Canned trauma and cynicism in Promising Young Woman
Lisa Chuckbucket considers how the film creates a stylised parody of rape that uses trauma as a genre device
Somewhere in the debate around ‘strong female leads’ we got lost and substituted ‘strong’ for ‘traumatised’. Traumatised female leads currently clog up our streaming services and our awards ceremonies. Rape and its repercussions are what you flip to when you’re bored of Bake Off or can’t keep your eyes open through MUBI’s brilliant paint-drying-with-subtitles offerings. It’s prime time ‘content’ that comes with the guilt-free caveat that it is taking on a serious issue.
Take for instance, Promising Young Woman, the film du moment being heralded as a “subversion of the rape revenge fantasy” as well as a (sigh) “empowering” film about trauma, and the first film since Vanilla Sky that has made me want to head-butt a weak glass pane with my eyes tooth-picked open.
Written and directed by Emerald Fennel (Phoebe Waller Bridges’s right-hand-woman on Killing Eve and showrunner for KE2), starring Carey Mulligan, Laverne Cox, the guy who’s an actor but who directed teen-indie flick Fourteen, Alfred Molina, the mum from American Pie, Adam Brody etc and produced by Margot Robbie, the film is up for a bunch of Golden Globes blah blah. Between the talent that lent itself to the project and the accolades it’s beginning to receive, it’s fair to say this is the film industry saying this is what it hopes to see in the post-you-know-what Time’s Up era of recognising and promoting female-focused stories and female talent.
Without embarking on a lengthy plot summary, the film centres on Cassandra (the doomsayer of Greek mythology) whose friend has died by suicide as a consequence of rape. Cassandra orchestrates to put herself in situations that reveal that even the nicest men are creeps, if not rapists. Finally Cassandra’s efforts turn to the past and to getting equal with the original bad guys. She comes up with a plan, executes it, and then something goes wrong.
The film is pastel-hued Hot Line Bling-style, with doilies and lace trimmings throughout and the hyper-stylised look remains unforgivably crass throughout, creating a confounding ultra feminine world that remains unexplained at the end of the film (Is Cassandra living in a female revenge fantasy world? Has her distress trapped her inside a little girl’s world? We will never know). But the worst part of the film is its reliance on horror genre tropes. Genre films rely heavily on predictability and stereotype to entertain. They also rely on manipulation and extreme violence in order to shock. When you tell a story about rape that relies on gross stereotyping, foreseeable twists, a build-up of expectation that is met with predictable and extreme violence (that we’re programmed to delight in), then what you are doing is turning rape and female trauma into a genre motif. ‘Rape films’ by this logic can now live in the same category as ‘shark films’ and the idea of ‘trauma’ loses all meaning as well as its bite. And that would be fine if you were making a trashy low budget exploitation film (like say, I Spit On Your Grave), whose main and sole purposes are entertainment and profit. Where it becomes problematic is when the film is supposed to be middlebrow and the byproduct of the cream-of-the-Hollywood-crop, with a social justice mission to boot.
The film’s unwitting cynicism creates a My Little Pony-shaped moral vacuum at its heart. As Maggie Nelson puts it in The Art of Cruelty, “it is foolhardy to take any artist at face value when he or she purports to use violence in only a moral way.” Its creators know the subject matter and their audience and they rely on their predictable responses - predicated by topicality, societal confusion, and conditioned responses around a woman making art around rape in 2020 - for the film’s success. Cassandra is utterly dehumanised, as are the male characters, who are almost all homicidal rapists with malignant erections, which we as an audience are supposed to celebrate as a fuck you to men and misogyny - which really are one and the same according to this film.
Promising Young Woman does a disservice to anyone with experience of rape precisely because it pushes the right buttons to then insert standardised responses to rape, as though the creators themselves are inured to the point of insensitivity to the topic. This is not a study of a woman dealing with trauma, but a voyeuristic parody of the same that relies on ‘canned anger’ as much as it relies on ‘canned trauma’ at a time when discourse around rape and victimhood could benefit from art illuminating a path towards healing, perhaps even forgiveness.
More trauma in Lisa’s next column!
Next week we write to actor Owen Wilson about David Rattray’s book How I Became One Of The Invisible