The Woodburner Sessions: Promising Young Woman

The Woodburner Sessions are a series of columns bringing this Medium page back to two great strengths: the subject the writer in question got good at writing from writing about: film, and going down pop culture rabbit holes as a form of escapism from daily reality living under the [large medical news story of the last two years]. Even if we do end up learning something about the stuff we put into our ears and eyeballs along the way.

After haphazardly moving house with minimal support we were stuck with a preloaded Amazon Firestick, some pillows and a woodburner as the only things in our living room. Turns out there are alot of things the people who distribute these films want you to see and in a particular, if algorithmic, order — because they’re just so good. Well, we’ll see about that. And we’ll totally avoid talking about the [large medical news story] while we are at it. With this express purpose of isolating from stress in mind, the turnover of these stories will make a 20% contribution to MIND.

I’ve managed to keep an arms length from most of the arguments reassessing the rape-revenge genre as it existed at it’s peak. I have no issue with the impetus for a trope-laden horror subgenre changing its ways being placed at the feet of a form of cinema which has routinely surprised critics. I do take umbridge with people who fail to understand that the worst habits of rape-revenge and by extention, the equally eyeroll inducing Giallo subgenres spurned most of their shittery for chiefly commercial and/or superficial reasons. Women’s legs and breasts and arses never really left the forefront of these films’ aesthetic, regardless of the depth of the issue such titillation may have bookended. Almost like this kind of sexuality has to be an avowal of a film’s pitch and tone, as inseparable as any other form of textual expression. Basically, what I’m saying is, the likes of Wolves at The Door or Adulthood (Ding! Made by a Sex Offender!) are the equivalent of a two hour long Youtube video essay defending the Dwayne Johnson Doom movie as a masterpiece of adaptational verisimilitude because of that one sequence where it goes into a first person perspective. No no, this is film is from a bad genre but we’re playing with the conventions. You’re playing with the TV Tropes page and it’s all the worse for it.

With sex films, which is essentially and (rightfully) unashamedly what films like Promising Young Woman are, people who do what I do in these columns are no better. They’re the equivalent of a two hour long Youtube video wondering aloud how the blood effects in Wolves at The Door could be allowed to look so fake, the final fifty minutes of which is just a grainy social media picture of a relative someone killed in the real life tragedy upon which the film is based, whilst the flute from My Heart Will Go On screeches in the background.

I think women filmmakers like Emerald Fennel and to a lesser extent, Chloe Zhao, are rightfully pissed off in a creative playing field which takes all new efforts on the subject of sexual abuse as a free clout ticket. Either a free ticket to editorially state one’s own radar for spotting the essentialist bumcum of ‘rape as a plot device’ (wait until they find out it’s a crime, too) or a free ticket to broadcast their own tolerance of shock value as some kind of entrenched, indie-savvy clout. Like the bold, red, number 18 that blotched the corner of UK copies of the Cannibal Holocaust VHS which lurked at the back of every Blockbuster of the era actually represented the number of times you had to watch Day of The Dead or Don’t Look Now or Texas Chainsaw before you could be allowed to pick it up.

By making a film which responds to these biases from within the Hollywood/London process of attaching a bankable star to a circulating or even blacklisted script and pitching it within the anomalous Drama genre blanket, Promising Young Woman is contextually and aesthetically condemned to resembling the season finale of a well to do primetime hour drama. Meanwhile the I Spit On Your Grave and Straw Dogs of the day had an essentially finality attached to their plots, which lent itself to the seminality of experiencing those films — even if said finality came from an initial reaction by studios and censors of ‘don’t fucking pull that again.’ In Ms. Fennell’s vested defence, this retrofitting of a film into a drama genre dominated by a format which typically has ten times the runtime to play with is an issue which plagues several of the films I watched for The Woodburner Sessions.

The components of said anomalous ‘good drama’ elude neither writer/director Fennell nor lead Carey Mulligan, the later of whom in particular is utterly undisturbed by any need to put a filter between the power fantasy her character is playing out and the empowered role she has stepped in to. Every line delivery of Mulligan’s drips with the catharsis of a half-sauced matinee idol amazed their obscure, edgy, Edinburgh Fringe routine is still causing students and Guardian readers to split their sides for the 13th year running, leaving a bunch of cash to be picked up off the doorstep.

‘You know — you ain’t even that hot.’ Barks a jilted prospect for her revenge trip from a club parking lot.

‘You’re not exactly dropping panties yourself.’ She manages, in the manner of a friend commenting on how the burger the two of you just picked up could be a little more well done.

