A woman winning any Academy Award is relatively uncommon. And among the least common is the coveted writing award. For yes, as Joe Gillis cynically said in Sunset Boulevard, “Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.” Well, Emerald Fennell may have had to do less making up as she went along than others, as much of her screenplay for Promising Young Woman rings true to the misogynistic, rape culture-centric world we live in. And the title itself is a nod to Brock Turner’s case, the student from Stanford charged with sexual assault circa 2015, and who kept being referred to in the media as a “promising young man.” The woman involved (then labeled as “Emily Doe”) certainly never got called anything of the kind. And neither does Nina Fisher, the invisible secondary character that drives the protagonist in Fennell’s film.
In many instances, the marketing of the movie has exhibited a method that echoes the “we don’t know how to position and sell this” vibes of Jennifer’s Body—the sophomore opus from fellow Academy Award winner for screenwriting, Diablo Cody. While more time has passed since ’09, when the misandrist zombie horror masterpiece was released, audiences are still skeptical of things that can’t be neatly categorized into a specific box (or “big pink box,” as RuPaul would say). But at least Fennell and Promising Young Woman’s star, Carey Mulligan, have both greatly benefitted from a post-#MeToo climate in terms of people being “ready” to accept something “so dark” (read: true to reality). Cody would not get the same treatment until Jennifer’s Body reached cult status years later, timed accordingly to the #MeToo reckoning. Cody would later remark in 2018, “Because of the way the film was marketed, people wanted to see the movie as a cheap, trashy, exploitative vehicle for the hot girl from Transformers. That’s how people insisted on seeing the film, even though I think when you watch it, it’s pretty obvious that there’s something else going on.” Billing Promising Young Woman as a “dark comedy thriller” or “satire” also serves to soften the blow for any men who might see it. There is still so much male fragility out there, after all, and we’re continuing to do too much tiptoeing around it.
Following a sort of “anti-heroine” named Cassie Thomas (Mulligan) as she seeks revenge for the rape and, as a result of that trauma, suicide of her best friend whom she went to college with (where the crime went down, naturally), there are many shades of things in the movie that serve as proverbial “Academy bait” in the same way that Juno did back in 2007. A movie, incidentally, that Cody has expressed regrets about writing due to its interpretation as being anti-choice by those who want to see it that way. In any event, both films are markedly reliant on the trusting and collaborative dynamic between lead actress and screenwriter (a phenomenon also recently noted of the rapport shared between Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan for Lady Bird and Little Women).
Perhaps in numerous regards, Juno was actually much more avant-garde for its time than Promising Young Woman. Cody, who would go on to soar with even better films (including Jennifer’s Body and Young Adult—and hopefully, whatever Madonna’s biopic will end up being called) after her Oscar win, wrote a script that broke down the barriers between the stodgy Academy and the real world with what could subsequently be referred to as “millennial speak.” And it’s not just the millennials themselves who speak that way, but the adults around them… including Rainn Wilson playing the cashier at Dancing Elk Drugs (oui, that’s what it’s called… Dancing Elk), as he goads, “Your Eggo is prego, no doubt about it” when Juno MacGuff (Ellen [now Elliot] Page) comes in to take her third pregnancy test after “drinking her weight in Sunny D” to come up with the urine required.
Emerging from the public restroom, he continues to pry, “What’s the prognosis, Fertile Myrtle? Minus or plus?” She returns, “I don’t know, it’s not seasoned yet.” These are the dialogue exchanges said with a completely straight face, and largely because of the era it was written and released in. The “satirical” is more real here than it is in Promising Young Woman, which only feels “cartoonish” to some because they have never experienced quite what it’s like to fixate on one thing (revenge), and stop giving a fuck about all the rest.
One wonders, indeed, if Juno might end up becoming the same way should Paulie (Michael Cera, another sign of the 00s times) ever end up really fucking her over (as opposed to merely knocking her up). Upon deciding she wants to keep the baby and give it up for adoption, she suddenly gets choosy about who the couple will be, telling her best friend, Leah (Olivia Thirlby), she’s hoping for a “graphic designer with a cool Asian girlfriend” to take on her spawn—how 00s-era Williamsburg indeed (not that Juno lives there, but enough Midwesterners have infiltrated Brooklyn to know “what’s trending”).
“She’s just different,” Paulie’s mom cautions him as he stares lovingly at Juno’s yearbook picture unbeknownst to his hovering matriarch. The same can be said for Cassie being “that kind of girl.” You know, the “offbeat” one who doesn’t quite fit in with the basics but also isn’t so socially inept as to be a total misanthrope. Granted, she freely admits to her easily scandalized parents (with whom she still lives) that she doesn’t have any friends. After all, her best friend killed herself so… Juno at least has hers while they’re still in their adolescence, not yet thrust out into the even crueler world outside of high school where suicide probability greatly increases (much to the high schooler’s shock).
