(Spoilers for the entire first season of Jessica Jones)
Jessica Jones, Marvel’s powerfully transgressive Netflix release, has received roaring acclaim as a nuanced and grounded interweaving of noir superheroism and the emotional aftermath of trauma. I was thrilled at how deftly the show handled much of its mature content, but there was one resounding failure in treatment: people of color. Jessica Jones features a small handful of black characters: Parisa Fitz-Henley as Reva Connors, Mike Colter as Luke Cage, Clarke Peters as Detective Clemons and Eka Darville as Malcolm. While Jessica Jones is an enthralling and subversive feminist work, the people of color it features are routinely sidelined in predictable, disappointing ways.
Early tension is built as Jessica begins a romance with Colter’s Luke Cage. But what Jessica conceals for most of the relationship is the fatal punch to the chest cavity that killed Cage’s wife Reva. Although the guilt from killing Reva eventually freed Jessica from Kilgrave’s mind control, Jessica is haunted by flashbacks of killing Reva and her lowest moment in the season comes after she’s forced to tell Luke the truth. “I was wrong before…you are a piece of shit.” Jessica spirals into self-loathing and Luke disappears.
Put simply, Reva is fridged for Jessica’s sake and we focus on Jessica’s guilt over Luke’s grief. Did Reva have family? Friends? What was her relationship with Luke like before? We don’t know; Fitz-Henley doesn’t have a single spoken line in the show. She’s merely a ghost, turned into an emotional catalyst for Jessica. And when Luke is incapacitated in the finale, Jessica offers a tearful farewell (he survives, of course) that, again, emphasizes her guilt. Watching your semi-boyfriend in a coma sucks, sure — but Luke is trapped in a dishonest back and forth with his wife’s killer that he’s never given room to process. It’s a prioritization of whiteness made all the more glaring when you realize Reva is, story-wise, the most important woman of color on the show.
And while I found Cage’s treatment troubling, the true failure of the series is Malcolm, the crack-addled next door neighbor. Malcolm is written as the shameless, unsympathetic punching bag who is dismissed by all the white characters until halfway through the season. Then, after a stern talking to from Jessica, Malcolm recovers and becomes a high-functional and empathic human being. He kicks crack in a single episode. It’s absurd and reeks of white saviorism. Melissa Rosenberg and her writing team would never suggest that sexual or emotional trauma is something that a survivor can just “power through” after a single conversation. Neither is drug addiction. So why isn’t Malcolm allowed the same humanity of missteps, false starts and stumbles on his path to recovery as the other characters? He’s a plot device. It could be a pacing issue, sure, but Malcolm — who appears in more episodes than any other person of color — does little but beg for scraps of attention both before and after Jessica saves him. She bring him nothing but misery yet he remains a faithful sidekick because the plot wants him to.
The third leading black male character is Detective Clemons. He’s the grizzled police chief on the verge of retirement who gets pulled in for one last job: stopping Kilgrave. He’s initially obstinate, but his morals get the better of him and he eventually decides to help Jessica. A white man kills him for his troubles. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s point by point identical to Ben Urich’s plotline in Netflix’s DareDevil. Urich was a hard hitting journalist (his career fading as print becomes irrelevant in the digital age) who helps DareDevil and his allies in their campaign against Fisk. Fisk murders him and the season one finale begins at his funeral, DareDevil and his allies tearfully swearing vengeance. Again, Black death and Black pain serves to catalyze the white heroes’ emotional arcs. It’s predictable and disappointing. Marvel can do better.
I loved Jessica Jones. But swapping out one minoritized group (women) for another minoritized group (people of color) as plot tokens does not subversion make. Does not feminism make. I wanted Jessica Jones to smash these tired narrative crutches, not swap them out. I expected more critics to point out its failings on race and blackness, but that was a disappointment as well. But still, the fact remains: Netflix’s Jessica Jones is the best thing Marvel’s done beginning its global domination strategy and with a sharper eye in the writing room to avoid repeating these errors, could produce the dazzling (and intersectional!) super-heroine we’ve always wanted.
