![]() You’d have to not think much to find it surprising, or to not poke holes in it immediately (What did the plane mean? Did no one have any sense of personal history? Why did Gemma Chan’s character turn on Chris Pine’s Frank?! Pugh is completely convincing throughout, but why did Alice, supposedly a smart character, confess her skepticism to Wilde’s Bunny and not Kiki Layne’s Margaret?) And you’d have to really not think to find it some sort of feminist statement. But it turns the brain off rather than on. The twist (spoilers, again) – that Pugh’s Alice has been trapped in a 50s simulation because her internet-poisoned boyfriend, Styles’s Jack, wants her to himself all the time – is shocking, in that it’s borderline offensive for a film Wilde has hyped for female pleasure to have said pleasure be nonconsensual, in the service of captivity. Unfortunately, the discrepancy between what the film seems to be trying to do (or what Wilde says it’s doing) and what it’s actually doing has the opposite effect. People will fill it with speculation that, yes, can be sexist and judgmental and extra, but also just curious. ![]() But a lot of it is the natural response to seeing something that does not align with the official narrative. I could go on about the off-screen drama and the unusual press tour, and some of it ( “spitgate”) is just noise. (A letter signed by 40 crew members disputed “any allegations of unprofessional behavior” on set and called reports of a vocal argument between Pugh and Wilde “completely false.”) Pugh, the lead star of a major release, skipped almost all promotional duties except the Venice film festival, where she did not acknowledge Wilde (there are a million TikToks/explainers dissecting the Venice premiere like the Zapruder film, if you want a refresher.) Vulture reported that the two had a screaming match in January 2021 that resulted in negotiations with Warner Bros executives to ensure Pugh would participate in any promotion at all. Everybody’s just, like, applauding just every move he makes’”). “I’m like, ‘That must be nice to be that guy. On the PR side something was clearly off despite Wilde’s protestations that all the “endless tabloid gossip” around on-set strife and issues with Pugh amount to internet nonsense and sexist double standards (“am I envious of my male colleagues in the way that they seem to be able to live their lives without as much judgment? Yeah, I think about it,” she told Kelly Clarkson last week. A difference between official narrative and actual material, and in the case of the film – which Wilde has billed as a vehicle for female pleasure and a feminist thriller – a stark gap between visual achievement and cheap, empty narrative. ![]() The PR around Don’t Worry Darling and the film itself suffer from a similar issue: there’s a clear discrepancy between what we’re told is happening and what we actually see. The problem is, it’s impossible to separate the film from its off-screen drama. ![]()
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