Marvel’s Jessica Jones

The Binge
By Jessica Zafra
SUPERPOWERS are one of the less interesting elements in Marvel’s Jessica Jones. They’re very useful, and they account for the heroine’s ability to sleep soundly despite having a broken front door, but they don’t protect her from life itself. No wonder she’s so pissed off.

She certainly doesn’t need superpowers to intimidate people. As played by Krysten Ritter, Jones looks like a model, dresses like a roadie in a metal band, takes no shit from anyone, and has a hard stare that can freeze your insides. She’s Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, with a resemblance to Filipino movie queen Gloria Romero. “New York may be the city that never sleeps,” she says over the moody jazzy score, “but it sure does sleep around.” As a private investigator, she specializes in unearthing illicit sex and deceit, and if that wasn’t enough to turn her into a hard-drinking cynic, she’s also dealing with a personal trauma. That trauma provides the plot for season one of the Netflix series created by Melissa Rosenberg, based on one of the lesser-known Marvel comic books.

Jones alludes to the Marvel universe (“the big green guy and the flag-waver”) and has a brush with the anti-“gifted” backlash following The Incident (i.e. the first Avengers movie), but is otherwise independent of the costumed phenomena. She’s apparently unaware of her fellow Hell’s Kitchen resident Matt Murdock a.k.a. Daredevil. Marvel’s Daredevil, also from Netflix, raised the bar on comic book adaptations; Marvel’s Jessica Jones jumps right over it.

This is a superhero show for grown-ups, from its candid view of sex to its nonlinear portrayal of Jones’s origin story. The nature and source of her abilities is revealed to us in brief flashbacks and bits of conversation: she’s an orphan who was adopted by a teen star and her stage mother, she tried the world-saving hero route briefly but gave it up, she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Her nemesis is not aliens, gods, secret organizations or evil dictators, but one ordinary-seeming guy with an extraordinary talent for getting into her head. Sounds relatable, no? It takes us all 13 episodes to understand why she is the way she is, and that’s how to build a complex character.

Melissa Rosenberg has produced a heroine who is strong, intelligent and fearless about everything. Much has been written about the sex scenes, which are remarkable not because they are graphic but because they portray women in control of their sexuality. It’s sex without guilt, coercion, or ulterior motives, just basic animal pleasure. Jones becomes fascinated with bar owner Luke Cage (Mike Colter from The Good Wife), who turns out to be gifted as well — good for them, because their bed-breaking activities would injure most people. Sex is not a problem, it’s relationships that are awkward.

The real masterstroke of season one is its depiction of a villain who not only tests the heroine to her limits, but tests the viewer’s sympathy as well. He’s a man without an organization, an outlandish manner or a convoluted plan for world domination, just a good suit and a will so strong he can control anyone. Kilgrave (“Was Murdercorpse already taken?” Jones quips) doesn’t have to throw a punch, he can just order the other guy to put his head through a wall. You don’t want to hand over your Zegna jacket but you have to, you don’t want to kill anyone but you do. Strong, sexually confident heroine versus brain-rapist: brilliant.

On top of everything, Kilgrave believes his motives are romantic — he insists that he’s in love with Jessica Jones. He won’t or can’t control Jones, but he has a particularly nefarious way of ensuring his safety. “If I’m not back in two hours, please remove the skin from each other’s faces,” he tells the chef and the maid. To further confuse the viewer, David Tennant, the Tenth Doctor on Doctor Who and the star of Broadchurch, plays Kilgrave. You may hear yourself making excuses for him — “Yes, he brainwashes people, and he forces someone to smile for days, but all he wants are her photographs…” In a small way, the series does to us what Kilgrave does to people.

Jones prefers to be a lone wolf, but she has allies in this fight. Her best friend Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor), former teen star and now a popular radio talk show host, gives her support and Saran-Wraps her broken ribs. Walker had tried to convince Jones to take up saving the world as a career, even coming up with a name and costume. “Jewel is a stripper’s name,” Jones retorts, “and if I wear that (spandex costume) you’re going to have to call me Cameltoe.” Trish has her own problems, including her scheming stage mother. “I wish you had a Mother of the Year award so I could bludgeon you with it,” Jones tells her.

Other associates include lawyer Jeryn Hogarth (Carrie-Ann Moss), a power lesbian embroiled in a messy divorce. The male characters are more conventional: there’s Malcolm (Eka Darville) the junkie next door, and Will Simpson (Wil Traval), a cop who becomes Kilgrave’s victim, then a love interest for Trish, then an ally, then a member of some secret group, then someone else familiar to comic book readers. Sorry about that spoiler, but it’s jarring for a show that largely ignores the Marvel universe to suddenly strain to link to it.

Comic books are routinely dismissed as simplistic and silly, but nothing on Marvel’s Jessica Jones is simple and the silliness is barbed. Superpowers don’t make everything right. The past isn’t even past. You survive, but you don’t forget. This heroine can lift a car and jump several stories, but her real strength is her prickly humanity.

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This is the last edition of The Binge for 2015. We’ll be back on Jan. 8, 2016. In the meantime we’ll all be spending a lot of time stuck in traffic, so I recommend that you watch TV on your tablets, laptops, phones (assuming that you’re not driving). Check out our favorite shows of the past year: Fargo, You’re The Worst, The Americans, Game of Thrones, Broad City, Silicon Valley, Transparent, Penny Dreadful, Jessica Jones, and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (which I haven’t reviewed because I use it for sanity maintenance). Then e-mail me at [email protected] and tell me what you liked.