Jessica Jones: Phillip Marlowe gets a vagina, and additional superpowers

Hey, we Americans love our TV, don’t we? Sure we do! And why not? Because TV these days is great! Great, great, great!

Well, some TV is, or was, pretty great, like Sex and the City and Monk, though I guess they weren’t really great great—not, you know, Don Giovanni great—but, still, great enough.¹ I’ve been less enthusiastic about some other “great” shows—more or less trashing Breaking Bad and Girls while giving Mad Men a one thumb’s up in a two-part take-down. As for Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones, well, I wouldn’t waste my eyeballs. And, with Jessica Jones, a heavily noir series now tearing it up on Netflix, I’m afraid we have another dog.

Jessica, played by Krysten Ritter, is a Marvel Comics superchick, but a different kind of superchick. She’s turned her back on the whole superhero cape ‘n tights thing—because who needs that kind of ego-trip, amirite? There’s a ton of backstory for Jessica from the original comic books, which the show wisely jettisons, showing us Jessica as a bad-ass street waif, supporting herself as, you guessed it, a private investigator, skulking around the back streets of the Big Apple in a black leather jacket and jeans and chugging Wild Turkey 101 straight from the bottle—and, when she really gets pissed off, lifting the back end of a car—basically applying noir with a trowel.² Of course, Jessica does have some backstory, to explain why’s she’s hurting, to give some justification for her sarcastic, self-pitying, self-destructive, self-dramatizing behavior, even though her go fuck yourself attitude is the essence of her charm and the show would have no purpose without it.

With her black hair and blood-red lipstick,³ Jessica looks like a vampire, though I guess she isn’t one. The show has gotten some vibe from the headboard-banging, backdoor inter-racial sex Jessica enjoys courtesy of fellow undercover super-being Luke Cage (Mike Colter), who sports a six-pack that looks like it was carved out of a half a ton of black marble—which, presumably, is what it takes to make Jessica come.

But despite the hetero headboard banging, what Jessica Jones is really about is lesbians. Jessica has two “sisters”—one of whom actually is her step sister—Trish Walker (Rachel Taylor) and Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss), who lead glamorous lives. Trish, the step sister, is the host of a radio talk show, while Jeri, who actually is a lesbian,⁴ is a high-powered attorney. Jessica is constantly barging into their fancy offices and demanding that they do whatever it is she wants them to do, because she cares and they’re just phonies who only worry about appearances and cash and social position—everything about which Jessica (loudly) does not give a fuck. And they comply, because Jessica is the one in their clique who hasn’t moved on, hasn’t grown up, hasn’t learned to compromise, and she reminds them of the way they were when they were young.

The big case that Jessica is wrestling with also has serious lesbian overtones, revolving around Hope Shlottman (Erin Moriarty), a sweet, young college track star from the sticks,⁵ who murdered her parents under the evil influence of “Kilgrave” (David Tennant), a man who has the power to make women do bad things and who, naturally, made Jessica do some bad things too.

What kind of bad things? Well, I’m afraid I bailed on the show before we got to that, but, presumably, they’ll be “dark”. I’m just not much of a noir guy. I like “happy”, or at least banter, like Psyche or Castle. I’ve got problems of my own. I don’t need anyone else’s misery.