Jessica Jones - Season 1
This review contains spoilers
The Purple Man Was Always Already Here: On Jessica Jones and the Anatomy of Coercion
The most honest thing Jessica Jones ever did was refuse to make its villain interesting. Kilgrave is not a tragic figure, not a misunderstood genius, not a dark mirror. He is a tantrum in a violet suit—a grown man who believes, with the unshakable conviction of someone who has never been told no, that the world is a buffet laid out for his consumption. The show's first season understood something that prestige television, with its endless rotation of charismatic monsters, has been working hard to forget: that the men who destroy women's lives are rarely fascinating. They are simply people who have been allowed.
What Marvel's 2015 series does, almost in spite of its corporate parentage, is take the entire architecture of male entitlement and make it literal. Kilgrave's power is not a metaphor for coercive control; it is coercive control with the metaphor stripped off. He says the words and the woman complies. He calls it love. When Jessica forces him to confront what he has done, his defense is the oldest one in the book: how was I supposed to know? You should have told me. You should have stopped me. You seemed to be enjoying yourself. Here is bad faith in its purest distillation—the abuser who insists on his own innocence by demanding that his victim perform a freedom he has systematically destroyed. He weaponizes the very condition he has eliminated. It is an old trick, and the show, refreshingly, does not dignify it with ambiguity.
Jessica herself is the more difficult problem, and the more radical one. She has the strength to throw a man through a wall, and yet the season is structured around her inability to free herself from what was done to her. This is not a flaw in the writing; it is the writing's deepest insight. Strength of body is not the same as sovereignty of self. Her powers belong to the register of transcendence—the projection outward, the capacity to act on the world—but trauma drags her relentlessly back into immanence, into the apartment, the whiskey bottle, the loop of memory she cannot outrun. The show grasps that the situation in which a person finds herself is not a backdrop she steps in front of but the very stuff her freedom must work through. Jessica is free, yes. She is also drinking herself unconscious because freedom, when it has been violated this thoroughly, is not a triumphant condition but a wound.
This is why the show's much-discussed "unlikability" of its protagonist is not a stylistic choice but an ethical one. Jessica refuses every script the culture offers her. She will not be the sleek noir detective with her wisecracks polished to a shine. She will not be the survivor whose suffering has refined her into wisdom. She will not be a hero in the Marvel sense—will not put on the suit, accept the name, model herself into a figure suitable for merchandising. She is sour and cruel and self-sabotaging, and she is, crucially, not punished by the narrative for any of it. The myth of the redeemed woman, the woman whose pain is alchemized into grace, is precisely the myth Kilgrave's existence makes impossible. There is no growth arc available to someone whose primary task is simply continuing to exist in a body that has been used against her will.
The supporting women clarify the stakes by triangulating them. Trish Walker has built a fortress of competence around a childhood of maternal violence and is starving, by the season's middle, for the kind of agency Jessica wields without enthusiasm. Hope Shlottman is what Jessica would have been without the powers: a girl whose body became a crime scene she was then asked to apologize for. Jeri Hogarth, magnificently odious, demonstrates that proximity to power does not exempt women from cruelty—she simply replicates the logic of domination in a tailored suit, proving that gender is not a guarantee of solidarity, only a shared condition that can be embraced or fled. The show resists the easy feminism of presenting all women as allies. It insists, more interestingly, that women are situated, that each of them is working out a particular accommodation with a world that has not been built to accommodate them, and that some of those accommodations curdle.
What is Kilgrave, finally, except the dramatized form of a question every woman has been asked to answer in some lower register? Why didn't you leave. Why did you smile at him. Why were you wearing that. Why did you go back. The brilliance of making his power supernatural is that it forecloses every one of these questions in advance and thereby exposes them, in their ordinary form, as the gaslighting they have always been. The show is not subtle about this, and it shouldn't be. Subtlety is what allowed the Kilgraves of the world to flourish in the first place.
The finale offers no catharsis worth the name. Jessica snaps his neck, and the camera does not give us the swelling music of triumph because there is none to give. She has not been freed; she has merely been left alive. The ambiguity at the heart of survival—that to continue is not the same as to flourish, that ending the threat is not the same as healing from it—is allowed to stand. This refusal of resolution is perhaps the most adult thing a superhero show has ever done. It accepts that some experiences do not metabolize into meaning. They simply become part of the body that carries them.
Watching the season now, after the cultural reckonings of the years that followed it, what strikes one is how little the show has dated and how much the surrounding discourse has caught up to it. Jessica Jones arrived with a fully formed grammar for talking about coercion, consent, and the long erosion of the self under another's will, at a moment when popular culture was still largely pretending these were niche concerns. It understood that the work of becoming a self—of refusing to be the Other in someone else's story—is not accomplished in a single defiant gesture but in the grinding daily labor of staying, drinking too much, answering the phone, taking the case, getting up. Heroism, on these terms, is not a costume. It is the decision, made over and over because it cannot be made once, to remain the author of one's own life. Jessica Jones, glowering through a rainy window with a bottle in her hand, is doing philosophy. The culture is finally beginning to recognize the discipline.
