This week I'm looking at storytelling takeaways from the 2021 Oscar Nominees for Best Original Screenplay.
One of Emerald Fennell's PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN great strengths is its use of audience expectations.
The film presents itself as a classic revenge story. Cassie (Carey Mulligan) is a former med student intent on punishing the monsters who harmed her best friend Nina. We begin in Act 1 with setting herself as a target for the various creeps who take advantage of vulnerable women, only to then turn the tables on them once they think they have her.
Act 2 sees her moving up the through the food chain punishing those involved with Nina's death: the former classmate who didn't believe them; the dean who did nothing; the lawyer for the rapist.
Finally in Act 3 we get to Al the rapist himself. Cassie shows up as the stripper bought for his bachelor party. Getting him alone, she handcuffs him to the bed and prepares to cut Nina's name into him.
Then, he breaks free. Which fits the genre. It's the hero's journey--the hero has to confront their demon in order to be free. And it has to be difficult; it's the hardship they go through both to get here and now that earns them their victory.
Except that's not how this goes. From Fennell's script (which you can download here):
BAM!- He breaks a hand free from a handcuff and grabs her by the throat. CASSANDRA is caught off-guard.
He turns her onto the bed, to get both hands around her throat. She struggles. He’s choking her.
AL MONROE You asked for this. You fucking asked for this. This is your...fault.
CASSANDRA is looking at him. She can’t breathe.
She somehow slips out of his grasp. There’s a struggle, with AL’s hand tied to the bed they’re evenly matched, she manages to get her hand free again and she raises the scalpel.
It looks like she might win when, at the last second, AL catches her arm and twists it. The scalpel falls to the ground.
He wrestles her back down onto the bed. One arm on her neck, pushing down. He starts to cry.
AL MONROE (CONT'D) This is your fault...
He can’t look at her. He grabs a pillow puts it over her face.
He climbs onto her head, kneeling on the pillow, smothering her with his knees. The one hand still handcuffed to the bed. It’s clumsy. It is going on for much too long. It feels like forever as she struggles underneath him. Every second we’re waiting for her to turn things around.
She tries to fight back, her hands scrabbling over him. She scratches his neck, but she’s running out of air. Her face hidden. AL is really sobbing now, kneeling on top of her.
Finally, after a long time, her body goes limp. Her arm falls, lifeless, to the ground.
AL stays on top of her. Crying. He climbs off tentatively.
We wait for the Fatal Attraction moment when she springs back to life. It never comes.
Even though Cassie's whole story is about how life for women is anything but some Joseph fucking Campbell archetype, having set up the story in the standard way, we don't see Cassie's end coming. Fennell has used the conventions of the genre to distract us from what's coming.
In the scene that follows, Fennell plays upon our knowledge of genre again, delivering what she describes in the script as "the beginning of
every bro comedy where a guy accidentally kills/hits/hurts a
sex worker. We’ve seen this trope before. Guys hurting women.
Guys covering for their friends. We are familiar with this
scene."
It's a pitch perfect delivery, right down to the antic absurdity of those kinds of scenes.
JOE: Hey man. This is not your fault ok?
AL MONROE (sniffing): I don’t know...it kinda seems like it is...
JOE: No, it’s not!
AL MONROE (crying): Am I...am I going to jail? What about the wedding? What about my job? Anastasia is going to be so upset. No one will understand...
JOE: It was an accident though, right?
AL MONROE: I mean-
JOE (firm): It was an accident, Al.
AL MONROE: Yeah. Of course. I mean, of course it was!
The scene reinforces the significance of Cassie's murder, that the actual state of the world is not just justice or hero journeys but bros helping bros murder hoes. Just the fact that Fennell gives Al this scene of his own, and also lets that prior scene end not with Cassie's death, but with Al's freaked out reaction to it, says everything about who is the real subject and who the object in our reality.
It also suddenly implicates us in the audience, who have likely watched these kind of bro comedies for decades and never thought twice about the women in them.
From the start this was a film about a woman playing upon others' fucked up expectations. In the end, it turns out Fennell has spent two hours doing the same thing to us. And she does so by "hiding the knife" behind all our genre assumptions.
Takeaway Question: What kind of expectations might the audience naturally be bringing to my story? How can I play on them?
