TW: This essay contains discussions of violence and rape.
In Marvel’s Jessica Jones (2015-2019), intense nightmares and flashbacks plague the titular character.
Recovering from a year of physical and emotional abuse, Jessica (Krysten Ritter) self-medicates with alcohol and isolates herself from her closest ally. She is not trying to heal—she is simply trying to survive.
The show discerningly navigates the fraught waters of trauma, sidestepping one-dimensional characterizations and sexist tropes. Throughout the show, Jessica is abrasive, sarcastic, rude. She is not “likable,” a highly gendered term that shackles many female figures to sterile depictions of polite, palatable womanhood. Jones stomps around onscreen, punching brick walls and bad guys. She does not exist to assuage fears, but to visually portray the devastating ramifications of patriarchal violence. Jones is fucking angry—and the show validates that fury with rich, powerful writing.
In this way, the series consciously refrains from propping Jessica’s assault as a shallow, sexualized plot device.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, series writer Melissa Rosenberg explains, “I wanted the audience to really viscerally feel the scars that [rape] leaves. It was not important to me, on any level, to actually see it. TV has plenty of that, way too often, used as titillation, which is horrifying.”
As Rosenberg articulates, graphic depictions of rape rely on disturbing elements of objectification; these scenes hypersexualize the victim and fail to fully grapple with the psychological toll such an assault wields on the survivor. Instead, these moments serve as salacious shock value that provides afflicted characters with instant “depth.” In many cases, fictionalized rape works as an easy, lazy piece of storytelling to reify female pain and further a male character’s arc.
Multiple shows employ sexual assault as a rapid, yet emotionally-jarring, way to develop its male protagonists. In season five of Game of Thrones, Lord Ramsay Bolton brutally rapes one of the main characters, Sansa Stark. Rather than acknowledge the emotional consequences of Sana’s assault, the show centers on Theon Greyjoy’s horror and pain at having to witness this violation. The camera pans across his face, making it clear that the explicit attack is not about Sansa, but him. He has to witness his childhood friend’s assault and it “changes” him. Sansa’s rape serves as a catalyst for his character’s redemption.
Perhaps even more damning than this gratuitous portrayal of sexual violence is the revelation that this moment does not exist in the original source material. The show specifically employs rape as a way to “harden” Sansa, make her “stronger,” without having to actually engage in meaningful, layered writing. It is a quick fix. Moreover, the scene perpetuates the destructive notion that rape will turn women “cold.” Sansa’s assault transforms her from a naïve girl to a canny, manipulative woman.
As part of a broader trend in visual media, Game of Thrones authenticates harmful perceptions of sexual assault, as well as undermines the complex psychological and bodily aftereffects of trauma.
In “Consuming Trauma; or, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating,” Patricia Yaeger discusses the dangers of romanticizing trauma for artistic output and consumption. She questions, “Who profits when someone else’s body is turned into a set of tropes to be perused as an academic commodity?”
While Yaeger focuses on the academic and literary production of trauma, her analysis can also be applied to its cinematic depiction on television. Visual art can also contribute to—rather than critique—blatant acts of dehumanization and violence. This form of media glorifies female pain for the sake of a chauvinist art that finds women’s suffering poetic; it is predicated on multiple tropes, including that of the “fallen woman,” the pure girl made impure by man. In this narrative format, scenes of sexual violence take place in a vacuum—the moment exists to emphasize a man’s villainy or a man’s pain. The moment exists to break a woman. But the misogynistic infrastructure that allows sexual assault to take place rarely receives acknowledgement.
In this fictional world, rape is a character flaw, not a societal flaw.
Consequently, Jessica Jones purposefully subverts normative modes of storytelling that reinforce the violent devaluation of female pain and ignore social complicity. While working as a private investigator, Jessica attempts to help the Shlottmans find their young daughter, Hope (Erin Moriarty). To her horror, she discovers that Kilgrave, her assailant, is alive and now has Hope under his control. Her first instinct is to run. Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor), Jessica’s childhood friend, chastises her impulse to flee. As if speaking from the perspective of the audience, she emphasizes Jessica’s immense strength—her superpower—and argues that she should be fighting for Hope. In this moment, Trish acts as the arbiter of reason, the ally encouraging the downtrodden hero to pull herself together.
