Introduction

… you keep going, you keep pushing – yet, here you are; still here … (Frank to Alice in Don’t Worry Darling)

What happens when the push to move forward stops? What happens to you when you are ‘still here’ and the world which seemed on the verge of pushing over existing systems, returns to business as usual? What, then, do you want? This article poses such a question about #MeToo. It asks, drawing on Jacques Lacan: Che vuoi – what do you want? More specifically, I ask: what do women want after #MeToo. #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 fail. Some years after the #MeToo moment, the movement which it promised wanes. Revanchist patriarchy surges forth with eruption of #TradWives on TikTok, and the exhaustion of #MeToo in the wake of clapbacks over ‘woke’ and callouts of ‘cancel culture’.

I have written elsewhere that it is no accident that #MeToo moved outwards from Hollywood (Overell, 2021). It required a particular spectacular force to push it along, which is why we have a plethora of ‘based on a true story’ films in the movement’s wake (Roach, 2019; Schrader, 2022). This paper re-turns to Hollywood with a consideration of Don’t Worry Darling (Wilde, 2022a), hereafter DWD. Touted as a ‘feminist psychological thriller in the wake of #MeToo’ by director Olivia Wilde (Wilde, 2022b), the film presents a trad wife dreamworld governed by a Jordan Peterson like guru. Drawing on Lacan, I argue that DWD, in its box office failure, surrounding sexual scandal, and especially in the film’s narrative, works as an index of feminist, but also patriarchal, anxieties after #MeToo.

Orientations: Noise Cancels Sleep

Before I begin on DWD, however, I want to begin with setting up three touchstones through which I will consider the film. These are noise, cancels and sleep. These will operate as orientations in the article but run together they also make a sentence: noise cancels sleep. With all the noise made by #MeToo cancellations, we might ask, did all the #Me-s rise from their sleep, consciousness-raised, as woke? Not quite.

The figure of the ‘noisy’ woman has been celebrated for loudly calling out patriarchy and misogyny by feminists; and criticised by conservative commentators (including women) for her perceived over-reactions to sexist abuse (Bakari, 2019; Doty, 2020; Ibarra, 2019; Lindsay, 2020).Footnote 1 In both iterations this noisy subject is excessive. Instead of repeating arguments made elsewhere (and, much better) in feminist academia and the popular press, here I wish to consider noise through Lacan’s approach to anxiety. Such an attention to the noisy vociferations of anxiety opens on to the broader questions of the failures of #MeToo, but also presents a precedent for a different type of feminism. As I hope to show, especially in DWD, noisy interruptions might force ‘consciousness’ and raise a feminist subject to call out, but also indicate necessary, in-built, failure of fantasies of emancipation via the symbolic order; that is, via the language of slogans, as well as the imaginary constitution of this order in the projection of a unified, complementary relation between subjects as a political force. Anxiety, as Lacan (2004/2020) repeats in book X of his seminar (hereafter SX) is when this lack of lack – the relentless, engulfing unity of the Other as one which totalises and overbears desire and signification – comes to bear on the subject. I will refer to SX throughout the article, but, here, want to – by way of orientation – establish how noise might function to induce anxiety in the subject and, also, open up a vista where lack of lack is experienced as dreadful – yes – but brings to bear an irritation which reintroduces the lack requisite for movement, desire and the push requisite to spur the subject forward.

‘Noise’ preoccupies contemporary society. Often framed as interference, distraction and of detriment to an ordered, productive subjectivity, commodity culture offers various forms of ‘noise-cancellation’ as a solution to problems of concentration and well-being. This is most evident in noise-cancelling headphones, but also in ‘hacks’ offered to block out audible irritations as a means of calming, soothing oneself and, importantly, putting oneself to sleep. In short, to allay anxiety, noise, it seems, must be eradicated. Within what Banet-Weiser (2018) might designate ‘popular feminism’, too, there have been calls to stop the noise. Folded into an ethic of ‘self-care’, online feminists offer ‘silent mode’ as a way of preserving an individualised sovereignty in the face of demands of the social (Bond, 2023; Campbell, 2024). The sleep accompanying such silence, too, is often offered as a counter to the relentless commands of bosses, male partners, and capital (Odell, 2020). The position of refusing the superegoic Other’s verbal irruptions becomes a form of resistance embodied in the use-less and non-productive sleeping body (cf. Galioto, 2023; Odell, 2020; Su, 2023).Footnote 2 While such opting out might form a sort of subversion of hegemonic imperatives towards lively bodies, I wish to emphasise that the superegoic noise of capital and patriarchy is quite different to the noise I wish to foreground in this article. Instead, I consider the noise in DWD as interruptive to patriarchal business as usual; but also, as a vociferated object, a collateral remainder necessary to #MeToo. Thus, I take noise not as something which should be cancelled, eradicated or silenced, but as that which must be amplified to interrupt the smoothed-out fantasy of care-full and calm subjectivity. Further, I think such amplification is especially urgent in a world where it would very much suit those in power if we did simply withdraw, disconnect, go silent and sleep – nowhere more evident, as we shall see, in Wilde’s film.

