Marvel Show “Jessica Jones” Marks Progress for Complex Female Superheroes

Image Source: Netflix

Marvel has always had a problem with coming up with as many complex female superheroes as it has male ones. It felt like for each Storm, there were already five guys in spandex named Steve.

In recent years, of course, this trend has shifted somewhat: the growing popularity of characters like Gamora and the Wasp, plus the promising announcement of a Black Widow movie in 2019, clearly indicates a growth in diversity on the silver screens. Regardless of the progress Marvel has had with its female superheroes, though, it still has a long way to go.

Many of the female additions to the Marvel movie world have been one-sided at best. Elektra’s solo movie in 2005 characterized her as little more than a sex symbol with a pouty face and some knives. Both Gamora and the Black Widow, while written in the comics to have complex backgrounds and character arcs, are beginning to devolve into little more than love interests for the men of Marvel movies. And don’t even get me started on the one-dimensional, vanilla mess which was the Scarlet Witch in the Avengers movies.

While Marvel has certainly been stocking up on its shere number of female superheroes, it often misses the target when it comes to actually developing these characters.

But there is hope on the horizon, most specifically in the continued success of the Marvel web-series Jessica Jones, which first aired in 2015 and completed a second season this March. The series chronicles the life of the mysterious Jessica Jones, who possesses superhuman strength but spends most of her time accepting shady detective jobs and drinking alone in her apartment. It is fairly evident within the first few minutes of the first episode, as Jones effortlessly pushes the head of a rude customer through the glassdoor of her apartment, that this hero is darker than your average Marvel creation.

Jones is unconventional and imperfect by all standards: she swears like a sailor, gets into bar fights, and is at times a downright asshole to her neighbors. But even as Jones struggles to see the goodness in humanity, and at times hurts more people than she helps, she is eventually able to find a purpose for her powers and a method to the world’s madness. As a result, she is arguably Marvel’s first truly well-executed anti-heroine.

The Avengers’ franchise’s Black Widow may have held a candle to Jones in this role at moments, with her dark background and cold, vicious exterior–but while Black Widow’s background is mentioned rarely and seemingly at random, Jones’s history follows her throughout the show and actually adds to the complexity of her character. Her P.T.S.D., established early in the show, never disappears or is magically cured, but rather continues to shape her character without blatantly defining it, and allows her to grow in other areas. In the end, the audience is swayed to love Jessica Jones even more for these imperfections.

While Marvel’s history of female superheroes is far from perfect, it does offer some hope in the form of Jessica Jones. Aggressive, impatient, and far from perfect, Jessica Jones is the complex anti-heroine we’ve all been waiting for. And I, for one, am rooting for her.