Lot's Wife Edition 2 2016

CULTURE
remodelled, and new video games have to be released. The horizontal
convergence that spreads to other industries is almost
limitless.
But speaking literally, maybe we can’t say we have
reached peak – which infers best – just quite yet. Despite the
high-profile releases that much superhero media is treated to,
sometimes the least assuming heroes end up surprising us the
most (Guardians of the Galaxy excited very few people in its
pre-production stages). For starters, Marvel and Netflix have
buddied up to conceptualise a Defenders series; think of it like
a gritty, streetwise Avengers-esque ensemble, only set in the
big sprawling metropolis of Manhattan, New York. Only the instalments
of Daredevil and Jessica Jones have been released thus
far, but the latter in particular hints at the potential superhero
media has to climb higher and darker than it ever has before.
Daredevil is excellent in its own right, but Matt Murdock isn’t
so dissimilar to his other cinematic Marvel counterparts in that
he is a do-gooder trying to do right by the wrong people.
Jessica Jones, on the other hand, is the quintessential
anti-hero. Shows like the latter, in particular, are a paucity
because they nix the genre conventions. Popular construction
of superheroes features many hyper-masculine, philanthropic
men in an array of costumes. Jessica Jones is a leather-jacketed
angel forced to unfurl her wings; an unapologetically cynical,
broken woman who can throw a man across the room, has outbursts
of rage and self-medicates with hard liquor. Often the
genre chronicles the transformation of an unassuming young
boy into a hero; Jessica Jones can be described as a post-hero
story, where she tried the whole superhero thing, everything
went pear-shaped, and she left her dreams of valour at the
doorstep of Hell’s Kitchen. The show is as open and frank as its
eponymous star, refusing to be coy on the exploration of traditionally
taboo media topics like rape, post-traumatic stress disorder,
sexuality, and sociopathy. But Jessica is as far-removed
from the role of a femme fatale (a role undertaken by equally
enthralling villain Kilgrave) as can be. She’s an antihero, she’s
broken and she openly ridicules caped costumes– and the world
loves her for just being her. Even if she never gets her own
Barbie doll, Jessica Jones is considered unorthodox as a hero
for the exact reasons that make her a trailblazer in the genre.
At the same time, the young, white, heterosexual and idealistic
superhero demographic is slowly opening up to new faces
that continually upend superhero norms. Luke Cage is soon to
join Matt and Jessica to defend the streets of the Big Apple, as
the first lead African American superhero on the big or small
screens. Suicide Squad completely inverts traditional ‘hero’
archetypes; the reason they become heroes is because they were
villains first. And the Amazon Wonder Woman finally gets her
own movie in 2017 after countless years being one of the best
known figures on the DC stage. What Jessica Jones affirms is
that because superhero media also hybridises genres, storylines
aren’t only involved with supernatural origins, superhuman
abilities or supervillain foes anymore; the earthly world can collide
with the unearthly. We need to remember that qualifying
‘Peak Superhero’ is more important that quantifying it. Some
of the most poignant narratives to come out of the superhero
genre are not the birds and not the planes, but those that are
the antithesis of their name; the hero is not reliant on its super
preface, and likely never will be again.
Lot’s Wife | 53