Why “Don’t Worry Darling” Doesn’t Work (And How I Would Fix It)
by Ashley Griffin, Stage Directions
I am a firm believer that, with skill and the right vantage point, every story can work. I know that’s a controversial opinion.
I had a powerful moment as a child where, in the middle of an ordinary day, I was watching people on the street – all kinds of people walking, homeless people on the corner, a child, an elderly person… and I had this overwhelming thought that every single person I saw’s story is worth telling. Can you possibly imagine going up to someone and saying that their life just wasn’t interesting or important enough? I think that’s ridiculous.
Even the smallest things can make for the most moving art. Think about “Grey Gardens” – two hoarders hanging out in their home. Or “Mrs. Dalloway” – a woman needs to buy flowers. Or “The Yellow Wallpaper” – a woman doesn’t leave a room with yellow wallpaper. We are all the protagonists of our own tale… there is no one whose life’s function is to be an extra in someone else’s story.
And I think the same thing can be true for the essential stories we feel called to tell. Whatever your idea is, if it’s important to you, truly important for reasons other than ego, there’s a way to make it work. It may take a lot of tweaking and restructuring and, well, WORK, but no truly meaningful idea is just “trash.”
I was thinking about this while watching the 2022 film “Don’t Worry Darling.”
If you remember this movie at all its most likely from the behind the scenes drama that became fodder for the tabloids for months. When the film finally premiered it was…lackluster…getting pretty skewered by the critics mainly for being…meh. It isn’t as entertainingly awful as “The Room”, but Oscar worth it is not.
But…why, exactly? Stories that are “meh” fascinate me because, well, it’s harder to do than you might think. Landing smack dab in between “great” and “horrible” can actually be a tricky tightrope to walk.
If the meaningful essence of all stories are worth telling, why, exactly, doesn’t “Don’t Worry Darling” feel like it really needed to be told? And how could it have felt essential?
For those who don’t know the story, be warned – I’m about to spoil the entire thing, including the twist at the end. (And later I’m going to spoil “The Stepford Wives.”)
“Don’t Worry Darling” is basically “The Stepford Wives” meets “The Matrix” for a 2022 audience. It follows Alice (played by the always wonderful Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles) – a married couple living in the idealistic 1950’s secluded desert company town of Victory, California. Every day the men leave for work at Victory Headquarters – an imposing building in the middle of the desert. The one rule their wives are asked to respect is to not go there, or ask them about what they do. The all but worshipped founder of Victory, Frank (a great Chris Pine), tells them (daily on T.V. and the radio) that they are doing something great and that the world belongs to them. They’re lucky to be there and they’re going to change the world.
Alice is living a charmed life. She and Jack are mad for each other (he literally can’t keep his hands off of her – so much so that the neighbors joke about the sounds that come from their house…) She is popular, Jack is a rising star in the company, all seems well.
And then one of the wives, Margaret, starts acting strange. Just before the events of the film Margaret went with her child out into the desert near company headquarters. She then found herself suddenly back at home – without her child (who she says was taken from her as punishment.) She starts showing up at community events like “Richard the 3rd”’s Queen Margaret – warning everyone that something’s not right – culminating in her committing suicide in front of Alice.
This is doubly disturbing for Alice as, just before Margaret’s suicide, she ended up going into the desert too, after seeing a plane crash and wanting to help. Like Margaret, she wakes up back at home with no memory of how she got there. Then she starts experiencing weird things – like cracking eggs in the morning for breakfast and finding that they’re empty shells. When she witnesses Margaret’s suicide she’s quickly gaslit and told that Margaret simply slipped and fell. She discovers that Margaret’s medical records have all been redacted, and by now she’s having some SERIOUS hallucinations.
One evening she and Jack host a dinner party which Frank and his wife attend. While Alice is preparing the food, Frank comes into the kitchen and, far from chastising her behavior, tells her she fascinates him… and that he’s been waiting for someone like her to challenge him. The dinner turns into a disaster when Alice tries to convince the rest of the guests that something is very, VERY wrong in Victory (why do all the couples have one of the same three stories about where they met? They all honeymooned in one of the same three places… No one knows where the food comes from…) This is the best scene in the film with Pugh and Pine at their finest.
