I’m so fond of the new writers I’ve discovered on Substack. They seem to owe nothing to trying to please both sides (ahem NYT). I’ve not seen either movie, but I think this writer makes a valid point.
Wonderful write up as always. However you keep mentioning Ryan Reynolds as Ken throughout the article and it’s Ryan Gosling. Unless I have slipped into an alternate reality. Also possible.
I was also unsure if you were just playing along with the fact that Conservatives keep saying Ryan Reynolds instead of Gosling when they are talking about the movie 🤣
Alice isn't a mess of wanting or rage because she's a woman, she's a mess because her trusted husband has put her into a simulation without her knowledge or permission, and as these things go, reality cracks keep opening up. She wasn't happy in the real world either, because her husband didn't hold up his end of the relationship. But, he was prepared to work a great deal at everything if his ideal would be met.
It was never clear how Alice was kept oblivious 24 hours a day, including whlle Jack was working at a real job to pay for the whole shebang. In the real world she had no bodily functions, didn't eat, didn't shower, didn't go to the toilet, was abruptly out of contact with everyone she knew? (Was she in a coma 24 x 7?) The pretense of the film fell apart as soon as the reveal became clear to the audience.
It's not a good film. It was irritating. It was slow. It was Stepford Wives for the 21st century. It was hard to resist fast forwarding, and hard to persist to the end.
The frequent synchronized swimmer / dancer sequences were bizarre, and irrelevant to anything. It reminded me of the introduction of horses in the woeful American version of The Ring.
I wanted this to be a good enough film. It wasn't.
so, I think the point of the film (and a good point!) is that women are regularly and systematically oppressed, gaslit, controlled. Alice's husband kidnapping and controlling her is a metaphor for that, and her experience is a metaphor for sexist oppression. It doesn't completely make sense because (in part) it's a dream, and about dreams.
It's an odd art film with surreal imagery; obviously not everyone loves that. And you certainly don't have to like it! But...I mean, her wanting and her rage seem very clearly tied to her oppression as a woman, and to the way that the patriarchy determines not just women's reality but (to some not insignificant extent) women's dreams. and again, it was very much Alice's story, even if you hate it...whereas Barbie more than half wanted to be about Ken, even if you like it. (I liked both movies, as I said.)
Noah - I wanted to like Wilde's film, but I couldn't get over the line. The acting and the visuals were fine. The messaging was an awfully worn out sledge hammer. For women, it's not interesting. We live it. It's not entertaining. (Yes, I just spoke for all women. 🤣) And it's been done before, the modern twist merely raised a bucket full of plot holes.
Throwing in random hallucinations doesn't make a film arty, to my mind.
In the real world, Alice had agency, a professional job. Her partner was an old-school jerk, but there wasn't, as far as we know, anything to stop her from getting rid of the jerk, if she'd wanted to.
I liked that Barbie gave both Ken and Barbie solid story arcs. It would have been a different film if it had only been about Barbie, the intent would have been a different flavor, and the best scenes would not have been in the script, because the context wouldn't have existed.
I was expecting to enjoy Barbie, and I did. It was actually a much better film than I expected. A clever script, part fluff, part fun, part heavy messaging. Gotta love America's speech. What other film has included such unambiguous and honest statements about the absurd and impossible expectations still being mfoisted upon women, well into the 21st century?
This clever conflation of the two film titles subconsciously brings the Beach Boys '64 classic "Don't Worry Baby" to mind. Which is perfect as both films also owe a lot to mid-century Southern California cultural references.
::Don't Worry, Darling faced critical backlash in part because Styles was dating Wilde; male directors have famously cast women they find attractive as leads, but a female director doing the same was seen as distasteful.::
It wasn't that Olivia Wilde was having an affair with Henry Styles—they're both consenting adults, after all. While I care about "character" when it comes to politicians or religious figures (hence my comments about "hypocrisy being the worst of sins" in another context), I'm not really so invested in movie or television stars, writers, or filmmakers that I care if they were or weren't in a relationship when they started banging somebody else—again with the "consenting adults" proviso.
