Once asked to describe Leaving
Las Vegas, Mike Figgis’ masterpiece about an alcoholic drinking himself to
death, star Nicolas Cage described it as a ‘dead man’s suicide note’. Having rewatched it, I think that summary
could just as easily describe Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman.
It is generally agreed
that this is one of the darkest and best movies made in recent years, led by a
masterclass by Carey Mulligan as Cassandra, a woman who spends her nights
acting out the kinds of vengeance against potential rapists in her
neighborhood, and then enacting a plan to bring about revenge and justice for
her best friend who committing suicide in college after being raped and
publicly shamed by a fellow student. It’s a perfect movie for the MeToo era
(I’m almost positive that’s why Mulligan was cast in the lead role in the
recent She Said, a film about the revelations behind Harvey Weinstein)
and one of the most brilliant mixtures of horror and comedy I’ve ever seen,
rivaling the work of Jordan Peele. Fennell deservedly won an Oscar for the
screenplay and as great as Frances McDormand was in Nomadland, I think
she would have been fine letting the Oscar go to Mulligan that year.
But rewatching again
recently, I can not help think that there may be another, deeper level to the
movie that many of us may not immediately get on the first or even the fifth
rewatching. That assumes, of course, that many people, particularly of my
gender would want to watch again considering how firmly Fennell is in the camp
of saying that ‘there are no good men’ out there. I don’t deny I’m not immensely uncomfortable
every time I come across it on TV, but that’s generally how some of the best
art is supposed to make us feel: if every movie had us walk away feeling
warm and fuzzy, there’s a problem with the viewer not the film. And the last
time I watched Promising Young Woman, I couldn’t help but feel that
everything Cassandra did, from the first moment we see her until the last scene
was probably her ultimate plan. Perhaps not vengeance, but… well, let me get to
it.
Consider Cassandra’s life
when we meet her. I don’t mean what she does at night; I mean what we mere
mortals might consider a ‘normal life’. She works at a coffee shop where she
can not pay the rent. She’s living with her parents and the relationship is
very tenuous. She has no friends, save the owner of the coffee shop she works
at, and you get the feeling she had to be forced into that one. In one of the
opening scenes, she walks out to breakfast and has to be reminded by her mother
that it’s her birthday.
Cassandra has essentially
stopped being Cassandra. She has no drive, she has no ties, she doesn’t even
think the day she was born matters any more. You actually wonder when she has
the time to sleep. The only thing she lives for any more is going out at night,
engaging with men who consider
themselves nice, getting into a situation where they take her home, she
pretends to drunkenly pass out, and she confronts them. Then she goes home,
opens her notebook, and puts a notch on it. We never know if that’s the only
notebook she’s filled, but it’s a safe assumption there are more of them.
The context is horrible in
terms of masculinity. But ask yourself: what is Cassandra looking for?
There are no names recorded only checkmarks, which signifies that while she’s
keeping count she doesn’t bother to keep a record of the man in question. She
clearly has no focus on any of the other people in the bar, as we find out in a
scene in the second half of the movie. What is the purpose of her actions? She
already knows how horrible men are, and she doesn’t need any more objective
proof. She has to know she’s not changing anything as she limits her attention
only to her own neighborhood. She even tells one of her ‘victims’ as much. Even a serial killer has more focus in their
actions. Cassandra, until Ryan shows up, has no purpose to her actions.
As much as Cassandra would
never consider herself one, she is a victim of her friend’s rape and suicide,
and there’s an argument that her friends death effectively killed her as much
as her friend. She dropped out of med school, has reduced all ‘normal’ human
interaction to the bare minimum, and seems determined to stop one man at a time
from the same crime that destroyed her friend. (Fennell, of course, does
nothing to indicate that any of these men, merely go to another bar in a different
neighborhood rather than alter their behavior.)
Now consider Cassandra’s
point-by-point revenge. She sets up a friend, Madison (Alison Brie) of hers who
was at med school to appear to be the victim of rape. She sets up the daughter
of the dean at the college who did everything to whitewash Jeff’s record to
appear to be the likely victim of a sexual assault. In neither case does she
follow through, which leads us to think that the implication was more than
enough.
She is clearly planning
for more than that when she has a meeting with the attorney who made sure
Jeff’s case never got the inside of a jury. And I have to tell you that scene
is the scariest in the entire film. Alfred Molina, in my opinion, should have
gotten a Supporting Actor nod for his six minutes in that movie because it is
by far the most unsettling scene in the film.
His character is the only
one who seems to be ready for Cassandra’s arrival. He welcomes her into his
house. He tells her he’s had what his employers claim is a ‘breakdown’ but he
knows is an acceptance of his life’s work. His firm’s entire reason for
existence seems to have been to debunk rape cases and destroy the victims – he
says simply they got bonuses for how many people they destroyed in a year and
how much easier it is to do it not. When he finishes, he actually seems to want
Cassandra to inflict vengeance on him. And for the first time in the film,
Cassandra is hesitant. She walks away: “You’ll just have to live with
yourself.” Then she goes outside and at her car is a hulking man asking if she
wants him to go through with it. Cassandra seems subdued when she tells him no.
I think at this point in
the movie, Cassandra realizes the futility of what she is doing and what she
has done. There’s always going to be bars filled with ‘nice guys’ and
organizations determined to make sure none of them have to spend a night in
jail. And what is she doing it for? The next day, she goes to see her friend’s
mother, and she tells her to ‘let it go’ and move on. All the vengeance in the
world will never bring her friend back.
Cassandra then tries to
have some kind of semblance of a normal life. She goes on dates with Ryan (Bo Burnham)
that are more traditional, she introduces them to her parents, she actually
seems to be ‘doing better’. There is the briefest of moments when it looks like
she might be happy. And then Madison shows up, looking utterly broken. She
seems horribly damaged by her encounter with Cassandra and the aftermath, and
then she shows her the footage of her friend being raped while her med school
students cheer her on – and she sees that Ryan is there.
From that point, I think
Cassandra is going on what amounts to a kamikaze run. Sure, she’d been plotting
vengeance for her friend, and everything prior had been based on her making
that trip to her bachelor party. But I think there’s more to it than that. I
think finding Ryan is as much of a monster as Jeff has finally confirmed what
she has suspected: there is truly no such thing as a good man. Combined with
what the attorney has told her, she now has nothing left to live for.
The final scenes are in a
sense, a triumph – Cassandra getting her vengeance from beyond the grave. But I
think at the end of the day she had no intention of coming back alive. All she
had left was revenge, and what was the point of living in this world that had
nothing for her? The fact that she was essentially leaving her parents without
their daughter is, in a way, selfish and self-centered. She knows first-hand
what the loss of a child can do to their parents, and yet she has no problem
doing the same to hers.
Her last words to Jeff are
an acknowledgement that he ended Cassandra’s life as much as he did her
friends. In that sense, I think there’s
an argument that she let Jeff kill her. Not only because she wanted to make
sure the full course of vengeance against everyone who wronged her was meted
out – as it clearly was – but because she had no reason to live when it was
over. I think even if she had successfully carried out her vengeance on Jeff,
she would have made sure she was dead at the end of the day. What reason did
she have to live now that her life’s work was finished?
I don’t know if Fennell
had this in mind when she wrote Promising Young Woman but either way,
its another layer to the story she was telling. It makes it crystal clear – as if
we truly had any doubt by the end – that rape causes ripple effects that go far
beyond the lives of the victims, and that the damage is far deeper to our
psyche than we ever considered. It
certainly gives another reason to rewatch this extraordinary film, even if you
disagree with my analysis of Cassandra’s behavior, and it shows just how
powerful a movie it is.
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