Alice’s behavior gets her taken away by some strange men in red jumpsuits who force her to a medical facility and perform shock treatment on her. During the treatment Alice has a flash of a completely different life with Jack. In this life they’re both in the modern world - she is an incredibly successful surgeon who loves her career, and he is a deadbeat with no job who spends all day and night listening to podcasts by someone named “Frank”, unable to so much as make dinner for himself when she comes home late (“I called you!” “I can’t take my phone into the ER…”)
Turns out that Frank runs a cult-like virtual tech group largely catering to incels who “miss” the “good old days” when women acted like “women are supposed to.” Jack got accepted into Franks VR “Victory Project” and had Alice, against her will, put into this VR world (it’s strongly implied that many of the “wives” in Victory don’t even know their “husbands” in the real world – the guys just saw them from afar, wanted them, kidnapped them and are basically sexually assaulting them and holding them hostage in a VR world…) Every day when the men go to work at Victory headquarters they’re really going back into the real world where they have to care for the bodies of their “wives” (keeping their IV’s changed, moisturizing their lips and eyes, etc.) and going to work to earn enough money to keep them and their “spouse” in Victory.
Alice shows up back in Victory and at first seems to be “cured” of her hallucinations. But it’s quickly apparent they haven’t gone away, indeed she now remembers everything about her real life. Jack is at first relieved that he can be honest with her, but becomes enraged when he discovers that Alice is upset about this arrangement. Long story short Alice ends up accidentally killing Jack. Her best friend Bunny confesses that she’s known the truth all along (and has been gaslighting Alice) and has chosen to be here so she can be with her kids (who died in the real world.) She tells Alice to run – if you die in Victory you die in the real world, and they won’t let Alice out alive knowing what she knows. The rest of the film is a car chase through the desert where Alice eventually makes it to headquarters just in time.
The biggest artistic criticism of this film is…we’ve been here before. The idea of brainwashed women living in a 50’s “utopia” has become an archetypal story for us. We get it. The women are trapped, the men have nefarious motives, and the 50’s weren’t as great as some would like to believe. There are no discoveries here. It’s a feminist formula we’ve seen ad nauseam.
Now, formulas are not inherently bad – if you’re using them as a structural foundation and not to do all your work for you. But “Don’t Worry Darling” is doing just that – letting a well-known formula do all its work for it. The film advertises itself as an experimental three course Michelin meal but it’s really just serving you a street vendor hot dog. I’m not knocking the street vendor hot dog (they can be fantastic) but don’t try to tell us we’re getting something new and experimental when you’re really giving us something we’ve had a million times.
What frustrates me about the “meh” ness of this film is not the fact that it’s retreading well-worn ground (most stories are, but are we really getting mad that “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” follow the same outline of the Hero’s Journey? No.)
What frustrates me is that it didn’t utilize the tools it had at its disposal.
Every story inherently carries with it tools that you can utilize, and “Don’t Worry Darling” feels a bit like the creators decided to build a table, but completely ignored the nails and hammer that came with the assembly kit, and instead decided to just use tape… um… you had a hammer right there!
So, what are the “tools” that I feel went ignored?
Well, let’s start with the most basic premise of what this film is:
“Don’t Worry Darling” is an examination of the toxic elements of the “traditional” nuclear family dynamic through the point of view of modern day people and told to a modern day audience.
So already this lends itself to some interesting things.
“The Stepford Wives” is obviously the go to for this kind of story. We all know it. But that story came out in the 1970’s and it was the first time a story like that was being told. And the time in which it was being told was right when women were making a dramatic move to break away from the nuclear family dynamic. These were questions that were just starting to be asked in earnest and the first time the nuclear family had been so dramatically and publicly lambasted. There was a remake of “The Stepford Wives” in 2004 that, though it tried to “update” the premise – including a same sex couple and literal robot replacements for the wives (not to mention the twist that it was actually a woman that was at the heart of this whole thing – an, actually, pretty interesting twist that was wasted in being just that… and 11th hour twist) fell completely flat.
But now it’s almost twenty years since that remake… and the world looks different.
We are now almost fifty years out from the original “Stepford Wives” and we know what the world is post women “getting” (I can’t put enough air quotes around that) the things they were fighting for in the ‘70’s. And the things we know… are pretty dark.
Women may be able to have our own credit cards (hurray!) But misogyny is still rampant. What happened to many of those guys who, sometimes ignorantly, were fighting against equality for women? They became incel communities who are so blunt about wanting women to be their personal sex slaves they’ve committed mass murders to prove their point. Women can have careers now (hurray!) but work can be stressful and exhausting – especially in a horrible economy dealing with the fallout of a recession and ridiculous inflation so now most homes HAVE to be two income households just to survive. Having kids now isn’t simply a decision one makes about what they want for their life – kids are a luxury item that only those in the right income bracket can afford… and that’s not taking into account the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and how that affects the course of a woman’s life. And all that is happening during the rise of “Me Too” and the realization of just how awful most women have had it. And this isn’t just the now seemingly simple, almost “idyllic” oppression of being forced to have roast and a drink waiting for your man every evening, but the fact that most women have been sexually assaulted both at home and at work, and discriminated against over long periods of time.
