Jessica Jones: AKA Hero

Warning: Spoilers. Also, Trigger Warnings (For the show also): Rape, Abusive Relationships.

Jessica Jones is Marvel's second Netflix television show following Daredevil. The best way I can put it is that whilst Daredevil is the epitome of male violence then Jessica Jones is the consequences of that same violence. It was an exercise in how to take a typically sexist genre – neo/noir – and use it to tell the story of how women live day to day in a world suffering under male violence. In the pilot we are given the typical noir protagonist: an insomniac who drinks, has no friends and a past that won't leave them alone. It was even complete with narration but it's Ritter's female voice that breathes freshness into a genre that typically sees women as dames who are there to seduce and kill the poor male protagonist.

It is set in Hell’s Kitchen, a place depicted as full of violence and poverty so rife that people have no choice but to live there and suffer. We follow Jessica Jones, a character who shares my name (an experience I'll tell you), who we meet as she is putting a man through her door window, because he oddly blamed her for his wife having an affair. She is established straight away as being similar to many a fictional detective before her, one who has abrasive, illegal methods but who, damn it, gets the job done, and yes she does get called Sherlock at one point. Just like Sherlock using his talents to trick others into telling him things Jess is no different, using a Barbie style voice to get information from a woman over the phone.

Yet Jess brings more to the table than those mere human detectives before her for she is a superhero too. Though the word superhero is perhaps not accurate here, for Jess isn't out fighting crime with her powers – at least not anymore. The show drifts around various words to describe her, though it is not shy in calling her a hero, but it mostly settles on gifted – though even that is argued over by one character, instead calling her a freak. Either way she has superior strength, she can kind of fly, or as Jess describes it 'guided falling', and she can't half take a punch. These skills are often held up as evidence as to how a woman can do a job that comes with the threat of someone deciding to kick your arse. On quite a few occasions did Jess, and her friend Trish, find ways to shrug off and defend Jess' considerable strength, from a cleanse to pilates.

The show explores similar themes to shows like it such as Marvel's Agents of SHIELD which has introduced Inhumans to its current season; it looks at the threat that people with superhuman powers would be, people who can rip people apart with their bare hands if they want to. Jessica Jones adds a dimension that I have always argued: but what if they didn't? What if they were like the many, many people that weren't violent? Like the fact that the violence in this world is pretty much committed by men, the statistics are staggering.

So what is it about women that makes us so much less inclined to commit violence? And what if we got powers? Would we turn around and wreak havoc for the thousands of years of violence and oppression done against us? Or would we be like Jess, who does good and mostly uses her strength to defend herself? As Jess says to someone who accuses her of being 'one of them', “It's people like you that give people like you a bad name”; it's not that she is or isn't the problem but it's like many scared, paranoid, fear mongering people who assume and accuse others of being a threat. That's not even getting into the fact that humans are enough of a threat on their own & that weapons can bridge that gap between human and inhumans, I mean seriously three members of the Avengers are human.

In the pilot she gets a case that starts off the whole season: someone's daughter, Hope, has gone missing. Even in this exchange alone we are treated to one way that gender stereotypes can crop up as the father starts trying to fix Jess' apartment door – the one that she threw a man through. At one point he asks her if she has a spirit level & we get a little moment where noir crosses with sexism as she doesn't have one but instead she hands him some glue, noir protagonists are not the most prepared characters. It's sexism is topped off by him saying he doesn't want to leave a woman alone in the city with a door that won't lock, the irony of this of course being that Jess can more than handle herself.

The theme of strength is a core one of the show however; from dealing with literal, physical strength to a more abstract, mental and emotional strength. This happens because despite Jess' immense strength she was once powerless to use it as her enemy was a man by the name of Kilgrave, played by David Tennant, who instead controlled her mind. It's this helplessness, this losing control over your mind and body that is the key fascination that Jessica Jones explores. Many a time do Trish and Jess point out that being mind controlled by Kilgrave does not make you weak, and that in fact you could be the strongest person in both mind and body and it doesn't matter against Kilgrave's powers.

This is where I say that I'm going to spoil the entire season so I hope you've watched it all before you read on. This lack of strength & weakness becomes especially clear when we find out that his powers are a virus & that the only way to be free of him is by being with him for long enough that your body can create antibodies against it, as happens with Jess. It's also this anti-body resistance that serves as one of many great metaphors in the show for what happens when you leave an abusive relationship. Women who've left abusive partners can still feel trapped, and often live under the very real threat of their ex returning to hurt them – leaving is the most dangerous time for women in these relationships. These women over time would hopefully learn how to be free, as it were, from their partners' spell; whilst Kilgrave has fictional mind control powers he is representative of men who use simple manipulation to exercise that same control of their female partners.