OTOH, the movie was all over the map with its message, kind of like Frank Oz's THE STEPFORD WIVES remake. Ira Levin had written a sharp, pointed satirical horror novel about masculinity at its most insidiously toxic decades before "toxic masculinity" was a recognizable term, and while the original motion picture was no classic, it at least preserved Levin's plot right to its horrific logical conclusion. Oz's remake had the distinct smell of #NotAllMen to it, along with a tacked-on "happy ending" that seems to say, "Oppression is just fine...if it's the RIGHT Oppressor!"
DON'T WORRY, DARLING isn't based on a previous property—it's an original screenplay written by Olivia Wilde's producing partner Kate Silberman and Dick Van Dyke's grandsons. (I really need to stop being surprised by the weird bounces children of well-known persons' lives take.) All the publicity I read, including by the director, centered around "women's pleasure" and how the film wasn't afraid of women's sexuality...in a film about women being turned, without their consent, into Suzie Homemakers and Bambi Fuckbunnies in a faux-1950s by their resentful husbands! The whole premise is a non-consensual D/s fantasy that the main character ultimately breaks free of, which you have to admit is a REALLY mixed message when combined with the PR.
Again, not kink-shaming—I'm great with women being submissive in the bedroom, or Dominant in the bedroom, or switching off with their partner or partners in the bedroom...PROVIDED all involved are consenting adults. That's not the case here by any means: The husband, who lost his job and thus couldn't hold up his end of the couple's financial duties, nonetheless finds a job that pays well enough to afford this new, presumably super-secret VR technology that turns his wife into an eagerly-submissive fuckbunny and house muffin. (I assume it's super-secret, because otherwise Alice would have known about it before the start of the movie.) If she's kept there 24/7, as is implied by what happens inside the HAPPY DAYS eXistenZ Matrix, then he also has to pay for the household expenses he couldn't hold up his end of before! If she's not, where are the scenes where she either tells Jack about her weirdly specific dreams (and he slips up and says "Don't Worry, Darling", which is the first step in her realization that maybe it's NOT all just dreams?), or she confides in a colleague (or her training doctor) at the hospital she works for as a surgical intern, which prompts...::handwave, technobabble, handwave:: which lets her know what Jack might be up to.
I wonder if the original screenplay had a more conventional structure, as I suggested in the last paragraph—but Olivia Wilde, upon reading it, went, "Oh, I know! I can make this my homage to Hitchcock's VERTIGO!" That VERTIGO was a critically-divisive financial disappointment, with much of the negative commentary in its initial release revolving around its plot, which once revealed made little logical sense, didn't...matter? I guess?
I might actually have felt the movie fit Olivia Wilde's description of it if it had turned out to be Alice's VR fantasies thanks to her stressful day job (kind of like the sitcom world Wanda Maximoff created for herself in WANDA/VISION?), or the entire experience was a consensual one (part of a new marriage counseling technique utilizing VR?). In that latter scenario, both Alice and Jack either realize that that's what Jack wants but Alice doesn't (so she leaves him), or that that's not what either of them want (so Jack takes a "lesser" job so he can help with the finances more). Even if the movie had been more of a thriller that wove in and out of reality, with Alice slowly realizing Jack's gaslighting her into this nighttime housewife lifestyle to bolster his ego (and possibly brainwash her into accepting that life?), that would have made the movie's dramatic climax land better than it did.
As it is, though? It's pulling in two opposite directions so hard that it just didn't work for me....
as I said in the piece, it's about (in part) how women's fantasies are shaped by the patriarchy. so it's about women's sexual pleasure, but also about how that is often connected to, or exploited by, women's oppressors.
Which to me seems meaningful and thoughtful. But...it's an art movie, in a lot of ways. like, people don't necessarily give David Lynch a ton of crap because his movies don't exactly make sense. Wilde made a weird, ambitious art movie with difficult themes about sexual pleasure and sexual violence. It's a wonder that it did so well at the box office. But I think it was failed by critics.
::as I said in the piece, it's about (in part) how women's fantasies are shaped by the patriarchy. so it's about women's sexual pleasure, but also about how that is often connected to, or exploited by, women's oppressors.::
There! In one sentence you've given a far better *raison d'être* for the movie having such a problematic tone than most reviews (including my informal one) or publicity managed to, including from the director herself.