The most honest thing Jessica Jones ever did was refuse to make its villain interesting. Kilgrave is not a tragic figure, not a misunderstood genius, not a dark mirror. He is a tantrum in a violet suit—a grown man who believes, with the unshakable conviction of someone who has never been told no, that the world is a buffet laid out for his consumption. The show's first season understood something that prestige television, with its endless rotation of charismatic monsters, has been working hard to forget: that the men who destroy women's lives are rarely fascinating. They are simply people who have been allowed.
What Marvel's 2015 series does, almost in spite of its corporate parentage, is take the entire architecture of male entitlement and make it literal. Kilgrave's power is not a metaphor for coercive control; it is coercive control with the metaphor stripped off. He says the words and the woman complies. He calls it love. When Jessica forces him to confront what he has done, his defense is the oldest one in the book: how was I supposed to know? You should have told me. You should have stopped me. You seemed to be enjoying yourself. Here is bad faith in its purest distillation—the abuser who insists on his own innocence by demanding that his victim perform a freedom he has systematically destroyed. He weaponizes the very condition he has eliminated. It is an old trick, and the show, refreshingly, does not dignify it with ambiguity.
Jessica herself is the more difficult problem, and the more radical one. She has the strength to throw a man through a wall, and yet the season is structured around her inability to free herself from what was done to her. This is not a flaw in the writing; it is the writing's deepest insight. Strength of body is not the same as sovereignty of self. Her powers belong to the register of transcendence—the projection outward, the capacity to act on the world—but trauma drags her relentlessly back into immanence, into the apartment, the whiskey bottle, the loop of memory she cannot outrun. The show grasps that the situation in which a person finds herself is not a backdrop she steps in front of but the very stuff her freedom must work through. Jessica is free, yes. She is also drinking herself unconscious because freedom, when it has been violated this thoroughly, is not a triumphant condition but a wound.
This is why the show's much-discussed "unlikability" of its protagonist is not a stylistic choice but an ethical one. Jessica refuses every script the culture offers her. She will not be the sleek noir detective with her wisecracks polished to a shine. She will not be the survivor whose suffering has refined her into wisdom. She will not be a hero in the Marvel sense—will not put on the suit, accept the name, model herself into a figure suitable for merchandising. She is sour and cruel and self-sabotaging, and she is, crucially, not punished by the narrative for any of it. The myth of the redeemed woman, the woman whose pain is alchemized into grace, is precisely the myth Kilgrave's existence makes impossible. There is no growth arc available to someone whose primary task is simply continuing to exist in a body that has been used against her will.
The supporting women clarify the stakes by triangulating them. Trish Walker has built a fortress of competence around a childhood of maternal violence and is starving, by the season's middle, for the kind of agency Jessica wields without enthusiasm. Hope Shlottman is what Jessica would have been without the powers: a girl whose body became a crime scene she was then asked to apologize for. Jeri Hogarth, magnificently odious, demonstrates that proximity to power does not exempt women from cruelty—she simply replicates the logic of domination in a tailored suit, proving that gender is not a guarantee of solidarity, only a shared condition that can be embraced or fled. The show resists the easy feminism of presenting all women as allies. It insists, more interestingly, that women are situated, that each of them is working out a particular accommodation with a world that has not been built to accommodate them, and that some of those accommodations curdle.
What is Kilgrave, finally, except the dramatized form of a question every woman has been asked to answer in some lower register? Why didn't you leave. Why did you smile at him. Why were you wearing that. Why did you go back. The brilliance of making his power supernatural is that it forecloses every one of these questions in advance and thereby exposes them, in their ordinary form, as the gaslighting they have always been. The show is not subtle about this, and it shouldn't be. Subtlety is what allowed the Kilgraves of the world to flourish in the first place.
The finale offers no catharsis worth the name. Jessica snaps his neck, and the camera does not give us the swelling music of triumph because there is none to give. She has not been freed; she has merely been left alive. The ambiguity at the heart of survival—that to continue is not the same as to flourish, that ending the threat is not the same as healing from it—is allowed to stand. This refusal of resolution is perhaps the most adult thing a superhero show has ever done. It accepts that some experiences do not metabolize into meaning. They simply become part of the body that carries them.
Watching the season now, after the cultural reckonings of the years that followed it, what strikes one is how little the show has dated and how much the surrounding discourse has caught up to it. Jessica Jones arrived with a fully formed grammar for talking about coercion, consent, and the long erosion of the self under another's will, at a moment when popular culture was still largely pretending these were niche concerns. It understood that the work of becoming a self—of refusing to be the Other in someone else's story—is not accomplished in a single defiant gesture but in the grinding daily labor of staying, drinking too much, answering the phone, taking the case, getting up. Heroism, on these terms, is not a costume. It is the decision, made over and over because it cannot be made once, to remain the author of one's own life. Jessica Jones, glowering through a rainy window with a bottle in her hand, is doing philosophy. The culture is finally beginning to recognize the discipline.
Mini Review: Jessica Jones refuses to make its villain a tragic genius. Kilgrave is a tantrum in a violet suit, making the architecture of male entitlement literal. His power isn't a metaphor for coercive control; it is abuse with the metaphor stripped off. Against him, Jessica’s struggle is radically existential. Super-strength cannot erase the wound to her autonomy. The show brilliantly rejects the myth of the healed survivor, proving heroism is just the daily labor of reclaiming one's own life.