Emmy Rossum and Quincy Tyler Bernstine in Furious.Sarah Shatz/Disney/Supplied
The ancient Greeks had separate words for different types of anger, a woman FBI agent explains in Furious, the new Hulu on Disney+ series that shines a chilling light on the sex trafficking of preteen girls: There’s ménis, the moral anger of a society; thumos, the violent anger that makes you fight (and often makes you a hero); and then there’s orgē – that’s the slow, quiet anger that builds up in you until you finally decide to do something about it.
Orgē burns in me when I read on canadasmissing.ca that 23 per cent of missing children/youth in 2023 were Indigenous, and 70 per cent of those were female. It burns when I hear about a popular book such as Laura Doyle’s The Surrendered Wife (2001), which counsels women to submit to their husbands even if they’re abusive, to restore their “masculine need for control.” It burns when I learn that Uber’s civil litigation attorneys grilled a 24-year-old woman about what she’d been wearing the night her Uber driver raped her vaginally, orally and anally.
Can you imagine an attorney defending a car thief by saying to the victim, “It’s your fault for parking in that underground lot,” or defending a burglar by saying, “Well, you’d just painted your house; you asked for that break-in”? No, you cannot. But patriarchies want to be able to control women in every way, including sexually, and they want to blame women when things go wrong.
Now that more and more women are getting the chance to create entertainment, orgē is fuelling them, too – in films such as Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, in which a woman is willing to die if that’s the only path to getting a rapist punished; the series Unbelievable (Netflix) and I May Destroy You (Crave), where the respective showrunners Susannah Grant and Michaela Coel depict how patriarchal societies and institutions not only refuse to take the sexual assault of women seriously, but also sideline the women who do; and the new Netflix stand-up hour Mary Beth Barone: Galaxy Brain, where the comedian drops deadpan but devastating lines about being “a woman trapped in a woman’s body,” including one bit about how installing emergency phones on university campuses to combat sexual assault “is a fundamental misunderstanding of how sexual assault works. They don’t let you make a phone call.”
Rossum and Scoot McNairy in Furious.Sarah Shatz/Disney/Supplied
Furious, from showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether – whose career has moved her from New Girl to The Dropout to Dying for Sex to this – is orgē incarnate, and it is excellent. A quick description of the plot makes it sound familiar: Two women FBI agents pursue an elusive serial killer, Catherine (Lola Petticrew), who targets powerful men – the ones who abuse, and the ones who enable abuse. But trust me, this show is anything but typical.
Every character is nuanced and repeatedly surprising, especially the two agents: Seasoned Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) insists that sex crimes against children and young women should be investigated, even if the perpetrators are wealthy, connected men; that’s kept her stuck in a basement office and overlooked for promotions. Enter new agent Alice (Emmy Rossum, devastatingly good), who explains to Nora why she transferred to the FBI from the NYPD: “I dated a detective. He put me in the hospital. And when I told my lieutenant, everyone I worked with and everyone I grew up with stopped talking to me.” Alice’s complicated past not only helps her catch Catherine, it helps her understand her.
Lola Petticrew in Furious.Sarah Shatz/Disney/Supplied
The ancient Greeks cautioned that anger can make a person insane, and most of the men in this series are quite happy to dismiss any woman who tries to rock the status quo as “crazy.” They would much rather ignore a woman’s broken bones and black eyes than jeopardize a man’s career. A dead teenager fished out of a river doesn’t matter; a big donor to the policeman’s fund does. (Danny, an NYPD detective played by Scoot McNairy, is the exception; taking Alice’s side cost him friends, too.)
In the stand-up Galaxy Brain, Mary Beth Barone urges women to lean into their crazy: “When men are crazy, they don’t let it hold them back. They redraw congressional maps.” And Meriwether is crazy like a fox: Tasked with remaking the neo-noir Black Widow, a hoary Disney property from 1987 – in which a Fed (Debra Winger) chases a serial murderess of rich husbands (Theresa Russell); the only commonality with Furious is that none of Winger’s male bosses listen to her, either – Meriwether has delivered a thriller that has you biting your nails because of the depth of its characters and the urgency of its insights.
McNairy and Rossum in Furious.Sarah Shatz/Disney/Supplied
Meriwether also gives us a primer on ideas that puzzle the public about sexual assault, integrated seamlessly into the action: Why a woman might return to her abuser. How a victim can dissociate from her body during an assault. Why her memories of the assault are often fragmented and make no sense. Why so few women press charges (“Because you knew it wouldn’t work,” one assault survivor character tells another. “Because it never works.”) Catherine, we learn, has been sex trafficked since she was 13. “My memory sucks,” she tosses off. “Because I got strangled so much.”
Writing about this much anger made Meriwether herself uncomfortable, she has said in interviews. But in Furious she pushes herself, and us, past that, because the dead girls no one cares about – the Jane Does buried unmarked in potter’s fields “three, four graves deep,” as Nora says – do, and should, matter.
In a later episode (there are eight, arriving weekly), Bernstine gives Nora a brief but spectacular bit of physical comedy: As she follows her strutting boss out of an office, she parodies his oh-so-manly walk. I actually sucked in my breath when I saw it: This is why some men don’t want women in the workplace, and why they prevent women from gaining too much power. Things will change, and not in ways that favour those men. Their own crazy will be exposed; maybe they’ll even have to reign it in.
“I’m not getting high and mighty,” Nora claps back at her boss. “I am high and mighty.”