Does ‘Promising Young Woman’ Break The Stereotypes Of The Female Revenge Film?
'Promising Young Woman' joins the long, often bloody, line of female revenge films.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” goes the adage as old as time (1697, to be exact).
Cassie Thomas, played by Carey Mulligan is our latest woman scorned, as the main character in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman. She leads a double life — unambitious café worker by day and vengeful club frequenter by night. Here she picks up men on the pretence of being wasted only to confront them when they take her home and make unwanted advances on her, stone-cold sober and entirely dominating.
CW: the films discussed deal with sexual assault and rape
Promising Young Woman joins the long, often bloody, line of female revenge films.
The Bride in Kill Bill (Uma Thurman, yellow latex suit queen) blood lusts for revenge on her ex-lover Bill who tried to kill her on her wedding day. High school hottie turned vampire, Jennifer, due to a nasty boy band in Jennifer’s Body, now only feasts on boys. In the South Korean Lady Vengeance, Lee Geum-ja has spent 13 years in prison for a murder she did not commit, dreaming of the gory revenge she seeks against the real murderer, Mr Baek, who sexually assaulted and blackmailed her.
In each of these examples, the woman at the centre of the narrative has suffered at the hands of wicked men. She must rise from the ashes of her victimhood to meet these males with equal or more violent forces compelled by the men who have caused her to suffer. Fight fire with fire, spill blood for blood. There is an inescapable circularity here. Ironically, the tools at the disposal of the wronged woman are the same that caused her suffering. She is perpetually entrapped by the patriarchy.
Can we recode these all too familiar tropes of female revenge? Is Promising Young Woman the film to finally escape this cycle? Basically, can a bitch find other ways to fight back, or just be a goddamn bitchin’ bitch in her own right?
Feminism and Female Revenge
Enter 2017, the year of one very necessary cancellation and Me Too, a movement driven by the cult of the celebrity and social media. American writer Jia Tolentino aptly describes what Me Too does for feminism:
“…when we reclaim the stories that surround female celebrities, stories surrounding ordinary women are reclaimed, too. The Harvey Weinstein story, and everything that followed, was possible in no small part because women were finally able to count upon a baseline of feminist narrative interpretation. Women knew their stories of victimization would be understood – not by everyone, but by many people – on their terms.”
We can identify our own experiences through those of female celebrities as they speak out. We feel seen and heard. And social media is the new stage on which this is all occurring, a stage that any woman can stand upon and find an audience that is sympathetic and willing to listen. Online, celebrities are our sisters and hashtags bring us solidarity. It is merely superfluous and performative on many levels, but this also makes it an accessible platform that has guided feminism post-Me Too to be about speaking up for your most earnest self and being heard.
Cassie in Promising Young Woman appears to be the ideal everywoman to play an unexpected but timely revenge hero, or anti-hero, more aptly. Almost thirty, she lives at home with her parents in her girlish childhood bedroom and works at a café without any other aspirations. In this post-Me Too world, any woman – any Cassie Thomas of the world, can tell her story and unabashedly centre herself. Our hero does not appear at first glance to need to dress up in a latex suit or be covered in the blood of her victims, or have a backstory to explain her revenge. She is simply the plain Jane that she is — except that she goes out every weekend and pretends to get extremely drunk and allows a man to take her home and almost take advantage of her, before confronting him and forcing him to confess to his mistakes.
finally watched promising young woman and can say the use of a Paris Hilton song in it is truly inspired
— rachel syme (@rachsyme) January 23, 2021
She is the performative self on the world’s stage as lived and plausible, speaking truth to her experiences as a woman and demanding to be heard. Could she be the perfect post-Me Too feminist?
Yet there is a backstory, there is violent retribution, and the female victims must martyr themselves. Damn, not so different after all.
Cassie’s best friend, Nina, was raped by her classmates while they were at medical school and no one believed her. Nina committed suicide. Cassie’s weekend exploits avenge Nina’s death by attempting to hold predatorial male behaviour to account. The main male culprit meanwhile has gone on to become a successful medical practitioner, fulfilling his potential as a promising young man. But Nina and Cassie, promising young women until the incident, are now could-have-beens.
The film’s title and the backstory is reminiscent of the Brock Turner case — the Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious female student. His characterisation as a star athlete and “promising young man” were somehow meant to absolve him or make his word more reliable over that of the female survivor. How could a promising young man commit such a terrible act? How dare we ruin his life with this conviction and let him forego all his promise?