Reading that made me go, "Ohhh—I see! Yeah, that IS a meaningful and thoughtful theme that needs to be explored...."
I just don't think Olivia Wilde, Karen Silberman, or Dick Van Dyke's grandsons have gotten there with this movie. I would like to see a movie that asks that question and gives it some serious thought, instead of leaving it there floating in the aether unconsidered. But I doubt that's the movie these people made; instead, it feels like an erotic thriller made with more thought and care than you'd get from Skinemax or Joe Eszterhas, but less than you'd get from Paul Verhoeven or Andrzej Żuławski. (Yes, I had to look his name up, because I remembered the movie POSSESSION but couldn't remember his name!)
I remember something funny I heard in film school that kind of relates to this: Schlockmeister William Castle came to speak at my University's film school, late in his career when film professors started to think there might be more to him than "Emergo", "Percepto", or cardboard axes handed out to patrons. After he finished speaking and started to take audience questions, one very earnest film student asked, "Mr. Castle, in STRAIT-JACKET you had Joan Crawford standing on a train platform being completely enveloped in smoke. Was that because you were making a statement about her desire to re-enter the womb...?" Castle paused for a moment, then laughed and said, "The reason Joan was enveloped in smoke was that the effects guy put too much juice in the smoke machine, so when we shot the take we all got a face full of smoke! Since it was the last take before lunch and we were scheduled to move to another location, I just figured it was good enough and let it go...."
Because sometimes, Art is the Effects Guy putting too much juice in the Smoke Machine.
I like Verhoeven and Eszterhas can be okay. I don't think this is really an erotic thriller. the touchstones seem to be David Lynch, the Matrix, Philip K. Dick, Stepford Wives, more or less.
I’m so fond of the new writers I’ve discovered on Substack. They seem to owe nothing to trying to please both sides (ahem NYT). I’ve not seen either movie, but I think this writer makes a valid point.
they're both worth seeing; hope you get a chance to check them out.
and thank you!
Wonderful write up as always. However you keep mentioning Ryan Reynolds as Ken throughout the article and it’s Ryan Gosling. Unless I have slipped into an alternate reality. Also possible.
oh god damn it. thank you. this is what you get for not having an editor.
I was also unsure if you were just playing along with the fact that Conservatives keep saying Ryan Reynolds instead of Gosling when they are talking about the movie 🤣
https://twitter.com/Nancy023922191/status/1683610121711292416
nope; I just have problems with proper names.
Noah, it's Ryan GOSLING, not Ryan Reynolds.
Ryan Reynolds's Ken would definitely fuck, and say "Fuck".
A lot.
yep; it's been changed. sorry about that. as I mention above, I have real problems with proper names.
Oh, I got the one with Ryan Reynolds still in there.
I commented, then saw I was the third person to do so.
Oops?
the email went out with the wrong name; I changed it on the site, but once the email is gone, it's gone for good...
Alice isn't a mess of wanting or rage because she's a woman, she's a mess because her trusted husband has put her into a simulation without her knowledge or permission, and as these things go, reality cracks keep opening up. She wasn't happy in the real world either, because her husband didn't hold up his end of the relationship. But, he was prepared to work a great deal at everything if his ideal would be met.
It was never clear how Alice was kept oblivious 24 hours a day, including whlle Jack was working at a real job to pay for the whole shebang. In the real world she had no bodily functions, didn't eat, didn't shower, didn't go to the toilet, was abruptly out of contact with everyone she knew? (Was she in a coma 24 x 7?) The pretense of the film fell apart as soon as the reveal became clear to the audience.
It's not a good film. It was irritating. It was slow. It was Stepford Wives for the 21st century. It was hard to resist fast forwarding, and hard to persist to the end.
The frequent synchronized swimmer / dancer sequences were bizarre, and irrelevant to anything. It reminded me of the introduction of horses in the woeful American version of The Ring.
I wanted this to be a good enough film. It wasn't.
so, I think the point of the film (and a good point!) is that women are regularly and systematically oppressed, gaslit, controlled. Alice's husband kidnapping and controlling her is a metaphor for that, and her experience is a metaphor for sexist oppression. It doesn't completely make sense because (in part) it's a dream, and about dreams.
