Alice Black knows how to recognize violence before others, she knows how to read its traces when they are still confused, hidden within a relationship, a behavior, a detail that someone preferred to ignore, and she has built around this ability not only her work as an FBI agent, but such an important part of her identity that she has almost ended up confusing the two things; However, there is a person in front of whom that lucidity suddenly breaks, and it is Alice herself, because the woman who… Furious Emmy Rossum interprets with a restrained harshness and is almost always on the verge of cracking, managing to see with extraordinary precision the violence exercised on others, much less the violence that has gone through her own life.
It is perhaps here, much more than in the murders, in the investigation or in the thriller structure that initially seems to guide the series created by Elizabeth Meriwether, who Furious finds its most interesting center, transforming the chase between a federal agent and a serial killer into a story about two apparently very distant women who, episode after episode, discover that they are separated above all by the way in which they have decided to react to the same question: what happens when the system in which justice should exist is no longer able to guarantee it?
Rossum, met by Panorama in a one-to-one interview after the conclusion of the first season of the series, he doesn’t even try to simplify the answer, because Alice Black and Catherine, the young assassin played by Lola Petticrew, were created precisely to escape that reassuring division between victim and culprit, good and evil, law and revenge that many crime stories use to recompose the chaos at the end of each episode.
“They are two women who are much more similar than they are different,” explains Rossum. «Both are seeking justice, or revenge, but not necessarily for themselves. Catherine’s mission is to get justice and understand what happened to Isabel, while Alice’s is to get justice for all the victims.”
At the beginning of the series Alice still believes that that distinction is enough, that there is a right side of the line and that her job is to stay there, because the job of an FBI agent should consist precisely in defending the system even when that system shows all its imperfections; just that Furiousrather than allowing her to remain safe within this certainty, progressively forces her to look at what happens when the law exists, is applied and yet fails to protect the people who most need to be protected.
“This is the only system we have, and if we didn’t have it, we would have chaos,” Rossum observes. “But at the same time it doesn’t always manage to serve the most vulnerable people, it doesn’t always manage to serve women.”
It’s a sentence that probably contains more than Furious than many of its twists do, because the series does not build Catherine to demonstrate that revenge can replace the law nor Alice to convince us that relying on the law is always enough; instead it places the two women face to face to the point of forcing both of them, and the viewer with them, to recognize a much less comfortable zone in which the system continues to be indispensable even as its failures become evident.
When we meet Alice, that contradiction has already become personal. She is a woman who has gone through violence, who continues to bear its consequences in her relationship with her own body, in her sexuality, in her anger and in the almost obsessive way in which she dedicates herself to work, and for this very reason the ease with which she manages to recognize what happens to other victims appears immediately paradoxical compared to the difficulty with which she manages to give the same name to what happened to her.
To the question of Panorama if that work, in addition to representing a search for justice, also became a way to avoid looking at herself, Rossum directly links Alice’s professional ability to the most painful part of her story.
“I think that, because of what she experienced, Alice doesn’t necessarily think she deserves justice,” she says. «He is certainly not the perfect victim. The way the trauma shaped her affected her anger and also her relationship with her sexuality, and I think all of this leads her to judge herself.”
It is one of the hardest passages of his interpretation and, at the same time, one of those that best explains why Furious you stubbornly reject the idea of the “perfect victim”, that person whose pain we are willing to fully acknowledge only when his behavior, his past and even his reactions correspond to the model that we have decided to consider acceptable.
Alice does not correspond to that model and, for this very reason, she is the first to struggle to recognize the right that she expects to be guaranteed to others.
“I don’t think she thinks she can get justice for herself,” Rossum continues, “and she probably doesn’t feel like she deserves it either. These are very complicated feelings and this makes her extremely obsessive about her work and the search for justice for others.”
Inside this sentence there is also perhaps the most interesting reversal of the character: that same wound that makes her incapable of fully defending herself becomes the reason why she is able to recognize the suffering of others so quickly, transforming the trauma into a kind of radar that allows her to see what others do not see but which, at the same time, continues to prevent her from directing the same attention towards herself.
Rossum knows well the morally unresolved areas of the female characters he chooses, from Fiona Gallagher in Shameless to Angelynepassing through roles that in recent years have progressively distanced her from easily classifiable women, and Alice also belongs to this trajectory, perhaps in its most radical form: not because it is impossible to understand what she wants, but because understanding it means accepting that a person can simultaneously believe in the law and doubt it, seek justice and desire revenge, be very strong in defending others and very fragile in recognizing what has happened to themselves.
It’s also what brings her closer to Catherine than Alice would be willing to admit. One chooses to remain within the institutions and the other decides that those institutions have failed; one builds its identity around the rules, the other destroys them, but both act because someone has not been protected and because both, in profoundly different ways, have stopped believing that waiting is enough.
The result is a crime in which the central question soon stops being just who is chasing whom and becomes something decidedly more uncomfortable: how much does a system have to fail before a person starts thinking they can get out of it? And, above all, what really distinguishes the search for justice from revenge when both arise from the belief that someone has stopped listening?
Rossum doesn’t offer a definitive answer, because it would probably go against the very nature of the series, and even when he talks about Alice’s transformation over the course of the season he insists on the fact that something inside her changes precisely when her old certainties stop being enough.
Alice initially states that her duty is to obtain justice for every victim and uphold the law; in the end, Rossum observes, “something inside her shifted”, enough to lead her to a choice that the Alice of the first episodes probably couldn’t even have contemplated.
It is in that shift that Furious it also prepares the ground for its future: Hulu has already renewed the series for a second season, after the first had brought to the end the confrontation between two women who for eight episodes continued to observe each other as if each contained an alternative possibility of the other’s life.
At the end of the interview there remains a much simpler question than the previous ones, almost a provocation after having spent so much time describing a character impossible to reduce to a definition.
A word just for Alice Black.
Emmy Rossum doesn’t need to think about it.
«Fierce». Fierce, combative, indomitable.
Perhaps also because she continues to fight for others the battle that, at least for now, she has not yet managed to believe she deserves for herself.
