For my final film, I watched Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (2020). Protagonist Cassie is a cunning woman with a painful past. She spends her nights in bars, feigning drunkenness to entrap men to take her home with them. When they attempt to take advantage of her, she exposes her sobriety and confronts them. Cassie does not do this for her own entertainment. Rather, she is motivated by her trauma surrounding her best friend, Nina’s, rape at the hands of her classmate, Al Monroe. Her assault was witnessed by many and recorded, but the university ultimately dismissed her allegations, which contributed to Nina’s suicide. When Cassie learns Al is soon to be married, she constructs a plot targeting those involved or complicit in Nina’s assault.
Promising Young Woman is a complicated example of rape-revenge, but it takes bold strides to rework the subgenre for modern audiences. Cassie, the beloved avenger, dies at the end of the film, making a clear distinction between this film and its predecessors. Posing as a stripper, she infiltrates Al’s bachelor party, where he suffocates her with a pillow after she confronts him about Nina’s rape. However, Cassie’s plot is far from over; she previously sent evidence of the rape and her location to Jordan Green, a remorseful lawyer who initially defended Al. Green assists Cassie with her plot, and the police arrive to arrest Al. In this respect, Promising Young Woman takes a more inventive route, incorporating technology for twenty-first-century audiences and, in true Ms .45 fashion, refusing to grant its protagonist cathartic release—at least in life. With its somewhat unsatisfying ending, its position as a rape-revenge film is up for debate, but it is possibly a more realistic outcome. Cassie’s murder demonstrates the lengths Al will go to avoid taking accountability for Nina’s assault, and Al’s friend Joe acts as a willing accomplice in covering up his former frat brother’s wrongdoing. Though Cassie’s revenge plot was relatively successful, the true question is why it had to take another, now-murdered, woman to bring her best friend’s rapists to justice.
In “Film Genres after #MeToo: Promising Young Woman as a Rape-Revenge Film and a Rom-Com,” Zsófia O. Réti makes a strong case for the film as a modern reinterpretation of the genre, combining both rape-revenge and romantic comedy tropes. This is most obvious in Cassie’s brief relationship with Ryan, a seemingly well-meaning man she meets at her workplace, whom she later discovers was a complicit bystander in Nina’s rape. Earlier rape-revenge films often relied on coding perpetrators as visibly ‘other’---often working-class, racialized, or socially marginal men—thereby implying that only these ‘bad’ individuals commit sexual violence. By contrast, Promising Young Woman portrays men who fit the cultural image of ‘respectability’—white, educated. well-dressed, professionally successful, and polite—as assailants, rather than lean into racist or classist stereotypes that only present a specific type of man as a rapist. This choice broadens the scope of accountability, more accurately modeling reality in revealing how these men are deeply embedded in the systems that obfuscate and even accommodate their detrimental behavior.
With that said, on-campus sexual assault is by no means a new or uncommon occurrence, but Promising Young Woman’s emphasis on it is decidedly modern, particularly in the post-#MeToo era. Gang rape or party rape scenarios are often connected to forms of social, institutional, or criminal affiliations. Fraternities are a strong example of this association, where party rape culture on college campuses contributes to the 13% of all students who experience rape or sexual assault, with rates even higher for undergraduate women (26.4%) and students with nonconforming social identities (21%) (RAINN). As Peggy Reeves Sanday explains in her 2007 book Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus, “The isolation of fraternities and athletic teams may enhance a sense of privilege and entitlement that spills over into interpersonal violence against outsider males or violence against female party guests that takes the form of sexual abuse” (Sanday 159). This observation highlights how these insular social groups can cultivate environments where harmful norms go unchallenged and where fear of consequences is diminished.
Further, my previous discussion of homosocial bonds and masculinity is especially salient when considered in relation to real-world sexual assaults with multiple perpetrators. Sanday states that the group sexual assault scenarios are rooted in a desire to not only dominate women, but also display masculinity to other males: “The woman involved is a tool, an object, the centerfold around which boys both test and demonstrate their heterosexual desire by performing for one another. They prove their manhood on a wounded girl who is unable to protest” (173). Sanday’s statements reveal that this violence is not solely about a desire for sexual gratification, but about performance. The assault is an act designed, in part, for male peers in which masculinity is measured through dominance, control, and subjugation of the violated body; a woman’s dehumanization is central to this process. The group reinforces its bonds through a ritualized and shared transgression (160). In this way, these fraternities and campus environments serve as a microcosm of larger environments, where the pursuit and performance of masculinity is entangled with violence against women, and insufficient punitive measures and support resources obstruct justice.