Through subversive art, Promising Young Woman is an articulation of silent tragedy

Rape victims are expected to exist in a world that will not speak of their suffering.

Carey Mulligan stars as Cassandra in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman.

The most controversial nomination for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards is Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman. It’s a film that sharply divides critics and audiences by tapping into two of the most prominent and contentious discourses in the Western world — the unspoken effect of sexual abuse, and the scourge of suicide.

The film should win this year’s best picture for many reasons. Mostly it should win because it reminds us that art can be subversive. It can articulate what everyday life and language can’t.

Carey Mulligan stars as Cassie Thomas, a 30-year-old med school dropout. She was once a promising young woman — not nearly as promising as her best friend Nina, though, a brilliant student whose life was destroyed by an undisclosed act of sexual violence that remains buried in secrecy.

The subversiveness of the film comes, in part, from a manipulation of the tropes of genres that the audience knows well.

At one point, for instance, the unsettling narrative seems to resolve into the reassuring trajectory of a quirky romantic comedy: an attractive but odd young woman finds salvation in the form a goofy, sensitive guy who helps her rebuild her life and lets her live again.

For a little while, Fennell allows the audience to hope that a typical rom-com will evolve: Cassie will rediscover that life is worth living, remember how to establish relationships and become hopeful for the future — just like her former friends and colleagues. Despite the tragedy that she witnessed, she will resume the game of life as though there was never a major breach of the rules.

But Cassie will not relent. The rom-com narrative won’t play out.

Oblivious to how uncomfortable her life makes onlookers, Cassie obsesses over her friend’s death. She is acutely attuned to the systematic behaviour that underpinned and allowed the attack in the first place. By the time Cassie smashes in a car windscreen, triggered by an offensive but innocuous gibe, we know where this film is heading. As if we need any further clue, the scene is accompanied by Wagner’s Liebestod: Death and Love will be one.

But before this inexorable conclusion, Cassie wants to work something out: how do other people not only ignore suffering but also prosper and thrive in its wake?

It’s a puzzle that has plagued other famous protagonists. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for example, Nick Carraway ends his narration perplexed by the ability of some people to “keep it together” while others are shattered by life’s tragedies. He is baffled by the behaviour of his cousin, the iconically cool Daisy, and her husband Tom, whose wealth and status provide a harbour of “vast carelessness”, where no one ever has to think about life’s losers.

Similarly, in Promising Young Woman, the medical students who perpetrated the harm — whose actions and inactions created the mess — find refuge in the respectable status of their profession. The conspiracy of silence that pervades their respectable society enables them to carry on and to exorcise the unwanted spectre of their victim.

In this sense, Nina’s story is an allegory for the plight of millions of silent women who have endured unresolved and unrecognised hurt. As such, the film is a substitute for absent justice. This is art in its truest, most subversive and powerful form.

The cathartic outcome of this film — the sense that somehow victory can be wrought from the hands of the guilty — is the hallmark of dramatic tragedy. It mimics the real sacrificial catharsis found in all early human cultures — but, as a fictional depiction, it does not cause harm. Again, this is the power of art, and of tragedy in particular.

The film addresses the reality that has become increasingly clear in Western society generally and in Australian political life during the past month: we have little solace to offer rape victims; they are continually let down by our political and legal institutions.

The best our culture can offer is a flimsy survival narrative — the encouragement to overcome stoically what has happened by somehow keeping a part of you separate from the event.

Women are urged not to let rape destroy them but to rethink the way that it is categorised. But for many victims, the mantra “You will survive” is no substitute for the oppression that fills the rest of their lives. They are expected to exist in a world that will not speak of their suffering.

The all-too-common result — the act self-destruction — is proof that they cannot.

The root of justice is a communal recognition and a shared understanding of the pain of the victim. Ordinary people are dragged towards this recognition by bothersome, obsessed individuals who remind us, annoyingly, stubbornly, repeatedly, of events that most of us want to forget.

Without this single, unwavering advocate — this saviour, this “angel of the morning” — there would be no justice.

The consequence of self-destruction is the inability to communicate. Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously described a Hindu widow’s act of self-immolation as a failed attempt at self-representation. There was no listener and no dialogue. Speaking is not possible under those conditions.

Spivak was commenting on the voicelessness of the “subaltern” — a group excluded from any kind of socio-economic institutions, whose voice does not exist and can never be represented by others. Her words can’t be extrapolated to a film about a white, privileged class. The existence of Promising Young Woman in itself is evidence that the white, privileged class can speak.

However, Spivak’s language accurately interprets the silent spectre of the funeral pyre; it explains the devastation wrought by the idea of willing death; and points out that the suicide victim represents failed communication, and a disordered understanding of death.

When my sister committed suicide 3½ years ago, the priest told the funeral congregation that she had “struggled with the human condition”. I bridled at first. What did he know about her life? What did he know about her struggles?

But now I agree. Her death in itself is evidence that she struggled with life, and proof that she was defeated.

Like most suicide victims, my sister believed that her death held a special meaning — that it would free her and allow her family to continue their lives unchanged, while she watched them from elsewhere. She succumbed to death’s false promise — that there would be some kind of reward.

It is only in art and religion that a willing death is beautiful.

In reality, suicide occurs in a vacuum of misunderstanding and failed communication; it is a failure of the deceased to self-represent and a failure of the living to listen.

Promising Young Woman portrays the devastating impact of suicide on those left behind — who wished they had listened harder, and who are haunted by the desire to relocate that silenced voice and let that person speak again.

The film is a beautiful tragedy. It’s beautiful because, for a moment, it seems like death is not the end, that the victim can be reclaimed, and that they can speak again.

It’s a tragedy because this is fictional death — death as a metaphor and an artistic image. In the end, although we may be shaken in our seats, we know that none of it is true.

Brigitte Dwyer is an Adelaide-based writer. If this story has raised issues for you, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14