Sunday Scaries (on a Monday) and The Rage Within
A long weekend meditation on anger
In WandaVision — controversially, and uncharacteristically, one of my favourite shows of all time — Wanda ruins the lives of an entire town, puppeteering and torturing them for what feels like years (but is just one week), as a way of escaping, and manufacturing her grief.
Her grief curdles into a fabricated sitcom-themed reality, where she can live out the fantasy of her dead husband with magic-generated children, and have every day just like so. The town's residents are ensnared in this illusion, forced to participate in Wanda's destructive narrative, leading to an epic sorceress showdown.
In Big Little Lies, Laura Dern spits out one of the best lines in television history: I will not NOT be rich, she tells her shady, no-good, insider trading husband from behind a glass visitation partition. To assuage her rage and trauma, Nicole Kidman’s character slinks into a series of slow-motion affairs.
In Wild, Cheryl Strayed details her hike across the Pacific Crest Trail — a radical, grizzly journey propelled by rageful, hungry grief.
Love Lies Bleeding climaxes into a real scorcher of body horror catharsis.
Jackie (Katy O’Brian), pushed past the brink by betrayal, steroids, and blistering grief, finally erupts—veins bulging, muscles swelling, rage spilling out of her skin. She storms a gun compound and annihilates everyone inside like a vengeance-fueled cryptid. Rage becomes flesh, and then it starts throwing punches.
In the Substance, Elisabeth and her counterpart, Sue, meld into one Monster, a showstopping monster. I left the theatre punching the air.
Elphaba’s rage —one of my favourite flavours in the culture —is one of the most iconic expressions of righteous female fury in contemporary musical theatre.
I love rage.
An unhinged character? A mind-losing scene of descent? I see her, I know her. I am horny, eager, excited to witness unhinged, burst-through-your-tank-top madness.
I, myself, am carbonated with fury.
I feel at home in anger. But aside from the occasional altercation with a man in public, I don’t act on it as often as you’d think by this ode to madness. It’s been over a decade since I’ve had a fight in a beach house, shivering in an ill-fitting bathing suit like Hannah, Marnie, and Shosh — but that feels appropriate given my big age.
Most people I know have some kind of cinematic coping mechanism for their anger. They walk it away, weight lift it away, fuck it away, kickbox it away, pick at their skin, pull out their hair, choose the wrong men, take medication, clean their house, go on really weird diets, and swear off coffee.
I don’t have a remedy, however cockamamie, for my anger. Sometimes, when I’m really all consumed by the grief and disappointment of the last few years, I scroll TikTok until I realize I’ve had to pee for an hour and my dog has put herself to bed.
I come from a long line of women who sit with their rage—lids bowed under pressure, one gentle tap away from imploding. We keep it together until we can’t.
We are roommates, my fury and I. Disgruntled with the arrangement, but too comfortable, or too tired, to move out in this economy.
Zoe Kravitz killed Nicole Kidman’s husband in Big Little Lies; Deborah Vance of Hacks fame burned down her ex-husband’s house after he slept with her sister; and have you seen Promising Young Woman? All adventurous women are kookoo.
We all have a lot to be angry about. It’s a griefy time of life. Smoke has whistled out of my ears over knee-buckling change, the ache of a dead loved one, the impossibility of being financially stable as a small business owner and writer in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Over climate change, elections, career strife, and really, really painful periods. Last year, a gynecologist told me my PCOS could be reversed if I had a baby, and maybe I should reconsider my decision on having children. The smoke that came out of my ears rivalled the Vatican on Pope Day.
I feel a special type of rage when I have to send back shorts from the Gap because they are all wonky and ill-fitting despite putting all my hopes and dreams into the possibility of a new outfit.
“What is grief, if not love persevering?" Vision says to Wanda, in one of the most profound lines written on television.
But also: what is rage, if not love left to boil?
Love the idea of acknowledging fury not as dysfunction, but as devotion with nowhere to go. And 10/10 would burn down a metaphorical house for a pair of shorts that actually fit right...