No, Do Worry
Dear Ms. Wilde,
Hi. You make me a little nervous, and that’s no way to start, so let me say, as a fellow Irish dual-citizen, I’d much rather be having a pint of Smithwick’s with you, but here I am, tired and confused.
I could begin with a bit about myself, like when I was born, where I grew up, the kids who tortured me, and how I developed Columbine levels of rage toward the universe. Not as a teenager, mind you, but as a little boy who found his only solace in a movie theater.
I could tell you how I identify with the loneliness and pain those two gunmen felt, and I risk alienating everyone around me after admitting it. Here is the crucial, unimpeachable part: I identified with them until they walked into their school and unloaded on their classmates. Rage became violence in a way I couldn’t conceive of, as it would never have occurred to me to get a gun and kill someone bothering me. I attribute this to being raised right: A couple of teachers listened, and my parents had the good sense to encourage the artist in me. I also really hate guns and wish they’d be melted down and re-sculpted as a metal dinosaur, or perhaps an entire family of dinosaurs.
I had no fundamental concept of sex or girlfriends as a child. I didn’t really have friendships, except the fairweather variety. Still, even my loneliness was mollified by my imagination. I was content to play with my Ninja Turtles and see every Spielberg movie. Those moments gave me peace and, more importantly, another day.
As I’m not the quitting type, whatever pain I suffered, I bounced back from — at least I tried. Therapy helped, although I thought it strange that the guys bullying me didn’t have to go, too.
With time, I found love for myself and others and a way of feeling intimacy I thought I’d never get as a child. I was listened to and seen and became a part of the world.
Again, I cannot emphasize the role movies and art as a whole played in my healing and being able to keep on keeping on to this day.
Movies explained life to me — showing me the best and worst of ourselves. They taught me what is good and how we often miss out on that goodness. Movies were and are the great equalizer. They help me dwell on possibility, and film has been the most explicit indication that hope matters, even as I struggle with that idea.
The movies, I used to say, likely saved my life, but as I grew older, I realized that maybe they didn’t save me but empowered me to save myself.
And…scene!
I’m glad I got that out. If you’re still with me, I’d like to talk about Don’t Worry,Darling. There has been a rock on my shoe ever since I saw it.
As I write this, It’s the number-one movie in the country, and good on ye. Female filmmakers deserve as much of the pie as their male counterparts.
I’ve read of the behind-the-scenes dramatics with Don’t Worry Darling, with unhappy actors and a narrative suggesting that you, their director, did them dirty at various points. If it were a man misbehaving, I am told, we wouldn’t hear about it. While I disagree, I sympathize with your position being more precarious. It sucks to be on an unhappy set, and it sucks when people who weren’t there drag you for being responsible for the unhappiness. For that, I am sorry.
However, I watched your movie, and I have some concerns about where reality and fiction become hard to separate.
There’s the matter of Florence Pugh. The Divine Miss Flo is powerful; she makes everything glow and hum, scene after scene. As a housewife who suspects all is not right in her utopian development, Pugh towers above everyone and everything in the movie, offering a glimmer of what could have been.
The movie looks and sounds stunning, and it’s clear you studied Mad Max: Fury Road, Requiem For A Dream, and many others. The movie is often alive and kicking, even against itself.
When the twist comes — and I will tread lightly — the movie becomes an enslavement narrative akin to The Matrix, but without any of that movie’s depth or purpose. Suddenly, the men, including Pugh’s husband, become the villains and reveal the horrifying machinations within the film’s world.
Darling ends with a strange message against patriarchal tyranny. It suggests that men, so-called “incels,” want to build a fantasy world where they can do nice things for women and women do nice things for them. Everyone gets to be happy because everything is under control. Your POV of this scenario is nightmarish, and I see why. It is a vision of America as a paradise that slowly snuffs out female identity through conformity. In a world where Donald Trump is omnipresent, it’s easy to see why this story would resonate.
You made a movie about how you are oppressed and stick it to the pathetic boys who only come out of their mom’s basement to feed, violate, and destroy.
Good on ye.
Score settled.
And there’s the rub.
Film is too powerful an artform to weaponize in settling scores. They do not need to teach, but if you think you are, you’d better clarify your point.
