Send Help: Let's Face It, She Didn't Deserve the Promotion

Spoiler Warning

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Spoiler Warning 🚨

I watched “Send Help” today. Let’s get the disclaimers out of the way: It’s a good movie. Bradley Preston was an asshole. And someone dying is a much better ending than them sailing off happily into the sunset together. And it probably would have been way more fucked up if it was her. All of that said, can we just admit it?

She didn’t deserve that promotion.

Do you remember which promotion I’m talking about? If not, I’ll refresh your memory. Bradley Preston’s father has a Big Corporate Company doing big corporate company things. Linda Liddle is a corporate strategist for said Big Corporate Company and was promised a promotion by Bradley’s father. When Bradley takes over his father’s Big Corporate Company, he’s expected to honor his father’s promise but he doesn’t and instead gives the promotion to

his Bro-ey College Frat Bro from College. And Linda is upset by this. And why wouldn’t she be?

Bro-ey College Frat Bro from College is lazy, incompetent, steals credit for her work, and is,

altogether, just obnoxiously bro-ey and collegey and fratty. Like how could we root for anyone

other than the woman who isn’t that?

Well. On one hand we roughly do, at least at first. But here’s the thing. Linda Liddle is

weird. Like weird weird. She eats smelly food at her desk, she leaves chunks of food on her

mouth when talking to people, and she inserts herself into other people’s conversations when

she clearly isn’t welcome. Her coworkers, male and female, are uncomfortable around her and

she isn’t well-liked. And these are the people she would be expected to manage if she was

given the promotion. Let’s face it: She didn’t deserve the promotion. Now. Does Bro-ey College

Frat Bro from College deserve this promotion? No. Not even a little bit. And the way he vultures

other people’s work is unethical and a pattern many people in the corporate world are sadly

used to. His death in the plane crash is not one I think many of the audience lamented. But his

particular skillset might genuinely be more necessary in boardrooms- which is where this

promotion would put whoever got it- than the woman who can’t hold a normal conversation

without making a cringeworthy joke or putting her foot in her mouth. Linda Liddle was an

extremely competent numbers person who other characters note that Bradley’s father relied on.

It sounds like she was perfect where she was. Knowing the commodity he had, Bradley Preston

and others should have shown her more respect and given her more credit while she was there.

But Bradley Preston, while he is a pretty unlikeable guy, isn’t a villain simply for not promoting

the weirdo who no one likes.

So why does this matter? Well it matters because the premise of this movie is that

Bradley Preston learns the hard way that when disaster strikes and you’re forced to confront the

real world via a plane crash and being stranded on a tropical island, competence and hard work

matter a hell of a lot more than whether your daddy owns a company. And watching an entitled

prick flounder is fun. And that’d be all well and good except that that isn’t the whole story. The

whole story is that Linda Liddle discovers a house on the island and has every ability in the

world to call for help. Instead, she tells Bradley not to go to that side of the island so she can

keep the house’s existence a secret and maintain her position of dominance over a man who

needs her. She uses her newfound position at the top of the social hierarchy to control her

former boss and, when he shows a desire to be disobedient, to torment him. Bradley just wants

to escape and get back to his old life. Bradley attempts to poison Linda so that he can escape

the island on a raft, something she has pointedly refused to assist him in doing. When it fails.

Linda paralyzes him with octopus venom and convinces him she has cut off his testicles andtells him next time she will do it for real. When Bradley’s fiance hires a guide and finds Linda

wandering on one side of the island, Linda leads Bradley’s fiance down a treacherous path

where his fiance falls to her death along with the guide after Linda hits the guide in the head

with a rock. When Bradley discovers the truth, he attempts to kill Linda. By the end of the movie,

Bradley discovers the house and Linda tells him she’s always known about it. A big fight ensues

and Linda kills him. She is rescued from the island and makes a lot of money off of selling her

story of survival..

So essentially we have a story of one character who manipulates, imprisons, and

psychologically torments another character. That first character also kills anyone who attempts

to rescue this other character, and then kills the tormented character himself for finding the

means to escape. And then she profits from her behavior. And that’s justified because the

tormented character was a jerk. But not just because he was a jerk. The Big Corporate

Company doing big corporate things seemed like it was chalk full of jerks. She was fine with

that. It was because this jerk didn’t give her a promotion. And that’s why it matters. She didn’t

really deserve the promotion. So her entirely wilful imprisonsment and torture of anther human

is built on the grounds of her feeling she deserves something that she simply doesn’t.

What concerns me is that at this pre-release screening I attended today- well not today

but recently- was that by the final fight scene, at least half the theater was still cheering for

Linda. Linda, who is killing this man in the home on the side of the island that she had forbidden

him from going because that would have meant his freedom, was still their hero. Uh oh.

It occurred to me that when Wolf of Wall Street came out, a bunch of bro-ey college frat

bros from college- as well as many who hadn’t attended any institution of higher learning but I

was doing it for the callback- missed the whole point of that movie which was that such

decadence and wealth is built very often on deceit and a dearth of morality. They seemed to

miss that Jordan Belfort destroyed much of his life and was not a good man. But something

odious in our nature (I don’t know whether it’s in the individualistic roots of this country, the fiber

of what makes up all western countries, or it’s just in our DNA at this particular stage in our

evolutionary journey) made them see Jordan Belfort as a man to be admired. It saw a

resurgence in his career. The guy does TED Talks now which is just wild. But I wondered if this

was that movie for the bitter and cynical of the corporate world. Not that their grievances aren’t

often legitimate, but that their bitterness is such that they’ll cheer for someone they perceive to

be one of their own even if she’s the literal bad guy.

Which she is. Because, let’s face it: she went to murder before maybe just not storing

tuna sandwiches in her desk drawer. She went to paralysis and feigned genital mutilation before

a wet wipe to the face after lunch. The narrative of them trading blows and her rising rightfully

victorious at the end only works out if she doesn’t know about the house and their situation is

entirely unavoidable. Then serendipity has taught this asshole a lesson. The only other way she

isn’t the villain is if you conclude that he still deserves it. To which imprisonment, torture, and a

triple murder is a tall order to say a man deserves, but I’ll listen. But the only two rebuttals

presented in the movie are that he’s not nice, and that he passes her up for a promotion. Since

“not nice” isn’t a reason to do all of those things, we’re left with the fact that he wouldn’t allow

her that coveted position higher in the social hierarchy back home, so now she’ll take it in the

wild. It seems poetic justice. Until we just face it: she didn’t deserve that promotion in the first

place. So that’s awkward.