Why Emerald Fennell’s film about the disabling qualities of just anger seems to have been made to be seen alongside I can destroy you.
Photo: focus features
Warning: important spoilers ahead.
Cassie Thomas, the floral print femme fatale performed by Carey Mulligan in Promising young woman, want to die? The first time I saw the film, a year ago, now at Sundance, I don’t think so. When I came back to watch it recently, though, I felt less sure. Cassie definitely doesn’t seem to expect damage from the predatory softboys she looks for in bars, at least not beyond what she is willing to allow. She can turn her body into a target, pretending to be insensitive to see who has the upper hand, but is always in control in the scenes in which she sneaks false-You are drunk while an Adam Brody or Christopher Mintz-Plasse tries to maneuver you out of your clothes. An abrupt leap into sobriety interrupts any attack on its tracks, a dark fantasy that the film allows because its focus is on a particular type of rapist: the self-styled cool guy who would never resort to force, but that it’s okay to have sex with someone too drunk to keep your eyes open, let alone give consent. Promising young woman teases her protagonist as a vengeful killer on her way home from the first of these encounters, the camera sliding down a red drop on her leg as she walks barefoot at dawn – only to reveal the liquid to be ketchup from an evening snack. The punishment Cassie prefers is to force men who seek her out to really see each other, if only for a moment.
But then there’s the scene where Cassie takes a wheel wrench to a guy’s car yelling at her for stopping too long at an intersection, and there’s no calculation in her actions, no grand plan – she’s just a woman daring a bigger , stronger stranger respond to your explosive anger with his. And there is the ending, that spectacularly uncomfortable ending, in which Cassie goes on a date with destiny at the bachelor party of Al Monroe (Chris Lowell), the medical school colleague who once raped her drunk blackout best friend, Nina in front of a mock audience, then had an illustrious career while Nina gave up and killed herself. It is in that cabin, the other participants passed out on the floor below, where Cassie finds what she may or may not have been looking for all this time: a man who does the kind of damage that results in consequences he cannot escape. Al may not be willing to admit what he did to Nina, but he ends up showing himself willing to suffocate Cassie in a panic to prevent the information from surfacing. Cassie screams and kicks her legs in white pantyhose along the agonizingly long sequence, fighting like someone who wants to live. Still, she was fully prepared to die, scheduling text messages and leaving evidence in the event of her disappearance. And when she pulls up outside the party, ready to bluff her way in pretending to be a stripper, she takes the license plates out of her car and throws them into the forest for a terrible purpose, the gesture of someone who will only discover her escape if she appears.
There are a million more urgent COVID pressures in this universe, but the one I’ve been thinking about lately is the one Promising young woman opened in theaters as originally planned in April, less than two months before I can destroy you had its debut on HBO. Emerald Fennell’s film is intensified and somberly comic, while Michaela Coel’s series is personal and chaotically empathetic, but both are post-Me works that also try to have the same idea of how to deal with the reality of rape culture. They are about women whose lives are interrupted by incidents of sexual violence, a second-hand nightmare in Cassie’s case, and directed at Coel’s character, Arabella, who is drugged and assaulted in a bar, an experience that remains frustratingly out of place. focus on your memory. But they are, more urgently, about what happens next, and about anger justified as powerful, but ultimately debilitating to live with – something that can crush a person as effectively as trauma. What if Promising young woman and I can destroy you they had come very close, as originally planned, they might look like they were in casual conversation.
They may also have looked like they were involved in a debate, with the brilliantly discursive ending to the Coel series serving as a gentle replica of Fennell’s film, which directs his heroine to an act of self-immolation in order to find justice for his dead friend. Both works are about the struggle to find a way forward – emotionally, but also narratively, because what is a satisfactory conclusion to an experience that is both mundane and destructive of the world, to a horror that we were told was not exceptional and should be accepted until, abruptly, did everyone change their mind? Nina is the one who initially dies in Promising young woman, but Cassie’s life ends early in its own way; she exists in a kind of female stasis, stagnating in her job at the cafeteria, forgetting her own 30th birthday, living in her childhood room while her parents hover in loving concern. What she seems to want is to go back in time and save her friend, or, except, that everyone admit her complicity and guilt in her death, and apologize. And yet, when she meets someone who is willing and ready to do so – a depressed defense lawyer, played by Alfred Molina, who used to specialize in defending young people accused of rape – she is lost, moved and overwhelmed , but also exhausted from direction.
Anger can be a sanctuary and also a dead end. Inside I can destroy you, Arabella publicly condemns the publisher’s employee who removed the condom without her consent during sex, and has a brief flirtation with being an angry voice on the internet, speaking the truth to power and basking in the addictive nature of the statements and agreements that Follows. She seems lost while staggering through the streets in a demonic Halloween outfit, revealing her friend’s behavior in real life and patriarchy on social media. It is a reduced version of the feeling that Cassie pursues in her weekly ritual in her own set of fantasies, poking the same crust over and over again, reopening an old wound to be reminded that she is right in her resentment. And yet, when I can destroy you comes to an end, revenge is the first of the scenarios that Coel considers and then discards as his character and series seek an end. Arabella, after nights of searching, sees her assailant, David (Lewis Reeves) at the bar where she was assaulted, and finally remembers what happened that night. She allows him to buy her a drink, and lets him believe that she drugged her, and allows him to drag her into the bathroom – at that point she pulls out a Cassie, revealing that she is fully aware of what he is trying to do.
Arabella and her friends go further, stabbing the guy with a syringe of their own drugs, and staggering down the street, attempting sexual humiliation, and then beating and strangling him, in an echo of Promising young womanlast act of violence. Then everything stops, because Arabella, who was writing what was on the screen all the time, understands that there is no closure – if that is what she is looking for. Time goes by and, in the next round, Arabella consumes enough cocaine to fight the ceilings and confronts David in the bathroom alone, causing him to sob excuses and talk about his own dark past and damaged people doing damage. It is reminiscent of the scene with Molina in Promising young woman, the two reaching some point of impossible and undeserved understanding. It’s another stalemate, this humanization of her rapist, and then Arabella takes the story back one last time, rewriting her encounter with David in one where she has the agency to approach him, penetrate him, take pleasure in him and decide when he can go. She turns him into a character who goes through her narrative, unlike someone who derails her, having decided that she is the one who will have to overcome his trauma, or cling to him forever.
Holding is what Cassie does, having explored the other options that Arabella does, and also finding it lacking. There is a moment when Promising young woman when, having found love, despite her many defenses, with another former classmate named Ryan (Bo Burnham), Cassie seems to be moving on. She begins to think about the future and takes steps to become the person she used to be before her broken heart and guilt broke her. But, like an orpheus in soft tones, she can’t resist looking back, and when she revisits that old pain one last time watching a video on Nina’s rape cell phone, what she sees cuts off any chance of her having a normal life . Promising young woman he doesn’t choose to complicate his ending by making Ryan admit his minor part in Nina’s death – like all the other “nice guys” in Cassie’s life, he immediately crouches defensively, stating everything she came to believe about the world. I wish so – I wish you had made your heroine’s final decisions seem a little less direct and a little less supported by the world you create. I can destroy you embraces a radical and revolutionary empathy in its end that may be more aspirational than replicable for most of us, but it presents a way of imagining life after trauma and of releasing anger as an act of self-care rather than weakness or pardon.
what Promising young woman opt for is something much darker, with Cassie screaming from beyond her unidentified grave when the consequences finally reach the men who ruined others and then moved on. She can come out on top in that incendiary and uncomfortable ending, her triumph conveyed with a posthumous laughing emoji. But righteousness is a cold comfort when you are dead.