Jessica Jones on Netflix
I just watched Jessica Jones on Netflix and I liked it a lot.
I liked that Jessica drinks like a fish. It's such a man thing to do, in fictions. She's the hard-drinking Private Investigator, and that's her, and her drinking impairs her as much as any fictional PI's drinking ever impaired them.
I like that women talk to each other. All the time. About many things. And also lie to each other, and hide things from each other. Many different relationships!
I like that having no deaf people is shown as a grim dystopian version of reality. This is because in episode 12 or so I suddenly and belatedly realised that a task-force of deaf people could just go up to Kilgrave and disable him before he worked out how to overpower and control them. And not even a big task force. Just one or two people who can't hear Kilgrave.
It would require them believing and trusting in the mind-control powers, which is where it breaks down. Because they cannot experience it first-hand, and it's very hard to believe - as is shown repeatedly on the show - and they'd have to trust whoever told them about it.
And trust is hard. We can see Jessica, trusting very few people - she trusts Trish, and she trusts
Jeri-the-lawyer to be a good and useful lawyer, and the rest mostly goes on a case-by-case basis. And Jessica doesn't have many friends, so not having deaf friends doesn't *particularly* stand out. But no-one else in the show's universe, as the mind-control becomes more obvious and known and believed, proposes a plan with deaf people in it. No one.
So the show ends with two messages:
Unquestioning obedience is the worst.
Eliminating Disabilities, like deafness, is grimly dystopian.
I also enjoyed that the recurring white-straight-male characters are:
basically untrustworthy and controlling and violent. And then there's Kilgrave.
Edited to add:
I like that the on-screen sex, that the show actually shows, is all about the enthusiastic consent. This is especially important because so much of Jessica's story is about recovering from Kilgrave raping her.
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