“They Put Themselves in Danger,Girls Like That”: Ezekiel 16 and Promising Young Woman

Abstract

This article pairs the worst of the biblical marriage metaphor texts, Ezekiel 16, with a feminist film about sexual violence, Promising Young Woman (2020). Strikingly, the God of Ezekiel 16 acts in ways that closely resemble the would-be rapists and “good guys” of Promising Young Woman. Furthermore, the portraits of female revenge in Promising Young Woman and Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) suggest new ways of reading the seemingly monolithic gender violence of text.

In this essay, I want to use the film Promising Young Woman (2020) to offer some new perspectives on sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible, and on some key texts from the book of Ezekiel in particular. ¹ The Hebrew Bible, like Emerald Fennell's film—and like the world we live in—is filled with sexual violence. This violence is directed principally (but by no means exclusively) against women; the agents of violence are usually (but not always) men. The Bible's sexual violence includes stories of rape (Dinah, Tamar, and Daughter Zion), the sexual use of slaves (Hagar, Bilhah, and Zilpah), the violent policing of women's sexuality (the Sotah ritual, Cozbi), the rape laws that privilege male control of female bodies, and of course the infamous "marriage metaphor," which imagines Israel as God's unfaithful wife (found in multiple prophetic books). In the final category, the book of Ezekiel is especially infamous. Ezekiel's marriage metaphor passages (chs. 16 and 23) are truly terrible texts, combining an "icky" voyeurism into women's sexuality with shocking punishments: public stripping, humiliation, bodily injury, and death.

These stories fill us with rage and sadness, as well they should. At the same time, as a feminist biblical scholar, I have long felt frustrated at the limited range of feelings and responses that seem to be available when confronted with what Phyllis Trible called "texts of terror." Often, our responses seem to be limited to those that Trible herself charted in her landmark 1984 book, Texts of Terror, which center around feminist criticism as bearing witness to gender-based horrors. ² The appropriate emotions for the feminist critic are grief and sadness; the appropriate gestures of feminist criticism are commemoration and memory. In my own work, I have been greatly inspired by Trible. ³ I have also felt frustrated by the limitations of her work. I want feminist interpretation to be able to do more than perform grief and anger. I want to find other ways of being in relation with the biblical texts. And I want a way of talking about sexual violence—in the Bible, beyond the Bible—that also holds space for the fuzziness, messiness, and ickiness that many experiences of sexual violence involve. ⁴ Our experiences are complicated; our emotional, physiological, and psychological responses to trauma are complicated, and our biblical texts, not to mention our relationships to these texts, are no less complicated.

Elsewhere, I have argued that reading biblical rape texts through literature, especially literature with a feminist bent, offers a new perspective on familiar stories. ⁵ More specifically, it helps us describe the complexity of sexual violence without falling into the trap of merely repeating old feminist platitudes. Here, I will employ a similar procedure, but using film. Promising Young Woman is a feminist rape revenge film that repeatedly subverts what we expect from the genre. It is also a remarkably uneven film with regard to tone, lurching from dark comedy to quiet drama to horror, and back again. While this inconsistency has been criticized, I find it compelling precisely because of the ways the tonal lurches interrupt the compulsory affects of so many rape stories.

Promising Young Woman takes place in a very different world than the Hebrew Bible — a world of cell phones and social media, dorm rooms and coffee shops, police sirens and ironic music choices, a world where (at least some) rapists are (eventually) caught and punished. And yet the film also offers a number of striking connections to Ezekiel's fantasies of sexual violence and violation. In what follows, I will explore three key points of connection: (1) the "nice guy" pickup type-scene, (2) the (over)emphasis on male homosociality and concomitant absence of female relationships, and (3) the fantasy of a woman who can speak beyond the grave. At each of these points of contact, Promising Young Woman and Ezekiel 16 illuminate each other across time and text, surfacing questions of violence, justice, and vengeance. I end with a reflection on the limits of Promising Young Woman as a paradigm for rethinking feminist responses to sexual violence and suggest a second film, Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), as a new way of reading these texts.

