Editor's Note: This week I'm excited to feature a review by my friend Avi Appel. The topic of Jessica Jones is especially fitting because Avi studies the concept of reasons as part of his Ph.D. candidacy. Enjoy!
In a behind-the-scenes documentary about the movie Alien, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon explained that “One thing that people are all disturbed about is sex... I said 'That's how I'm going to attack the audience; I'm going to attack them sexually. And I'm not going to go after the women in the audience, I'm going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number.”
And O’Bannon delivered: in the most gut-wrenching scenes of the movie, an alien violently forces its reproductive matter down a man’s throat and soon thereafter a new alien bloodily bursts out of its host’s chest, killing the host in the process.
In the sparsely populated world of science fiction works that attempt to communicate the horror of rape to a mainstream audience, I think Alien may now have to cede the throne to Netflix’s recently released show, Jessica Jones (2015). Jessica Jones accomplishes this feat in a surprising and, prima facie, self-handicapping way: without any actual depictions of rape. Instead of focusing on the physical aspects of rape (as Alien does) Jessica Jones focuses on the psychological, including the traumatic and long-lasting aftermath. What Jessica Jones astutely suggests is that the trauma of rape goes beyond the mere moment of sexual penetration: it includes ongoing mental stress, self-doubt, and denial by society.
Jessica Jones confronts Kilgrave
Here’s the basic gist of the show: everyone knows about “gifted people” or “mutants” because of some vague event in the city’s (New York City) recent past, but most such persons hide their abilities from the public and blend in. In fact, only three superhumans are featured in this season (although others are alluded to, including the title character of Netflix’s concurrent show Daredevil). Jessica Jones (played by Krysten Ritter of Breaking Bad fame) is a private investigator that uses but keeps secret her super-strength. In an early episode, Jessica effortlessly leaps from the sidewalk to the second floor fire-escape in order to get a better angle for photographing her mark across the street. Other uses include: opening locked doors by twisting the doorknob really hard and, of course, knocking people out with one’s fists. Her antagonist is Kilgrave (played by David Tennant of Doctor Who fame) who has the ability to control people’s minds. Kilgrave is a psychopath who uses his talents for evil. So far, this is standard comic book fair: evil mind-controller has been done before, for example with Emma Frost aka The White Queen in the “The Dark Phoenix Saga” run of the comic book series The Uncanny X-Men (1980, worth reading if you are into comic books).
But two aspects of Kilgrave’s character stand out to me as a new and refreshing take on the theme. First, Kilgrave’s ability controls what people want to do, not merely what their body does do. This makes his ability especially scary and philosophically interesting – more on this point below. Second, Kilgrave is incredibly petty. The villains of X-Men and the recent Netflix superhero shows Daredevil (2015-, worth watching although I rank this towards the bottom of my list of shows whose first season I enjoyed enough to complete) and Arrow (2012-, not worth watching), participate in vast elaborate, criminal conspiracies. Kilgrave is refreshingly realistic in his worldly desires: fancy clothing (e.g. purple suit-jackets) and one-off acts of sadism / dyadic exertions of power (a vendor rebukes him for stealing magazines: he commands the vendor to splash burning hot coffee in the vendor’s own face). Now I don’t mean to suggest that rape is petty, but it’s certainly not on the cliché grand scale of recent superhero films.
I mentioned that Kilgrave’s unique brand of mind-control offers a new take on the motif. First, let’s start with body control: I control my knees and nobody other than me controls my knees. But when we say “body control” we mean the unusual situation in which the typical or historical controller of the body is usurped in this role. For example, I go to the doctor, the doctor hits my knee with a hammer to provoke a knee-jerk reaction. In this scenario, the doctor is controlling my body (although he does so with my consent). Then there are body-controllers that seem to use the host’s brain while pushing aside the host’s conscious mind such as in the children’s book series Animorphs (1996-2001, worth reading if you are a child), in which the recurring villains are a slug-like alien species (called Yeerks) that controls its host by “shoving aside” the host’s conscious mind. Next we move to mind-control in which a person’s motivational set is influenced. “Motivational set” (a term coined by the famous ethicist Bernard Williams in his book Moral Luck (1981, worth reading if you are into philosophy of ethics)) refers to desires, intentions, preferences, dispositions, etc.; those key components that connect a thinking mind to action via motivation (as opposed to, e.g., neuro-chemical explanations of action). Again, starting with the mundane: when Matthew Murdock (of Daredevil) holds a bad guy off the edge of a building and threatens to drop him unless he tells Matthew where Wilson Fisk is, Matthew is attempting to “control” the bad guy’s actions via coercion. But this coercive form of mind-control hardly deserves the label since it works with your motivational set instead of against or without it. And then there is Kilgrave’s power.
Kilgrave directly chooses what you want to do. He does not bypass your conscious mind like the Yeerk in Animorphs, nor does he offer lop-sided options for you to choose from like Matthew hanging someone over the edge of a building. When Kilgrave tells the show’s primary damsel in distress, Hope Shlottman, to wait in bed for him, she therefore wants to wait in bed for him. Paradoxically, she wants to wait in bed for him against her will. Her conscious mind is aware that her desire to wait in bed was not produced from her own motivational set; she is aware that this desire is not of her own making, that it was implanted there by Kilgrave, like a plague of rabbits invading Australia’s ecosystem: the species is just as much a part of the causal system as any other animal, yet its origin and effects are alien and invasive respectively. Kilgrave’s victims are left feeling instinctually guilty for their actions despite knowing, on a more rational level, that they bear no personal responsibility. (Guilt without guiltworthiness…perhaps the most common form of guilt in our Judeo-Christian culture?)
Part way through the season, Jessica accuses Kilgrave of having raped her (the rape-event occurs before the timeline of the show begins) and Kilgrave attempts to defend himself against the accusation by arguing that Jessica wanted to have sex with him. This is another point where Jessica Jones surpasses Alien in communicating the horror of rape. In Alien, the social context that contributes to the problem of rape is absent. Part of the horror of real life rape is that rapists deny wrongdoing by arguing that their victims wanted to have sex. And further, the denial of rape (e.g. because of the delusion that if sex occurs the woman must have wanted) is shared, often preemptively, by others (cops, husbands, etc.) This aspect of rape – that victims are generally disbelieved and rapists are exonerated - is a recurrent theme in Jessica Jones, albeit by analogy: even though everyone is aware that the city is inhabited by superhumans, nobody believes Jessica when she tells them that Kilgrave has the power to control people’s minds. Even another superhuman (one with impenetrable skin) scoffs at the notion. (Although, once Kilgrave’s powers are acknowledged, at least nobody doubts that Jessica did not want to have sex with him.)
You should watch Jessica Jones, but be forewarned: it is not uplifting and repeatedly so. Many episodes left me feeling sad. Not only do bad things frequently happen to good characters, but the emotional effect is doubled by the believability and relatability of those characters. The believability of the characters deserves further emphasis – I am not recommending this show solely on presence of feminist themes (although these are ample) but also because of how real and multidimensional the characters are.