The Cutprice Guignol

I have to admit – I’m starting to feel some type of way about female rage fiction.

Over the last few years, there has been this move towards the marketing of certain projects as “female rage” pieces – books, movies, TV shows, all tagged under this broad spectrum of anger that springs from the unique oppression faced by women. Not because I don’t think the experiences of women and how infuriating, devastating, and galling they can be don’t contribute to some really brilliant stories – fuck, I even wrote a book based on that very premise myself, so that would be a hell of an argument to make. There’s a great deal of power in the catharsis of a great, big scream into the proverbial void about the way things are and how far they are from the way things should be, and I sincerely hope that we don’t see an end to these kinds of stories anytime soon. But there’s something about the way it has been turned into a marketing buzzword, a genre in its own right, that really takes the sting out of the subversive nature that makes so many of these stories compelling. Female rage is, in many ways, an oxymoron; a contradiction in terms when it comes to how women are supposed to act. Rage is something reserved for the masculine, and feminine fury is a rebellion against that – seeing it flattened into marketing mumbo-jumbo in productions by some of the biggest businesses in the world can’t help but feel a bit cynical to me, you know?

Which brings me to Furious, appropriately-named as it is – one of the very productions in question; a crime thriller whose embrace of female rage has been breathlessly put at the front and centre of much of the marketing and reviews prior to its release earlier this week. Created by Elizabeth Meriweather – probably best known till now for being the person behind New Girl – it stars Emmy Rossum as Alice Black, a newly-minted FBI agent grappling with the aftermath of an abusive relationship, on the trail of a mysterious female serial killer, Catherine (Lola Pettricrew), who pursues men involved with her childhood sex trafficking.

With the show split pretty evenly between Alice and Catherine, Furious takes different approaches to the female rage upon which it has been sold. For Catherine, the rage is more explicit and recognizable – she kills for revenge, murdering the men who were involved in her abuse and exploitation as a child. The abuse and violence she subjects her victims to are to further her goals of making the people who hurt her and those she cared about pay, and there’s a cold, brutal callousness to it that Pettricrew captures with exceptional clarity. Even where the writing wavers for her, and it does – I don’t know how many times Catherine is going to take her top off and have someone instantly start acting against their own best interests with her magical tits – she does a great job laying this brittle veneer of charm over the roiling fury that lies beneath.

But Rossum is the heart of the show here, and a far more complex – and realistic – depiction of how women’s anger must be crushed down in order to continue functioning in their day-to-day lives. Alice’s abuse came at the hands of another cop, leading to her alienation from much of the force due to their assumption that she’s lying or exaggerating to defame him. To pursue more traditional forms of justice would be to entirely nuke what is left of her career, with the matter complicated by her once-close relationship to her abuser’s family. Virtually every connection she had has been severed or warped by her experiences, even damaging the lives of the people who choose to stand by her (like long-time colleague and friend Danny, played by the typically-brilliant Scoot McNairy). She has nowhere to turn that injustice on but either into her job or into herself, stuck in trauma responses like being unable to shower due to her abuse taking place in the bathroom, pushing her even further out of normal social circles and alienating her even further.

And it’s that anger that I find the most compelling by far, not least thanks to some excellent acting on Rossum’s part. One of the first scenes she shares with her abusive ex, Marshall (Jake Lacy, who remains playing either the best person ever or the biggest arsehole you’ve ever heard of in your life), where she expresses her grief over the intimacy of their relationship being lost as part of his abuse, is perhaps the most grounded and impactful in the show so far. Nora, head of the FBI sex crimes unit (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), is perhaps my favourite encapsulation of this aspect of the show so far, exhausted from decades of witnessing the harm done to women who receive little to no justice due to the power of their abusers, reliant on alcohol to cope. but unwavering in her willingness to let it go. It feels like a more nuanced take on the female rage genre, one that’s far less openly cathartic but far more honest in the process.

Furious handles female rage with a fascinating contrast – between the more explicit and recognisable versions of anger and violence that so often populate these stories, and the grim reality of coping with abuse and balancing that fury with the need to continue existing in the real world. While we’re just at the start of the series now, I’m interested to see how it explores these themes in the rest of the show’s run – what do you make of it so far, and of the “female rage” subgenre as a whole? Let me know in the comments!

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(header image via Hello! Magazine)