Promising Young Woman: analysis - and a solution?

I shall follow up my post on It's a Wonderful Life by writing about another, quite different film - Promising Young Woman (PYW). (As it happens, I watched PYW over the Christmas holidays but not IAWL: infer from that what you will.) 

PYW is a clever and funny film. Both I and the people with whom I saw it thought that it deserved a bit of mulling over and perhaps even a re-watch. I have now given it some thought, had a look at the screenplay and I think I have solved it, so to speak. 

My thesis is that PYW is rather similar to Parasite: PYW and Parasite are both films which seem to have been instinctively understood to be "savage" (or "searing") indictments of the evils they undoubtedly depict (in Parasite's case, social inequality, and sexual misconduct in the case of PYW) simply because they depict them, but both films are rather more nuanced than first appear. In Parasite, for example, the rich family has made its money honestly by carrying out socially useful work, they behave broadly decently and they are trusting, while the poor family has wasted their talents and the opportunities that society has given them in favour of a life of crime: whatever you think about the film as a whole (and it's more complex than that summary suggests), it's plainly not merely a corruscating attack on the rich oppressing the poor. 

My view is that PYW is similarly complex. I set out below my theory that it is about something a little different from its most obvious subject matter. 

A couple of warnings before I go on. First, this is not a film review. If you just want a decent review of the film then this one does the job: if you like the sound of it from that review then you will probably enjoy the film (as I did). Second, and related to my first point, in what follows below there are spoilers galore: please don't read on if you have not seen the film. 

I want to start by describing the film in some detail, commenting as I go, in order to set up my discussion. This is my final warning: spoilers ahead.

The review that I linked to above describes the film as a "playfully provocative and ingenious rape-revenge satire", which is broadly right, although whether it is a "satire" and, if so, precisely what it is satirising is something we will have to come back to. Wikipedia calls it a "black comedy psychological thriller". I thought of it as a rather dark comedy too. Although it is a film about serious sexual and violent crime, a lot of it is played for laughs: think, perhaps, of Inside No 9. It is fundamentally more serious - more serious in its intent - than black comedies of the kind of, say, Harry, He's Here to Help (Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien) or a Saki short story about murder, but it's not a million miles away from that kind of thing in tone. Parasite, which is a better film qua film than PYW (the music, the framing, the choice of shot, its perfect montage), also has a broadly equivalent mix of humour and darkness, although PYW probably has more laugh-out-loud funny lines.

PYW is set in America. Carey Mulligan plays a young woman (she turns 30 in the course of film) called Cassie who dropped out of medical school a few years before the films starts. It is either a prestigious medical school, or perhaps all medical schools are prestigious in America, but either way we are, I think, given to understand that the milieu was one of entitlement and success. 

Cassie dropped out because her close friend Nina committed suicide after getting very drunk at a party and being raped. (The assault was filmed and the film was widely shared at the time. We find this out relatively late on in the film and it is important for plot reasons, but neither Cassie nor Nina seems to have known about it at the time. I don't think we are meant to notice that their ignorance is implausible.) Cassie now spends her life working a dead-end job in a cafe and living with her parents: the assault ruined not only Nina's life but also Cassie's. Either Nina (who had been the top student, ahead even of her rapist) or Cassie could be the eponymous Promising Young Woman. 

You might, if you were hard hearted or even just thinking about it critically, wonder why Nina's tragedy should have so affected Cassie's life that it trumped her long-standing desire to become a doctor, a desire which she had every chance of fulfilling. On this point, we learn that Nina and Cassie had been great friends since they were very young and that Cassie looked up to Nina. We also learn in due course that Cassie is probably a psychopath. 

As you will have seen from the trailer, Cassie goes to bars, pretends to be very drunk, and is invariably picked up by a self-described 'nice guy' who purports to take her home but in fact tries to take advantage of her. The first time we see this, the man starts off taking her home, but en route he changes his mind and takes her to his apartment; perhaps this is standard behaviour. (Given that Cassie lives with her parents, she must always be taken to the man's apartment: he never wants to 'see her safely in' to her own home. Again, I don't think we supposed to wonder about this - what is his plan for afterwards? - and this is just another premise we are asked to accept.) At the vital moment, she reveals that she is not drunk at all and asks the man what he is up to, whereupon he becomes deeply apologetic, embarrassed and backs off.  

