Don’t Worry Darling and the Libidinal Economy
I want to work, I like to work
An extreme cynicism toward economic and social progress regarding work marks bourgeois society. So much so that even in our most fantastical cultural tales of utopian dreams, the fatal flaw of a utopia is that people must work to feel pleasure. This belief is so ingrained that, to achieve success, the only path is to invert the pain and suffering of work and turn it into pleasure.
In Olivia Wilde’s 2022 film Don’t Worry Darling, work is romanticized. Understandably, the systemic oppression of being a housewife under a Fordist economy is presented as a dystopia. This film critically examines the conservative men’s 1950s fantasy of the docile, submissive housewife as the progenerating of violence against women. On the other hand, it also reminds us how much our expectation of the daily egalitarianism administered grind has programmed us to accept it as liberation.
Much can be said about Victory, the fantastical simulated universe where Alice Chambers, played by Florence Pugh, has been transported. For one, many anachronisms are immediately noticeable — interracial marriage is accepted and promoted, and technology is a mix of black-and-white televisions and futuristic memory-wiping devices. This gives the universe a pastiche-like quality, a world that is already hyperreal and whose reality is ready to crack.
As Alice notices cracks in the simulacra of Victory, she slowly remembers — like someone with diminishing amnesia — her past life before the simulation. She feels wronged and betrayed by her husband, Jack Chambers (Harry Styles), who coerced her into the simulation, and longs for the long work days and backbreaking labor that men and women experience in 2022. As Mark Fisher and Fredric Jameson have noted, a perpetual state of amnesia is one of the conditions of postmodernity, and our 21st century is chok full of examples — Memento, Jason Bourne, etc.
Like Bourne, Alice remembers her pre-Victory identity slowly, over time, and is confronted with the horrors of knowing that she existed outside of this time. Like her namesake from In the Looking Glass, Alice seeks to escape the rabbit hole that keeps her from the truth. She rages against the machine, embracing the machinic universe that makes her unhappy. We return to the pain of existing under extreme exploitation through this seduction. I like working; I wanted to work! She says at the climax of the film.
When we look at how alienating the past was, that may appear more stable and attached to the Real than the hyperreality of postmodern capitalist society. However, this hyper-nostalgia projected into the voices of the marginalized in society — in this case, the housewives of Victory — gives way to Jameson’s concept of nostalgia for the present. Despite the insistence of Chris Pines’ character Frank, who is the capitalist patriarch owning the means of production within this simulated universe (owning the whole universe) — there is no future for Alice in Victory. But is there a future outside of the simulation, either?
In creating an alternative, Utopian reality, Alice longs for the dirty, destructive, and horrible conditions that 2022 presents. A world of instability and precarity: in her “real” life, she lived as a doctor who worked 30-hour shifts at a hospital. What was taken from her was destroying her, and now she wants to return to the destruction.
First, an obvious comparison. The story bears similarities to The Stepford Wives, the Ira Levin novel from 1972, which was then made into movies in 1975 and 2004; it is about a family moving to an idyllic small town of Stepford only to discover that a fraternity of men had come together to turn their wives into docile, submissive robots.
The most striking update to The Stepford Wives made by Don’t Worry Darling is that the cultural expectations for women have changed. were expected to be confined to the home in the 1970s. In 2022, the banal horror of Alice’s existence in Don’t Worry Darling is signified by depictions of her constant housework and the propaganda that keeps her in line to complete it.
In The Stepford Wives, that division of labor is accepted, and creative pursuits, like photography, are the objects that need to be stamped out. By contrast, Alice desires liberation in the promises of autonomy afforded by being a worker, where work frees her from the simulation that has kept her under lock and key.
Second, a slight detour into psychoanalytic analysis. Alice, within the simulation, experiences the pure jouissance of living. Every day, her husband, Jack, leaves the simulation and returns to the dire conditions of postmodernity; what he does is never accounted for, but, as he alludes to in the film, he is out in the “real world” working to pay for Alice to subsist in the simulation. The world may have changed but the dynamic remains the same.