This sardonism drives a wedge between Mulligan’s character, a disillusioned medical student out to punish predatory men following a sex attack on her young friend, and any other last-girl we’ve seen in the past 30 years — with the possible exception of Ellen Ripley. She is sick of this shit and the plodding delivery of her verbal barbs and excoriations almost ushers in a laugh track and a melancholy sense that she should not want to make it to the end of her adventure and be in fact proven right about male violence. In the business we call this foreshadowing. In this column I call it undeserved.

An overbearing percentage of what’s on screen during Promising Young Woman is a matter of transparently mechanical screenwriting. Characters appear and leave the moment their contribution to exactly what our protagonist needs to hear has been fulfilled. The level of violence implied, nay stated by the scenes in which Mulligan successfully traps men and the social and legal implications thereof change from minute to minute with no rhyme or reason. The cast of characters who might appreciably react to what Mulligan’s character is doing or who might present a confused set of identifiers between ‘safe’ and ‘rapist’ in her mind are gradually phased out and scenes which allow us to see the traumatised Cassie reassimilating to life with the intelligence to understand that’s what’s happening are editorially all over the place, both within the runtime and in terms of moment to moment editing, failing to effectively relativise this part of her life to her revenge quest. Perhaps I’m speaking to the power of the kind of postmodern nit picking that so effectively masquerades as creative novelty as to give us films like this (as well as some of the poorer entries in this column) but even the simplest acknowledgement by Cassie or someone around her of how her revenge quest is the kind of thing that adult pop culture has been magnetised to for decades now could solidify things, for lack of a better word. No one can tell me, for example, when the film is set. Faux real-world social media sites look like they were made in After Effects in an afternoon, universities and lawyer’s firms and international companies go unnamed, every other woman anywhere near Cassie’s age is a proto-millennial stereotype literally wondering how good they look on Instagram or where their next latte is going to come from. Could it be saved by someone turning around and quipping ‘Hey, Cass, seen The Handmaiden?’ No but having only Cassie’s word for it that this is a course of action she must continue on serves as an uncomfortable additional echelon to the sheer amount of gaslighting contained in the film. The staggering, high school edufilm levels of Xbox-Live tier verbal abuse uttered by the men in the different party situations depicted in the film was enough.

This commitment to the character of Cassie being in an essentially liminal space where both concrete action and concrete consequences can only be brought on by her is a very effective depiction of trauma. I was willing to forgive the intangible, copyright friendly suburban America she moves through as essentially functioning as an unending video game level, where the role of protagonist is so often trauma’s way of justifying constant action and stimulation in the name of the greater cause of not allowing a tragedy to strike again. The film’s two twists, one at the end of the second act and another at the end of the third are both immensely cheapened by the need to reassure an otherwise unpatronised audience that Cassie’s actions are taking place in a world with rudderless reactions — something any trauma survivor could already tell you. Given an entire sequence or act, these two short scenes in which, major spoiler warning, she discovers her boyfriend was an amused witness to the rape of her friend and in which she is caught in a struggle with her final revenge target and killed, could have been paired off against the fibres of life affirming drama added when Mulligan’s Cassie interacts with characters who aren’t willing participants in the most horrific violation human beings can visit on one another.

Spoilers aside, the film’s need to editorially and aesthetically block off sections of Cassie’s story in which she interacts with her parents, interacts with her boyfriend, interacts with other men and then interacts with institutions with 90ft concrete walls mean that the film’s final twenty minutes play out as a hedonistic, heightened reality setpiece. Just, as afore mentioned, with a total absence of the detachment, confidence or commitment to depict Cassie going after her final target as a rudderless curveball of reciprocal abuse.This culminates in an off kilter stretch of what passes for black comedy, attempting to drag the objectification of Cassie as some kind of natural instinct for the men around her, whilst the film reduces her role to something similarly petty, contrived and essentialist. It is high school movie hamfistedness again, expect this time someone has been brutally murdered. It’s amazing that such a self evident incongruity was not intentional but I know it wasn’t because they forgot the laugh track.

Beating, stabbing or tricking rapists into their deaths is, as I hope I adequately indicated at the beginning of this piece, the very substance of the extended family of films Promising Young Woman belongs to yet we’re never given any real indication of Cassie’s proximity to this violence (until we need to pull a tweeeest out), whether an audience finds it redemptive, cathartic, condemnable or any of the above. The reaction to the pace at which Cassie’s personal gaslight flickers and fizzles is left to her boyfriend, played to eerie perfection by Bo Burnham. Like so many comics that have forayed into drama roles, the nuances of how the most interesting people in our lives assume that role through the way they move and talk and twirl a pen and struggle to find a coat hook are putty in his hands. He rides the edge of pitiable and intellectually insecure in a way only someone trying to accurately portray a doctor possibly can but never irredeemably so. If only such temperance of the role Cassie is playing in the lives of those around her was allowed to strike a similarly bewildering balance between thrust-upon vulnerability and voluntary compensation for vulnerability.