Olivia Wilde was Coked out to do this

Monoculture back, sadly

The average man born in the United States is expected to live for 77 years. This figure is apparently declining, but that feels like somebody else’s problem. That’s 28,105 days. 674,520 hours. If you’re average, that is.

I’ve recently reached the stage of my life where I find myself quite preoccupied with death. Not in the “lurking around every corner” sense, in the “immediate,” but death as an unavoidable finality. The prospect of death as investing tremendous importance into how I spend those 674,520 hours – death as the guarantee that these hours are non-refundable.

Last week, I spent just over 2 of those 674,520 hours watching Don’t Worry Darling, which Wikipedia describes as a 2022 American psychological thriller film directed by Olivia Wilde and which in reality is a movie I saw because of Twitter and TikTok. I’m not interested in ragging on this movie. It was fine enough. It had something to say about gender politics, and people who appear far more qualified than I to opine on the topic seem dissatisfied with its conclusions and approaches. Apparently, it made Jordan Peterson cry. He seems to cry often. All of that strikes me as none of my business.

What is, definitionally, my business is figuring out how I found myself in a relatively packed theater on a Saturday afternoon out of a sort of felt duty to watch an unremarkable movie. The achievement of Don’t Worry Darling is entirely metatextual, a collective performance art piece in which you, the viewer, are brought to the theaters to see a perfectly regular movie about (spoiler, I guess) virtual reality out of a duty imposed on you through your interactions with virtual reality – Twitter and TikTok.

As recently as a few months ago, I did not know who Florence Pugh was. I had heard her name, but to the best of my knowledge she was the Florence whose Machine put together “Dog Days Are Over,” a song I heard a lot when I was drunk in college. I knew Harry Styles to be the creator of the watermelon sugar song that I disliked tremendously (this was before he ripped off a Beach House song, triggering a sort of Pavlovian “indie pop” response that has led me to kind of fuck with the guy). I did not know that Olivia Wilde was married to Jason Sudeikis.

I now know about these people and things. I have opinions on them, I am aware of their dramas. I cannot explain to you precisely why you should care, but I can tell you that Olivia Wilde called Florence Pugh “Miss Flo,” that Harry Styles may have but likely did not spit on Chris Pine at the Venice Film Festival. I learned of these people through their drama. I learned of their drama because other people knew of their drama. I knew of this all because of Twitter, which knew of these things because of the yeoman posters of TikTok, the backbone of our online-offline ecosystem. I think the people sitting next to me in the theater knew these things too. They laughed every time they saw Chris Pine on the screen. Is this what it feels like to be a part of the culture?

The Don’t Worry Darling drama, like the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial before it, are things that I had no interest in or business learning about. And yet I absorbed both through something like osmosis, understanding them to be worth my fleeting time only because they seemed to be worth the time of others. Both phenomena were, beyond the shadow of a doubt, deeply astroturfed.

Netflix used to, and still does, try this shit all the time. You see memes from a strange mix of obvious bots and people inexplicably deemed “influencers” and think to yourself that maybe you should just watch Squid Game. But where those marketing campaigns feel as overtly artificial and cringe as the tweets where Sunny D, the juice company, says it has depression, new modes of astroturfed interest read as shockingly authentic. Marketing teams are no longer offering pale imitations of whatever the algorithm has deemed relevant; they are gaming and rewiring the algorithm itself. Culture, of course, follows.

And so there’s a sort of rewarding irony to be uncovered in Don’t Worry Darling if you care enough to try. The movie, which concerns an unraveling, simulated, days-gone-by male fantasy brought into existence by the fantasized incel-adjacent desire for “return,” is made relevant only through its marketers’ use of new technologies to offer viewers an escape from meaninglessness into the safety of the past. Celebrity dramas. A common understanding. The Internet, which appeared to have slayed the monoculture once and for all, recast as a tool to shepherd us all to the same places again, care about the same things again. Web 3 is coming, they say, but until then it’s clear that marketers have, after much trial and error, mastered the language and logic of the one we have.

So, if you haven’t yet seen the movie, take care to more wisely spend those two hours of your life. Feel free to not care about these things for as long as you still have the choice.