Even for those demonstrably uninterested in teenage heartthrobs, it was impossible to ignore when One Direction became the world’s biggest boy band in the 2010s. Of the five members of the band, it was almost ridiculously easy to see which one was the star. It was Harry Styles, the knight of the piercing gaze and fluffy locks. When the five of them stood there in a row, dressed in perfectly matching clothes, that’s what Styles’ eyes were drawn to, always. It’s almost ten years later, One Direction is history and Styles has become the world’s biggest pop artist. Perhaps it is because he brings with him a mixture of presence and distance. Styles has an open and sometimes painful presence, while at the same time preserving a kind of mystery. He gives the impression that he thinks his own way. This is part of the effective cocktail that created Frank Sinatra’s meteoric career in his time. The play with androgynous and feminine expressions gives him an unpredictability reminiscent of Styles’ role model David Bowie, although for now perhaps without the same innovative power. Still, it’s fair to say Styles has been floating on a good tailwind in recent years. The teenage girls who were One Direction fans have stuck with him, the parents’ generation like him to be inspired by old heroes like Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell, and for fashion designers and photographers he is something close to the perfect mannequin. But when Styles was in Venice in August to attend the film festival there, what was written about him was so negative and so heated that the internet was near melting point. What had happened in the meantime? While Harry Styles was soaring towards the stars, actress and director Olivia Wilde was planning an ambitious film project, a sort of feminist thriller from the fifties entitled “Don’t Worry Darling”. Wilde also had a nice buoyancy. She was on the cast list in blockbusters such as “Tron: Legacy”. She was engaged to the archly sympathetic “Ted Lasso” actor Jason Sudeikis and had two children. She had also been celebrated for the feminine coming-of-age comedy “Booksmart”. There had been a bidding war for the distribution rights to her next film, which did not diminish when the cast was announced in the spring of 2020. It was fronted by Hollywood’s favorite, Florence Pugh, who had given an effortless toughness to all the roles she had portrayed so far – and the film city’s powder keg, the rising, intense Shia LaBeouf. Also set to star in the film was Chris Pine, the man who in the informal competition of who is Hollywood’s hottest Chris (against Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans and Chris Pratt) is known as the thinking woman’s Chris. Take a breath now. In autumn 2020, it will be known that Harry Styles will replace Shia LaBeouf in the lead role in “Don’t Worry Darling”. A couple of months later, Wilde says that it is over between her and Sudeikis. In January, she and Styles are spotted holding hands at a friend’s wedding. At the same time, the professionally careful Pugh and Pine are said to have been annoyed that the relationship between the director and the pop star made the recording difficult, and that it was difficult to find the two when they were needed on set. Nick Kroll, Florence Pugh, Chris Pine, director Olivia Wilde, Sydney Chandler, Harry Styles and Gemma Chan on the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival in early September. Photo: Joel C Ryan / AP But the real drama only begins when the film is finished and the marketing begins. At a promotional event, Wilde is handed summons papers on stage, in connection with the child custody case between her and Sudeikis. Her glowing descriptions of the sex scenes in “Don’t Worry Darling” apparently irritate Florence Pugh, who speaks loudly of feeling that her work is reduced to a few erotic moments and eventually withdraws from marketing the film. When Wilde says that she fired LeBoeuf because he created an unsafe atmosphere on the film set, LeBoeuf responds by releasing a video of Wilde begging him to stay on the film project, in which the director apparently speaks condescendingly of Florence Pugh. Then we are back in August this year. Styles and the others are in place during the prestigious film festival in Venice, where “Don’t Worry Darling” will premiere. Pugh skips press conference. Styles gives some vague answers to the reporters for which he is thoroughly ridiculed. The internet, which is paying close attention to everything that happens, interprets the session to mean that Chris Pine looks distant and contemptuous whenever Styles speaks. And during the premiere itself, someone claims to see Styles spit in Chris Pine’s lap inside the cinema hall. Half of Twitter and probably 2/3 of Instagram sit and squint at a video clip of a few seconds, trying to figure out if anything wet leaves Styles’ lips. The promotional tour for “Don’t Worry Darling” is the perfect PR disaster. Where it is obvious to all that there is a huge gap between facade and reality, between the collected, enthusiastic and glamorous front that producers and PR apparatus usually demand, and the chaotic, human knot of crushes and insults, irritation and need for mark that lay behind. The film, for its part, is raked over the embers by a united body of critics, who seem to save the worst adjectives for Styles’ interpretation of the role. It could look to my sant as if he, the controlled superstar, had finally found something he couldn’t, well, control. Not on the cinema screen and not outside of it. It didn’t help that his acting as a bisexual police officer in the upcoming “My Policeman” is also getting rave reviews. But then the story takes another turn. Because despite the pitch-black reviews, “Don’t Worry Darling” is doing very well in cinemas. It brings in nineteen million dollars in the opening weekend in the USA, and also becomes the fourth most watched film in Norway. Why has “Don’t Worry Darling” become a success? Is it as simple as that all PR is, in fact, good PR? In any case, all the scandals have meant that far more people know about the film than would otherwise. But it is more complex than that. The strong opening weekend says something about the love Harry Styles has built up over the past few years, and that the interest in everything he does is too strong to be swayed by negative reviews. And it may say something about which story the audience is really interested in. Film magazine Variety’s commentator Owen Gleiberman has a cunning perspective: The interest in everything Harry Styles does is too strong to be swayed by negative reviews, writes Inger Merete Hobbelstad. Photo: ANDREW KELLY / Reuters If you were captivated by the soap opera surrounding the filming and promotion of “Don’t Worry Darling”, the film itself is simply an episode in this soap opera, something you have to watch to better understand the other story. The film can, perhaps, give hints and pointers about who felt and did what to whom when the camera was not rolling. While all this is happening, Putin is threatening the world with nuclear war. And there is perhaps something of the third reason why melodramas like this engage so basally and widely. When you’re sitting there squinting at Harry Styles’ mouth to see if he’s actually spitting on Chris Pine, you forget what’s scary. Soap operas are not really dramatic, they are the opposite. They are respites, free minutes in a dangerous world, which for a few consecutive minutes whisper, yes, precisely, “Don’t Worry Darling”.
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Oh, Harry, Harry, Harry – Utterance
