Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman opens to the dreamy electronic notes of Charli XCX’s ‘Boys’, the London singer’s 2017 light-hearted anthem to days and nights spent daydreaming about good boys, bad boys, and how “the one from work can come over on Monday night.” But Fennell uses the song to create an anti-music video, setting it to aggressively quotidian close-ups of beige khakis, leather belts, blue button-up work shirts and navy ties. The montage takes the lingering slow-motion shots of mouths, pelvises, and other chopped-up body parts (prominently identified by Laura Mulvey as central to the male gaze and typical to the pop music video genre) only to affix them to subjects we are not used to seeing as objects. Fennell seems to be making the point that men are usually behind the camera, or in boardrooms where actual power lies, busy making money off this bullshit. As the camera zooms out we realise that we are looking at portly heterosexual men in their Brooks Brothers casuals. The visual gag is uncanny and funny. No matter how many times we theorise the male gaze (and increasingly the knotty notion of the “female gaze”) or cite Berger on how men watch while women watch themselves being watched, there’s still a visceral revanchist joy in seeing city bros on a night out being reminded that in an alternative feminist utopia, they too might be just another gawked-at body.
Unfortunately, Fennell never moves beyond the limits of the joke, as if it enough to display inequality by simply reversing its dynamic. Throughout the film, every word, every line, every image is delivered in service of an all-too-obvious point, spoon-feeding the audience a kind of elementary feminism (I felt the same way when, a few seconds into the recent remake of Charlie’s Angels, Kirsten Stewart was telling a generic bad guy that women could be strong too, that she was very proud of being “Miss Independent.”) But for all that is gained in service of clarity, something much greater is lost in this flattening of sexual politics into familiar forms. Promising Young Woman gives us the same old loop of identification that promises something like release, scaffolded by a culture that still believes that showing awareness of an issue will somehow magically chart the way to liberation. (The fact is that this articulation of a supposedly sparse representational territory is nearly always all too known to those who live it). In the first five minutes of the film, we see:
- Bros being dismissive towards women colleagues;
- She’s asking for it/people will take advantage;
- A “nice guy” luring a woman home under the pretence of helping her and then ignoring her protests to stop kissing her.
Meanwhile, I wondered why I was watching something that made me feel so terrible. I know this, I live it; why is it being presented here as if some great revelation – or worse, entertainment?
After this montage, the business bros bitch about a woman colleague who is tired of the firm taking client meetings at the golf club (the club doesn’t let women play). “We used to be able to go to a strip club!” one complains. They see a woman splayed semi-conscious in the middle of a blood red sofa, heavily drunk: “They put themselves in danger, girls like that.”
Promising Young Woman’s protagonist Cassandra (‘Cassie’) hunts latent predators by pretending to be wasted and vulnerable: after they take her home and try to have sex with her, she reveals herself to be completely sober, terrifying them (and more). As the film unfolds, we discover that Cassie dropped out of medical school seven years earlier to look after her childhood friend Nina, who was assaulted by their classmates and later killed herself. Cassie’s life is centred around avenging this death. Once a star student, Cassie has taken a job at a local café (a nod to the “promise” of the film’s title, though I prefer my feminist imaginations to put forward different ways of human flourishing outside the professional treadmill altogether.) She lives with her parents, who nervously try to coax her into getting her life back on track. She has no friends. Her social world is made up of extinct friendships (Nina); congenial but distant relationships (her café manager, Gail; her parents); and bastards (most men, some women). The women from their medical school who know about Nina are cold and complicit, and so Cassie feels little concern about reproducing this cycle of violence onto them too. This might have been an interesting way for Fennell to extend, and transcend, the simple reversal revenge dynamic she sets up in the opening – i.e., what happens when women willingly reproduce cycles of hurt? Who takes the collateral, and how does this map on other social fault lines, like race or class? – but like most characters in the film, these women exist as floating signifiers (“the complicit woman”) and consequently we remain locked in an initial, less interesting, set-up. Because Cassie’s revenge is isolating, empty, and endless, everything about her life hurtles her towards death. In the claustrophobic maze of Promising Young Woman’s over-familiar symbols, there is freedom only in denial and destruction, in cutting off all ties between women survivors and a blemished, compromised life.
