After having watched this movie, I can definitively conclude that there is little to no reason to believe that Harry Styles spat in Chris Pine’s lap at Venice.
I can’t do this without spoilers so here’s your warning.
In light of the ending–why is it always incels?–some questions: why did the doctor prescribe Alice medications? Like, what would that have done? It seems like the biggest issue here is that the design didn’t take into account women’s needs, right? Why couldn’t they just… go to work while their husbands were… also at work? I know that’s not the metaphor and that’s the Matrix instead, but surely Alice and her friends don’t have in mind that the perfect life is working a 40 hour week, right? How did they get von Tease to perform? Is she an NPC or is she real? What about all the servers at the party and shopworkers at the mall? What about the trolley driver? I get that there is some value to having everyone in one place, in the same way that you can’t buy just one gerbil (and Wife asks how do they all coordinate their work schedules to leave at the same time? But honestly, I can see how between mind control and a set of small servers, maybe that’s not that big a deal), but it seems like there’s a problem with having that many women in one place, right?
More questions: why does Frank (heh, the name) intimate that he’s had sex with Alice during the dinner party? It’s so wildly inappropriate for him to suggest that and it’s clearly how Jack interprets it, but isn’t it a major worry that anyone would have keeping their captive girlfriend or wife on the server all day? Having some charismatic, attractive leader take advantage? Like, if there’s one thing you wouldn’t want as a subscriber to a mind prison, it would be someone whose work schedule didn’t overlap with your own, right? On that point, is there good speculation for why some people didn’t double or triple down and have, like, five or six wives? You could probably mask it pretty well by calling them daughters or stashing them in different houses or whatever? But maybe that’s too much thinking for this movie?
Also, why ARE the children automata? Is that just a gut punch for Bunny and Peg, or is there a reason why consciousness of children that you literally spend all day with is not as much a priority as it is for not kidnapping women? Why doesn’t everyone have a von Tease, circling back to that? Why was there a plane crash? Did Jack mess up when he was humming that song?
My issues with mind control, short sex scenes: I wonder how much it would’ve changed responses to Jack’s behavior if the Matrix device just sat on your temples while your eyes were closed instead of Clockwork Oranging your brain. With the tech they use to knock out old memories and implant new ones, one imagines it might’ve been easier to just invent a non-evil way of letting lonely men live out fulfilling lives with fake wives online, but alas. I’ve written a little about mind control as metaphor before, weirdly in the Incredibles 2, but to add to that conversation, the use of mind control as a means of telling a story in reverse order for the sake of a twist is not my favorite. At the same time, I don’t think DWD does anything so far out of the bounds of what we’re used to with Matrixing people for it to be notably bad. Wife says that the twist was actually better than she was expecting, and I align myself with that point of view. There’s some expectation that we are in the present, because likelihood of this being a biting period drama on a The Village type set with an It Follows level of technology seems too much of a waste. But, as Friend said in his careful, non-spoilery pre-review review, the mystery box is more fun than the reveal. What are they building/mining in the basement when they say they’re “at work”? Why isn’t it weapons? Why is the faux prestige better than an actual insidious plot? Why is the red herring eating its own tail? Is it better this way?
There was some discussion about the offensiveness of such a short foreplay in The Long Shot, which you probably don’t remember because you had something important to do a few years ago, but I did not, so I direct you there to consider the corrosive effect of collapsing twenty minutes of good foreplay into a few seconds for the ease of the audience at the expense of all women. The fact that the sex scenes in DWD are so short only makes sense in light of the twist, which really takes some wind out of my sails and maybe speaks a little to why Pugh seems so reticent to embrace the film as sexually liberated in the same way that Wilde does.
Wife’s big takeaway was “THE ACCENT WAS FAKE,” which I think is actually the perfect thing to leave with.
Aside from the missing comma, this movie is a perfectly acceptable way to spend your first afternoon away from your child as new parents, for the first time in a year. Depending on how much you like your kid, you will feel very relieved or just pleasantly happy about spending time with your spouse that you have sacrificed so much with over the long months. These days, we don’t actually get to see that many movies together, and even during the two years of isolation, we only very seldom spent time watching new movies together, so this afternoon was special, a reminder of one of the many reasons why we first fell in love and one of the activities we bonded over ten years ago. To you, Wife, and many more movies together.