Let me briefly set out how Lacan approaches noise as a ‘vociferated object’; an object which is causal of anxiety. SX is where Lacan arguably begins to articulate his concept of the petit objet a, though it is not until book XI of the seminar that he ‘invents’ this as such. I will return to this objet below, suffice to say that in SX this special object is synonymised with anxiety (passim, but see especially Lacan, 2004/2020, pp. 249, 253. This is due to anxiety’s position not as a signal (contra Freud, 1926/1959) which is signified primarily via the symbolic and imaginary orders, but as an affect which does not deceive the subject in its indication of its cause – the object cause of petit objet a. That is, anxiety reveals to the subject two things simultaneously and with ‘dreadful certainty’ (Lacan, 2004/2020, p. 77). Firstly, anxiety interrupts the subject’s fantasy of an ideal ego in a dialectic with the second revelatory function: that the object which pushes the desiring subject forward must be yielded, and that, it Is in this ceding, that the subject might come in to being (Lacan, 2004/2020, p. 329). This object too is brought into being right here, in this moment of anxiety, via the logic of the dialectic. This object though is unlike any other – as petit objet a – experienced in and produced by anxiety – it has no ‘objective’ form, rather it works as ballast for the subject’s desire.Footnote 3 I will return to the importance of this ballast in terms of a feminist politics later. But let us now turn to noise in terms of anxiety.

Lacan approaches noise via the ‘vociferated object’ or ‘object-voice’ which, unlike the demanding voice of the phallic superego, carries no clear content, or form (2004/2020, p. 246). Rather, using the analogy of the Torahic shofar, Lacan considers the breath, the space, or, in his words the ‘new dimension’ (2004/2020, p. 249) of the void within the shofar’s hollow. He notes that the ‘storm of noise’ (Lacan, 2004/2020, p. 248) which the shofar generates is considered the impossible voice, or roar, of God – that is a voice that is unplaceable in the symbolic and unrecognisable in the imaginary. We return to the excess introduced in my precis of the noisy woman-subject. This voice, in its noisiness, is more than that of the big Other – of boss, partner, or society – whose directives are oppressive utterances. Rather, this voice is objectified through its noisiness, it is an objectified-voice which, as petit objet a is yieldable, separable, offering a gap or lack where, at once, it appears and is apprehended as appearing (it does not deceive) as its opposite: as the lack of lack and inseparability between subject and object requisite of anxiety. Lacan goes on to state that the voice is ‘essential’ in its operation as petit objet a in its ability to more radically grasp this contradictory cession and stopping-up; separability and unity and in particular in its ability to open ‘new dimensions between desire and anxiety’ (2004/2020, p. 255). Throughout the latter part of the SX, Lacan demonstrates, in fact, the object-voice’s especial ability to bear the residual index (effect), and production (causality) of petit objet a via anxiety.

Noise runs throughout my engagement with DWD. But what of the second two orienting marks: cancels and sleep? I am reticent of noise-cancellation – just as the objet petit a can never be fully ceded, so, too, is noise impossible to cancel out. Cancellations will always bear a mark. The context of ‘cancel culture’ is present throughout what follows, however, I reiterate, I am disinclined towards a form of cancellation as a type of sleepy subversion which, as we shall see with DWD, can be lethal. This article, instead, offers anxiety as a way into thinking through, and forward with, contemporary feminism, hinging on the radical disconnect between the imagined and symbolised unity of organising structures such as #MeToo; and their inevitable lack and failure. I offer noise as the harbinger and constitutor of this disconnection – rather than cancellation – one which in this case, instead of soothing one to sleep in a dreamworld of wholesome signifiers, pushes one awake towards new configurations and desires.

Che Vuoi? Me? Too?

I explore these touchstones through anxiety but also via an engagement with Lacan’s concept of che vuoi? That is, the question which the subject-supposed-to-know poses to the Other: ‘What do you want? But also, what do I want? What am I to you?’ (Lacan, 1966/2002, p. 690). Here I consider #MeToo as the object of che vuoi: what do women want after #MeToo? And how is this question screened through popular media, such as DWD? This question, too, is predicated on desire which, I suggest, is opened up via anxiety.

