Emerald Fennell, Class Politics, and Me.
After "Wuthering Heights", it's become clear that, at the very least, Fennell wields, perhaps naively, a dangerous politic.
I have made 7 attempts, to this day, to watch Promising Young Woman. Each time, I barely make it past the first 5 minutes of the film – the moment the men decide to approach her, my subconscious mind kicks in, and I pause the film, always finding something else to do or something else I'd rather watch. Each time I've had the opportunity to see it in theatres, I've declined, and never really known why.
I saw Saltburn in theatres. I can’t remember the circumstances of my visit — I think I just went to the cinema that day — and I left feeling kind of...proud?...of Fennell. This was clearly gross-out humour and an attempt at suburbia/Cotswolds-friendly extreme sexuality, and I hadn’t witnessed a film made at that scale and gloss level that attempted this material that was made by a woman. So I was proud, but also deeply amused — my letterboxd review, written on the escalator out of the theatre, “When the last remaining aristocrats in the UK have nightmares, it’s this movie playing in their head. I support posh nepo baby women to be Fucking filthy and homoerotic. Another Oscar for Emerald.”
This is by no means an endorsement of the film’s politics, but a tongue-in-cheek jab at how brazenly she allowed that message to land.
Now might be a good time to mention that, when it comes to this topic — namely, naval-gazey upper-middle-class British white women and their “liberated” whims — I have a little more than the average knowledge, both lived and studied.