I think it is important to note that Cassie does not get raped in these encounters. Although alone with a rape-y kind of man who is clearly physically stronger than her (Mulligan's appearance is important to the film, and she is not presented as a physically strong - this is not a kick-ass girl fantasy), the fact that she is suddenly stone-cold sober is enough to reduce each man to grovelling apologies. Indeed, these men have no sexual interest in her once she is clearly compos mentis. This is all played for laughs - after all, no one gets hurt - and you can see that it is a kind of 'men, eh? only want one thing, amirite?'-type joke, of a dark kind. 

Why does Cassie do this? Perhaps the men are taught a lesson by their encounters with her, but as we don't see them again we don't know that. (We hear that one such man warned his mates about her, calling her a "psycho", which does not suggest enlightenment on his part.) The main reason for her behaviour seems to be that she gets some kind of satisfaction from it: it's a kind of revenge for what happened to Nina. 

So that's the rut in which Cassie's life is stuck when a nice young doctor, Ryan, appears at the coffee shop where she works, recognises her from medical school and asks her out. They have a slow and respectful courtship during which Ryan behaves as a modern gentleman ought (not forcing the pace, being nice to Cassie's one friend, being charming to her parents) and they seem to establish a healthy relationship. 

I pause here to observe that the film is, up to this point, structurally identical to those romantic comedies in which we see the protagonist at the beginning stuck in a comic but ultimately sterile rut and the story is all about getting them to move on. Think, for example, of Wedding Crashers (young men crash weddings to pick up women), Something's Gotta Give (old rich man only 'dates' young women) or Failure to Launch (young woman has a business persuading men to move out of their parents' homes by simulating a serious relationship with them). The comic premise might not stand up to much probing, but it's plausible enough, it makes a fun social comment and it provides an opportunity for laughs. In PYW, the comic rut of pretending to be drunk before surprising rape-y men encapsulates a rather more cutting social observation than merely spotting that weddings are good opportunities for forming romantic relationships with strangers, but it performs a similar dramatic purpose. In short, Cassie's life cannot carry on like that - something's gotta give - and Ryan is that something. Indeed, Ryan and Cassie's first meeting is scripted as a standard romcom meet-cute, only slightly more excruciating than the norm.

But PYW is not a romantic comedy. You'll have noted that Ryan recognised Cassie from medical school. Which means that he is inevitably connected to the Nina incident. Indeed, he is still in touch with Nina's rapist, Al, who is now a successful doctor. And Al is recently engaged. Which means, equally inevitably, that the film will come to a climax at Al's wedding. (But note also that a climax at a wedding is not unusual for a romcom: if PYW is a satire then perhaps it is in part a satire of romcoms?)

Cassie switches her revenge programme from men in general to people connected to the Nina incident. In the course of doing so, we come to see that she is not merely a kooky adorkable klutz (or whatever the romcom stereotype is) but something rather more odd. 

Cassie meets up with an old friend, Madison, a formerly hard-partying friend of Al's who is now happily married and the mother of twins. The conversation turns to Nina and Madison is insufficiently apologetic about it all for Cassie's liking ("Don’t get blackout hammered every night and then expect people to be on your side when you have sex with someone you didn’t want to!"). So Cassie gets Madison drunk and hands her hotel keys to a strange man who asks "are you sure?" and is told "I'm sure". Madison later wakes up, not knowing what has happened. (We later learn - or least, Cassie later tells us - that nothing happened.) 

Similarly, the Dean of the medical school (who didn't investigate the Nina incident at the time) gets punished by being told that her teenage (underage) daughter has been left in the hands of some medical students and a large amount of vodka. (Again, not really, Cassie tells us, but only after the Dean becomes distraught and admits that she should have done better in Nina's case.) 

On another occasion, we see Cassie calling off someone who seems to be a hitman, apparently hired to punish the lawyer who defended Al. 

At one point, Cassie stops her car at an intersection, blocking the road. A man pulls up alongside and remonstrates with her. She gets out of her car, picks up a crowbar and starts smashing up his truck, including the windscreen, until he drives off in terror. The only purpose of this scene, I think, is to persuade us that Cassie is not quite right in the head: I wonder whether the makers of the film (I'll come back to them below) were otherwise concerned that the audience would be too much on Cassie's side. Just to confirm the point, we also meet Nina's mother, who is shown to be a nice decent woman with a nice house (houses and interiors are important in the film - Cassie's parents' house is rather horrid), and we see that she also wants Cassie to move on from dwelling on Nina's tragedy.

Then we get the final stages of the plot. Madison gives the Nina video to Cassie, Cassie watches it and sees that Ryan was an enthusiastic spectator, Cassie blackmails Ryan by threatening to send the video to everyone he knows (which, for plot reasons, we have to assume will end his career) until he agrees to tell her where Al's stag weekend is taking place. Cassie dresses up as a nurse-themed stripper, arrives at the stag weekend location (fortunately for the plot, a cabin in the middle of nowhere), treats the guests to some booze and persuades Al to go upstairs. 

