# Don’t Worry, Darling (2022) w/ Julia Gledhill | Ep. 62

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/bang-bang-podcast-7028254/don-t-worry-darling-2022-w-julia-gledhill-ep-62
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/bang-bang-podcast-7028254/don-t-worry-darling-2022-w-julia-gledhill-ep-62.md
Podcast: [Bang-Bang Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/bang-bang-podcast-7028254)
Published: 2026-03-15T07:48:02+00:00
Episode link: https://www.bangbangpod.com/p/dont-worry-darling-2022-w-julia-gledhill
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/190999219/e90908a77f8f922983651e43f3d61a6d.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/bang-bang-podcast-7028254/episodes/don-t-worry-darling-2022-w-julia-gledhill-ep-62
Duration seconds: 3772

## Resource

Van and Lyle are joined by Julia Gledhill (of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast and Stimson Center fame) to revisit Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry, Darling , a film dismissed by many critics as a glossy pastiche but better understood as a deliberate medley of American ideological fantasies. Set in the manicured desert enclave of the “Victory Project,” the movie opens in Ray Charles warmth before sliding into rigid choreography: Men drive off in unison, women clean in unison, then glide into ballet formation as their instructor intones, “There is beauty in symmetry… we move as one.” The aesthetic excess isn’t accidental. The film’s kaleidoscopic dance sequences explicitly evoke Busby Berkeley, whose WWII-era aerial sensibility turned human bodies into geometric ornament. Berkeley, a former U.S. Army artillery lieutenant and aerial observer, staged dancers from a “God’s eye view,” transforming individuality into pattern. Wilde weaponizes that grammar. What once read as escapist spectacle now registers as dehumanization, a mass ornament in service of hierarchy and control. The Victory Project’s guru, Frank, speaks the language of progress while policing chaos. “What is the enemy of progress?” he asks. “Chaos,” one acolyte responds. The rhetoric blends mid-century self-help, Cold War technocracy, and contemporary manosphere grievance. The town’s clean surfaces conceal its true engine of disaffected men plugged into a fantasy where wives are restored to compliance and breadwinning humiliation is reversed. Jack’s resentment over his surgeon wife’s success curdles into full incel submission to Frank’s digital sermons. “We are not going backward, we are pushing forward!” Frank insists, though everything about Victory is nostalgic regression. The Busby Berkeley motif returns in distorted f…

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## Transcript

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