A couple of years ago, I was a graduate student taking a class on American monsters. For our final project, we were asked to create our own monster that contended with the fears and anxieties of our own cultural moment. I chose to create a monster that embodied the #MeToo movement. Long story short, my monster was a serial killer who murdered men just before they committed sexual assault.
So of course, when I first saw the trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, I was a little furious that someone else had my idea. More than that, though, I was very intrigued (and excited about hearing Donna Missal’s voice on TV). I spent the first half of 2020 finishing my master’s thesis, which was about the role of creative work in the #MeToo movement. Promising Young Woman was set to premiere in theaters just before my deadline, but the pandemic changed that.
This is all to say that I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of years exploring the ways we talk about sexual violence on screen. Now that I’ve finally had the chance to see Promising Young Woman, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about its place in this conversation. This essay ended up being much longer than I originally planned for it to be, so you’ve been warned.
The TL;DR version is as follows:
I loved a lot of things about this movie, but I don’t know if the feeling is mutual.
I wanted higher stakes.
Whiteness is not the absence of race, and we shouldn’t act like it is.
The possibility of incarceration is not cathartic, and the first two acts of the film know that.
I want to issue a huge spoiler alert (if you haven’t seen the film yet, go stream it right now and come back when you’re done). I also want to give a trigger warning for the discussion of sexual violence.
Ok, here we go
Before I get into it, I do think it’s important to say that, even though I’m mostly going to be discussing the things that I resent about the film, I really enjoyed watching Promising Young Woman. The pastel color palette, Cassie’s muted rainbow manicure, the iconic stage-lit pharmacy, the soundtrack, they all worked for me. It’s an aesthetically pretty movie. The cast is excellent. The genre play is refreshing. The tension is also very well crafted, and it’s the kind of film I wish I could have seen in a movie theater full of other women. The dialogue is clever, and the narrative is tight. If this film existed in a vacuum, I would probably have no notes.
However, Promising Young Woman exists in, and consciously tries to reflect, our world. And I think we deserve a more radical film.
Ultimately, I think that most of my gripes with Promising Young Woman have more to do with the film industry rather than the film itself. I understand that, given the landscape, the fact that this movie is mainstream is groundbreaking and important in and of itself. I also understand that this movie made a lot of people feel seen, and it has the potential to invite a lot of other people (mostly men) to reflect on their own behaviors and beliefs about themselves and their friends. If the film had pushed any more envelopes, it probably wouldn’t have gotten the same kind of industry support it did.
My individual experience with this film is definitely informed by my own lived experiences, as well as my aforementioned thesis project. In some ways, I’m hyper-aware of and, therefore, hyper-critical about media that tackles sexual violence. The first time I watched Promising Young Woman, I felt a minor case of what I’ve started calling The Happiest Season Effect.
The Happiest Season Effect (n): when you think you are the target audience of a film about a subject or experience you have a deep personal connection to, only to watch said film and realize that you, in fact, were not the target audience
Example: Happiest Season was supposed to be a rom com for queer people by queer people, but a lot of us experienced it as a horror movie for queer people and a rom com for moderately left straight people. I felt sad and duped for days after watching it. But that’s an essay for another time.
My experience with Promising Young Woman, ironically, left me much less traumatized. However, I just kept thinking (and saying to anyone who would listen), haven’t we moved past this? Is there really anyone left who isn’t wary of men who call themselves “nice guys”? The answer of course is no, mainstream media has not moved past this and yes, the world is full of men who make excuses for themselves and the other men around them.
In many ways, Promising Young Woman feels like a movie designed to gently show men who think of themselves as “nice guys” that “nice guys” can, and often do, perpetrate violence. And that is a very important undertaking. I just wish this has been a film for people who already knew that.
If this is a horror movie, why are the stakes so low?
Of course, I was thinking about my own story (and the film’s trailer) the first time I watched Promising Young Woman. I had to recalibrate my expectations when I realized that Cassie (Carrie Mulligan) was not murdering or even harming any of the men she went home with. She mistreats, but never actually endangers, the women she seeks revenge or apologies from (although kidnapping a teen girl as punishment for her mother’s actions is inherently messed up, even if she had no intention of harming her). This was less disappointing to me on the second watch, but it’s a narrative decision that I’m still processing.
In the horror genre, women are constantly punished for engaging in sexual activity, or even for expressing or exploring their sexuality. This film had the opportunity to subvert that trope, and potentially explore what that subversion could reveal about the power dynamics and narrative implications of it. Instead, Cassie reveals that she’s sober and lays bare what the man was truly about to do, and then warns him to act better next time. We don’t see any of these men have emotional transformations (in fact, quite the opposite - one man recognizes her as the “crazy” girl his friend brought home once), which makes me think that the burden of self assessment is supposed to lie with the male viewer, rather than the characters.
