Netflix’s Jessica Jones is one of the most complex treatments of agency in the wake of victimhood that the small screen has seen yet seen. A grim show, shadowy and hopeless and unlikeable, it’s finally less about trauma than it is a murky contest between revenge and rehabilitation and the term that floats between those: responsibility.



Its villain Kilgrave, played by David Tennant, has the power of mind control and is as legally blameless as he is morally monstrous. Jones, a New York detective with superpowers played by Breaking Bad’s Krysten Ritter, spent time in his thrall, during which he made her do terrible things, and now he’s back in her life, a year after his apparent death.

It’s a testament to the subtlety of Kilgrave’s psychopathic villainy that he sometimes includes a command to feel as well as to act. Given the gruesome parade of victims smashing their heads through posts or stabbing themselves with scissors, it’s an easy detail to overlook; the occasional allusion to pleasure is almost charmingly forgettable. But it happens: “I’m going to be your guest here indefinitely,” he says to a family. “You’ll be delighted.”

It’s this last bit, this mention of delight, that complicates the show’s treatment of moral and emotional agency. Kilgrave’s pronouncement seems to work: his hostess does seem delighted. She smiles. But smiles are high-stakes events in Jessica Jones. Kilgrave’s obsession with smiling is a pointed comment on the widespread phenomenon of men hectoring women to smile on the street, and the point of the comparison is to drive home that the difference between “be happy” and “look happy” is vast.

Here is Jones performing “being in love” at his behest:

Photograph: Netflix

Here’s a real smile, when she’s “free” for 18 seconds and thinks of leaving him:

Photograph: Netflix

Here for the sake of contrast, is one of the photos she agrees to send Kilgrave so he’ll spare Malcolm, the junkie neighbour Jones wants to help – in one of the strangest uses of the “selfie” to date:

Photograph: Netflix

Those 18 seconds of freedom in the yellow dress are fleeting: Kilgrave calls her back, and when she hesitates to follow his command, he hands her a knife.

She slices into her ear and he stops her, saying “It’s all right. I’m here. I’ll always be here.”

The flashback shows how brutally Jones was forced to “punish herself” whenever her obedience flagged, and the scene that provokes it is exceptionally rare. How often do we see a rape survivor confronting her rapist and decimating the gaslighting he uses to avoid the word? He took her to five-star hotels, he says. He bought her things.

“I didn’t want any of it,” she says.

This scene comes in episode 10, and the amount of political and philosophical work it does is frankly exhausting. If it dramatises how he-said, she-said accounts arise by showing the how abuser and victim remember the same event, it also exposes how emotional manipulation convinces the abuser too. (“What revisionist bullshit!” he says of her account, until she shows him her literal scars.)

Within the show’s rules, the scene establishes that Jones’s self-annihilation is a direct response to the horrifying revelation that she remembers everything perfectly – and how she felt while it was happening. This means that Kilgrave’s victims aren’t – despite appearances – automatons or zombies. It would be better, perhaps, if they were. Instead, they’re aware, trapped under the glass. They can feel. They can see. And there is no achieving a clean separation between him and them:

Jessica Jones: Kilgrave’s heroin(e). Photograph: Netflix

This suggests that Kilgrave’s power isn’t “mind control” at all, but something more limited but also, paradoxically, more invasive. Let’s start with his limits, which are clear and almost virtuosically sad: Kilgrave can compel behaviour and obedience, but he can’t elicit desire or belief or love. “I had to force people to care for me!” he screams at his parents, who abandoned him. It’s a loaded word: the care he achieved was material, not emotional.

His unwillingness to seek genuine consent from others stems from an almost insurmountable inability to produce the circumstances that make consent possible. And why would he? If almost everyone on the show is an addict, he is too: the giant pun around which the show functions – jonesing – is that Jones is his heroin(e). His impatience waiting for her to wake up in her childhood home is an antsy symptom of withdrawal, and when he goes in search of a bigger high, his failure is catastrophically sad. Even at the height of his powers, his father – compelled to be honest – tells him the truth, and it’s a truth Kilgrave is powerless to change: even Kilgrave’s father wants him to die.

These are limitations, to be sure, but they spray out like shrapnel, causing soft tissue damage. That a part of Jones remained conscious while under Kilgrave’s control is not a relief. If Kilgrave refuses general anesthesia during his kidney transplant, he denies the same loss of consciousness to his victims. They are forced to witness what they’ve done and experience it as something they did themselves. They will not escape guilt, and they will never stop wondering what part of themselves made their obedience to Kilgrave possible.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because, however exceptional Kilgrave’s power seems, the moral quagmire it produces is all too common. It’s the condition of the rape victim who had an orgasm during her assault. It’s the condition of the soldier trained to kill when he suspects his targets are innocent. It’s the condition of the battered woman who goes back to her abuser and stays “of her own free will”. It’s the condition of police asked to attack protesters, of the alcoholic or drug addict who knows, intellectually, that he can stop, but doesn’t. It’s the condition of Anastasia Steele from Fifty Shades of Grey and of any person, really, who agrees, whatever the context, to consent to forgo consent in the future.

The problem, for victims struggling to tease out their own desires from the things they were forced to do, is that the focus they mustered while on a mission for Kilgrave felt like desire. Was it? Jones agonises over this – her discovery of her resistance to Kilgrave’s power raises the possibility that, since if was developing right around the time of Reva’s death, maybe she wanted to kill her? She will suggest later to Luke that her desire not to kill Reva helped her break free of Kilgrave, but this is a fragile explanation.

