on "promising young woman"
*****SOME MINOR SPOILERS*****
There’s a scene about halfway through Promising Young Woman, the new film starring Carey Mulligan, that when it arrives it does so with such unexpected and apparent sincerity that one is, temporarily, thrown off balance. In it, Cassie (Mulligan), a medical school dropout-cum-coffee-shop-barista, is on a date with Ryan (played rather too perspicaciously by Bo Burnham), the guy who has been courting her affections with varying degrees of success for most of the movie and who, having made some headway, was distressed to catch Cassie in a handful of lies and at least one compromising situation outside of a night club a few scenes prior. Never mind, though: the scene in question immediately succeeds one in which the would-be lovers make amends. Now they’re in a pharmacy (reasons unclear) while Paris Hilton’s rapturous 2005 hit “Stars Are Blind” plays over the pharmacy sound system. Cassie notices Ryan singing along to the first verse and teases him for knowing the lyrics, which only encourages him. Soon, he’s singing and dancing around the store, using the various wares as props and making a genuine though endearing spectacle of himself. Cassie eventually joins him, in the process revealing her own deep knowledge of the zeitgeist of the early aughts. The scene becomes a montage, with shots cutting between Cassie and Ryan at the pharmacy to Cassie and Ryan in bed watching TV, or Cassie and Ryan in bed having breakfast, or Cassie and Ryan having pizza with Cassie’s manager, or Cassie and Ryan kissing at the coffee shop. You get the idea.
At first glance, the scene is corny and trite, a schmaltzy and mawkish send-up of pretty much every romantic comedy ever, and it feels disparate and out of place in the context of a film that has set itself up as a bleak and wryly funny referendum on what I am loathe to refer to as rape culture. What of the ruthless cynicism that has characterized the movie thus far? What of the humor so sharp and uncomfortable you don’t know whether to laugh or to cringe? When I first began to read about and see the trailers for Promising Young Woman, I worried that it couldn’t possibly live up to itself; when I got to the “Stars Are Blind” montage, I feared my worries were beginning to play out, that the movie was abandoning its early course for one that would deliver its heroine to the sort of happy ending that would befit a movie starring, I don’t know, Meg Ryan or somebody. I felt a sinking, preemptive disappointment.
But lo! Promising Young Woman is too cunning and fashionable to be taken for granted. Like a nefarious house cat, the moment you take your eye off it is the moment it strikes, and it isn’t long before one begins to realize just how deliberate and intentional this scene is. Just as it might in a straight romantic comedy, the montage acts as cinematic short-hand for Cassie and Ryan’s burgeoning relationship. This aspect is underscored in subsequent scenes: Cassie and Ryan have dinner with Cassie’s parents (it goes well!) and later, in bed, they start bandying the L Word about—the linchpin scene of any romantic comedy. Then, of course, a secret about Ryan comes to light, and it’s just like in Working Girl when Harrison Ford discovers that Melanie Griffith is actually a lowly executive assistant and not the powerful business woman she’s been pretending to be, except that in Working Girl, Harrison Ford can find it in himself to forgive Melanie Griffith and they get to go on saying “I love you” to each other forever and ever, which is vehemently not the case for Cassie and Ryan. For a while, it did seem like Ryan would rescue Cassie from the morose, despondent vigil she’s been holding for Nina, the friend whose death she has virtually stopped her own life to mourn, but her discovery, too awful to forgive, reorients Cassie on her mission to avenge her friend and cements her will to go toward this film’s thrilling, devastating, and surprisingly gratifying conclusion.
The romantic comedy is only one of several film genres Promising Young Woman engages, subverts, and venerates. Written and directed by “Killing Eve” show-runner Emerald Fennell, it is also a young woman’s revenge fantasy and the story of a costumed vigilante and a study of guilt, grief, and depression and a cautionary tale and a nail-biting thriller and a horror movie. It’s laugh-out-loud funny and gut-punch tragic. Influences and references come together seamlessly. The movie shocks and surprises you over and over. It will also horrify and discomfit you, or should. It left me both drained and elated.
It is the story of Cassie, a former medical student who by day works as a barista in a coffee shop where she spends her time reading, gently menacing the patrons, and chatting with her manager (Laverne Cox, who deserves more work). By night, however, Cassie prowls the local hot spots, where she makes herself appealing prey for predatory members of the dicked species by pretending to be irretrievably drunk. Indeed, “irretrievably drunk” (or “white girl wasted,” as we used to say) is how we first meet her: barely able to maintain an upright position on a vinyl booth in some tragic bar, drunkenly searching out her missing phone, her legs falling open like an invitation. Her inebriation, naturally, draws the attention of a small group of men, whose commentary is as crude as it will be familiar to anyone who has ever had the misfortune of interacting with a straight man on the internet or in real life. Girls like Cassie “put themselves in danger.” They are “disgusting” and without dignity, but still “kinda hot.” Most importantly, they are “asking for it.” One of these men, Jerry (played by Adam Brody)(the CASTING in this movie is, like the inclusion of “Stars Are Blind,” perfect, unexpected, and bizarre), volunteers to go over and check on her, and soon, under the guise of getting her home safely, he’s whisking her via Uber back to his place. He plies her with more liquor and as soon as he gets her in bed he starts to undress her, despite her drunken protestations and repeated query of “What are you doing?” The last time she asks it, though, just as Jerry’s removing her panties, it’s obvious that she’s stone-cold sober. This moment is in the trailer for the film, but it hits like a sledgehammer nevertheless. I thought of the scene in Wes Craven’s Scream, where Skeet Ulrich, before licking corn syrup and red food coloring from his fingers, reveals himself to be the killer. “We all go a little mad sometimes,” he says, quoting Norman Bates. Cassie might be of a similar disposition.
