On Screen: What Does ‘Promising Young Woman’ Really Promise?
By: Sophie Hayssen
During the four years I attended college in Connecticut, I got used to traveling alone. The trip from Connecticut to New York City, my hometown, was deceptively difficult. Despite being billed as a quick two hours from NYC by campus admissions, the trip often took over four hours.
During the 30 minute cab rides to and from the New Haven train station l was keenly aware that I was a twenty-something college girl sitting alone in the backseat of a strangers’ car. I clutched my phone in a white knuckled grasp, made small talk, tracked the route carefully. One time, the driver turned down a street I didn’t recognize. “Where are we going?” I said my voice sharp and strained. “It’s a short cut, miss,” the driver responded, a small chuckle in his tone. Only when I noticed the sign for the local deli and the familiar concrete block of our athletic center could I breathe again.
The question of “what if…” sat heavy in my mind well after that false alarm. What if my driver decided not to take me to my dorm? How do I fight back in a moving car with my captor at the wheel? Like a lot of rape revenge movies, Promising Young Woman, a 2020 Oscar winning film from director Emerald Fennell, negotiates this string of what ifs. What if the worst case scenario occurs? What if you find yourself in a position where self-defense seems impossible? However, Promising Young Woman avoids the typical plot of “woman seeking vengeance by murdering evil dudes,” by focusing instead on psychological revenge, an intriguing but ultimately bleak, unsatisfying choice.
A med school dropout, our heroine, Cassie is still reeling from the rape and implied suicide of her childhood best friend and former medical school peer, Nina. Cassie’s preferred mode of vengeance is cerebral as opposed to gory. Among her many plots, Cassie takes ex-friend Madison out to lunch, plies her with alcohol, and questions Madison about her insistence that Nina’s rape was a consequence of drunkeness. To teach Madison a lesson, Cassie sets up an elaborate ruse to convince Madison she had her own drunken, one night stand. On the outset this premise is interesting because it acknowledges the element of psychological violence, which creates a more complicated network of culpability expanding beyond just the perpetrator, and offers potential for a fresh take on a niche genre.
A major attraction of rape revenge films is that they illuminate an avenue to justice outside conventional society, free of bureaucracy and self-explanation. Their answer to the question “What if the worst case scenario occurs?” is that the woman fights back and wins. The cerebral realm of gaslighting and victim blaming doesn’t inherently preclude Promising Young Woman from coming to a powerful answer for how women can fight their own oppression. However, the plot of the film instead chooses to go in the opposite direction, selectively prioritizing “realism” to heighten traumatic impact without thought to catharsis. The first time the audience sees Cassie threaten violence is in her climactic confrontation with Nina’s rapist, the blue-blooded, soon-to-be married Al Monroe, he overtakes and murders her. Fennell mentioned in an interview with Variety that she decided on Cassie’s fate as a testament to “realism.” She said “The moment I put Cassie in that room I knew there was no way of honestly showing [her comeuppance].” Yet the emphasis on realism and the film’s cynical eye loses all focus in the final scene of the film when we learn Cassie anticipated her death and set a plan in place to alert the authorities who arrest Al mid-wedding. Cassie’s final messages are a series of posthumous texts to Ryan, an “adorkable” pediatrician who was ultimately revealed to be complicit in Nina’s rape, ending with “Enjoy the wedding! Love, Cassie & Nina ; )”.
A generous reading of this scene would argue that it’s a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the way women can only achieve “justice” by following their most morbid instincts, but this is overshadowed by the unsettling juxtaposition of loss and victory. Police are known to be not only unproductive, but oftentimes complicit in perpetuating rape culture, a reality the film conveniently ignores. After focusing for over an hour on a woman supposedly obsessed with upsetting norms, the film choses perhaps the least rebellious, most fraught “victory” possible. In the world of Promising Young Woman, worst case scenarios are given. My cab driver would be a psycho. I’d probably end up in a ditch somewhere and my only path to “victory” is one I wouldn’t live to see.
In retrospect, this morbidity is present from the start of the film. The question of ‘Who will listen to me after I’m gone?’ lingers heavily in the way Nina is referenced and portrayed. She is never seen. Never heard from. Alluded to vaguely by other characters, who can’t bother to remember her name, much less recognize her trauma. Nina’s humanity is erased both in the minds of the character’s and the film itself. The plotline speaks to a reality of womanhood, in which society minimizes and ignores women’s trauma, which is especially pronounced for Black and Indigenous women.
It’s implied that Cassie left a paper trail because she knew if she didn’t she would never be found, and this cynicism offers a kernel of truth in the way women, LGBTQ folks, and other groups susceptible to harassment navigate the world. Even if a woman never faces sexual assault or worse,she knows the only thing standing in the way of that reality is tenuous luck. One instance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In order to protect themselves from this reality, women can enter into moments of temporal and self displacement. When I sent screenshots and photographs to my parents on those tense cab rides and hatched escape plans with friends in case their Tinder date went awry, I was fighting for a disappeared, abstract, future self. But it’s more than just planning for a future that I hope would never happen. It’s about more than just being physically found. It’s about trying to make sure that if I disappear, I won’t be forgotten.
However, Promising Young Woman doesn’t actually do anything with this potential insight. Instead, like many of the women who are enveloped in tragedy, Cassie’s life is defined by her death. Like Sarah Everard, who was murdered by a cop while walking home at night, the audience knows more about Cassie’s death than her life. The film message amounts to nothing more than an unnecessary reminder in a world where we are constantly confronted with tragedies like the Atlanta shooting earlier this year, where simply saying the names of victims is a political act.
In this sense Promising Young Woman charts no path forward, opting instead for a vision of modern womanhood that is not only non-cathartic but depressing on every level, except perhaps its pretty pink and blue aesthetic. Every supposedly “rebellious” moment adds up to nothing more than directionless pronouncements about how bad women are treated. And truthfully, I don’t think I need that. I don’t want any victories that I have to win through paranoia and morbid foresight. I just want to be able to sit in the back of a cab with my headphones on, phone in my pocket, watching the ever transforming foliage slip by as I gently nod off to sleep.
Sophie Hayssen is a freelance writer and recent graduate of Wesleyan University. Her work has appeared in Rookie, Teen Vogue, and BUST Magazine. She is a born-and-raised New Yorker who currently lives in Brooklyn. You can find more of her work here.