TW: This essay contains discussions of violence and rape.
Also, spoilers.
I’ll never forget her name.
I remember walking to the library as a college freshman. A young woman leading a protest in front of the gates introduced herself as Lena Sclove. During her first year, she was strangled twice and raped by a close male friend. The attack left her with a cervical spine injury that required medical leave for one semester. After reporting her assault to Brown University, the school assembled a disciplinary hearing that suspended the assailant for one year. Despite the fact that this man had fractured her spine, he was not expelled. He was not banned from campus. He was not even arrested. Instead, he was offered a waiting period. An opportunity to stand back and quietly watch his unforgivable acts of violence dissipate, fade.
Sclove fought against his return. She still had two years left on campus and feared for her safety.
The school rejected her appeals.
Her education disrupted, her mental health crushed, Sclove did not know what to do. She couldn’t think or breathe and the very idea of casually running into him as she walked to the dining hall or hurried to class was unbearable.
In the end, Sclove transferred.
By the time I left Brown, I would have multiple close friends who had been sexually assaulted.
This is a difficult review to write because I really wanted to love Promising Young Woman (2020). Hell, I wanted to like it. The trailer—the assertive, confrontational gaze of Carey Mulligan, the string cover of Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” the fact that Emerald Fennel, a Killing Eve writer, penned the film—made me feel like this was a movie made for me.
But it wasn’t.
And I’m not going to pretend that it was.
First, let’s get the disclaimers out of the way. This is Carey Mulligan’s best role. I truly believe that. As Cassie, she delivers every line with a canny internal sense of wit and pain and grief and simmering trauma. This film would have utterly failed without her performance. She added depth and nuance to a difficult, inconsistently written character.
The other best thing the film chose to do was unapologetically burrow into the ways that all men, even the “good” ones, contribute to rape culture. When Cassie discovers that her caring, witty boyfriend (Bo Burnham) stood by, laughing, while her friend was raped in medical school years ago, she can’t breathe. We can’t believe it. Later, she confronts him about his past actions. When his quick justifications don’t assuage her anger or condemnation, he grows irritated, defensive, stating that they were “just kids.”
Cassie’s friend, Nina, was also just a kid. But her personhood doesn’t matter.
He never takes full responsibility for his behavior because to do so would undermine the persona he has cultivated in the years since. He cannot acknowledge his complicity because he doesn’t want to. He wants to pretend that joking around with friends while a girl is violently assaulted is simply not as bad as the actual assault. He wants to hide behind the excuse of youth because these types of excuses—youth, his “promising” career, his newfound niceness now—are excuses that usually allow men to avoid accountability. The film title, after all, is a direct reference to the Brock Turner case.
The casting is also an example of savvy, purposeful marketing. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that Adam Brody (The O.C.), Max Greenfield (New Girl), Christopher Lowell (Veronica Mars), and Bo Burnham (Eighth Grade) were all offered roles in this film. For years, they have all elicited affection and warmth from viewers for their endearing charm in prior work. We watch these men onscreen and we want to trust them. As Carrie Witmer writes in The Ringer, “Their performances in the film, which emulate their previous roles but with a sinister twist, perfectly capture the film’s message that anyone could be a predator, and anyone could be complicit.”
Again and again, the film shatters the “Nice Guy” persona by revealing the deeper toxicity beneath the benevolent paternalism. After almost ten years, Cassie finally encounters Nina’s rapist, Al Monroe. When she refuses to abide by his terms of behavior, he grows more and more irritated. His self-effacing, apologetic demeanor washes away to reveal an impulsive, angry man who will do anything to wrest back his power.
And now. We reach that part of the film.
How a story chooses to end shapes what we take away from it.
In NPR’s review, Justin Chang refers to the film’s jarring tonal shifts. He writes, “[A]s it barrels toward an ending that strives to be tragic, darkly funny and queasily nihilistic all at once, Promising Young Woman starts to feel at odds with itself, as if it were trying to make you cackle and weep at the same time.”
And I find that to be the Achilles’ heel of the film.
If I am shown violence, I want to know why. If I am shown an extended scene where Al violently murders Cassie by suffocating her with a pillow, her legs writhing under her, muffled screams, as the minutes tick by, you better believe I want to know why. I want to understand how it contributes to the narrative. And it must. If the violence is rooted in nothing, then it is reprehensible. I do not accept sloppy storytelling. I do not accept violence for the sake of violence. It is lazy. It is bad writing.
Here, I could not understand what the film was trying to do or what it was trying to make me feel. When Al’s best friend walks into the bedroom, the early morning sun shedding an ugly spotlight on Cassie’s body, he looks at his friend in disbelief. Then, he grabs Al’s face and promises he will take care of everything. It is played in a strangely comedic tone—he speaks like a soothing mother, promising Al that he did nothing wrong, and Al exhales, relieved, and repeats the same thing like a child. The direction of this scene made me angry. I did not want to laugh. This was not a funny moment. Dear God, Carey Mulligan’s head was covered under a pillow, her feet sprawled on the comforter. I could see the outlines of the scene—I sensed that it wanted to highlight the cruel absurdity of the ways in which the men sought to absolve themselves of these atrocious acts of violence. I knew that. But it did not land. It felt like the film was laughing, too. It felt like the film was throwing a sarcastic quip at a funeral. It felt like the film was laughing at me.
And all I could think was, Who is this for?
