‘Furious’ Makes You Face It

In her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich lists over 60 examples of systematized female oppression. To name a few: the power of men to deny women their own sexuality or to force male sexuality upon them via rape, domestic violence, prostitution, chastity belts, incest; to command or exploit their labor via horizontal segregation in the workplace, pimping, and male control of abortion; to confine them physically or control their movement via rape as terrorism, high heels and restrictive clothing, or physical violence; to use them as objects in male transactions—the use of women as gifts, the use of women as entertainment in male transactions, wife-hostesses, call girls, cocktail waitresses. She concludes, after her harrowing delineation of the ways that women are restricted by male desire, that the pervasiveness of patriarchy can only suggest that “an enormous potential counterforce is having to be restrained.” Furious, Hulu’s new drama from Elizabeth Meriwether, is a love letter to that counterforce, showing us what happens when it erupts from its restraints. The show follows Alice (Emmy Rossum), a newly hired FBI agent tracking down a mysterious serial killer, and Catherine (Lola Petticrew), the killer herself, as she kidnaps and murders a series of seemingly unconnected men. In the show’s first five minutes, we see Catherine inject fentanyl into the arm of an already sedated man, lying next to him as he dies. Next, we cut to Alice, confined to the phone lines at the otherwise all-male New York City FBI office, helping a confused old woman that the men had been teasing. Catherine is too powerful; Alice, not powerful enough. At a glance, the premise could appear to be another lazy attempt at wedging so-called feminism into mainstream television by way of shallow representation—look, a female cop, brought down by the boy’s club, chasing a crazed female serial killer! But as the story progresses, we see the brutal complexity of life under omnipotent patriarchy: Alice grows twisted and strong, while Catherine deflates, gives her own game away, until the two meet in the middle. Ultimately, they are no better or worse than each other, just women forced into a world they never chose, figuring out how to survive it. Furious is not a girlboss fantasy. Instead, it’s a story of our world—a world in which women are sidelined, beaten, raped, and killed with impunity—and the women who try, in their own mangled ways, to resist it. First, all the typical TV stuff. The show is beautifully acted: you can’t take your eyes off Petticrew as they dance along Catherine’s traumatized web of contradictions, sometimes gleeful, sometimes scared, sometimes so angry you can feel the heat rising in you as you watch. Quincy Tyler Bernstine is delightfully withering as the burned-out, cynical, mythology-obsessed sex crimes specialist Nora Washington, oscillating between taking slugs of tequila and giving the show’s more powerful monologues about justice, trust, and power. The pacing is excellent, devastating me each time an episode ended and I knew I’d have to wait a week for the next. The show weaves Catherine and Alice’s paths until they finally intersect with grace and finesse. But where Furious really shines is the writing, both on the line level (“I’m not getting high and mighty; I am high and mighty”) and as a holistic triumph of narrative structure. We come in thinking we know the story: a sex-crazed, mind-addled serial killer and the competent yet haunted agent trying to track her down. But as the web of crimes unfolds, we see that Catherine’s motivations are far more complex, and that she is not the show’s true villain. We see Alice resist and find love, we see Catherine look for a home, we see intimacy and rage and so much fear that we can’t help but want a better world, too, not just for these women but for ourselves, recognizing that horrors are happening every day to women we will never meet and who will likely never have the wherewithal to embark on a mass murder campaign in an attempt to stop them.

Read it at Defector ↗

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