#MeToo was celebrated as a global moment which became a movement, and a progressive reckoning with sexual violence and business-as-usual patriarchal aggression, by journalists (Rock, 2017; Wildman, 2019) and academics (Lee & Murdie, 2021; Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2023). Several years later the movement seems on the wane. That word ‘post-’ has adhered to the hashtag (Gaillard, 2023; Garrett, 2023). That’s the problem with moments – they pass – without some sort of steer to move them forward. I have written elsewhere (Overell, 2021) of how the hashtag worked as an anchor; that this mark ‘#’ – a little grid which apparently ‘stopped the scroll’ and called ‘time’s up’ on sexual harassment and violence – worked as a suitable semblant, a little signifier for what is unsignifiable: the real of sexual violence. Women who used the hashtag spoke of the power in the declarative, of the anguish of rape and the outrage of harassment; the hashtag became a way of holding one together, but also holding together with others who share that hashtagged mark. An anchor is quite different from a steer, an anchor is about holding in time and place, rather than progressing forward. In 2024, the hashtag mostly circulates as a slogan on tote bags and T-shirts; it is a sting in a headline. #MeToo was touted a noisy, messy, callout to patriarchy’s regular communication. But for all the noise it made, its potential to steer elsewhere, its anchorage appears moored in commodity culture and media spectacle; that is, in the imaginary and symbolic registers. Lately, too, the talk has been of #MeToo’s failures and the backlash to the movement (Moro et al., 2023). Backlash might also form part of the steadying feedback of patriarchal power. This is visible in the conflation of #MeToo with other with other hashtags (for example, #BlackLivesMatter) and signifiers (such as ‘critical race theory’) as a motif of the broader folk devil of ‘woke culture’ forming a moral panic about identity politics as subsuming everything – from ‘the family’ (Šerić, 2023) to ‘academic freedom’ (Lloyd, 2023). Arguably, such backlash was, at least partly, roused and rallied under the pseudo-psychological speeches of Jordan Peterson, who claimed in The New York Times that women need to stop being ‘whiny’ about sexual violence and ‘get a hobby’ (Bowles, 2018). As #MeToo moors to panics about ‘woke’ it is little wonder that the Me-s who gripped that anchor so tightly in 2018 might turn to noise-cancelling self-care.

The Right Time

DWD begins with an overhead close-up shot of a record spinning: ‘The Right Time’ by Ray Charles (1957). It also plays in the background. We are at a party which, judging by the mise-en-scène, is the ‘right time’ for the track: the late 1950s. Husbands and wives play a party game. We look through the husband protagonist Jack’s eyes at his wife Alice as she balances a whisky glass on her head. Such a male view, or gaze, also fits the apparent ‘time’ looking as it does like a scene from classical Hollywood cinema. Jack asks – in fact this is the opening line of the film – ‘what are we seeing?’ What indeed? The male gaze is one way we could understand this scene. But a man so sure about who he gazes at might not beg the question: ‘what are we seeing?’ This question – with its echoes of che vuoi? – also sets the tone for the audience viewing the rest of the film; they well might wonder what they are seeing and through whose eyes.

What a lot of noise DWD made! Arguably the gossipy coverage of its Venice premiere overshadowed the film’s reception. The official publicity, further promulgated by Wilde herself in interviews, was that not only that DWD was ‘female-centric’ (Wilde, 2022b), but also ‘post-feminist’ (Wagmeister, 2022) and working to ‘subvert the male gaze’ (Wilde, 2022b). Wilde’s proof of this subversive work was primarily linked to her inclusion of a scene where Alice receives cunnilingus from Jack on a lavishly set dining table. This scene was central to DWD’s teaser trailer. Emphasis was made, too, on the film’s villain, Frank, based on, in Wilde’s words the ‘insane … incel’ Jordan Peterson (Gyllenhaal, 2022). More proof of the film’s post-feminist credentials was offered in the news that Shia LaBeouf was dropped from the role of Jack after he was ‘me-too-ed’ (Alter, 2020). Squeaky clean popstar Harry Styles was his replacement. Later, however, the press coverage went off-script. We had a leak of Wilde apparently pleading with LaBeouf to come back; and then there were various red carpet ‘moments’ at Venice. These included Florence Pugh, who played Alice, apparently refusing to join Wilde and Styles at the premiere, Styles apparently spitting on co-star Chris Pine, and the latter seemingly zoning out during the press conference. The film flopped and was panned by critics, partly due to its failure to adhere to its promise as a #MeToo movie (Angus, 2022; Bale, 2022; Horton, 2022).

I want this vociferating, extra-textual noise to hum away in the background. In fact, as I will return to, humming is a repeated motif in DWD. But for the remainder of this article, I am going to focus on the film, rather than its press coverage. It arrives at the right time (not in the 1950s, but in 2022) to ask the question: what are we looking at here, when we look at #MeToo several years on? With the reworking of the # into the grid of spectacularised commodity forms, the film’s floppy failure and its messy mixed message indexes that #MeToo, as a semblant, as an anchor, rather than a steer, was always destined to fail.

Set in the late 1950s, DWD follows newlyweds Jack and Alice in their apparently blissful lives in a planned community called the ‘Victory Project’. The Project, where Jack is employed, is run by a charismatic leader, Frank. More than just a boss, Frank regales his employees, and their wives, with speeches, touting the virtues of ‘order over chaos’ and adherence to one’s ‘biological destiny’, almost directly out of Peterson’s (2018) quasi-Jungian 12 Rules For Life. Alice witnesses the suicide of another wife, leading her to question Frank’s, and the Project’s, motives. It is revealed that the Project is a ‘simulation’; a virtual reality experience purchased by incel-type men to experience ‘perfect happiness’ (in Jack’s words) via the complete subjugation of their women partners, who are comatose in the non-virtual world. When Alice realises this, she murders Jack in the simulation. However, we are also told, she has killed him ‘in the real world’. The film’s final scenes indicate that as Alice seemingly escapes the simulation, her fellow wives also ‘awaken’ to their position in the Project.

