It’s easy for many to forget how different things were before the end of 2017 when it came to speaking openly about sexual assault. Most have been so conditioned to the witch-hunting evolution of the #MeToo movement (apart from its original 2006 iteration) that it’s probably a struggle to remember that it was born of earnest, fed-up intentions. In this regard, Jessica Knoll’s 2015 novel, Luckiest Girl Alive, was very much ahead of its time. And perhaps the film adaptation (also penned by Knoll) could only come out post-2017. Nonetheless, Ani Fanelli (Mila Kunis), whose experience is based on Knoll’s own, is sure to mention in her voiceover at the beginning of the movie, “It’s 2015 and people still act like marriage is some sort of crowning achievement for women.”
The significance of the “time period” being just two years before the #MeToo wave broke effectively conveys the “scandalousness” of someone like Ani ever “daring” to speak out about her rape while she attended a prestigious private high school called Brentley in 1999. And, of course, forget about trying to speak out in 1999, when it was a scholarship student’s word against a trio of untouchable prep school boys. So Ani, then going by TifAni, did what the majority of women have always done: buried the incident in an attempt to “move forward.”
Alas, the addition of a school shooting into the repertoire of trauma didn’t help with “moving on.” Especially since Dean (Carson MacCormac), one of her gang rapists, spreads the rumor that she was in cahoots with the school shooters, Arthur (Thomas Barbusca) and Ben (David Webster)—very Columbine-reminiscent, and not just because the year is meant to be ’99. The accusation is believed because 1) it’s Dean who says it and 2) Ani had been friends with both of them despite managing to latch onto the popular crowd. But her “connection” to them is rooted entirely in the group preying upon her naïveté, her eagerness to please.
These flashbacks to that dynamic are doled out slowly at first, as we watch Ani live her “successful” life as a senior editor for The Women’s Bible and plan her wedding to the affluent Luke Harrison (Finn Wittrock). Which is why, after mentioning that it’s 2015 and everyone is still obsessed with women getting married, she adds, “That is a trap I did not fall into… I dove in headfirst.” It’s one of the endless dichotomies (or what some might call “hypocrisies”) about Ani. In addition to choosing a fiancé who so closely resembles the douchey type that might have partaken in a gang rape in high school and college and beyond. Even so, a girl has to look at knives for her future together with such a person, as Ani and Luke are doing in the first moments of the film.
The second Ani touches a knife, she hallucinates that it has blood all over it, tapping into some Lady Macbeth shit as she tells herself to, “Snap out of it, psycho.” A tactic she’s likely been using her entire life to remain the “wind-up doll” everyone wants her to be, including her own highly insensitive mother, Dina (Connie Britton). A woman who truly believes Ani owes all her “good fortune” to her because Dina “got her into” Brentley, even though Ani’s the one that secured her own entrance through a writing scholarship. Her talent being something that her English professor, Andrew Larson (Scoot McNairy), can see immediately, as we’re given a requisite classroom scene that wields a piece of literature as a foil of the main character’s life. In this case, The Catcher in the Rye, with Larson quoting Ani’s essay, “Holden is what we call an unreliable narrator, someone whose version of the truth can’t be trusted.” Clearly, it’s a sentiment that applies to Ani from her own perspective of going up against privileged white boys—but, ultimately, it mirrors Dean spinning his false version of “the truth” to protect himself. And, further still, there’s no denying Holden Caulfield has a school shooter quality that applies to both Arthur and Ben.
Although Luke is “good on paper,” his treatment of Ani is often undercutting and condescending, dismissing her when she says that her long-time boss and editor, Lolo Vincent (Jennifer Beals), is finally going to take her to The New York Times. Luke throws cold water on the notion by saying it’s not real until there’s an offer in writing, but that his job transfer in London is real. And wouldn’t it be so great if she got an MFA there? Ani ripostes, “You know MFA programs are just for white girls who can’t get paid to write.” Her overt use of barbing humor as a defense mechanism is obviously another side effect from her repressed trauma.
And yes, Ani’s people-pleasing nature, the desire to fit in and not be othered is what led her down the path of false temptation in the first place, all those years ago. To laugh off her gang rape as some kind of mutual misunderstanding. Not wanting to be further made a fool of. Plus, the headmaster didn’t exactly make the scenario of what would happen if she reported the “incident” sound all too favorable. Even so, Mr. Larson encourages her to tell the police, having run into her at the gas station after she fled there on foot in the wake of her brutalization. Seeing her firsthand, there’s no doubt in his mind about what happened, and yet, he serves as the scapegoat who gets fired for letting any students leave the fall dance that night to go to the party in question. The party that Ani blows her second chance to evade when a popular girl named Hilary (Alexandra Beaton) shouts out that she should leave with them. Too flattered by Liam’s (Isaac Kragten) attention—in that moment—she opts to stay, altering the entire course of her life. And compromising her emotional well-being. But then, it’s not as though it’s Ani or any girl’s fault that they have the “gall” to believe they can get drunk at a party and not risk a gang rape. Or any kind of rape.
The effects of this violation start to come out more and more in her interactions with Luke as they get closer to the wedding. For instance, an argument over a song to include on the playlist ensues when Ani says, “I do like the song but the guy’s a pedophile.” Luke replies, “You can still like the song though.” And in 2015, that was actually true. There remained a defense around separating the sexual abuser from his work. With #MeToo, all of that changed. It was no longer acceptable for men like Luke to say, “I always thought you had moved on from all this… I thought you were so tough.” In disbelief that men really do think a rape is something that can just be “moved on” from, Ani hits back, “So tough that I try to skip the part where I hurt about this? No. Until I do that, I’m just a fraud.”
Vexed that this article she wrote is going public in The New York Times, he demands, “Fine, but can’t you work that out privately? Do you have to get into the nitty-gritty details for the whole world?” Trying to spell it out for his daft ass, she answers, “Those guys were going around making fun of the shape of my pubic hair. They were making fun of the sounds I was making so yes, the ‘nitty-gritty’ matters to me.” Defending them (because they’re cut from the same cloth), he offers, “They’re dead, and one of them is in a wheelchair. Haven’t they paid for their mistakes?” “Their mistakes?” “They fucked up, I’m agreeing with you.” “No, no, no. A ‘fuck-up’ is when you take your parents’ car out without permission and scratch the paint. A ‘fuck-up’ doesn’t even begin to encompass what they did to me.” Realizing there’s no way to win his “argument”—the one where she shouldn’t be hurt and traumatized by an extreme violation to her body—he yells, “Ani, it’s our fucking rehearsal dinner, how are we talking about this right now?” Perhaps because rape is always relevant in a woman’s life, even when men don’t want to acknowledge it.
It also bears noting that, in the background of these unfolding events, signs of Hillary Clinton’s campaign are everywhere, with Ani’s own best friend, Nell Rutherford (Justine Lupe), saying she won’t get married until there’s a woman for president. Which means, naturally, she may never get married. For Hillary’s prevention from winning office in 2016 is, in many ways, what helped set off #MeToo. The fact that a “grab ‘em by the pussy” rapist like Trump was more “appealing” to patriarchal America (read: the electoral college) than a woman with “emails” was undeniably a catalyst for the sudden droves refusing to sit in silence any longer. Just as Ani refuses to by the end of Luckiest Girl Alive. And, unlike Cassie (Carey Mulligan) in the post-#MeToo Promising Young Woman, she opts to do it through words instead of violence. For it was, again, 2015, when we were all still playing at being “civil” to get our message across.
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