Playing at Being a Superhero

Trish Walker in Jessica Jones

Abstract

Abstract

The superhero fantasy Jessica Jones completed its third and final season having offering a sustained exploration of (dis)ability, social responsibility and the female superhero. In this essay, I examine the tensions between play and responsibility in relation to the character of Trish Walker, Jessica Jones’s adoptive sister and friend. I draw from Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘play’ and ideas from cognitive psychology such as ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 2014) and ‘dark play’ (Linderoth and Mortensen 2015), to consider how the series positions the two women, awkwardly but interestingly, in terms of gender and justice.

Trish Walker’s ambition is to be a superhero like Jessica and she eventually attains this, first through the use of chemical enhancement, in Season One. In the episode At the end of Season Two, Trish gains enduring physical powers of agility and strength through a medical experiment, improving her new abilities through intensive physical practice, and sets out to become a vigilante, like Hellcat in the original comic (Marvel 1944/1976). She begins spending her time on the streets with the intention of fighting crime, but, after her mother is murdered in Season Three, she sets out on a path of punishment and revenge without ethical restraint.

Can Trish’s transformation be seen as a form of ‘play’ – at attempt to express the sense of selfhood that has been subsumed under her mother’s needs? Is her determination to become ‘super’ a way to break-out from her famous persona as the cute little girl of a television show? Is it instance of flow – the directed use of attention to gain advantage? (Csikszentmihalyi 2014) Can it be seen as a form of ‘dark play’ (Linderoth and Mortensen 2015) in which the audience, along with the character of Trish, is invited to see what happens and how it feels to take revenge? Is it a negative compulsion in which self-determined autonomy and social responsibility are undermined by the imperative to act at all costs? Or, has Trish been framed, to some extent, by the limited scope available for female characters in action combat roles?