Last year, Olivia Wilde’s sophomore film Don’t Worry Darling became a bit of a martyr to our current taste for meaningless celebrity gossip. The film became notorious for rumors of messy on-set romance, disorganized filming, director-star tension, and Harry Styles spitting or not spitting on Chris Pine. Most of it has a bit of sexism in the mix; Wilde struggled in interviews and marketing to figure out how to respond to the fact that she cast her younger boyfriend in her movie, a move that doesn’t seem to have sat well with everyone on set. Male directors have been doing this presumably since the Greeks, if not before, and I’m guessing this still goes on without the media fracas it caused in this instance. All of this might have just been a bit of gossipy hubbub, but the story that this movie was a mess caught fire and has overshadowed the movie’s actual content so much that I felt the need to wait a bit until I saw it. When the actual reviews appeared, they were generally negative. Still, there’s something interesting in the way the media prepared me for this movie. Even with some time between its release and my viewing, I was ready to see a mess, complete with terrible acting (and accent work) from Harry Styles, a lack of chemistry between the leads, and a series of weird expressions on Chris Pine’s face. Surprisingly, I only got the last.
Don’t Worry Darling is a competent film. Set in a planned model community somewhere in the sort of 50s, the film follows Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles), a loving couple who can’t keep their hands off each other. Alice cooks and cleans and wears perfect little dresses; Jack drives a Corvette and looks impeccable in skinny ties. They live in the Victory project, a mysterious and potentially national defense-related model community in the California desert. After one of her friends starts to question the Victory project’s purpose and motives, Alice starts to question the power structures around her. I won’t dissemble; most of this is ground that’s been tread and retread before. There’s The Truman Show in here and Stepford Wives too. We need hardly be told that the 1950s was a time when men could be men and women could be heavily medicated. But I didn’t find that Wilde’s film was trying to reteach us that white American middle class housewives were oppressed in the 1950s, rather she uses that vocabulary to say something about women’s relationships with their male partners today. In that respect, the film reminded me of another recent release, Edgar Wright’s 2021 film Last Night in Soho. Under Wright’s direction similar themes are illustrated in a way I found more visually effective, but that’s hardly surprising given Wright’s incredible facility for visual storytelling. I think Don’t Worry Darling would have been more impactful if it had leaned more fully into the horror elements of its aesthetic, and I think the waffling between social satire and horror is part of what has turned some critics off.
What I find really striking about this film’s reception is the cri de coeur of “novelty, please!” This is a film that absolutely could not get away from its ancestry; nearly every review I read framed this as a retread, and in the ways I’ve acknowledged, it is. But I’m not sure I buy the severity with which this complaint was registered. Forgive me for being blunt, but what isn’t a retread these days? At every level of television we are in retread territory, from the reboot of Night Court to the Columbo-infused Poker Face to literally everything about Avatar to Ant Man and the Curious Case of Another Superhero Gone Dark Phoenix. That’s not to say there’s nothing to complain about here- there is. I and every other critic alive is making the argument that we need more truly novel content that isn’t just an endless iteration of beloved IP. When something novel does come along, like Tar or Women Talking or The White Lotus critics are most likely to be found on their knees praising the gods of their choosing. But for a whole host of reasons too complex to delve into here, the industry at the heart of our discourse is not choosing to make novelty a prime directive. So what do we do with what we’re being given?
In 1919, T.S. Eliot published an essay in The Egoist called “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that I find pertinent to this discussion. I was expensively educated at three institutions that each assigned this reading to me, and as I sit here writing about a 2022 summer flick, I find it pushing at the edges of my brain. Eliot is probably most famous today for being a poet high schoolers struggle to comprehend, or as the man who wrote the poem Andrew Lloyd Webber felt the need to turn into Cats. But he was also an influential literary critic and his thoughts on literature are as clear and relevant today as they were 100 years ago. In the essay, Eliot asserts the importance of understanding our literary ancestry. To his mind, no poet can create “significant emotion” through his or her work unless they live in the “the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” It is the history of our stories and our expressions of emotion that must live within all newly created work. Nothing comes from a vacuum, for Eliot, but from the stories that have shaped us. He charges poets with the responsibility of knowing and understanding to the best of their ability what has come before them. In his words, “Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did'. Precisely, and they are that which we know.”
It isn’t enough to praise novelty, for Eliot, because to him there can be no truly novel creation. He writes,
We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.
In a work like Poker Face, the ancestry is not only acknowledged, but worshipped. That’s called a loving homage, and it is. Don’t Worry Darling is nowhere near as entertaining a work of fiction, but its clearly acknowledged debt to ancestors like Stepford Wives and Mad Men feels on par with many other works. In a work like Poker Face we find ourselves celebrating the enduring appeal of the quirky detective, rather than groaning to find yet another iteration of it on our screens. Yet in DWD, suddenly we’ve decided that critiquing gender relations is passé? It may very well be, but I think Olivia Wilde and Co. could be forgiven for not realizing it.
But perhaps you’ve made it this far in the essay with one question on your mind, and perhaps it is the same question that’s been on mine. Can Don’t Worry Darling stand up to my defense of it? Or, put more cleanly, is it good enough to be worth all this fuss? It may not be. I called it “competent” at the top, and I mean that somewhat lackluster encomium with its full meaning. It is better than I expected it to be, but it is not extraordinary. Eliot would not ask the great art of its ancestors to jostle about and make room. It is a kind of movie difficult to analyze because it is not extraordinary and it is not terrible. It is what is usually called “uneven.” Were it an episode of The Twilight Zone I think it would be called very clever indeed, but with the weight of cinematic and gossip rag (Twitter) expectations upon it, it’s merely competent and a little forgettable and totally fine. But perhaps that’s exactly why I wish to defend the idea of it, if not the film itself, so vigorously.
Does every film or TV show (or artwork or album or song or opera or ballet) have to “make it new” as Ezra Pound asserted? Pound (another poet cum critic) wanted modernism to be a movement founded on that principle. You must acknowledge your debt to the past, but you must create something novel, something truly individual. I don’t think Don’t Worry Darling lives up to Eliot or Pound’s hopes for a new piece of work, but I also don’t think we are living under the same conditions they created their prescriptions for. Neither could have imagined a world where this many new pieces of work are created, disseminated, and endlessly dissected in 240 character snarls. In 2019, there were 792 movies released in the United States and Canada and over 10K television shows released globally. On average, 2.2 million books are published every year. A few catch our attention, our love for gossip, our thirst for scandal. But do they all have to be great to be worth experiencing?
Maybe they should, but I sort of wish I could have just watched this movie without the thunderous weight of The Discourse pushing me to find so much fault. I don’t think every new work has to be novel, in fact, one that so clearly understands the power of its antecedents like Don’t Worry Darling checks a lot more boxes than one that doesn’t (I’m coming for you Avatar: The Way of Water). There’s value to be found in imperfect movies and I just want the critical apparatus/Twitter mafia to look a little harder for that value sometimes. The truth about Don’t Worry Darling is it isn’t hefty enough to bear the weight of any of this, and will ultimately only be remembered for the swirling gossip it stumbled into and the truth is my little essay has only added to that weight. And yet, we write on.