Don’t Worry Darling: Being Chaos, Part One

 

***Spoilers ahead!***

***Content warning—gaslighting, immobilization, all things patriarchy***

When the masterminds of Victory are training their housewives, they hypnotize and re-hypnotize them with images of women in synchronized movement, they even, inside the cute prison cul-de-sac of the mind they’ve created, require dance classes to teach them to move together in frictionless harmony. Instead of overtly espousing red pill/incel grievance, the leader talks about order. The Don’t Worry Darling vision of order helps me understand some things, both political and personal.

The Victory men aim to attain this order by literally immobilizing and silencing women and by convincing them they are happy in a pretty, refined, and regressive reality, looking beautiful (My KINGDOM for Florence Pugh’s floral housedress!) and serving the men. The simulation is classic Stepford Wives, where men go off to “important jobs” and women stay home and make perfect roasts. No one really eats or (At least I really hope!) physically fucks. It’s a (nonconsensual for women) happiness machine for a specific, shallow kind of happiness, one that gives helpless- and worthless-feeling men a sense of control and worth.

There’s a scene toward the end. Shortly before Florence breaks though and wakes up, where we flash back to her alone in her living room, just kind of singing and dancing around and being herself. She’s moving her body the way she likes, a moment of privacy and inner joy.

That moment helps me understand what feels so threatening to the real-life gender-policing white supremacist patriarchy—joy that THEY don’t specifically provide or oversee makes them feel like some levee has broken, like some force has overflowed and become a threat.

I still don’t understand why us having our own thoughts, rhythms, choices feels so threatening to them, but I’ve read On Tyranny a couple times and I think it’s just that: creeping, defensive tyranny. It feels us waking up, breaking free, and it wants nothing more than for us to shut up, be still, settle down into a reality they alone create.

The “they” here is I don’t know who. Tyranny and patriarchy steal everyone’s freedom, but I guess not everybody believes that. I guess maybe they (again, I’m only sort of sure who that is) think that if they can silence us (and who, also, is us?) make us be still and obey, then they’ll have a thing they’ll call freedom? No one would tell them that they said the wrong words or bother them with the pesky fact that democracy is in danger.

Oh, I see. Democracy is the opposite of being frozen in someone else’s reality. It’s agency, however vexingly slight. It’s movement and progress and disagreement and struggle, the furthest thing from being still. It’s not a synchronized dance routine, it’s kind of a mosh pit. Or a march. Or a Philadelphia victory parade.