It's an odd art film with surreal imagery; obviously not everyone loves that. And you certainly don't have to like it! But...I mean, her wanting and her rage seem very clearly tied to her oppression as a woman, and to the way that the patriarchy determines not just women's reality but (to some not insignificant extent) women's dreams. and again, it was very much Alice's story, even if you hate it...whereas Barbie more than half wanted to be about Ken, even if you like it. (I liked both movies, as I said.)
Noah - I wanted to like Wilde's film, but I couldn't get over the line. The acting and the visuals were fine. The messaging was an awfully worn out sledge hammer. For women, it's not interesting. We live it. It's not entertaining. (Yes, I just spoke for all women. 🤣) And it's been done before, the modern twist merely raised a bucket full of plot holes.
Throwing in random hallucinations doesn't make a film arty, to my mind.
In the real world, Alice had agency, a professional job. Her partner was an old-school jerk, but there wasn't, as far as we know, anything to stop her from getting rid of the jerk, if she'd wanted to.
I liked that Barbie gave both Ken and Barbie solid story arcs. It would have been a different film if it had only been about Barbie, the intent would have been a different flavor, and the best scenes would not have been in the script, because the context wouldn't have existed.
I was expecting to enjoy Barbie, and I did. It was actually a much better film than I expected. A clever script, part fluff, part fun, part heavy messaging. Gotta love America's speech. What other film has included such unambiguous and honest statements about the absurd and impossible expectations still being mfoisted upon women, well into the 21st century?
And Ken's fur coat was fab. 💕
This clever conflation of the two film titles subconsciously brings the Beach Boys '64 classic "Don't Worry Baby" to mind. Which is perfect as both films also owe a lot to mid-century Southern California cultural references.
I hadn’t thought of that! Good point!
::Don't Worry, Darling faced critical backlash in part because Styles was dating Wilde; male directors have famously cast women they find attractive as leads, but a female director doing the same was seen as distasteful.::
It wasn't that Olivia Wilde was having an affair with Henry Styles—they're both consenting adults, after all. While I care about "character" when it comes to politicians or religious figures (hence my comments about "hypocrisy being the worst of sins" in another context), I'm not really so invested in movie or television stars, writers, or filmmakers that I care if they were or weren't in a relationship when they started banging somebody else—again with the "consenting adults" proviso.
OTOH, the movie was all over the map with its message, kind of like Frank Oz's THE STEPFORD WIVES remake. Ira Levin had written a sharp, pointed satirical horror novel about masculinity at its most insidiously toxic decades before "toxic masculinity" was a recognizable term, and while the original motion picture was no classic, it at least preserved Levin's plot right to its horrific logical conclusion. Oz's remake had the distinct smell of #NotAllMen to it, along with a tacked-on "happy ending" that seems to say, "Oppression is just fine...if it's the RIGHT Oppressor!"
DON'T WORRY, DARLING isn't based on a previous property—it's an original screenplay written by Olivia Wilde's producing partner Kate Silberman and Dick Van Dyke's grandsons. (I really need to stop being surprised by the weird bounces children of well-known persons' lives take.) All the publicity I read, including by the director, centered around "women's pleasure" and how the film wasn't afraid of women's sexuality...in a film about women being turned, without their consent, into Suzie Homemakers and Bambi Fuckbunnies in a faux-1950s by their resentful husbands! The whole premise is a non-consensual D/s fantasy that the main character ultimately breaks free of, which you have to admit is a REALLY mixed message when combined with the PR.
Again, not kink-shaming—I'm great with women being submissive in the bedroom, or Dominant in the bedroom, or switching off with their partner or partners in the bedroom...PROVIDED all involved are consenting adults. That's not the case here by any means: The husband, who lost his job and thus couldn't hold up his end of the couple's financial duties, nonetheless finds a job that pays well enough to afford this new, presumably super-secret VR technology that turns his wife into an eagerly-submissive fuckbunny and house muffin. (I assume it's super-secret, because otherwise Alice would have known about it before the start of the movie.) If she's kept there 24/7, as is implied by what happens inside the HAPPY DAYS eXistenZ Matrix, then he also has to pay for the household expenses he couldn't hold up his end of before! If she's not, where are the scenes where she either tells Jack about her weirdly specific dreams (and he slips up and says "Don't Worry, Darling", which is the first step in her realization that maybe it's NOT all just dreams?), or she confides in a colleague (or her training doctor) at the hospital she works for as a surgical intern, which prompts...::handwave, technobabble, handwave:: which lets her know what Jack might be up to.
