If you haven’t been watching “Jessica Jones” on Netflix, then allow me to be the thousandth person to recommend it to you. The leads range from good to great, the visuals are excellent, and the core dilemmas are interesting and emotionally engaging.
The show’s great strength and weakness is that it is committed to showing a woman doling out street justice without crying at rainbows, or dressing up in a skintight leotard.
Web odes have been written to this show’s feminist cred; I will not add to them. Much. Though for those readers who suspect “feminist cred” means Jessica Jones routinely stops the plot to deliver stinging lectures about the patriarchy … well, just give the show a try anyway. There are no lectures. It’s obvious that the writers wanted to explore feminist issues such as sexual consent, and to make a show where women do the serious fighting rather than functioning as arm candy for the men. But the creators don’t dance around shouting about how feminist it all is; they just make a darn good show.
If anything, it wasn’t quite feminist enough. Or maybe that’s not quite right. I was left feeling that in order to break the normal mold of superhero shows, where the lady superheroes are secondary characters, they often ended up just inverting those conventions.
What do I mean by this? Start with the secondary sex characteristics. Writers think they have given us stereotype-busting female characters, but actually they wrote a male part and cast a female for the role. The clearest example in “Jessica Jones” is Hogarth, the high-powered lawyer who’s cheating on her wife with a young chippie. I looked at my husband and said: “That character feels like they wrote a man, and then just changed the name at the last minute.” And indeed, it turns out that in the graphic novels on which this show is based, Hogarth is a man.
What about Hogarth as a woman feels inauthentic? It’s not that women can’t be amoral, adulterous or interested in someone younger and fresher than the old ball and chain.
I have no problem believing that a rich older lesbian can be cruel to her wife of many years and interested in a younger woman largely as arm candy. What I don’t believe is that that said lesbian can do this while being completely unaware of what it feels like to be the older woman losing her youthful looks as menopause rears its head, or the 23-year-old woman being courted. Yet that’s how the Hogarth character is written. This studied inversion made a significant subplot fall flat for me.
Meanwhile, the villain — a man — isn’t allowed to have a single redeeming quality other than bold taste in suits. Feminists have a quite legitimate complaint about the way that rape (or the threat of rape) is often played for erotic frisson in movies, but in order to avoid that they go to the other extreme, belittling the villain so thoroughly as the rape subplot emerges that by the end, I had lost interest in him. He doesn’t appear to be particularly charming, or smart, or anything else. It’s possible the writers did this because they decided that a rapist couldn’t be allowed to have any qualities that would make him look other than pathetic.
After this great first season, in which a male character was only cosmetically revised to become a female character and in which a male villain was needlessly weakened, I’m left wondering whether it is possible to make stories about strong female characters who come across as female — not in an inversion of standard feminist bugbears, but without reference to them at all. While I got a lot out of Jessica Jones, I didn’t get that.