Scenes from a Marriage and from a Murder

The "marriage metaphor" texts are well known in feminist biblical criticism. ⁶ The most developed iterations of the metaphor occur in Ezekiel 16 and 23. Ezekiel 16, the text I focus on here, is a lengthy prose narrative focused on God and Jerusalem. God speaks to Ezekiel, but the prophet himself is basically absent from the text, serving only as a medium to transmit divine words. God's relationship with Jerusalem begins when he finds her abandoned and bloody beside the road. He takes her in and cares for her (while also insulting her parentage: "Your father was an Amorite, and your mother a Hittite," Ezek 16:3). ⁷ When she reaches sexual maturity, indicated by her breasts and pubic hair, God spreads his cloak over her, covers her nakedness, and enters into a covenant with her—details often interpreted to refer to a marriage. ⁸ But while God provides Jerusalem with many beautiful and luxurious things, she becomes unfaithful and "lavish[es her] whorings on any passer-by" (16:15). Her transgressions are multiple: infidelity, misappropriation of gifts, religious and ritual abominations, and sacrificing her own children, all the while "play[ing] the whore" with Israel's neighboring nations (16:26-29). Before her former lovers, Jerusalem is stripped naked, found guilty of adultery, thrown to an armed mob, and subjected to public judgment. After all this, God promises, "I will satisfy my fury on you, and my jealousy shall turn away from you" (16:42). But, of course, his fury is not really satisfied, and he turns from describing Jerusalem's punishments to chronicling the sexual transgressions of her female relatives (including Samaria and Sodom). The text ends with the restoration of the covenant between God and Jerusalem (16:62-63).

Ezekiel 16 is extreme, but it is not unique. In Hosea 2, God also instructs his prophet (Hosea) to tell his wife about her terrible infidelity and other transgressions; there, too, the text ends with a new covenant and a silenced woman. ⁹ In Ezekiel 23, the sexually deviant sisters motif takes center stage, as the entire narrative focuses on the sisters Oholah and Oholibah (Samaria and Jerusalem, respectively). In Jeremiah 2:24, God excoriates unrestrained female lust. The repetition of themes and iterability of the marriage metaphor itself is part of what gives these texts such terrible power. While my focus here will be on Ezekiel 16, I hope that by dismantling some of the workings of rape culture in that text that I will speak, as well, to the marriage metaphor more broadly.

The film Promising Young Woman also seems, at least at first, to tell a familiar story. The basic plot of the film is simple: a woman seeks to avenge the rape and subsequent suicide of her best friend, and to expose the everyday workings of rape culture. The victim is Nina, a brilliant medical student who is raped by a classmate and later dies by suicide, prior to the events of the film. The second "promising young woman" is Cassie, Nina's best friend and the film's protagonist. Now a medical school dropout, Cassie spends her days working in a coffee shop and her nights catfishing would-be rapists. She does this by pretending to be a drunk girl in a bar, getting a man to bring her home, and then dramatically confronting him when he tries to initiate sex or rape. Cassie's general pursuit of bad men in bars is replaced by a specific plan to avenge Nina and to punish those who hurt her, including a female friend named Madison who downplayed the rape, the female dean who shielded Nina's rapist, the male lawyer who defended the rapist, and finally the rapist himself, Al Monroe. In her final act, Cassie shows up at Al's bachelor party disguised as a stripper, drugs his friends, and persuades Al to take her upstairs. Alone, she handcuffs him to the bed, reveals her identity, and begins tattooing him with Nina's name. Al panics, breaks free, and suffocates Cassie with a pillow; the following morning, his friend Joe helps him burn her corpse. Cassie, however, has the last laugh: fearing she might not escape the bachelorette party, she has arranged for the police to be tipped off, and they arrive at Al's wedding to arrest him for murder.

