"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Relationship Spotlight: Jessica Jones & Malcolm Ducasse (Jessica Jones)



Another check in the win column for Marvel friendships.  I liked these two right away, but by the end of season 1, I adored them.  All of Marvel’s superheroes need friends who can tell them the truth and keep them grounded, and Jessica really needs that.  Despite all the craziness going down, Malcolm definitely fits the bill (spoilers.)

At the start of the season, Malcolm is glorified background in Jessica’s life, the comic junkie (by which I mean “humorous drug addict,” not “comic book enthusiast”) who lives in her building and has a hard time keeping track of which apartment is his.  In the brief, absurd moments when we see him pop up, Jessica appears to have a surprising level of tolerance for his blissed-out spaciness – maybe because she knows she’s not a paragon of stability herself – corralling him where he needs to go and getting impatient when she doesn’t have time to deal with him, but still, grading on her social-skills curve, remarkably pleasant.

Things get real when Jessica makes a devastating pair of discoveries.  First, she learns that Malcolm is under Kilgrave’s thrall and has been spying on her for her superpowered stalker.  Horror, anger, revulsion – the whole nine yards.  But she also finds out that Malcolm isn’t a junkie Kilgrave picked up.  He’s a junkie Kilgrave created; knowing the effect of his persuasive powers wouldn’t last long enough to keep Malcolm continually coming back, Kilgrave made him shoot heroin, got him hooked on it, and has been luring him with more to get him to return for a fresh whammy.  As furious and disgusted as Jessica is when she discovers that Malcolm is spying on her, it kills her to learn that Kilgrave wreaked so much damage on someone’s life and body purely to get to her.  She still blames Kilgrave for what’s been done to Malcolm, of course, but she places a lot of blame on herself as well, simply for being the reason Kilgrave did it.  That feeling of guilt mingles with her determination not to let Kilgrave destroy everything he touches, and so she grabs Malcolm and keeps an eye on him while he goes through withdrawal.  She doesn’t take the choice of using away from him, but in her prickly Jessica way, encourages him to make the right one.

From there on out, Malcolm is Jessica’s guy.  He’s similarly messed-up from his guilt over the whole experience, and like Jessica, his encounter with Kilgrave has left him beating himself up and questioning a lot.  What he does know is that Jessica helped bring him back to himself, she plans to take out Kilgrave, and he doesn’t want her to do it alone.  He doesn’t have a lot of skills directly applicable to superhero work, but he helps in other ways.  He smooths things over when Jessica tries to bulldoze her way into situations.  He gives Jessica the emotional support she says she doesn’t need and tries to help save her from herself when her plans get really desperate and ill-advised.  He only puts up with her crap to a point, particularly when she pushes people away or when she’s derisive about other people’s pain.  He tries to make her talk through what she’s going through, because he’s going through it too, and he does his best to make her see that she can’t take everything on herself – either the risk or the guilt.  Jessica, of course, spends much of the season not listening, shrugging him off, or snarking at his attempts to get her to open up, but just the fact that Malcolm is there is a big help to her.  Because when she’s finally ready to hear what he’s saying, he’s got her back.

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