So I am really sleepy today (carbs hangover?) and therefore I do not know how cohesive this post will be but I made some frenzied, excited notes while I was watching Jessica Jones and I should probably do the post while things are still ~fresh.
There are many things I loved about the show (Jessica’s everything, Jessica and Trish, LUKE CAGE, Malcolm!!!!!, how Jessica is another in a growing list of female protagonists who are MESSY AS FUCK, and how the show does not blitz past Kilgrave’s many victims but instead gives voice to a lot of them and follows up on many of their individual consequences/coping mechanisms) but I was really surprised by the turn it took re: Jessica and Kilgrave in the middle and it brought up some stuff for me so I kind of wanted to have a quickish little post about that specifically. And the “that” in my excessive run on sentence would be abuse in media, specifically romantic abuse.
In the show we have three more central abusive relationships that take up a lot of narrative time: Jessica and Kilgrave, Jeri and Wendy, and Trish and Simpson. And I think that we are supposed to read parallels and comparisons within all three, and especially Jeri and Kilgrave, because I think the show drew a lot of direct comparisons between them.
I think Jessica and Kilgrave felt…I don’t know, cathartic to a lot of people? Maybe me specifically, because I haven’t read much fandom response to the show and only a little critical response because I loved the show a lot and when I love something a lot I don’t always want to hear other people’s opinions on it, lol. Even when they are good opinions. I’m weird, I know. But anyway, the catharsis comes from how explicitly Jessica is able to say things like: You raped me. You abused me, in all these ways and for all these reasons. Plus there is the fact that Jessica was literally brainwashed and mind-controlled which allows in some ways for it to be a more cut and dry situation, though we still get all of the classic abuser language from Kilgrave. As far as he’s concerned, he treated Jessica better than anyone ever could. He gave her nice clothes and they lived in fancy apartments. He took her out for expensive dinners. He’s deluded obviously but it’s a lot of shit we’re used to hearing from male characters that we are not supposed to think are deluded, but instead supposed to find sexy and exciting. He and Jessica are special; they’re perfectly matched; they’re made for each other. She’ll see that soon enough, according to him. He denies everyone the right to a choice, but he will bequeath that right to Jessica, because she’s special. There’s a lot of other stuff too, like the way he needs Jessica to make him “good” or at least to make him enact a superficial performance of goodness by coaching him step by step. The fact that people ship Jessica and Kilgrave is not a surprise because of how much stories like that have been de rigueur but also it’s still gross.
(Side note, I really loved that scene where he left a pretty little sequined dress in a box on Jessica’s bed for her and she just ripped it in half. So satisfying, lol.)
And of course, the whole thing is bullshit. It has nothing to do with what Jessica wants, and the only reason he’s pretending to give her a choice is because he knows his powers don’t work on her anymore. He holds onto these nonsense reasons that “prove” her love for him, like the fact that she wasn’t able to jump off a roof in eighteen seconds of uncompelled time to get away from him. Eighteen seconds!
Binge-watching has somewhat blended by remembrance of what events occurred in conjunction with other events but from what I remember, a lot of the major Jessica and Kilgrave stuff (in her childhood home, where so much of the direct dissection and confrontation of their past happened) was going on simultaneously with Jeri and Wendy’s divorce proceedings. Jeri and Kilgrave got some nice visual mirroring when he’s in his cell and she’s outside of it but it definitely goes further than that. Her first instinct upon finding out Hope’s pregnant is to keep the fetus post-abortion so she can figure out if she can get his powers from it somehow. Like, sis.
But I think it’s important that the show also contained these non-powered abusive relationships. Jeri uses her money and position to control both Wendy and Pam in addition to being emotionally nasty to Wendy at literally every opportunity even though she was the one having an affair and Wendy was just, like, existing. What caught me the most was when Wendy specifically laid this out in just about the most concise statement on one of these types of relationships: “You were kind to me. You were a bastard to everyone else but you were kind to me. I was special.”
I mean, doesn’t that just say it all? And of course it comes back to bite Wendy in the ass, because with people like that, who relate to others only to get what they want from them, it is only a matter of time.
