"Don't Worry Darling" and Black Women in Suburbia

On Margaret and the madness of being Black, female, and truthful

Warner Bros.

//Disclaimer: There are minor spoilers ahead. Trigger warning: Suicide//

In Greek mythology, a Trojan priestess named Cassandra was said to have captured the heart of the god Apollo. He was so in love with Cassandra that he endowed her with prophetic gifts. However, when Cassandra ultimately turned down Apollo’s gifts, he was so upset that he placed a curse upon her talent so that no one would ever believe a word that she said. It’s a story that I always come back to as a Black female author and journalist who, like many of my other contemporaries and those who came before us, sounds the alarm on countless issues almost too soon until those issues bubble up and metastasize. And then Black women all around the world go “we tried to tell you” or worse: there is a public outcry for why or when Black women would save us all. Whether it’s about Trumpism, global fascism, the narrow-mindedness of mainstream white feminism, or the exorbitant spending on American police forces, somewhere, a Black woman said it first and may have been punished for doing so.

I could not help but draw parallels to Cassandra, Black female mavericks, and the character of Margaret played by Kiki Layne (Beale Street, The Old Guard).

By now, you may have heard about all the controversy surrounding the Don’t Worry Darling cast members and their alleged bad blood both on and off set. I’ve seen the movie twice and though DWD is far from being a perfect film, and I had more questions than answers upon leaving the theater (both times), there are some elements that I will hold onto beyond the current media blitz. For one, the cinematography and production design are gorgeous. For another, Florence Pugh is a powerhouse and I will enjoy watching her on screen for decades to come. But most importantly, I thought it was an astute choice on the casting director’s part to cast a Black woman as the whistleblower in this story.

Don’t Worry Darling takes place in a sunny, idyllic community called Victory. The town looks straight out of a 1950s editorial spread from Better Homes & Gardens. The photography and filming took place at Palm Springs, a dead giveaway being the palm tree-lined streets and the behemoth of a desert looming above the ranch-style homes encircled in a cul-de-sac.

This is a place where the wives always stand outside at the same time to wave good-bye to their suited-up husbands. The husbands hop into their first and second generation Chevy Bel Airs and drive into the desert where they work on developing “progressive materials.” While they’re gone, the women go shopping and charge everything on their husbands’ credit cards, take ballet lessons, clean the house, and sit outside in their gardens to drink and gossip with other wives. There is no poverty, no crime, no illness. Everybody is good-looking, the weather is always beautiful, and there is neither a vinyl record, blanket, or hair strand out of place.

Minutes into the film, while Alice Chambers (played by Florence Pugh) is outside checking on her laundry, she sees Margaret dressed in all white standing outside looking determined. Alice is confused but ultimately leaves it alone. Not too long after, there is a party where all of Victory gets together and the community’s ominously charismatic leader, Frank, is in the midst of giving a speech when Margaret interrupts him. She sounds like she’s in a daze when she warns the guests that Victory is not what it seems. Her husband Ted pulls her away and Frank assures the crowd that Margaret and Ted are simply going through a rough time.

When Frank’s speech concludes and the guests continue mingling, Alice decides to go check up on Margaret, who is in some back room staring straight ahead while her husband’s back is turned away from the camera. “They’re hiding me in here,” Margaret tells Alice before Ted pulls the curtain to hide her again.

The story behind Margaret’s deviant behavior is a bit of a mystery. Bunny (played by Olivia Wilde) says that one day Margaret broke one of Victory’s cardinal rules and that was venturing into the desert. Margaret went with her son and when Margaret was found, she was by herself. She returned to Victory with the loss of her mind and her son. 

The desert as a symbol for isolation, clarity, or wondrous possibility is thousands of years old. We see this motif in The Alchemist, Holes, Slouching Towards Bethlehem… The desert can also be a site for reassessing what power and infrastructure can do to one’s sense of their own life and morality. We’ve seen in the Book of Exodus when Moses killed an Egyptian for beating an enslaved person almost to death and fled to Midian to avoid Pharaoh’s death penalty. It was in this wilderness that Moses had the burning bush moment. 

John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley: In Search of America, “The desert, being an unwanted place, might well be the last stand of life against unlife. For in the rich and moist and wanted areas of the world, life pyramids against itself and in its confusion has finally allied itself with the enemy non-life.”

This is Victory in a nutshell, and Margaret knew it. She knows the town is the unlife and the desert was where she’d be illuminated. We aren’t ever told what caused Margaret to go out into the desert in the first place but we do know that with her new perspective, she is ostracized by everyone in the community who believes her to be crazy.

Alice ventures into the desert herself and Margaret is the only person in the community who knows it. She calls Alice up to warn her again that Frank is hiding things from everyone and Alice abandons her by hanging up the phone. Soon after, Margaret dies by suicide by slitting her throat while standing on the roof of her home and Alice sees the entire scene play out. Margaret’s body disappears, Alice tries to tell people what she saw, and not even her husband Jack (played by Harry Styles) believes her. Alice is the new Margaret.

I already knew that Victory was not what it seemed because if this town is a 1950s imitation, then Black women like Margaret would not exist in this place.

If Victory is like Palm Springs, in that era, Margaret might have been in a predominately Black neighborhood that was blocked off by a row of tamarisk trees from the town’s golf course. She could’ve been part Indigenous, of the Agua Caliente tribe, who were forced out of Palm Springs due to a 1959 rule by the secretary of interior. The Great Migration and post-World War II development would’ve had folks like Jack, Alice, Bunny, and Frank running straight to suburban projects like Victory to get away from racially heterogeneous cities, also known as “white flight.”

Side note: There is a scene in DWD where Florence makes it known how uniform all the women are because they come from cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, or Baltimore. Mm.

I hated that I admitted to my own self after watching the movie that I did not understand why Margaret didn’t just leave it be. I too was caught up in the fantasy of the unlife.

Who wouldn’t want to live in a town where the champagne is always flowing, the pot roast is always tender, and women’s orgasms are prioritized?

But that’s not life. Margaret understood that their livelihoods were still being controlled by one white, male mastermind who was gaslighting everyone on a daily basis.

Critics may not like the fact that only one Black character speaks in the entire film, but I believe that Margaret did what she had to do. She was only included in Victory when she remained silent and in alignment with her white, female counterparts. Though Alice undergoes the same painful cycles of clarity, Alice gets a chance of redemption. She’s captured and taken to a hospital to be given electric shock therapy for her hysteria. 

What is echoed throughout DWD is that “There is beauty in control, there is grace in symmetry…we move as one.”  

Margaret opts out of being rehabilitated and returned to Victory by removing herself from that world completely through suicide. She does not want to be controlled any more, and arguably this was one of her few options to reclaim her autonomy. She doesn’t want to live a lie any longer that everything is perfect when it’s not. Maybe her story is the true victory. I am not celebrating her death by any means but what I am saying is that there is a history of people who take their life into their own hands rather than be controlled by an enemy. Example: Igbo Landing or seppuku.

The uniformity of everyone’s lives emerged under that large cloak of white male rule. And for some reason, I found that observation to be the most apparent throughline between Victory and the world as it is. 

The problem starts when someone calls out this hierarchy for what it is. Think of how much literature has been written on Black and Brown people who’ve grown up in suburban neighborhoods and found issues once they saw the cracks beneath the finely paved sidewalks and new tile floors. Hell, I wrote a whole essay collection on it. Now you’re crazy. Now you’ve brought your isolation upon yourself. Now you’re ungrateful. All these condemnations were slung like filth onto Margaret’s character and there was never a moment where she would have defended herself. That wasn’t just Victory. That’s America. Not the 1950s. That’s now.