Anxiety! At the Ballroom

Now I return to my three touchstones of noise, cancels, sleep, which I will work through via a focus on one scene from DWD. The scene shows Jack and Alice attending an extravagant ball hosted by the Frank. Alice has recently witnessed Margaret’s suicide but has been reassured that she simply ‘had an accident’. Preceding the ball, Jack tells Alice he would like ‘a little you’ in the form of a baby from Alice. Alice is perturbed. Nonetheless she joins him at the ball, where Jack receives a promotion from Frank. Frank places a ring on Jack’s finger and whispers to him: ‘are you the man that you say you are?’ Frank implores Jack to dance. He does – in a frenzied jive – as Frank and the audience cheer him on. Alice grows increasingly anxious, crying and running to the ‘Ladies’ powder room. Here, she is castigated by best friend Bunny for spoiling Jack’s special occasion.

If we think of Lacan, perhaps in the usual way we may have encountered his film theory, we think of the ‘male gaze’ mentioned above (Mulvey, 1975). I will return to why such an approach is inadequate below. But most might also think of Lacan’s chain of signifiers. In this understanding, from the early Lacan (1966/2002, 1981/1997), meaning moves across, but also up and down. The chain forms a structuralist grid. The chain of signifiers might prompt us to ask: why this or that signifier? For the chain-linked Lacan, signifiers work largely in the symbolic and the imaginary. We can think of the symbolic as language and the law, and the imaginary as how one uses that language to perceive their body. But there is some other thing sticking to the chain, and this is something is crucial to anxiety’s uniqueness as an affect: the real. Unlike the symbolic and the imaginary, the real is something we cannot quite perceive, or chain onto meaning. It is stuck there, nonetheless, in the corner of one’s eye (Lacan, 1973/2019). It is an irritation or interruption. At worst the real might cause us to feel as though we have flown off the chain! Certainly, as I will show, this is how Alice experiences anxiety in the ballroom scene. In SX, Lacan topologises these three modes of real, symbolic and imaginary in knots, Klein bottles and Möbius strips. These knotty models make the displacement and linear movement, suitable to chains and grids, tricky. Think of the Möbius: a differential placement of the surface and its underside is impossible to parse out in a linear fashion. Here, the real is less something anchored or stuck in one place, than an indelible mark in all three modes. The knotting of real, symbolic and the imaginary produce the subject. One can only glance the real on the Möbius through its marks. As a mark on its own, a scribble, it is illegible, it is only in the twisting of saying – the speaking by the subject – that the real might make some noise, and be brought to bear on the body. And even then, it resists being completely bound with or subsumed by the symbolic and imaginary.

Before I am accused of needlessly mixing my metaphors and reminded that scribbles are seen and noises are heard, let us return to the vociferated object in SX (Lacan, 2004/2020, pp. 274-277). This is the extimate part of the voice that exceeds the words it speaks. It is most certainly something real, particularly when it generates an affect like anxiety. We can hear this in DWD. Throughout the film Alice hums rather tunelessly as part of the diegesis. Her friend Bunny finds such noise invasive, imploring ‘you have to stop humming!’ The hum bears some of this anxious real, it is a bit leftover; in fact, it bears an echo from the past of Alice and Jack’s pre-simulation life: it is a tune sung by Jack to Alice before he bound her to the bed, rendered her comatose, strapped on his VR headset and positioned her as his perfect ‘Victory’ wife. The hum is also a harbinger of Alice’s future. Throughout DWD her humming marks the anxious moments which add up in Alice’s realisation that she is trapped in a simulation.

Anxiety, Lacan writes, is the only true affect, stating that it is the only affect which does not deceive the subject (2004/2020, p. 76). For Lacan, affect is not a phenomenology of ‘being in immediacy’ (2004/2020, p. 14) outside of the symbolic or language. Returning to the Möbius – there is no thing or experience which can escape the knotting together of real, symbolic and imaginary. Affects, though certainly with their smudgy, noisy non-sense, working through and from the real, are also an effect of discourse. They are the effect of the motion put into play via the subject’s use of language. We cannot, if we approach affects psychoanalytically, tease out language (symbolic), and the body who speaks such language (imaginary) from each other, or affect; no less the real affect of anxiety. Whilst these modes are connected though – that excessive, distracting part, that part which sticks on to language and the body, which might be the noise that cuts out or cuts over the message, indicates affect’s persistence and power. Affects – moving as they do on the real – are experienced as ‘off the chain’ of signification. Stuck to this signifier or that one, they, in Lacan’s words, ‘lie’ (2004/2020, p. 76), in their sense of immediacy and apparent lack of stickiness or difference from the subject’s experience of themselves as a speaking (symbolic) body (imaginary). Anxiety does not fly off so well – or it does so only in a noisy and marked way. This is because it marks out for the subject the symbolic, and real cut of discourse, of language which every body must bear. Anxiety indexes not a specific event but the gap through which such speech slices (Lacan, 2004/2020, p. 76). Anxiety traces the subject’s taking on of language and taking up their embodied place in the world, in relation to the Other. The marked experience of anxiety draws attention to that cut in the real which the signifier (and, indeed when affects are reduced to signifying descriptors of ‘happy’, ‘sad’, etc.) cannot reveal. What was once closed, immediate, experienced as natural and immediately personal, opens up with ‘dreadful certainty’ onto the Other (Lacan, 2004/2020, p. 77).