It is through this threat that the show expertly portrays the realities of living in and out of an abusive relationship. Often when we hear about these relationships there are cries of why didn't she leave as though women happily choose to stay with men who hurt them, as though there could be no other side to it. When often in reality women's choices are more complex, as reality often is, and it’s this lack of choice that the show handles brilliantly. Women in abusive relationships are emotionally abused to feel as though they are worthless, that they bring the abuse on themselves and that they deserve it; abusive men also isolate women from their friends, their family, the people who would be able to warn and help them. They make them financially dependent on them so even if they wanted to leave they would have no money to get away. They keep track of everything that they do on the internet, or outside of home – if they even allow them to go out alone that is – so even women finding out that there are options to escape is pretty slim. Considering many people don't understand the signs of abuse, and that much of the abuse isn't physical, it is not really a mystery why people don't get out of abusive relationships. Again, that's not even considering just how dangerous, as I've said, it is when women do finally leave – that is often when they are killed. I am sure there are people out there who have even stopped watching this show, or have had their abusive partners turn it off in front of them after realising Kilgrave is portrayed as the evil villain.

A big part of liberal feminism that I often see is this idea of choice, in particular women's choices. There's a lot of discussion about the idea that women should have the freedom to make whatever choices they want, regardless of the impact those choices have on other women even. For instance, when some feminists talk about how harmful things like objectification can be, how patriarchal ideas of women's worth are tied to how sexually attractive to men they are and when it comes to  women who are objectified – such as those in the modelling and sex industries – liberal feminists are quick to point out that if a woman chooses to be objectified then that's her business. I'm hardly the first feminist then to point out that this is a rather narrow way to look at the world and that it is all but useless for feminism seems as feminism deals with oppressive structures and systems rather than solely individual choices.

Jessica Jones then as a show has much to say on choices and how free women really are to make certain choices. It understands that abusive men and oppressive structures can take away a woman's choice, can remove her chance to say no, and then will turn around and blame her for doing something she had no real choice but to do. As much as Kilgrave uses his powers there's also many times when he simply manipulates Jess with his words, with the threat of making others take their own lives, and with the threat of doing despicable things to those that she cares about. Where is the choice when it’s between your best friend being killed or raped and stopping the man who has ruined yours and many others lives? Many women have argued that in a patriarchy women's free will is twisted and marked by the oppression that she lives under, it's no different for Jess.

On the other hand however, it is very aware of the choices that men make, that men have the power to make for they are the ones in a patriarchy with the most power. Kilgrave is a perfect example of what an abusive, entitled man would do if he was given the power to control minds. He uses women like puppets, there to be raped for his pleasure, to be pretty things on his arms. He even uses a woman, Hope, simply to annoy and lure Jess as he goes through the same steps he did with her - dinner, hotels and such. He gets whatever he wants and it is the simple fact that Jess leaves him and is the one person who disobeys him that makes him so furious he sets out to ruin her life, in the name of loving her.

That again is another corner stone of abuse, and sadly one many believe if newspaper headlines and stories are to be believed. We paint men who kill their partners and their families as loving men whose love was simply so much that they had no choice but to kill them; that by taking their life they were showing some true act of love. Kilgrave made it very clear that he thought that he loved Jess, that he was controlling her because he loved her more than anyone did and that only he could love her in the Right Way. The truth is, of course, that he doesn't love her but instead he is obsessed with her. That he feels like she is his possession and that any time she is a real person, exercising her right to say no to him, that this illusion shatters and he reacts with anger and more and more control.

In the final episode, in the climax of Jess finally standing off and up to Kilgrave in what ends with his death at her hands, is a line that shows how he wants her to see herself; he says to her that she isn't capable of loving, that she could never truly love him because she couldn't love any man. This is again another common abuse tactic as it turns him into the victim and her into the villain; of course he has to hurt her because it’s the only way he can make her see how great he is, of course he has to force her to be with him so he can teach her how to love, and ultimately she ends up feeling like the person in the wrong when it’s his own issues and insecurities that mean she doesn't love him, not hers. It is one of many patriarchal reversals that men often pull to convince themselves that women are the cause of all problems and not men, for example a simple one would be men saying that women are bad drivers when in fact it is men who cause the most road accidents, and especially the most fatal ones.

Even then there are other things throughout the show that hint at the reality of women living in a patriarchal world that abuses women but then hates any attempt they make at dealing with it. For instance, in this final fight Jess tells her best friend Trish, stood nearby after being threatened by Kilgrave with a future of rape and death, that she loves her, and she does so because she knows she's about to murder Kilgrave; she does this simply because she knows that she will be sent to jail – though, luckily perhaps, that does not happen – and this is because killing your abuser is seen as an unacceptable choice women make. There are many, many women in prison for this exact reason and whilst I'm not advocating they should all be free I think that there is a lack of understanding of how little choice these women had in doing what they did.

