Angels May Destroy You: The Pretty Promise of The Female Revenge Fantasy
Content warning: Sexual assault and self harm. The following work contains sensitive content. This article also contains spoilers for Promising Young Woman and I May Destroy You. Please be advised.
“How do we represent female pain without (re)producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative?”
Carey Mulligan as Cassandra in Promising Young Woman (2020)
Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman has taken its place in the dynasty of films featuring a post-wounded femme fatale figure, most of whom are young, white, middle class, well-dressed and above all––pretty. From Carrie to Emma Stone in Easy A to Winona Ryder in Heathers and Lee Geum-ja as Lady Vengeance we see an angel-faced young woman turn to revenge, alongside a portrayal of the weaponisation of female sexuality. But a girl(ish) aggressive Lolita-ism is particularly evident in Promising Young Woman; its puff pastry imagery, pastel colour schemes, princess plaits, hair bows and general visual candy. The contrast between an evocation of the “sugar and spice and all things nice” which supposedly constitutes “little girls” and the brutal reality of the theme of sexual assault is one which immediately makes you question the wider implications of such representations of violation and its traumatic aftermath.
Cassandra Thomas (Carey Mulligan), Promising Young Woman’s central character, is a woman whose life has been derailed after her friend Nina Fisher was raped while they were at medical school, and who subsequently killed herself. Having dropped out of college, Cassandra’s life is portrayed as a “failure,” her ‘promise’ wasted — but materially, it could not be described as such. Always perfectly made up and dressed in attractive, expensive-looking clothes with matching, immaculate multicoloured nail varnish, Cassie is portrayed to be living in a world where everything is colour coordinated, Instagram-able, and cute. If the film didn’t insist upon signposting it to the viewer through obvious dialogue moments, it would be hard to pick up on the trauma and grief which Cassie is dealing with, the rage which motivates her nightly vigilante excursions to catch “nice guys” in the act of being “not very nice” (shocker).
In the dramatic climax of the film, Cassie is set to act out her ultimate revenge fantasy to the tune of Toxic by Britney Spears (another figure from America’s guilty sexual conscience.) Dressed as a sexy nurse in a rainbow wig, the ultra-sexualised Cassie resembles a version of Harley Quinn, The Joker, or as the lyric in the Paris Hilton song on the soundtrack illustrates, “I can make it nice and naughty, be the devil and angel too.” Cassie is serving the men at the bachelor party their sexual fantasy only to turn on them, drugging them, and attempting to carve Nina’s name into Al, her rapist. But it all goes horribly wrong: Cassie ends up dead, a lifeless costumed doll, an exquisitely painted corpse the morning after.
To what extent is this dress-up as the glamorous avenging angel figure damaging for people who have experienced sexual assault? It says that your suffering must be aesthetically pleasing. It perpetuates the “revenge fantasy” as intrinsically sexual as well as violent. It privileges the pain of “pretty” people by gracing it with a cinematic narrative, while the vast majority of women watching would not be able to see themselves in these scenarios. “Don’t you think I’m a pretty present?... Check me, fun wig candy spun ringlet red to ultra…” (Cat Marnell, Danielle Pafunda). The revenge fantasy becomes another fetish for male consumption, and its pretty promise obscures the reality of the endemic punishment of women by rape culture.
Jodie Comer as Villanelle in Killing Eve (2018)
The relationship between cuteness and violence appears in other work by Emerald Fennell, namely the TV show Killing Eve. Poet Precious Okoyomon writes that ‘cuteness is its own violence’ but in the case of Villanelle (Jodie Comer), the stylish female assassin from Killing Eve, violence is its own violence. ‘I was trained to look devastating,’ Villanelle says, wearing another designer outfit to murder in. Villanelle’s glamour is a disarming weapon in the arsenal of her deadliness; Cassandra’s prettiness makes her violent, ugly acts more ‘shocking’. But the narrative of Promising Young Woman is too neat, the shots too perfect. The retribution for Cassie’s horrifying death by suffocation, a scene which draws out her suffering into what feels like an hour, is the eventual arrest of her murderer and Nina’s rapist. The promise of a carceral future for these men is framed as a victory for Cassie and Nina, but in reality they are both dead. Cassie wants to destroy Al and his friends, but who is ultimately destroyed? No one ‘wins’. No one can. ‘Perfect triumph, either over the self or the other, never arrives’. Revenge is a fantasy of closure, but the ending of Promising Young Woman is all tragedy.
Michaela Coel as Arabella in I May Destroy You (2020)
By contrast, Michaela Coel’s series I May Destroy You demonstrates how female pain can be represented in work addressing sexual assault with a main character who is far more complex and three dimensional. Michaela Coel’s Arabella defies the lukewarm provocations of Promising Young Woman, its representation of white female martyrdom through romanticised hues and dewy pop feminism. Arabella is angry, confused, loud, lashing. Messy and fractured with disruptive neon lighting, the final episode of the series, “Ego Death,” returns to the scene of the crime, Ego Death Bar, where Arabella was raped in the toilets after her drink was spiked. Like Cassandra, Arabella pretends to be drunk and drugged in order to catch the male perpetrator, David. She disguises herself with a blonde wig, in contrast to the pink hair of her earlier self, and sets out to “give him a taste of his own medicine.” Three possible scenarios are then portrayed in rapid, painful succession: one where Arabella ends up killing David, one where David goes to prison, and one where the two actually reconcile. But all three fantasy endings are rejected, thereby asking the more nuanced question, “Is closure a reality, or is it a lie that life can abide by neat narratives?”
Whereas in Promising Young Woman, the unicorn wig transforms Cassie into a sexual fantasy, the use of wigs and costuming in I May Destroy You offers a burlesque of such “girly kitsch” attributes of female seductivity and beauty that have historically been tailored towards white women. The pink hair of Arabella’s earlier self becomes a symbol of the death of the self who has suffered, the “ego death” which leads to transformation. The ending occurs on a psychological level, through the use of fantasy’s endless cathartic potential: I May Destroy You understands that none of the fantasised scenarios of revenge would be satisfactory — would “end” the closed loop of trauma — and so the revenge fantasy with all its stereotypes is revealed in reality to be nothing but a terrible dream. ◆