The tradeoff — the libidinal economy — is that when he comes home, Alice is flush with an exuberance of sex. Scene after scene shows the two romping on kitchen tables and every room of their perfect house. The movie itself is gratuitous in its sexual allure, down to the bright nostalgic filters and pop art-like color schemes. Each scene is a seduction — seducing an audience into the world of sexual freedom, into the libidinal economy of the simulation. Living in an unalienated space provides a neverending virility for unending libido. This is the promise of simulation and fantasy.
What is the cause of this jouissance? A lot of the pleasure seems to come from the banal housework that she endures throughout the day while Jack is away. She does her housework, makes dinner, cleans the house, does chores, etc., expecting her husband to come home to reward her, to reward him. She is purposefully the submissive archetype of male sexual fantasy and never-ending consent projected onto women’s bodies by male chauvinism. The expectation is that women will always be in a state of consent — an object, a doll made for male pleasure regardless of women’s own feelings or desires.
However, the film conveys the dark side to this patriarchal pleasure: she is kept on a schedule and propagandized, via television, on a near-constant basis. In order for docility to be maintained, control needs to be administered. Another aspect of domesticity is the pressure of motherhood and maternity. What would it change? How would her life be made different? What social currency would bearing a child allow in such a tight-knit simulation of reality?
Jack is an avatar of the patriarchy that provides peer pressure. He needs to have her agree to have a child to maintain his place in the fraternal order, presumably, to keep her in the simulation for longer — at least to keep her occupied for long stretches while in the simulation. But then, there is the negation of pleasure. In 2022, joy can only exist in fantasy. It is this fantasy of unlimited pleasure sensors that forms the dystopian experience. One cannot live under neoliberalism and not recognize the seduction of absolute pleasure as false.
We do not live in a working-class society where workers are allowed to experience unlimited pleasure. We live in a society where the bourgeois dictates pleasure to the working class along an algorithmic intensity. Alice experiences unlimited joy because happiness can only exist in another world. It is Other. Alice is her own Other, and she, in her amnesiac state, must reconcile with this contradiction and negation.
Once she remembers her past life, she remembers how life used to be. She yearns to uncover the Real and destroy the plastic fantasy of pleasure. This, also, is a bourgeois fantasy implanted into the minds of the working class, that one must yearn to be pleasureless, not to inhabit the cold dose of reality that comes with enjoyment, that is, that enjoyment must only be a fleeting source, and not a lasting source, of identity.
The negation of pleasure is essential to understanding how left-political projects like feminism have evolved and devolved since the end of World War II. The freeing of pleasures always came with a dialectical opposition; within bliss was the recognition of the suffering that came with existence itself. As Wendy Brown noted, it is the mourning of these failed feminist utopian ideals, ascribed to radicalization, that makes up our cynicism for the future of pleasure-seeking:
When poetry becomes political, when politics becomes erotic, when thinking de-commodified and comes to feel as essential to life as food and shelter, not only do ordinary fields of activity become libidinally charged, but this desublimated condition itself betokens (however illusory) and emancipated world to come. This revolutionary awakening of the mind and senses carries (however falsely) a promise of living beyond repression, alienation, compartmentalization, indeed beyond settled forms of institutions tout court (108, Edgework, 2005).
Alice experiences this “revolutionary awakening” by entering the simulation, ending with her being disillusioned by her pleasure. Don’t Worry Darling begins with her enlightenment and ends with her waking up. The simulation and pleasure was an emancipation from reality itself. Alice always had to return to The Real — the real that is traumatic and suffering. The pathway away from patriarchial enlightment and toward waking up is part of the symptom of the postmodern condition.
The movement from enlightened jouissance of living to dire capitalist suffering is tracked throughout the film. Contradictions and
déjà vu (much like Neo from The Matrix) follows her like ghost — she begins to wonder why her life begins to not add up. A new family moves in next door, and their story eerily matches hers. Daily life begins to degrade. Things are not as they appear. She dreams of her past life and longs to live in the dream when her autonomy exists outside of her housewife duties.
Suddenly, she is enlightened to the emancipation from her current life of libidinal pleasure. In flashback, they show her as a doctor who works 30-hour shifts at the hospital. She is shown refusing sex from her recently unemployed — and chauvinistic and alienated — husband. She is captive to the world of feeling alien in her own world, a worker living without pleasure. But in the end, the message of the movie makes the case — this world of misery is preferable to patriarchial fantasy.
