Olivia Wilde tries to retcon the narrative, throws Donald Trump’s name into the Don’t Worry Darling mix
Olivia Wilde name-drops Florence Pugh and Donald Trump while trying to rewrite the Don't Worry Darling narrative
Aux News Olivia Wilde
This story contains minor spoilers for Don’t Worry Darling.
Lord forgive us for continuing the already overwrought Don’t Worry Darling press cycle, but it’s been a while since the content of a film was so at odds with the media circus around it. This isn’t to say that the gossip and drama have negatively colored the reception of the movie, which has been a popular reaction to the reactions. Rather, Olivia Wilde’s idea of the film doesn’t seem to line up with her final product, and the media circus has only muddied the waters further.
Let’s get this out of the way first: in a new Elle interview, Wilde adds to the list of DWD inspirations (which includes The Feminine Mystique and Jordan Peterson) the movement to overthrow Roe v. Wade as well as former president Donald Trump. “We had a bunch of Trump quotes up on our board when we were writing the script, and there was this gross tendency of Trump’s to be very nostalgic about a better time,” the director says. “What these men are referring to is a time that was horrific for anyone who wasn’t a straight white cis man.”
Fair enough, yet Wilde is also careful to clarify that straight white cis men are not the sole target of Don’t Worry Darling’s cultural commentary. “I’m very curious about our collective complicity in [upholding] the patriarchy. I found myself seeing a lot of content that was struggling to address feminist issues and instead becoming either really simplified or overly didactic,” she explains. “I had no interest in making a feminist parable that was judgy or that defined men as bad and women as good. I was much more interested in that tense space where we recognize our own participation in the system that objectifies us.”
Those who have seen Don’t Worry Darling may be confused to hear this as men—at least these men—are definitely all painted with the same “bad” brush; almost all of them have non-consensually brainwashed their female partners. There are a few female characters who do actively participate in this system, though the protagonist, Alice (Florence Pugh) is not one of them. Shelley (Gemma Chan) and Bunny (Wilde) are both eventually revealed to be active participants, though so far along in the film that it’s too late to interrogate the ways they’ve also subjugated their fellow women.
“This film is trying to ask big questions, but [it’s] ‘Let’s just focus on this sideshow over here,’” Wilde laments to Elle, though by her own remarks, it doesn’t seem like the questions she’s asking and the questions her film asked are the same. But speaking of the sideshow, she goes on to denounce the media for the way it “pits women against one another,” presumably referencing her alleged feud with Pugh, her star.
Wilde has been consistently careful to heap praise on Pugh throughout the film’s PR blitz, but in the Elle piece she attempts to rewrite history by referencing the actor’s (rare) comments on the film. “Florence very wisely pointed out that a lot of attention has been given to the sex scenes. And I think she’s so right,” Wilde asserts. “I completely agree with her that it’s overshadowing everything else that the movie’s about, which is so interestingly ironic because one of the uses of sex in Victory is as a tool of distraction.”
Hilariously, Pugh’s remark about DWD being “reduced” to its sex scenes only came after Wilde had proudly touted the rarity of a film depicting “female hunger, specifically this type of female pleasure.” For Elle, she downgrades this slightly to an interest in “acknowledging female pleasure that doesn’t come from penetration.” In any case, as many critics of the film have pointed out, the nature of the film’s simulation cult means that all of the intimate scenes we witness in Victory are dubiously consensual, and therefore an odd way to make a point about female pleasure.
Olivia Wilde has already won the day, as despite Don’t Worry Darling’s mixed-to-negative reviews, the film still made a tidy sum at the box office. Undoubtedly that success was aided by the accompanying drama, although she tells Elle it wasn’t her intention to “throw myself into the flames for the movie.” Instead, she continues to try to redirect attention toward the film itself while simultaneously trying to rewrite the narrative around it. You can decide for yourself whether that attempt is successful or not.
59 Comments
“are definitely all painted with the same “bad” brush; almost all of them”Wait, is it definitely all or almost all? Those are not the same thing, and only one of them supports your argument.“Shelley (Gemma Chan) and Bunny (Wilde) are both eventually revealed to be active participants, though so far along in the film that it’s too late to interrogate the ways they’ve also subjugated their fellow women.”
So, if it isn’t revealed early enough in the film it can’t be discussed afterwards? What in the entire FUCK are you talking about?
waitthere were issues on the set of don’t worry, darling?
Yes, indeed there were! And yet, the production of “Don’t Worry Baby” was…harmonious. Get it?!
I believe the movie title was meant to be ironic.
Rosamund Pike in
I Worry A Lot
coming this Christmas
I Worry A Lot: The Al Marsh Story
first i’m hearing of it
It hasn’t been covered very well by the media, especially this site, but from what I gather, the film had some issues, maybe. Olivia had issues with Florence Henderson due to Olivia dating one of the guys from BTS.
