February 20, 2021

It's been a pretty good end to the week. I cranked out the second episode of Sarah Someone yesterday. (Had to fix some of the dialogue spots and add in sound effects. I may or may not have actually fixed the dialogue, tbh.) I got a free digital screener for Promising Young Woman from The Hollywood Reporter, and Mitch and I watched it together last night. So it's Mlog time. 

**SPOLIERS**

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN

2020

Directed by: Emerald Fennell

Written by: Emerald Fennell

Watched: 2/19/21

        Cassie is a med-school dropout who works at a cafe and, at night, pretends to be super drunk so that guys will take her home and try to take advantage of her. Before they rape her, she snaps out of it, completely sober, and freaks them out. A little disappointingly, she doesn't cause them bodily harm or like steal anything from their apartments. Cassie's all fucked up because her best and childhood friend was raped in front of a party of people at the med school they both attended. Both women dropped out after the allegation/investigation was thrown out on a he-said-she-said basis. (Funny how it's he-said-she-said instead of he-said-he-said. Makes you think that the whole concept sprang from rape allegations and is why it was originally deemed inadmissible.) Cassie's friend, we're to understand, eventually killed herself as a result. 

        Cassie's reintroduced to her old med school cohort, when Ryan shows up at her coffee shop. He's interested in her and the two start dating. Cassie starts taking more pointed revenge on the people who were involved in Nina's case. She discovers that there was actually a video of the rape, and that Ryan is there when it happened. The two break up, and Cassie, dressed like a clown nurse stripper, goes to the bachelor party of the perpetrator. She spikes the drinks of the rest of the guys and handcuffs the groom to the bed. She wants to carve Nina's (her friend's) name into the man's chest so that he will never forget her. But, in the process, he gets one of his hands free and suffocates her with a pillow. When the detectives investigate, Ryan doesn't tell them he knows she went up to the bachelor party. The groom, who had burned Cassie's body in the woods with his best man, holds his wedding ceremony and seems to have gotten away with it, when it's revealed that Cassie had made plans in the case of her own death and had sent the information about her plan and the tape of the rape to someone she trusted. 

        Emerald Fennell sounds like a name I would make up for a character. She also was the show runner for season two of Killing Eve. I wonder how many conversations she had (with herself or other people) about how much harm Cassie would do in her revenge. Especially when she targets one of her female classmates and the Dean of the college, she uses the threat of rape culture as her weapon. She doesn't follow through with it -- no one actually gets raped. But the threat is there. Simply, the threat of being vulnerable -- either by drink or just by age -- around any given man. (Just going to jumble out my thoughts here, I realize.) It's interesting how men in the movie have two sides: on one side, a person, someone to be celebrated, the pride of society, a fragile thing who's precious life could be ruined by a single allegation; and the other side, an uncontrollable agent of violence. There's societal pride and sympathy for the first side and deep lurking fear of the other. It's a potent combination for looking the other way. I think too, the other reason society has for not punishing sexual assault, is that we know the power imbalance between men and women is foundational to our current order. What if any woman could just say that a man assaulted her and that people would take it seriously? Wouldn't that give women far too much power? It would be more power than women have now, that's for sure. And the structure of things would shift. People dislike instability. So for now, in practice, what it comes down to is society choosing between the man -- this entity they admire and fear -- and the promising young woman -- a person they weren't quite sure existed in the first place. 

Rating: ★★★ 1/2