Not so promising not so young men

My friend Michael recently strongly recommended the film Promising Young Woman. Here’s a big collection of reviews.

He was wondering how the respectable (cough cough) right wing media were reacting to a challenging film with a strong feminist message, and so he went mango hunting at National Review:

Three separate reviews on how this was a man-hating movie that overstated the prevalence of sexual assault. My personal favorite was from Kyle Smith, NR’s critic-at-large. According to Smith, the real problems that should have been addressed by the movie are the following:

1.

“What’s actually been happening on campuses across America is that a sizable number of accused men have seen their reputations dragged through the mud while they were denied legal counsel; concomitant with this anti-male atmosphere, young men have lost interest in college to such a degree that there are now 40 percent more women than men on campus. There is today a gross mismatch in the dating market both on campus and among degree-holding single adults, meaning educated women face an unnerving situation with little precedent in all of human history: a culture in which they feel forced to compete with each other for men instead of the reverse.”

Do you know a single young male who has not gone to college because he is scared of being falsely accused of sexual assault? The review starts off by criticizing the movie for implying that gang rapes in higher ed are common (forget for a second that the sexual assault in the movie is not a gang rape, but rather one man raping one woman and the man’s friends not doing anything to stop it) and then goes off down a road of stating the existence of a phenomenon for which there has to be absolutely no evidence whatsoever.

2.

“Fennell, the writer-director of this debut film (and a showrunner for the feminist BBC series Killing Eve) is using the myth of widespread unpunished gang rape as a way to express disgust with a culture that does indeed victimize women, but in a far subtler way. Note that for feminists who occupy leading positions in journalism and the arts, the statistical reality of rape attracts very little discussion: It is, like other violent crimes, heavily concentrated among low-income groups and minorities, not in Fortune 500 companies and elite college dorms. In the movie, Cassie snickers at a reference to the principle of innocence being presumed until there is proof of guilt, but tell the average college-educated liberal woman that withdrawing this bedrock of criminal justice would lead to putting far more black men behind bars, and they’d blanch. No, no, it’s not poor black guys from Anacostia we want punished, they’d say, it’s this guy Brad I knew in chem class, we dated for a while, we had sex one time when I wasn’t into it, it wasn’t really rape though, it’s complicated, he’s such a jerk, I did a performance-art piece on this, can’t anything be done?”

In other words, the poors and the blacks are the real criminals and if you would just let us punish them severely, then this problem would go away.

3.

“Alas, there isn’t any principle in law that would serve Brad with his just deserts; an entire generation of drunken-hookup culture has left the Brads able to use women as sexual playthings without breaking any laws. Many women feel abused by the perfectly legal and culturally approved standard operating procedure among young adults: Men, whose sensibilities are saturated with Internet-porn scenarios from adolescence on, take lusty advantage of a system of sexual permissiveness in which women feel compelled to participate. Drinking themselves to the point of stupor, women do things that, when sober, they know to be unwise. They then find themselves emotionally hollowed out by the results to such a degree that their tales of woe are like Sex and the City reimagined as an Ingmar Bergman production. When the entire weight of the culture pushes casual sex, many go along with it, at which point many women feel the only means of protest available is either to launch false sexual-assault charges or whip up some revenge porn.”

Dan Quayle was right all along! By the way, I doubt that Fennell would disagree with the notion that women should be careful in getting drunk around young men. However, the price for doing so should not be “you get raped and then the system – including other women! – makes excuses for the rapist.” Who can say why conservatives get accused of victim blaming when the conclusion to a piece reviewing a movie about sexual assault is that women shouldn’t get drunk around men?

Here’s how NR’s regular film critic Armond White saw things:

I give you the first three paragraphs of the review:

***

[White review]

The serial-killer comedy Promising Young Woman is so full of hatred and cheating, it deserves to be called the first movie of the Biden-Harris era. More than that president-elect photo with the vacant smile in front of haloed backdrop signage, or that Vogue cover shot of Harris in sneakers, it’s Promising Young Woman that conveys ideas about revenge and cultural takeover.

British actress Carey “Crybaby” Mulligan plays Cassie (short for the prophetess Cassandra), who sets out to punish men for a BFF’s date-rape. Pretending girly helplessness, she recalls those pink-hatted Hillary Clinton cry-bullies of 2016. That’s the slyest aspect of director Emerald Fennell’s angry satire. Fennell’s facetious pop-art visual style loses its mirth as the film slips into an attack on the patriarchy, justifying Cassie’s plan to dominate other people’s lives while sacrificing herself — the cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face method seen in COVID culture and politics.

Pouty Cassie combines the traits of Hillary, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Lady Macbeth, yet Mulligan’s miscasting (she’s 35 years old) exposes the film’s deceit. Mulligan’s poor-poor-pitiful-me shtick feels based on a lifetime of bellyaching.

[End of excerpt from White review]

***

Yes, how unfortunate that a protagonist whose best friend kills herself after being raped is not sufficiently perky. So much bellyaching!

Also, Cassie has dropped out of medical school and is living with her parents. She turns 30 during the movie. (There’s a whole scene devoted to that fact!) So how it is a crime that a 35-year old was cast to play a 30-year old?

Ross Douthat also reviewed PYW for NR and that goes about how you’d expect. He’s a better writer than Smith or White and he doesn’t make as many dumb arguments, but the tone is the same.

Never get out of the boat.