“All they ask of us is to stay here. Where it's safe.” Bunny (Olivia Wilde)
In director Olivia Wilde’s Utopian world of the 1950’s, a film called Don’t Worry Darling, Alice (Florence Pugh), is initially a submissive, clueless housewife. Just a little less naïve than Stepford Wives, she senses that life is not as safe as she once thought. Enter The Truman Show and a host of other sci-fi socio treatments that eventually expose the superficiality of the state and the horror of being controlled.
Writer Kate Silberman’s script is prime for exposing the danger of any society whose favorite mode is obedience while you accept the largesse of the controllers. Her husband Jack’s rise in the V organization is no joy for Alice, who is slowly understanding the Alice-in-Wonderland world where not everything is as it seems and the most secure citizens are the most vulnerable.
Don’t Worry Darling is best at showing how organizations can brainwash its citizens into a false complacency, especially as it showers physical comforts on them while it feeds them lies about their individuality and the benign plans of the controllers. The worst state is chaos because it counters the organized state the rulers want to foster, especially Frank (Chris Pine), the Jim Jones of V.
It's easy to see, as George Orwell did, that organs of communication like social media and biased TV programs are the chief culprits in a patriarchal society, which seeks mind control. Don’t Worry Darling does an effective job of building tension to the final reveals, which fit into the thematic framework of control and loss of identity. Pugh is particularly successful at showing the reservations ordinary citizens might develop over despotic, QAnon worlds where lies and power corrupt to a point where those ordinary citizens must bolt or revolt or die of themselves.
Controller and controlled:
“I've been waiting for someone like you. Someone to challenge me. Like a good girl.” Frank
“Well, Frank, you can just kiss my grits!” Alice