The question is where the will fits in. The Jessica Jones universe takes that question – the matter of responsibility – more seriously than most.

There’s precious little clarity, however: everyone is responsible somehow, and no matter how much Jones insists to Malcolm (for example) that his surveillance of her is not his fault, he argues that it is: he knew he was continuing to do it for the drugs, even after Kilgrave’s power ended. Kilgrave’s power more than anything resembles that of an unbelievably effective boss, the kind who makes everyone subordinate their agendas to his. There is a salary of sorts – bosses are good at creating dependencies – but he’s above all the kind of person who makes you want to say “mission accomplished”, even if it was never your mission.

This is the problem any employee tasked with “giving it their all” has faced: the invitation to link your personal feelings of success up to the abstract impersonal requirements of a job. When you’re tasked with doing something repugnant, how much of your impulses and wishes do you accidentally enlist and therefore contaminate? (It is also, of course, the ultimate superhero problem: the difference between a villain and a superhero is that a villain gets to set his own agenda.)

The craving for Kilgrave’s validation is strong. “I couldn’t stop,” Trish says, horrified, after Jones finds her trying to slam a bullet into her head, pursuant to Kilgrave’s instructions. (Jones puts the bullet in her mouth in a “letter-of-the-law” hail mary. It works and deactivates the order.)

Photograph: Netflix

What’s interesting is that Jones performs an innocent version here of what Kilgrave did to her in the flashback, when he stopped her from cutting off her own ear and acted like her savior. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” they both say. It’s an interesting repetition because that flashback scene mirrors another man in the Jessica Jones world. I’m talking, of course, about Simpson’s confession to Trish that he lit his sister’s Barbie dream house on fire in order for his GI Joes to come to the rescue and put the fire out. “You torched a Dream House?” Trish says, and we know this doesn’t bode well.

Simpson explains that he was committed to the realism of the scenario. His men melted into a giant blob. When Trish points out the losses his men sustained to “save” Barbie, his joke is telling:

Photograph: Netflix

The mission was never to save: it was to create an emergency that would make saving necessary. Kilgrave wasn’t Simpson’s first exposure to mind control – he was already brainwashing himself into the “saviour” narrative as a kid, and it turns out he’s returned to the care of a sinister military doctor who medicates soldiers into more effective killers. The pills in question are red, white and blue. Simpson, who likes fire, prefers red.

The red pill – while hinting that Simpson might become Nuke in the Marvel universe – seems in this context to function also as an obvious reference to “red pillers”, men’s rights activists who see themselves as proud anti-feminists interested in dominance, traditional gender roles, and the subjugation of women, whose flaws make that subjugation necessary. It’s also a reference to The Matrix, where those who disconnect themselves from the matrix choose the “real world” and make the difficult choices the real world demands.

Unfortunately, Simpson’s red pill doesn’t live it up to the red pill promise: his dose of “reality” renders him not just dangerously delusional, but so utterly at odds with nature and reality of any kind that he will forget to breathe unless he counteracts the pill’s effects.

(This sly critique of geek culture takes on some other resonances: the red pill joins Carrie-Anne Moss in calling to mind The Matrix, just as David Tennant’s Kilgrave can’t help but evoke Doctor Who. Kilgrave is an evil version of the Doctor – a man who enjoys his power and doesn’t mind using it to surround himself with beautiful worshipful female sidekicks.)

But the point of these echoes between Kilgrave and “regular” men is that they continually erode Kilgrave’s exceptionalism. Heroin addiction is so common that it hardly seems fair to give Kilgrave credit for arranging Malcolm’s. Nor did Simpson really need to be “Kilgraved” to give up his consent: he’d done it before quite willingly, and now he’s every bit as addicted to the red pill as Malcolm was addicted to heroin. Simpson remains hooked on sex-specific heroism, and he produces it by, once again, creating the fire he wants credit for putting out – or endangering the safety he wants credit for maintaining. If he torched Barbie’s Dream House as a kid, Kilgrave imitates the gesture by reconstructing Jones’ childhood home. Jones’s label for this reconstruction dovetails well with Simpson’s story:

Photograph: Netflix

But if Jessica Jones is a feminist text, it’s extraordinarily sympathetic to men who succumb to the temptation of power. Trish, for instance, does what many women dream of doing: she takes the red pill of male privilege and goes temporarily insane from the crack-like unreality it offers – power unfettered by morality or kindness or reflection. “Is this what it’s like for you?” she says to Jones.

It isn’t, of course. But it is what it’s like for many men who farm out their consent to the police, the army, or Isis – famous for drugging recruits with “captagon”, the real-world equivalent of the red pill. The real villain in Jessica Jones is any idea of heroism that simplifies the “moral math”.

Regardless of whether the delusion is that an artificial sense of plenty (the five-star hotels) or an artificial sense of safety (the protector) will produce the necessary unpayable love-debt, the red pill position is that love and life are about dominance, and one gets what one wants through guilt and gaslighting and a version of “free market” choice that is actually pure constraint.

Fortunately, there are other characters, like Trish and Malcolm and Luke – who, thank sweet Christmas – offers exactly only command, even when he’s Kilgraved, and it’s a call to self-determination at any price.

Photograph: Netflix