Jessica Jones, Post Binge

Well, apparently I liked it, because now I've finished season one of Jessica Jones, the second of Marvel's Netflix shows, which will form the kind of "street level Avengers" group, the Defenders. Much like the preceding Daredevil, Jessica Jones is very much about the rough, more grounded and gritty world of superheroes. It's a lot darker, certainly more violent, and less gee-whiz-fun than the movies tend to be. In fact, there are clear lines of distinction drawn between the movies and these shows that almost feels like a class division. The Avengers are the 1% - they have a massive battle in New York City with tons of explosions and bark witty one-liners at each other while fighting aliens. But Daredevil and Jessica Jones don't have the fame or the resources that the Avengers do. Their fights are not to save the world, but are more about cleaning things up in their immediate areas.

Spoilers are going to come after a cut, but for now I'm going to keep things broad.

Daredevil's story was a much more classic superhero story - Wilson Fisk is Lex Luthor writ small - he's another bald crime boss, but while he has a lot of power in his neighborhood, he's definitely not going to be taking over the whole world any time soon. While Fisk is certainly strong, it's not really a superpower - he's ultimately just a charismatic gangster who runs a tight ship.

Jessica Jones spends the entire season in a struggle to stop someone who absolutely has a superpower. Kilgrave, the "Purple Man" is utterly horrifying thanks to his ability to force people to do things simply by asking or telling them to, combined with an utter megalomania and lack of empathy.

David Tennant is of course beloved for his portrayal of the Tenth Doctor on Doctor Who, and what makes that prior casting so interesting is that in many ways, Kilgrave is sort of a villainous take on that character. (Just for the record, that isn't my original idea - I read it in some AV Club comment and was fascinated by it.) Tennant's Doctor often masterfully talked his way out of problems, averting disaster through sheer force of charisma. In the Waters of Mars, the Doctor begins to wonder if he should just embrace how powerful a person he is and use it to simply get what he wants - to become the "Time Lord Victorious." We never really got to see him fall into that on that show, but in a sense, we see that in the Purple Man.

Ok, let's make this officially spoilers:

Jessica Jones

Having been a fan of Marvel's Daredevil, the first of its Netflix shows, I was eager to take a look at Jessica Jones, their next foray into the kind of "Marvel at Night," darker stories.

The star is Jessica Jones, a hard-drinking private investigator. Jessica is hardboiled as they come, a depressed loner who claims not to have friends and works pretty hard to push people away from her. There are people in her life, like an old friend Trish who has a popular talk-radio show, or Hogarth, a lawyer contact who provides her with some of her leads. Then there's Luke, the bartender who she photographs despite no one hiring her to do so.

But there are two very big details that set her aside from your typical Sam-Spade type (apart from her gender,) and that make the show Jessica Jones a Marvel story rather than your standard neo-Noir. The first is that Jessica has superpowers, namely incredible strength. She easily lifts a summons-dodging strip club proprietor's car to prevent him from avoiding getting served his papers, and she easily jumps multiple stories to a fire escape in order to take pictures of Luke.

The other big detail is that she is haunted by visions of "Kilgrave," the monstrous man who, for some period of time, had her under his complete mind control.

There's very little ambiguity that her experiences are allegorical for rape, unless her time under his control also included that more literally (which the show strongly hints may be the case.) Jessica is literally a strong woman, and the memory of this violation has gnawed at her - we can probably interpret her current lifestyle as the result of this trauma.

When she investigates the disappearance of a college student whose midwestern parents come to her with a referral from the police station (but as we discover later, not from the police themselves,) she realizes that, contrary to what she had thought, Kilgrave (whose more comic-booky name is "The Purple Man," which is alluded to with the appearance of purple lighting signaling that she is having a vision of him,) is alive, and has kidnapped this girl.

Jessica manages to rescue her, but she doesn't realize that there is one last compulsion that Kilgrave has left her with, and as Hope rides down in the elevator, reunited with her parents and instructed by Jessica to get the hell out of dodge, Hope pulls out a gun and kills her parents, only to collapse and burst into horrified screams once she realizes what she has done.

The arc of the season, I imagine, would be Jessica's attempts to track down Kilgrave and kill him. That's obviously tricky, given that he has the incredibly powerful ability to force anyone he talks to to do whatever he asks of them.

We're left with a bunch of questions after two episodes. We get glimpses of Jessica under Kilgrave's thrall, but we don't know exactly what she did under his control. Given her super-strength, I wouldn't be surprised to find that she did something very bad indeed. We don't know where her strength comes from, or how long she or Trish has known about them. We do find out, however, that Luke is Luke Cage, himself super-powered with, as far as I can tell, complete indestructibility (I'm not a big comics guy, so forgive me for not knowing this already.)

Jessica Jones follows very much in Daredevil's Netflix footsteps, being a much darker, more brutal story than you see with Captain America or Iron Man. It's on a smaller scale, obviously, with villains hiding within the urban landscape instead of razing said landscape to the ground, but it also has the luxury of being on what has sort of become a premium-cable-style service, without the obligation to keep things all soft PG-13 or easier (isn't it funny how movies and TV flipped some point in the last ten years?)