What makes Promising Young Woman unusual is the way that the film interweaves a romantic comedy-style love story with a rape revenge narrative. Cassie's specific turn to avenge Nina is spurred by a conversation with Ryan, a former classmate who shows up at the coffee shop where Cassie works. It is from Ryan that Cassie learns about Al's engagement, and later, the location of his bachelor party. At the same time that Cassie is embarking on her grisly plans, she is also in the early stages of a relationship with Ryan, now a pediatric surgeon, who is painted as an aggressively kind, likable character—unlike the cartoonish "nice guys" that Cassie typically targets. But, of course, this film is ultimately neither comedy nor romance. Cassie learns that Ryan was a spectator at Nina's rape years ago and did nothing; he is just another "nice guy," no different from the others. And, perhaps, not so different from the Hebrew Bible as well.

"I'm a Nice Guy"

Literary scholars of the Hebrew Bible often refer to the "type-scene" — that is, a scene that follows strict literary and thematic conventions and, in doing so, helps guide the expectations of the reader. Convention, as Robert Alter explains, helps us read by setting our expectations and deploying genre in meaningful ways. ¹⁰ The "meeting at the well" is a common example, found in Genesis and Exodus. When a man and a woman meet at a well, we as readers know that this is a prelude to a marriage.

Promising Young Woman offers its own variation on the type-scene, one that also takes place at a watering hole. The first variation occurs before the opening credits. The scene opens with a bouncy pop hit playing over a montage of gyrating male pelvises, clad in khaki and sensible leather belts. The lighting suggests a club, and the camera pans to reveal three men, drinks in hand, debating the merits of doing business on women-free golf courses. The men notice Cassie, who is slumped over on a banquette, makeup smeared, skirt hiked up, apparently extremely drunk. One of the men, Jerry, goes to check on Cassie and offers to help her get home. In the car, his plans change, and he persuades her to come to his apartment for "like one beer," which becomes a large glass of kum-quat liqueur. ¹¹ Then, against her faint and very drunk protestations, he makes his move and starts to remove her underwear. It is then that Cassie's eyes fly open—a wink to the classic horror movie shot—she sits up, and demands, "Hey, what are you doing?" ¹² Jerry's actions have been exposed; cut to opening credits.

The nice guy type-scene recurs across Promising Young Woman: a second iteration begins in medias res, with Cassie already at the man's apartment. This time the would-be Romeo/rapist is Neil, an aspiring novelist and self-described "nice guy." ¹³ He patters on, then makes his move; Cassie reveals her sobriety at the final moment. Her would-be assailant is frightened, ashamed, and angry. A third iteration occurs as Cassie is leaving a club with Paul, though the pickup is aborted before they reach his home. Like the meeting at the well, the nice guy type-scene draws its power from repetition and convention: each occurrence reinforces the pattern. Every time Cassie, apparently very drunk, slouches on a "nice guy" who offers to help her home, we know what to expect, and the anticipation of the big reveal adds to the scene's enjoyment. ¹⁴ This effect is reinforced by allusions to the world beyond the film. The drunk-girl-in-danger is a staple that appears in sexual violence-prevention seminars, TV procedurals, and prestige rape dramas. Promising Young Woman evokes the genre set piece while also subverting it by including a number of allusions to another type familiar from popular culture, the not-so-nice nice-guy. Thus Jerry, despite his seemingly successful job, has a roommate and a dismal bedroom with chili-shaped Christmas lights. Neil is a David Foster Wallace evangelist. ¹⁵ Paul wears a fedora and lives with his parents. Adding to the effect, Jerry (Adam Brody) and Neil (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) are played by actors best known for their lovable teenage roles—Brody as Seth Cohen on teen primetime soap/drama The O.C., and Mintz-Plasse the hapless "McLovin" in the teen comedy, Superbad. ¹⁶ The very legibility and familiarity of these characters inform the way they are "read" by audiences, with subversive results.

