The Courage to Betray Other Men: Why "Promising Young Woman" is Such a Compelling Moral Challenge
Some 15 years ago, I traveled out of state for a family wedding. I met some distant cousins I hadn’t seen in years, including one who had traveled to the occasion without his wife. I knew the wife well. At the reception, this cousin, then in his early 40s, got drunk and began flirting with a bridesmaid half his age. Eventually, he stumbled off with the young woman, who seemed somewhat more sober than he was.
As they left, my cousin turned to me and slurred, “If you say anything to my wife, I’ll kick your ass.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, old boy,” I replied.
It was a line from a novel I read once, where the protagonist says the exact same thing to his brother who is about to have a very similar extramarital rendezvous. I can’t remember the book (perhaps a reader can, as Google has been useless), but the double meaning of those words has always stuck with me. It meant in the book what I meant at the wedding: Don’t be ridiculous and jeopardize your marriage like this -- and it also meant, Don’t be ridiculous, you should know that even if I am disappointed by you, I will never betray a confidence.
My cousins’ marriage survives to this day. (And loved ones, do not even attempt to guess; ours is a very large family and we have all been to many, many weddings over the decades. You cannot suss out who it is I am talking about.) I have never discussed what I saw that night, keeping a promise that I made.
I thought about that moment with my cousin when Victoria and I watched Promising Young Women, a film which may well have a big haul at tonight’s Oscar ceremony. Spoilers for the film follow, so if you haven’t seen it yet and think it likely you will, give this post a miss.
The movie centers on Cassie (Carey Mulligan), and her remarkable efforts to exact a reckoning from abusive men. Cassie goes to bars and clubs, pretends to be drunk, and allows “nice guys” to take her home. When they try to rape her, as they invariably do, she reveals that she is sober, and confronts them. The scenes where these confrontations happen are difficult to watch, even when they are filled with bizarre and comedic touches.
Cassie is haunted by the memory of her best friend, Nina, who committed suicide after she was raped at a law school party. The man who raped Nina was never disciplined by the school, and Cassie is determined to force clarity and shame on those who hurt and betrayed her best friend – and on those men who continue to do the same indefensible things.
As grim as Cassie’s life is, it takes a brighter turn when she meets Ryan (played brilliantly by comedian, actor, and director Bo Burnham). Ryan is smitten by Cassie, and willing to go at her pace. “I can go slow,” he tells her, “I can barely move if you like.” Their courtship is a sunny, hopeful counterpoint to the grim and sordid encounters Cassie has with lecherous men. Their joy together is infectious.
And then, a friend gives Cassie a smart phone. On it is a video that shows Nina’s rape at that law school party. And in the background, providing nervous commentary, is Ryan. He is not a rapist, but he did not stop a rape, or report a rape, or confront the rapist. He witnessed, and did not tell.
Cassie confronts Ryan. He protests that he was young, “a kid,” and asks her to forgive him. In a scene that will stay with me a long time, Cassie refuses to offer him absolution, and instead blackmails Ryan for information on where Al, Nina’s rapist, will be holding his bachelor party. The scene ends with each feeling bereft and betrayed, and the film heads inexorably into its grim and shocking final act.
A lot has been said about this remarkable movie. Ella Dawson writes,
I want all of the men in my life to watch Promising Young Woman. I want to sit next to them and catalogue every anxious twitch of their mouths. I am equally petrified of their reactions. What if a man I trust calls Cassie “crazy”? What if a man I love doesn’t get it? After all, how can any man possibly relate to the pain and fear and absolute fury that this movie unleashed in me?
Promising Young Woman lanced the part of me that worries none of this will ever be okay. That worries all men will disappoint us if we give them the opportunity.
I had quite a few anxious twitches watching this film.
Look, there is a colossal distinction between cheating and rape. If I had seen that the young bridesmaid had been drunk, or if she had not seemed enthusiastic, I would have done more than tell my cousin not to worry about my discretion. I would have intervened. In the moral calculus with which I was raised, I have an obligation to prevent rape; I do not have an obligation to prevent infidelity.
I know, however, that a distinction is not absolution. I made an implied promise to my cousin of the sort that men are trained from birth to make, which is to be reverent about safeguarding the privacy of other men. The message I got as a child was that women’s expectations for men were high, and deservedly so. Men should do all they could to avoid hurting or embarrassing the women in their lives. At the same time, meeting those expectations all the time could be exhausting, and frankly, impossible. At times, we would inevitably fall short. When we fell, it was the job of other men to safeguard what might shame us. The “Bro Code” is many things, but it is chiefly about agreeing to condone the frailty that is part and parcel of what it means to be human.
Part of the genius of Promising Young Woman is that we’re shown, over and over, how far men will go to protect other men. At the end of the film, Cassie is killed by Al at that bachelor party. When he discovers Cassie’s body next to a panicked Al, Al’s best friend, Joe, swings into action, soothing his distraught friend, even cradling him in his arms and reassuring him that all will be okay. (It will not be okay; Al and Joe will end up being arrested in the film’s final scene, and there’s an implication that even Ryan could be in legal trouble as an accessory.) The only man who gets anything close to a redemption arc is the retired lawyer played by the sublime Alfred Molina; he is absolved of his former sins (defending rapists) by breaking the code of silence and giving the police the evidence they need to make arrests for both Nina’s rape and Cassie’s death.
The film’s title is itself an indictment, an indirect reference to the Brock Turner case. You may remember the “Stanford swimmer rapist” who received only a few months in jail after being convicted of rape. As an explanation for the lenient sentence, the judge said that Turner was a “promising young man” who deserved a second chance. The film argues that the culture that protects young men’s promise destroys women’s lives; Cassie and Nina were both promising too, and rape set in motion a chain of events that snuffed out that promise.
There’s a double meaning to “promise.” It can refer to potential, but it can also refer to the pledges we give each other. Ryan, the flawed protagonist, promises Cassie he will be respectful and gentle with her, and he is. In terms of how he treats her, he is as good as his word. Their ruin comes when Cassie finds that he has already made another promise – the promise to shield another man from accountability.
Ryan embodies the tension with which my generation of men was raised: the obligation to be decent to women, and the obligation to protect other men’s secrets. The film insists that that tension is irreconcilable and ultimately, destructive to everything and everyone.
A few years before I watched my cousin cheat with the bridesmaid, I had been at his wedding. The pastor asked the congregation if we who were there would do all we could to uphold the newlyweds in their marriage. We answered, “We will,” and that too was a promise. I choose to believe that holding my cousin’s secret both protects his marriage from a hurtful revelation and protects my cousin from shame.
I still believe all these promises can somehow be reconciled. The brilliant film that may sweep the Oscars tonight insists I am very, very wrong.