How Jessica Jones embodies the #MeToo movement
Noir-superhero series partly inspired by experiences of showrunner Melissa Rosenberg
LOS ANGELES— For the past dozen years, Melissa Rosenberg has devoted herself to some seriously gloomy characters. She was the screenwriter behind the
Twilight movies and their tortured vampires, not to mention serving as head writer on the serial killer drama Dexter before she created the noir-superhero Netflix series Jessica Jones (which debuts March 8).
A hard-drinking private eye who has been physically and emotionally assaulted by a powerful man, Jessica (Krysten Ritter) harnessed her superhuman strength in Season 1 to exact vengeance and protect others from her depraved abuser. Looking back, it’s slightly eerie how Jessica Jones anticipated the conversations about sexual harassment and assault that bubbled to the surface of American public life these last six months. Season 2 had finished shooting when #MeToo exploded, but these 13 new episodes venture even deeper into that toxic territory.
While Jessica tries to tamp down the trauma of her past and get on with her work as a hard-boiled detective, her foster sister Trish (Rachael Taylor) moves in the opposite direction, confronting an older male producer who exploited her when she was a teenage performer.
“We were writing the second season during the whole Trump/Hillary election and I was just so angry,” Rosenberg said of her team of writers. “We constantly talked about characters that had been trying to be nice for so long, finally just saying, ‘Get out of my way!’ ”
Rosenberg, 55, said the show’s approach was partly inspired by her own troubling encounters with men as a girl growing up in a permissive Marin County household.
The upside of having hippie parents (her psychologist father Jack Lee Rosenberg wrote the 1973 book Total Orgasm) was the freedom to “create your own reality.” The downside was that no one was protecting her or teaching her to protect herself. “You’re vulnerable to predators and all manner of ills,” she continued. “We were told that we were free and what’s wrong with you that you’re not embracing your sexuality? It’s like, ‘Well, I’m 13!’ ”
After graduating from high school at 17, Rosenberg moved to the East Coast to study and perform with a theatre company in New Jersey, and worked a circuit of strip clubs there to support herself. This is the kind of dark matter whirling through her writers’ room and into her characters’ heads.
Those edges weren’t particularly welcome in a female tele- vision writer when Rosenberg began her career in the mid-1990s on series like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, The Magnificent Seven and Party of Five. If she didn’t laugh along with men at sexist conversations that made her uncomfortable, she risked being left out of meetings — or fired.
A show about a furious female avenger, Jessica Jones now looks like the first step toward a more socially conscious Marvel television and film universe; it was soon followed by Luke Cage, which is steeped in Black history and racial politics, and now Black Panther.
To mirror the heroines onscreen, Rosenberg ensured there were a lot of women in the crew. And when she announced that she’d like to have women direct half of the second season, Allie Goss, vice president for original programming at Netflix, countered with a better offer: Why not have female directors take on all 13 episodes?
Ritter describes the character of Jones as a two-headed creature that is “half Melissa and half me. Someone on set said that watching the two of us in rehearsal is like watching two teenagers start a band in a garage: all passion and grit and fire.”