Jerry, Neil, and Paul are not the only "nice guys" who attempt to pick up a messy young woman, with messy results. This is also the basic outline of the opening verses of Ezekiel 16. Both Fennell's film and the biblical text begin with men talking to men (or, in the case Ezekiel, a male God speaking to a male prophet) about a woman and her humiliating state. From the conversation's beginning, the goal seems to be insult—in Ezekiel, for her origins, and in the film, for her intoxication. (However, given the strong association of Canaanites with sexual impropriety, there is also a whiff of "she's asking for it" in the biblical text, as well.) In both stories, a single male figure takes pity on the woman he sees, takes her home with him, and then decides to sexually assault her. Jerusalem, no less than Cassie or Nina, is a "promising young woman" whose future is threatened by masculine entitlement and sexual violence.

Is Jerusalem really figured as a young woman? The opening lines of the text are often taken as describing an infant who has been left to die by exposure. From this perspective, God's providing shelter is an act of compassion; its overtones are parental, rather than sexual. And commentators are quick to point out that is not until Jerusalem has reached "full womanhood" (as indicated by her mature breasts and pubic hair) that the relationship becomes marital and sexual. But equally, I suggest, we can read these events as a pickup scene, and an icky one at that. Though the text refers to birth, it is not actually clear from the text that his "rescue" (scare quotes intended) occurs in the immediate postpartum period, or even when she is a child. The passage reads:

As for your birth, on the day you were born your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor wrapped in cloths. No eye pitied you to do any of these things for you out of compassion for you, but you were thrown out in the open field, for you were abhorred on the day you were born. I passed by you and saw you flailing about in your blood. As you lay in your blood, I said to you, "Live! and grow up like a plant of the field." You grew up and became tall and arrived at full womanhood; your breasts were formed, and your hair had grown, yet you were naked and bare. I passed by you again and looked on you; you were at the age for love. I spread the edge of my cloak over you and covered your nakedness: I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord God, and you became mine. (16:4-8)

While the woman's birth is twice mentioned, there is also a kind of fuzziness around time and timelines in the passage: verses 4-5 can equally be read as a kind of offhand "that kind of girl" dismissal. The blood that Jerusalem is flailing in may be recent blood, or perhaps not. It may be blood from birth, or something else. What is important here is not why Jerusalem is (perceived as) bloody, but rather why God is so proud of rescuing her. For whose benefit is this rescue being narrated? For whose benefit does YHWH enact "this gritty, lowlife, fucked-up love story"? ¹⁷ Not for the woman—by the end of the story, she will be tortured and silenced. This story, like the act of rescue with which it begins, is enacted for male audience: Ezekiel, the guys at the bar, the masculine implied reader of the text.

Reading the opening of Ezekiel 16 as another iteration of Promising Young Woman's "nice guy" type-scene becomes more interesting still when we probe what this does to our understanding of the character of God. The "nice guys" and would-be rapists of the film's type-scenes are, uniformly, pathetic. They are, moreover, especially pathetic in their belief that they are "different," "nice," or otherwise deserving. The masculine entitlement to feminine goods that Kate Manne describes as a key feature of misogyny is thick here; this entitlement includes sexual access. ¹⁸ What would it mean to consider the Bible's God as another "nice guy"? Elsewhere, in my book Texts after Terror, I have explored reading the violent rapist God of Nahum 3 through the lens of the character of Robert in Kristen Roupenian's short story "Cat Person." ¹⁹ Robert is a mildly creepy man who has bad sex with a college student, Margot, then denounces her as a "whore" when she refuses to pursue a relationship with him. ²⁰ I have suggested that the deflationary representation of the angry would-be rapist, whether Robert or God, offers an intriguing feminist alternative to either expressing grief and terror over sexual violence or denying its existence.

Sometimes, we experience sexual violence as forthrightly terrible; sometimes, it is prickly, confusing, irreducible to straightforward categories or pre-scripted rape stories. Promising Young Woman, in its very use of the "nice guy" type-scene, at once repeats and subverts a familiar way of telling stories about rape, and especially about rapists. The God of Ezekiel, too, seems to take advantage of a vulnerable young woman; he seems equally convinced that he has acted in a praiseworthy and even benevolent manner. He is furious when challenged; he threatens horrible violence. But reading the film scenes together with Ezekiel helps us disrupt the text's quick movement from benevolence to violence. It asks: what if Ezekiel's God is perhaps simply too much of a David Foster Wallace fan? What if he, too, is secretly frustrated by the "really gritty, fucked up love story" he just can't write? What if his violence, too, could be interrupted?

