3 Promising Young Women

Perusing my recent Letterboxd entries, I see that I have watched three films with related themes over the past several days. These connections wouldn’t necessarily occur to me without that site organizing my viewing for me. I choose what to watch for a variety of reasons, not all of them easy to unpack.

I rented 2020’s Promising Young Woman based on a few blurbs and the premise, and the style glimpsed in the trailer and the promise of some humor. It’s a #MeToo era rape revenge film, a problematic genre, historically, with 1970s sexploitation roots, that has often gloried in the victim’s sexual abuse as much (or more) than the violent revenge she enacts in act three. This film changes up that formula in interesting ways. The original violation happened in the past, to a different character, and we never see it. Carey Mulligan’s Cassie was a lifelong friend of the victim, and dropped out of medical school after the rape to care for her friend, who appears to have later killed herself.

Cassie’s response to this tragedy is the twist which gives the movie most of its cathartic power, and dark humor, as she visits bars and nightclubs, pretends to be wasted drunk and allows men to take her home. At some point, when they make a move on her, she drops the drunk routine and enjoys watching them turn white as a sheet and protest, absurdly, that they’re really “nice guys,” even though they had been about to assault or rape her. In some cases—such as when the guy who takes her home is the dorky actor who played “McLovin” so memorably in Superbad (2007)—this is played for uncomfortable laughs.

This is a clever premise and, of course, its ruthlessness in revealing the predator in many a “nice guy” is bracing and troubling. Cassie has a notebook in which she keeps track of how many times she’s done this act—and it’s a LOT. There’s no indication that she has ever suffered any immediate consequences for this, though. This places the film in the range of plenty of B-movie revenge fantasies. It’s a fantasy to imagine that she could recklessly do this, night after night, without ever getting badly hurt. But it’s an empowering fantasy, for a while.

What would you predict would happen next? Yep, she meets an actual nice guy. A sweet, relaxed, respectful guy willing to take things slow. Does he turn out not to be what he seems? What do you think?

The problem with a fantasy is that it’s hard to subsequently shift into something approximating reality, where we might find truthful behavior and possibly redemption. The premise does not really allow us to believe that her Nice Guy is what he seems. Nearly all of the men in the film are predators, or predator-adjacent. So while we wait for the other shoe to drop, Cassie shifts into her real revenge plan. There are specific individuals—her friend’s rapist, a former friend who wouldn’t acknowledge the truth, the lawyer whose aggressive defense of the rapist drove the friend to suicide, the college dean who didn’t do enough to protect the friend—who Cassie targets with the kind of crazy, cruel but cathartic attacks that can only happen in the movies. We are meant to cheer her on and feel these people deserve what they get—and perhaps they do. After all, this is not really a movie about people as much as it is about a broken society that looks the other way and makes excuses for violence against women.

It’s common for tonal shifts in movies to simply not work very well, and that’s what happens here. There are ways this movie could have been a pitch black comedy or a luridly aggressive revenge film; it dabbles in these modes, but also wants to be taken a bit more seriously than that, provoking genuine care and concern for a well-played but not well-drawn character.

I contrast it with, for example, David Fincher’s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), which I rewatched over a couple of nights recently. I read the book series some years ago, prior to the movie, and while it’s amusing and suspenseful, it’s also fairly lurid and ridiculous. That’s what the movie’s got to work with and Fincher makes it haunting and beautiful—but it’s still lurid and ridiculous. He cleans up certain aspects—Daniel Craig’s disgraced reporter is far less of an absurd slut than in the book, in which the character sleeps with pretty much every woman he encounters. Rooney Mara’s Lizbeth Salander is a victim of years of sexual violence and abuse, a ward of the state as a result of her attempts at revenge, but she is also completely in charge of almost everything she does in the film, apart from the abuse she suffers at the hand of her new case worker. She is by far the smartest, most competent, coolest person in the story; plus a parody of the omnipotent hacker trope, plus a righteous revenge goddess from hell. She is not to be trifled with and, if you cross her badly, she will utterly destroy you. Yet she is also sensitive and kind, from time to time, and makes her own decisions about what to do, including fucking Daniel Craig. Dragon Tattoo, the book (and the Swedish film), was originally titled Men Who Hate Women, and the horrors of the story are directly on the nose when it comes to that. There’s a lot of fantasy going on in this story, too, but it doesn’t try to be something else—in Fincher’s hands it’s a diabolical thriller with a deeply committed central performance (of a fantastical character), and it doesn’t waver from that mission.

I also watched Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), a brilliant character study of a difficult teenage girl who also falls prey to an older man’s predation. That is not what the film is about, however; it’s something that happens and, like the whole film, it’s deeply complicated and troubling. Arnold doesn’t tell a story of a promising young woman undone by misogyny. She tells a story of a violent, deeply troubled, utterly believable lower class girl, who views the world with great ambivalence. There’s almost no one she can rely on—certainly not the adults who are closest to her—but must get by on her instincts. She frequently makes objectively bad decisions that seem totally understandable, particularly given her lack of support; but she also has a persistent, if cloaked, ability to hope for something better. Arnold doesn’t offer us much catharsis; instead she offers us humanity in all of its complexity and contradiction.