In the fantastical simulacrum, the alienated existence of working-class insecurity is mourned. The liberation that is aspired to is stuck in a time-continuum of 70 years passing between being a housewife and being constantly libidinally charged in the 1950s with Fordist security and the adverse libido of the Neoliberal Post-Fordist 2020s, full of untended social wounds, misery, and self-destruction, creating a pastiche of dark, melancholic cynicism.
At the heart of the movie is an ontological hesitation — what is Real and False — similar to in The Stepford Wives or The Truman Show or The Matrix. But unlike The Truman Show or The Matrix, Don’t Worry Darling doesn’t have a counterbalancing spectacle navigating Reality from Hyperreality. No, only a deep well of cynicism lies at the heart of Don’t Worry Darling: Is the Real distinguishable from the simulation? Where are the boundaries on the map of the mind?
Rather than answer this unanswerable question, the third way appears: the anti-libidinal is contained within our simulated pleasure. The two are inseparable. The surplus enjoyment of the libidinal economy cannot be imagined without a lack of joy allowed in the Real. We find out later in the film, at the height of Alice’s challenge, that her husband put her into the simulation and allowed her memory to be wiped clean so that she remembers how to be happy and feel pleasure again.
Alice’s best friend, Bunny, knowingly puts herself into the simulation (here, it’s fuzzy the role that amnesia plays in her coercion) and that this simulation is preferable to the trauma experienced in the real world where her children are dead. Here, in the simulation, they are immortal. The pleasure-drive mixes with an aversion to death in a subtle dance of knowing-forgetting, living-dying, mother-son, mourning the loss, and accepting its haunting presence in the simulacrum. Bunny enjoys the simulation because it is more real to her to be with her child as she remembers him than to accept their premature death in Real.
In the libidinal economy, as described by Lyotard, the one major criticism of Marx follows along this train of thought: as capitalism expands like a body seeking pleasure, the exploited and alienated workers end up enjoying the way their bodies are destroyed and broken down. There is an enjoyment to be found in the masochism of being crushed in the wage-slave machine that capitalism has erected. As Lyotard controversially put it:
And that if they choose that, if they become the slave of the machine, the machine of the machine, fucker fucked by it, eight hours, twelve hours, a day, year after year, it is because they are forced into it, constrained, because they cling to life? Death is not an alternative to it, it is a part of it, it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it, the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they — hang on tight and spit on me — enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of the families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening.
Is this not precisely the impression of capitalism offered by Don’t Worry, Darling? The working-class women, who fought hard to raise themselves out of indentured servitude as housewives and confined to objectification, must then learn to enjoy masochistic exhaustion sold as liberation.
In her journey for liberation from the confines of the household, Alice must accept the backbreaking exploitation of her labor. There is a conditioned enjoyment of misery. There is a conditioned paradox that there is an enjoyment to not being able to enjoy things. These are the conditions that Fisher, in Capitalist Realism, describes as anhedonia, or the reduced motivation to experience a pleasure. Instead, a reversal; we feel joy from anything that resembles crumbs of serotonin to self-destruction and self-denial as the new hedonism.
In the end, Alice’s acts were dictated by the bourgeois, whose parallels to our world cannot go unchecked. Everything from her memory to how her body is stimulated is carefully monitored, especially since we find out that her body is actually in a coma-like state that she is looking to wake up from. Her enlightenment requires killing the father, the patriarch. In doing so, she accepts her status as not just a fully automatized human in Real but also continues with the miserable existence of her job (or did she lose her career when she was put in the simulation…?).
Her ontological hesitation adds to this movie's further problems. Instead of life-affirming lived-in enlightenment, as with The Truman Show, we get more uncertainty and no resolution. We exit the simulation and end in darkness. The world is dark. The breathing, shallow. The great climactic orgasm that is harnessed and deferred endlessly by capitalism beats on. There is no exit from capitalism, the movie seems to state. There is only a returning to work, a returning to endure the pain caused by the ruin of technological utopianism. Within that lateral movement from simulation to reality is its own kind of ruin — a loss of a future that could have been.