Anxiety is exceptional because it is with out doubt in its marking of the subject as object-cause for the Other. However, and this is crucial, anxiety not only affirms and marks the split of castration which we all bear, but also fills that split or lack in. What generates anxiety is not lack – but, and this bears repeating, the lack of lack; that is, smudge of the real humming at the edges suddenly, but atrociously right on time, bears down onto the subject filling up the otherwise lacking knowledge of the subject as coherent symbolisable (spoken) and imagined (embodied, and of course, gendered) ‘self’.

While Alice does not yet know she is in a simulation when she is at the ball, she senses, in her words, that ‘something is off’, experienced as anxiety. Her position in the Project falters. Unlike the other wives, she does not want a ‘a little you’ in the form of a baby.Footnote 4 Such little me-s and you-s – as little object-things – move us even closer to an understanding of anxiety from Lacan’s point of view. Anxiety appears when the cause – that little object cause – that makes the cut which paradoxically gives us lack, sends us on the course of desire – when that cutting-cause becomes clear, and full (rather than lacking), then we feel anxiety. It is when the subject is rendered, and atrociously certain of this rendering, in a position of utter certitude for the Other. There is no lack here, no left over, one is completely reduced to being the Other’s object and, importantly, one is aware of this. The fantasy of chain-linked meaning unravels. The subject is overwhelmed and stuck in place. But, too, this position, once experienced, might push one elsewhere, towards that gap – requisite of desire.

So let us return to Alice at the ball. Alice is anxious as she dragged to the ball as objective proof of Jack being ‘the man he says he is’ to Frank. Part of the ball scene is a spectacle piece where Dita Von Teese performs a burlesque routine, the men cheering and ogling her. Surely, this is where Alice, watching the men as they gaze, this is when her position as an object of her husband is realised? Surely, then, this is why she is anxious. This is, after all, ‘subversive’ ‘female-centric’ cinema which tallies with the usual Mulvey-informed destabilising of the male gaze?

Maybe.

But I rather encourage us to look elsewhere in the scene and away from how we might, particularly in film studies, think of the gaze as one which simply catches the passive woman-object in the male-subject’s snare. The act of snaring one’s object is binarised (subject : object), linear, and causal (subject → object). Rather, the knotted form of the scopic gaze discussed in SX leaves neither the subject or object passive or lacking – ‘nothing is lacking’ in the scopic (Lacan, 2004/2020, p. 189). Further, the gaze, here, working as the little object cause, does little to affirm a binarised, complementary (either harmonious or acrimonious) relation between the subject-as-man and the object-as-woman. Instead, the gaze emerges as one where the subject and the object collapse; the distance generally experienced through the imaginary, mirrored, self-as-Other’s-object in the mirror ‘starts not to look at us … [Instead, t]here’s an initium … a dawning sense of uncanniness which leaves the door open to anxiety’ (Lacan, 2004/2020, p. 88; see also p. 271). The uncanny which precedes anxiety via the scopic drive is one where one is less caught than moving rapidly in place along the Möbius (here-to-there-to-here; subject-to-other-to-subject). One is aware of the cut of the symbolic in the imaginary (‘starts not to look at us’) but the gaze here, too, feels too close – or more precisely, closing in on oneself (‘nothing is lacking’). The cut is at once marked, and in its marking, it is closed up and filled in. For this to be brought to bear as anxiety, we first must squint, or in the case of the vociferated object humming away, listen a little harder. Earlier in DWD, when Bunny tells Alice to stop humming, Alice wonders aloud ‘what song is that? I was hoping you’d tell me’. This anxious hum is that which cannot parse out to whom the hum belongs, where it is from and what it means to hum it: I was hoping you’d tell me … che vuoi? At that point in the film all Alice can do is strain and hum some more. If we think of this humming as noise it is also worth noting that Lacan offers the vociferated object as distinct from its scopic counterpart. Whilst the scopic engulfs the subject in its lack of lack, generative of the turmoil of anxiety, the voice has the potential to cut through and cut open the sheer smoothness of real anxiety in a way which potentially opens on to desire (Lacan, 2004/2020, pp. 253, 332).