I have a feeling this entire “Don’t Worry Darling” and her attempt to paint Jason Sudeikis as a shitty person, is going to get her Black Listed in Hollywood.
Your feeling would be incorrect.
That’s a weird reason to make a movie. Wouldn’t have been simpler to just co-write a song with Taylor Swift?
Jezebel and the AV Club have certainly carried water for Wilde in her attempt to paint Sudekis as some sort of conspiratorial criminal mastermind for the whole thing where she was served papers while on stage.
Is it possible for Olivia Wilde to come off any more insincere and self-serving? She says all the right things, but you can feel her hatred of anyone who gives her even the slightest bit of pushback oozing through her every word.
We keep asking that and she keeps answering “Challenge accepted, you fuckers!”
I just wonder if she really believes the stuff she says, or if she’s just seething with hate for anyone giving her the tiniest amount of sass and wildly overcompensating. No pun intended. All I can say is, if the 2022 wokey dokey AV Club is giving you the ol’ side eye, you might be coming off a tad disingenuous, Ms. Wilde.
I feel like we’re trying to let her have the last word and move on, but she keeps storming back in like “Oh! And another thing…!”
She comes off sounding like someone who was too immature for the women’s studies course she just completed.
Or taught, more likely.
She’s a nominally attractive, extremely privileged white woman. She’s not used to having any amount of pushback and having to wear it. Unfortunately, she’s stuck her name on this bag o’ bullshit and now can’t escape it. She was the director (at least on paper).
I think Wilde was expecting the film to be a critical darling a la her last film. It very clearly isn’t. She can’t seem to let it go, so trying desperately to attach cultural relevance to the movie just comes off…weird. She really just has to move on. I mean, Led Zeppelin didn’t write tunes everybody liked. They left that to the Bee Gees.
But . . . is she funny or something?
It only took two movies for her to get lost up her own ass as a director.
It must be great fun for Pugh just saying absolutely fuck all and watching Wilde tie herself up in knots in interviews months and months later, like a gift that keeps on giving.
Thank you for reintroducing coverage of Don’t Worry Darling. You can’t just give 46 articles one month and then deprive me the next. I want total coverage all the time! For instance, what does Florence Pugh think of Olivia Wilde’s make-up and hair in that photo?
Be careful, your Highness. Any dosage of DWD coverage shot straight into your veins is an overdose. Smoke some Nick Kroll trivia first. Get acclimated.
It’s like a drug, you can’t just go cold turkey on DWD coverage.You have to slowly wean yourself off of it, over time.
Really thought the next fart bubble in this publicity lower intestine was going to be when it hit whatever streaming service it’s going to.
Anyway, it’s made about $70 million (on a budget of $35 million)
I have to guess whatever marketing dollars applies to MCU or other big-budget movies doesn’t strictly apply here. (And whatever else Wilde has done, you can certainly say she saved on the publicity budget by getting a lot of free media)
So, it didn’t lose money.
Anyway, I feel like there are plenty of ways Wilde can tell stories involving women getting oral and make it consensual. It’s also hilarious to me that she continually said, “Men don’t orgasm in this.”
Great. You don’t specifically show it. You just show men kidnapping their partners, putting them on feeding tubes and adult diapers and tell us they get sex every night. But good job not showing blowjobs, I guess.
“You just show men kidnapping their partners, putting them on feeding
tubes and adult diapers and tell us they get sex every night”Excuse me?
I want what she’s having, am I right?
What? Sounds simple to me.
I will nitpick the suggestion that the drama added to its box office, though.Two words: Harry. Styles.
“Men don’t orgasm in this.”
Challenge accepted, Ms. Wilde!
Man does the writing room for DWD just sound insufferable.
The finest pseudointellectuals Twitter can muster.
Shelley (Gemma Chan) and Bunny (Wilde) are both eventually revealed to be active participantsHuh? Shelley’s final scene suggested to me she didn’t realize what was going on until Florence Pugh’s character spelled it out. Hence her final action – although I guess that could also be interpreted as her taking over the system in an active role.
Yeah, I think there’s a certain degree of ambiguity there.SPOILERS, I guess.Based in part on how Shelley chewed out Florence Pugh’s character during the big dinner scene, I lean toward the interpretation that in stabbing Chris Pine and saying, “It’s my turn now” that she was taking control of the simulation after being complicit in its creation and maintenance. But it’s definitely reasonable and legitimate to read Shelley’s actions as her destroying everything, and her line means “I’m going to be in charge of my life now, not you, asshole.”