A few points are worth noting before we get to the denouement. Al is annoyed that someone has hired a stripper: he had specifically asked for no strippers. Cassie has to persuade him to go upstairs by saying that she doesn't get paid unless that happens. And then, as she handcuffs him to the bed, he insists that he doesn't want anything to happen as he loves his fiancée. The point of all this is that, like Ryan, Al is shown behaving perfectly properly. The party is appropriately boozy, racous and lewd for a stag party, but Cassie is not, for instance, mistreated or manhandled by the guests, and her instructions (i.e. to drink) are obeyed by them all. Male sexuality is not always pleasant to see at close quarters, but what we see of the men up to this point is that their behaviour is within the moral bounds set by the film. 

Once Al is handcuffed, Cassie reminds him of Nina and says that her name should be on him. She tells Al that all the other guests have been drugged (i.e. when she gave them drink). She pulls out a scalpel and says that it has been sterilised. Now I think she intends no more than to leave Al with a scar in the shape of Nina's name: "NINA" is a short word that can be formed from a few straight lines so it seems like a plausible plan to me - better than trying "CASSIE", anyway - and it fits with the phrasing of her threat. I don't think Cassie intends to kill Al: if so, why not not shoot him? But of course he is terrified. He manages to break one of the handcuffs and then suffocates Cassie with his one free arm and a pillow.

(Little bit of a legal side note. Was Al acting in reasonable self-defence? From what we see in the film, the answer is no: once Al has one arm free, he is physically able to defend himself without recourse to killing Cassie. As I pointed out above, we are repeatedly shown that Cassie is physically slight - at one point, for example, Ryan points out how much bigger he is than her. That said, a jury would not see what happened in the room. The undisputed facts are that a woman with a grudge against Al handcuffed him under a pretext and then attacked him with a sharp blade, while he was unarmed, his friends had been drugged and he was only ever able to use one arm - his left arm - to defend himself. I suspect there's many a jury that would back Al in those circumstances.)

In the morning, Al's best man, Joe, comes in and finds a dead stripper, with Al still attached to the bed by the other handcuff. Cue this droll (and perfectly-delivered) exchange:

JOE

Hey man. This is not your fault ok? AL MONROE (sniffing) I don’t know...it kinda seems like it is... 

Joe and Al dispose of the body, the wedding goes ahead, but Cassie has laid plans such that the wedding is interrupted by the police arriving - but not before a couple more comic moments from Joe (his speech mentioning that the bride is "by all accounts, quite a catch" and him spotting the police and immediately trying to run away).

So that's what happens in the the film. But what is it about? The film is funny and aggressive: it is clearly making fun of something, attacking something. But what? What's the target?

The immediate answer is simply that the film's targets are the same as Cassie's targets: rape-y men.

But the immediate answer must be the wrong one. Cassie's vengeance campaign is not presented to us as straightforwardly a moral crusade. Nina's mother, a kind of quiet conscience of the film, would rather Cassie let things lie. And Cassie herself seems to be a psychopath, which rather undermines our sympathy for her cause. 

So let's try the opposite idea: maybe PYW is a reductio ad absurdum of people dredging up historic sexual impropriety? There is decent support for this theory in the film: Cassie has ruined her own life, saddened her parents and ends up by leaving the careers and lives of a number of doctors in ruins. One can certainly imagine a cynic (or a utilitarian) saying that Cassie is making too much of a meal about one drunken sexual escapade carried out by people who have subsequently grown up, matured into sexually responsible adults and now lead socially useful lives. Moreover, at one point we see Cassie's parents watching The Night of the Hunter. I wondered why this film was chosen: is it because a film about someone who is outwardly a preacher but really a murderer reminds us that Cassie, although outwardly espousing the acceptable pieties of the age, is really a bad lot?

Of course, that can't be right either. Raping drunken medical students really is bad. The film is not as cynical as to suggest that we let sleeping dogs lie. Just because Cassie goes too far, it doesn't mean that she doesn't have a point at all, any more than Mrs Banks' lack of personal emancipation undermines the cause of women's suffrage.

Having dismissed the obvious theories, I think we need to be a bit more subtle. Let me take it in stages.

At first sight, PYW seems to be about male entitlement - it's surely a #MeToo film. But that's not quite right. Cassie's revenge campaign is not solely directed against men: Madison and the female Dean receive her attentions too. The target is something wider than male sexuality: it is something to do with society.

