"Promising Young Woman"

The entire film world is prostrating itself in unison over the greatness of Emerald Fennell’s film, “Promising Young Woman.” Fennell is the brains behind “Killing Eve” and the first two seasons, but not the third, were very good.

For the record, this post contains numerous spoilers. Buyer beware. Also, for the record, one notes that normal syntax would have produced the title, "A Promising Young Woman." That Fennell chose to out-clever herself by dropping the article does not impress me, at the least.

Fennell's new movie, having already received many rewards and a slew of positive reviews, is unfortunately a failure. I have not read each of the hundreds of reviews, and I will focus primarily on the one that seems to have gotten it right, by Dana Stevens in Slate. Hers is impressively intelligent, well worthy of praise.

Strangely, all the reviews fail to notice that the genre Fennell is mining-- taking revenge for a gang rape-- has already given us a series of movies called: I Spit on Your Grave. 

The first of the series dates to the late 1970s, but further explorations of the theme have been produced more recently. I am not familiar with all of them, but I am intrigued by the fact that no one has mentioned them, and I am also intrigued by the fact that they, being B grade and trashy, work better than Fennell’s.

Where Fennell offers something of a psycho drama, where the best friend of the rape victim-- the latter being deceased-- seems to want to put all men in therapy, so that they can discover their repressed hidden impulses to rape women. 

The Spitting movies, as I will call them, are cleaner, more compact and better structured. They are about actions, not psyches. In them we see a simulation of a gang rape, which leads to the victim taking revenge on her rapists. In the end she succeeds in avenging herself and walks away with her head held high. Having seen images of the crime we are more likely to be with her as she exacts revenge. In the Fennell redo we do not see the crime, we do not know precisely what happened to the victim and we believe at times that the avenging angel, played by Carey Mulligan, has seriously lost her mind. She has lost her sense of purpose and even her prowess as a pseudo-therapist.

For the record, even Carey Mulligan, a superb  actress, cannot save this concoction.

The Spitting movies have a unity of action that the Fennell remake lacks. They also make far more sense.

Dana Stevens does not bring up the Spitting movies, but she offers the best and most comprehensive analysis of Fennell’s film. She takes issue with the general consensus, that the film is: 

a provocative feminist subversion of the rape-revenge genre.

I cannot imagine what that phrase means. If that is what the other critics say, they have suffered some serious miseducation. 

Stevens offers an apt description of Cassie’s therapeutic technique. 

When we first meet her, Mulligan’s Cassie is seen pulling a shrewd con on a would-be rapist. Her makeup smeared just so, her skirt hiked up to her hips, she fakes being near-blackout drunk in a bar, thereby luring a nearby bro (a shrewdly cast Adam Brody) to offer her an ostensibly gentlemanly ride home. When he instead takes her up to his place, pours her a large glass of neon-orange kumquat liqueur, and tries to get her wasted enough to assault her, Cassie waits till the very moment he starts to slip off her underwear, then snaps into icy sobriety and asks what the hell he thinks he’s doing.

This scene is supposed to produce an epiphany. It is supposed to help the man to overcome his repression of his true nature, as a rapist, and therefore, perhaps, to discover what he really is.

Among the problems here are the assumption that all men are rapists beneath the skin, or, if you prefer, in their unconscious minds. Given the opportunity they all revert to their true criminal nature. The notion that movies are designed to issue ideological driven indictments of nearly half of humanity is obviously a sign of mental deformity.

Strangely, none of the men ever really gets hurt. It is all psycho therapy:

Her recurring nocturnal expeditions to track down the shittiest men in her unnamed suburban town don’t ever seem to end in violence—despite the sly misdirection of those opening credits, where the trickle of ketchup down Cassie’s shirt as she strides away from the scene munching a hot dog is at first meant to be mistaken for blood. No, she is after vigilante justice of a different kind: She forces the men trying to violate her to confront their own worst selves. 

As I said, its therapy for toxic males-- that is, all males. To which Stevens correctly remarks that Cassie is purposefully putting herself in danger. Since Cassie has a notebook where she keeps a record of the number of men she has thusly therapied-- the marks in her notebook are like notches on a bedpost-- Stevens asks how it can happen in a small community that no one has caught on to her game. There are, dare we say, a lot of marks in her notebook.

Dare I say, this is sloppy writing on Fennell’s part. 

Stevens explains:

That a habit as dangerous as Cassie’s—the writer-director has described it in interviews as a kind of addiction, an analogy Mulligan’s performance powerfully suggests—would consistently end in little more than a successful shaming followed by a safe escape seems unlikely, but that’s one of those givens you have to accept in a stylized thriller like Promising Young Woman. Still, the premise suggests further questions, both logical and moral, that the movie’s setup quickly glides over. Are we to infer that, once they’ve been honey-trapped and exposed in this way, her marks will stop targeting intoxicated women? And in the small suburban town where Cassie lives (a place that’s never named, presumably to make it more of an Everytown), would she not have gained a reputation as the fake-drunk girl after years of pulling this stunt?

Stevens also offers an intriguing moral question. Cassie is running her crusade in order to obtain justice for someone else, for her friend Nina. Would Nina have wanted Cassie to endanger herself at this level in order to retaliate for her?