The backstory of sexual abuse by a male who has not been held to account for his actions shows that female revenge continues to be a fight against a patriarchal chokehold.
Promising Young Woman, rather than undoing the tenets of female revenge, underlines how much hold they still have over us. Yes, it is a sobering reminder of our reality, and female revenge does turn upon a seething anger towards this, but there is something too simplistic about the way Promising Young Woman approaches this premise. It seems to say, above all: men have been trash, and they still are.
It’s a reductive and lazy feminist statement, even if it is addressed through a timely quip to the Stanford swimmer case. Yes, Cassie does fight back against a man’s world by claiming their space, time and attention in her own version of revenge as she speaks her truth to shitty guys. But this speaking out is simply that: speaking out. She must ultimately achieve her retribution by taking action. And this looks the same violent, self-martyring way it always has. It’s a bit disappointing that the buildup of Cassie’s revenge persona ends up being predictably and one-dimensionally constructed around shitty male actions.
The possibilities to rewrite the limitations of female revenge through combining it with the relatability and earnestness of post-Me Too feminism are addressed, but not fully explored in Promising Young Woman. The story it tells could be far more significant if the throughline “men are still trash” was not so consuming. Cassie as the female revenge hero lacks some curves and complexities in her persona and actions. She is flattened to a palatable revenge stereotype.
Bitches, everywhere, writing
That’s not to say Promising Young Woman doesn’t have its highlights.
It is highly entertaining and excels in bringing to the big screen a thrilling and earnestly pop feminist style (think an orchestral score of Britney Spears’ Toxic, YES we love to see it) and positioning Cassie as plausibly average rather than a sexy fantasy revenge object. It is important as it takes its place among an era of increasingly female-driven writing that allows for a . That is to say, writing from a non-straight cis male point of view about females and their lives. A bit abnormal, a bit radical.
This abnormal subjectivity is expressed in wildly creative, unusual and darkly comic ways — often cross-genre with a tone that is difficult to pin down. The more pioneering ones, unlike Promising Young Woman, also tend to embrace a queering of heteronormative relationships and cultural and ethnically diverse perspectives.
Take Jennifer’s Body, from writer Diablo Cody (of Juno) and director Karyn Kusama, initially panned as a failed horror sex-romp and now, is recognisable as an opening to the radical subjectivity of female writing. Megan Fox as Jennifer makes it all too easy to frame the movie as the erotic fantasy of male wet dreams. Yet her seductions of the local boys are far from sexy and in fact rather…off. The tone is B-grade camp, and even the girl-on-girl scene between Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and Jennifer comes off as plain confusing. It’s refusal to play by the rules while playing within them makes it ahead of its time. Other examples are TV shows like the hit drama slash spy thriller slash dark comedy Killing Eve (2018 – ) for which Emerald Fennell wrote the second season, as well as I May Destroy You (2020), a sprawling fictionalised story of its creator and star Michaela Coel’s own sexual assault. This show brings many much-needed new perspectives on female friendships, consent, trauma, casual and online dating not least because the main character and her friends embody Coel’s black community in East London.
Both of these shows share an unsettling, off-kilter attitude whose characters unashamedly toe the line between neurosis and insanity. Certainly not one-dimensional, these are complex characters who raise questions about their actions, motivations, relationships and identities to which answers do not have to be clearly presented.
The more female-driven iterations of female revenge that arise, the more we as wom*n reclaim and recode our experiences and our identities. Female revenge presents opportunities for “imaginary revolutions” that are “empowering fantasies,” as Kirsten Lentz calls them. The more we encourage, celebrate and ask for as feminist audiences and writers and makers, the increasing number of female heroes exist — ones who look like us too.
What the moment in popular culture requires now in the name of the earnest, lived feminism awakened by Me Too is more diverse, more complex female characters and experiences — representation. This is where Promising Young Woman especially, falls short of any major value add to the female revenge genre and feminism in 2021. The film is a promising if not wholly satisfying addition to the female revenge catalogue. Revenge is a dish blah blah blah — it’s now a multi-course degustation, none of the chefs are men and this movie is a zany and entertaining appetiser. This kitchen be bitchin’!
Michelle writes, snacks, and ruminates — all at the same time and often about films and culture. You can find her on twitter @_mwangx.