This choice also maintains Cassie’s morality as our protagonist. The only choices she makes that I feel at all morally ambiguous about are the times she makes other women think they have been or are about to be harmed. The tallies in her notebook are all just men she lectured. Maybe she isn’t out to hurt men after all. Maybe her goal is to scare them enough to keep other women safe from the harm that Nina experienced.
This sense of responsibility or care for the collective is, to me, the most #MeToo aspect of the film. It differentiates the film from others in its lineage, like Teeth and Jennifer’s Body, which often focus entirely on avenging a single crime or a single victim. Instead, Promising Young Woman is expressly aware of and in dialogue with rape culture, which I think is a major reason why it is resonating with so many people.
I do wish that we saw Cassie have relationships with other women. Gail (Laverne Cox) is presumably her best friend (more on that in a moment), but Cassie doesn’t confide in her, or anyone, about the grief she’s processing or the dangerous work she takes up every night. In that respect, Cassie is, much like Dawn in Teeth, a solitary woman taking on systemic misogyny and sexual violence without the community support of other women. In my opinion, this was also a missed opportunity to break from the narrative tradition of isolating women from each other, an act that uncritically displays some of the gaps left by feminist movements that the emerging fourth wave is addressing head on.
Whiteness
Speaking of second-wave feminism, we have to talk about how white this movie is. Again, I do think that many of the issues I take with this film are issues that exist because of the entertainment industry itself. If we had more diverse representation to choose from in general, the landscape would be different. But, since this film speaks so directly and consciously to our world, I feel very comfortable holding it accountable for its silences.
Women of color experience sexual violence at a higher rate than white women, while receiving significantly less representation in media and in the mainstream iteration of movements like #MeToo. This is not to say that white women don’t experience violence, or that movies like this shouldn’t exist. However, I think it’s worth questioning the ways Promising Young Woman reproduces and participates in these existing silences without acknowledging them, especially when so much of the film is, otherwise, so self aware.
I think that the issue of race in this film has less to do with casting than I’d initially thought (though that’s still a conversation worth having), since Cassie is kind of the only (living) character with an interior life and a backstory. The only non-white characters are would-be rapists and her wise best friend. I suppose that the same could be said for all the white characters; aside from Cassie, Cassie’s parents, Nina, and Nina’s mother, everyone else is either complicit in sexual violence or attempting violence themselves.
I think that the film may have tried to avoid some criticism by making Gail Cassie’s boss rather than her coworker, but that choice kind of falls flat because Gail’s role as her supervisor has zero effect on the narrative or their relationship. She only exists in service to Cassie.
On Feminist Frequency Radio’s episode about Promising Young Woman, Carolyn Petit aptly pointed out that the narrative is, in many ways, inherently white. That observation really helped me make sense of the role of race in the film. One of the starkest examples of this is this car window breaking scene. In one of the few moments we see Cassie processing her grief in a messier, less calculated way than usual, she is sitting in her car at a stop sign, blocking the road. A frustrated man in a truck pulls up next to her, honks at her, and yells several misogynist slurs at her. Cassie responds by getting out of her car and smashing his truck’s tail lights, windows, and windshield before he drives off. As a white woman, Cassie’s anger does not endanger her, or relegate her to a stereotype that the man hadn’t already applied to her when she was parked at the stop sign. This scene is also another example of Cassie navigating dangerous situations and coming out unscathed. This may just be a narrative strategy to make the ending that much more dissonant and shocking for the audience, but it also created a pretty significant silence.
Regardless of intention, these moments in the narrative imply that, if the film is meant to exist in and be aware of our world, Cassie’s whiteness is an important aspect of the story that is never directly addressed.
There’s a lot more to say about this. I hope that the conversation about the role of race in films like this continues, but more than that, I hope that media that contends with the work of the #MeToo movement grows more critical of the silences and pitfalls of the mainstream iteration of the movement (i.e. centering the experiences of cis straight white women). And I hope that the media that’s already doing that work (like I May Destroy You) gets the recognition it deserves.
The Ending (Spoiler Alert Final Warning)
To be honest, after watching Promising Young Woman a second time, I’m not even mad that Cassie dies. It’s a brutal scene to watch, and it surprised me on the first watch, but it’s also the only plausible and logical conclusion to Cassie’s mission. I also think that her murder serves the thesis of the film well in that it places the behavior of Al (Chris Lowell) and his friend Joe (Max Greenfield, or as I call him, Schmidt) on a continuum of violence. It demonstrates that the leap from college-days rapists to men who don’t hesitate to burn a woman’s dead body to protect themselves from repercussions is not as far as we might want to believe.