As part of the ‘bastards’ category, Cassie runs into a litany of cartoon cut-outs pulled from the fever dreams of popular misandry: a David Foster Wallace fan who is working on an unbearable novel; wolf-whistlers who tell her to smile; a man in a fedora. There’s something deeply unsatisfying and incomplete about these interactions: Cassie’s hollowed-out emotional life, her cynicism, and blanket distaste for human interaction are understandable, but the fact that Fennell leaves this entirely unchallenged by depicting an entire world inhabited by cold caricatures is not. The viewer is given only cheap release (when it comes to men) and cheap sympathy (when it comes to the now-repentant lawyer who initially pressured Nina to drop her sexual abuse charges), as the film takes the fraught matter of gendered society and curdles it into punchline. (I was not surprised to learn that Promising Young Woman was fast-tracked through production –presumably due to the profitability of #metoo discourse – and that the film was commissioned on the basis of an unedited first draft of a script.) True to Audre Lorde’s conviction that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, I noted Promising Young Woman’s continual reappropriation of the most facile tropes of ‘male gaze’ filmmaking – protagonist on a hero’s quest; one-dimensional love interest number 1; one-dimensional love interest number 2; meta-universe full of NPCs who exist only to affirm the hero’s quest; the glory that arrives with walking on the bodies of those who considered you weak – and came up feeling empty.
Since 2016, there has been a welcome rise in films telling stories about women, sex, and power (from Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers to Kitty Green’s The Assistant to Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, to name a few). I wonder why it is Promising Young Woman that has been so embraced by the Academy. Awards are arbitrary, and the Oscars have increased their membership to include more women and people of colour. Yet I also noticed there were components to the film that, for all its apparent vengeful theatrics, felt more palatable to a taste averse to challenge: the way the film freezes pain into spectacle; how the world bears down on Cassie and eventually swallows her whole (Virginie Despentes says of the enduring erotic fascination with female vulnerability: “Yes, girls, we also find your corpses very hot”[1]); how solidarity – the kind that shakes the world; the kind that really makes the powerful feel, for once, their own wounded frailty – only exists here between dead girls. It would be one thing if Promising Young Woman wanted to speak to the futility of the one-woman revenge machine, but it then turns around after Cassie’s death (in a twist that seems so bizarre that I wondered whether it was the result of a last-minute workaround after her death was focus-tested as “too bleak”) to suggest that some victory was won after all. Though the film points to the many links in the chain that diminish women’s suffering (complicit universities; nice guys who play along; women who tell other women it’s no big deal) it is somehow the most troubling institution of all – the police – who come to the dead Cassie’s rescue. We are meant to find her final freedom in the image of a handcuffed man being escorted by detectives away from his wedding, a strange, pasted-together compromise that comes across as ideologically insulting and confused, although ideal for the Academy, which loves to slickly gesture at subversion while leaving the core tenets of the establishment unchallenged. It came as no surprise to find out that Fennell is part of the British establishment.
Perhaps Promising Young Woman wanted to be a pulpy revenge flick that did not dive too deep into the annals of grief: a Kill Bill for our times. But contra to the film’s recycling of familiar cultural tropes to drive home points already known, it would be far better to break out of the loop entirely. Perhaps to truly depict the many ways in which the world continually breaks the psyches and bodies of women all over, we might think of how to – as Jacqueline Rose writes in an essay on Eimear McBride, literary modernism and sexual violence – twist and break the very form of language and representation itself.[2] When thinking about the way Promising Young Woman explored suffering and revenge and fell short, I kept turning to another popular British exploration of sexual abuse that has not garnered similar recognition in Hollywood (and we know why.) In Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, the protagonist Arabella, much like Cassie, is frozen in time and consumed by grief following a sexual assault. But unlike Fennell’s content-driven, laser-focused pursuit, Arabella’s pain breaks loose, diverts and twists in all sorts of directions, conveyed cinematically (or televisually) through experiments in form: dream sequences; gaps in memory; the attempt to mentally pick up the pieces. The mind is more complicated than Hollywood would like to suggest. Arabella, crucially, reaches out around the world around her, to friends, family, counsellors, parents and old enemies. She is present in the world, a participant with a past, as well as a future, to claim. The slick release of gender reversals is briefly entertained here, too: Arabella has a revenge fantasy of her own, imagining identifying and beating her rapist to death after a checklist-list operation gone right. This is followed by another dream sequence in which Arabella assumes the “traditional” role of the man and his rapist, now cast as a woman. But this remains locked in fleeting fantasy. Rather than simply switching pre-determined tropes to leave us gaping at a trophy we never wanted, Coel’s “female gaze” is multi-faceted and always evolving. Perfect triumph, either over the self or the other, never arrives. Arabella has to grapple with what she knows and what she may never know. There’s just the muck of keeping on living, holding onto the people who hold you back dearly.
Rebecca Liu is an editor and writer based in London. She is one of Another Gaze’s staff writers.
[1] Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory, Profile Books, 2010.
[2] In “Writing Violence: From Modernism to Eimear McBride”, Rose writes “what might be the relationship between experiment in language and the violence of the modern world, between a truncated sentence and a truncated life?” and notes “a broken world snatched from the writer and artist their confidence that reality could be seized, or simply recorded, in the work.” The spliced-up, truncated sentences in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half Form Thing, in which you see the mind confronted with the limits of what it thinks and what is unthinkable, she continues, “confronts us with the question of where and how such horrors can be endured and/or fought against.” On Violence and On Violence Against Women, 199 – 219.