While at Stanford, I received countless criminal alerts: these notifications relayed possible aggravated assaults and druggings. One of them explicitly disclosed a rape. These messages pinged my phone at night. They were short, terse messages. And I was expected, like my other female friends and colleagues and professors, to read about these violent acts and then slip my phone into my pocket and pay attention in class. We were supposed to know and then forget. We were supposed to behave “normally,” unshaken, completely at ease. These messages were meant to be warnings, but not warnings that actually affected us on a psychological level. It was normal, this violence. It was always treated like it was normal.
You think I don’t know how badly it can end for a woman who enters a room full of men? Give me a break.
Years ago, after my friend and I finished our bubble teas, we jumped into my car. As I navigated the dark streets, my friend grew quiet.
“Did I ever tell you what happened on my public health trip?”
On the day of her departure, she waited for a taxi that had been pre-approved by our university. Instead of a cab, an off-white van rumbled onto the street. Her stomach dropped. She contemplated not getting into the vehicle. This town was in an incredibly isolated area and they would have to drive through miles and miles of deserted land to get to the airport. She had no cell phone service. But she didn’t want to miss her flight, so she got into the van. After asking if she had a boyfriend, the driver became sexually explicit.
She remembered looking out her window and thinking to herself, If he attacks me, I’m going to throw myself out of the car. I’d rather die.
She tried to remain calm. As they neared the airport, the driver asked if they could stop at a coffee shop. Stiffly, she said that she needed to make her flight. Once they reached the terminal, he jumped out of the car and pulled her into an unwanted hug.
“He could see that I was freaking out,” my friend said. “And he whispered in my ear, ‘If I wanted to do anything to you, I would have.’”
A year later, it was Senior Week and my friends and I had lined up for free pizza outside a well-known pizzeria in Providence. We shivered in the early April cold. Suddenly, one of my friends grabbed my arm.
“He’s here,” she whispered. Her eyes remained focused in front of her. “To the left. By CVS. He’s—” she breathed in deeply. “The guy I told you about.” I searched throughout the crowd. “Don’t—” she sighed. “Can we just get the pizza and go?”
It was summer and I had joined my new friends from work for dinner. After eating, we sat on the living room couch.
“I studied abroad last year.” My friend shook her head. “It was terrible.” I looked at her in surprise. “The people…” she began. “They were terrible.”
My friends did not report their rapes. They knew they would never get justice. As case after case had shown, their testimony was considered meaningless by the legal system. Their testimony would ultimately culminate in a “he said, she said” trial that would leave them with nothing but a scarlet letter.
One summer, I cycled through multiple documentaries about sexual assault.
I had nightmares. I spent the next few days in a depressive haze. Usually, I could handle the dissonance. I could compartmentalize. The pain and anxiety would sink to the edges, a dull whine, as I lived my life. But this time, it all really hit me.
My sister asked, “Why do you keep watching these films?”
I didn’t have an answer. I don’t know why. Was I trying to see if there was a way I could learn from their “mistakes” and adjust accordingly? Was I trying to see if there was a way I could escape their fates? If anything, all I have learned is that there is no rational framework for navigating an irrational world. Watching these documentaries, the only thing I knew was that I was lucky.
I, too, have sat in a room drinking beers with boys who I considered friends. I, too, have walked home alone at night, wearing heels and a short skirt, wracked with anxiety as I scanned the empty streets. I, too, have felt unwanted hands on my body and pushed them off. Nothing catastrophic happened. Somehow, this makes me lucky. That is bullshit. My bodily autonomy should not be a matter of luck. Girls should be able to exist freely, without fearing for their very lives. They should not chide themselves for “mistakes” that are not, in reality, mistakes. Trusting your male friends is not a mistake. Walking home is not a mistake. Wearing a short skirt is not a mistake. And yet, courts repeatedly prop up these actions as a way to shame women for “leading men on” and implying that they “wanted it.”
Our bodies are not implications.
The men who betray your trust, or follow you home, or target you based on your clothes—they are the ones who should face punishment in court.
I do not consider the ending of Promising Young Woman a successful or honest portrayal of the ways in which rape culture can destroy a woman. Instead, I think it was included for shock value. I think it was meant for men—to show them how bad it can get. Because it sure as hell was not meant for me.
Girls are fed violent morality stories masked as fairy tales. We are taught to be scared of men, to distrust them, to avoid dark alleyways and groups of men on the sidewalk. We can do all those things and still be cut down viciously.
I can’t watch The Handmaid’s Tale. I stopped watching Game of Thrones after Sansa and Cersei were both raped—two brutal assaults that did not exist in the original source material. Women already know, in their bones, about the darkness of patriarchal oppression, its violence and ruthless apathy, its desire to assert grotesque power no matter the outcome.
Who are these stories for?
I’m so tired. The rage roars, flickers, and is then replaced by a sense of overwhelming exhaustion. I want to sleep for a thousand years.
And the idea that it is somehow my job to swallow the pain and the trauma—the idea that it is somehow my job to chip away at my own humanity, to appeal to the emotions of those who are complicit in this very system—is maddening.
You think I don’t know the ways in which rape culture can destroy a woman?
Give me a fucking break.
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If you or someone you know is experiencing violence and needs help or support, there are national and state-based agencies that can assist you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Call 1 800 RESPECT (1 800 737 732).
Click here to access RAINN’s National Resources for Sexual Assault Survivors.