Lastly, Trish and Simpson. There was something the show did a few times that I really appreciated: occasionally there would be something that just felt off to me but I would brush it off. Like towards the end when Luke forgave Jessica; I thought that was weird and too soon and just not tonally consistent but I ship them a lot so I was like WHATEVER I’LL TAKE IT. And when you think Jessica is going to meet Kilgrave with headphones on and eyes hidden so he can’t control her and you hear the music playing in her headphones – I just thought, this is not what Jessica would choose for music, but okay. And then in both times it was proved to be bullshit! Luke was being controlled by Kilgave and those were Kilgrave’s words! It wasn’t really Jessica, it was Trish! I really loved that, because it seemed to me that the show did a good job of impressing on me who these people were and how they behave, so I was able to detect when it was a little weird but not enough to fully ~raise my suspicions, you know?
I bring it up in relation to Trish and Simpson because I kind of think the show was doing the same thing there. Like, who didn’t think it was shady for Trish to hook up with the guy who attacked her? But then there are easy excuses to make: he was controlled by Kilgrave. He did his best to make it up to her and gain her trust, which I honestly thought was a nice scene. But he pressures her and picks at her boundaries even before the pills, constantly overstepping and butting heads with everyone. Even at the end, even after Trish kicks his ass, she’s still sticking to the idea that he was a good guy before the pills, which I think is an in-character response from her (even as Jessica sort of scoffs). I don’t think we’re supposed to just take that at face value. It’s a little more insidious, it’s not called out plainly by the narrative, but it’s still there. The show explores the gradations of lots of different abusive relationships (have not even brought up Trish and her mother) that we see all the time, just not always as the focus or discussed in-show in such clear terms. So it was probably good (and by good I mean narratively beneficial) to have something like Trish and Simpson alongside it; show it in all forms.
There are a lot more things to talk about with this show but I’ll leave it at that for now.
And this is unrelated but how great was that one episode full of Rosario Dawson and how DOUBLY GREAT was it when she made a little joke about Kilgrave’s name and Jessica sort of fell in love with her for a second?
There are many things I loved about the show (Jessica’s everything, Jessica and Trish, LUKE CAGE, Malcolm!!!!!, how Jessica is another in a growing list of female protagonists who are MESSY AS FUCK, and how the show does not blitz past Kilgrave’s many victims but instead gives voice to a lot of them and follows up on many of their individual consequences/coping mechanisms) but I was really surprised by the turn it took re: Jessica and Kilgrave in the middle and it brought up some stuff for me so I kind of wanted to have a quickish little post about that specifically. And the “that” in my excessive run on sentence would be abuse in media, specifically romantic abuse.
In the show we have three more central abusive relationships that take up a lot of narrative time: Jessica and Kilgrave, Jeri and Wendy, and Trish and Simpson. And I think that we are supposed to read parallels and comparisons within all three, and especially Jeri and Kilgrave, because I think the show drew a lot of direct comparisons between them.
I think Jessica and Kilgrave felt…I don’t know, cathartic to a lot of people? Maybe me specifically, because I haven’t read much fandom response to the show and only a little critical response because I loved the show a lot and when I love something a lot I don’t always want to hear other people’s opinions on it, lol. Even when they are good opinions. I’m weird, I know. But anyway, the catharsis comes from how explicitly Jessica is able to say things like: You raped me. You abused me, in all these ways and for all these reasons. Plus there is the fact that Jessica was literally brainwashed and mind-controlled which allows in some ways for it to be a more cut and dry situation, though we still get all of the classic abuser language from Kilgrave. As far as he’s concerned, he treated Jessica better than anyone ever could. He gave her nice clothes and they lived in fancy apartments. He took her out for expensive dinners. He’s deluded obviously but it’s a lot of shit we’re used to hearing from male characters that we are not supposed to think are deluded, but instead supposed to find sexy and exciting. He and Jessica are special; they’re perfectly matched; they’re made for each other. She’ll see that soon enough, according to him. He denies everyone the right to a choice, but he will bequeath that right to Jessica, because she’s special. There’s a lot of other stuff too, like the way he needs Jessica to make him “good” or at least to make him enact a superficial performance of goodness by coaching him step by step. The fact that people ship Jessica and Kilgrave is not a surprise because of how much stories like that have been de rigueur but also it’s still gross.