Both films take aim at boys/men in different ways, with Juno possessing more levity about their ineptitude in handling emotions and unexpected situations. Each movie seeks to shame the male sex for what they are—amounting to little more than their flaccid parts (ironic, considering how women are usually the ones objectified)—which is why Promising Young Woman opens with bellies flopping around as men “dance” on the floor and, in Juno, “pork swords” are quickly introduced via the track team running through the neighborhood. This undercutting condemnation of the male body—critiquing it for its many pratfalls and uglinesses the way men have, for centuries, felt comfortable critiquing women’s bodies—is part of the larger theme of how the main characters are searching for a bloke who is truly “different.” Each woman just wants to believe there’s at least one decent hetero male out there. Maybe because Juno is much younger, she’s still capable of that.
Like Cassie, Juno falsely mistrusts a man claiming to be a “good guy”—in this case, Mark Loring (Jason Bateman), the prospective adoptive father of her child. “Laid-back” and “chill” in a manner that much contrasts against his high-strung, uptight wife, Vanessa (Jennifer Garner). The two strike an almost immediate bond upon Juno’s arrival at their home (with her father, Mac [J.K. Simmons] in tow). All it takes is both of them leaving the downstairs fold—where the Lorings’ lawyer is also present to talk adoption proceedings—to start “vibing” by playing “Doll Parts” together on guitar. These types of one-on-one encounters somehow manage to escalate as the narrative goes on, leading to a moment where things get really skeevy when they’re watching The Wizard of Gore and Mark ogles her with the line, “You are somethin’ else.” Leah saying, in the early minutes of the movie, “I love Woody Allen!” to an older male teacher kind of unwittingly foreshadows what’s to come with Mark. But, in typical male fashion, he accuses Juno of being the tease for simply wanting to enjoy one another’s company platonically. “How do you think of me? You know, why are you over here?” Mark throws back in her face when she gets upset after he tells her he’s leaving Vanessa. She sadly replies, “I just like being a piece of furniture in your weird life.”
Juno’s stepmother, Brenda (Allison Janney), in the misogynistic female way we’ve all fallen prey to manifesting, is quick to note how inappropriate Juno is being in seeking out alone time with Mark, stating, “You don’t understand. Mark is a married man. There are boundaries.” There are boundaries for Cassie, too, as she starts cautiously dating an alumnus of her college, Ryan Cooper (Bo Burnham). Like Mark, he has “good guy” tendencies just begging to be questioned and exposed for the passive aggressive male rage of the twenty-first century such a persona really embodies.
With Juno being the only, for all intents and purposes, “high school movie” to ever win such recognition from The Academy, one could argue Promising Young Woman carries the torch as a “college movie”—even if we’re talking about the aftermath of college. For what happened there has left a permanent stain on Cassie’s psyche. And each story winds with quagmire-like twists and turns one wouldn’t actually expect from such a plot. “I’m a legend. They call me the cautionary whale,” Juno remarks proudly. Kind of like how Cassie is the cautionary tale for her own fellow students. Along with her best friend. Of what happens when women “keep pushing” for the truth to be acknowledged instead of being constantly told they’re overreacting.
Juno’s own “overreaction” to Paulie going to prom with another girl when she’s lugging around the evidence of their indiscretion also speaks to the betrayal that men (at any age) are so ready and willing to commit. Worse still, they often can’t even recognize their behavior as affronting. It hurts perhaps all the more when women encounter other women who act the same way, like the current dean of Cassie’s alma mater, Dean Walker (Connie Britton), who brushes off Cassie’s continued mention of Nina with, “What would you have me do? Ruin a young man’s life every time we get an accusation like this?” For men, apparently, must still be cushioned from judgment, whereas a woman like Juno has to bear the bulbous mark of pregnancy despite two people being involved in “the crime.”
Another notable factor in each of these female-penned scripts is that the soundtracks play equally important roles in both films, with Promising Young Woman wielding music for a more sardonic tone via ditties like Charli XCX’s “Boys” and Spice Girls’ “2 Become 1” (this is, after all, a movie with two British millennial women at the helm—Spice Girls is a must). Other standouts include cover versions of well-known songs, like DeathbyRomy’s rendition of Weather Girls’ “It’s Raining Men” or Cigarettes After Sex as interpreted by Donna Missal—the ironically titled “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby.” Juno’s soundtrack, in contrast, presently feels like a distinct time capsule to this particular moment in “indie/hipster” fare, with Kimya Dawson (in bands The Moldy Peaches and Antsy Pants) taking up most of the sonic space.
But time is, in many regards, illusory in each movie. For the set design and aesthetic relies on kitsch in both worlds—seeming even further back in time because both protagonists live in small-town America. The odd “Barbie but with an old woman’s spin” vibe of Cassie’s house is just such a detail that makes Promising Young Woman not feel modern, per se, so much as able to be implanted in any time period of the past several decades. Allusions to other pop culture “pieces” are present in Fennell and Cody’s style as well, with The Night of the Hunter being of particular importance in the former’s script.
So, all in all, it would seem The Academy does have a type when it opts to so “generously,” every once in a while, throw a female writer a bone of acknowledgement (Greta Gerwig almost got one too, and her style definitely fits in with these latter two auteurs). Thus, keep the “weird” girls coming and maybe one day it won’t be such an “event” for women to win a Best Original Screenplay award.
