Don’t Worry Darling: Critiquing the nostalgic cultural logic of late patriarchy

Don’t Worry Darling features a group of men from the 2020s who retreat into a computer simulation of 1950s suburbia in which they can exert full patriarchal control over their chosen wives. Meanwhile, the real-world models on which these fantasy wives are based are forced to give up their own lives in the 2020s in order to support the simulation (via some unspecified and rather unlikely process). The film doesn’t always make sense, but it is obviously meant to be read allegorically, rather than literally – as a commentary on the persistence of patriarchal ideas in our own time. Some critics felt that the film’s feminist commentary was a bit simplistic and heavy-handed. However, read through the optic of Fredric Jameson’s seminal theorization of postmodernism, Don’t Worry Darling can be seen to call attention to the ways in which fears of the loss of patriarchal power can be used to divert attention from the damaging psychic consequences of late capitalism. The persistence of patriarchy after decades of feminist activism can thus be partly explained by the fact that this persistence is useful to the capitalist power structure.