The scene after Cassie has been murdered and Joe (Schmidt) is hugging and comforting Al and telling him it isn’t his fault has really stuck with me. It was subtle enough that I didn’t feel like I was being hit over the head with subversion, but I did feel the discomfort and sadness of knowing that these men are capable of giving support and comfort, and even delivering a speech similar to the one that Cassie probably gave Nina after she was assaulted. I hope that parallelism wasn’t lost on the men this movie was made for.
The resolution of the film (cops showing up at Al’s wedding to arrest him on circumstantial evidence) felt jarring and weird to me for a few reasons. Up until the ending, the film presents the reality that our justice systems generally do not serve survivors of sexual violence, only to turn back on itself and offer us a solution within the same system that drove Cassie to vigilantism in the first place.
The truth of the matter is that carceral feminism is not feminism. Al’s dramatic arrest in the middle of his wedding doesn’t give me any closure because we’ve just watched him and men like him be protected and upheld by the justice system for the whole film, and because if this film has any relationship with our reality, it’s not believable.
Even when Ryan (Bo Burnam), who Cassie just broke up with because she learned that he was complicit in Nina’s assault, is questioned by the police about Cassie’s whereabouts after she’s gone missing, the cop who questions him really leans into the boys’ club cliches. His words feel very obvious, like Dean Walker (Connie Britton) when she explains to Cassie that she has to give every young man accused of rape the benefit of the doubt. The conversation between the cop and Ryan seems like a nudge to the audience; we’re supposed to recognize it. It’s another moment in the film that seems to be aimed at men in the audience rather than the man on the screen, because Ryan doesn’t seem to have any emotional development or introspection around the realization that his friend probably murdered Cassie. In fact, he still goes to his wedding a few days later.
It is very clear, for me at least, that the ending of the film is supposed to be cathartic. The chorus of “Angel of the Morning” swells as Ryan receives Cassie’s impeccably scheduled text messages, and Al is arrested while taking wedding photos with his bride. As far as Cassie is concerned, Nina is avenged.
But we’ll never know if Nina is avenged because we’ll never know what Nina would have wanted because she’s dead. The whole film deals with Cassie’s secondhand, or maybe even shared, trauma, which I think is an interesting and relatively unexplored topic (I could write a whole essay about their friendship but I’ll refrain for now). But, she signs off in her last message to Ryan as “Cassie & Nina,” implying that we’re supposed to feel like Nina is getting justice too.
I wish we knew what Nina wanted. The closest we get to that answer is Nina’s mother begging Cassie to stop doing whatever she’s doing, and telling her it isn’t good for anyone, including Nina.
Silencing the person who directly experienced the harm recreates the way the justice system deals with sexual violence, but not in a very subversive or even conscious way. If Nina were alive, there might be a way to actually enact revenge or, in a different kind of film, explore the possibilities of survivor-focused restorative justice. But Nina is silent and gone, and now Cassie is dead too.
I think I resent the ending so much because for a moment, I felt like the film was giving us a chance to see reality reflected and affirmed on screen, but then they closed the compact mirror and jerked us back to a fantasy land where cops solve everything. I worry that this bait and switch will coerce a lot of viewers into cheering for the very justice system that did not serve Nina when she was alive, and in turn, the justice system that largely does not serve survivors of sexual violence.
I can’t blame any viewer who does cheer. Of course we want catharsis in that moment, we want our protagonist and her beloved best friend to be avenged. But I want justice, and one man being arrested by the police for crimes that many others were complicit in is not justice.
Unlearning beliefs about the carceral system and imagining a new and better system of justice is hard and emotional work. If you’re interested in learning more about this discourse, I’d recommend the book The Feminist and the Sex Offender.
The Wrap-Up
Ultimately, though this film plays with the revenge thriller genre, I don’t think Promising Young Woman is about revenge. Writer and director Emerald Fennell has said in interviews that this is a film about the cycle of addiction, and that feels more accurate. It’s also a film about grieving, and the heavy feeling of guilt that often accompanies grief. It’s not a film about change; it’s about looking back.
Anyways, I hope that there are many essays written about the ethics and implications of this film, and I hope it opens the door for more stories like this to be told differently. Promising Young Woman is a movie that I’ll keep thinking about, and one that I’ll probably watch again. If you made it this far, thank you! I promise that the rest of these essays will almost never be 3,000 words long.
If you’ve seen the film and want to talk about it, I’m all ears. You can leave a comment on this post.
If you know someone who might want to read this, please take a moment to share it with them!
If you have a paid subscription, I’ll send you a new poem in a couple of weeks. Otherwise, I’ll be back in your inbox at the end of March with a much shorter essay about something called “Dude Salad”. See you then!
Best,
Christina