However, the camera tightens on Jessica’s face, capturing the intense fear and pain in her eyes. When she says, voice taut, “He’s coming for me, not you,” Trish replies, “I know!” Immediately, Jessica responds, “You don’t.” The pause that follows accentuates the raw truth of these words.
As Trish realizes—as the audience realizes—we do not know. Jessica knows because she has undergone the trauma; her fearful reaction, her desire to hide away, is not cowardice, but a tiny shred of self-care that she seeks to wrest from the nightmares and the flashbacks and the possibility that she will have to face her assailant again. First and foremost, Jessica is human. She is suffering from PTSD. To act the part of superhero requires further denial of the unresolved trauma that follows her every day. The show complicates the narrative of hero by pinpointing the fractured humanity of Jessica’s character: she is physically strong, but she is emotionally weak. This does not make her bad. This does not make her wrong. In the end, she does decide to rescue Hope—and this makes her incalculably brave.
When Jessica finds a distraught Hope, she attempts to comfort her through a shared understanding of trauma.
Firmly, she says, “Listen to me. None of it is your fault.”
Wearily, Hope responds in a manner almost identical to that of Jessica’s only a few scenes earlier: “You don’t know.”
This time, however, she does.
In only a few words—“I know. Okay? I know”—Jessica and Hope enter a difficult, yet affirming, kinship; they do not have to explain themselves because they both speak the bitter language of the survivor. There are no presumptions or co-optations of pain. Instead, these women find brief respite in each other because they do not have to attempt to explain the unexplainable. They intrinsically understand and this painful knowledge acts as a balm. Only when Jessica reveals this part of herself does Hope take a deep breath and say, “None of it is my fault.” In this scene, female allyship powerfully paves the way for emotional trust.
Throughout the season, Kilgrave (David Tennant), the instigator of these vicious attacks, keenly represents the toxic excesses of male privilege.
At one point, Trish succinctly states, “Men and power. It’s seriously a disease.”
As the story progresses, Kilgrave refuses to take accountability for his horrific actions. Instead, he blames others—specifically, Jessica and his parents—for his ruthless operations of bloodshed. When Jessica condemns the murder of Hope’s family, Kilgrave responds, “No, that was all about you. I was mad at you for literally throwing me under the bus.” He places culpability squarely on Jessica’s shoulders, creating a highly manipulative dichotomy where she feels guilt and anxiety both for ignoring his orders and for not ignoring his orders. In this way, Kilgrave perpetuates a distorted reality where Jessica is the villain, not him. He “needs her” to make him better. Again, the onus for good behavior is placed on other people. Kilgrave thrives on a power that allows him to do whatever he wants, regardless of the consequences.
At the same time, the show illustrates the disturbing nature of Kilgrave’s privilege. He easily commands others to perform his bidding with only a few words; victims must execute both physical and psychological acts: they may have to jump out a building, or stop feeling afraid. In both cases, individuals reside in a cognitive prison where they must follow his orders or risk further suffering. Although Kilgrave’s abilities function as a villainous power on the show, its manifestation in the everyday follows a similar pattern of emotional manipulation and coercion. When Jessica finds Hope, the young girl says, “He made me do things I didn’t want to do, but I wanted to.” The paradoxical nature of her words illuminates the conflicting reality of abusive relationships.
In “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation,” Wendy Hesford elucidates, “The victim’s agency emerges from her ability to mimic socially learned and acceptable behavior: women learn how not to upset violent men. The victim’s ability to reproduce dominant cultural scripts and ideologies of gender may have saved her life.”
In this way, capitulating to the demands of an abuser can be contradictory because the victim, intellectually, may not want to relent—but, at the same, she does want to relent as a method of self-preservation. In a state of intense duress and violence, attempts to survive take many forms. While the show demonstrates Kilgrave’s coercion as a freak superpower, it forcefully parallels a grim reality that many women experience. In this way, it dissects the complexities of abusive relationships with acute perception.
The crux of Jessica Jones’s narrative tension derives from Kilgrave’s obsessive efforts to regain control over the one woman who escaped. In episode five, Jessica confronts the delusional nature of his fond memories of their “relationship.” When she states that he raped her, he openly scoffs: “Which part of staying in five-star hotels, eating at all the best places, doing whatever the hell you wanted, is rape?”