It would have been funny if they wrote it so that Florence Pugh turns out to have been a trad influencer in real life, who joined the simulation and had her memory wiped on purpose to make some kind of point, and that’s why her sexist 50s husband is a pretty boy who goes down on her all the time rather than, like, Nick Kroll or whatever.
From the moment Sudeikis served her with divorce papers while she was talking about this movie at CinemaCon, this has been like a slow motion car wreck. Why is she so insistent on dragging this out? Not every director makes a hit with every project. Move on yo.
I’m starting to think she and Aaron Rodgers should get back together.
At the risk of ruining your attempt at irony, I guess I should point out… wrong Olivia.
Lord help us if Olivia Wilde and Aaron Rodgers get together. Maybe they’ll die tragically in a weird 69 where they don’t perform oral sex on each other, but they sniff each others farts.
Oh I know, it was a slightly convoluted joke. Those two would indeed create some sort of terrestrial black hole of self-involvement.
Retcon? Or maybe making a movie is a big project and you don’t publicize all the details at once.
It’s October. I thought we were past this.
I’ve never heard of this movie before. Why hasn’t there been any posts about it? I mean it stars Harry Styles and Florence Pug. I can’t believe AV Club has just been ignoring this!
What is this? It’s borderline unreadable.
Keep on pushin’ readability
“Lord forgive us”Forgiveness denied. You guys have run dozens of boring pieces on this project. Dozens. Across how many sites?
The Beyond The Valley of the Dolls of our generation
“Lord forgive us for continuing the already overwrought Don’t Worry Darling press cycle, but it’s been a while since the content of a film was so at odds with the media circus around it. This isn’t to say that the gossip and drama have negatively colored the reception of the movie, which has been a popular reaction to the reactions. Rather, Olivia Wilde’s idea of the film doesn’t seem to line up with her final product, and the media circus has only muddied the waters further.”10 points to anyone who can parse this paragraph for me. Extra credit for a detailed explanation of the phrase “a popular reaction to the reactions” and which and whose reactions it’s referring to.
Is Emerson one of those colleges that just runs your degree off on the ol’ Konica-Minolta as soon as your payment clears?
Uh, no. It’s a 140-year-old private college, and its V&MA program is in the top 10 in the country. Norman Lear went there. Its main campus is in Boston, but it also has one in (strangely enough) Hollywood, CA. I assume it’s right next door to Dr. Nick’s Hollywood Upstairs College..
She’s using a lot of extraneous words to say ‘Wilde’s statements during her promotion of the film don’t necessarily jive with the content of the film itself.’I have to parse a lot of gibberish for my job and I have to say that this was quality gibberish.
Murry Chang: Gibberish Parser
I’ve been doing desktop support for 20+ years and have found that most people are really bad at turning their thoughts into sentences. Oddly enough, the journalists I deal with tend to be the worst at it: They want to tell the whole story around their problem and what they’ll be doing for the next few days rather than detailing what’s actually happening.
The first sentence starts easy enough. A not-clever expansion of the “sorry/not sorry, lol” thing that passed its expiration date a while back. Not sure about the “content of a film bit” but I’ll let is slide.
The second sentence is a work of art. The kind of art where the artist mixes their own blood, urine and sexy fluids into the paint and then splatters it on the canvas via enemas and snot rockets.
I have to forgo the points, my friend. I am at a loss.
The third sentence returns to normalcy a bit, only it gives Wilde a bit of a chance to weasel out.
Maybe Wilde is not a talented enough director to fix script problems herself, or didn’t have the pull with the studio to have a rewrite done, or didn’t want to cross Katie Silberman who also co-wrote Booksmart? The movie’s gotten mixed/negative reviews and Wilde seems to spend a good amount of press explaining what the movie is actually about. Perhaps the script was mediocre and Wilde couldn’t execute the film making very well, which makes the allegory nonsensical?
I do think it’s hilarious that, after all the dust has settled, Wilde’s movie was successful at the box office, whereas David O. Russell’s new movie was a massive flop, but I bet I know which of those two will have less trouble putting together their next high profile movie.
AV Club’s coverage of this mess is absolutely awful because it’s filled with awful English, overwritten, unfunny snark and the self-aggrandizing “ugh we’re all SO TIRED but we gotta cover this” bullshit.BUTI have been, for a lack of a better phrase, thoroughly sports entertained by this drama and particularly Olivia Wilde’s wild attempts at changing the narrative about the film and herself. It’s been some time I’ve seen someone twist themselves into a knot for something so unimportant, it’s magical. It’s even more impressive that she consistently sees how her efforts at spin are only making things worse and every time she goes “oh, and another thing”.
“Lord forgive us for continuing the already overwrought Don’t Worry Darling press cycle”He will, we won’t.