Worry, darling

Desperate for approval, claiming to be both empowered and oppressed: Olivia Wilde achieves the holy trinity of the upper class professional woman.

On my flight to New York a few weeks ago, I watched last year’s film Don’t Worry, Darling, an erotic thriller directed by Olivia Wilde. The movie caused two stirs upon its release in November. The first when, to the delight of tabloids everywhere, the cloyingly feminist Wilde managed to piss off her film’s female star and have an affair with the film’s male star, two things frowned upon in feminism. I am a connoisseur of celeb gossip, and this story line had Restoration Comedy levels of sexual intrigue and sycophancy.

The second media storm came after she smugly announced that the movie’s villain, a creepy cult leader type played by Chris Pine, was inspired by Jordan Peterson. As Wilde explained in an interview with fellow actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, Pine’s role is based on Peterson, who Wilde described as “this insane man who is this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community.” The incels, she continued, are “basically disenfranchised, mostly white men, who believe they are entitled to sex from women.” And: “This guy Jordan Peterson is someone that legitimizes certain aspects of their movement because he’s a former professor, he’s an author, he wears a suit, so they feel like this is a real philosophy that should be taken seriously.”

I watched this drama unfold at the time, with great interest, but I didn’t write about it back then, because I like my hot takes to be served several months after the fact, like defrosted Thanksgiving leftovers. Just kidding. The real reason I didn’t write about this when the movie came out was because I was so irritated by the director’s comment that I was just not prepared to fork over my money to go see it.

Olivia Wilde is the sort of woman who wears “Feminist AF” tees and gives cringe interviews claiming she’s raising her daughter to reject gender stereotypes. It seems that irritation is just something that Olivia Wilde engenders in people. I have been watching her with irritation since 2019, when upon the poor box office returns of her first movie, she wrote a tweet attempting to guilt-trip the American public into buying a ticket. The tweet did not work, she was widely ridiculed for it, and the movie bombed.  

Wilde is the apex of the rich, white, female, guilt-ridden, prestige-industry striver. Craven and desperate for approval, while simultaneously claiming to be empowered, while also claiming to be a victim: the holy trinity of the upper middle class white professional female. This type of woman is heavily represented in the media and culture sectors. The overproduction of cultural elites, combined with the vicious race-and-gender ideological takeover, has left almost everyone, even fabulously wealthy, drop-dead gorgeous movie stars like Wilde, very uncertain of their perch atop the greasy pole. As females, successful women in the prestige industries are supposed to own their power, flaunt it even. But! Being secure in your position as a successful woman is itself a reason to take you down. So you have to bow and scrape while you also girl boss to the max, and on top of that tap dance, you also have to make a show of empowering others further down the rankings of the oppression olympics. It sounds exhausting. I feel kinda bad for her.

So I finally got my chance to see this movie without paying for it. I am not a high-brow movie-goer. I love the tropes and the formulas of franchises and blockbusters, but most of all, I go to be visually pleasured. So beautiful actors, beautiful clothes, beautiful sets are enough to make me happy— provided I’m not subjected to a libtard lecture while I’m there. 

By that metric, Wilde’s film was almost a success. The actors looked great, the sets were like something out of a catalogue, and scenes of the cooking and serving of food were aurally and visually appealing. The end, even without the dumb-as-rocks Peterson thing, was a contrivance, but overall, the film was fairly enjoyable.

But Don’t Worry Darling is interesting not because of any of that. It’s because it is, much like Wilde herself, the perfect example of how truly clueless so many of our betters are. It’s like their brains are locked in gated communities outside of which it is very unsafe to venture, lest they catch some nasty populist, alt-right ideas. Then where would they be? Reduced to interviews on the Joe Rogan podcast, like Roseanne Barr? The horror! 

I know people who have studied philosophy and religion who object to Jordan Peterson on philosophical grounds. I don’t agree with those people, but that seems like honest criticism —though all criticism of Peterson is contaminated by the fact that criticising him is like a job requirement to be allowed in keep your spot in polite society, so it’s hard to take any of it seriously.

But there is no world in which Wilde’s characterisation of him as a guru who tells young men they are entitled to sex from women is even remotely accurate, never mind fair or honest. Wilde’s comment was so profoundly incorrect, in fact, that it almost gives me more reason to feel sorry for her. Could she really be that sloppy?

The denouement of the film comes when Florence Pugh’s character, Alice, realises that her beautiful 1950’s life in the desert is not real, but rather a simulation that her bitter, loser, husband (Harry Styles) has put her into a coma in order to experience. In the real world, she’s a go-getter professional who works all the hours that god gives. He sits at home at his computer all night, getting sucked into an Internet underworld where manipulative men entice him into a worldview in which his woman isn’t such a demanding bitch and he’s the man around the house. Said Internet underworld is lead by this Jordan Peterson-like figure, who runs some kind of operation involving the non-consensual drugging of women who then stay in induced comas and live only in the metaverse. The simulation is nothing like their reality: women stay home and clean the house, then get dolled up to meet their hubbies at the door, cocktail in hand, and ready to get down to some lovemaking on the dining room table.

Problem is, the real Peterson has grown to be a global celebrity by telling boys things like: 

“If you’re irritated at women… there’s something wrong with you. They’re right. You’re wrong. If they’re not picking you, it’s because they’re right.”

And: “Don’t they find you attractive? Well, maybe you’re not. Have you paid attention to how you dress, do you have a plan? Are you as educated as you could be?”

Elsewhere, he tells men to be clean and generous, be willing to sacrifice and delay gratification, be playful, and serve their partners. In a nutshell, what he’s saying about men is what the lib feminist — her mind addled by the stress of dealing with all the complex hierarchies of oppression — thinks he’s saying about women. 

Several years after he burst onto the scene, there continues to be a thriving cottage industry of cultural and media figures whose speciality is deliberately misunderstanding Peterson.

It just never occurs to these people that we, the normies and the plebs who are drifting “rightward,” might be operating at full brain capacity. It never crosses their minds that we are choosing to listen to people like Peterson (and Tucker, and Bannon, and Roseanne, etc etc) because we have evaluated and analysed what they say and found it to be true, or at least close to true, in a world full of the most obvious and sinister lies. But no, the libs must continue to self-soothe by whispering to themselves, “it’s the algorithm, not our own blatant dishonesty.” 

In one interview following the release of Don’t Worry, Darling, Wilde actually had the gall to say: “I am so interested in exploring what it really takes to be a revolutionary, and who is really brave enough to question a system that serves us. I think that’s something that’s very important in today’s society. ”

I lol’d. Wilde and women like her are quite literally handmaidens to an industry full of neo-liberal cultural grifters whose growing panic over new media upstarts is causing them to create increasingly banal content for an ever-shrinking market. 

Very amusingly, from a Hollywood perspective, Olivia came out of the debacle smelling like roses, because the movie made money. Which, despite all their sermonising, is all that anyone in the movie industry cares about. I’m going to be a terrible cynic and suggest that the movie did well probably because the press coverage was focused on the personal drama, especially the fact that she was sleeping with heartthrob Harry Styles; and the extensive mentions of the hot sex scenes featuring Styles. That man has a big female following. I wonder does Wilde secretly suspect — as I do — that her movie’s success was due not to the quality of her craftsmanship or the bravery of her message, but because lots of chicks wanted to see Harry Styles go down on his co-star? I’m sure she would loudly protest that her smart, empowered, female audience didn’t go see her movie for such base reasons, but whatever — she should still chalk it up as a win.

And the grift comes out on top, again. As someone who greatly appreciates irony, I can’t help but smile.