What? Me Worry
The U.S. hot hit “Don’t Worry Darling” premiered at the Venice Film Festival last Tuesday, starring Harry Styles, Florence Pugh, Olivia Wilde, Chris Pine, Nick Kroll, and Gemma Chan, and directed by Olivia Wilde. The movie is a psychological thriller set in a utopian American society, Victory Town, in the 1950s. While Alice (Pugh) is living her best dream, happily married to Jack (Styles), she begins to discover and question the truth behind the town, similar to every other utopian film and piece of literature in history.
Not to our surprise, neither the plot nor the movie are anyone’s main focus, as the production and casting captured everyone’s eye. In August of 2020, the male lead actor Shia LeBeouf announced his departure from the project, citing a “scheduling conflict.” Wilde later announced on Instagram that Harry Styles would be joining the cast as the male lead, later tweeting that “The cast is B A N A N A S.” One Direction fans and Styles stans ran to the comment section, and suddenly fan art was flying in the air. Later, during an interview with Variety on Aug. 24, Wilde commented that she fired Shia because “he was making the set environment uncomfortable.” Shia LeBeouf proceeded to email Variety both email and video receipts of Wilde begging him to stay. He said that the reason he quit was that neither he nor the other cast members could find time to rehearse. In Wilde’s video response to LeBeouf, she mentioned that this “might be a wake-up call for Miss Flo,” hinting towards some tension between LeBeouf and Pugh.
Another thing that One Direction fans care about is Styles and Wilde’s flourishing relationship. As with many of Wilde’s brethren, she too is driven by the undeniable and uncontrollable lust for young blood. In Jan. 2021, Page Six published photos of Styles and Wilde holding hands, placing their relationship in the public eye. Their work romance was so intense that Pugh reportedly had to take on the role of directing some of the scenes in “Don’t Worry Darling.” In Matthew Belloni’s newsletter, he wrote that Pugh was unhappy with how Styles and Wilde would disappear together; three staff members also mentioned something similar. They were probably doing some late-night talking.
During the promotional events for “Don’t Worry Darling,” so many things went down, it wasn’t even funny anymore. While Wilde was promoting the movie at CinemaCon, she was served custody papers on stage. We all obviously have no clue who she’s with, or where she could be, to the point where her partner’s lawyer can’t even locate her in private.
Wilde told Vogue that she promotes sex scenes in the movie, where Styles performs oral sex (see “Watermelon Sugar”) on Pugh. Wilde then proceeds to comment that she intends to be able to show female hunger in mainstream media, where the majority of the heterosexual scenes are focused on male pleasure. Pugh later commented that “This is not why I am in the industry.”
During the movie’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Pugh only appeared on the red carpet and explained her absence by stating that she is busy on set for “Dune 2.” However, other protagonist Timothée Shablagoo was busy being backless at the Venice Film Festival. To make the audience more comfortable, the PR team strategically placed everyone while the cast was walking through the red carpet such that there was always someone between Wilde, Styles, and Pugh. Fans are questioning the relationship between the three, as it was clear that the placement of the cast members was purely because of the intensive and avoidant relationship between Styles and Chris Pine, and the internalized homophobia embedded in Styles and Nick Kroll’s hearts. After all, Styles did supposedly spit on Pine while kissing Kroll on the mouth.
Another defining piece of evidence that there is some type of beef between Styles and Pine is seen during the Fred Insider interview, when Styles was so enraged that he did not even know how to form comprehensible sentences. During the interview, Styles expressed that he thinks “the most amazing part of the film is that it was not intended to be entertaining, but it ended up to be an entertaining film” and that his favorite part of the movie was that “the movie feels like a movie.”
Even though the only interesting part of this movie is everything that is not the movie, there are still some aspects of the movie that I quite admire and agree with. I admire Wilde’s attempts to emphasize female pleasure, her views on sexual freedom, and other feminist theories that branched out during the third wave of feminism.