Is This All?

Like Frank’s Victory Project, Don’t Worry Darling claims to be progressive material but refuses to develop a meaningful relationship to either the simulated past or the real present. The film is a symptom of a larger cultural derangement: an inability to deal with the past and with those it doesn’t understand with anything other than contempt. I’ll begin with the film’s anticlimactic twist. Victory is not actually a 1950s suburban desert town, but rather a simulation made possible by technological innovations in the present.