Men Together, Women Alone

In Cat Person, part of what sets Robert off and leads him to call Margot a whore is that he sees her with another man. In Ezekiel, too, God is furious about Jerusalem's sexual liaisons with other men, as well as his failure to maintain sexual control over her. This emphasis on exclusive masculine sexual access is balanced uneasily against the counter-dynamic of masculine solidarity in moments of violence against women. Given his jealousy, it is striking that he turns to her lovers to punish her. In 16:37, he threatens, "I will gather all your lovers, with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved and all those you hated; I will gather them against you from all around, and will uncover your nakedness to them, so that they may see all your nakedness." In subsequent verses, the lovers throw Jerusalem down, strip her, cut her with swords, and burn her. Harsh physical punishment is the work of other men; God, it seems, simply wants to watch.

This sort of masculine solidarity over and against the bodies of women is common in the Hebrew Bible. Women's bodies are offered as leverage in moments of conflict between the men of Sodom and Lot's guests (Genesis 19) and in the story of the Levite's concubine (Judges 19). The many women of the David story are largely pawns in men's relationships with other men. In the prophetic literature, God negotiates his relationships with his prophets on or through women, whether this means killing Ezekiel's wife, forbidding Jeremiah to marry, or instructing Hosea and Isaiah to impregnate their wives. This is "toxic hegemonic masculinity" (Barbara Thiede's apt description), enacted at the expense of women, their bodies, and even their lives. ²¹

We do not need to look beyond the Bible's pages to find that men negotiate their relationships with other men through women, and often through gendered violence. We likewise do not need to look beyond the Bible to find evidence that this violence can double as a site of pleasure, at least for those who watch. Violent enjoyment of women's suffering is on clear display in Ezekiel 16, as it is in Ezekiel 23, Hosea 2, and a host of other passages. From this perspective, Promising Young Woman's scenes of men bonding over women's bodies—most strikingly, Al and Joe embracing in bed alongside Cassie's corpse—is just another iteration of an old biblical pattern. ²² Should we be reading the film through the text, instead?

I want to suggest, however, that there is at least one way in which the film helps deepen our understanding of "toxic hegemonic masculinity": by directing attention to its banality. There are certainly scenes of dramatic violence against women as a form of male bonding (the burning of Cassie's body, the bachelor party more generally). But Fennell also includes a number of scenes that show the ordinariness of male homosociality vis-a-vis violence against women. One crucial turning point for Cassie is when she realizes that Ryan watched Nina's rape and did nothing. When she confronts him, he offers as a defense only “I don't remember” and “I was a kid. . .” ²³ The inadequacy of this response, as well as its inability to move beyond cliche, is not a revelation: it is obvious to everyone, including Ryan himself.

Furthermore, in its focus on violent male solidarity, Promising Young Woman also illuminates a related dynamic: the absence of female relationships. Instead, men watch men doing things to women. But there are no women watching, still less watching out for other women. While male friendship and fraternity are on display everywhere, Cassie has no living female friends. When Cassie seeks to share memories of Nina with Nina's mother, she is rebuffed and told to “move on”; her connection to her own mother is complicated. ²⁴ A former friend, Madison, becomes a victim of Cassie's revenge scheme for her failure to protect Nina. Perhaps Cassie's only moderately healthy female relationship is with her boss, Gail. There are certainly suggestions of friendship here. But Cassie sabotages this relationship with a living female friend in favor of the dead Nina, once again. In what appears to be a gesture of intimacy, Cassie leaves half of her friendship necklace in the cash register for Gail before she departs for Al Monroe's bachelor party. Perhaps she is, at last, acknowledging that her boss has become a friend? Perhaps a relationship beyond the conditions of employment is possible? But this act reveals itself as about remembering Nina all along when the other half of the friendship necklace is found by the police among Cassie's burned bones, thus allowing them to identify her remains. Relationships of trust and care between women, the film seems to suggest, are mostly impossible. Female friends are closest in death, as in the posthumous texts that Cassie sends to Ryan, signed “Love, Cassie & Nina”. It is likewise the absence of female solidarity "that allows violence against women to flourish: Cassie is obsessed with the idea that her absence from the party allowed Nina’s rape to happen.

