| Director(s) | Emerald Fennell |
| Principal Cast | Carey Mulligan as Cassandra/ “Cassie” Bo Burnham as Dr. Ryan Cooper Clancy Brown as Stanley Jennifer Coolidge as Susan |
| Release Date | 2020 |
| Language(s) | English |
| Running Time | 113 minutes |
Charlie XCX’s “Boys” plays accompanied by a montage of men’s hips thrusting and gyrating in a bar setting. A pop song that means something more.
The song’s accompanying music video is a view on alternative masculinity – men commit to performing “sexiness” in alternate fashions [1]Kim, M. (2018, March 17). We need to talk about charli xcx’s very important “boys” video. Retrieved February 09, 2021, from … Continue reading. The video showcases men acting like prototypical women in sexy photoshoots, but treats the whole endeavor as more wholesome. The result is a exploration of the ranges of masculinity. As a result, the song’s hook, “I’ve been busy thinking about boys,” comes to mean something far more. It’s thinking about alternative instantiations of masculine agency. Promising Young Woman operates in a similar fashion- it has a lot to say about the way power and gender operates under its stylized poppy exterior.
The montage ends and the movie moves to a conversation among 3 men in the bar who engage in “locker room” talk. It starts off with them trashing on some coworkers until they notice Cassandra, a seemingly inebriated and thoroughly “wasted” woman, laying passed out on some couches.
The group’s insults turn towards her as they cast judgement on her poor decisions. If anything happens to her it’s her fault for not taking care of herself – rape culture. One member of the group, Jerry (Adam Brody), feigns worry about Cassandra’s state and goes to help her get home. He lets his friends know and they immediately and holler – the implication is clear. Rape becomes an in-joke – consent is murky and she was asking for it, but it’s all a joke so there’s plausible deniability. The moment he gets her out of the bar and into a rideshare vehicle, he announces that his apartment is “close by” and actively changes the GPS end location. He tells Cassie they can have some drinks at his place. The man who was concerned about the drunk girl getting taken advantage of takes her home to give her more alcohol. Did we expect something different?
Meanwhile, the cab driver feigns ignorance. It doesn’t matter that a drunk woman is being escorted by a stranger blatantly taking advantage of her. We’ve met 4 men so far -3 were willing to look past the obviously drunk woman being escorted by someone she doesn’t know while 1 is fine taking her home despite knowing she can’t consent to anything . Complicity is not direct participation says the former group but that complicity is what serves as direct affirmation for the latter person. As such everything becomes forgiven.
Unfortunately for Jerry, he’s finally run into someone who can’t forget and definitely can’t forgive. As he removes her underwear despite her protests and questions about what he’s doing, she looks up directly at the camera- at the audience – to clue us in on on a little secret; she’s the one who’s in charge. No longer relegated to the periphery of society, she flips the script and reveals her drunk performance was nothing more than bait set out to lure prey to her.
Furthermore, the way she carries over her “gotcha” look from the audience to Jerry reflects the way that the problems the latter represents are endemic in society proper, not just the world of the movie.
She had “been busy thinking about boys” all along – their agency, their ability to inflict violence, their nice guy personas, the way society actively helps protect/enable them, and had decided that enough was enough.
The movie cuts from Cassie revealing to Jerry that she’s very much conscious to her walking down the street, a red smear on her leg. In a typical revenge movie, this smear would be blood- the presence of the torture that Cassie enacted on Jerry in her “revenge”. However, this is a movie that’s painfully aware of narrative conventions and subverts them in an attempt to interrogate the underlying logic of a phallocentric society – one where rape culture, as the movie demonstrates heads on , is pervasive and built into the “rules”. The camera continues to tilt up and reveals a similar huge red smear on Cassie’s arm. However, it’s made immediately apparent that the red smears aren’t blood but are jelly from the doughnuts instead. What we thought to be blood turns to be something far more innocuous instead – violence transformed into something sweet and sugary.
As she continues to walk, Cassie is accosted by cat-calling construction workers across the street who deride/shame her for having had a crazy night out. They laugh at her. She stares back at them. She is unmoving. She is unfazed. Her gaze unsettles them to the point of distress. They immediately call her a spoil sport and go off. Her refusal to play along to the scripted relation by frustrates them. She continues on her path until she gets home. Once she’s inside her room she retrieves a journal, flips through dozens upon dozens of pages, deliberately and aggressive adds a count to a tally which appears to be color coded, flips to another section of the journal, and then proceeds to write out the name Jerry in a list that contains a staggering number of names. What’s been done to Jerry or any of these other names is still unknown at this point.
This is simple, clean, and effective visual storytelling. It’s immediately clear that Cassie has been playing rape culture vigilante for a while. The throng of names and tally marks give an indication of the count, but the way that indentations bleed from page to page show brutal and destructive the whole endeavor has been for Cassie. Hundreds of people have tried to do God knows what to her to the point where she has a healthy running tally. No wonder she’s so fatalistic. How does one live in a world where one is constantly reduced to a passive object that can be casually used and discarded?
Her name Cassandra is fitting. In Greek myth, Cassandra is a princess who catches the eye of Apollo, rejects him, and then is cursed with the power to tell of prophecies that will come true but that no one will listen to. [2]“Cassandra.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Cassandra. A woman cursed by a man for rejecting his advances who is then condemned to tell the truth but be ignored. That description seems to hit a lot of marks especially as we proceed through the story. Given that Cassie’s prophecies are doomed to be ignored the question becomes how does she exercise agency? How can rape culture be fought when it’s part and parcel of society at large – when people hear the truth but choose to ignore it? This is where the movie’s play and subversion on narrative ideology comes in.
