10 Things the Dark Comedy, Promising Young Woman Gets Right
For a long time, Hollywood was really sucking, with virtually no material that fostered a meaningful dialogue between the sexes on the varying degrees of men behaving badly and how it’s a living nightmare for women who suffer from such behavior until Promising Young Woman came along and changed all of that.
Here are 10 things that the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, and Academy Award-nominated film gets right (Warning: Contains spoilers. Although they are more on the vague side, if you don’t want important details given away before you see the film, please stop reading at once, see the film, and then revisit this.):
1. Vengeance is all-consuming: Our protagonist, Cassie (Carey Mulligan), is so busy and obsessed with righting the wrongs of the bad behavior that led to her best friend, Nina, committing suicide that she forgets her own birthday, as well as a couple of dates with a seemingly nice guy (Bo Burnham).
2. Arrested development and/or hyposexualization or hypersexualization arise from trauma: Ever notice how when something bad happens to a female—whether it’s sexual harassment or assault or rape—a woman’s natural instinct and defense mechanism is either to cover up in her clothing and avoid relationships with the opposite sex or to dress provocatively and be promiscuous?
For the most part, Cassie wears bright satiny ribbons in her hair, as if she were in grade school, and Urban Outfitters-type clothing, such as short fuzzy pink sweaters and tight-fitting printed tops/bodysuits under her snug jeans. This is hardly what a 30-year-old woman, who is already considered to be getting long in the tooth, should be wearing. She also lures men in at bars by playing dumb and drunk when, really, she runs laps around them and then some with her intelligence—even on her worst day.
3. The movie pays homage to classics while still being its own, original film: The camera likes to close in on the back of Cassie’s beautifully braided hair, with a bright-colored silk ribbon towards the end of it, which is very much in the vein of the camera closing in on the back of Heather Chandler’s (Kim Walker) head as she wraps her bright red scrunchie around her hair in Heathers.
Avenging her friend, Nina, is grueling business and in order to satisfy her cravings, Cassie develops quite a sweet tooth. This is very similar to Norman’s (Anthony Perkins) constant candy chewing when he’s covering his tracks after Mother/he kills Marion (Janet Leigh) in Psycho. Where does Mother end and Norman begin? We aren’t sure and the same troubling question is posed in Promising Young Woman. Where does Nina end and Cassie begin?
4. Sexual trauma is insidious in the way it destroys relationships and fosters self-loathing: Ever since Cassie failed to accompany Nina to that awful party on that fateful night, she has been blaming herself and refuses to let herself off of the hook. What’s so sad about this is that guilt refuses to listen to reason. Even if she would’ve accompanied Nina to the party, would she really have been able to fight off all those men, especially with less upper-body strength? Would she have been able to save herself too? The both of them would’ve still been outnumbered by these horrible men. Plus, heavy drinking was involved, which severely lowers inhibitions…I don’t think I need to tell you that all of these ingredients create a powder keg.
Cassie lives with her parents and only has one friend. She’s also in a dead-end job that doesn’t challenge her. It’s almost as if Cassie is ceasing to exist as penance for not being there for her friend. What’s so heartbreaking about this is that you get the sense from the way Cassie talks about Nina that she already considered Nina out of her league and way above her and everyone else and that she was just lucky and grateful enough that Nina allowed her to be her best friend and thus, be along for the ride.
This is why it’s so important when Cassie starts to finally move on with her life. She starts to live again and be her own person. “We’ve missed Nina a lot,” her dad tells her, trying to fight back tears. “But, by God, we’ve really missed you!” he finishes, a sigh of relief washing over them.
5. All the usual suspects fall in line, one by one, in their complicity in the way they stay silent in regard to bad behavior and allow it to flourish: It’ll never cease to amaze me the way Hollywood, educational institutions, defense attorneys, apparently nice guys, good friends, loved ones, and fellow classmates all comply with this behavior and the female is left all alone to fend for herself. A lot of it has to do with money. Such structures really, really wish you wouldn’t go there and just leave well enough alone—especially when it comes to making movies or admitting students or holding bonuses in the balance…
6. The whole film, especially when things get better for Cassie, has a Blow Out type of an impending sense of doom: I appreciate movies like this for the reason that they’re uncompromising and they follow their heart instead of what the actors and viewers want. You really want it to go a certain way, but your gut is steering it where it should and needs to go instead.
7. Like Psycho, just when you’re identifying with a certain character and point of view, something happens to her and you’re forced to identify with a scarier, far-less-familiar, and more unstable point of view: Psycho does this early on and turns the film on its head. So does Promising Young Woman, except that it does so towards the end.
It also blindsides you with something you thought you knew all along about the past and shakes you to your very core, along with Cassie, and refuses to show that obligatory shocking scene, leaving the worst to your imagination as you just hear the din of the depravity offscreen.
8. Male power and privilege are very real, exist, and allow all sorts of depraved behavior to thrive: When that crushing thing happens at the bachelor party towards the end, it is very reminiscent of how Ted Kennedy was allowed to thrive, with little to no consequences, after Chappaquiddick occurred. If you have money and influence and know the right people, you can make just about anything disappear that poses an inconvenience to you.
9. The soundtrack and the look and feel of the film are very bubblegum pink in their 1980’s type of wanting to have it all and creating flimsy, paper-thin illusions that are easily shattered, revealing something darker, deeper, and far more sinister at work underneath this superficial surface: The tunes are catchy, poppy, and happy. The opening credits are cotton candy pink and the sweets in the display cases at the coffee shop that Cassie works at contain an assortment of yummy pastels. Be careful, as it’s all deceptively innocent and tasty…It’s a trap…
10. People either love or hate the ending: Seriously, when was the last time you cared enough about a movie for it to matter? Clearly, it’s doing something right. The ending is what we wish real life, with all of its injustices and bad breaks, could be. It’s not the most realistic ending, but wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world in which the bad guy doesn’t get away with it all of the time? It’s such a sad, tired, and inconvenient truth that we’ve all grown too accustomed to. The director and screenwriter, Emerald Fennell, understands this and does otherwise, providing a very cathartic ending.
All in all, Promising Young Woman achieves what it sets out to do, which is to raise awareness about what survivors of sexual harassment, assault, and rape go through and create a dialogue not only between women, but between men and women as well long after the film’s candy-coated bright pink ending credits roll.
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