An absolutely impeccable film from start to finish. Aesthetically, artfully, meaningfully. And yet it draws a line where it shouldn't and refuses to look where it should.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The crucial moment in Don't Worry Darling, that determines what the film means, happens towards the final scenes when Alice is making her getaway from the Victory Project and Frank's wife overhears him talking about doing whatever it takes to stop Alice from escaping. He hangs up the phone, turns around from the bar, and gets a knife straight into the chest. 'You stupid, stupid man, now it's my turn', she says, as she turns the knife in his chest. The key question here for what the film ultimately means and whether it amounts to an homogenous consistency hostage to the present or a disjunctive openness to the future depends on how we understand this moment.

The most obvious solution is that this moment is just what it appears to be: Frank's wife herself has all-along been, like all the other women held prisoner to the imagined past-reality of gender-defined roles of 1950s suburbia, and the clarity of purpose this produces within and between men and women. Frank's wife has been the most committed supporter of her husband's vision within the false Black Mirror simulation: she leads the ballet lessons for all the women, striving to instill discipline and commitment, to orchestrate the perfect harmony of a performance that reflects the purity of their role in their gendered, womans' world. 'There is beauty in control, there is grace in symmetry, we move as one', she voices-over. Women's function in this society is to internalize the limitations of the collective position in such a way that they can express, in unison, the beautiful scintillating spectacle of an imprisonment that finds its own collective release and creative openness in the rigidity and discipline of the performance these limitations impose on them (i.e., the synchronized movements with which the film credits roll). Free despite all of them, and, in fact, because of them. Discovering,then, that Frank has betrayed all her sacrifices, according to this interpretation, that all of it amounts to little more than a farce, she exacts her revenge. She's following Alice's car and making her own escape. The Time of Men has ended and a world where women participate unbound has finally arrived. All delusions have fallen.

This is one version of the film. The other, more realistic interpretation that the film doesn't make, and that might be tenable after a single viewing of the film, but becomes untenable after five, is that Frank's wife was a willing participant all along. Always lurking somewhere deep below her calm, rehearsed facade was a hidden collusion with him: together they were creating this new world of each their own volition. He, an exemplar for the men and she an examplar for the women. Their own relationship itself a reflection of the rehearsed consistency of the myriad individual performances they catalyze through their orchestrations. Their relationship only reaching the purity of its reason for being through each partner's—husband and wife's—ability to pull-off this feat. Mutual respect only becoming possible based on it. That Frank and his contingent of men have allowed the matrix to crack, allowed Alice to speed across the desert towards her escape at Headquarters exposes him as a weak man, unable to fulfill his role in the world they've created. In this interpretation, she knifes him in the chest based on disdain for his puny, weak performance. Her turn to lead, men are pathetic and weak.

According to the first interpretation the movie is entirely consistent: the world the men created as a refuge from the gender dysphoria of their future present (that we only briefly glimpse in the dark, rainy dystopic near-future towards the film's end) is a false hope: there is nothing left in the nostalgia for a lost past time: what's necessary is to move on once and for all. The sad, disheveled wimp scouring the internet all day and night, eating tuna from a can, acting the petty victim when his wife returns home from a long day at work to no dinner ('I'm starving, I haven't eaten/I wasn't sure what you wanted and you never text me back'): the entire micro-phenomenology of what the contemporary feminist critique is fundamentally based on, despite reams of pages written, academic work, university courses. Tiny, small, seemingly insignificant affronts to the dignity of the working woman construed as historical oppression and impossible obstruction to women's final, most liberated form of existence.

According to the second interpretation, however, the situation is quite different. The version of men created to support this entire feminist liberation crusade is a straw man that reveals the true dynamic between men and women. In much the same way as Frank's wife turns the knife in his chest for his poor performance, Olivia Wilde looks to do the same to men writ large in the world outside her movie. It's the same move all such women fundamentally want to make: to look in every minor transgression for the epic, historical reflections of the ceaseless and unbreakable chains men impose upon women and that define their guilty conscience of ceaseless submission. This is the real dynamic and women should be honest about it: rather than weak bookworms who will submit to them, to allow them the freest range of expression, what women aspire to create is precisely the world they want: troll men until they grow a spine that amounts to a productive obstruction worth taking seriously. There is a viciousness in women that any honest woman should also be honest about. Life is vicious, and the reproduction of life its most consequential act. Reproduction doesn't take place between men converted to women who have had their penis removed or cut and folded and women who have had a penis fashioned from flesh from their backside or wherever else and made shapely with an inflatable prosthetic. There is nothing wrong with these forms of humanity, they can be loving, productive and meaningful, of that there is not question. But, to the extent that the most consequential act of our species survival is not at stake in them, the 'gender' dynamics they reflect can only ever amount to a second-order passenger on the broader currents of existence.

Once we acknowledge that reality, we can let go.