Though while it's similar in tone, I'm finding the distinction between the headlining villains of both shows to be kind of interesting. Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, was the most humanized, sympathetic Marvel villain we've seen (with a little scene-chewing for flavor.) In contrast, we haven't even really gotten a good look at Kilgrave's face (a face that most nerds would recognize as possibly the second-most-popular person to play the lead role of Doctor Who.) There's nothing sympathetic (so far) about the Purple Man - instead he seems to just be a specter of terror that haunts the show.

Anyway, I'm two episodes in, and so far I'm liking it.

iZombie (TV)

I had heard good things about iZombie a few months ago and decided to give it a look. It was only then that I realized that Rob Thomas, who was behind Veronica Mars and Party Down, was one of the show's co-creators.

iZombie is based on a comic book of the same name, though it apparently takes great liberties with the source material. As someone exposed to the show first, I'm willing to let it exist as its own thing.

The premise is this: Promising medical resident Olivia "Liv" Moore (yes, it's a kind of dumb pun) has her life perfectly on track, with a promising career, good friendships, and a pretty ideal fiancé, with the again, improbable name of Major Lilywhite (the names on the show are kind of ridiculous, but you get used to it.) Deciding to finally unwind, she accepts an invitation to a boat party, which is unfortunately where an outbreak of zombies goes off and she gets scratched by a zombie drug dealer named Blaine.

Now, zombies work very differently than your Romero-rules version. Liv finds that she has a powerful need to consume human brains, but doing so maintains her human mind, preventing her from becoming a ravenous fiend. Her hair goes white, as does her skin. When she eats a person's brain, she starts to adopt some of the person's personality traits and can get flashes of memories from the days before the person died. Also, they're nearly-indestructible (as always, the brain is the weak-spot) and they can go "full-zombie," which gives them super-strength and makes their eyes go red.

Liv gets a job working at the morgue as a Medical Examiner so that she has a fresh supply of brains, conveniently avoiding the need to rob graves or, of course, kill people.

But zombieism mostly ruins her life. She's afraid of giving the condition to Major, so she breaks off the engagement and loses a lot of motivation in life.

However, she gains that motivation when she realizes that she can use her brain-eating powers to, that's right, solve crimes! She helps out a detective who just joined Seattle PD's homicide division named Clive Babineaux, who she explains her visions to as being the result of her being a psychic, which... is almost true.

There's also Ravi Chakrabarti, the senior ME and her boss, who figures out what her condition is when he sees her eating brains but, refreshingly, immediately becomes her ally in trying to cure her of the condition and get to the bottom of what caused the outbreak in the first place.

Finally, Blaine (no last name given) is the main-cast villain character, who basically tries to turn his zombie status into the basis of a pyramid scheme to make money off other zombies desperate for brains.

Still with me?

The show feels very similar in tone to Veronica Mars, complete with charming blonde (though to be fair, the blondeness in this case is caused by zombieism) female protagonist who maintains a mostly friendly relationship with her ex and narrates every episode through Voice Over. Both shows have a mostly-light and humourous take on their premises but occasionally goes into very dark and disturbing places. And of course both come at the crime procedural format from a very unusual angle.

Veronica Mars was clearly heavily influenced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In a sense, iZombie is the Angel to Veronica Mars' Buffy. The Buffy spin-off extracted the premise of the original show from its "High School is Hell" setting an made it more about fighting against the ugly truths of adulthood. iZombie has no High School portion - its characters are fully adult by the time the show starts, now dealing with some of the frustrations of adulthood, like the potential for aimlessness and the shocking cruelty the world is capable of inflicting on people.

The show has a great cast, and Rose McIver makes for a very fun person to watch episode to episode. Sometimes the show's procedural and episodic format can skew a little cheesy, but the show employs the trick of usually teasing out the master arc-plot at least a bit with each episode to keep us whatever-the-opposite-of-ADD-is havers interested.

It remains to be seen if the show will truly do anything really ground-breaking, but it's a show that's solid on fundamentals and also fits that weird niche for me of doing something unusual with old monster tropes to make the monsters more sympathetic.

Lovecraft, Science Fiction, and Horror

Kind of a late Halloween post, but here are some thoughts I had about one of the most influential horror writers of all time.

H. P. Lovecraft is, I would argue, more important for his influence than what he personally wrote. His influence can be felt in fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He tremendously expanded the idea of what an "alien" could be, and also blended genres in interesting ways, which has made it easy to incorporate "Lovecraftian" influences in other writing. He also had a kind of novel concept of a mythos that he allowed, and in fact encouraged other writers to help build (Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was among them.)

He was writing at a time when the field of Physics was undergoing tremendous changes. Moving forward from the clockwork, familiar predictability of Newtonian physics, thinkers like Einstein were redefining the way we thought about time and space, and though Einstein himself was never satisfied with it, his work brought about the probabilistic science of Quantum Physics, which suggested that the universe was, at a fundamental level, not only subjective (that he was fine with, and was the basis of General Relativity) but also chaotic and unpredictable.

