Don’t Worry Darling: The anxious question of what women want after #MeToo?

Abstract

This article considers ‘post-MeToo’ media culture through a close reading of Olivia Wilde’s 2022 film Don’t Worry Darling by drawing primarily on Jacques Lacan’s approach to anxiety. #MeToo indexed, in its marking of ‘#’, in its saying, in its hashing out, that the ‘me’ of feminist subjectivity and the ‘too’ of a collective form of that subjectivity always bears a marked remainder. There is something which the symbolic will always miss; so too do fantasies of a united feminism, under the signifier ‘#MeToo’ lack. Some years after the #MeToo moment, the movement which it appeared to promise wanes. Revanchist patriarchy surges forth with eruption of #TradWives on TikTok, and the exhaustion of #MeToo in the wake of clapbacks and callouts of ‘cancel culture’. This paper returns to the original site where #MeToo irrupted – Hollywood – through a consideration of Don’t Worry Darling. Branded a ‘feminist psychological thriller in the wake of #MeToo’ by director Olivia Wilde, the film presents a trad wife dreamworld governed by a Jordan Peterson like guru. Drawing on Lacan, I argue that Don’t Worry Darling, in its spectacular box office failure, surrounding sexual scandal, and in the narrative itself, works as an index of feminist, but also patriarchal, anxieties after #MeToo.