The failure of female friendship and solidarity in Promising Young Woman invites us to consider similar dynamics in the Hebrew Bible. There are very few positive bonds between women here, still less the more we zero in on the Bible’s rape stories. Jerusalem is alone when God finds her, takes her in, and abuses her in Ezekiel 16. Tamar has no friends to help her when she is raped by Amnon in 2 Samuel 13. Daughter Zion is alone in her suffering. Dinah is going out to meet “the daughters of the land” in Genesis 34:1 when she is delayed and raped by Shechem, and yet these daughters never appear. Solidarity or even simply community between women remains spectral. In other stories, women are present but complicit (or worse) in sexual violence, as when Sarah gives Hagar to Abraham (Genesis 16) to be raped, or Naomi sends Ruth to seduce Boaz (Ruth 3:3-4), but perhaps without the consent of both parties.

We also see these dynamics in Ezekiel 16. From the beginning, the female Jerusalem is alone. God is able to take her in and shelter her because she has been abandoned. This loneliness and separation continue across the text: Jerusalem has many lovers, but no friends. When other women are mentioned, it is in the context of judgment: Jerusalem is handed over to “your enemies, the daughters of the Philistines” (16:27); she is criticized as worse than other whores, because she fails to solicit payment (16:34); she is judged “in the sight of many women” (16:41). These references to women feel thin—because they are. This is a masculine fantasy of retribution and violence against women, one that depends on isolating a single woman, who stands in relation to masculine forces of judgment. Where things become more complicated is in the final third of the chapter. Here, the proverb “like mother, like daughter” inspires a divine a tirade about the woman's female relatives: her mother, her sisters, her daughters. These women are to be subjected to the same criticism as Jerusalem: they are whores, they deserve punishment, God will nevertheless spare them. There are no moments of female relationship, just multiple women being punished by a male god.

Against this dynamic, Promising Young Woman raises two possibilities. First, Cassie's deep connection to Nina, even after her death, suggests that there are powerful forms of female rela-tionality that nevertheless pass unobserved and unacknowledged by men and masculine systems of representation. Perhaps there is more to these other women than meets the eye. Perhaps Jerusalem, too, has a Nina of her own. ²⁵ Second, Cassie's interactions with Madison suggest a second, darker way of analyzing female relationships. Within the film, Madison stands for the failure of women to protect other women. ²⁶ It is equally possible to read hints of a similar failure in the proliferation of other female figures in the final third of Ezekiel 16.

After the Violence

Given the extreme violence of Ezekiel 16's revenge fantasy, it is somewhat surprising to find that, in the end, the woman does not die. This result is not a given in the Hebrew Bible. In Judges 19, for example, the Levite's nameless concubine is gang-raped and murdered. Cozbi dies at Phinehas' hands (Numbers 25). The Sotah ritual (Numbers 5) shows little concern for the bodily integrity of the woman on whom it is performed. The text is certainly willing to imagine the death of a woman, especially a woman associated with sexual transgression. And yet—Jerusalem survives, and YHWH establishes a new covenant with her (Ezek 16:61-63).

Still, we should view this promise of reconciliation with some suspicion. Renita Weems has argued, persuasively, that God's speeches in the marriage metaphor passages frequently mimic a classic domestic abuser script—first violence, then apologies and promises. ²⁷ We certainly see traces of that here. I am also suspicious of the way that God's new covenant demands the woman's silence: “in order that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I forgive you all that you have done” (16:63). If this is truly a new covenant, why can't the woman speak about it? What would she say, if she could talk?

Here again, Promising Young Woman offers an unexpected twist on an answer: What if she were dead, but could answer anyway? In the final scene, as the police arrive at Al's wedding to arrest him for murder, a series of scheduled text messages arrive on Ryan's phone: ²⁸

You didn't think this was the end did you? It is now.

