Review / Personal Essay by Paige Taylor
Content warning: this essay contains spoilers for Promising Young Woman and discussion of sexual assault.
“This book does not have a happy ending. The happy part is there is no ending, because I’ll always find a way to keep going.”
– Chanel Miller, Know My Name
It’s an unusual time to watch movies, isn’t it? It’s an unusual time to do anything, really. With every masked gathering of loved ones, every trip to the grocery store, every time I craft a corporate email, I can feel the blanket of “not normal” quietly muffling me from ever being completely present. A part of me is always waiting in that lobby, wondering when someone will come out to deliver the message that I’m free to go home.
A few days ago I watched Promising Young Woman outdoors around a bonfire with a small group of masked friends. The picture quality wasn’t done any favors by the projector, the speakers weren’t nearly loud enough, and I could never quite get as warm as I wanted to be, but I was grateful as I always am, for the companionship.
Based on the trailers I had seen, I went into the film expecting a bubblegum-style revenge thriller – something I’d enjoy on a surface level and then not think about for a while. But as the movie gradually marched towards the end of its runtime, I could feel that person who normally waits in the lobby begin to quietly walk down corridors I normally avoid. Along this journey I sifted through painful memories of my own trauma, dusting off conversations with faces I used to regard with fondness, feeling feeble echoes of the emotions that temporarily stripped me of my personhood years ago.
Promising Young Woman’s protagonist Cassie, played by Carrey Mulligan, is a 30-something medical school dropout whose entire life is shaped around avenging her best friend, Nina. We learn that Nina had been raped by a boy named Al Monroe at a party while others watched. After the school does nothing and no one except Cassie believes her, Nina is driven to suicide. The story of the film takes place years later, and Cassie has never moved on. By day she is a dry, cynical barista and by night she preys on would-be predatory men by pretending to be a completely intoxicated easy target before turning the tables on them. When her love interest Ryan, played by Bo Burnham, informs her that Al Monroe is getting married and leading a normal life, Cassie hatches a plan to seek revenge on all those involved in Nina’s rape and subsequent death.
The premise is compelling enough, the imagery is sugary sweet and contrasts nicely with its dark interior, and the needledrops are sure to get a crowd of 90’s kids’ toes-a-tappin’. But towards the end, we see Cassie suffer a drawn-out, shocking death. And I can’t help but wonder…
Who is this for?
Because it certainly isn’t for someone like me, a survivor of sexual assault. If it was for me, there would be catharsis, there would be hope, empowerment. In an interview with Deadline, director Emerald Fennell says, “There is a reason women do not resort to violence. Because they fucking lose when they do.” She defends her decision for the story to stay rigidly in reality, claiming that fighting off an abuser would only perpetuate the damaging idea that women can physically fight their abusers.
Unpack this with me.
It is irresponsible to show women physically punishing rapists, but it’s okay to show them luring “nice guys” from bars so they can give them lectures on rape culture? It is important to showcase the grim reality of the cross that women bear, but the only solution we can offer is to lose every bit of your soul to grief and rage, die at the hands of abusers, and allow our judicial system to handle the rest?
Speaking of grim reality, it’s important to note that Fennell was largely inspired by People v. Turner – the 2015 criminal trial of Brock Turner, who sexually assaulted Chanel Miller while she was unconscious on Stanford University Campus. The entire reason why this case garnered so much outrage in the first place, is because the US Judicial System failed. Turner only served 3 months in county jail and was described by his judge as a “promising young man.” And despite this reality, somehow, the happy ending that Fennell’s film presents is one where our heroic judicial system saves the day.
Who is this fucking for?
This movie had painful memories come flooding back to me. I remember walking in a hungover daze, unable to fully grasp that someone I cared about had betrayed my trust so profoundly. I remember carefully telling my friends what had happened as I tried to shake the shock from my addled mind. I remember my former best friend patting my hand and telling me, “I’m going over to his place to get his side later. Thinking about you.” I remember my disbelief as I watched my friends scrutinize my story, my rapist later tugging on their heartstrings enough with his tears to turn them against me. I remember the empty consolations and canned responses, the free therapy I joked my way through, the showers I stood in wondering if the sensation of being violated that permeated through my skin, would ever go away.
But the thing that I remember the most, the thing that stands most sharply in my mind, is the moment I rehashed my story weeks after it had happened, to my sister. I recited the events of that night emptily, expecting the same distanced response. Instead she looked me in the eyes, her own welling with tears, and she told me, “I am so sorry, Paige” and she pierced through my numbness, and we both cried together. It was what I had needed. I needed someone to not only acknowledge my pain, but feel it with me. To share my hurt. To believe me.
How could a filmmaker create a character like Nina, kill her without the audience ever knowing her, and then create the only character who felt her pain and loved her, and kill her too? How could they let a woman be murdered – who represents vindication, justice and empathy – and let it be the only visceral scene of on-screen violence?
Don’t get me wrong, I recognize that the movie is intended to be eye-opening and it includes are insights I was grateful to see put into words. It is mentioned over and over that Nina is forgotten but her rapist lives on at the forefront of everyone’s minds. This is another reference to Chanel Miller, the student who was assaulted by Brock Turner, who later wrote a book called, Know My Name: A Memoir, in an effort to re-appropriate her identity into public consciousness.
It’s also important to remind people that rapists and rape-apologists can be anybody, even people we love. The film does a great job illustrating that, and how allowing them to live on unpunished turns them into toxic people that imbue every facet of society, strengthening the system that allows abusers to live out their “promising” futures. I think both those points are excellent ones and I am not dismissing their value.
But by the end, by making Cassie’s death the “gotcha” of the film, and by offering no positive solution or consolation, the movie becomes a vessel of buzzwords, hashtags, and #girlboss posturing, a neon pink marketer’s dream – a product of women’s pain nicely packaged and commodified.
Not every survivor needs revenge, and the path of healing is different for everyone. The one universal thing we do need is the knowledge that recovery is worth fighting for. Despite being inspired by Chanel Miller and writing a screenplay in her honor, Fennell neglected the most important message by Miller that every survivor needs to hear:
We conquer our abusers by continuing to live.
“You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine. It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do.”
– Chanel Miller, Know My Name