Trigger warning: this article contains mention of suicide.

Though decades have passed since she was invented, the image of the perfect Western housewife of the 1950s and 60s still looms large in our culture. This woman, with her coiffed hair, mown lawn and hardworking husband, haunts our screens with a force that is at once familiar and destabilising.

We have come to associate the housewife with the uncomfortable indication that something isn’t right beneath the surface. In popular culture, she has become shorthand for a smile hiding deeper problems. Behind the doors of her picture-perfect neighbourhood, there are always dark secrets waiting to see the light of day.

And so to Don’t Worry Darling, the most anticipated film of 2022, which explores the breakdown of a housewife’s seemingly idyllic 1950s life. The glossy thriller has been generating plenty of buzz offscreen recently for a reported rift between its lead actor Florence Pugh and director Olivia Wilde. But onscreen, the story follows Alice (Pugh), a young wife living in a mid-century suburban paradise with her husband Jack (Harry Styles).

When Alice begins to question the exact nature of the work that Jack and the town’s other men are undertaking at a mysterious facility called the Victory Project, cracks begin to appear in her perfect life and even reality itself.

The film is not the only recent example of our enduring fascination with the darkness that lies beneath the existence of middle and upper-class, predominantly white housewives in pop culture. Just think of the first unsettling episode of Disney+’s Wandavision, which finds MCU favourites Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), and Vision (Paul Bettany) in an idealised but glitching suburban world, or Jessica Biel’s turn as a Texan housewife accused of the axe murder of her neighbour in Hulu’s chilling true crime series Candy. 

Dr Rebecca Feasey, a senior lecturer in media and film communications at Bath Spa University, suggests that the trope of the unravelling housewife may be a reassuring counterpoint to the “supermum” ideal, which has taken on a distinctly modern incarnation thanks to the rise of social media.

“We are told that although mothers can never live up to these unrealistic expectations, they put on a mask of perfect motherhood and rarely speak of their trials and tribulations,” she explains.

“We are therefore drawn to stories of struggling and strained mothers and housewives in a suburban setting because it makes those of us who are ourselves harried and hurried feel better about our own domestic efforts.”

Women in Western countries may have more opportunities in the workplace today than they were afforded in the 1950s and 60s, but this has not led to a significant lessening of responsibilities at home. Women in the UK still shoulder the responsibility of unpaid work, putting in significantly more hours of cooking, childcare, housework and laundry than men. Whether we work or not, many of us can relate to the drudgery of domestic labour and the way it siphons away precious time and energy that we’d much rather spend on more fulfilling pursuits.

Housewives of the screen often have extreme responses to this dissatisfaction. In desperation, the mother in the 1979 legal drama Kramer Vs Kramer walks out on her family life. Others seek to limit the expansion of their family obligations by turning to DIY or backstreet abortions, as Kate Winslet’s character does in the 2008 film Revolutionary Road. They get divorced, have affairs, and even turn to violence.

Desperate Housewives opens with one such dramatic moment, when seemingly happy wife and mother Mary Alice Young takes her own life with a gun. It sets the tone for a show that is constantly undermining the happy housewife myth, throwing a mix of both realistic and improbable challenges at the wives who inhabit the idyllic Wisteria Lane.

The show is notable for grappling with the concerns of modern-day housewives, when many other stories prefer to situate the struggles of housewives in the past. The word ‘housewife’, too, is now something of a relic from a bygone age; these days, we defer to the more family-oriented ‘stay-at-home mother’ or ‘full-time parent’.

Professor Shani Orgad of the London School of Economics says this could be to do with the way contemporary society prizes the role of ‘mother’, but hardly discusses the role of ‘wife’. In her book Heading Home: Motherhood, Work And The Failed Promise Of Equality, Orgad interviewed women who had put their successful careers on hold to take care of children. She found that, although most subjects usually justified their decision to leave work for the sake of their children, there was often an element of facilitating a husband’s career, or otherwise making his life easier, which was less discussed. “That’s something that is very hard to reconcile in 2022 when the meaning of being a housewife is very, very different,” she notes.

Orgad suggests that we are especially drawn to housewife stories set in the past because they reflect the very real concerns women still have in the present day, albeit with the safe distance of a period setting. An element of universal relatability, in other words, that continues to strike a nerve despite the supposed advancement of gender equality in modern society.

“These critiques are only possible when they’re in a very different era,” she continues. “It’s a fantasy for viewers that this belongs safely in the past.”

Don’t Worry Darling revels in its period setting. From shooting at a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, to hiring Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and A Single Man costume designer Arianne Phillips, every element is finely-tuned for a mid-century aesthetic fantasy.

But director Olivia Wilde seems aware of the double-edged sword of 50s nostalgia for women. “My version of paradise is very nostalgic and actually comes from a world that doesn’t serve me as a woman at all,” she told Variety. She has also alluded to the ways the modern, online men’s rights movement influenced how the male characters in the movie are written.

In this way, Don’t Worry Darling looks to be following another grand tradition of the housewife story: acting as a vehicle for anxieties of the age. Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives and its 1975 film adaptation set the standard for this. The story – of a woman who suspects something strange is going on with the immaculate, housework-obsessed wives who occupy her town – touches on concerns about the women’s liberation movement, the rapid advance of technology, prescription drugs, and even environmental issues.

Don’t Worry Darling, meanwhile, comes out at the tail-end of a pandemic that researchers once warned could send society back to “a 1950s way of living”. Add the threat to reproductive freedoms in the US and other parts of the world, and it amounts to a very anxious time for women.

“Women were what’s called the ‘shock absorbers’ of the pandemic,” says Orgad. “It’s meaningful that such a dystopian film comes out in 2022 in a moment when there’s such a chilling setback in terms of gender equality across the world”.

Don’t Worry Darling makes sense to us, Orgad continues, because it speaks to how “women have in some ways been forced back into the confines of lives that are oppressive.”

Images: Warner Bros; Hulu; Getty