Enjoy the wedding! Love,

Cassie & Nina

;)

Cassie has found a way to speak from beyond the grave and uses her final words to humiliate one last male betrayer.

For a feminist biblical scholar, it is tempting to read these two scenes, Cassie's death and then her postmortem revenge, together with another biblical “text of terror,” the rape and murder of the Levite's concubine (Judges 19). Like the Levite, Al Monroe is more concerned with how the terrible events of the night prior have affected him, rather than the fate of the woman whose actual death they have caused. Like the biblical narrator, who tells us that the concubine collapses with her hands on the threshold of the house, the camera in Promising Young Woman lingers on Cassie's hands, first as she dies, then as her body is burned. And like the concubine, whose body becomes a message, Cassie finds a way to speak from beyond the grave.

To this I would add: as with Judges 19, so too with Ezekiel 16. Like the Levite, like Al, Ezekiel's God seems more concerned with his own humiliation than with the fate of the woman. Like the concubine, like Cassie, Jerusalem's female body is dismembered. In both stories, a gathering follows the crime (a wedding for Promising Young Woman, a war for Judges, a restoration and new covenant for Ezekiel). But where we should cast suspicion is on the “happiness” of this ending, even if it ends with a rapist and murderer truly and justly punished. ²⁹ Cassie is still dead. Nina is still dead. The Levite's nameless concubine is still dead. Could this be true of Ezekiel 16 as well? Perhaps the woman Jerusalem does not survive—otherwise, why the obsession with her silence? And even if she is alive, why can't she speak?

In the end, I do not find the ending of Promising Young Woman satisfying, any more than I find the promise of restoration at the end of Ezekiel 16 reassuring. Both text and film offer final fantasies that do not, ultimately, move beyond the masculine economy that undergirds their worst abuses and misogynistic violence. We need another fantasy.

The Limits of Promising Young Woman, or What Happens When A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night?

Promising Young Woman can bring us a long way in the project of rethinking biblical sexual violence and violence against women. A long way, but perhaps not quite far enough. And so, in closing, I want to broaden our horizons by introducing another feminist anti-rape film, Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014). ³⁰ In the film, a girl does just that: she walks home alone, at night. And amazingly, and counter to all the ways that genre has trained us to watch and anticipate, nothing happens to her. The girl simply walks home. She is not harassed, molested, or murdered; she is not even threatened (though at one point she threatens a little boy to be good).

Of course, the girl is also a vampire.

Amirpour's film takes the form of the vampire story, mixes in a heavy dash of the Spaghetti Western and the female revenge plot, sets the whole thing in “Bad City” (a mix of central California and Iran), and in the process, creates something entirely new. One of the details I love most in Amirpour's film involves what doesn't happen: No women are killed. Even the Girl (that is, the vampire) has no traumatic backstory filling in the violence done to her that transformed her into a vampire and led her to hunt down deserving victims: all men. Unlike countless other protagonists in female revenge stories, the Girl does not have to suffer for the plot of the film to kick off. She is never raped. Instead, we know that she likes striped shirts, red lipstick, and cats; her ears are unpierced; she has a sharp set of fangs to display when necessary. The Girl is not a Victorian “angel in the house”—she has no scruples about killing men; neither does she express any guilt. And her violence is not especially eroticized, even as she kills men and drinks their blood.

Unlike A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the Hebrew Bible presents a world where many, many women are killed. It is not safe to walk home alone at night; it is not safe even to go out, as Dinah and the girls of Shiloh, devastatingly, learn. It is not safe to be alone with a man, as Tamar's story reveals. If we take Ezekiel 16 seriously, it's not safe to be born (as) a woman. And men are always waiting with punishment for sexually adventurous women, as Ezekiel 16 shows again and again. We can name, classify, and critique the violence with the help of feminist tools; Promising Young Woman is one such tool. But to imagine otherwise, we also need feminist flights of fancy. For this, I recommend we begin with a female vampire, and a long dark walk home.