Furiously, Jessica responds, “The part where I didn’t want to do any of it! Not only did you physically rape me, but you violated every cell in my body and every thought in my goddamn head.”
In this scene, Jessica articulates an unflinching fact: he raped her repeatedly. She will not sugarcoat these atrocities with sanitized euphemisms. Rape in a five-star hotel is still rape.
Kilgrave attempts to undermine her perception of events, saying, “That is not what I was trying to do.”
Yet, as Jessica determinedly answers back, “It doesn’t matter what you were trying to do. You raped me. Again and again and again!”
She does not allow him one fraction of deniability, nor does she enable him to sidestep responsibility for his assaults.
As Jessica emphasizes, her assaults happened—no matter the “reasoning.” The voice of the survivor is all that matters.
Yet, Kilgrave attempts to deflect guilt again, lamenting, “I didn’t have this. A home, loving parents, a family.” In this moment, he plays the part of someone who is merely “misunderstood,” a man who only acts destructively because no one taught him how to love.
But Jessica—and, by extension, the show—demolishes this damaging storytelling trope. This time, she scoffs: “You blame bad parenting? My parents died. You don’t see me raping anyone.”
Here, she dismantles a harmful trope that allows male characters to attain redemption and sympathy no matter their crimes; not for one second does she, or the story, grant Kilgrave support for his assaults. His white cisgender identity does not grant him clemency.
At the same time, knowing this information does not immediately resolve Jessica’s pain. While she internalizes the bulk of her psychological grief, she also manifests this anguish and frustration with her physique—yanking doors off their hinges, throwing concrete blocks, and crumpling car bumpers. She physically overwhelms the criminals in the city, sending them flying into brick walls with an annoyed backhand. Yet, Jessica struggles with the pressure to exercise her superpowers for the “greater good.” As a result, she resists the label of “hero,” a superficial martyrdom that proves crippling. To Jessica, the role of savior is a deleterious misnomer. A survivor of rape, she remains viscerally cognizant of one truth: she couldn’t even save herself.
Again and again, her anger is palpably present. In discussing trauma, Hesford describes the allure of the rape-revenge fantasy for assault victims, who can reimagine debilitating scenarios in a way that allows them to viciously assert their agency.
As Hesford notes, “The fantasy also challenges social prescriptions that sanitize the female psyche and dictate what constitutes appropriate female behavior and female fantasies…women are not supposed to express anger; they have been sexualized to care for others, not to confront.”
Jessica subverts conventional expectations of femininity and, almost paradoxically, revels in both apathy and brusque confrontation. Her immense strength proves cathartic: for the most part, she does not have to fear attacks from men because she can easily overtake them. As her reputation grows, criminals begin running away from her. Not only is it satisfying to witness, but it is also freeing.
Here, Jessica’s brute strength is a potent display of reclaimed agency; she does not have to run home at night, or constantly look over her shoulder. She leaves her front door hanging off its hinge for the entire season.
In Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense, Martha McCaughey writes, “[F]antasized violence can be a cathartic ritual for displaying women’s anger at past and potential sexual aggressors.”
When Jessica aggressively bats away an attacker, or punches a man in the face, it is intensely gratifying. Not because all men are terrible. But because women have been socialized, from birth, to be fearful of men—and Jessica’s ability to assert physical dominance is a form of liberation unavailable to most.
At the same time, the show directly demonstrates the ways in which Jessica feels unsafe. Although she possesses super-strength, she must also navigate day-to-day interactions as a woman suffering from PTSD. She can combat physical threats, but the traumatic effects of her past leave her straining to survive mentally. Moreover, the one man she is unable to fight is the one man she fears the most: her assailant. Trauma manifests in many different forms. While Jessica struggles to defeat him due to his powers, the same anxiety also translates into the real-world panic that leaves assault survivors frozen with fear; they are physically unable to react because of psychological triggers, including the reappearance of their assailant.
Jessica may have superpowers, but she is not superhuman.
As a result, when she finally manages to confront Kilgrave, the payoff proves therapeutic. She dangles him in the air, leaving him helpless and weak, and she avenges her pain and the pain of other women.
If you or someone you know is experiencing violence and needs help or support, there are national and state-based agencies that can assist you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Call 1 800 RESPECT (1 800 737 732).
Click here to access RAINN’s National Resources for Sexual Assault Survivors.