No More Mr Nice Guy: A Look At The Trope In Promising Young Woman
TW: This article discusses rape and sexual assault
Warning: This article includes spoilers for the film, Promising Young Woman
Cassandra Thomas, played by Carey Mulligan, is on a dangerous mission to avenge the death of her best friend as she singlehandedly attempts to confront rape culture one Nice Guy at a time. Take her home and take your chances - that’s the challenge posed by the tagline of Emerald Fennel’s directorial debut Promising Young Woman. Every week Cassie gets glammed up and heads out to a nightclub alone where she pretends to be drunk. Without fail, by the end of the night a self-proclaimed Nice Guy will swoop in with offers to take care of her. Instead, what usually happens once they’ve performatively escorted her out of the club is that they see her drunken vulnerability as an opportunity to take advantage and they attempt to sexually assault her. It is at this point that Cassie reveals herself to be stone cold sober and these men have to reckon with the fact that what they wanted to do, what they were attempting to do, was in fact assault. On a larger scale, Promising Young Woman works in the same way: female rage is used to rip back the curtains on rape culture, more specifically how our society accommodates predators and normalises sexual violence.
Until Cassie confronts them, the men that take her home would not consider their actions to be a crime because they didn’t use force. False reassurances of “It’s OK, you’re safe” quickly turn to cries of “I thought we had a connection”, “I’m a nice guy!”. Notably, Cassie is unarmed throughout these scenes. She weaponises her body and her faux-intoxication as she takes control of the precarious and dangerous situations, forcing her would-be assaulters to take a long hard look in the mirror. These early scenes highlight the glaring limitations of ‘no means no’ rhetoric. Cassie flipping the switch from hunted to hunter could be empowering to watch if it weren’t for the nail-biting fear induced in these scenes. Even knowing that she is in control of the situation does not entirely assuage worries about the danger Cassie is positioning herself in. Its thoughts like this that Fennel seeks to elicit from the audience, only for you to realise that that in itself is part of the larger problem. Promising Young Woman draws out the audiences internalised rape culture narratives but is not the straightforward #MeToo parable you may expect.
Fennel’s Oscar award winning best original screenplay satirises the well-trodden tropes of rape-revenge fantasies and splices them with rom-com aesthetic, sound-track (it seems fair to admit here that Paris Hilton’s Stars Are Blind in the promo reeled me in) and a knight-in-shining-armour plot line, producing a nice guy exposé that serves as an unsettling and provocative watch. Though the blend of genres is at times jarring, it illustrates how rape culture seeps into wider society in a way that is all too recognisable. Beyond revealing the limitations of ‘no means no’ consent rhetoric, the film weaponises femininity whilst also critiquing complacency within rape culture. Promising Young Woman is more than just a nice-guy-exposé-cum-rape-culture-exemplum, it is deliberately polarising, both morally and psychologically. Cassie’s world view is starkly black and white and her relentless desire for revenge is not a victimless crime. Beyond Cassie’s weekly club outings, the film also sees Cassie consumed by a larger revenge plan, working through a numbered list of people she considers to be complicit in the rape and death of her best friend, Nina.
Although Promising Young Woman centres around Cassie and her relationship with, grief for and revenge on behalf of Nina, who died by suicide following her sexual assault, she is notably absent on-screen. We meet her mother, see pictures of her even, but it is poignant that there are no flashback scenes of her. Perhaps even more importantly than that, despite the existence of a video of Nina’s assault that features as a significant plot point of the film, the tape is never shown on screen. Of all Fennel’s generic adaptations, this is the most welcome distancing from rape-revenge plots that prioritise gratuitous scenes of violence. It goes without saying that it is not necessary to witness sexual assault to believe that it happened, to believe the survivor or to hold the perpetrators accountable. Fennel exemplifies this whilst demonstrating sexual violence to be a societal issue as opposed to an individual issue. Unlike rape-revenge films before it, Promising Young Woman does not position sexual assault to be a baptism by fire style plot accelerator. Instead, Fennel highlights the ubiquity and seismic repercussions of rape culture.
Accountability is an overarching theme throughout the film. Fennel’s tightening focus on it can be tracked from the opening scenes of men that cheer on their letchy friends in clubs and consider it a win to take advantage of a drunk and vulnerable woman in a club, to the film's climax where Cassie confronts Nina’s rapist. One of the women on Cassie’s revenge list is Madison, an old friend of hers and Ninas from university. She earned her place on the list because of her complicity with Nina’s abuser, denying she knew anything about the assault when questioned by the authorities only to admit years later that she did know about it and disregarded it as a ‘boys will be boys’ situation, implying a bleak sense of inevitability. Cassie plays on this sense of inevitability in her personal revenge on Madison. The two go for lunch and Cassie facilitates Madison getting drunk to the point of blacking out and has her moved to a hotel room where she wakes up next to a man she doesn’t know, with no recollection of how she got there. To make matters worse, Cassie ignores all of Madison’s desperate calls as she tries to piece together the events of the night, fearing that she has been assaulted. Cassie’s polarising actions are in no way justifiable, instead they are exemplary of the pain and destruction that she continues to live with. At this point of the film it becomes clear that Cassie’s black and white ideal of justice doesn’t exist. Her revenge is instead a manifestation of anger that Fennel herself describes as a ‘monster that needs feeding’.
After facing no repercussions for raping Nina in med-school whilst she was black-out drunk in front of an entire party, Al Monroe played by Chris Lowell, goes on to have a successful career and is engaged to be married. Cassie’s revenge plan culminates in her posing as a stripper at his bachelor party. For the first time, she threatens to resort to violence but it ends tragically for her. Al suffocates her to death. Throughout the excruciatingly long scene, as Cassie kicks and screams, Al’s determination is shocking. Fennel’s depiction of the murder, though disturbing to watch, does provide a strategically interesting visual extreme that stands in place of scenes of sexual violence. Finally, Al has committed a crime for which the consequences cannot be escaped. The climactic murder scene firmly shuts the door on any meagre defence attempts that suggest the existence of grey areas surrounding the notion of consent, that worry about running the lives of young rapists and assaulters, and that this is a kind of violence that is accidental or can be grown out of.
Undoubtedly, Cassie is a deeply flawed character. Debating whether or not she, or this film, is problematic is a moot point. To try and moralise her wreaking psychological havoc on Madison or even the merits of her entrapment style missions is to ignore that the character of Cassie symbolises a collision of grief and rage. Neither a hero nor an anti-hero, her loss and pain echoes out and eats away at all aspects of her life and ultimately costs her her life. Her death, at the hands of Al, Nina’s rapist, is poignant - not because of the frustratingly empty catharsis her quasi-martyrdom leaves us with - but because she preempts it. Her understanding of the danger of the so-called Nice Guy is chilling. Wherever you stand on Cassie’s methods and morality, when stripped back to its essence her endeavour was borne out of desperation for someone to acknowledge the tragedy of and condemn Nina’s rape and death. To do so, for each of the characters she targets, would be to admit guilt or complicity. Fennel’s film is loud and brash because the self-perpetuating silence and silencing surrounding rape culture, of which Cassie’s death is symbolic, is deafening.
Written by Hannah Coom
Hannah is a postgraduate with an MA in Issues in Modern Culture from UCL. Recently she has been working in e-commerce selling model planes, trains and automobiles. Outside of that she enjoys pottery, roller-skating and is honestly just trying her best.