Lovecraft was certainly not the first writer to imagine alien life as hostile. While other examples could surely exist, H. G. Wells really codified the “alien invasion” trope with War of the Worlds. The book depicted a terrifying alien threat that devastated an unprepared humanity, and Earth’s victory comes not at the hands of smart and brave people, but of virulent microbes that we had only recently even discovered.

But while the Martians of War of the Worlds are truly horrific – liquefying the dead to feed themselves and existing as mushy, formless brain-things that require mechanical exobodies to do just about anything (something that had to be an inspiration for the Daleks of Doctor Who) – their threat is really a physical one. A human who saw such a creature would respond with fear, but a rational fear of a physical danger.

Lovecraft blended genres to create an amalgam that felt very much his own. Aesthetically, we often combine Lovecraftian stories with the trappings of Gothic Horror, such as that pioneered by Edgar Alan Poe. Poe’s stories are almost all horror of the mind, dealing with madness. The Casque of Amontillado is not so much terrifying because of the horrible murder that Montresor committed, but more the casual, blithe manner in which he readily confesses his sin. The Tell-Tale Heart has the killer become convinced that his victim’s heart is still beating, which we see through his mad perspective.

The Adventure genre, which flourished thanks to 19^th Century Imperialism, was also a great progenitor of Lovecraft’s style. Adventure stories suggested that the world had many hidden places – cultures that, in the “civilized” world, had never been heard of. With all these cultures came strange religious beliefs and superstitions.

Unfortunately, this also came with a lot of racism. The idea that there was such a thing as a “superior race” was still a quite-popular idea at the time. Lovecraft extended his fears about these foreign cultures to foreign people of all sorts. Despite a kind of contempt for the very notion that humanity is anything special, he still fell into the common contemporary idea that "White, Anglo-Saxons" were basically humanity at its most human and therefore best.

Fear of the Other is central to Lovecraft’s stories. But typically, this Otherness goes beyond mere foreign cultures, and extends rather into the vast cosmos.

Throughout the Enlightenment, but particularly in the Industrialization of the 19^th century, rationalism came to be the default mode of thought for the Western World. Diseases were caused by microbes rather than demons, people born with deformities might have had genetic disorders rather than curses. Alchemy gave way to Chemistry and Astrology gave way to Astronomy. We began to understand that the sun was just a big ball of hydrogen gas and the stars were the same sort of thing, just much farther away.

But Lovecraft feared that rationalism was just naïveté. Our conception of the universe had grown tremendously – from a geo- and then helio-centric universe that was really just the solar system to the concept of a galaxy and then multiple galaxies… and things have just gotten larger and stranger, with real scientists today coming up with theories of multiple universes and far more than the 3+1 dimensions that we experience day-to-day.

In a universe so vast, a few possibilities presented themselves. The first was that there could be, and perhaps it’s so likely to be almost inevitable that there are, other species, alien species, that are more complex and advanced than we are as much as we are more complex and advanced than a bacterium.

Not only is the universe so enormous that, in Lovecraft’s eyes, all of human history is essentially irrelevant, but if some greater species were to come here, they would not even destroy us out of cruelty, jealousy, or avarice, like Wells' Martians, but perhaps out of simple ignorance or apathy. Even a vegetarian cannot prevent his or her white blood cells from killing foreign bacteria. A vegan might accidentally step on an ant.

But as far as we’ve gotten here, there still isn’t a real distinct difference between Lovecraft and Science Fiction. The Xenomorph from Alien is so deadly (at least in the first movie) that it’s almost hard to believe anyone at all survived. But even though it’s faster, stronger, and maybe even smarter than the people on board the Nostromo, it’s still something that can be rationally understood.

Where Lovecraft goes farther is the idea of incomprehensibility. One of the conceits of the whole endeavor of Rationalism is that, with enough study and cleverness, any mystery is solvable. But if we are, biologically, physiologically finite in our intellectual faculties, that means that we will, at best, eventually just reach a point where our minds cannot handle the complexity of a being that is greater than we are.

And so, Lovecraft’s horror is largely about seeing the failure of rationalism.

We have learned enough to look into the cosmos, but what Lovecraft's heroes find there is so vast, powerful, and fundamentally mysterious that we must fall back on our superstitious terminology – referring to things as gods and demons and magic.

The horrors of Lovecraft defy rational explanation, not because there is no such explanation, but because the explanation is so complex, so fundamentally unlike our familiar experience of reality, that human brains cannot handle them. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, this calls back to Biblical ideas about how humans cannot look on the face of God without being destroyed.

Lovecraft does not have much to offer in the way of comfort. Ignorance is best, and cultish superstition is essentially your best-case scenario if you do wind up wandering into these truths. But a Lovecraftian hero who embodies the modern values of relentless curiosity and intelligence is doomed to a tragic end, often going beyond the event horizon into insanity – a brain that has cracked from the pressure of knowledge that cannot fit within it.