When she was in medical school years before, her best friend since childhood, Nina, was publicly assaulted at a campus party, unsuccessfully sought justice through the school’s legal channels, and—it is implied but never stated—subsequently killed herself. Cassie’s quest for retribution, then, is not on her own behalf but on someone else’s, someone who never asked to be avenged in this way and who, one could imagine, might have valued her best friend’s safety and well-being over such a high-risk performance of symbolic justice. In fact, there’s a character later in the film who points out this very fact—Nina’s mother, played by Molly Shannon, shows up in one scene to offer Cassie a comfortingly infantilizing juice box and some advice: “Move on,” she tells her, “for all of us.”

Her compulsively repeated actions on behalf of Nina, who never appears in the film except in the old photos Cassie keeps on her laptop, constitute “a violation of their friendship”—a violation that drags into its wake at least three other women, one of them completely unconnected with the events surrounding Nina’s rape.

And then there is the forced empathy issue. We have all accepted, unthinkingly, that empathy is a wholesomely good thing. It is like the old injunction to get in touch with your feminine side. So, Cassie, as part of her crusade decides to make the med school dean feel what she is feeling. Apparently, she must punish the deal for not extracting sufficient justice for what happened to Nina. I will call it forcing the woman to feel empathy. She does so by pretending that the dean’s daughter is being gang raped.

As Stevens puts it, this form of retaliatory justice makes Cassie look very bad indeed. It makes her look like an amoral actor-- not a good role for an avenging angel:

In one scene, Cassie essentially abducts the teenage daughter of the med school dean (Connie Britton) who dismissed Nina’s accusations. No real harm comes to the girl—Cassie has stashed her away somewhere safe in order to pretend to the dean that her child is at that moment in danger of being gang-raped in the same dorm room where her friend was harmed years before. But if the scene in the dean’s office is meant to give the audience the satisfaction of watching the callous administrator get a taste of her own medicine, it fails miserably. Instead, we start to lose trust in Cassie as a moral actor—a narrative choice that could be defended on the grounds of its complex “ambiguity” were it not for the ending, which, as we’ll see, depends on the audience accepting her as a righteous if damaged angel of vengeance.

The notion that the best payback for a person who has minimized someone else’s rape in the past is to be terrorized by the false belief they themselves have been raped seems at best troubling and, at worst, sociopathic.

She continues:

 It can’t decide whether it wants the audience to cheer for its heroine’s cleverness and pluck or worry about her mental and physical safety, and its attempts to have it both ways muddy the movie’s moral waters. Fennell tries to provide the satisfaction of a successful revenge plot while also questioning the possibility, or desirability, of such an outcome. 

And then there is the film’s ending, when Cassie, having trapped Nina’s rapist by handcuffing him to a bedpost, is preparing to extract punishment by mutilating him, only to see him escape from the handcuffs that hold him to the headboard. At that point, the man, Al Monroe, murders Cassie by suffocating him with a pillow. 

As for the movie’s last half-hour: How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. It’s not simply because Cassie dies, smothered to death by Nina’s rapist Al (Chris Lowell) after she infiltrates his bachelor party disguised as a stripper. Watching Cassie suffocate in real time is a near-unbearable gut punch, but I respect Fennell’s choice to undercut our expectation of a triumphant resolution.

But, Cassie supposedly has the last word, from beyond the grave. You see, she seems to have known that Al might kill her, so she sent prescheduled texts informing the police and a sympathetic lawyer about the crime. They will all arrest Al during his wedding:

As Al and his bride are saying their bad self-written vows, Ryan, a guest at the ceremony, gets a series of prescheduled texts from Cassie, alerting him that the cops are on their way. Before leaving for the bachelor party, it turns out, she had arranged for the guilt-stricken lawyer who originally defended Al against rape charges (Alfred Molina) to receive evidence linking her to the fatal gathering. As the wedding guests are heading for the snack table, sirens can be heard approaching from afar. A protesting Al is whisked away just as Cassie’s last text to Ryan arrives: “Enjoy the wedding ;)”.

Impotent rage… anyone? Stevens makes the important point that, given what happened during the bachelor party, Al will very likely plead self-defense. At which point, the victim of the revenge will be Cassie herself.

Given that Cassie invaded Al’s house, handcuffed him to a bed, and threatened to carve him up with a scalpel, won’t he easily manage to get off with a plea of self-defense? And even if he is convicted for her murder, how does that constitute justice for Nina’s rape, an entirely separate crime? I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call this resolution “copaganda,” but in its suggestion that Al’s arrest constitutes a posthumous victory for both Cassie and Nina, it doesn’t differ significantly from your garden-variety episode of Law & Order.

Stevens concludes:

There’s a crushing nihilism to the intimation that Cassie’s death was a heroic self-sacrifice on her friend’s behalf. It’s as if the movie wants to provide the audience with the satisfaction of a successful revenge plot while robbing its main character of everything the quest for vengeance was meant to give her in the first place: agency, freedom, the chance to get on with her life and make it about more than the worst thing that ever happened to her. If there are assault survivors out there who find some kind of grim comfort in this bleak-yet-cute ending, more power to them. 

Or, as Confucius said: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”