As the movie progresses, we begin to learn the motivating factors behind Cassie’s behavior, though the details come in bits and snatches. In med school, Cassie’s best friend since childhood, Nina, was publicly raped by one of their classmates. Afterward, no one believed her and her assailants were never brought to justice, and in the end she took her own life. Cassie dropped out of school to mourn her friend, and has been stuck mourning her ever since. Her clever traps are a way to both memorialize and avenge Nina, though her goals are also altruistic: the men who fall into her trap leave unharmed but with a warning. “I’m not the only one who does this,” Cassie tells one. “There’s a woman in this city who carries a pair of scissors.” “Men are afraid women will laugh at them,” Margaret Atwood famously said. “Women are afraid men will kill them.” But what if the stakes could be reversed? Cassie’s goal seems to be a balancing of the proverbial scales.
The film takes a crucial turn when Cassie learns that Nina’s rapist, a successful former classmate, is getting married. This sets into motion the film’s second half, wherein Cassie enacts revenge on specific individuals she considers to be largely at fault for Nina’s suicide: not only her rapist but also a mutual female friend who took his side, the lawyer who defended him (and, over the years, a host of other similarly accused young men), and the dean of their college, who continues to insist that “we have to give these boys the benefit of the doubt.”
Promising Young Woman is the rare film that takes seriously grimly serious issues while still managing to be broadly entertaining, but those who are expecting it to articulate anything either radical or original about its core subjects will likely be disappointed. In terms of what it has to say about the prevalence in our society of male violence against women, the film makes certain moral decisions early on and sticks to them until the end. The “not all men” faction will undoubtedly read misandry into the film’s apparent insistence on the very opposite claim, for in the world of Promising Young Woman, men are at most redeemable, and none are quite innocent. This, too, is one of its successes, for whether its representation of men is fair or even true is, for me and for the film, somewhat beside the point. It easily sidesteps some of the hallmark straw men that are too commonly employed to either distract or derail meaningful or restorative conversations about rape. It is not interested, for instance, in finding nuance where consent is concerned, instead taking for granted that not only the audience is able to distinguish between the consensual and the non, but that its male characters are similarly able. Whenever Cassie reveals herself to be sober, the men know immediately how fucked they are, because they know Cassie has not consented. Likewise, it refuses the notion that “both sides” or “boys will be boys” arguments are ever given in good faith. The revenge Cassie takes against Dean Walker (played by Connie Britton, who does what she can with her dubious talents and few lines) is as cunning as it is cruel because it makes clear that the Dean, despite what she says, knows exactly what young men are capable of when they’re left alone with nothing but their own devices and a vulnerable young woman. To any who might think this movie is hard on men, I can only say that the light most of the women are presented in is only marginally brighter.
I was thinking of Promising Young Woman on Wednesday morning as I watched Donald Trump leave the White House on Marine One in advance of Joe Biden’s inauguration, a highly irregular (or, to use a word that has been worn the fuck out over the last four years, unprecedented) exit for an out-going president. Typically, the exiting executive attends not only the inauguration ceremony, but also a number of traditional events that, however silly, act as symbolic markers of what is called a peaceful transition of power. Instead, Trump left the White House early to catch Air Force One to Mar-a-Lago, skipping not only the requisite teas and tours, but the inauguration altogether. It was a move that surprised no one, of course, and in fact is probably the most appropriate way for the man to go: before the job is done (he was still officially president until Biden took his oaths later that day), skirting the implicit responsibilities and obligations of his post. He spoke to a small contingent of (probably paid) supporters at Andrews Air Force base, going on about what a great president he was and how many good things he got done (Space Force! The economy!). He even tried to spin COVID vaccines as his own triumph, predicting that in the next few months we’d begin to see cases “sky rocket downward.” Again: zero surprises. Like all villains, he ended with a chilling vow to return, “in one form or another.”
And you know what? He’s probably not wrong. Last week, Trump became the only president in history to be impeached twice, but I’ll eat my shoe if he ends up actually convicted of anything. There’s a lot of speculation or hope that he’ll face criminal charges for crimes committed before he was president, but let’s face it: that man has never faced a consequence in his entire orange life. Many of us have known the frustration over the years of watching him evade responsibility time after time. He has so far been a living, breathing reminder that too often the bad guys get away with it; on Wednesday, he did it again, dashing off before he even had to face the electoral loss he spent so much time decrying as fraudulent, and even incited an insurrection against. What makes Promising Young Woman such a balm at the end of the Trump presidency, an era which has included national reckonings over issues of racism and sexism, is that it is ultimately concerned with justice, and with the curative power of seeing justice served. This is its most fantastic aspect: it presents a world where wrongs might be righted, or at least avenged.