I found so much of Darling lacked a point beyond, “Men bad!” The movie connects male behavior to the internet. Still, it feels like the internet made it — self-satisfied in a dangerous way, choosing vague accusations and a “gotcha” mentality over context and nuance.
Blame the incels, losers who feel entitled to sex and will have it by any means necessary!
The sexuality in the film, to whit, further confuses the issue. If, as you said, “female pleasure” was paramount to your vision, why does consent go out the window? This applies to the story and the one behind the scenes. Pugh expressed frustration with the over-sexual marketing. If your work intended to empower and liberate women’s sexuality, it seems odd the film exploited it simultaneously.
Yet, I’m more worried about the men because that’s my lane.
These “incels” are propped up, you’ve said, by people like Jordan Peterson. I don’t care about the man; he can be a bully and constantly undermines himself with his online persona, but you’re wrong if you think he’s rallying the troops to wage war on women. Peterson, who is a model for the main villain played by Chris Pine, is a lot of things, but you need only do a simple search on YouTube to find how opposed he is to incel culture.
That culture is real; the internet has provided their rhetoric with fertile nesting grounds. While I don’t think men saying terrible things equals them doing terrible things, this growing movement must be dealt with accordingly, so their misogynist ideas are not continually actualized.
It’s a question of responsibility. I can see your point if we’re talking about men not taking that responsibility. It’s just not in the movie, which suggests pulling the wool over one’s eyes is preferable to the hard work of mending a hurt and bleeding world.
I imagine the lonely boy-anger your movie highlights boiling over because rich, entitled people are the ones with a microphone calling for their banishment. Social media has ruthlessly waved that flag while benefiting from the conflict. This has all but guaranteed the problem will never go away. Monetizing suffering is too crucial to our capitalist society.
I understand these guys’ impulses. Everyone wants to be seen and live in a world where they are right, but I strenuously object to the notion that bullying solves bullying. Furthermore, no art should ever be used against people.
Movies. Force for good. The end. I look to Céline Sciamma, arguably the greats filmmaker on the planet. Look to Alice Guy-Blache, Maya Deren, Ida Lupino, Agnes Varda, Kathryn Bigelow, Jennifer Kent, Jane Campion, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Chloe Zhao, Sofia Coppola, Penelope Spbeeris, Amy Heckerling, Caroline Thompson, Greta Gerwig, Kasi Lemmons, Jennifer Yuh, Anna Rose Holmer, Julie Delpy, Julie Dash, Anna Biller, Anna Rose Holmer, Joan Micklin Silver, the Soska Sisters, ElizaHittman… I could do this forever, but I gotta wrap this up nefore the weekend.
Do men need help? Yes, wedo. But that comes from stopping and listening, not from further retaliation. You can beat someone into submission, but they will only learn to get used to the beating.
Men need to do better. We do, and misogyny, as it is man-made, can only be dismantled by men. Men owe it to one another to provide spaces where we can be open and vulnerable, welcoming and warm. We need to find our feminine sides and act courageously with them.
Don’t Worry Darling is alienating, discouraging, sneering, and condescending. Its aesthetics ultimately appear aggressively masculine, countering the movie’s pro-feminist message.
I think I’ve calmed down a bit.
I don’t ask that you calm down — quite the opposite. Art often requires anger and expressions of our shadow selves, but it also requires that the mirror gets turned on the artist. What “Don’t Worry, Darling” demonstrates is how unwilling one in the lap of luxury can be to do that, even as you ironically played a complicit character in the movie. It was a part of a mosaic that didn’t add up and, in the end, became an act of entitled complaining about something that needed to be taken seriously and wasn’t.
Still, I thank you for making your movie. It’s good to try and work out what we’re all thinking. I only wish there was more forgiveness to dole out. I get up every day, forgiving those who hurt me. It’s hard but necessary for me because I’d go insane otherwise. I always thank the gods of film for a better life, and if there’s one thing I know to be truest, they must remain that force for good. Otherwise, we surrender to our illusions or get destroyed by them.
What you do is too important. Take good care. Take better care.
Michael
PS- Your private life is no one’s business, but if you were to marry Harry, it would tickle me to no end if you started marketing yourself as “Olivia Wilde-Styles.” I know, right???