Drafting an essay on contemporary dystopian cinema 1: 65 (Beck and Woods 2023)
The sense of relative privilege is perhaps nowhere clearer than in contemporary retrotopian tendencies, since such evocations of mythical pasts as models of utopian futures hinge upon hierarchical differences of class, race and gender. Zygmunt Bauman[1] identifies four interwoven tendencies in contemporary real-world politics which offer some kind of utopian sensation by focusing on (1) tribalism, which can mediate between the individual and wider forces in a world imagined as a (2) Hobbesian war of all against all while also offering some kind of (3) return-to-the-womb consolation, even if it means (4) perpetuating, reinforcing and increasing existing inequalities.
Don’t Worry Darling (Olivia Wilde 2022) appears initially to be set in the Victory Project, a wealthy 1950s American suburb, moderately and monogamously debauched, given over to libidinal–consumerist pleasures and rigid gender roles.
Something is clearly amiss, though. The world is too brightly lit, the colours too vibrant, to be true. The houses are show-home immaculate; every surface gleams or invites sensuous tactility. The women are too content as housewives, and their husbands too prompt to initiate and perform expert cunnilingus. There is no trace of discontent, of restriction, of suffocation. It is as if Betty Friedan never existed, as if the feminine mystique were true.
Also, the setting is (slightly) more ethnically diverse than it would actually have been, with suburbanites of Asian, African American and Jewish descent in supporting and background roles.
It is the dream image of the white suburban 1950s – that ‘emblem of happier times, when family values and small-town American were concrete manifestations of the triumph of capitalism and the “end of ideology”’ – but adjusted to take some account of the period’s ‘repressed [racial, patriarchal and sexual, but never class] realities’[2] and of more contemporary blandly middle-of-the-road liberal sensibilities.
In this way, Don’t Worry Darling ‘calcifies the current state of affairs in America and presents it as a future that we should be excited for’, as Clark Seanor writes of Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series of novels (2014–21), and it is not alone in doing so. For example, Barbie (Greta Gerwig 2023) surrounds stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) with ethnically diverse, albeit mostly light-skinned, Barbies and signals a queer presence in the-sexless-because-they-have-no-genitals Barbieland through Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) and Allan (Michael Cera); the Kens are similarly diverse.
Moreover, Barbie is careful to put the key speech about ‘the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy’ into the mouth of Gloria, played by America Ferrara, a Honduran American with Indigenous (Lenca) ancestry. Powerful and affecting as her delivery is, the speech is cast in terms so broad and vague as to seem inclusive, but really just (once more) presents white bourgeois liberal feminist plaints as if they are universal. There is no sense of women’s differential material experiences of patriarchal (and other intersecting) systems of oppression. Gloria’s daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) is right to dub stereotypical Barbie ‘white saviour Barbie’, even if she demurs in favour of Sasha’s mother who just delivered the speech and thus found a way to deprogram the other Barbies, who’ve been brainwashed into subservience through the Kens’ plot to institute patriarchy in Barbieland (‘It’s like I’ve been in a dream where I was really invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League’).
Just as Barbie begins to realise something is rotten in the state of Barbieland when she wakes up tired and headachey with bad breath and ‘irrepressible thoughts of death’, to a cold shower, a burnt waffle, milk that’s gone off, gravity, flat feet and traces of cellulite, so Alice (Florence Pugh), the protagonist of Don’t Worry Darling, begins to experience glitches in the Matrix. There are flashes of traumatic images within the glossy Victory Project and from the desert outside; brief moments of anamnesis, coded through lighting, colour and design to suggest some other locale, but always in close-ups that to deny Alice (and the viewer) sufficient information to make sense of them; and black-and-white glimpses of corseted dancers, choreographed in some eerie Busby Berkeley-style reduction of women to interchangeable elements in a machine. Moments of crisis end unresolved, with Alice waking up later and elsewhere, not knowing how she got there and uncertain about the reality of what she witnessed. When she is distracted by a stubborn speck of dirt on the window she is cleaning, the wall behind glides forward to crush her against the glass; and in the film’s most Phildickian moment, she opens a box of eggs only to discover that each one is just an empty shell.
She is, of course, in a virtual world.
In real reality, Alice is an overworked surgeon, even more exhausted than usual from having to take on additional shifts since her husband lost his job. Jack (Harry Styles) whines about how Alice, who is constantly working, neglects him and their relationship, and has no luck finding employment – but he is drawn to the ‘philosophy’ of Frank (Chris Pine), an online tech-millionaire guru partly based on Jordan Peterson. Without Alice’s knowledge or consent, he signs them up to the real Victory Project, which inserts them both into the virtual world and suppresses her memories and identity to prevent her from realising the truth. In exchange, when Jack and the other husbands head off to their top-secret engineering work every day, they actually exit the virtual world for jobs in the real work that pay enough to sustain their illusory existence (the details of this are unclear, but it looks a lot like the indentured servitude Elon Musk seems to have in mind for his Martian colonists).
In the virtual world, variations in costume design and the mid-century modern architecture and décor emphasise, although less overtly than the wryly synchronised departure of husbands for work each morning, superficial differences within uniformity. This can probably be extended to variations in ethnicity, body shape and so on; like Barbie, Don’t Worry Darling often seems to intersectionality-wash cherry-picked elements of second-wave and post-feminist liberal feminisms; like Barbie, it possesses no actual vision.
This is not, however, to dismiss the significance of these movies, whether they flop (Don’t Worry Darling took $87.6 million off a $35 million budget) or are global blockbusters (Barbie took $.144 billion off a $145 million budget, the biggest domestic, foreign and worldwide box-office of the year). The outraged responses to such films indicate the extent to which the anti-feminist backlash, often tied to ethnonationalism, is entrenched in mainstream political and alt-victimhood[3] discourses, and thus the extent to which even such modest acts of liberal feminism (Alice is often barefoot, her friend Peg (Kate Berlant) continually pregnant) and anti-racism are necessary portals to a better world.
[1] In his rather mediocre Retrotopia. John Wiley, 2017.
[2] Peter Fitting, writing about Pleasantville (Gary Ross 1998) in ‘Unmasking the Real? Critique and Utopia in Recent SF Film’. Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. Ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, Routledge, 2003. 155–166. 163.
[3] See David M. Higgins’s rather good book, Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy and Alt-Victimhood. University of Iowa Press, 2021.
Mark Bould 
A thoughtful read. The first quotation should be Zygmunt Bauman. 🙂
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Thanks – just living in an autocorrect dystopia here!
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