Trapped in the simulation: Tradwife culture, fake allyship, and the exhaustion of the domestic dystopia in Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

This article examines Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling (2022) as a critical impasse in popular feminist cinema’s deployment of the domestic dystopia. Rather than offering another comparative reading with Bryan Forbes’s The Stepford Wives (1975) or its 2004 remake (dir. Frank Oz), the article situates Wilde’s film within three interconnected contemporary contexts: the tradwife movement’s appropriation of Stepford aesthetics; post-#MeToo discourse around fake male allyship; and the exhaustion of the ‘fiftiesness’ that the nostalgia film recycles as a substitute for historical engagement with the postwar period. Drawing on scholarship on postfeminist domesticity, popular feminism and the female fantastic, I argue that Don’t Worry Darling inadvertently reveals the limits of recycling the Stepford trope at a moment when tradwife creators already deploy identical aesthetics to resell domesticity as aspirational choice. Distinguishing period drama, pastiche and simulation as different modes of ‘fiftiesness,’ the article shows that the film’s simulated suburb converts critique into seduction. It further examines how the film’s troubled production and reception, including Florence Pugh’s public distancing and the casting of Harry Styles, symptomatically reproduce the contradictions the film ostensibly critiques. The article concludes by asking whether popular feminist cinema can move beyond these structural limitations.