(Side note, I really loved that scene where he left a pretty little sequined dress in a box on Jessica’s bed for her and she just ripped it in half. So satisfying, lol.)
And of course, the whole thing is bullshit. It has nothing to do with what Jessica wants, and the only reason he’s pretending to give her a choice is because he knows his powers don’t work on her anymore. He holds onto these nonsense reasons that “prove” her love for him, like the fact that she wasn’t able to jump off a roof in eighteen seconds of uncompelled time to get away from him. Eighteen seconds!
Binge-watching has somewhat blended by remembrance of what events occurred in conjunction with other events but from what I remember, a lot of the major Jessica and Kilgrave stuff (in her childhood home, where so much of the direct dissection and confrontation of their past happened) was going on simultaneously with Jeri and Wendy’s divorce proceedings. Jeri and Kilgrave got some nice visual mirroring when he’s in his cell and she’s outside of it but it definitely goes further than that. Her first instinct upon finding out Hope’s pregnant is to keep the fetus post-abortion so she can figure out if she can get his powers from it somehow. Like, sis.
But I think it’s important that the show also contained these non-powered abusive relationships. Jeri uses her money and position to control both Wendy and Pam in addition to being emotionally nasty to Wendy at literally every opportunity even though she was the one having an affair and Wendy was just, like, existing. What caught me the most was when Wendy specifically laid this out in just about the most concise statement on one of these types of relationships: “You were kind to me. You were a bastard to everyone else but you were kind to me. I was special.”
I mean, doesn’t that just say it all? And of course it comes back to bite Wendy in the ass, because with people like that, who relate to others only to get what they want from them, it is only a matter of time.
Lastly, Trish and Simpson. There was something the show did a few times that I really appreciated: occasionally there would be something that just felt off to me but I would brush it off. Like towards the end when Luke forgave Jessica; I thought that was weird and too soon and just not tonally consistent but I ship them a lot so I was like WHATEVER I’LL TAKE IT. And when you think Jessica is going to meet Kilgrave with headphones on and eyes hidden so he can’t control her and you hear the music playing in her headphones – I just thought, this is not what Jessica would choose for music, but okay. And then in both times it was proved to be bullshit! Luke was being controlled by Kilgave and those were Kilgrave’s words! It wasn’t really Jessica, it was Trish! I really loved that, because it seemed to me that the show did a good job of impressing on me who these people were and how they behave, so I was able to detect when it was a little weird but not enough to fully ~raise my suspicions, you know?
I bring it up in relation to Trish and Simpson because I kind of think the show was doing the same thing there. Like, who didn’t think it was shady for Trish to hook up with the guy who attacked her? But then there are easy excuses to make: he was controlled by Kilgrave. He did his best to make it up to her and gain her trust, which I honestly thought was a nice scene. But he pressures her and picks at her boundaries even before the pills, constantly overstepping and butting heads with everyone. Even at the end, even after Trish kicks his ass, she’s still sticking to the idea that he was a good guy before the pills, which I think is an in-character response from her (even as Jessica sort of scoffs). I don’t think we’re supposed to just take that at face value. It’s a little more insidious, it’s not called out plainly by the narrative, but it’s still there. The show explores the gradations of lots of different abusive relationships (have not even brought up Trish and her mother) that we see all the time, just not always as the focus or discussed in-show in such clear terms. So it was probably good (and by good I mean narratively beneficial) to have something like Trish and Simpson alongside it; show it in all forms.
There are a lot more things to talk about with this show but I’ll leave it at that for now.
And this is unrelated but how great was that one episode full of Rosario Dawson and how DOUBLY GREAT was it when she made a little joke about Kilgrave’s name and Jessica sort of fell in love with her for a second?