I wonder if the original screenplay had a more conventional structure, as I suggested in the last paragraph—but Olivia Wilde, upon reading it, went, "Oh, I know! I can make this my homage to Hitchcock's VERTIGO!" That VERTIGO was a critically-divisive financial disappointment, with much of the negative commentary in its initial release revolving around its plot, which once revealed made little logical sense, didn't...matter? I guess?
I might actually have felt the movie fit Olivia Wilde's description of it if it had turned out to be Alice's VR fantasies thanks to her stressful day job (kind of like the sitcom world Wanda Maximoff created for herself in WANDA/VISION?), or the entire experience was a consensual one (part of a new marriage counseling technique utilizing VR?). In that latter scenario, both Alice and Jack either realize that that's what Jack wants but Alice doesn't (so she leaves him), or that that's not what either of them want (so Jack takes a "lesser" job so he can help with the finances more). Even if the movie had been more of a thriller that wove in and out of reality, with Alice slowly realizing Jack's gaslighting her into this nighttime housewife lifestyle to bolster his ego (and possibly brainwash her into accepting that life?), that would have made the movie's dramatic climax land better than it did.
As it is, though? It's pulling in two opposite directions so hard that it just didn't work for me....
as I said in the piece, it's about (in part) how women's fantasies are shaped by the patriarchy. so it's about women's sexual pleasure, but also about how that is often connected to, or exploited by, women's oppressors.
Which to me seems meaningful and thoughtful. But...it's an art movie, in a lot of ways. like, people don't necessarily give David Lynch a ton of crap because his movies don't exactly make sense. Wilde made a weird, ambitious art movie with difficult themes about sexual pleasure and sexual violence. It's a wonder that it did so well at the box office. But I think it was failed by critics.
::as I said in the piece, it's about (in part) how women's fantasies are shaped by the patriarchy. so it's about women's sexual pleasure, but also about how that is often connected to, or exploited by, women's oppressors.::
There! In one sentence you've given a far better *raison d'être* for the movie having such a problematic tone than most reviews (including my informal one) or publicity managed to, including from the director herself.
Reading that made me go, "Ohhh—I see! Yeah, that IS a meaningful and thoughtful theme that needs to be explored...."
::strokes beard while thinking::
https://i.imgur.com/Wu8GwXa.gif
I just don't think Olivia Wilde, Karen Silberman, or Dick Van Dyke's grandsons have gotten there with this movie. I would like to see a movie that asks that question and gives it some serious thought, instead of leaving it there floating in the aether unconsidered. But I doubt that's the movie these people made; instead, it feels like an erotic thriller made with more thought and care than you'd get from Skinemax or Joe Eszterhas, but less than you'd get from Paul Verhoeven or Andrzej Żuławski. (Yes, I had to look his name up, because I remembered the movie POSSESSION but couldn't remember his name!)
I remember something funny I heard in film school that kind of relates to this: Schlockmeister William Castle came to speak at my University's film school, late in his career when film professors started to think there might be more to him than "Emergo", "Percepto", or cardboard axes handed out to patrons. After he finished speaking and started to take audience questions, one very earnest film student asked, "Mr. Castle, in STRAIT-JACKET you had Joan Crawford standing on a train platform being completely enveloped in smoke. Was that because you were making a statement about her desire to re-enter the womb...?" Castle paused for a moment, then laughed and said, "The reason Joan was enveloped in smoke was that the effects guy put too much juice in the smoke machine, so when we shot the take we all got a face full of smoke! Since it was the last take before lunch and we were scheduled to move to another location, I just figured it was good enough and let it go...."
Because sometimes, Art is the Effects Guy putting too much juice in the Smoke Machine.
I like Verhoeven and Eszterhas can be okay. I don't think this is really an erotic thriller. the touchstones seem to be David Lynch, the Matrix, Philip K. Dick, Stepford Wives, more or less.