In art, the image of the enraged woman often represents an ugly,
almost talismanic evil: In Adolphe-William Bouguereau’s 1862 painting “Orestes
Pursued by the Furies,” the women sneer, brandishing weapons at Orestes. In
Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” Judith furrows her brow,
half of her face cloaked in shadow, and clutches a fistful of Holofernes’ hair
as she plunges a sword into his neck. And Caravaggio’s Medusa, a wronged woman
transformed into a monster, is just a severed head, and yet her face is
animated with fury, mouth open in a scream, brows creased.
اضافة اعلان
Over the last few years, TV has offered similar portraits of
female rage — striking scenes within a culture that still mostly prefers women
either to carry their anger calmly and silently or to express it within a
misogynistic framing (the manic or hysterical woman).
It is empowering to watch a woman rage indelicately, like
the recently divorced Rachel Fleishman, played by Claire Danes, in the FX
series “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” During a therapy treatment in the penultimate
episode, Rachel lets loose a sharp, achy howl that overtakes her whole body. It
takes several attempts for her to fully release this deep-seated scream. The
first few are abbreviated and strained but then she seems to unload everything,
her mouth opened wide, her face contracting so hard it takes on an all around
rosy hue. Who said rage could not be beautiful?
In fact, it’s an asset to Jennifer Walters (Tatiana
Maslany), aka She-Hulk, who got her own slice-of-life action court drama on
Disney+ last year. Her hero-training journey is truncated because she takes to
being the hulk much easier than did her cousin Bruce Banner, the original Hulk.
“I’m great at controlling my anger; I do it all the time,”
Jennifer tells Bruce in the first episode. “When I’m catcalled in the street,
when incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me. I do it pretty
much every day because if I don’t, I will get called emotional or difficult or
might just literally get murdered.”
The series is not about her tempering her rage but rather
about living with a manifestation of the power her rage has given her: She-Hulk
is strong and intelligent, a celebrity and a popular right-swipe on the dating
apps.
The same is true for Retsuko, the star of the popular
animated Netflix series “Aggretsuko,” about a 25-year-old red panda who hates
her job, where she is taken advantage of and disrespected by many of her
colleagues. She handles the stress and frustration by doing karaoke — death
metal karaoke, specifically.
Women who show rage in domestic spaces, like Ali Wong’s
character Amy in the hilarious and bruising Netflix series “Beef,” disrupt the
stereotype of women who are permitted to rage only in relationship to their
roles as caretakers. Amy’s anger, even when warranted, is destructive, and
everything in her life crumbles because of it, including her relationship with
her family.
Well-worn characters like the mother who does whatever it
takes to save her children or the faithful wife who gets roped into crime to
save or avenge her husband are more digestible, women granted the appearance of
being multidimensional and emotionally complex when they are just following a
formula.
But even when female characters are developed outside of
these reductive tropes, often the writing eventually flattens and diminishes
them again. Take, for example, the rich emotional complexity that the Disney+
series “WandaVision” uncovered within Wanda Maximoff, which was absent from her
next Marvel assignment. In the series, Wanda is caught in a sitcom-style
delusion spurred by her anger, sorrow and grief. But in the film “Doctor
Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” she is reduced to fury and nothing else,
as fierce maternal protectiveness transforms her into a killing machine. Her
personhood is no longer relevant because being an angry mother has become her
whole character.
In other examples of women raging in a domestic space, there
is sometimes comical collateral damage. In Season 1 of “Dead to Me,” Jen, a
widowed mother with an attitude problem, takes out her rage about her mother-in-law
by punching the cake she got for Jen’s late husband’s memorial. In “Mad Men,”
Betty Draper, a 1960s housewife caught in a marriage of spite and deception,
stands in her yard in her peach nightgown, holding a rifle pointed toward the
sky. With every flex of a manicured pink-nail-polished finger, she shoots at
birds as a horrified neighbor looks on, calling to her in horror; she keeps
shooting as a cigarette dangles from her mouth.
A woman’s rage can be heroic — whether you’re a hulk or
Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), bashing in walls at an anger management class.
It can be a barometer of what’s gone horrendously wrong in a world that has
taken women for granted. Think the irate faces of Elisabeth Moss as Offred in
the misogynistic dystopia of “The Handmaid’s Tale”; or the rage of the
ill-fated soccer players in “Yellowjackets”; or the magically endowed young
women in “The Power,” who sometimes use their abilities for self-defense or
revenge.
A woman can rage over privilege, as does Renata Klein (Laura
Dern), the reputation- and money-obsessed mom in “Big Little Lies,” or over
violent passion, as does Dre (Dominique Fishback), the killer stan of “Swarm.”
In many cases, rage may be a last resort, a way for a woman to finally get what
she desperately desires — catharsis, vengeance, justice, peace. Whether or not
that satisfaction lasts, however, is a very different story.
These scenes and storylines are not about the anger itself
but rather what has led a woman to speak, to act, to defend herself and others,
to have the autonomy to express an unpalatable emotion. To be unattractive and
merciless. Because sometimes, in order to change her world — for good or for
bad — all a woman needs to do is open her mouth and let out a vicious,
unbridled scream.
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