And that’s not to mention the fact that men suffer from gender inequality too. The pressure to provide, to “be a man” hasn’t gone away… it’s just gotten more and more confusing.
The conversation is no longer simply “women deserve to have their own lives and men need to stop oppressing them,” it’s “being a woman is a freaking horror show and it doesn’t matter if you’re at home or at work things are REALLY complicated even if you have a partner and a job you love…” “Let’s all get jobs” can no longer be the message to the “women are oppressed” problem…
And that’s all the delicious fodder “Don’t Worry Darling” had to work with. And it, with, (I think), the exception of one line… it didn’t use any of it.
What’s that one line?
Well, it’s almost all the way at the end of the movie when Jack, angry that Alice doesn’t want to be in Victory, says:
“I gave this to you! I gave you all of this, Alice! We are lucky to be here! Frank built this world so that we can live the life that we deserve. I have to leave every day just to make enough money to keep us here and I f****** hate every minute of it…You get to stay here and you’re happy.”
That’s a point that I would love to see explored.
But instead the film takes an important issue… and adds nothing new to the conversation.
So, as a thought experiment… what would I do with “Don’t Worry Darling?”
I’m not saying this is the “right” way to tell this story (there’s nothing worse than someone commenting on a piece immediately out of the gate with “well what you should have done is…”) This is just a thought experiment to examine how finding the tools that come with your story, and deliberately utilizing them, can make your job easier, and create a more engaging work.
The film clearly named the heroine “Alice” as a reference to “Alice in Wonderland” – but it didn’t lean into it in any other way but her name.
One of the questions that is often posited about the great triune of late 19th/early 20th century children’s literature (namely “Alice in Wonderland”, “Peter Pan” and “The Wizard of Oz”) is… why didn’t the heroines choose to stay in the magical worlds? (“Alice” is a little bit less a part of this conversation than the other two…) There’s a little part of us that thinks Dorothy would have been much better off in Oz, and, indeed, in the sequels she returns over and over again. This actually culminates in the sixth book in the series, “The Emerald City of Oz” - when Dorothy’s Kansas farm is foreclosed and she brings Uncle Henry and Aunt Em to live in Oz with her. Presumably forever.
And that is the perfect set up for the debate of “Alice” in “Don’t Worry Darling.” The real question the story has set up (seemingly without realizing it) is: Which world is better?
So if that’s the question, let’s really ask it! Let’s not assume we all know the “right” answer the second we realize what’s actually going on, just as we don’t assume Wendy would be an idiot if she didn’t go back to London and leave Neverland forever.
I would have Alice discover what’s going on in this world MUCH sooner. I’d make it the midpoint of the story.
So, how about this?
We get the beginning pretty much as is. We’re in an idyllic world. Everything is beautiful and fun. I would actually go even further with this than the movie does. This is, after all, a VR world which means, in essence, there are no rules. And if we go with a sort of “Jetsons” aesthetic, it could push both the celebration of Victory, and questions regarding what exactly it is. What if the women don’t actually have to vacuum and clean the tub every day? What if the Victory Project provides them with incredible machines that do all that work for them? Maybe there’s a 1950’s looking Rumba-esque device that the women just have to set in motion and it will perfectly clean all their floors for them? Maybe they even have an equivalent of Rosie the Robot to do the cooking when they don’t want to. The better this world is, the more they can justify why they’re so lucky to be living here and not with the poor souls who don’t get to be a part of Victory or their great technology.
There’s a brief scene in the film of the women going shopping – in one of those beautiful old fashioned shopping centers where models literally come out and show the clothes to you in a mini fashion show. One of the women comments “isn’t it great that we can just charge everything?” Let’s lean into that. Since this is a VR world, nothing actually costs money… so what if the wives can literally just buy everything they want, charge it, but somehow the bill never actually comes due. They order their groceries, and they’re magically delivered to their door. They can buy every dress they see.
