Week 6 Tech Journal: Aesthetics of the Extreme
The film Promising Young Woman (2020) is a time I feel that I experienced an aesthetic of the extreme because it was a thriller movie that shocked me in a way that was so disturbing that it gave me awareness of the dangers that women in society struggle with from a perspective that was very uncomfortable. The movie begins with a young med student named Cassie who drops out of college her last year after her best friend Nina is raped and murdered at a fraternity party one weekend. Cassie, who is overly qualified, now works at a small coffee shop where she goes out at night pretending to be drunk at a local bar to see whether or not someone will attempt to sexually assault her without consent. When she finds out that the graduate from the college she used to attend who raped and left Nina for dead was getting married, Cassie comes up with an elaborate scheme to show up at his bachelor party, where she lures her best friend’s killer into a room and handcuffs him to the bed in order to get the justice she feels she deserves. The moment that I experienced an aesthetic of the extreme was the unexpected twist to the plot where what appeared to be a success story, where the enemy gets what they deserved, backfires, and the protagonist Cassie is killed by the same student that sexually assaulted and killed her best friend by smothering her with a pillow. This provoked a feeling of total shock and horror, for I was so disgusted by the scene and did not have any idea of what was going to happen. I immediately paused the film because I did not believe what had just happened.
After finishing the movie, it made me begin to think about how often people in society, specifically males, talk about going out and the hook-up culture that consumes our nightlife. While guys often brag about how drunk they got last night and how they don’t remember anything except that they got with a female, it is not often considered amongst them the perspective of the female. This movie’s immediate shock gave me a sense of being placed in a dark, uncomfortable place in which I was forced to experience the horrors of being unconscious and out of control of my own body in a way that I am vulnerable to anything that could harm me. This was not merely a scene that surprised me, but it left me with a resonating feeling that it is important that we look out for our friends and family when we are out in public because it is a sensitive and horrible matter when someone becomes a victim of such crimes. The perspective of the female in this movie outshines the male perspective, which was unusual to me and made it more interesting because it was from a feminist view.
