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One of the great things about film and television isn’t the power of storytelling or the artistry and craftsmanship involved – but the tweets, memes and TikTok trends. Erin, Community Manager at Puzzle, takes a deep dive into the impact of memes on wider media. 

Whether it’s a Hollywood blockbuster like Avatar 2, or the latest season of YOU on Netflix, the internet is bound to meme it. Take Stranger Things, for example – even a year after the latest series, we’re seeing Stranger Things inspired CapCut templates dominate TikTok. 

This can do wonders for exposure – if I hadn’t seen memes about Netflix’s Wednesday, I probably wouldn’t have watched it. The same goes for M3GAN – I had to see that dance scene after it was all over TikTok. But it can also have the opposite effect. Avatar 2’s reception helped me decide I definitely did not want to sit through hours and hours of another Avatar movie (especially when I didn’t love the first one). 

Then, there are instances that are a little bit of column A and column B – maybe it has all the right ingredients, but the recipe isn’t as tasty as you’d like. That’s where I am with the film we’re talking about today. It had potential to be the most scrumptious thing I had ever tasted, but instead, I filled up on online content and had a bit of a funny taste in my mouth as I left the cinema. 

Let me set the scene… it’s 2022, we’re at the Venice Film Festival in early September. There’s an awkward press conference, expensive clothes and (maybe) a bit of spitting. That’s right, it’s the ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ (henceforth referred to as DWD) premiere. 

You might have guessed where I’m going with this.That’s right, the memes. I have not been able to get them out of my head. Any time it comes up, I respond like this – and I figured if I still can’t stop thinking about the impact this movie has had on the meme-sphere, then I’m probably not alone. 

So, join me on a tour of The Film That Broke The Internet.

Stop #1 – Sad Face Harry era): 

A good place to start is the casting of the main characters: enter Florence Pugh and Harry Styles. There’s no surprise that the internet lost its cool when these two were announced as the leading roles. Fans were excited… until the first trailer was released. While this era didn’t cause as much viral content, it’s important to cover DWD’s humble meme beginnings.

The first meme centres Harry’s slightly awkward accent. TikTok took ownership of teaser clips straight away, lip syncing and quoting Styles’ lines, leading to content like this. People also took it as an opportunity to be… less than kind… about Harry’s acting skills. 

This is where Sad Face Harry was born, first making an appearance in this clip. While these memes weren’t groundbreaking, they set the tone for the DWD cinematic universe – and this example really helps contextualise how the hype phase of this movie was, like, a whole thing. 

Stop #2 – Shia vs Olivia, featuring Miss Flo:

The next important moment in the DWD universe is this leaked video that Olivia Wilde sent to Shia le Bouf, birthing Florence’s iconic nickname, “Miss Flo”. Florence’s team captioned many Instagram posts from the Venice Film Festival with the nickname, even going as far as getting T-shirts made (which you could then buy). This moment has one of the longest shelf lives of all the DWD memes. 

It was a turning point. Where we’d previously seen smaller TikTok trends, “Miss Flo” appeared in conversations from the moment this video was leaked, until… Well, we’re still seeing it now. Rather than stagnating into meme obscurity, it’s evolved into a pop culture reference. This iconic moment displayed a pretty clear divide between the cast members, building even more anticipation for the premiere. 

All of this combined brings us swiftly to the absolute chaos that was the Venice Film Festival, with Miss Flo of course featuring heavily throughout. 

Stop #3 – It feels like a movie, the entrance of Florence & other stories: 

So, we’ve finally arrived in Venice. At first glance, we have Harry and Olivia not interacting despite being in a relationship, Chris Pine’s iconic facial expressions, weird energy between the entire cast and the announcement that Florence Pugh would not be attending the press events (despite her landing literally when the conference started). There is a lot to unpack here. 

To dive deeper, Olivia says Florence is too busy to attend press events for the film. Meanwhile, Miss Flo is sipping on an Aperol spritz with her gran. With people dressing up as Florence in Venice for Halloween in 2022, and viral moments still living in our minds rent free, this is definitely one of the Internet Moments of 2022.

In addition to this, a whole miniverse of yet more long shelf life memes, brought to us by the one and only Chris Pine. We have him completely zoning out during the press conference, resulting in this incredible tweet (the inception of memes here is *chef’s kiss*). We also have his completely reasonable response to Harry Styles saying that the movie “feels like a movie”, which I think is one of the funniest things anyone’s ever said, especially about a movie they play the lead in. 

And if you thought this was chaos, you’re in for a treat.   

Stop #4 – SpitGate

In short: Did Harry just spit on Chris Pine?!

This question well and truly took the internet by storm, with internet sleuths slowing the video down to see what happened and even investigating from different angles. You need only Google ‘SpitGate’ to see what a grip this moment had on the internet. 

Reader, I’d like to take a moment to remind you that this is all happening before anyone outside of Venice has even seen the movie. 

My FYP on TikTok was literally just this moment, over, and over, and over again. It revived dead WhatsApp groups, and even my Dad messaged me asking if “that fella spat on the other fella”. 

At this point, I started to wonder if the cast had just been briefed to be as unhinged as possible to hype up the movie. I started to feel like this. SpitGate was the height of the DWD memesphere, engaging people who didn’t care about the film or the people in it, which is legendary given that, again, no one had even seen it yet.

Chris himself took his time getting around to debunking the rumours, breaking his silence a full six months later.

This service terminates here: 

Things start to die down after the movie is released. There isn’t much else popping off on the internet, with SpitGate really the last hurrah of the DWD viral content. There’s not much about the movie that can be memed, so with no more content, this brings us to the end of our journey. Fitting, no?

The internet’s response to this movie highlights the need to collectively meme-ify everything that happens within pop culture, and I can’t help but feel like being immortalised as a meme today is either one of the highest forms of flattery, or the drag of the century. There is no in between. 

It could be argued that the high-quality content we saw before the film was released outshone the actual film for most people. One of the main reasons DWD was so talked about was because of the online response – the memes are the reason it sits in so many people’s minds as a broader pop culture moment. 

Whether we like it or not, SpitGate is still mentioned, Miss Flo is still mentioned and Harry’s bedraggled look is still mentioned. It created the perfect recipe for how to go viral. If I hadn’t seen the chaos at the press conferences and premiere, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to watch the movie.

I wanted to see what Harry Styles meant when he said “it feels like a movie”, and I wanted to see the difference between Chris, Gemma and Florence in the movie versus how they were at the press events. The hype from this movie was everywhere – but can content replace the quality of the movie itself?

Well, we’ve reached a natural stopping point on the DWD Express, so I’m going to wrap things up. To sum up, do I replay SpitGate in my mind when I want to feel something? Yes. Do I think about the movie itself, like at all? No, I do not – and I think that says it all.