That means that the women can 100% focus on doing what they want to do. Maybe they take classes, hang out by the pool, go to the spa. Maybe some of them love cooking and do everything themselves. The two things they don’t have control over are: they are all crazy about their husbands (they think this is just how they organically feel,) and the one and only rule they have to obey… is don’t go to Victory headquarters…
And let’s REALLY make this idyllic. There’s no racism. There’s no political unrest. All of the things that were actually problems in the 1950’s don’t exist here… it’s just a little unsettling how all the women are SO enthusiastic about traditional gender roles…
So, Margaret starts acting weird. There’s no explanation in the film about why she broke the cardinal sin of going to headquarters, but it might be interesting if she went there deliberately because she was curious. She knowingly broke the rule. And now she’s saying “crazy” things about them all being trapped there.
I do really like the idea that Alice goes to headquarters for altruistic reasons. She loves her life and has no desire to disobey, but her need to help someone overrides the need to “follow the rules.” This is Alice’s “Save the Cat” moment (check out Blake Snyder’s brilliant book) and is the real reason we fall in love with her. But the whole plane thing is really confusing since it’s given absolutely no context. Do planes never come here? How did this plane show up in the VR simulation? I would go one of two ways with it – either I would keep the plane but, in a “The Giver” way, make a thing out of it – planes literally never come here, we later find out it was a “glitch in the Matrix” kind of situation, etc. Or I would have Margaret run back out to headquarters and have Alice run after her to try and help. You could even tie this in with some Alice following the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole imagery.
Either way, for kindhearted reasons, Alice goes to headquarters and all kinds of wacky things happen. This is where I would have her start getting flashes of her real life…
She wakes up back at home in Victory and has no idea how she got there. This is the “inciting incident” where she starts to sense that something’s really wrong. The movie gets some things really right here with some fantastic visual images – Alice cracking eggs and finding nothing inside them, looking out her window and suddenly having the wall behind her move up and crush her into the glass… some others I think could be improved upon… there’s a moment where she wraps her head in saran wrap and then rips it open when she starts suffocating. I think it would be really interesting if she wrapped her head in saran wrap – and then found that, somehow, she could still breathe…
This is where we get all the “fun and games” (or the “promise of the premise”). Her trying to figure out what’s going on, Margaret’s death and everyone gaslighting Alice about it, and the great confrontation between Alice and Frank at the dinner party.
And this is where I would really diverge from the movie as is.
I would have Alice go back to headquarters… and actually wake up in the real world. And we get to see not only the horrors of her current situation, but the darker aspects of her real life.
Alice wakes up strapped to her bed, all kinds of equipment on her. Her eyes are hooked up to the VR machine, she has an IV in, her lips are chapped, and her muscles have all but completely atrophied. It’s like something out of a “Saw” movie. It takes all her strength just to get herself out of the bed.
She remembers her former life and finds clues in her home about what’s been going on. She hears Frank’s podcast. Finds the paperwork Jack signed, etc. But she’s all but dying. She’s weak. And just as she’s about to pass out trying to call for help, some very nice men come in and restrap her into the bed.
And she wakes up back in Victory. And now we’re in a “Twilight Zone” episode.
This is where Bunny comes to see her and tells her that she knows what’s going on. She tells Alice how she chose to be here, how she can still be with her children here who have died in the real world. We get a real conversation (and flashbacks to Alice’s real life) about the fact that the real world isn’t actually so great. Alice’s first instinct is “I loved my job,” “I had a life that was mine”, but is quickly reminded that she wasn’t living a fairy tale. She was burned out. She was developing medical conditions from her exhaustion and poor diet. She’d always dreamed about having kids but couldn’t figure out how to do it with the cost of living and the demands of her job. She couldn’t find the right guy – Jack was the best she’d found, but he was in the middle of a downward spiral that was going to end their relationship sooner or later. She was estranged from her family and didn’t really have any friends. She held her keys between her fingers when she walked to her car every night.
Isn’t this world better?
And Bunny tells her the best part. Now that she’s in on what’s going on, she can have a say in customizing her experience. Want the best version of your mom to come stay with you? She can! Want to start teaching classes in medicine? She can! She can look any way she wants with just a tweak of some code. And, on top of that, isn’t it, really, the fantasy of every good hearted doctor that someday they will live in a world with no disease? Isn’t that why she became a surgeon – to save people’s lives and find ways to improve quality of life? Well, now she’s living in a world where no one gets sick. She’ll never have to lose a patient on an operating table again. She’ll never have to tell a child their mom died…
Bunny has a point…
Alice fights with Jack – but he shares with her his frustration and sadness about the fact that he has to keep going back into the real world every day and earn an insane amount of money to keep them there, while she gets to stay and just have fun. He hates it. He hates having to be the bread winner. But he’s doing it because he loves her. Frank gave him a job working for him. He gave them Victory. There are good things here and the women, in some ways, have it a lot better than the guys.