Perhaps, then, PYW's target is what we might call, using rather old-fashioned jargon, the Fast Set. Medical students are a notoriously rowdy and fast-living bunch, and it seems that the same is true in America. These are a set of entitled, jock-type alpha personalities. They lived lives of sexual licentiousness as students. And they all get their come-uppance in the end - even Cassie herself who must, we feel, have lived happily in their midst, keeping pace with them, until the Nina incident.

But Cassie's former students are not really that fast as fast sets go: Ryan is presented as a typical sweet/awkward nice young man, suitable for a romcom, and being a paediatrician is an odd job choice for a flashy type of doctor; Madison is smartly dressed and well-turned out, but again not in a flashy way - she's just a well-off, respectable married mother of two; and Al and his stag party are just standard issue be-chino'd young professionals who, in the English context, would be found in Fulham, Cornwall or Courchevel depending on the time of year. They were not really a fast set, just a bit lively at university.

No, I think the target is something a little different: it's alcohol. More specifically, it's the way that Americans can't handle alcohol. 

Let's look at the evidence as we go through the film:

- We see that it is perfectly safe for Cassie to be alone with sexually excited strange men in their homes - as long as she is sober. The difference between safety and danger is purely alcohol. Not sure I would pass that message on to young women in Britain ...

- Madison tells us that Nina got blackout drunk all the time. In the British context, that's someone with a problem; but I don't think we are meant to judge Nina too harshly. As Madison later says "So much ...stuff happened back then, like, all the time. You know what it was like just...one blackout after another".

- Madison herself is a respectable young mother who meets an old girlfriend for lunch - and ends up getting so drunk that she doesn't remember the afternoon. That's crazy! A British professional mother is well able to share a bottle of wine over lunch and pick her children up from nursery in the afternoon with no problems. Who ends up dead drunk at lunchtime? Not 30 year old British mothers in smart restaurants, that's for sure.

- Cassie goes to see the Dean during office hours. Yet the Dean seems to be convinced that leaving a, say, 15 year-old-but-looks-older girl in the company of medical students and some vodka will result in rape. Seriously? Medics? During daylight hours? In the UK a girl in such circumstances might learn some obscene songs and a couple of inventive euphemisms for sodomy, but I don't think I'm being Pollyannaish in thinking that the sexual assault of just-met teenage girls would at least wait until after dark, and perhaps not happen even then. Again, the only conclusion we can draw is that alcohol has an irresistible effect on American youth.

- Even on the stag night, all the problems would have been avoided if the guests had not been so keen to imbibe the spiked booze brought by Cassie and poured down their open and willing throats: if just one had been awake to hear Al's cries then Cassie could have been disarmed safely. Moreover, none of the guests seem to have considered it at all odd that they passed out unconscious the night before.

Note that "alcohol" is not a euphemism here: the film is happy to show us illegal drugs. "Alcohol" just means alcohol. The golden thread that passes through the film is that Americans can't handle their drink.

This is a long-standing British (and European) criticism of Americans. My suspicions that this is the true meaning of the film were confirmed when I checked who made it (I did say I'd come back to this). The writer, producer and director of the film is Emerald Fennell. Yes, Emerald Fennell from Call the Midwife, ex-Marlborough and Oxford, the daughter of Theo Fennell. She's as British as scrumpy or Pimm's. Carey Mulligan - the star who carries the entire film, who appears in almost every shot - is also British. Margot Robbie helped produce it so perhaps there's an Australian angle too (I think of Australia and the UK as sharing a disdain for Americans on this front). The film is just a couple of Brits, with Aussie help, perfoming an extended satire about Americans and their weird relationship with alcohol. 

Am I serious? Maybe not entirely. But you have to admit that the evidence is pretty strong. Of course, the Brits do have a history of finding humour in alcohol-enabled sexual assault, even without recourse to Americans - and Fennell might have unpleasant alcohol-related memories from boarding school or university to draw on, but the American-ness of the film's setting is quite strong. Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but there is also something of British sneering about, for example, the American interiors in the film such as Cassie's parents' house, the flats of the various men that Cassie goes to and the stag party's cabin in the woods. If I had to guess, I would say that Fennell's work was triggered by those strangely common yet bizarre stories about US undergraduate drinking (of the kind one can find here). 

So there you have it. PYW is not the #MeToo, up-to-the-minute Hollywood film you thought. Instead, it's the latest in the long and not altogether loveable tradition of Brits laughing at Americans through the medium of black comedy. Perhaps Evelyn Waugh is the best comparison: "Promising Young Woman - it does to booze what the The Loved One did to funerals!" You can see why they didn't use that strapline, but we know the truth.