrepancy causes her mind to fracture and go off in two disparate directions.
Q: What was up with the empty eggs?
A: The eggs serve a dual purpose, in my eyes at least. Literally, they’re hinting at the artificiality of Victory. They’re a little glitch, a peek behind the curtain. Figuratively, I think they’re also probably tied to Alice’s doubts about having children. She’s convinced herself that she doesn’t want them, but she clearly has a lot of affection for Bunny’s kids. The eggs may be her grappling with the idea that, now that she is with Jack, her opportunity to have a child may have passed her by. After all, “they” don’t want kids.
Q: What’s up with the plane that crashed?
A: There was no plane. Earlier, Alice saw Margaret holding the toy plane and realized that it belonged to her child, the boy who was supposedly lost out in the “dangerous” section of Victory (near Headquarters). Alice has always been curious about what happened that day. That, coupled with Margaret’s paranoia, drove Alice to want to investigate that part of town. The plane was Alice’s mind giving her an excuse to break protocol, to go against her programming, and defy Victory’s “one rule”. She had been so effectively brainwashed that her mind needed to invent a reason that she would betray the trust of her community and her beloved husband.
Q: Isn’t it cheap/convenient to claim that the plane was imaginary? How do you know that for sure?
A: Because when she arrived at Headquarters the plane was nowhere to be found, and because there was no reason for a plane to be there in the first place. This is all Frank’s self-serving simulated reality, and it would not benefit Frank for there to be some random plane crashing into a mountain. Also, we see Alice’s mind invent things that aren’t really there all the time. If you can’t accept that the plane was a hallucination, do you also think that she was literally being crushed by a wall of glass in that one scene?
Q: What about the earthquakes and tremors that kept passing through the town? I thought the men were going to be working on something cool and mysterious and I was disappointed that it wasn’t revealed to be some evil death laser or something.
A: The tremors were only there to convince the women to stay away from Headquarters. It wasn’t enough of an assurance to simply tell the women to “keep out”. They had to make the work seem dangerous so that the wives and children would avoid the area, not only because they promised to do so but because of their own instinct for self-preservation.
Q: What about all that other trippy stuff, like when Alice saw herself in the mirror as Margaret, or when she was in the bath and her reflection had a mind of its own?
A: That was all just illustrating that Alice’s mind was fractured, that a part of her was still trapped in Victory but a part of her needed to wake up. None of that stuff literally happened.
Q: What about that recurring dream she keeps having of the dancers with the messed-up faces?
A: We saw during the flashback that the black and white footage of dancers was part of Frank’s brainwashing material. You’ve seen this in everything from A Clockwork Orange to Street Fighter: The Movie — when you want to brainwash someone you show them representational images that evoke an emotional response and get trapped in the subconscious mind. Frank provides the ladies with a dance class where they can emulate these subconscious memories, internalizing them to an even greater degree. In Alice’s dream, the dancers have messed-up faces because she knows that something is wrong, that this “perfect” world isn’t everything it’s made out to be.
Q: What does Frank get out of this?
A: Mostly money. Jack mentions that he still has to go to work in the real world to pay for this fantasy. Whether he’s working for Frank or not isn’t made clear, but it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that Jack is paying Frank handsomely for an opportunity to live in Victory. Also, Frank is obviously getting an ego boost from being “the man with all the answers.” To the men of Victory, Frank is essentially God, and that’s gotta feel pretty empowering, especially if you don’t have a conscience.
Q: When you die in the dream why do you die in the real world too?
A: Because this movie is what we call “soft sci-fi.” In “hard sci-fi” the screenwriter would take the time to explain this dream machine in detail and break down exactly how it works. Screenwriter Katie Silberman simply chose to not go down that path, to make it a magical brainwashing machine that does exactly what Frank needs it to do. So, I don’t know, maybe your brain becomes so involved in the simulation that when you die in Victory it causes actual brain death to occur. I’m not sure. We don’t know how the machine works, but in soft sci-fi we don’t have to. It works the way it works. If that’s not acceptable to you then you’re really gonna hate Star Wars.
Q: How come the first time Alice touched headquarters she woke up in bed in Victory but the second time she escaped back to the real world?
A: She probably did escape the simulation that first time, but Jack was there to force her back in. This is why he’s being so ferociously nice to her when she “wakes up” back at home. Jack’s probably just endured a horrible scene with his wife pleading with him, chained to the bed, trying desperately to leave Frank’s nightmare behind, and he feels guilty. He’s trying to convince himself, and her, that he’s doing the right thing by not letting her leave.
Q: So what happened this time when she touched Headquarters, and why didn’t the movie show it?
A: This is a movie about Alice escaping Victory and her abusive relationship with Jack. We can only imagine what happens next. Alice is going to wake up in bed next to Jack’s corpse. She’s going to be chained to the bed, the brainwashing material still playing across her eyes. Maybe she’ll fight her way out of her restraints, maybe she’ll scream for help and somebody will bust the door down. Perhaps she’ll be unable to escape and will eventually succumb to the brainwashing materials and fall back into the dream. We can only speculate. Frank would have probably headed back to the real world to attempt to stop Alice from spilling the beans, but he’s dead now too so that solves that problem. Will any of the other men attempt to stop Alice from revealing the truth? Will Frank’s wife be able to free the other women from the simulation? All of this stuff would be fascinating to see, but that’s not the story that Don’t Worry Darling is intent on telling. Though if they made a sequel to this I would be there with bells on. Let me write it, Olivia. Just give me a shot.
Q: If this movie’s so good then why were critics so dismissive of it?
A: Well I don’t want to blame sexism, but… I’m having trouble finishing that sentence. I don’t know. Maybe they’re pissed off that Olivia Wilde took Harry Styles off the market. If there’s one thing I know about film critics, it’s that they all want to date Harry Styles.
Q: So did Harry Styles spit on Chris Pine or not?
A: I don’t know, damn it. I’ve watched that video 7,000 times, and I Just. Don’t. Know.
Probably not.