He has a point…
He apologizes for the way he went about everything and asks her what she wants.
And the truth is… she doesn’t know.
Alice begins to discover the backstories behind why different people are in Victory. Apparently Margaret was in the worst situation – she was literally kidnapped by an incel, a stranger who just thought she was “hot” and wanted her to be his Victory wife. She was trapped in a nightmare.
But that’s not the case for most of the people there. Some husbands and wives decided to be there together. Some wives don’t know what’s really going on, but their husbands did that intentionally to save them from the memory of trauma in their real life.
Some situations are a bit creepier… Alice discovers that one wife is actually a man in the real world – his husband wanted to explore a heteronormative fantasy, and his partner has no idea of what’s going on.
But what’s creepy about the whole situation is how much in a grey area it is. For some people Victory is a Godsend. For some it’s hell. Tearing down the system isn’t necessarily the right thing to do. Leaving it as is isn’t either.
But the center of all of this is Alice having to decide what she wants for herself. And that’s much more complicated than she ever thought it would be.
The ending could go in a million different ways. Here are some ideas:
1.) Alice decides to stay in Victory (in essence “plugging herself into the internet” for the rest of her life.) The real world is so disturbing that she’d much rather be here…she deliberately keeps the truth from the other members of the community and thus becomes a part of the very system she was at first fighting against.
2.) The U.S. government busts the Victory Project for tax evasion and everyone is forced back into the real world with no rehabilitation. We see them all having to go back to their real lives… they’re free, but not necessarily liberated.
3.) Alice goes back to the real world and starts fighting to free the others. But the more she stands up against Victory the more she experiences people coming up to her – people struggling, suffering, asking her if she can, secretly, tell them how be chosen to get into Victory – willing to spend their life savings to get there.
4.) Alice goes back to the real world, dumps Jack, and spends a few years rehabilitating herself before deciding that she wants to go back to Victory on her own terms.
5.) The same as #4 but she tricks (or forces) her new partner into Victory with her, now doing to someone else what Jack did to her.
6.) Jack ends up dying, but Alice wants to stay in Victory. She ends up having to take a job in the outside world to afford staying there. She’s now the “masculine” bread winner… and she hates it just as much as she hated being trapped.
7.) We see Alice back in the real world living an ideal life. She’s a famous surgeon who’s managed to develop a perfect work/life balance. She’s always done by 5pm, goes home to a loving husband and kids and gets plenty of vacation time. We then discover that this is really also a simulation – an extension of the Victory project.
8.) Alice goes back to the real world and, one night, on her way back to her car she is attacked by an incel (the latest Victory recruit) who has seen her from afar and decided that she’s going to be his wife in Victory. The attack doesn’t go as planned and he ends up killing her.
9.) Alice decides to go back to the real world because there are no stakes living in a fantasy and that takes away meaning. We watch her struggle to get back to her old life and make improvements based on her experience.
Any of those can work. The point of the end is to hit home that repression of women is wrong, but we live in a very grey world with no clear cut perfect solutions. Our current situation is less “liberate us!” and more “everything is just ‘out of the frying pan into the fire.’”
When you’re working on a piece, whether as a writer, director, performer, designer (etc.) It’s helpful to lay out what the tools in your toolbox are. Write down things you think are obvious – sometimes the seemingly most obvious things can yield the most interesting and “out of the box” results. In the case of “Don’t Worry Darling” you have:
- This story is taking place in present day.
- The things that are unique to a discussion of feminism NOW include: the rise of incels, cost of living, Me Too, the complexities of modern dating and relationships, rising fertility issues, overturning of Roe Vs. Wade (and more)
- This story is primarily set in a VR universe – which means anything goes (this does require a detailed establishing of rules of the world…)
- There are actually benefits for everyone living in Victory that must be explored and examined (even if they are to be ultimately discarded).
- We all now, communally, have a shared knowledge of feminist stories that have come before (like “The Stepford Wives”) which means we have a shared vocabulary that can be utilized and built upon, instead of simply being restated.
- A principal character (Frank, who is largely in opposition to our protagonist) who WANTS to be challenged.
- A group of male characters who also have legitimate complaints about how the world works and the role they’re expected to fill (which has also changed in modern day discourse.)
Each one of these things is great fodder to let your mind wander, imagine and explore. Don’t ignore or discard them. They are the organic, inherent building blocks of your story and they are only going to serve you. Every story comes with its own toolbox just waiting to support you in your creative process. When you don’t utilize what you have right in front of you, you’re going to be left with a table held together with tape.