Warning: this contains spoilers.
Set in 1991 Cape Cod, Hot Summer Nights centers on Daniel (portrayed by Timothée Chalamet) as his self-discovery journey goes a bit awry. Following the loss of his father, Daniel’s mother sends him to spend the summer in Cape Cod with his aunt. With the film being told from the perspective of a bystander, viewers are given the chance to watch Daniel as he transmutes from a shy and awkward teenager to a recklessly confident one. As outlandish as the plot might seem — with the exorbitant drug-dealing ventures and the simultaneous hurricane, it’s actually based on the true stories of a college drug-dealer, as observed by an outsider’s POV (the director and writer, Elijah Bynum).
While Hot Summer Nights focuses on Daniel and his friendship and business partnership with Hunter Strawberry (portrayed by Alex Roe), the ending of the film showcases the subplot of McKayla Strawberry’s (portrayed by Maika Monroe) empowering rise to success.
Although the women in the movie might seem to linger on the cusp of the film’s foreground throughout the film, McKayla’s particular story arc takes a triumphant feministic turn toward the end. During Daniel’s rise as an awkward-adolescent-turned-drug-dealer, his melodramatic climax grabs his boss’ attention (i.e. the drug-dealing kingpin of the townie area). As Daniel’s plans to turn his weed distributions to a cocaine empire start to unravel, the duo’s boss searches for Daniel after he tries to break the unspoken non-compete business disclosure of the drug-dealing business.
When their boss can’t find Daniel, he naturally targets his partner, Hunter. After an immense amount of character growth, Hunter defies his previously selfish persona and refuses to tell his boss that Daniel’s skipped town. This obviously results in Hunter’s untimely demise.
One summer can change everything. From writer/director Elijah Bynum and starring Timothée Chalamet, this is #HotSummerNights. Coming soon pic.twitter.com/gb4n2R1nZo
— Hot Summer Nights (@hotsummernights) April 12, 2018
After the initial debris from this suspense, which all takes place at the peak of the tropical storm’s wake, Hunter’s sister, McKayla comes across Hunter’s body. Although the film focuses on the parallels between Hunter and Daniel, and how they have similarly self-destructive methods of coping with their grief and guilt, the film redirects McKayla’s new-found guilt in a productive and healthy manner.
Instead of being negatively motivated by her brother’s death, McKayla utilizes this tragedy to finally take the money that she’d been hoarding since her mother’s death and uses Hunter’s death as an excuse to make a positive change in her life. In other words, Hunter’s death motivates McKayla to leave Cape Cod and start her life for her and nobody else.
Beyond the obvious constructive character development from McKayla, this ending scene rewrites the hackneyed women in refrigerators trope. This problematic, and somehow still prevalent trope, refers to how women are discriminately used as objects to motivate the male protagonist, typically in a vengeful or heroic story arc.
Using Hunter’s demise to show McKayla’s implied rise at the end of the film shows that the women of Hot Summer Nights aren’t dispensable characters, nor are they used as stereotypical plot-bolsters for the men of the movie. Because so many modern movies, television shows, books and the like still incorporate the stereotypical stuffed in a fridge plot to simultaneously abuse and objectify women characters, Hot Summer Nights’ opposition of this trope is especially important.
Still, McKayla isn’t the only powerful woman who might profit from Hot Summer Nights‘ inevitable ending. Despite Amy’s end-scene grief over losing her boyfriend, Hunter, she could have an implicit, empowering unspoken arc off-camera. Maia Mitchell, who portrays Amy, tells Her Campus, “I hope that [Amy’s] relationship with her father—I hope that she would mend that. At the end of the film, she kind of puts a lot of blame on her father for the role he played in Hunter’s shortcoming. So, I hope she would reconcile that and put more energy into their relationship. Her father, being this kind of authoritarian father figure, I’d just want them to work on that.”
Given McKayla’s reclamation of the women in refrigerators from using Hunter’s tragic death to motivate her, it isn’t entirely unlikely that Amy would go on to mend her relationship with her father and her family in a healthy manner, had the film hypothetically continued.
From Magda and Nina in X-Men: Apocalypse to Gamora and Nebula in Avengers: Infinity War (and related media), it’s crucial to show women in mindful roles that don’t serve the men in their cinematic worlds. Though Hot Summer Nights may not overtly focus on McKayla or Amy in the entirety of the film, these strong women character portrayals illustrate that women characters can coexist in movies, scripts, and otherwise beyond their relationships with the men in their lives.