Small Engine RepairandPromising Young Womanare both sinister revenge stories that follow the loved ones of a sexual assault victim. While both of these films are inspired by the same sort of tragedy, they demonstrate vastly different approaches to the topic of assault and rape.
StarringCarey MulliganandBo Burnham,Promising Young Womanis a masterfully thought-out film byEmerald Fennellabout a young woman’s inexorable obsession with vengeance. Cassie (Mulligan) loses her best friend to suicide after she was raped at a university party. As a method of protecting other women from the same fate, Cassie scares men out of taking advantage of drunk women in bars with an elaborate weekly act. After reconnecting with someone from her school days, however, Cassie’s quest intensifies with a new focus. She feels that she and she alone must avenge her best friend’s horrible and untimely death by making everyone pay for the ways they obstructed Nina from ever finding justice while she was alive.
Small Engine Repairis deceptively tender in the beginning. The main character, Frank (John Pollono), is slowly rebuilding his life after a stint in jail and is trying to connect with his daughter before she goes to college. The bulk of the story revolves around the rekindling of a friendship with the closest men in his life (Jon Bernthal,Shea Whigham) after a falling out. The events of this film linger on his relationships before taking a swift turn. He has invited a young man to his boys’ night with every intention of murdering him, an intricate revenge plot he concocted after discovering that this man coerced his daughter into sending naked pictures. He then released them to the public, but not before bullying her for her appearance in the photos. After an attempted suicide, Crystal (Ciara Bravo) lies in a coma while her father hunts down the man that lured her into this horrendous scenario.
RELATED:‘Promising Young Woman’ Is Designed to Discomfort. Here’s Why You Should Sit With It
Two Very Different Tales of Revenge
These films adopt radically different points of view to convey similar messages and themes. Vigilante justice from Cassie’s character is rooted in a fear that, as another woman, she would have shared the same fate as her late friend. She flips the script of constantly feeling like prey in the setting of a crowded club or bar, places where women are routinely told to not drink too much, watch what they wear, or not be left unattended. Cassie intentionally puts herself in harm’s way to subvert this idea that women are alone in their responsibility to avoid being assaulted. She and her best friend Nina shared the same social conditioning, were entrenched in the same culture of victim blaming, and ultimately lived with the same fear of being overpowered in a dangerous situation. This story of anger, heartache, and revenge resonates deeply when told from the perspective of a woman. Fennell articulates a cry for empathy and solidarity that has been echoing for decades.
Frank and his friends Swaino and Packie unabashedly engage in so many traits that wreak of toxic masculinity. They get into public brawls, and fabricate or embellish stories about their sexual conquests; they essentially exist in a vacuum of unchecked aggression, homophobia, misogyny, and chauvinism. They undoubtedly benefit from the machismo culture that allows them to swing their egos around Mach Vegas only to return to the garage and regale their friends with stories of their triumph. These men suddenly come face to face with a younger, more privileged version of their kind, and it is a sobering experience for them.
The parallels that writer, director, and star Pollono draw between the smug Chad (Spencer House) and the men in the group are astute. The scene where Chad tells the men about his ploy to have a young girl send him naked pictures tells audiences everything they need to know about the overall message of this film. The men, Swaino in particular, are pretty engrossed with the grueling details of Chad’s story, even when he nonchalantly includes that he tries to force this girl into a sexual act while she was passed out. They agree that he must have needed his friends’ opinions when he justifies why his network of fraternity brothers circulated her naked photos. When they chanted her degrading nickname over and over until she fled the house, Swaino replies that “young girls think that everything is the end of the world." The men are blatantly complicit in their role in Chrystal’s suicide attempt, and they see no issue in their behavior until they discover who the girl in Chad’s story really is. Interestingly, the two films intersect with this theme.
As Cassie says to the dean of her school that ignored the report of Nina’s rape: “I guess it feels different when it’s someone you love.”
Both Cassie and Frank use revenge in this film as a means to regain control over a situation that has left them feeling heartbroken and helpless. When Cassie and Frank can’t shield their loved ones from harm, they seek out severe ways to restore a sense of balance to their understanding of right and wrong. Extreme measures to match equally heinous acts.
Extreme Measures to Match Heinous Acts
Cassie targets each player in Nina’s hellish experience one by one. Her own personal development and relationships have all been put on indefinite hold until she feels that she has made enough of an impact with her acts of vengeance to make her own life worthy of living again. Judging by the endless amount of tallies in her score-keeping notebook, she will never reach that magic offset number; it is infinite.
In her final encounter with the man who raped Nina, Cassie tells the story of how she dropped out of school to take care of her best friend. Despite her best efforts and sacrifice, she couldn’t keep Nina with her, and now she feels she is losing her all over again when she confronts those who wronged her and they don’t even remember her name. She is powerless in keeping Nina’s memory alive just as she was powerless to stop her from taking her own life. She embarks on an endless mission to regain that power every time she stops a “nice guy” from taking a drunk girl home from the bar or makes one of Nina’s adversaries see the error of their ways.
Frank admits that he has a hard time understanding how young people conduct themselves in this new era of technology. Crystal and Chad were texting right under his nose, the nude photos were sent under his roof, and he was none the wiser and unable to stop it. The precision with which he orchestrates his plan to kill Chad speaks to his obsession, and how much time he has spent over the last three months of Crystal’s coma going over the details of this tragedy in his head.
Another aspect of Frank’s egregious revenge plot is to compensate for the grave mistake he made when Crystal came to him with her confession. In a flashback, it is revealed that Crystal came clean to her father about what Chad had done to her, and in response, Frank’s instinct is to blame her. His reaction is a prime example of the aforementioned victim-blaming culture and unchecked misogyny. He is instilling in his daughter’s mind that “she is supposed to be smarter than this.” He also compares her to her mother, someone that all three men openly disrespect, disparage, and mock. Of course, in that environment, a struggling young woman would get the message that she has no support and would blame herself for how much pain she is experiencing. Frank takes such drastic measures against Chad because he is trying to absolve himself of the guilt he feels for failing as Crystal’s last line of defense.
Though these two stories and the way they are presented stand in stark contrast to one another, they uphold similar ideologies. They both comment on how the widespread belief that society should give young men the benefit of the doubt is upheld by the institutions they benefit from. Chad is endlessly connected to powerful lawyers and “men that run the world” through his father’s law firm. Nina’s rapist was protected by their medical school when they chose to protect his bright future over hers.
When placed side by side, the films highlight how reputations typically hurt women and benefit men. Nina’s claims are dismissed because she had a reputation for being promiscuous whereas Chad’s reputation gives him the impression that he is shielded from being held accountable. In the end, it is only his fear of losing that gleaming reputation that allows Frank and his gang to walk away from their haphazard plot without repercussions. By tackling the same subject matter from completely different perspectives,Promising Young WomanandSmall Engine Repaircan be considered two sides of the same coin, thus creating a larger more diverse discussion around sexual assault in film.
