FEBRUARY 2021 BLOG
CANCEL CULTURE AND THE PROMISING
YOUNG WOMAN MOVIE.
Dear Reader,
Recently I went to see a film
with some of my male friends. The movie was hailed as an amazing and complex
story of a young woman attending a medical school at a University in the USA.
Her studies were interrupted by a rape of her best friend, who later suicides.
She becomes totally obsessed with VENGEANCE and stalks young men pretending she
is blind drunk. A quote from a review:
“She lives with her parents, and spends her nights going to bars and night
clubs and pretending to be dangerously, blindly intoxicated. When men take her back to their places—under
the pretense of helping her—she rejects their advances, begs to go home, and
then, when they persist, switches off the slurring and asks, in a cold and
sober voice, what they are doing. It is startling enough that they always
immediately backpedal. “I thought we had a connection,” one sputters. “I’m a
nice guy!” Afterward, she goes home, tallies each conquest in a small notebook
hidden under her childhood bed, and the next morning begins the whole process
over again”.
The movie A PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN
(written by Emerald Fennell) was very upsetting for me and I walked out at the
middle of it. I felt a sense of inner disgust at the way the woman “Cassie” is
after vengeance against all young men. Here the victim and the vigilante
collapse into a single entity or confluence and it is an overly complex story.
As I left the movie theater, I had a flash in my mind about how similar the
theme seemed to the old Westerns where the good (hero) cowboy is taking vengeance
on several “bad guys” who killed his friends. He stalks them and kills them
all.
But vengeance (male or female) is
a place where a ‘fractured’ mind goes when it is striving to stay whole (sane).
But in many cultures, revenge means ‘doing something’ right and justifiable.
While reading several reviews to
find out the end of the movie, I found this description:
Much has been made about the
film’s ending, the final way in which “Promising Young Woman” sets itself apart
from its lineage. Cassie infiltrates the bachelor party of Nina’s rapist
disguised as a stripper. She ties him up, tells him what she knows, tries to
get him to admit to what he has done, and threatens to cut Nina’s name into his
skin. He breaks free of his restraints and smothers Cassie with a pillow. It
takes an agonizingly long time for her to die. It is as brutal as watching the
rape we’ve never been witness to.”
Now, this is an amazing topic for
a serious discussion, and I am inviting my male friends to meet and share
freely their opinions and feelings about the movie. I am asking my friends to
be open and free to keep the door of rational debate and do not enter a place that
journalists call “the cancel culture”.
where all rational open sharing is quickly judged, and the blame is usually put
on the men.
Young men, in my experience, are
frightened to express themselves freely for fear of being castigated and blamed
for injuring women. Many young men retire to their mobiles and stay quiet.
As I followed my own intuition
regarding the origin of the movie script and as I read the interview with the
writer published in the VULTURE (www.vulture.com),where
the author, Emerald Fennell, states that she loved old cowboy movies – YES! I
thought, here is the source of her script. A hero cowboy now converted in the
girl Cassey, is on a rampage to avenge the killing of his friend and goes and
kills all the bandidos (bad guys). Therefore, I am seeing a ‘cancel culture”
model emerging in the movie where the hero is a woman, and the young men are
the bad guys. As Gemma Tognini states in her newspaper article: “The mob does
not always dress in black and wear dark glasses, and carry knives or guns, the
mob also wear suits and dresses, and are everywhere.” So, my readers, here is
the challenge – speak up and write your comments - and here is a question:
As viewers, we have our own
questions to ask. Do filmmakers owe us realistic portrayals of rape and its
aftermath, or may we take pleasure in revenge fantasies, in which real-life
obstacles are cast aside?
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