Alex Yarde binges on Marvel’s Jessica Jones and is hungry for more!
Jessica Jones is Marvel’s first show featuring a female lead, it’s Marvel’s greatest translation of a character from comic book to screen to date and ironically, Jessica Jones is the Marvel property with the most balls.
The recent MCU big budget properties were fun, safe popcorn superhero epics. No real danger to the heroes and the good guys win for the most part unscathed. ABC’s Agents of SHIELD turned it up a notch with compelling stories a sense of real danger to the lead characters that shared vulnerabilities. But as Netfilx has demonstrated first with the stellar Daredevil and now with Jessica Jones, less may be actually more. The smaller screen and street level stories of the Netflix corner of the shared Marvel Universe resonate in a way that the big budjet Gods & Monster tentpoles that run a mile wide and an inch deep don’t have the time to explore. In Jessica Jones no ones hands are entirely clean and nobody gets out untouched by the events at the end of 13 episodes.
There is a distinction to be made between a superhero film and a film that features superheroes. Captain America: The Winter Solider was the closest big screen MCU property to break that mold by being a spy thriller first and superhero movie a close second. Jessica Jones is at its heart a detective story, old school film noir. Complete with voice over by a hard drinking, morally malleable, damaged protagonist Jessica Jones (Kysten Ritter in a career define role). An awesomely strange rouges gallery of characters in a uniformly terrific ensemble cast, a compelling love interest in Luke Cage (Mike Colter), her seedy lawyer (appropriately reptilian Carrie Anne Moss) and David Tenant‘s remarkable turn as Jessica’s repulsive, mind controlling sociopath nemesis Killgrave.
The writers deftly thread the needle between the super heroic feats, the gritty hard boiled gumshoe aesthetic, wry humor and examining in an unvarnished, intelligent way how we all deal with the aftermath of traumatic events. Killgrave due to his missing moral compass and limitless power quite literally uses people and throws them away. He leaves damaged lives in his wake like a hurricane. Jessica Jones is a survivor of Kilgrave’s mental and physical abuse. Ms.Ritter’s portrayal of Jessica displays both a supremely powerful, competent ace detective with touching pathos for her fellow survivors. The subject of rape has typically been used quite lazily as a throwaway plot device. Games of Thrones & Downton Abbey have had their detractors. But Netfilx’s Jessica Jones has a very nuanced approach. The damage to the lives of survivors of physical and sexual assault is featured quite prominently thought the series. The show has important things to say about power, rape, consent, domestic violence and redemption without being preachy or exploitive.
In a Variety interview, series creator Melissa Rosenberg dismissed TV’s reliance on rape as a throaway plot device:
“We have this rich, complex female lead and we are looking at what happened to her from her perspective.”
Jessica bears a great deal of guilt from a childhood incident and coupled with surviving the exploitation mentally and physically by Killgrave, these events fuel her determination to stop him whatever her personal cost and save others. Marvels Jessica Jones approach to dealing with power and consent by looking at all characters, even the super powerful ones, vulnerabilities and choices they make that define them at this level of depth is a bit revolutionary for a superhero show. It asks the age old question: are we defined as people by what happens to us or is it up to us to make that choice?
Marvel, rightfully so, had taken heat about a lack of female lead properties and they came out of the box swing for the bleachers with this remarkable achievement in Jessica Jones. You don’t need to be a comic book geek to appreciate the deep and nuanced approach to consent, the high quality of acting or the writing on serious subject matter that both informs and entertains.
Quite frankly there is nothing else like it on television, and you need to see this show.
See Jessica Jones only on Netflix.
cover art~
credit~ Steve Sands/GC Images / Marvel
I’m the only person I know who just isn’t crazy about it. Part of it may be my relative unfamiliarity with the original IP and source material, but after the Daredevil reboot, I just had higher expectations. Krysten Ritter is excellent, but I couldn’t disagree more when it comes to Kilgrave. As an antagonist, he’s so painfully one-dimensional, it lessens the impact he has on the viewer. Sociopathy is often a narrative cop-out, but it can have its own nuances. Jessica Jones doesn’t allow for any; the villain is so relentlessly evil, there’s never a compelling reason to question the… Read more »