The Last Ordinary Lady.

All things eventually die.

For the past several months, I have been showcasing films devoted to Ordinary Ladies (as I have been calling them). These ladies have been characters who would (in other circumstances) have lived at the margins of the narrative; they were the girlfriends, the wives, the little old ladies, the aliens from outer space(!). Films are not usually about them, and everyone else in the narrative just assumes that they are going to be the supporting characters.


But ignore an Ordinary Lady at your peril.

This Thursday (the 3rd of November) we will be screening the final entry in this series. 

Our final Ordinary Lady.

In the wholesome world of slasher movies, there is a narrative trope that is referred to by connoisseurs as the Final Girl.


Most slasher films follow a basic formula: some monstrous thing threatens a group of photogenic youngsters who have had the misfortune to get themselves trapped in whatever location they are in (a haunted summer camp; a cabin in the woods; a Republican convention). The Monstrous Thing proceeds to pick the hapless youngsters off one by one (it's generally a bit of a bloodbath; you'll love it) and the audience has great fun trying to guess which hapless youngster is going to be the Last One Standing. 

Audiences who are in any way familiar with the conventions of Torture Porn (as it is sometimes called) don't need to wonder for too long. Most of these films follow a very specific set of rules, and the hapless youngsters almost always fall very neatly into a Horror Movie Food Chain ("Victim Chain" I suppose you could say). The male characters tend to be either "jocks" or "nerds" and the jock is always doomed (Jocks don't usually grow up to write horror movies for a living). The female characters in turn are generally either "sluts" or "virgins", and the slut is almost always the first one to die. After all, she's no better than she oughta be.

The "virgin" is the good girl (this is Hollywood morality we're talking about) and she is generally the last character standing at the end of the film (that's presumably her reward for not having sex; a lifetime of therapy and PTSD). This convention is so commonplace that fans of horror movies refer to her as the Final Girl: she is the one still alive after all of her close friends have been chain-sawed, skewered, impaled, dismembered or eaten by zombies.

Our "Final" Ordinary Lady may not be a torture porn survivor, but she does live in a very similar neighbourhood.


Promising Young Woman is the directorial debut of writer Emerald Fennell, and tells the story of Cassie, a young woman who was forced to drop out of medical school after her best friend was brutally raped by a (very popular) fellow student.


Even though it was released less than two years ago, Promising Young Woman is already being referred to as the signature film of the "#MeToo" era. The story is one with which many young women will unfortunately be very familiar: a woman has been sexually assaulted and her story is dismissed by the authorities, who either trivialise the assault or actively try to protect the reputation of the rapist. Instead of investigating the assault, the victim's character is assassinated (remember, "sluts" are always the first to go, and not just in slasher movies). 


In the UK, the conviction rate in rape cases is currently around 1%; and the vast majority of sexual assaults are never reported to the police in the first place.

As you might imagine, Promising Young Woman deals with some fairly difficult issues - but it does so in a wholly new and original way. Carey Mulligan's Cassie cannot be easily compartmentalised. She is not content to simply allow events to take their course, and she refuses to be defined by what others might do to her. She isn't the good girl or the bad girl; the virgin or the slut (the Madonna or the Whore, to use Molly Haskell's terms). What she is, in fact, is the Ordinary Lady.

She is the last Ordinary Lady.


We will screen Promising Young Woman at 7.30pm on Thursday, the 3rd of November at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

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