At the ball, though, any humming would be drowned out by the band. It is what Alice sees, at least at first, not what she hears, here that causes her anxiety. Frank is welcomed to the stage to much fanfare. He circulates through the crowd glad-handing his employees (‘Let’s make some noise!’ he yells). Frank then invites Jack to join him and announces his promotion to the ‘Senior Advisory Board’. To mark this, Frank gives Jack a ring, which he places on his index finger. The crowd, bar Alice, erupts in applause. Frank stares at Alice, who returns his gaze, then Frank removes Jack’s blazer and encourages him to dance as the band strikes up a tune. What Alice sees in this moment – from the ring to the blazer to the dance is what at once hits home with dreadful certainty, and renders the scene simultaneously uncanny – is unhomely. Leading up to this, she pleaded with Jack to ‘go home’. He ignored her. After all, the Project and its happenings are home. It is not Frank’s leering objectifying gaze on Alice which reveals the fissure caused by that little thing as filled in, lacking lack. Rather, it is the revelation of Jack’s function in Frank’s phallic Project which sparks Alice’s anxiety, not her own position. For the Victory men, power – and, importantly, phallic power here does indeed map on to patriarchal power which requires the little doll wife – is the ‘sacrifice’ of which Frank speaks incessantly over Victory radio, that is the debasement of the husbands, and the subjugation of them and their wives, to Frank. The male adherents to Frank, it is later revealed in the film, also degrade themselves in the non-virtual world to pay to be in the simulation. Jack, offline, works all day in a dead-end job to ‘support’ his online life. The onstage ceremony Alice witnesses at the ball also demonstrates the lack of lack ready to be filled in requisite for anxiety. Frank’s question to Jack – ‘Are you the man that you say you are?’ – is not intended to be answered. Earlier, we see that Frank and the men agree that Frank knows them completely. He assures them, and their wives, at a pool party that: ‘I know exactly who you are.’ There is no che vuoi? or subject supposing to know here, requiring as it does a lack – a desire and supposition of self via the Other. Instead, Frank and the men in the Project have full, victorious, phallic knowledge. The gift of the ring in the ballroom scene is indicative – it is a whole circle in which a thing might fit. ‘It’s a good fit,’ chuckles Frank, acknowledging Jack’s lack and castration, but also the gains that come with fulfilling that (w)hole: position, power, and a place on the board.Footnote 5

Alice, the one in the film who does ask che vuoi, is bearing witness here, is crushed. Her own position, not just as a little thing to a whole-some husband in Jack, but also her position as a fervent adherent to Frank’s ‘mission’, falters. At the earlier pool party, she, along with the other wives, nods in accordance with Frank’s declaration that he knows them completely. At the ball, however, this fulsome knowledge, this lack of lack shifts from comforting slogan to overwhelming anxiety.

In her anxiety, Alice retreats to the promising symbolic and imaginary anchorage of the ‘Ladies’ powder room. The symbolic operates here in the linguistically marked segregation of Ladies from Gentlemen; and the imaginary via the multitude of mirrors in the powder room. Lacan argues that the scopic drive in anxiety is characterised by the experience of not seeing oneself in the mirror (Lacan, 2004/2020, pp. 88, 120). In the Ladies room, however, surrounded by mirrors, Alice finds her reflection at a lag. There is a mismatch between body and image.

Meanwhile, the film cuts to show further evidence of Jack’s function as object cause to Frank’s phallic power and fantasised lack of castration/wholeness. Jack dances in a frenzy as the band speeds up. Frank watches on, directing the view of those still gathered in the ballroom, but also the film’s audience: ‘Look at this boy dance! Watch him spin!’ This boy – Jack – may not quite be the man he says he is – and Frank knows as much. This is not as crass as Frank being an evil puppet master, forcing compliance from browbeaten employees. Rather, Jack dances, spins and taps apparently willingly. He knows his place within the phallic order, as a prop to Frank’s patriarchal Project. The film cuts then to the Ladies – where the noise of the music echoes with atrocious certainty. That Jack was always part of Frank’s order appears as a fait accompli. The dance ends with Frank demanding of his audience: ‘Doesn’t that make you believe?’ For those who believe in the promises and knowledge held by masters, slogans, and rings – surely, then, as the audience resounding cries: ‘Yes!’

Noise Cancels Sleep

Anxiety is akin to a noisy interruption, experienced as the invasive realisation of the object cause (that little thing) of desire in the Other – that one is little more than an object for some Other. We can approach the object cause then as the noisiness of anxiety experienced by Alice in the Ladies, hearing Frank’s overtures onstage. This noise indexes what that little object causes – its effect – a lack marked out on that Möbius strip, that is closed over and overwhelms when anxiety attacks. The Möbius model is useful for us again because it also returns us to the touchstone of cancellation. Alice, despite her recourse to the symbolic anchorage of the signifier ‘Ladies’, cannot cancel out the noisy disturbance of the real: ‘Frank! His voice is in my head!’ she yells at Bunny. Further, we still hear the crowd chanting Frank’s slogans. Appeals to the symbolic via the ‘Ladies’ fail. Any steer which might mitigate Alice’s anxiety are drowned out by the noise of Frank’s masculinist rhetoric – his voice both echoing from the ballroom, and as an auditory vociferation in Alice’s head. Alice tells Bunny that she knows she saw Margaret commit suicide. The story of it being an accident does not make sense. Still, her appeals do not convince Bunny.

The model of the Möbius shows us that cancellation, here considered as the complete extraction of that smudgy stain, of that noisy residue, is impossible. The stain which moves under and over cannot be excised, only move out of our direct line of sight. On excisions, and extractions in DWD, well, after Alice’s breakdown at the ball, Jack announces that his promotion involves working on ‘Operation Extraction’. This is an attempt, revealed later, to remove Alice from the simulation to give her electroshock treatment offline, intended to render her properly compliant. As the film plays out, we find that this ‘extraction’ fails, and Alice is haunted by broken visual and aural memories of the treatment.