The revenge story is the cultural mythos of this society – a man who is wronged in some way musters up the wherewithal necessary to beat down whomever stands in his way whether it involve underground criminal organizations or covert government forces. Even when women are written in as the leads, the way they deal with the problems and scenarios doesn’t differ in a meaningful structural level. The “good” guys win and the “bad” guys lose. The overall result is a kind of propaganda that doesn’t meaningfully wrangle with subjectivity. Promising Young Woman does the opposite of this by having Cassie act with a distinct womanhood. It recognizes that the world forces certain vantage points upon people based on their social position and actively positions the narrative and its development around Cassie and her subjective orientation towards the dominant social order.
Everything from the way she deals with her night-time vigilante situations to the way she handles her fundamental revenge mission plays on familiar tropes (look back to the aforementioned doughnut example). By placing her in typical revenge confrontations and delaying the reveal of what she actually done, the movie forces us to examine just how brutal the rules of the social order are for some while they’re unfairly stacked in the favor of others. We have images of what we think Cassie has done which help reveal our complicity in/normalization of the system and the movie cleverly shows us how out of depth we are when it reveals what’s actually happened. Furthermore, Cassie’s relation to her trauma is kept as anonymized as possible – there’s no “face” to attach to it per say. It makes placing yourself in Cassie’s shoes incredibly easy because her relationship becomes something more universal – the anonymization helps showcase just how deep seated rape culture is and how devastating it can be to all involved.
The end result is a striking dialogue that engages the audience on multiple levels. It becomes clear just how integrated certain ideas are within our psyches and how they colors our view on envisioning the realm of possible action, both for ourselves and other people. It shows us just how easy it is to distract away from violence by framing it in more abstract terms – a sweeping under the rug that does nothing but tidy the mess. This is reflected in the structure of the movie, which uses Cassie’s orientation towards her trauma as a way to constantly change the genre. As her character arc progresses the movie goes from thriller/black comedy, to rom-com, to drama, to fantasy with some some great transitory bits in between. Each of these moments uses Cassie’s character disposition, the music, the use of montage (like the one that starts the movie), and so on to reveal a vantage point that women can occupy in respect to a male dominated order. Some of these genre moves feel abrupt (ex: a rom- com styled dance sequence that pops up out of nowhere is a common criticism I’ve seen in some reviews) because they are meant to critique the way these issues are normally pushed aside in favor of more lighthearted and palatable discussions – the range fantasies go in concealing the true nature of what’s going on.
Structurally the movie makes use of a list of targets from Cassie’s journal as a framing device. This directly ties form to content – the story (movie proper) is Cassie’s tale. This is the story she’s writing and the framing mechanism does an important job in both establishing the way she thinks about how to deal with her trauma and what “winning” against the same looks like. Each genre shift forces you to think about what her agency means. There are multiple moments where you’re left wondering if her range of choices were really as limited as presented or if that limitation was meant to reveal something else entirely.
Holding all these strands together is Cary Mulligan’s standout performance as Cassie. She’s the emotional center of the movie and single handedly helps every story thread come together in a cohesive and moving fashion. Her deadpan delivery along with her witty dialogue makes her easy to root for. The anger by which she emotes make it easy to understand how serious what she’s dealing with is. There are moments where she moves around on the camera like a hunter- slowly pushing her target to the corner of the frame trapping them – cornering someone in the most literal sense of the term. The ease by which she controls situations makes it apparent that she’s skilled. It all coms down to one thing – Mulligan knows how to show the depth of what she’s going through which makes Cassie’s subsequent arc coherent and believable while still using it to explore social positions. This is also why so many members of the supporting cast were cast from likable comedians/actors who immediately make us trust as opposed to doubt them. The movie uses this previously built trust to reveal how deep seated and ubiquitous rape culture is and the danger inherent at the heart of it – anyone can hurt you and appearances are deceiving.
The end result plays like a Gothic fairy tale, albeit one with a bubblegum pop aesthetic as opposed to the traditional black and white palette. The traditional pop songs and the vibrant use of colors, namely pink and blue, come off feeling as something reclaimed as opposed to something campy -they are the artifice of womanhood that must be taken seriously. Likewise, the story actively forces you to engage with the point it’s trying to make, not in a way that’s preachy but in a way that demonstrates the ideological maneuverings we use to obstruct and get around difficult issues and conversations. Most importantly, it tells a story that needs to be heard because of how lasting and important it is. The way the movie tackles issues of culpability, consent, systemic injustice, and the manifestation make it essential viewing, but it’s presentation and examination of the way ideology plays into these demarcating these thoughts makes it an absolute masterwork.
REPORT CARD
| TLDR | Promising Young Women is the type of debut that gets you excited for the director’s future movies. Fennell takes an idea – what does “real” agency look like in a world where rape culture is built into the way that world operates – and explores it in a way that actively gets the audience involved in examining their own prejudice while being wholly committed to a strong singular vision. The movie utilizes a bubblegum pop aesthetic comes in both the c olor palette and music choice giving this Grimm fairytale an updated makeover that’s infectious, fun, and serious. The script’s genre jumping tendencies gives Mulligan a huge canvas to play on which gives the story the emotional core it needs to sustain its more intense beats. The elements come together in a truly ambitious fashion that help it more than deliver on its promise. |
| Rating | 10/10 |
| Grade | A+ |
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