Trauma and Netflix's 'Jessica Jones'

Over the Thanksgiving break, I’ve been watching the new Netflix Original, Jessica Jones, which is amazing and you should all go and watch it! (If you aren’t running to watch it right now, we can’t be friends.) (I’m joking. Let’s be friends.)

Although what Jessica Jones ultimately centers around is her battle with the season’s “Big Bad” Kilgrave, there is also an overwhelming presence of trauma in the show as well. For the first few episodes, the audience is not told much about Jessica’s background except through the flashbacks that she gets and how she avoids certain things (situations and sleep being the most prominent ones). Through those first episodes, her character is shaped by how we see her doing her investigations as well as how we see her alcoholism. A few times, we see her finishing her investigative work, debating sleep, and instead of sleeping, grabbing her camera as well as alcohol and when we see her sleeping it’s after drinking herself to sleep – it’s a pattern that continues through the season. If Jessica sleeps, it’s after drinking heavily or from sleep deprivation. When it is from sleep deprivation, we see her having nightmares very similar to her flashbacks. These nightmares and flashbacks begin to piece together exactly what happened in Jessica’s past, but the audience doesn’t begin to get the full story until she picks up a case that turns out to be the same man doing exactly what he did to her with a different girl.

Jessica spends the season trying to stop Kilgrave from controlling and brainwashing the human population, but through that, her own trauma with him comes through. We see how she was controlled by him herself and forced to be in a relationship with him. Right after the halfway point in the season, she is asked to voluntarily live with him, and when she does, Kilgrave brings up their relationship. Jessica’s response lays out exactly what the audience has been piecing together since the beginning of the season:

Kilgrave: We used to do a lot more than just touch hands.   
Jessica: Yeah, it’s called rape.
K: What? Which part of staying in five-star hotels, eating in all the best places, doing
whatever the hell you wanted, is rape?
J: 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.
K: That is not what I was trying to do.
J: It doesn’t matter what you were trying to do! You raped me. Again and again and again!*

Unlike other shows that have come out recently, Jessica Jones doesn’t turn away from portraying sexual assault and a characters reaction to it. Many times throughout the season we see Jessica grounding herself with her personal mantra of repeating the three streets that surrounded her childhood home. We also see Jessica and other characters removing the blame from themselves. “Not your fault” is a continuous theme. While most Marvel shows and movies want the audience to focus on the action and less on the characters, Jessica Jones takes it that one step further, digging into her subconscious and the trauma that is present there. 

*This conversation takes place in Episode 8 of Jessica Jones, AKA WWJD?