To simply leave the scene and gather under the signifier of Ladies and sisterhood with Bunny, to cancel Frank and the Project, is just as impossible as Jack’s attempts to excise Alice under Operation Extraction. Under and over: the mark remains and Alice’s anxiety increases. Alice’s rush to the Ladies room demonstrates not only an attempt at a symbolic anchorage of the word ‘Ladies’, but also a retreat to the imaginary of the sexual relation as one of unity between men and women.Footnote 6 Such a recourse to fantasies of sexual complementarity fails to cancel out the patriarchal pageant playing out at the ball. Far from offering the solidarity of a shared signifier of collective ‘Ladies’ – or women – Bunny accuses Alice of ‘ruin[ing] … the most important night’ of Jack’s life.

If opting out and moving away from the patriarchal fray to the position of Ladies cannot cancel, and the shared anxiety (we find out later that, indeed, Bunny knew all along that the Project is a simulation) of women cannot force some sort of exit, what might?

In a later scene, silence is offered as a means to cancel the Frank-as-Peterson patriarch and the anxiety which he arouses. This brings me back to noise-cancelling headphones. Many headphones offer the experience of ‘no transmission’ at all, they give only silence. They promise, too, sleep for the subject. In DWD – and as we will see, in the broader ‘post’-#MeToo context – the silence of sleep is perilous at best, at worst, it is lethal. The ‘wives’ are, by virtue of their inclusion in the Project, silent, sedated and sleeping. Further, beyond the extraction of value via lively productive bodies, necessary of the standard commodity relation; here, the sleeping body is still instrumentalised and offers extractive value to the Project. The anguished breakdowns which Alice experiences in the film, we find out, are also the moments where she ‘wakes up’ (then, again, she is electroshocked, anaesthetised and returned to the simulation). Nonetheless, with each awakening, Alice’s awareness of her position becomes clearer, culminating in an attempted escape. In the climatic final scene, with the collective looks of apparent realisation on the other wives’ faces, the viewer is encouraged to think that these women, too, are becoming ‘woke’. The women a-woken surely hold power. One woman shakes off her husband’s tightening grasp; Bunny, now avowedly on Alice’s side, helps her steal a car to drive away.

Conclusion

So, with all this in mind, how do we take Don’t Worry Darling as a (post) #MeToo movie? To close, I want to linger on noise, cancellation, silence, and the ballroom scene. What does this scene tell us? It spectacularises and indexes anxiety, but, as I have noted above, anxiety – especially that based solely on the scopic drive – is not enough to form a movement. Like Jack spinning onstage, the Möbius turns and twirls rather than progresses. To move, to act, to change requires a steer, better still it needs a steer which is not quite a signifier, one which is more a semblant, that indexes that fissure-filled-in, that cut that does not lack, to which the vociferated object of anxiety directs us but does not overwhelm, rather it reaches elsewhere. What better than this little hashtag, this little grid that points in all directions, but which still holds a void, a lack, in its centre? Still, that little mark needed to be next to symbolic linguistic cry of ‘me too’. That, together, the #MeToo is not quite a signifier, or at least was not quite a signifier at first, served the movement quite well. The ‘hash’ might point us to the noise which such a cry first bore. A semblant looks fixed sturdy and powerful, but works like a counterpart, to steer and steady the signified until it finds its position in discourse, in forging a social bond. This is what moved #MeToo across countries, languages and intersectional contexts. Once that marker faded (hashtags and hashtag politics, after all, are so millennial) and was brandished as holding a fixed meaning it ossified. In 2019, ‘me too’ was lauded as the ‘word of the year’ in the Australian Macquarie Dictionary (Webb, 2019), and it has been added to both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster. Rather than keeping discourse moving, through the mounting of more questions, provocations and challenges, the void which propelled the movement outwards seemed filled in. The ‘#’ marker which worked, I suggest, as a noisy semblant, was dropped as the phrase was included in the dictionaries. Here we see another iteration of the fantasy of completion via the other – the big Other of classified language, but also that of engagement with Law and its justice systems. ‘Me too’ interlocked in signifying chains over right-wing, and even mainstream, social and traditional media with ‘social justice warrior’ (for example, James, 2019), ‘troublemaker’ (Fitzmaurice, 2022), ‘white women’s feminism’ (Donegan, 2018), and as ‘over’ (post?) and ‘over it’ (Borysenko, 2020).

