How 'Jessica Jones' Uses Words As Weapons

"People do bad s***," Jessica says in the pilot episode. "I just avoid getting involved with them in the first place." This colorful quote serves as a sort of mission statement for the character. She's not interested in vulnerability or real relationships, and she'll be rude about it if she has to be. Jessica's blunt, biting choice of words was written into her story from the beginning. The first issue of Alias, the comic book series which introduced her, has "fuck" printed three times on the opening page.

This character quirk serves a couple purposes. On the most basic level, it communicates that Jessica is one tough broad — the swearing is there to match all the drinking and brawling. On another, it speaks to Jessica's deeply ingrained intimacy issues, which have only hardened as she lost her family and control of her body many times over. But Jessica isn't just lashing out in grief; she's aiming to bruise. Language is one of her many weapons, and it's one she picked up from her greatest abusers.

Jessica's most sadistic abuser, the one who looms over the entire series, uses his words in a more frightening, devastating way. Kilgrave, a British man with sinister charm and a penchant for purple suits, has little use for Jessica's f-bombs or Dorothy's passive aggression. He can end lives with a simple sentence.The words that Kilgrave says are clear and direct. He only occasionally growls or shouts them, preferring to intone them in a calm, steady voice. But they knock the breath out of your body. "You'd like to invite me in." "Go to the blender, lower your right hand in there." "If I'm not back within two hours, please remove the skin from each other's faces." Anyone who hears these words knows their power, for Kilgrave's commands are impossible to refuse. And he is always commanding, never asking.One of Kilgrave's most innocuous yet insidious orders is "smile." It's repeated throughout the first season, and the name of the finale. Any woman knows the loaded meaning of "smile." It's a seemingly simple, even friendly request uttered by so many men in public spaces. It has many variations, like "Smile, gorgeous" or "You're so pretty, why don't you smile?" But it's not really a request — it's meant the way Kilgrave means it, as a command.As Libby Hill wrote in The Los Angeles Times, "Telling a woman, particularly a stranger, to smile presumes unearned familiarity. Worse, it implies a right to dictate behavior." Hill and many others praised the show for using this single word as a commentary on street harassment and real-life sexism, and this commentary builds to a cathartic climax where Jessica, at Kilgrave's request, smiles and then promptly snaps his neck. Jessica took a word that had been dogging her for 13 episodes, that has been dogging women for ages, and literally drained it of its power.While Kilgrave is obviously more monstrous, he and Jessica both use language in harmful ways. Their delivery is completely different, but they both understand the weight of words. The difference lies in who they're trying to harm. Kilgrave is pure evil, so his victims are not limited in scope. He'll torture anyone who gets in his way, anyone who gets in between him and Jessica, or anyone who bores him. Jessica is a little more focused. Although she'll casually burn a stranger on the street or one of her few friends, she saves her most pointed insults for those threatening or abusing her — and where words fail, her fist does not.

Jessica isn't the only one with a drive to reclaim or warp words designed to put specific people down. In fact, her reaction to gendered insults runs in the family. Her long-lost mother Alisa has a fiery rant of her own with a cabbie who won't stop texting while driving. Alisa knows she is in the right, but when she asks the driver to stop, he dismisses her complaints outright, telling her to "calm down, lady." Alisa, whose rage is even more dangerous than Jessica's, arches her eyebrows and replies, "Excuse me?" There's enough venom in her voice to make her daughter nervous, but this cabbie isn't scared. Female rage is easily dismissed as hysteria, which is why he makes the grave mistake of telling her not to get her "panties in a bunch." Cue Alisa: "Our panties? Grown goddamn women don't wear panties. We wear underwear!"Jessica pushes Alisa out of the cab, cutting the conflict short. But based on Alisa's anger management issues, that driver was in for a hefty hospital bill.Jesscia's associate investigator Malcolm also grapples with an awful word, a slur that targets queer people. It's yelled at him while he's negotiating with a closeted lawyer outside a gay bar. Malcolm shouts back, "Assholes!" But just as "dickhead" is weightless compared to "bitch," "asshole" does not carry the same pain as "f*****," a word seeped in violent homophobia. That doesn't matter to the three men who shouted the slur. Angry that their insult didn't silence Malcolm or make him shrink into the wall, they confront him. They call him a "homo thug," a "pussy," and push him repeatedly, until Malcolm takes a swing. He's outmatched, but Trish runs to the rescue, sending the three bullies running scared. The personal stakes in this fight aren't the same as the others, since neither Malcolm nor Trish are, as far as we know, queer. The slur didn't hurt Malcolm the way those men intended, but it wasn't victimless — Steve Benowitz, the closeted lawyer, heard it loud and clear.