That so many of these women were faced with their own deaths, or the death of their children, and that the only way to stop them was killing them. Yet women's sentences, like with most other crimes, are harsher for this than men's would be. It is seen as a much greater crime for a woman to kill a man than for a man to kill a woman, just look at the sentences men get for killing a stranger compared to their partners. There is even a plot in the show of Trish getting a gun after she learns to defend herself and almost fails; but even this in the real world has consequences that women suffer worst, as is evidenced by a case where a woman went to jail for decades purely for firing warning shots at her abusive partner. A woman threatening a man was deemed worse than many men's very real violence against women, and children.

Male violence is a constant in the world of Hell's Kitchen, as was made painstakingly clear in Daredevil, and seen in obvious and subtle ways in Jessica Jones. Take the character of Simpson, or G.I. Joe as I took to calling him in my notes, he is very violent, time and time again; he complains that when Kilgrave made him try to kill Trish that that wasn't him, that he isn't like that. Yet as the series goes on his character is marked by the violence he commits, in many situations and against many different people. He even commits the abuse staple of immediately apologising for his violence against Trish as she tries to stop his violence, saying it will never happen again.

But then there is also the aftermaths of male violence scattered throughout; we see this in Jess' PTSD, in the male cliché remnants of Carrie Ann Moss' gender swapped character, in Pam & Wendy paying for male violence, in Hope's abortion, and in a patriarchy so obsessed with women being beautiful that a mother tries to force her own daughter to be sick so she will be skinnier. Male violence is plain and obvious to see once you start noticing it, which can be difficult as it is so hidden, so normalised and mystified by men who would rather you believe that violence just is, it just happens, and that its done by no one in particular. Take for instance Kilgrave's anger at being called evil, calling it reductive because he sees himself as so much greater, so much more complicated than a simple Evil Villain. Yet I'd argue that even the concept of evilness is one used to add a shine to what is otherwise your standard, pathetic entitled man throwing tantrums and trying to manipulate people when he doesn't get his own way.

Kilgrave sees himself not as a villain either, but as a loving partner. He describes recreating her childhood home, one Jess had to leave after a car crash she was in killed her family, and forcing her with the deaths of others to live there as a 'grand romantic gesture'; he gets angry and says that he 'gave and gave' and that 'she took and took', again he is the carer and provider and she the ungrateful leech who doesn't appreciate anything he does for her. People echo abusive sentiments like this when they believe that a woman owes a man sex after a date, that men's kindness should always be repaid as it comes at a cost – whilst women's kindness is one that is severely punished if its lacking. Kilgrave even goes so far as to say that she is crueler than his parents, who accidentally gave him his powers after trying to cure an illness he had in childhood, as to him she committed the worst possible act against him: saying no.

The only criticism perhaps that I would say this show has is that it does try to find reasons for Kilgrave's violence, for his entitlement. It first looks to his childhood, hoping that his shitty parents would be a good reason why a man would use his powers for so much evil; yet when Jess finds that his parents were loving, that they were trying to help and that he turned on them so much that they had to flee she instead argues that if their parenting didn't make him that way then the lack of it did instead. But again that doesn't account for those men who had loving families, that had amazing childhoods and it certainly doesn't explain why women with the worst childhoods don't become mass murderers or terrorists. When you see that on a basic, biological and mental level the differences between men and women are slim to none then it becomes clear that male socialisation is what is most likely to blame for men's violence.

Society, parents, family, friends, adverts, TV, film and all the things that men do and who they talk to and all the bits in between are what cause men to be entitled to the point of violence. It's a patriarchal society that praises men for being aggressive, for being harsh and violent, and that tells them women are sexy rewards for that violence (see most of film) that causes men to seek out violence in the hope of reward, glory, and fame – one that they sadly get, you just have to look at the title of the 2015 Kray’s biopic Legend to see that. But even then Jessica Jones as a show makes it clear that killing is, almost, never the answer, that there are other options than violence, and that being a hero requires making the right, if not difficult, choices. Men's violence is a choice, their entitlement is a choice, and the show makes it very clear how bad the consequences can be when men happily make certain choices.

There is so much more to talk about with this show and I hope that people do as they watch it and that it makes abusive relationships that much clearer so that they can one day avoid them; from Kilgrave underplaying his abuse to make himself the victim, to him taking a beating to make Jess look like the villain, to the idea of trying to fix abusive men and how Jess realises that she isn't the one to do that. Jessica Jones is an amazing show that shows the cost of male violence on women but more importantly it shows the strength, in every way, of women. It shows how female friendship can help mend the damage done by men, how it takes a village to fix the havoc of men's choices, and that in the face of no real choice women still try to make the right one.