Me Too, hashed out and ‘dictionary-ed’, becomes like the hollow slogans of Frank’s speeches in DWD. So too, as I have already suggested, does the ballroom scene show us the fallibility of signifiers of collective gendered identity. Ladies fails Alice. For many women Me Too failed them. They were retraumatized in the process of disclosure and, often, their abusers carried on. Transmission was restored to business as usual. This latter point is important. While the imaginary of the signifier of ‘Ladies’ – as a shared gender identity, as some safe space for Alice to find fellow feeling with bestie Bunny – fails, so too does its symbolic heft. And this is perhaps one of the main limits of post Me Too; the positioning of in relation to the symbolic as law. Quite literally. For many women, the recourse to the law, in court, or the lesser courts of workplace committees and official reporting procedures, also failed. As cleft in the big Other of patriarchal law, even with the incorporation of catch cries into the dictionary and rewritten policies, the symbolic can only take you so far. Perhaps, too, that is why DWD’s audience was disappointed by the surprise declaration of a switch in turns at holding the phallus when Frank’s wife stabs him. A boss is a boss. Shelley might ‘develop some progressive materials’ (to paraphrase Frank’s vague description of the Project’s work earlier in the film) or signifiers, but a rebranding of the Victory Project as an egalitarian dreamworld for Ladies and (gentle)Men (intersectionally including those #TradWives who might desire life in Victory) would produce the same patriarchal phallic power.

In the ‘post’-MeToo context, patriarchy remains in place. Nonetheless, for patriarchy’s proponents, the apparently ‘woke’, threatening, woman subject of the MeToo moment remain a crucial part of their fantasy. These a-woke-n women work as confirmation of the need of a firm hand and denunciatory response to so-called ‘cancellations’, but such women’s words and actions also, again operating as little things within their symbolic law, drive the Petersons, Tates and Shapiros forward. While they prefer their women sleeping, some woke-ness, and some agitation is also necessary to continue the patriarchal project. In DWD this movement between sleep and its cancellation (woke-ness) is evident in a scene where Frank confronts Alice alone as she prepares food for a dinner party. He makes the usual, and familiar, sexist noises bosses make, presuming an upcoming pregnancy: ‘Let’s hope it’s a boy.’ Then in an act of controlling flattery he pronounces that Alice ‘fascinates’ him. It is her noisiness, her woke-ness which captures his attention. He says: ‘I’ve been waiting for someone to challenge me.’ The caveat being, of course, that such challenges work only within the orbit of the challenger working as an object in Frank’s Project. He declares: ‘No great man has changed the course of history without being pushed to the limits of his potential.’ She is indeed his little thing, as well as her husband’s – the object cause (‘you push me’) requisite of phallic power. He ends his monologue with a wish: that Alice ‘keep going’; keep moving. But then he adds a qualification: ‘And yet, here you are. Preparing dinner. Like a good girl.’ Alice here is not anxiety-ridden. This scene occurs after the ball; she knows already that she, and Jack, and all the subjects of the Project are little more than drivers of Frank’s desire. Instead, she is enraged. For all the challenge, the apparent going-ness, there she is, in her place; or rather (che vuoi?), in the place he wants me. An agitation, or movement, built on anxiety in its very lack of lack does miss something – the cut of signification to drive forward. Like the Möbius it loops in place. In a Peterson-esque turn, Frank admonishes Alice when she ‘calls him out’ during the dinner party proper: ‘If you want to articulate your argument, try using your own words! Your own words Alice!’ Of course, words are never one’s own, despite how much one believes; they, too, are easily spoken by the Other. Still, the experience of having one’s words turned and twisted, say in laws around ‘operational procedures’ regarding sexual violence, or however else #MeToo might have morphed, is enough to want the whole thing over and done. A turn towards being a Gentle Woman, a Trad Wife who mostly sleeps, but sometimes speaks, enough – at least – to push patriarchy along, might seem the only option.

Certainly, DWD is a failure. It made little money, was lampooned in popular media, and the film, especially its woman director, was marked as problematic, even cancellable. The hard sell of women’s pleasure in the teaser became obscene to many feminist viewers, when it was revealed that the woman receiving, Alice, was, in fact, in a coma; the very opposite of ‘woke’. However, as I wrote at the outset, a failure might also indicate something. We can see in the film throughout, though I have focused on the ballroom scene here, missives to #MeToo; its post as ‘Me Too’ and its ostensible shortcomings. These are shortcomings which, I think, speak to any movement which holds fast to an anchor, rather than takes the signifier as a – yes – cut (not cancelled nor an extraction) or steer through the discursive politics of the social. It is worth returning, then, to noise as a vociferated object as potentially generating the steer required to move forward, rather than loop on the object-drive of anxiety. In the latter part of Lacan’s SX he suggests that, if approached awry, anxiety can push the subject towards their desire (2004/2020, pp. 242, 312). That is, fundamentally, anxiety presents us with lack of lack but also, it is not without object – the petit objet a which marks the lack and cut requisite of the desiring subject. Desire, too, is not without anxiety. We can best realise this by considering che vuoi? as a noisy hook in the graph of desire; one which demands a desiring response. Recall, while the scopic drive presents us with a smooth specular image which staves off desire, noise might interrupt and open onto the objet petit a (Lacan, 2004/2020, pp. 254, 255). The question of what women want after Me Too, if made noisily, rather than via recourse to the smoothed fantasy of slogans and commodified spectacle, pushes us elsewhere than the lack of lack and stuck in place-ness of anxiety. To seize what anxiety offers, to hear through the content, towards the humming remainder, which only fissures over the lack, and break that open, only then can we truly pose a reckoning to patriarchy.